Joyce's Achievement in Dubliners

In the 13 June 2014 article "James Joyce's 'Dubliners' still worth celebrating 100 years later" in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the author notes:

Joyce used his collection's 15 stories to piteously examine how life in his native city — provincial, intolerant, hypocritical and awash in drink — had deformed its politically frustrated, economically backward and spiritually bankrupt residents.

This captures well the sense I got from re-reading the full collection of Joyce's short stories.

Butler and Rousseau on Identity

Discussions, often controversial ones, about same-sex marriage are largely, among other things, about one's gender identity.  And discussions about gender identity can vacillate from the deterministic pole ("I was born this way") to the performative pole ("I construct my own 'gender,' which might differ from my 'sex'").  A recent speech by Lori Watson, Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of San Diego, illustrates especially the performative emphasis.  The speech was given in support of the Catholic university's Pride organization student group, which was organizing its 2nd Annual Drag Show.  In thinking about contemporary issues involving gender identity, I returned to the influential theorist Judith Butler.  Her 1990 book Gender Trouble is a seminal study of performativity that is influential in gender/queer circles such as Professor Watson's.

As I began Butler's 2004 book Undoing Gender, in which she clarifies her position on this passive/performative spectrum, I began to wonder about the pedigree of her central theoretical claims.  To what extent does her balancing act now between biological determinism and social construction resemble concerns about identity that also flowered in another era like the Enlightenment?

Although Judith Butler herself would likely not draw connections between her critique of gender and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment, some noteworthy echoes (and perhaps unacknowledged debts) exist. In particular, her insistence in Undoing Gender that gender “is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (p. 1) reflects, despite some important differences, a comparable tension that in his discourses Rousseau argued attended human self-invention in Enlightenment society: enslaving liberation, or alternatively liberated confinement. This similarity between Butler and Rousseau appears in several respects: recognition, the paradox of agency, and (in)authenticity.

Talk to Them

I am currently reading a book by two MIT professors, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, about poverty.  The book is Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.  It is a good read, and it seeks to cut through some of the major ideological divides.  The poles are often referred to as those of Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs, who argues that more foreign aid can eliminate poverty traps around the globe, and New York University's William Easterly, who argues that aid hurts more than helps because it prevents necessary self-agency, undermines and corrupts local institutions, and hinders the proper functioning of market forces (see pp. 3-4).  All of these authors, Banerjee and Duflo included, have a different, sometimes competing way of assessing and fighting global poverty.

Enter a different sort of prescription for tackling poverty, which so often disproportionately disadvantages children:  talking.

"The Power of Talking to Your Baby" is the title of a short post entry by Tina Rosenberg in yesterday's New York Times Opinionator section.  The entire post is worth reading.  But I'll reproduce the main points of the research she reports.  In prior posts (here, here, here, and here), I have touched on poverty and economic class differences. The research that Ms. Rosenberg discusses is noteworthy because it, like some of my prior posts, highlights the correlation of aspects of family life to poverty.

All parents gave their children directives like “Put away your toy!” or “Don’t eat that!” But interaction was more likely to stop there for parents on welfare, while as a family’s income and educational levels rose, those interactions were more likely to be just the beginning.

The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental.

Hart and Risley later wrote that children’s level of language development starts to level off when it matches that of their parents — so a language deficit is passed down through generations. They found that parents talk much more to girls than to boys (perhaps because girls are more sociable, or because it is Mom who does most of the care, and parents talk more to children of their gender). This might explain why young, poor boys have particular trouble in school. And they argued that the disparities in word usage correlated so closely with academic success that kids born to families on welfare do worse than professional-class children entirely because their parents talk to them less. In other words, if everyone talked to their young children the same amount, there would be no racial or socioeconomic gap at all. (Some other researchers say that while word count is extremely important, it can’t be the only factor.)

This raises a number of questions, and much could be said even before those questions are answered.  I am suspicious, for instance, that early-age word usage by parents accounts entirely for later academic success disparities among students. I think it may be one reason, and may be an important one.

