What David Brooks Gets Wrong About the Family

David Brooks has a recent essay in the Atlantic that is making the rounds on social media. It is titled, The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake. He argues that the mistake was in isolating the nuclear family from the extended clan, an event that he locates in the brief period between World War II and the sexual revolution, but which he thinks was caused by the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. He thinks that the nuclear family is inherently unstable. In setting it up as the ideal, conservatives set families up for failure.

Brooks is wrong, both in principle and in his history.

In principle, what Brooks calls the nuclear family is simply the biological family, which is normative for human beings. Aristotle explained why in The Politics: The fruitful union of a man and a woman is the basis of all society. Biological families combine into communities (the city, the sect, etc.) and share their fruits—the children whom they raise—as citizens. That is how civilizations are born. From the basic building blocks of biological families we get everything that’s good about civilizations—knowledge, the rule of law, technology, commerce, architecture, art, music, and the rest.

By contrast, cultures in which married couples never break from the clan remain mired in oppression, ignorance, and poverty. Clan-based societies are insular and stable. And that is a recipe for poverty.

For Christians, this is even more straight-forward. Jesus told us to leave and cleave. Game, set, match. In Ephesians 5, Saint Paul locates the married couple in the church, not the clan. The church surrounds and loves the married couple, enabling them to love each other and their children. The married couple returns the love by ministering to the widows and orphans. And everyone is fed, regardless of age or status.

And to top it off, look at what the church has given us over the centuries: civilization! What did the clan give us?

At bottom, Brooks poses a false dichotomy between clans, on one hand, and “isolated” biological families, on the other. But civilizations are not built on isolated families. They are built on the institutions of civil society that unite familes--the church and synagogue and mosque, the local school, charitable and fraternal organizations, etc. It is those institutions that have broken down as affluence and technology have isolated us from each other.

Brooks’ history is also wrong. Marital and family breakdown began in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the no-fault divorce revolution. It did not begin in the Industrial Revolution. Brooks focuses on marital age, which increased after the Industrial Revolution, and fertility, which decreased. But he ignores the most obvious indicators of family breakdown. He misses the obvious correlation between divorce rates and no-fault divorce statutes. And he ignores non-marital births, which remained negligible until the sexual revolution and then exploded in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

Brooks asserts that the nuclear family of the 1950s was stable only because women only performed domestic chores inside the home. He seems not to notice the American frontier of the nineteenth century, where men and women worked side by side. Nor does he notice all the clan cultures throughout history in which women worked… inside the home.

Biological families have been around for a long, long time. And where we find a biological family venturing out from the clan we often find the beginning of a great civilization. Abraham and Sara left Ur. Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt, following in the footsteps of Joseph. America is built on such families, hundreds of thousands of couples who came to the new world seeking a better life. They made it.

The biological family is the basis of civilization. And wherever we see a people revert to clans and tribalism, we see a reversal of fortune. The lights of civilization go out. Brooks has things nearly exactly backwards.