Contrary to previous belief, wolves aren’t solitary creatures that naturally roam in random packs but are rather, like most animals, familial beasts whose behaviors assume pathological characteristics when those domestic bonds are broken.  That observation, reiterated with reference to other species, is the biological starting point for Mary Eberstadt’s insightful exploration of the social and political consequences of the recent and monumental disruptions in American family structure that she terms “the Great Scattering” in her book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics.

Eberstadt’s focus is on the way divorce, absent fathers, shrinking family size, and the sexual revolution of the 60s has produced an environment that radically undermines traditional answers to the question “Who am I?” -- a question typically addressed by reference to a child’s father, mother, siblings, and sex.  In addition, since basic social skills are obtained vis-à-vis parental and familial examples, absent fathers and non-existent siblings make learning how to interact civilly with the opposite sex (or to respect one’s own) extremely difficult.

The rise in “identity politics,” therefore, is linked by Eberstadt to the social and especially familial disruptions that make answering the “Who am I?” question highly problematic.  The negative consequences of the sexual revolution (primarily contraception technology plus the destigmatization of non-marital sex, abortion, single-parent homes, and, to some extent, pornography) are provided abundantly by the author.  They include the clearly detrimental effects of fatherless homes (“a literature as well-known as it is stoutly ignored”) and various studies that document a large increase in self-harm and loneliness, including morose statistics on elderly folks (4,000 a week in population-dwindling Japan) who die alone without relatives and are only discovered by neighbors due to the odor coming from their residences.  The author links these and other sociological data to a desperate cri de coeur that amounts to a primal scream: “Who am I?”

As surrogates for the basic familial answers to that question, ethnic, erotic, racial, and sexual identities have been asserted with a vengeance, especially against those seen as oppressors.  Eberstadt notes that the “first collective articulation of identity politics comes from a community [black women] where familial identity was becoming increasingly riven” and constituted “a harbinger of what would come next for everyone else.”  In the previous year, 1976, “the out-of-wedlock birth rate for black Americans had just ‘tipped’ over the 50 percent mark.”

The “infantilized expression and vernacular” of identity politics also points to a regressive “mine, mine!” toddler mentality.  Young adults screaming at speakers they imagine threaten their sexual, racial, or ethnic identities (e.g. Christina Sommers and Charles Murray) or even at friendly faculty members offering criticism of Yale’s detailed “cultural appropriation” guidelines for Halloween costumes is typical behavior -- tantrums that go hand in hand with “safe spaces” on campus, “those tiny ersatz treehouses stuffed with candy, coloring books, and Care Bears.”  Such childish exhibitions point to a primitive psychological deficit that corresponds with studies about identity-formation in children of divorce or of those having no father at all.  

Eberstadt notes, furthermore, that after the sexual revolution, women were expected to be more like men and were praised for achieving sexual liberation (no strings sex), physical prowess comparable to men, or corporate CEO status.  Those women who assumed traditional maternal roles were correspondingly disparaged.  Men, on the other hand, received a steady dose of blame for “toxic masculinity” while those without fathers in the home had additional reasons to reject their biological heritage.  Lost in this reshuffling were familial models, via parents and siblings, to teach girls how to understand men and boys how to treat the other sex.  But were women, who now had the sole legal voice on abortion, naturally constructed to approach sex as men might?  And were men deprived of a father or an opposite sex sibling likely to approach females with the same respect and reticence as previous generations of men did whose families were large, intact, and often schooled to view women as, in some sense, sisters in a religious community?  And what about the impact of the sexually saturated culture that offers graphic, often violent, pornography with the click of a mouse?   

Eberstadt observes that the #MeToo movement exposed what perceptive observers already knew, that the dissolution of the family has led to profound ignorance not only about the opposite sex but also about one’s own sexual nature.  Even men who “identity” as women (or vice versa) are presumed to be the gender of their choice and treated as victims entitled to whatever athletic competition or locker room they choose.  Meanwhile, protestors against this biological conflation are relegated to the status of bigots.  The identity movement has gone so far that the feminist icon Martina Navratilova who protested against transgender competitors was all but excommunicated by its political mob -- a state of affairs that provides a stark example of the revolution consuming its own “in a spiral of scapegoating and social destruction that no one seems to know how to stop.”

Eberstadt concludes as follows: “Identity politics is not so much politics as a primal scream.  It’s the result of the Great Scattering -- our species’ unprecedented collective retreat from our very selves.”  Though the author’s analysis of the primacy of nature and the family is instructive, her persistent attempt to separate that nature from politics, at least for purposes of discussion, is destined to fail.  One of the three responses to her work included in Part Two of her book illustrates this point.  Though politics isn’t the only reason for “the Great Scattering,” the left side of the political spectrum clearly facilitated and encouraged it with gusto.  Thus, Columbia Humanities Professor Mark Lilla’s rejoinder to Eberstadt contained in the book is overwhelmingly political and ignores completely the role of nature in family fragmentation and the divisiveness of identity politics.  Instead, he blames everything bad on “Reagan individualism” and capitalism -- a predictable response from a partisan for whom deterministic Hegelian ideas about History (with a capital H) are embraced with ardor and for whom the importance for most conservatives of unifying cultural institutions (family, community organizations, and religion) is completely ignored. 

That said, Eberstadt’s very compact work is well worth reading for the significant insights it provides into the relationship between family dissolution, the devastation wrought by the sexual revolution, and the puzzlingly infantile extremes to which any reasonable version of identity politics has been taken.

 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle