The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

As early as the 1920s, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell had warned that the establishment of welfare states risked turning not just the economy but everything upside-down, because the state would replace the father as protector and provider. Breaking the traditional family structure might look rational, modern, and sensible. Nonetheless, Russell wrote, if this should occur, we must expect a complete breakdown of traditional morality, since there will no longer be any reason why a mother should wish the paternity of her child to be indubitable. . . . Whether the effect upon men would be good or bad, I do not venture to say. It would eliminate from their lives the only emotion equal in importance to sex love. It would make sex love itself more trivial. It would make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s own death. It would make men less active and probably cause them to retire earlier from work. It would diminish their interest in history and their sense of the continuity of historical tradition.

This is disquietingly descriptive of my own outlook.