More generally, the notion that talking to one's children in their earliest years might have long-term effects would seem to be as intuitive and obvious as it is apparently lacking in many homes.  Getting some families to talk more to their children, however, will not be as simple as informing them that it is important to do so.  This is not a quick fix.  Background challenges involving the social structure of these welfare children's home, particularly the single-parent nature of so many of them, will also be necessary.

I have not read the full paper by Professors Hart and Risley, but it would be interesting to know whether they also examine the correlation of decreased word use to children in single-parent homes.  Does word use go up or down depending on the household's marital structure, in other words?  If it goes down in single-parent homes relative to two-parent homes, then this study would be additional evidence that family structure, as well as what takes place within it, has a predictive effect on the presence and prevalence of poverty in the United States.

This study from the 1990s is stimulating, but it is only one window into a complex problem.

Hookup Culture and Same-Sex Marriage

A fascinating book review appears in today's Wall Street Journal.  The review is by Emily Esfahani Smith of a new book by Donna Freitas called The End of Sex:  How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.

The review includes an interesting suggestion, which I had not seen before but makes perfect sense.  It is that there is a high positive correlation between the increased use of technological devices among youth -- which replaces, removes, or corrupts traditional human interaction (a la Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, and many others) -- and the rise of hookup culture on college campuses. (Previous posts here and here provide a summary of Prof. Turkle's ideas.)

Something else worth pondering is a point that Prof. Freitas makes about the culture of sex on college campuses, here summarized by Ms. Smith:

In other words, many college students, who in philosophy class would surely recognize the ethical imperative not to use other people as means to an end, do so every night in their dorms. This selfishness is why, as Ms. Freitas argues, the hookup culture is intimately related to sexual assault. In both, one person uses another to satisfy a sexual or social desire without any regard for what that other person wants, needs or feels. 

Now, one might counter that the sex is consensual and so there is no assault. But the idea underlying the claim of selfish sexual use that disregards what another person "wants, needs, and feels" goes deeper than this.  It is more holistic.  The assumption seems to be that this sexual activity is done in the absence of thinking about what sex is, what it does relationally, and what it is part of holistically.   And absent these fundamental considerations, hookup sex is personally utilitarian to the extreme and, at bottom, immoral.

Professor Freitas may not go so far as I just put it (i.e., say that hookup sex is immoral), but that is apparently her instinct.  And there is something to that notion.

This discussion of campus sexuality is revealing, it seems to me, for the contours surrounding, and the connections to, the same-sex marriage debate that is now current.  Proponents of same-sex marriage tend to defend it on the basis of a "rights" argument, that it is an individual and civil right to be able to marry whomever one may wish.  But this line of argumentation, while it needs to be considered, may be similar to the hookup sex culture in this way:  it tends to assume something about the fundamental issue of what marriage is, and perhaps like hookup sex culture it misses the point.

Arguing for same-sex marriage may not always include explicitly a definition of what marriage is, but there is certainly an assumed definition, which is really a re-definition.  Redefining marriage from the conjugal view to include same-sex partners turns on the idea that marriage is simply a relationally satisfying forum, one that exists for the pursuit of the happiness, or the fulfillment of desires, of those persons involved.  One full expression of this revisionist view is given by S. Girgis, R. George, and R. Anderson:

Marriage is the union of two people (whether of the same sex or of opposite sexes) who commit to romantically loving and caring for each other and to sharing the burdens and benefits of domestic life. It is essentially a union of hearts and minds, enhanced by whatever forms of sexual intimacy both partners find agreeable. (my emphasis)

What if sexual intimacy according to whatever form that partners find agreeable turns out to be deleterious and misguided, as Prof. Freitas argues about hookup culture?  What if the potential form that sexual intimacy takes in marriage is in fact constitutive of marriage itself properly practiced?

I don't know Prof. Freitas's view of the same-sex marriage question, and I am not suggesting that she would support a conjugal view of it.  Based on the review, I doubt she would.

