Books, Arts & Manners: The Right Books

The Death of the Family and the keening that surrounds it is a real growth industry today, but it seems to me to be of no more intrinsic seriousness than the Death of God theology was twenty years ago. Whatever strains are being put upon it at the present time, the Family as the basic unit of society is not going to go away, any more than God went away, or honor and courage are destined to vanish from the face of the earth. Meanwhile, an at least respectable number of Yesterday’s Generation have got bored waiting for the Sexual Revolution to show up and have gone off, got married, and—pace Midge Decter —produced children; while the Death of the Family idea gives conservatives of a skittish emotional disposition something to discuss at symposia.

There is now an interesting volume out called The Wealth of Families: Ethics and Economics in the 1980s (The American Family Institute, 114 Fifth St., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003; $3.95), edited by Carl A. Anderson and William J. Gribbin and including essays by Allan C. Carlson, George Gilder, Midge Decter, Jacqueline Kasun, and C. Everett Koop. Of these the best are easily Carlson’s “The Family and Free Enterprise” and Gilder’s “The Family and Our Economic Future,” which was apparently delivered originally as a commencement address at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I recall hearing the standing ovation from my home in Kemmerer, Wyo., nearly two hundred miles distant.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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The Death of the Family and the keening that surrounds it is a real growth industry today, but it seems to me to be of no more intrinsic seriousness than the Death of God theology was twenty years ago. Whatever strains are being put upon it at the present time, the Family as the basic unit of society is not going to go away, any more than God went away, or honor and courage are destined to vanish from the face of the earth. Meanwhile, an at least respectable number of Yesterday’s Generation have got bored waiting for the Sexual Revolution to show up and have gone off, got married, and—pace Midge Decter —produced children; while the Death of the Family idea gives conservatives of a skittish emotional disposition something to discuss at symposia.

There is now an interesting volume out called The Wealth of Families: Ethics and Economics in the 1980s (The American Family Institute, 114 Fifth St., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003; $3.95), edited by Carl A. Anderson and William J. Gribbin and including essays by Allan C. Carlson, George Gilder, Midge Decter, Jacqueline Kasun, and C. Everett Koop. Of these the best are easily Carlson’s “The Family and Free Enterprise” and Gilder’s “The Family and Our Economic Future,” which was apparently delivered originally as a commencement address at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I recall hearing the standing ovation from my home in Kemmerer, Wyo., nearly two hundred miles distant.