Declining life expectancy, mass shootings, alarming rates of mental illness, rising white nationalism, the opioid crisis: By many measures, our society is in trouble, and we are ignoring a root cause: the unprecedented familial dispersion that followed the 1960s sexual revolution.
At heart, that revolution aimed to radically sever human sexuality from marriage and child-rearing, from the responsibilities society had hitherto imposed on the individual sexual appetite. Afterward, fatherless homes, family shrinkage and breakup, childlessness and abortion all became commonplace. The net effect of these changes is having fewer people to call one’s own.
Many Americans would say that their own lives have been enhanced mightily by the new liberties wrought by the ’60s revolution. Perhaps. But if we examine what these same changes have delivered at a collective level, an unsettling picture emerges.
One feature of the new landscape is widespread loneliness. And while initial studies were trained on the isolated elderly, scholarly focus is rapidly expanding as social-science data reveal ravaging isolation at the opposite end of the spectrum.
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