My main contention is simply that if one is going to discuss the merits or legitimacy of different forms of sexuality -- hookup culture on college campuses and marriage itself (because sexuality has been viewed as intrinsic to marriage) -- one needs to be candid about this:  the fact that the discussion is about, or should really be about, what sex or marriage is most basically.  And everyone in the conversation needs to be willing to engage substantively in that discussion.

The preoccupation with a supposed individual right of same-sex persons to marry obscures the logically prior and necessary question of the basic definition of marriage upon which the exercise of any right depends.  Moreover, if someone is confused about what something is and what it is a part of, as in the case of hookup culture, then the doing of that thing will have deleterious and misguided results.

To adapt the subtitle of Prof. Freitas's book, what if same-sex marriage ends up leaving a generation and its posterity confused about intimacy and what marriage really is?

Ancient Greek Tragedies and Our Own

I have been rereading some ancient Greek tragedies, and I am impressed by how relevant their themes remain, especially for our struggles in families and societies.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 9: Universal Impulse

In a prior post in which I reflected on James Q. Wilson's book The Moral Sense, I drew attention to the universal impulse in moral sentiment that he identifies:  "The most remarkable change in the moral history of mankind has been the rise -- and occasionally the application -- of the view that all people, and not just one’s own kind, are entitled to fair treatment" (191).  Because it is so remarkable, and because it has such sweeping implications, it is worth probing further this topic about the development of universalism in moral thinking and practice.

We can begin by focusing on a question that Prof. Wilson himself poses:  "How can we explain the great expansion of the boundaries within which the moral sense operates?  How, in particular, can we explain why we believe that moral rules ought to have universal applicability?  This aspiration toward the universal is the chief feature of the moral history of mankind" (194).  Indeed.

Professor Wilson suggests that the long development of consensual marriage, particularly in northwestern Europe, helps to provide a key, but not the only, component of an explanation.

The link between the two, consensual marriage and universal moral applicability, may not be immediately apparent.  The tie, however, is the parallel development in northwestern Europe of individualism.  What is the connection?

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 6: Sociability

In Part II of his book The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson discusses the sources of the four moral sentiments that he explores in Part I.  Those sentiments are sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.  The sources of these virtues that he takes up are also four in number:  the nature of humans as a social animal, the family, gender differences, and the modern impulse toward moral universalism.  A common theme across each of the four chapters on these sources is sociability:  “The mechanism underlying human moral conduct is the desire for attachment or affiliation” (127).

Testing Tolerance

Until now I have tried to stay above the fray involving Chick-fil-A.  I post this only to say that the main point of an editorial in today's The New York Times strikes me as correct:  Government officials, such as the mayors of Boston and Chicago, the Speaker of the New York City Council, and an alderman of Chicago, ought not to discriminate against a lawful business enterprise on the basis of the personal views of the business owner.  Those officials have said that they would block additional expansion of Chick-fil-A franchises in their jurisdictions.

The editors at the Times, as well as NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, hold a view of the permissible parties involved in and the moral nature of marriage that is opposed to that of Chick-fil-A owner Dan Cathy.  What they both accurately recognize, however, is that the public relations campaign and business threats by government officials against Mr. Cathy amount to intolerance of his religious beliefs and his entitlement both to hold and to express them.  As Mr. Bloomberg is quoted in the editorial as saying, “You can’t have a test for what the owners’ personal views are before you decide to give a [business] permit to do something in the city.”

The Chicago and Boston mayors', the NYC councilwoman's, and the Chicago alderman's views are intolerant because they seek to deny public rights (the rights to pursue property and lawful enterprise) as an attempt to censure private rights (the rights to free religious belief, free speech, and liberty of conscience).  These officials may attempt this in protest to, or as an expression of disagreement about, some other closely-held matter, but they are still intolerant.

