As Screwtape told Wormwood, ‘The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely.’
Screwtape knew his business. C.S. Lewis’ fictional devil knew a multitude of ways to ensnare and immiserate people, and poisoning relations between men and women was an essential weapon in his diabolic arsenal. As he put it to his protégé Wormwood, “The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely.” He wanted men and women to be looking for the wrong person and also to be the wrong person.
Were he around, the wily old devil would undoubtedly gloat over current relations between men and women, which are in many ways worse even than he anticipated. There are, of course, still unhappy marriages, but whereas Screwtape took marriage as a cultural given, about half of American adults are now unmarried. The decline in marriage and childbearing has alarmed everyone from politicians to cultural commentators to Elon Musk, but observing the problem isn’t enough to fix it — people will not get married and have children just because it will be good for GDP in a few decades.
And though some people deliberately reject marriage and children, many men and women would like to get married and have kids but are struggling to pair off. Our culture does not teach men and women how to find, let alone how to be, good husbands and wives. Rather, it sometimes seems that, as Lutheran pastor Hans Fiene put it, “[O]ur culture teaches young men to be losers and young women to be narcissists.” Harsh, but perhaps fair.
Because men and women are different, the current cultural and relational wasteland will play out differently for each, often in ways that make men and women even less suited for each other, thereby establishing a relational doom loop in which cultural corruption encourages individual dysfunction that damages and destroys relationships — thereby further entrenching both the cultural and individual problems. […]
— Read More: thefederalist.com
