Reversing Cause and Effect

One of the risks you run when you write about illegitimacy is that you can be called a racist. American statistics on illegitimacy are dominated by blacks where it's something like 70%. Thank goodness for the British. They help remove that risk by proving that behavior and its results are independent of race.

THREE-QUARTERS of children in some parts of Britain will be born to unmarried mothers within the next parliament, official figures indicate.

The number of births to single mothers and unmarried cohabiting couples is set to exceed 50% across the country in the next five years.

The issue is not political, nor is it solvable by governmental solutions. The problem is 100% cultural as can be seen in the grammar of this excerpt.

"Marriage is closely linked to class,” said Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University. “Being married is a marker for lower middle-class and middle-class behaviour.

“But for people who are relatively economically marginalised, marriage is not really seen as something that you associate with bringing children into the world.” Furedi said regional disparities were linked to class and social deprivation rather than a simple north-south divide.

All the facts are there, but the sentence construction is wrong. Poor people are not having illegitimate kids because they're poor, they're poor because they're having illegitimate kids. The way in which the facts are presented tell you everything you need to know about the society in which this is occurring.

Our modern culture makes it natural for the author of the piece to write this way. It's the way you see the same statistics presented in the US, too. The cause and effects have been reversed and so long as that's the natural way for people to present the issue, nothing will change. If you claim that poverty creates illegitimacy, then the solution is more government programs to alleviate poverty. That's not working out very well anywhere, but the author is so steeped in the libertine culture that they can't see it. If you reverse the cause and effect and see that behavior creates results, then it becomes obvious that there is no government program that will reduce illegitimacy - it will all have to come from cultural change.

Articles like this are societal markers. When the architecture of the prose changes, then you'll know we're on a path to success. So long as they're written like this, you can safely predict that we're going to keep seeing the same unpleasant results.