At my doctor's the other day, I asked, as I sometimes do, about what he's seeing with gay men and the crystal meth epidemic. His practice has a lot of sexually active young homos, and although they're not scientific, I take his anecdotes seriously. He told me there has been a big drop in usage in the lives of his patients. A much more empirically robust New York study came to the same conclusion.
Why? I ask this because it suggests that changes in social behavior – for good and bad – are not always easily explicable; and we should avoid easy or ideologically loaded explanations. My subjective interpretation is that the horrifying effect of meth on so many men's lives and health persuaded many others (and themselves) that the costs vastly outweighed the benefits. Stigmas emerged; lost lives stung; jail sentences began to impinge on the white middle class; watching young men age overnight must also have been a factor. The cool dudes stopped using it; it became uncool; it declined. If I were feeling ambitious, I might also suggest that the marriage movement might have subtly shifted social signals among gay men, and those looking to couple up may see more of a future for themselves, may be less damaged than previous generations (including my own), and therefore are better able to postpone instant gratification for longer-term contentment. Or it could have been just fashion – drugs rise and fall all the time in their varying popularity.
I raise this because the blogosphere had a great recent debate between Douthat and Yglesias that tried to answer two further social whys. Why are more women having children alone? And why are there fewer men in the workplace? Are these good or bad things and what can we do about them anyway?
Matt argues that fewer women need men to bring up children because of the vast new workplace opportunities for women compared with the past. In other words, for the first time, they can really afford to. He also suggests there are fewer men working – a long-term trend – because basically men are, at heart, bums, and being able to enjoy life with fewer resources and more distractions (hello, YouTube and Xbox) is a trade-off worth making. Mooching off parents or working wives or partners sounds like a pretty good deal to many.
Ross responds on Charles Murray lines by blaming the social mores of elites whose libertine example has led to social decay. His argument is not far from what Julian Sanchez has called Straussian social conservatism, in its emphasis on elite influence on the masses. He sees single-motherhood as draining for the woman and worse for the kids (as most studies show). And fewer responsible working men exacerbate the problem.
My terrifically constructive suggestion is that all of this may be correct, that the reasons behind these shifts are massively over-determined and largely beyond our full understanding.
In these trends, we may be seeing some good things – more choices for women, less stress and more sexual opportunities for men – along with some bad ones – worse environments for child-rearing, exhausted women, less fulfilled men. Some of this is obviously a function of spontaneous adaptation to a new, more-female economy; some may be attributed to top-down social messaging on Murray-esque lines; some may be genuine gains in happiness. It's a mess in a messy society, figuring out costs and benefits.
The evidence also suggests that the elites have begun to figure out a new balance: later and longer marriages. Men get to screw around for longer than they used to; women get to advance further in their careers; their own generational memories of parental divorce may have led them to be more leery of marriage and more committed when they go for it. Better still, feminism may have helped kill the notion that one gender has some kind of default position on bread-winning.
And could this trickle down to the less well off, the way some positive trends have spread spontaneously among gay men?
We don't know. But I think we should be leery of believing that the poor somehow cannot adapt and change to the same costs and benefits as elites. I guess that's long been one of my main issues with Straussianism. (The crack epidemic among urban blacks, for example, ended as suddenly as the meth epidemic among gays, for similarly over-determined reasons.) And now the elites are also sending subtly different signals about what is socially good – not a return to the 1950s, but a much more hybrid and nudging social conservatism – that non-elites might follow. Maybe the economics of the globalized economy will make it much harder for the poorer. But I wouldn't bet on it. If women hold more economic power, men may seek to latch on to some of it – this time with women in the drivers' seat.
I guess what I'm saying is that libertarianism – defined as an instinct to trust people to figure their own collective problems out by trial and error – is not incompatible with social conservatism from the top down and, more importantly, from the bottom up. In fact, if you believe that the truths of social conservatism endure, you should be more confident that digressions away from them will eventually return to the mean.
There's a phrase for these complex eddies and currents in social behavior: the pursuit of happiness. Only freedom allows us to enjoy it. And its end result, if left alone, may well be more conservative than many conservatives today are able to acknowledge.
The Dish 