And they are intolerant, moreover, because they deny in practice something at the heart of political liberalism, the fact of reasonable pluralism.  In a contemporary democratic society, John Rawls observes, the fact of reasonable pluralism is "the fact of profound and irreconcilable differences in citizens' reasonable comprehensive religious and philosophical conceptions of the world, and in their views of the moral and aesthetic values to be sought in human life" (Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 3).  The government officials do this -- deny in effect the fact of reasonable pluralism -- precisely by seeking to banish from their political communities (because they cannot be tolerated) those who differ in moral and civic viewpoints from them.  They do not accept profound and irreconcilable differences in worldview; they wish to eliminate them.  The officials make no room for public debate about how to balance in the community all agreed upon liberties with those that may be disputed.  In fact, they make little to no room for the exponents themselves who hold and express differing viewpoints.

In this vein, a creative thought experiment was narrated by Mona Charen in a column that she titled "Al-Rahim and Chicago Values."  She describes a situation in which a Muslim business owner of convenience stores articulates to a Muslim periodical his belief in the traditional, Quranic view of marriage, which is a man's having not more than four wives.  Apparently this differs from the view of marriage held by the mayors of Chicago and Boston, who go on record that they will do all within their power to prevent him from opening up more convenience stores in their cities, because his personal beliefs about heterosexual matrimony are at odds with their and their cities' approach to marriage and civil unions.  What would the response be to this Muslim man's comments?

This is a thought experiment, because it is retelling the story of Mr. Cathy as Mr. Al-Rahim, the story of a Christian businessman's expression of his personal viewpoint as the story of a Muslim's.  As Ms. Charen explains, "Rahim is an invention to illustrate the selective outrage of liberal Democrats. It is simply impossible to imagine that liberal Democrats would treat affirmations of Muslim faith with the kind of bullying that Cathy and Chick-fil-A have received.  Yet Islam is at least as doctrinally tough on homosexuality as Christianity is, and considerably tougher in practice."

The fact of reasonable pluralism, as Prof. Rawls understands it, is an unavoidable fixture of contemporary democratic republics such as the one in the United States.  It is also, as the present brouhaha attests, difficult to navigate in conjunction with a commitment to the core and treasured liberties of the moderns:  freedom of thought, speech, property ownership, and liberty of conscience.  (I borrow the phrase "liberties of the moderns" from Prof. Rawls; see Justice as Fairness, 140-45.)  As much as definitions of fairness still need to be clarified carefully, about which I wrote in a previous post, so, too, does the concept of tolerance.

Tolerance of a belief is not the same as acceptance of that belief.  In my view, however, in common, everyday practice, tolerance has become in many people's minds synonymous with conforming to, or acceptance of, their viewpoint.  This conception of tolerance is the converse of the popular conception of intolerance:  If you accept my view about P, then you are tolerant; if you do not accept -- do not agree with, do not conform to -- my view about P, then you are intolerant.  Disagreement is designated intolerance; reasonable difference of opinion is often quickly labeled bigotry.

But this popular conception, where it prevails, not only may serve as easy ad hominem argumentation.  This conception evacuates tolerance of all its meaning, for tolerance assumes non-acceptance.  It presupposes disagreement.  It says that a differing viewpoint and the one who holds it are not to be excluded from public discourse and the public square.  Reasonable disagreement will be endured and respected -- tolerated.  By contrast, to be intolerant is to be unwilling to grant equal freedom of expression or to penalize people unjustly for making free expressions.

The fact of reasonable pluralism tests real and workable conceptions of tolerance.  We may not agree with the fictional Mr. Al-Rahim's endorsement of traditional, Quranic marriage.  We may object to the real-life Mr. Cathy's advocacy of traditional marriage as a conjugal union.  These sorts of expression of speech and conviction of conscience are rights protected by the Constitution and enshrined as Constitutional essentials.

What we may not do, however, is this.  In advocating for fairness for all, we may not practice a selective view of fairness for some.  In an attempt to prevent certain Muslims and Christians from supposedly treating a group as separate but equal (for so goes the argument for same-sex "marriage"), we may not treat these Muslims and Christians themselves as separate but equal.  We may not, in other words, claim that they are equal but seek to separate them from our civic and business life.

