Patriarchy, Population, and Power: It's the Numbers, Stupid.

In the "Reading File" column of today's Times Week in Review section (I can't find it online), Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Empty Cradle: Freedom and Fertility in an Aging World, is quoted as saying in Foreign Policy that "the concept of patriarchy will rise again." In the actual FP article, Longman goes further and says that "Conservatives will inherit the earth." The bottom-line reason: fertility.

With the number of human beings having increased more than six-fold in the past 200 years, the modern mind simply assumes that men and women, no matter how estranged, will always breed enough children to grow the population [ . . . ]

Yet, for more than a generation now, well-fed, healthy, peaceful populations around the world have been producing too few children to avoid population decline. That is true even though dramatic improvements in infant and child mortality mean that far fewer children are needed today (only about 2.1 per woman in modern societies) to avoid population loss. Birthrates are falling far below replacement levels in one country after the next—from China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, to Canada, the Caribbean, all of Europe, Russia, and even parts of the Middle East.

The result: societies that are top-heavy with older people (less because of improved survival of older people than because of too few births to balance them); that have an unsustainable ratio of retirees to workers; that can't muster large enough armies. And it's a vicious cycle:

As governments raise taxes on a dwindling working-age population to cover the growing burdens of supporting the elderly, young couples may conclude they are even less able to afford children than their parents were, thereby setting off a new cycle of population aging and decline.

If you were around to remember, back in the '60s, the age of the Ehrlichs' The Population Bomb, the theory was that the earth was becoming catastrophically overcrowded and population growth must be curbed. Those societies would have more power that made higher investments in fewer children: more of their children would survive, more would be well-educated, skilled, and affluent. Quality was supposed to be more important than quantity.

Now, as we contemplate the raw demographic conquest of Europe and Israel by Muslims, we're shocked to realize that quantity can overwhelm quality, that raw numbers still count. Subjugated, breeding women, in a society that allows polygamy, produce an excess of poor and frustrated young men. Their very misery and superfluity can be a crude commodity for their societies, turning them into fanatical human bombs whose single, disposable lives can each destroy many more of the enemy's scarcer, more highly valued ones -- and enemy morale along with them.

What the . . . ?!

According to Longman's thesis, population first became power at the time of the Neolithic agricultural revolution. Hunter-gatherers needed to limit population so it wouldn't exceed what the wild food supply could sustain. (Their techniques for doing so included "late marriage, genital mutilation, abortion, and infanticide," but perhaps also "giving women high-status positions [ . . . ] such as priestess, sorcerer, oracle, artist, and even warrior.") With agriculture, however, it became possible to feed much larger populations, and societies that grew, sought more territory to sustain themselves, and bred large armies, overwhelmed and absorbed those that did not.

Throughout human history, Longman says, generations have repeatedly arisen that preferred to live for the now and for themselves rather than sacrifice and invest heavily in their posterity. Societies at their cultural climax seem particularly prone to fall into this sort of carpe diem connoisseurship of experience. Men as well as women can grow sick of the burdens, the responsibilities, the deferral of gratification, the elevation of family over self, that characterize traditional society:

[O]nce a society grows cosmopolitan, fast-paced, and filled with new ideas, new peoples, and new luxuries, this sense of honor and connection to one’s ancestors begins to fade, and with it, any sense of the necessity of reproduction.

In our time, it's all the '60s counterculture's fault, but that strain of thinking is unbreeding itself out of existence:

Declining birthrates also change national temperament. In the United States, for example, the percentage of women born in the late 1930s who remained childless was near 10 percent. By comparison, nearly 20 percent of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having had children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of their parents.

Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one’s own folk or nation.

In other words, we're seeing a resurgence of the counterforce that has come to the rescue again and again, keeping humanity from dying out and conferring preeminence on the societies that cleave to it: patriarchy.

Patriarchy stigmatizes illegitimacy (because children of known paternity enhance their fathers' power and status), and "penalizes women who do not marry and have children," making them feel "pitied for their barrenness or condemned for their selfishness" and allowing them "few desirable alternatives" to full-time wife-and-motherhood. Both fathers and mothers then invest more in their children -- fathers because their children's conduct will reflect honor or shame back on them, mothers because they have "few other ways of finding meaning in their lives". As Longman drily observes:

Without implying any endorsement for the strategy, one must observe that a society that presents women with essentially three options—be a nun, be a prostitute, or marry a man and bear children—has stumbled upon a highly effective way to reduce the risk of demographic decline.

