Complicated business.

(We spent the last two years founding a classical catholic high school, joining a law partnership, and thinking through the principles of the first three posts in light of those experiences.)

Where were we? Right, marriage and education. Right, then:

A large and growing cohort of Americans have conserved marriage and education. Not as legal or cultural institutions that shape the broader society in which we live, but as reinvigorated practices that open the door to human flourishing, and as foundations on which a new civilization will slowly rise. This post addresses marriage, the next will deal with education. Keep in mind that these two will lead to the argument that marriage and education are not enough, and that we need to add markets and health to the human capabilities that we are keeping real in a world losing its mind, heart, and soul.

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In spite of the disaster that was American marriage from the 60s to the 80s, young people (many more than one might expect) from the 90s to now have embraced married life as a great good, rejecting the sexual revolutionary slander that marriage is an ultimate evil.

Many of us were able to do this because our own parents got and stayed married, had more than a few children, and confidently showed us that this way of life is good. Our parents rarely had to read books on being married. They still directly participated in the accumulated millennia of wisdom embodied in myriad innately learned practices (i.e., “traditions”) that sustain marriage. Don’t get me wrong, they were not mindless. But they grew up in a culture that still mostly affirmed and supported good marriages as the normative way of life. Then, when the revolution unfolded in the 1960s, they had the vision and courage to choose marriage instead of abandoning their households to the chaos.

In my Catholic high school in the 80s, most of my friends had divorced parents. I vividly remember the day I realized that, whatever their difficulties, my own parents would never do that – not to each other and not to us their children. That moment is the origin of a lifelong peace built around the knowledge that happy marriage is possible for ordinary couples who are adequately matched (a much lower bar than most think) and mutually willing to do what is required to love each other for better or worse. Every family has its issues, but this is a debt I owe my parents: that in a culture that was severing my friends’ connections to wisdom and happiness, dad and mom stood against that tide and brought me to adulthood with those gifts largely intact.

On Father’s Day I try to remember to thank my father-in-law for raising such a wonderful daughter. What I hope that shorthand conveys is a broader gratitude that he and his wife also did their child rearing as a happily married couple who inspired my wife, when she was but a little girl, to follow their example and teaching instead of the lies and lures of the world.

Not many generations ago, this handing on of the torch was the more or less automatic result of culture. Today, it is a rebellion against culture. My beloved and I are proud and happy to have made the choice and then fought doggedly for it.

We have the gift of the upbringing that formed us for this, but we have had to do far more than mimic our parents. They did not have all the cultural supports that their parents had, but they still had some of them. As almost all of those supports have now fallen away in our time, we have had to work hard to master what we are trying to do, theoretically and practically. We live in a world in which many of our parents’ habits and practices and instincts are no longer useful. To make up for this, we have read, talked, prayed, movie watched, small grouped, asked, sought, taught, interviewed, written, befriended, cried, counseled, confessed, and much more to form ourselves to be a durably happy couple and worthy parents. This is true for most of the happily married couples we know. When the culture actively impedes virtuous adulthood, the only way to become and remain one is to actively cultivate the necessary virtues, usually in a community of like-minded people with similar goals and – perhaps above all – a common willingness to tell the anti-marriage culture all around us to pound it. You have to fight for what you want to keep.

We know many well married couples who were denied our patrimony, by parents who never married, or divorced, or abandoned them to educational and entertainment regimes that eviscerated the practices and ideas that are necessary if two are to become one. Later in life, they found their way to marriage and – perhaps against the odds – dedicated themselves to it. For them, the practice comes harder in some ways. They don’t have the same models to help them along the way. The challenges are steeper and the stakes are higher at times. Their path has been more experimental than ours, less able to form itself around common childhood experiences of strong households. And yet, many have done very well with this adventure. Most of them have also invested heavily in both theoretical and practical wisdom about happy marriage. Together we have all done our best to become experts instead of just practitioners, teachers instead of just students. This isn’t meant as a brag – this effort has been necessary for most of us just to make it through.