But this is what the mayors of Chicago and Boston have done.  They say, "You may have your beliefs, but you cannot pursue your conception of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in our community through your business enterprise.  You are equal, but you must remain separate from us.  We can discriminate, but you cannot."  In so doing, that is, by practicing a real separate-but-equal approach to matters of freedom of speech and lawful employment, these officials have undermined their professed moral justification for same-sex marriage on the basis of the same, namely, ending a purported practice of separate but equal.

Whether, in fact, the debate about the definition of marriage admits, as some parties believe, the separate but equal line from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is another matter.  The black community, for instance, does not on the whole view the subject in that light, and they might be positioned better than others to know separate but equal when they see it.  Separate but equal sounds nice; it is a powerful sound bite with a known civil rights pregnancy; but I am not sure that upon closer inspection it fully applies.  The debate about marriage seems to me fundamentally about the wisdom and propriety of redefining -- and thereby changing -- an indispensable cultural/civil (and arguably religious) institution, as well as about the moral consequences entailed by such a redefinition.

Be that as it may, the mayoral hubbub about Chick-fil-A demonstrates the ways in which so-called tolerance is frequently championed but inconsistently practiced.  For calling out what would amount to unjust policing and penalizing of law-abiding citizens and businesses for protected First Amendment rights, The New York Times editorial board is to be commended.

Initiative in the Poverty Debate

These days, questions about justice, particularly that nebulous but ubiquitous term social justice, turn in my hearing mostly on the basic structure of life in the United States.  It is a structure, it is claimed, that in its very fabric is unjust.  Therefore, the unjust social fabric ineluctably results in inherently unequal opportunities, not to mention also unequal outcomes.  A case in point, frequently offered as Exhibit A, is poverty.

Without discussing now the philosophical postulates about justice that this prevailing view reflects, I was struck by a report of Congressional testimony that was given last week on the subject of poverty.  The Wall Street Journal reproduces in today's edition the following remarks by Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution. (The Brookings Institution is generally considered a center-left think tank in Washington, D.C.)  Mr. Haskins's point:  certain behavior is an extremely accurate predictor of adult poverty or, alternately, general economic success.

His testimony does not deny environmental challenges (and one should readily admit them), but it does underscore, more than I believe is often acknowledged in philosophical and policy debates, the key role of individual responsibility.  (We might say communal responsibility for its individuals.)  This effort, as he describes it, seems to me to have at least one unifying moral quality:  discipline, or self-control.  Specifically, it is the self-control required in pursuing education, work, and family.

Whatever one may think of Mr. Haskins's view, the Census data that he provides must be part of the ongoing political, economic, and moral debate.  (The full transcript of his Senate testimony may be found here.)

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Ron Haskins testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, June 5:

I want to emphasize the importance of individual initiative in reducing poverty and promoting economic success. Young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success—complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby. Based on an analysis of Census data, people who followed all three of these rules had only a 2% chance of being in poverty and a 72% chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 in 2010). These numbers were almost precisely reversed for people who violated all three rules, elevating their chance of being poor to 77% and reducing their chance of making the middle class to 4%.

Individual effort and good decisions about the big events in life are more important than government programs. Call it blaming the victim if you like, but decisions made by individuals are paramount in the fight to reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America. The nation's struggle to expand opportunity will continue to be an uphill battle if young people do not learn to make better decisions about their future.

A version of this article appeared June 11, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Notable & Quotable.

Out in the Open

Today President Obama publicly affirmed his support for same-sex marriage.  His position has been an open secret for some time.

Moral Julia

In his op-ed piece "The Party of Julia" in yesterday's The New York Times, Ross Douthat analyzes "the policy vision and philosophical premises" of the president for persons and the nation as he seeks re-election -- inasmuch as that vision is depicted in the White House's new slideshow about its composite everywoman "Julia":

The liberalism of “the Life of Julia” doesn’t envision government spending the way an older liberalism did — as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness. It offers a more sweeping vision of government’s place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision — personal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexual — can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.

