Yearning for an idealized mythical past while vilifying the "diseases" of contemporary culture inevitably results in isolation from that culture. By the end of the book, Himmelfarb is identifying herself as a political dissident, abstaining from what she views as the culture's dominant, corrupt values. Yet she won't cop to the fact that this abstention also means that she has disengaged from the culture. Himmelfarb is absolutely right when she says that dissidents may be more active members of a culture "precisely because they find themselves in a position of dissent." The trouble is that, applied to the author of "One Nation, Two Cultures," this definition of "dissident" will not hold. Everything about this book, from Himmelfarb's prim, disapproving tone to her condemnation of Americans' growing refusal to attach shame to the choices people make in their private lives, reveals someone profoundly out of touch with her era. In order to oppose an idea or an epoch, you must first give it its due, and Himmelfarb simply will not.

The lists that dot this book, and the associations made in those lists, tell the story. "What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior," she writes, paraphrasing Daniel Moynihan, "is now tolerated and even sanctioned." Himmelfarb goes from a perfectly reasonable example of this -- the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill that swelled the ranks of the homeless -- to "divorce and out-of-wedlock births," events she describes as also "once betokening the breakdown of the family ... now viewed more benignly." Who but the most extreme among us would be willing to characterize divorce and children born outside marriage as examples of deviant behavior? In another passage she praises policies that have reduced "the incidence of crime, welfare, out-of-wedlock births, and the like" (emphasis added). Who but a fanatic would equate welfare or a child born outside of wedlock with crime?

Himmelfarb tells us that we are living in a world where privacy and decency are not just outmoded but ridiculed. But her conception of "privacy" does not include sexual relations which, she is quick to point out, are never a private matter. Like a busy little seamstress with a back order of scarlet letters, Gertie devotes herself to branding whatever behavior she thinks is destroying the fabric of society: extramarital sex, single parenthood, abortion, divorce. And the fact that many Americans would laugh at that notion only makes her needle and thread fly even faster.

In her preface, Himmelfarb claims to have taken "special pains" to document her arguments with "the hardest kind of evidence, quantified data." Later, however, she concedes that "I believe there are other sources of knowledge that are more compelling than numbers" and that "Statistics can be faulty and polls deceptive, and neither should be taken too literally ... but used in conjunction with other kinds of evidence ... they have been invaluable in establishing some hard facts and correcting some common misconceptions." What this means is that she's willing to twist the data to match her theories. One of her favorite strategies is to imply a causal relationship between two different facts when no such relationship has been established. Thus we read that the rise of employed women parallels the rise in the divorce. And that the kind of people who go to church and stay married live longer than people who don't. (Despite how she makes this sound, there's no evidence that divorce or agnosticism cause early death.)

For someone who is willing to allow that common sense and anecdotal evidence are legitimate sources of knowledge, Himmelfarb ridicules those who dispute the conclusions she reaches from her statistics, including those who have argued that the actual experiences of nontraditional families may provide more truth than the statistics of social science. What does your experience tell you about the assertion that you'll live longer if you go to church? Or about the relative health of married and divorced people? I have known a great many people whose parents were divorced, and without exception they were all far happier than even the grown children of people who persisted in marriages that made them, and their children, miserable. (If Himmelfarb is concerned about the reputation of marriage, she should talk to people who've been exposed to lousy ones.) What does it do to your health, physical as well as mental, to stay in a situation like that? It's not unreasonable to suggest that being in a happy marriage may promote longevity -- but that doesn't prove that being trapped in an awful one will do the same.

Himmelfarb castigates the English sociologist Jeffrey Weeks for saying, "For many people today family means something more than biological affinity." Where does that leave the friends who are as dear to us as siblings, or the friends of our parents (or our friends' parents) who, when we were growing up, treated us as if we were their own kids? On my wedding day, my father's best friend, a man I've known since I was born as my Uncle Marty, walked up to me, took my face in his hands, kissed me and said, "I was at your parents' wedding, kid, and I intend to be at your kids' weddings." The love I felt for him then (and whenever I remember that moment) couldn't have been any dearer if he'd been my blood relative.

Recent Stories