Within our little platoon of well married relatives and friends, marriage is indeed conserved. All of our marriages conserve marriage, to the extent that it is conserved at all. You might have been looking for something better, but you go to war with the army you’ve got.

Similar platoons proliferate in the nation. We certainly lack the power to impose healthy marriage as a social and legal norm that expresses itself in education, art, and literature, but we have kept it alive and kicking for any couple who wants to learn and do, to build their own life around it. It takes sometimes heroic work for those who want it, but that is good.

We hope most of all that we have made it available to our children, and that they will build better than we have. The ‘handing on to our kids’ part is the one we are truly responsible for as parents. Helping make it available to others is a knock-on effect.

What means?

Today we are regaled with the creation myth of the “lives of quiet desperation” lived in the Fools Golden Era of 1950s America. Then, we are told, marriage looked strong on the outside, but was rotten in the hearts of men and women. Whether that was true or not, it is different today. Now, many hearts are laid bare, and an epiphany of rot is manifest where once it was more carefully concealed. The post-marriage barbarism that beats on every door is not locked away in quiet suffering these days. The sexual revolution has begotten a culture built on an anti-anthropology whose purpose is to destroy human sexual happiness in marriage and child rearing, and to destroy human identity especially among the young.

So, in that setting, what have we conserved, exactly? What prospects do our functional (never perfect) marriages hold out for a better future? Precisely the opportunity for others, those willing to learn and do, to find a model to practice marriage for its proper ends in the face of barbarian nihilism. This will happen the way a plant grows, slowly at first and then exponentially, if it is cultivated properly and consistently for long enough.

You are asking: but how do we convert or reform the culture? How do we restore marriage’s proper place in our laws, in our entertainment, in our schools? How can we say we have conserved anything if we haven’t done that? How do we save everyone from what is happening?

This is to think of society, of culture, as a mechanism to which one applies programs and campaigns. It is at heart the progressive view of the world – that if we only apply the right politics, the new age will reveal itself. But it was never so. Information warfare looks like it operates that way, but in truth civilizations fall the way people do: corruption, old age, disease, fecklessness, selfishness, self-deceit, lack of purpose. The new sins are really just all the old ones. Populations must first be formed a certain way for the program to operate on them. “Programs” and platforms are useless now – only real virtue can save us. A new civilization will only grow organically, the way people and families do. It will take time, and it will take space, and it will take determination by particular families across that time and space to build a new and better society. The marriages we build along that way are the first foundation stones.

If you still want to know “what do we do today” then the point of disagreement between us may simply be this: perhaps you think that you can tear off the last six decades of the cultural block chain and reimpose a national culture based on and for marriage. I don’t.

The beginning of hope is recognizing that the civilizational contest is lost for now but not forever. Conserving, in this context, means retaining the resources to rebuild something new on a sure foundation, not recapturing a lost edifice.

If your hope must express itself in the notion that at some point, “the good and decent American people” will finally have had enough and come to their senses, it is no hope at all. This is a brain worm of the right, implanted in you by the communications pros who raise money for the politicians and think tanks who were supposedly on watch as the sexual revolution destroyed our nation and its culture.

If you want to act on hope, you have to challenge the cultural dominance of the sexual revolution, knowing it for what it is and what it has done, and steadily and virtuously build a new world around the practices of marriage that we have saved from the wreckage and maintained in proper working order.

Those of us with intact functional marriages and families have a growing responsibility to make this life more accessible to young people who are wandering in from the cold, looking for it or something like it, something that their hearts are taking a risk on believing can even be done, trying to figure it out, trying to make it work, struggling with the difficulties of it. The ranks of these young humans are growing, and they need guides, formation, example, and practical help. I have said that we have conserved marriage after all, but there is a shelf life to that condition. If we don’t get better at passing it around and passing it on, then it will indeed die out, on our watch.

We must rebuild.

In this rebuilding, little gets done by being a content creator or (it is to laugh) a politician. Anything and everything that gets done, we do in a community, just doing it day in and out, a little better every time, helping each other, and never ever giving up.