Here's the argument in a nutshell. I'll go into further detail as I come across the passages that make my blood boil.
In essence, "well-fed, healthy, peaceful populations" are producing too few children to replace them. Therefore, it's only a matter of time before these populations fade into obscurity, to be replaced by...
Now, here's where the argument gets interesting. The author could have said something gravely offensive, like, "wogs will rule the earth." You know. Those people are breeding like rabbits and they will simply overwhelm us western, good folks. (I say this 'coz we've heard this argument ad nauseum.) But, instead, the author delivers a body-slam to liberals, because lo and behold, the people who are going forth and multiplying are, you guessed it, conservative, right-wing families and thus it turns out that liberals are going to non-breed themselves right into extinction. Well, shit. Didn't see that one coming, did you?
So, let me start from the beginning and try to set up a counterpoint to the arguments being put forth, or at least point out where this article seems to verge awfully close to something that looks like feminist-bashing, "uppity women are ruining us" kind of stuff. (And I don't know the author, so I'm not trying to pin a tail on his ass, but...)
It has been well-documented that fertility rates fluctuate, as do rates at which people reproduce. Certain cultures go through phases in which large parts of the population do not have children, or marry much later, thus restricting the number of children they might have (most famous example: European Marriage Pattern). What prevents these societies from simply disappearing altogether?
Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.
Patriarchy swoops in to save the day. And it is there that Longman states the two paragraphs that I've quoted above. Strong societies--the ones that survived--were patriarchal. Those societies that did not adopt patriarchal practices died out. (Please give me my props for not inserting snark here.)
Okay. I'm going to start quoting text here, with my commentary interspersed, because I want to point to the exact moments where I started feeling that perhaps the assumptions that this article makes are fucking bullshit.
The historical relation between patriarchy, population, and power has deep implications for our own time. As the United States is discovering today in Iraq, population is still power. Smart bombs, laser-guided missiles, and unmanned drones may vastly extend the violent reach of a hegemonic power. But ultimately, it is often the number of boots on the ground that changes history. Even with a fertility rate near replacement level, the United States lacks the amount of people necessary to sustain an imperial role in the world, just as Britain lost its ability to do so after its birthrates collapsed in the early 20th century. For countries such as China, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, in which one-child families are now the norm, the quality of human capital may be high, but it has literally become too rare to put at risk.
So, we're getting our asses kicked in Iraq because those people out-bred us, have too many bodies they're willing to sacrifice, and we cannot sustain ourselves as an imperial power if we do not create more babies. I always thought the British Empire collapsed for a whole host of reasons--stupid me didn't realize it was because the Brits couldn't make cannon fodder fast enough. And those other countries have turned into wimps of the first magnitude because they're not willing to sacrifice their precious single children for a good cause--like fighting the war on terror.
Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic problems that dominate today’s headlines. The long-term financing of social security schemes, private pension plans, and healthcare systems has little to do with people living longer. Gains in life expectancy at older ages have actually been quite modest, and the rate of improvement in the United States has diminished for each of the last three decades. Instead, the falling ratio of workers to retirees is overwhelmingly caused by workers who were never born. 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.
All right. I'm not going to make any assumptions, but I swear, wasn't one of the arguments made by rightwing fucktards during the Social Security debate that abortion was causing the SS crisis? After all, think of all those millions of workers that had been aborted? (I'm not making this shit up. They said it.)
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.
HaHaHaHa! Miss Smarty-Pants Feminist. You never bred! So who's your baby daddy now?
And, finally, this kicker:
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.
The liberal in this country is simply going to be out-numbered, because liberals don't breed, and conservatives breed--lots--and simple math will take care of it.
But, to give credit to the author, the article is more nuanced than I'm indicating. Which is one of the reasons that it bothers me as much as it does, because on the surface, the things he is saying are true, but when you dig deeper, you can offer other analyses, other possibilities than the ones being offered here.
It's in the discussion of patriarchy itself that I really take exception to the article.
Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different stages. What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively serve to maximize fertility and parental investment in the next generation.
According to Longman, patriarchy establishes a system in which men have strong investments in their children, as evidenced by the fact that "illegitimacy" attains the highest form of stigma. By establishing that children belong to the father, and not the mother, gives men an emotional investment in their children and, he argues, leads to men continuing to want to breed in hopes of producing at least one son.
Hand-in-hand with the emotional investment in children by fathers is the fact that it punishes women who do not have children and marry.
Patriarchy made the incentive of taking a husband and becoming a full-time mother very high because it offered women few desirable alternatives.
But here comes the part(s) that make me crazy.
To be sure, a society organized on such principles may well degenerate over time into misogyny, and eventually sterility, as occurred in both ancient Greece and Rome. In more recent times, the patriarchal family has also proved vulnerable to the rise of capitalism, which profits from the diversion of female labor from the house to the workplace. But as long as the patriarchal system avoids succumbing to these threats, it will produce a greater quantity of children, and arguably children of higher quality, than do societies organized by other principles, which is all that evolution cares about.
This claim is contentious. Today, after all, we associate patriarchy with the hideous abuse of women and children, with poverty and failed states. Taliban rebels or Muslim fanatics in Nigeria stoning an adulteress to death come to mind. Yet these are examples of insecure societies that have degenerated into male tyrannies, and they do not represent the form of patriarchy that has achieved evolutionary advantage in human history. Under a true patriarchal system, such as in early Rome or 17th-century Protestant Europe, fathers have strong reason to take an active interest in the children their wives bear. That is because, when men come to see themselves, and are seen by others, as upholders of a patriarchal line, how those children turn out directly affects their own rank and honor.
Under patriarchy, maternal investment in children also increases. As feminist economist Nancy Folbre has observed, “Patriarchal control over women tends to increase their specialization in reproductive labor, with important consequences for both the quantity and the quality of their investments in the next generation.” Those consequences arguably include: more children receiving more attention from their mothers, who, having few other ways of finding meaning in their lives, become more skilled at keeping their children safe and healthy. 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.
Okay. Where to start?
Notice that there's "grown-up patriarchy" like we practice in the modern west, and then there's insecure patriarchy as practiced in uncivilized countries. I don't think any other commentary is necessary.
What I find contentious here is the notion of the quality of maternal care that children receive in a patriarchal system. The assumption seems to be that if mom doesn't have anything else to distract her, she's just going to shower all of her attention on the babies, and well, that's just going to be peachy-keen for all of us.
But it's an assumption that does not take into account just how a system built upon the limiting of women's options so that they can only stay home with children is inherently misogynist in that it does not recognize women as full human beings (there's no "degenerate into misogyny". It's misogyny right from the get-go.) The second assumption is that women who are forced to stay home and take care of children are necessarily better mothers than those who work outside the home. That our natural impulses toward mommyhood, especially if we're caring for multiple children, is going to make us so much better mothers than simply caring for the one or two children we feel equipped to parent while we do other things. It's an argument that simply does not stand. IN THEORY, a woman at home with nothing to do but take care of children might be a better mom with a greater investment in her children. But IN REALITY, it's bullshit.
I can't quite put my finger on the source of the stink in this article. Perhaps I'm being paranoid and reading too much into Mr. Longman's explanation of why patriarchy arises and why we're on the road back to such a system (as if we ever fucking left it). But I can't get over my sense that I'm being asked to swallow something that manages to be racist (what constitutes an advanced society, anyway) and sexist while passing itself off as a warning to liberals that we've painted ourselves into a corner.
Source of illustration:D. Eberhard David Hauber. Biliotheca Acta et Scripta Magica. Lemod : Joh. Heinrich Mener, 1739. Page 0.1140141, Plate frontispeice.
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