Spread and Sustain

Peter Hitchens writes:

Since last Wednesday, when ‘no-fault’ divorce became law south of the border (Scotland did this in 2006), civil marriage in England has become little more than a middle-class foible.

Families are temporary arrangements, easily scattered. Why should most people bother with a ‘commitment’ so readily torn up that it isn’t worth the paper it’s scribbled on?

I say civil marriage because I believe there are still couples from all layers of society who make serious pledges of lifelong marriage in religious weddings. But civil marriage is now less binding than a car lease. It offers no guarantee of stability to those who marry, let alone to their children, the real victims of this trend in the law.

In fact, these are the two fascinating things about modern marriage law in the West. It virtually ignores the dreadful damage divorce does to children. It correctly claims to liberate adults – but at what price to their offspring, who are in so many cases made miserable, not liberated?

And it turns normal law upside down. It sides with the contract-breaker rather than with the person who wants to keep his or her word. Try telling your mortgage lender that you don’t actually owe them any money any more, even though you solemnly promised to pay it back, because your relationship with them has irretrievably broken down.

This has been getting worse for many years. The clever, slick BBC TV drama The Split, starring Nicola Walker, portrays the smooth, moneyed industry that now feeds off marital break-up. But now it is terminal. Why is that?

I have long thought that both the state and business do not much like families. Families have private lives and pass on opinions and stories that contradict all the official dogmas. Families like to have weekends and evenings off rather than working the whole time.

Families spread and sustain old-fashioned ideas such as inheritance, continuity, thrift and providence. Families can stand against the hypnotic power of advertising and political propaganda. Families have ferociously strong bonds of loyalty. People who are in families are harder to push around and brainwash than isolated individuals.

The old Soviet state specifically made war on proper families. Marriage was a scrap of paper easily dissolved. Children were, literally, taught to put the state above their parents. They were trained to worship the obscene child traitor Pavlik Morozov, idolised for betraying his mother and father to the secret police. There was still a statue to this horror in Moscow until 1991.

The young used to be paraded in front of it and told to revere him, even though he probably never existed. But here it’s been more subtle. If you make what was once a binding oath easy to get out of, you will in the end undermine its power.

The strong possibility of break-up has been inserted, by the State, into every marriage ceremony. So when difficulties come, people swiftly think of divorce as the remedy.

The first thing that happens is that there are more divorces. The next is that it becomes increasingly difficult to be critical of divorce because divorcees take it personally.

Then this settles down, and there are fewer marriages in the first place. And so we get a stronger state, greedier commerce – and more and more lonely, unhappy children who tragically think it is all their fault.