Noteworthy is not just the absence of an explicit and stable family structure; it is the absence of any family member not merely incidental to the story of family's replacement by government in the narrative of an individual's life.

In previous posts, in February and in April, I have observed the challenges of family structure in contemporary life and the difficulties that those challenges may pose for civic life.  I am not alone in discerning these trends.  Indeed, Mr. Douthat suggests that, while the president's vision may involve some inherent "condescension," "in an increasingly atomized society, where communities and families are weaker than ever before, such a vision may have more appeal — to both genders — than many of the conservatives mocking the slide show might like to believe."

This all brought to mind George Lakoff's book Moral Politics (1996).  In it the UC Berkeley professor seeks to help readers, but especially liberal readers, understand the cognitively systemic ways in which people think about morality and politics.  For him the two are intimately related.

At the heart of Mr. Lakoff's analysis is the family.  His thesis, in a nutshell, is that how one conceives of the nuclear family and its moral structure and function, so one conceives of the central government and its policy structure and function.  The systems of one's moral reasoning apply both to family and to government, and the cognitive conceptual metaphor that links them is the family.  A cognitive mapping occurs whereby what one expects of one's family one expects of one's government:  the government as family and what it should be. 

Professor Lakoff uses this idea of moral reasoning -- informed as it is by family-based metaphors that characterize the moral systems of two different family models -- to explain his view of the differences between so-called "liberals" and "conservatives" in American political life.  Without getting into the details of Mr. Lakoff's argument (which is immensely compelling but not above critique), the connection between it and the president's vision for government through Julia's dependence on it as a surrogate parent should be readily discernible.  The mapping of family onto government is overt.

Last month, the president met with his outgoing Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev on the controversial subject of missile defense in eastern Europe.  The U.S. president was overheard by a hot microphone saying, "This is my last election.  After my election, I have more flexibility."  The not-so-subtle message was that unconstrained by political (voter) accountability he could move things aggressively in new directions.  Mr. Medvedev replied, "I understand ... I will transmit this information to Vladimir [Putin], and I stand with you."

Based on "The Life of Julia" and Mr. Douthat's assessment of its implicit and explicit philosophical and political trajectory, one wonders whether the chief executive's apparent intention to stretch U.S. government policy in new directions also applies to both the family and liberal egalitarianism per se.

The Cohabitation Effect

"The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage," as discussed by Meg Jay in the Sunday, April 15, edition of The New York Times:

Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect. ... at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself.  ... Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean. ... Cohabitation is loaded with setup and switching costs.

The opinion piece is mostly descriptive based on Ms. Jay's clinical research and various published studies on the subject, including one in March by the Department of Health and Human Services.  She sketches a few suggestions to avoid the prevailing negative outcomes.

I took up the subject of marriage in the United States in two previous blog posts (on Feb. 22 and on Feb. 28).

Brooks on the future of virtue

David Brooks offers his reflections in today's The New York Times on the difficulty of consistently practicing virtue, of mastering excessively dangerous emotions, and of enduring suffering in life.  Not all will agree with his final four paragraphs.  He puts his finger, however, on some central and abiding subjects that often appear in this blog.

"Love and marriage"

As a quasi follow-up to my previous post on marriage in contemporary U.S. culture, I ran across this study on the subject via J. Taranto of The Wall Street Journal:

• A Brookings Institution study by George A. Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen, "An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births in the United States" (August 1996).  This paper was earlier published in May 1996 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 

"It's an institute you can't disparage"

For Frank Sinatra, 

Love and marriage, love and marriage / Go together like a horse and carriage ... 

Love and marriage, love and marriage / It's an institute you can't disparage ... 

Try, try, try to separate them / It's an illusion 

But according to this February 18 front-page report in The New York Times, "For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage," in the United States apparently neither love nor children goes with marriage like a horse and carriage.  Rather, as sociologist Frank Furstenberg tries to make sense of the phenomenon, "[m]arriage has become a luxury good."