‘Who, for starters, has the wherewithal to attend protests night after night for months on end, as happened for years in Portland, Oregon?” asks Mary Eberstadt, in the expanded reissue of her 2012 book, Adam and Eve after the Pill. “For the most part, not people living in families. And certainly not mothers and fathers caring for young children.”

Across a series of penetrating essays, Eberstadt endeavors to shine a klieg light on the feral scenes of the present, and on the ideological extremism of our times. What she finds are products and paradoxes of the sexual revolution. And in 2023 there is quite a bit of new ground to cover. Since the original was published, we’ve seen the introduction of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, a further plunge in birth rates, a decline of the American life span, the rise of “revenge porn,” and the proliferation of dating apps. Beyond these is the sudden proliferation of gender clinics promising to “affirm” the gender identity of young people by feeding them off-label puberty blockers and scheduling surgeries that will make them infertile and in many cases incontinent. All this was accompanied by a ferocious surge in identity politics, a rising tide of intolerant secularism, levels of reported teen depression never before recorded, and an opioid epidemic that is killing as many Americans per year as did the entire Vietnam War.

What was the sexual revolution, anyway? The title to this collection of essays points to the technology that made it all possible. Woman’s fertility could be reliably managed by pharmaceuticals. As Unherd’s Mary Harrington recently pointed out, this introduced a radical change in the human social order: “The Pill was the first transhumanist technology: it set out not to fix something that was wrong with ‘normal’ human physiology — in the ameliorative sense of medicine up to that point — but instead it introduced a whole new paradigm. It set out to interrupt normal in the interests of individual freedom.”

Yeah, yeah. Many readers by this time are already tuning out. Christian complaints about the sexual revolution are old hat. But turning away would be a mistake. Many socially conservative critics throw up their hands after having documented a few enormities and hypocrisies of the era they want to criticize. What Eberstadt offers is different from the normal jeremiads. Her intellect and wit are sharpened by her maternal care, especially for the losers of this revolution, children.

“What is fury, but the flip side of loss?” Eberstadt asks, in one of many plaintive passages that acknowledge a kind of inchoate rage that is running through what’s left of American society. What loss?

Well, a post-sexual-revolution society is a lower-commitment society. It’s not just that divorce, abortion, and hookup culture are themselves evidence of lowered commitment to nurturing relationships. Together they produce a society where commitment is less practiced generally. Writes Eberstadt:

Children today are considerably less likely to have siblings — and by extension, cousins, aunts, and uncles — than they were sixty years ago. Almost 30 percent of all households consist of just one person. Some 40 percent of all children lack a biological father in the home. Such momentous, ubiquitous changes to kinship have had and continue to have momentous and ubiquitous consequences. How could they not? A world of fewer and weaker family ties is one in which deprived people are furious about things they do not have or no longer know.

The result is that “a generational divide has opened between the Boomers and the Millennials and the Zoomers. It is a wealth gap over social capital. And it is enormous.”

To put it more starkly, in the name of human freedom, we have perhaps unwittingly created a society in which children on the whole experience less love and commitment in their lives than ever before. There are literally fewer people in their lives who are bonded to them by familial ties. This means fewer role models. Fewer chances to connect with the one odd cousin, aunt, or in-law who shares a peculiar passion or trait. It means less practice at socialization. It means fewer chances to practice sharing joy, and grief, with people whose bonds are natural and, for the most part, durable. It means that enthusiasms are “less tempered by familial and communal influences, hence more volatile.”

Eberstadt’s essays relay the realities we all have sensed, but she does so in statistics that render them shocking once again. “The vast majority of incarcerated juveniles have grown up in fatherless homes,” she writes. “Teen and other mass murderers almost invariably have a filial rupture in their biographies. Absent fathers predict higher rates of truancy, psychiatric problems, criminality, promiscuity, drug use, rape, domestic violence, and other tragic outcomes.”

Disengaged young men are far more likely to be attracted to politically extremist identitarian movements, left or right. Eberstadt, recalling the infamous night of Kenosha’s 2020 BLM protests, points out that Kyle Rittenhouse was the product of a broken home. So were two of the three men who were shot. The same human damage is in evidence in the transgender phenomenon. When looking at a spate of six celebrities who declared themselves nonbinary in a short period of time, Eberstadt finds that all of them had some primordial family wound — an absent father, a divorce, or early sexual abuse.

God, family, and country are all implicated in a general erosion of Western patriarchy, and in the absence of filial love there is resentment and rage. “The explosive events of 2020 were but the latest eruption along a fault line running through our already unstable lives. The eruption exposes the threefold crisis of filial attachment that has beset the Western world for more than half a century. Deprived of father, Father, and patria, a critical mass of mankind has become dysfunctional on a scale not seen before.”

Of particular interest to readers will be Eberstadt’s startling thesis in chapter nine, “What Causes Secularization?” A telescoped examination of the historical evidence argues against the common idea that material well-being and education are the primary causes. Social data from the Victorian era in England and from present-day America show working classes defecting from membership in the church first, and long before the middle classes. Was Western secularization driven by disenchantment after two horrendous world wars? That thesis also falls short when one looks at the surge of interest in and practice of religion after World War II.

Eberstadt’s arresting thesis is that the decline of family life — traceable in massive drops in general fertility — is a preview of defection from the Christian church, not the reverse. Family and faith are a kind of double helix, each reinforcing the other. Religious families do not divorce as often, and they have more children. Those who are defecting from the family way of life, by not marrying and not experiencing the primordial shift of mind brought on by fatherhood and motherhood, have fewer reasons to turn to the church for encouragement and guidance. It is in these life milestones that adults reconnect with and renew a childhood faith.

The collected testimony of these essays amounts to a vindication of derided traditional church teaching on family life. “Social science confirms that people who have robust social bonds are more likely to thrive than people who do not,” Eberstadt notes.

Those who do not have faith or see the prospect of it in their lives may choke on such a conclusion. But is it really so unintuitive? The nature documentaries so many of us watch in rapt attention point to the fine design of nature — the wonderful fittingness of creatures to their environment, the way their instincts and capacities serve them in their ecosystems and perpetuate the collective life of a species, whether the long tail of the snow leopard or the light of the lantern fish.

Is it unthinkable that our libido and the natural human capacity for fertility are similarly tuned to the intergenerational health of the species? Of all creatures on earth, the human is an extreme outlier in the length of its childhood compared with its life span. Our minds and bodies are built to undergo this long, slow, bright period — nearly a quarter of our lives. Taken at a species level, childhood is a time well designed to be fully “peopled” by kith and kin. Our modern dearth of births guarantees a level of social undernourishment for children. Born into the chaos of unstable homes, the rising generation reproduces the same chaos and instability at an institutional and social level.

One worries there is more to say each day, that Eberstadt will be producing more worrisome updates in the years to come. We have no shortage of subjects. Clearly, the social contagion of nonbinary and trans identity among young girls on the verge of puberty is related not just to family breakdown but to the ubiquity of violent pornography, which makes female sexuality look like little more than an occasion for male abuse and contempt. What young girl would welcome a female sexuality that has replaced the promise of intimacy and stability with asphyxiations and other forms of masochism followed by social “ghosting”? If boys are matured into beasts, the flight from femininity will continue indefinitely.

The value of Eberstadt’s book, however, is not just in the acuity of her insights. It is ultimately in the encouragement she gives to readers who intuit the great social problem of our time — who sense that several of our most distressing social trends are bundled together — but have had difficulty articulating how or why they should be resisted. A smart, tough — and, yes — motherly voice is here to reassure us that, no, we haven’t gone crazy.