Buy Local, Marry Local—College, Globalism, and Reversing Civilizational Decline

Original article here

High tech is not just about phones and computers. It’s also about travel, now so easy for so many in our globalist age—for better or worse.

Before 1960, most of the world’s people lived, worked, and stayed within 50 to 100 miles of their hometown. In America, the marriage of high school sweethearts was the norm, captured in phrases such as “the girl next door.” Forty-first President George H.W. Bush met his wife, Barbara, when she was 16; they married when she was 19. Rosalyn Carter knew Jimmy Carter’s family as a child. They married when she was 18. Such courtships and marriages were so firmly the norm that no one even remarked on them.

The 1960s changed this. The ease of travel and the promotion of attending college, especially college away from home, depicted life after high school as more exciting and full of opportunity. Young people could find themselves, even remake themselves. College sweethearts became another norm.

But all the moving around and remaking of oneself had a price, an unspoken downside, even as most went along, encouraged to relocate and attend college, even by American presidents such as Bill Clinton, who exhorted in his 1997 State of the Union address, “Give every American who works hard the chance to go to college!”

As early as the 1970s, however, consumer advocate Ralph Nader warned that employers such as IBM and General Motors liked relocations to benefit the company, not the employee, who then became “a company man,” not a put-upon “family man.” A wife and kids could come with, of course, but extended family was left behind—all promoted with phrases such as “upwardly mobile professionals.” Many such couples only realize the drawbacks of relocation when they start families. Why live so far from Grandma? From siblings also having kids? Some then try to move closer to home.

But the travel revolution coincided with the divorce revolution. In 1960, most marriages remained intact. By 1980, more than half dissolved. Coincidence?

Divorce has many causes, of course: “no fault” divorce—more properly called “divorce on demand”—became widespread in the 1960s and 1970s. Before then, divorce was legal only “for cause,” also the case in Europe. A spouse needed compelling reasons to leave and paid a price for departing, as in other contract breaches, not only for wronging a family but also for destabilizing society: Children of broken homes suffer more behavioral issues—eating disorders, delinquency, promiscuity—and more challenges forming their own families. Problems at home become problems for society. Religion’s decline is also a factor: wedding vows are no longer seen as binding, even when taken before God. And contraception facilitated pre- and extramarital relations, weakening marriage, just as pornography is doing today, introducing insecurity and estrangement between spouses. Radical individualism also plays a big part: marriage is viewed as an individual matter rather than a social good. “Not happy? Leave!” Thus is the societal aspect of marriage ignored.

But spouses from different locations also have weaker social bonds to keep things together. As was the case with President Jimmy Carter, married couples used to know each other from their youth and also knew and lived near each other’s families. The never-ending round of birthdays, anniversaries, and baptisms was the stuff of life, making marital separation almost unthinkable.

“She who rocks the cradle rules the world” is the adage. And it’s true; motherhood is the long game, the soft power of culture. But divorce attacks even the maternal bond, as single moms can’t do it all. They often then get boyfriends, another risk factor for kids—especially daughters—and for society.

By this view, divorce is not just destabilizing. It’s decivilizing. We don’t normally think of marriage and home life as preserving or destroying civilization; Hollywood and cultural gatekeepers don’t permit that. But isn’t it? Broken homes and “baby daddies” are the norm in America’s inner cities, along with rampant crime. Another coincidence?

As travel, college, and relocation have been encouraged, and divorce normalized, intercultural marriages have also become mainstream—the new normal in the modern, global order. No one cares that a Catholic marries a Hindu or that someone from Oklahoma marries a New Yorker. And their children? The children absorb that Oklahoma isn’t that important and that Catholicism isn’t that important. Their parents make the point. So the kids are deracinated; they don’t care where they’re from, or who their ancestors are, or whether God exists. Parents are multicultural, and so are they—which is to say, their inherited culture is lost.

But nature abhors a vacuum. So the void of the lost culture is inevitably filled by something else. As Ralph Nader noted, one’s employer becomes one’s culture and identity. Or one’s football team. Or one’s income.

People in the West have been made to forget that they are both heirs to and beneficiaries of a specific civilization. They owe those who sacrificed before them. There is a debt because civilization—the condition of order, peace, and freedom—doesn’t just happen. People—prior generations—work and sacrifice for that. They do it for themselves and their posterity, as the Constitution’s preamble says. That means their children, the future of their civilization.

Only recently have people been waking up to the West’s civilizational decline, coinciding with globalism, relocation, and deracination. They want to recover and restore what once was, saying, “Don’t go global—go local. Buy local! Support what’s local!”

Perhaps also marry local?

***

Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of Scholars, and a former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School, George Mason University.