The Fury of the Fatherless

The riots of last spring and summer were unlike anything in the history of our nation. There have been violent riots before, of course, but the organized and sustained vandalism and violence we witnessed last summer is unprecedented.

Mary Eberstadt, in an article at First Things titled The Fury of the Fatherless, claims that the apparently unlimited supply of mayhem-makers requires an explanation, and she offers one, but first she discounts the explanation that's most frequently invoked, that the riots were a reaction against racism.

The fact that rioters who were often white screamed at and spat at black police officers and, in at least one case, even killed a black security guard suggests that the rioters weren't motivated by any sense of sympathy for blacks. Nor, she asserts, do the actual statistics of police violence against blacks support the conclusion that police brutality is the cause.

For Eberstadt the critical factor responsible for the hatred and rage exhibited on our cities' streets this year is due to something more subtle but more insoluble. She writes:

So, here’s a new theory: The explosive events of 2020 are but the latest eruption along a fault line running through our already unstable lives. That eruption exposes the threefold crisis of filial attachment that has beset the Western world for more than half a century. Deprived of father, Father, and patria, a critical mass of humanity has become socially dysfunctional on a scale not seen before.

The riots are, at least in part, a visible consequence of the largely invisible crisis of Western paternity. We know this to be true, in more ways than one.

Six decades of social science have established that the most efficient way to increase dysfunction is to increase fatherlessness. And this the United States has done, for two generations now. Almost one in four children today grows up without a father in the home. For African Americans, it is some 65 percent of children.

Some people, mainly on the left, think there’s nothing to see here. They’re wrong. The vast majority of incarcerated juveniles have grown up in fatherless homes. Teen and other mass murderers almost invariably have filial rupture in their biographies. Absent fathers predict higher rates of truancy, psychiatric problems, criminality, promiscuity, drug use, rape, domestic violence, and other less-than-optimal outcomes.

Eberstadt goes on to argue that fatherlessness leads to a search for father substitutes which is one reason why the homicide rates among blacks are so high. Black homicide is largely a gang problem and gangs are largely a missing father problem. The gang and the gang leader are often father substitutes.

She has more to say about this that's interesting, but her point is that many of those attracted to BLM and Antifa are young people who grew up fatherless and the resentments and bitterness this causes is manifested in the violence we watched on our television screens last summer and probably would have watched again had Biden lost the election.

Moreover, the loss of an earthly father plays a role in the rejection of a heavenly Father. Each generation for the last sixty years has been less inclined to believe that there exists a transcendent, ideal Father. Their experience with earthly fathers has soured them on the notion of a heavenly Father. They can't trust the disappointing earthly version to be there for them, and are thus similarly distrustful of, and disinterested in, the heavenly version.

A further consequence of the lack of a decent father in so many lives is that many of those who've been abandoned by their fathers feel no allegiance or loyalty to their country. Loyalty starts in the family and children of dysfunctional families, or families that have been rent asunder by divorce or other forms of fatherlessness (except when the father was killed or died of natural causes in which case he's often memorialized and revered) have a much harder time developing a sense of loyalty to an abstraction like a nation.

Eberstadt's essay is rather long, but it can be summed up in this sentence: The anger and fury vented by our young in our cities last summer, as well as the increasing secularization among the young that we see reflected in survey after survey, is largely the culmination of our culture's six decades-long minimization of the importance of fathers in the lives of their children.

I think she's right.