[American Thinker] 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.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."