{"id":33186,"date":"2015-10-17T02:00:10","date_gmt":"2015-10-17T06:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33186"},"modified":"2015-10-14T11:25:22","modified_gmt":"2015-10-14T15:25:22","slug":"moynihans-scissors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/17\/moynihans-scissors\/","title":{"rendered":"Moynihan\u2019s scissors"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Warren<\/a> looks at the work of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan:<\/p>\n

We are celebrating this year, if that is the word, the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps the most inconsequential sociological study ever published. That was, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action<\/em>, by the brilliant American politician and thinker, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927\u20132003).<\/p>\n

Working then in the U.S. Department of Labour, Moynihan focused his attention on a counter-intuitive statistical fact. Unemployment among black males was falling, in 1965. But rates of welfare enrollment for black families was rising. This did not make sense. The two lines on this chart had always fallen or risen together. But they had crossed over in 1962. He had put his finger in what came to be called, \u201cMoynihan\u2019s scissors.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…] while the \u201cMoynihan Report\u201d is famous, and at one time, everyone claimed to have read it, it contains something so obnoxious to enlightened post-modern thought as to remain invisible to all participants in the discussion.<\/p>\n

This was Moynihan\u2019s sociological and anthropological observation that the American black culture was becoming \u201cmatriarchal.\u201d Whether without, or more likely with the help of welfare programmes, women were becoming the heads of households, and men were being removed from that station.<\/p>\n

(The background: All of the higher civilizations have been unambiguously patriarchal; matriarchy is associated in the prehistoric and anthropological record with savage, gratuitously violent, self-destructive tribes.)<\/p>\n

Already, in 1965, one in four black kids in the USA were born out of wedlock. Today it is more than three in four, and levels of bastardy among the other races have risen in course. By the end of the last century (1990s), white children were as likely to be raised in fatherless homes as black children had been in the 1960s. \u201cProgress\u201d has been progressing rapidly.<\/p>\n

The Nanny State has replaced fathers as the principal source of income for such families (bankrupting itself in the process), and the feminist movement has supplied the arguments \u2014 or more precisely, misandronist slogans and vindictive clich\u00e9s \u2014 for the overthrow of \u201cpatriarchy\u201d and its systematic replacement with a shrewish matriarchy in all facets of social life. The movement has been, moreover, so successful in achieving its objects \u2014 the emasculation of men, and degradation or actual inversion of traditional morality \u2014 that it has now moved on. For with the defeat of masculinity, new horizons of \u201cgender-bending\u201d or \u201ctransgendering\u201d have come into view.<\/p>\n

Now, part of the reason people can\u2019t get their little heads around what has actually happened \u2014 first to the black family, then to the brown, then to the white \u2014 is the surviving, basically modern (i.e. pre-post-modern) belief that eunuchs behave much like fairies; that they become docile and effeminate, harmless and nurturing, sensitive and sweet; that their previously reprehensible \u201cmasculine\u201d traits will quietly disappear. Some men do indeed respond to emasculation by becoming the pathetic, contemptible wimps that all women, including feminists, instinctively abhor. But some do not.<\/p>\n

As a well-read student of social sciences and history, Moynihan knew better than this. The masculine capacity for violence (at all levels, spiritual as much as physical) does not go away. From Spartan Laconia, backwards and forwards through history on all continents, we see that eunuchs and other \u201chomosexual\u201d (the word is inadequate) guards and soldiers have been employed by the great warrior despots. This is because they make the fiercest fighters. Having no families, no heritage to protect, no women and children to feed and shelter in safety, they become a purely destructive force. They become men who do not care even for their own lives, let alone for the lives of others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Warren looks at the work of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan: We are celebrating this year, if that is the word, the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps the most inconsequential sociological study ever published. That was, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, by the brilliant American politician and thinker, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927\u20132003). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,53,13],"tags":[343,968,987,91,1020,42],"class_list":["post-33186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-politics","category-usa","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-family","tag-feminism","tag-poverty","tag-progressives","tag-sociology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Dg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33187,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33186\/revisions\/33187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}