and delinquent than children living with one or more non-biological parent.
Children in single-parent families are also twice as likely to commit
suicide.^186
The strong turn towards political correctness in universities has
exacerbated the problem. The voices shouting against oppression have
become louder, it seems, in precise proportion to how equal—even now
increasingly skewed against men—the schools have become. There are whole
disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men. These are the
areas of study, dominated by the postmodern/neo-Marxist claim that Western
culture, in particular, is an oppressive structure, created by white men to
dominate and exclude women (and other select groups); successful only
because of that domination and exclusion.^187
The Patriarchy: Help or Hindrance?
Of course, culture is an oppressive structure. It’s always been that way. It’s a
fundamental, universal existential reality. The tyrannical king is a symbolic
truth; an archetypal constant. What we inherit from the past is willfully blind,
and out of date. It’s a ghost, a machine, and a monster. It must be rescued,
repaired and kept at bay by the attention and effort of the living. It crushes, as
it hammers us into socially acceptable shape, and it wastes great potential.
But it offers great gain, too. Every word we speak is a gift from our
ancestors. Every thought we think was thought previously by someone
smarter. The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in
the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political
and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom,
the luxury, and the opportunity. Culture takes with one hand, but in some
fortunate places it gives more with the other. To think about culture only as
oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous. This is not to say
(as I am hoping the content of this book has made abundantly clear, so far)
that culture should not be subject to criticism.
Consider this, as well, in regard to oppression: any hierarchy creates
winners and losers. The winners are, of course, more likely to justify the
hierarchy and the losers to criticize it. But (1) the collective pursuit of any
valued goal produces a hierarchy (as some will be better and some worse at
that pursuit not matter what it is) and (2) it is the pursuit of goals that in large