Critique of Pure Reason

It is sad that the public outrage over the choice of language Kevin Myers sported in his column in The Irish Times had brought to a halt any debate about the issues he had raised in relation to the state sponsorship of single parenthood.

Was it appropriate for Myers to use the word ‘bastard’? Probably not. Was Myers right to claim that the “system of benefits to unmarried mothers is creating a long-term time-bomb”? Was he right to claim the “welfare system is creating benefits-addicted, fatherless families who will be raised in a culture of personal and economic apathy - and from such warped timber, true masts are seldom hewn”. Amazingly, that seems irrelevant.

I could go on to describe virtues of the traditional family but that’d only get me branded as just another ranting backwards conservative bastard. I could go on, as Myers did to the same effect, claiming that using public money to encourage people to depart from traditional family is utterly stupid and self-destructive form of social engineering, which will yield nothing but problems in the future. However, I don’t have to do that. Kevin Myers didn’t have to do that. An American sociologist Charles Murray did it a decade and a half ago in response to pro-single-parenthood policies championed in Britain at the time.

“When I was looking at Britain in the 1980s, the offspring of the first big generation of single mothers were small children, now they are teenagers and young adults and the problems are exactly those that I was warning they would be — high crime rates and low participation in the labour force. These people have never been socialised and they simply don’t know how to behave, from sitting still in classrooms to knowing you don’t hit people if you have a problem.”

For his words Murray was vilified sixteen years ago, in the same way Myers was recently torn apart until he and (quite unusually for The Irish Times) the Editor apologized. Murray, however, got satisfaction in words of Tony Blair. Single mothers are “piling up problems for the future” said Tony in a public speech a few weeks ago. The full article is here.

So Murray was right. Myers is right. Does this matter? It does not. Will this ignite a public debate on the issue? It will not. No Irish media has even attempted to bring Murray and Myers in correlation. It appears to me the article in The Times has had virtually no impact at all. Is this important for the future of all of us? Of course it is. This is a cleat proof (like we needed one in the first place) that liberals are wrong when they offer a single-parent family as a perfectly viable alternative to a traditional family. This is true for homosexual families as well, but I am afraid we will have to wait a decade or two to get a living proof as well.

In the meantime, leftist feel-good, use-no-brains, tax-those-creating-wealth and throw-more-money-at-the-problem policies are likely to persist in spite of the pure reason.

Sic transit gloria mundi!