The Rage of Feral Children

No father. No Father. No patria. No father. No Church. No country. These gaping absences have produced a rage among young people that explains a great deal about our present national trauma. This is one of the fascinating theses in Mary Eberstadt’s masterful new book, Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited.

Don’t let the title fool you. This is not merely an updating or reworking of her 2012 book of roughly the same name. This is a fresh and deeply insightful look at the pathologies the sexual revolution hath wrought. Among them, envy and wrath among young men and women who have been cheated out of life’s true wealth: family relationships.

Eberstadt says, “Deprived of father, Father, and patria, a critical mass of mankind has become dysfunctional on a scale not seen before.” She argues that much of the violence we witnessed in the summer of 2020 can be chalked up to fatherlessness. We knew this already—for instance, that the epidemic of fatherlessness has caused the murder rate in the cities to bloom like poison plants gone mad. Eberstadt points out that much of the violence has been based on envy.