On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Senior Research Fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute Mary Eberstadt joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to break down her article discussing how fatherlessness played a role in the social unrest and riots seen across America over the last six months.
“In addition to literal fatherlessness, there’s also a figurative, spiritual fatherlessness and a disconnection from country especially among the young,” she explained. “What I think this adds up to is not just a crisis of missing dads, but a general Western crisis of paternity that is threefold. And that has now combined to disconnect lots of young people from a wholesome relationship with their families with their with places of worship, and their country.”
Eberstadt also expanded upon her recent book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, explaining that humans long for connection so they “claim membership in politicized groups whose displays of frantic irrationalism amount to primal screams for familial and communal loss.”
“We are social creatures,” Eberstadt said. “We are meant to exist in community with one another and when we dislocate ourselves in this radical way, we can expect to see some pretty dire consequences. The search for a substitute family ends up very often with toxic results as we are seeing in the streets.”
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