"Family and Civilization"

Yeah, and you read Rieff's "Triumph of the Therapeutic," and you can hardly believe this guy was so prophetic, writing this thing in the early to mid 1960s. He saw everything.

Rod--concerning children, I think we are correct to look at things in the direction of the therapeutic. Certainly, religion, sociologically speaking, always serves a certain "purpose" within society. Nonetheless, the mantra I hear over and over like a broke record is the phrase "whatever works for you." To a certain extent, religion has become an self-serving instrument of utility and self-satisfaction.

Even in some of the conservative circles I move in, I sometimes get the sense that there are some people who treat their religion as a hobby--something that makes them feel good about themselves.

Exactly how many children are we supposed to have to save civilization? I know plenty of families with three or four children, and that's above replacement rate.

I would argue that economics is the reason American Christians aren't having families of the size that our grandparents and great grandparents produced. Well, and I don't particularly want to die in childbirth like my maternal great grandmother, either. You're overlooking that particularly bitter little side effect of the days before families were limited at all.

I have three children plus a stepson. Sure, I'd like to have more, but there is no possible way that I could do it, considering the cost of health care, food, private school tuition and, eventually, college education. Economics is the answer. Raising children is much more expensive today than it was when most of the kids were going to work on the farm or in the coal mines or marry at age 14.

Andrea, you make a very good point: our culture and civilization is not arranged economically to make it easier to have larger families. That's E.F. Schumacher's basic argument, and Allan Carlson's too.

Michael, let's not forget the Catholic church's position on children (even though in practice most nominal Catholics act like lib Prots). As far as the Y2K 'crisis', apples and oranges: population decline in the West is well-documented, while Y2K involved a lot of "what if" guesswork.

Now, here's another thought, since we're on the subject of speculation: will those young people who are returning to orthodox religion (Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jews) reverse the trend? It would take several generations. John Paul II, with his theology of the body, and his successor, Benedict XVI, have initiated a quiet revolution in this area. I'm a prot, but these two men (in particular) have really changed my mind on birth control and the purposes of sex.

The truth is, fertility levels are falling all over the world (Spengler has posted a lot about how fertility in Iran is falling off a cliff). As I said in the blog post, though, what really counts is who's left standing at the end.

But the issue is, Rod, do you really think that humanity is literally going to die out? We ARE 6.5 billion strong so far. Or that 'whoever has the most bodies wins' the 'culture wars'?

This is what I don't get - To hear some people on this blog tell it, the Baby Boomers - the largest generation in American History - are responsible for our supposed current crisis. If the last big demographic bulge (the baby boomers) was responsible for the Decline of Western Civilization over the last 40 years with their sex, drugs and rock and roll, why do conservatives think another baby boom (which would ostensibly lead to another overwhelming youth culture) would be any different?

Fascinating post. When Rod mentioned a rare work of sociology rebuking his default allergy to the subject, and Harvard to boot, I was primed to introduce Sorokin myself, only to see him mentioned further down after all. No matter. Here, from my email archives, is a review from 1996 in The Times Literary Supplement of a Sorokin-themed book which garnered praise from across England's books-page landscape, and which deserves more exposure stateside, echoing many a CC theme:

The very age and body

Angela Ellis-Jones
27 December 1996

HOLDING UP A MIRROR: HOW CIVILIZATIONS DECLINE By Anne Glyn-Jones 652pp. Century. £20. - 0 7126 7633 3

As we near the end of the century, it is surprising how infrequently the phrase *fin de siecle*, with all its resonances of exhaustion and foreboding, is heard. Perhaps this is because the whole century has had a feeling of *fin de millenium* crisis about it. But what are the roots of this crisis? Even as contemporaries, we recognize that we live in an age of transition. What is going on?

Holding up a Mirror is an impressive search for an answer to these questions. In this, her first book, Anne Glyn-Jones works within a framework of ideas established by Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), the founder of the Harvard University Department of Sociology. In his vast work Social and Cultural Dynamics, Sorokin showed how empires rise as they turn from religion to science, but then decline, because, in the absence of an underpinning of religious belief, the morality that holds society together inevitably falls away. In the modern West, the triumph of materialist philosophies has transformed living standards, but declining moral standards are destroying this achievement, as families disintegrate and crime rises. The arts, once rooted in religion, turn increasingly to sensationalism, which ends in explicit violence and sex. Despair and disgust set in, and society ceases to reproduce itself, because of sterility due to sexually transmitted diseases, because of abortion, and because there is little confidence in the future. These trends were already apparent to Sorokin writing in the 1940s, but have been alarmingly amplified since his death.

Departing from Max Weber's *wertfrei* approach to sociology, Sorokin considered that societies cannot be understood without an analysis of what people cared about, and how that influenced their activities. His canvas stretched over many civilizations; Glyn-Jones illustrates the theory with reference to four: Greece, Rome, medieval Christendom and the West since the Reformation. Four main strands are traced in the development of these civilizations: the process of change in philosophy and theology; the impact of these changes both on our ideas of right and wrong, and on knowledge about the physical world, and our capacity to manipulate it; and how these developments interact with and are manifested in creative art, with especial reference to the theatre. The book's title is taken from Hamlet's observation of the theatre, whose function is "to hold, as t'were, the mirror up to nature; to show . . . the very age and body of the time".