He is not endorsing the strategy, in other words, just demonstrating that evolution endorses it (and in the process, demonstrating that conservatives can be Darwinian as all-get-out when it suits them). Egalitarian, individualistic societies can be so pleasurable to live in that they breed sterile, sensual grasshoppers, who will die out in favor of the disciplined, world-distrusting, prolific ants. The fittest are those whose selfish genes choose selfless memes as their means of propagation.

This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry. It may also help to explain the increasing popular resistance among rank-and-file Europeans to such crown jewels of secular liberalism as the European Union. It turns out that Europeans who are most likely to identify themselves as “world citizens” are also those least likely to have children.

Does this mean that today’s enlightened but slow-breeding societies face extinction? Probably not, but only because they face a dramatic, demographically driven transformation of their cultures. As has happened many times before in history, it is a transformation that occurs as secular and libertarian elements in society fail to reproduce, and as people adhering to more traditional, patriarchal values inherit society by default. [ . . . ]

Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or not. In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage, and therefore spur even higher fertility. As governments hand back functions they once appropriated from the family, notably support in old age, people will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating traditional religious values akin to the Bible’s injunction to honor thy mother and father.

Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.

You may not like it, but you ought to read it. Just in time, too, Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield has published Manliness (#276 and dropping on Amazon), reviewed snidely by Walter Kirn in today's Times Book Review. (But I bet Mansfield has more kids than Kirn, don't you?)

Comments

[flashcat]

I have that magazine with the patriarchy article and blogged about it here: http://scintillations.blogs.com/we_blog/2006/03/conservatives_w.html

I don't like their conclusions either, and might write about it more later when time allows.

I do like your complete assessment here!

[flashcat]

Hmmm, that link didn't work, did it?

http://scintillations.blogs.com/we_blog/2006/03/
conservatives_w.html

(How do you convert links in comments??)

[Melinda]

I got about halfway through this excerpt, then my head did that Warner Brothers' "Sucker Morph"--you know, the one where Elmer or Porky realizes he's just been made a fool of by Bugs.

It was this sentence:

"The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no genetic legacy."

And then I said, "Waaaaaait a minute...There it is again! Some guy wants me to feel guilty for being smart and independent. Oooh, good one, sir! You had me going for a while this time."

[amba]

Yeh, and there's a couple of fallacies there.

He assumes that the only legacy that really matters is genetic. As culture-bearing critters we also leave a cultural legacy. We impact people other than our offspring.

And often enough our impact on our offspring is negative, and they go the other way! The baby boomers' offspring may be conservative, but watch their offspring.

[realpc]

I did not get the impression he wants us to feel guilty for not having kids. He made it sound like anyone with any sense would avoid raising a big family (probably true).
I thought he was just stating his opinon that population decline will be a problem for our civilization. But it won't, because there will always be billions of people trying to leave the poor countries to come here for jobs.

I think he is so wrong in thinking over-population is not a problem. The earth is now supporting a ridiculous number of people because of advanced technology and unnatural agricultual methods. What happens if those methods stop working, as some (Kunstler, for ex.) predict?

And he claims that patriarchy has been a repeated response to under-population, but he provides no evidence. Patriarchy supposedly results when agriculture progresses from digging sticks to plows.

[sleipner]

I must admit reading that post rather terrified me, because I somewhat agree with his conclusions - the rabid fundies and uneducated third world types are the ones who are having bushels of babies, and the educated secular types are having 0 or 1.

An idea I've been promoting for years would possibly solve this situation (if not for the interference of religions who ban birth control because they're desperate to increase their congregations). Universal mandatory birth control that is only removed if and when people choose to have kids and can prove they can take care of them.

I believe that the world is already WAY too overpopulated, and unless something is done soon will destroy itself within the next few generations - though if the fundamentalists take over worldwide that might be a lesser of two evils.