The societies can be seen to pass through three stages of development: the ideational, which distrusts the experience of the senses as illusory, and in which truth is attained through revelation, interpreted by priests; the idealist, in which the material world is valued for its own sake, but is not seen as having any authority in the realm of values; and the sensate, in which true reality and value are sensory. The sensate mentality sees the purpose of life as fulfillment in the here and now, the pursuit of happiness, which is increasingly interpreted in material terms, and which ultimately becomes self-defeating as lawlessness increases.

As the author admits, "no society of any size or complexity is a pure manifestation of any of these world views. Exponents of all three, and variants of them, exist in all societies, though unevenly distributed among different social groups and different historical epochs". Nevertheless, the broad framework is tenable; different ages are dominated by one of the three outlooks. Before the fifth century BC, Greek society was ideational, as was European society from about the fifth to the twelfth centuries ad. After a transitional idealist phase, which in Greece spanned the fifth and fourth centuries BC, and in medieval Europe the thirteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries ad, both societies slipped into the sensate phase. The reason for the crisis of our age is that we are living through the period of disintegration of the sensate culture and the birth-pangs of its successor.

The book assembles a wealth of interesting information on the societies studied, and offers uncanny parallels which mirror each other and point almost to a law of cyclical human development. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate that the scheme precludes a consideration of legal and political systems in the three phases. Glyn-Jones explains that, in the sensate phase, the arts turn away from the idealist preoccupation with the noble and elevated, and become obsessed with the ordinary, the pathological and the debased. For modern Western culture, at any rate, there is a clear link between this and political developments. Nineteenth-century thinkers such as Maine, Lecky and W. H. Mallock predicted the disorders that would arise with the advance of democracy, as the rule of Apollo, symbolized by the educated Victorian gentleman, gave way to that of Dionysus, the *homme moyen sensuel*.

Anne Glyn-Jones appears to believe, with Sorokin, that religious faith alone can underpin morality. But levels of violence and incivility during the medieval "age of faith" were at least as high as today's. Unspeakable atrocities were committed by the Crusaders. Intensely religious societies tend to be unpleasant places for those who do not share the faith. The relationship of religion and morality needs far more critical examination than the author provides.

Liberals, who have done so much to accelerate the descent into barbarism which marks the final degringolade of the sensate society, will probably not like this book. But those who share Anne Glyn-Jones's belief in objective values will congratulate her on a thoroughly researched and illuminating reinterpretation of what Sorokin saw as "The Crisis of Our Age".

I did read that US fertility just rose above replacement levels again.

Andrea, what exactly did your great-grandmother die of? Is it something that is now treatable? I have had some minor difficulties delivering my children, but I had medical treatment and everything turned out just fine. People see me with my eight kids , and several women have said, "I want to stay home and have more children but my husband wants a boat/truck/vacations/you name it. It isn't glamorous, but each additional child costs less.

Another prescient voice was Paul VI, in "Humana Vitae"; his predictions on the results of the sexual Revolution are amazing.

The answer to the question "Why aren't American Christians having more kids ?" is so simple even an American can answer it.

It's taxes, pure and simple.

American Christians, like all other Americans, respond to incentives. Ever since the income tax was introduced in 1913, the political classes have tinkered with it to get the behaviors they want from the American people.

Consider this: under the current tax code, families with one stay-at-home parent are penalized, while families that put their children in daycare are subsidized. Social Security and Medicare taxes actively discourage savings, especially for retirement (Martin Feldstein found that one out in the late 70s). The idea behind both of those provisions was to encourage female participation in the paid labor force. Meanwhile, the value of the individual and child exemption keeps going down (and the Alternative Minimum Tax doesn't help much, either), Bush "tax credits" notwithstanding.

Meanwhile, the tax code is set up to directly encourage consumption, by giving tax exemptions for advertising and public-relations expenses.
This includes television and mass-media, as well. Shoot, it wasn't all that long ago that credit card interest was actually deductible on your tax return !

On the benefits side: Social Security and Medicare benefits were expressly designed to detach the elderly from their families--if the State gives them their own money to spend, they won't have to rely on their children. (The additional fact that they will be grateful to and vote for the politicians that preserve and extend those benefits never crossed anyone's mind, I'm sure.)

The upshot of it all is this: under the current tax code, it just doesn't pay to have children. Even worse, family unity once those children arrive is actively aggressed against by that same tax code.
Even a Christian has to pay attention to that.

The US government and political class is the greatest enemy of the American Christian, and of the American family in general. No other force (except for perhaps the large American corporations) even comes close.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

One other thing: if you're self-employed and (worse yet) the sole provider for a family of more than two children, you might as well have a target painted on your backside. What the self-employment taxes do to such a family does not even bear thinking about.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

Not sure if I'm disagreeing with you, Charles, but from my POV people's decisions are strongly influenced by the good that society provides to them. Self-interest, by extension, will include some component of what I (my family, company, clan, etc.) do for the good of that society.

I am skeptical of the premise that having less children and losing fundamentalist religious faith will be the downfall of Western Civilization.

However, lets take that as a given, and assume that increasing birth rates in combination with a revival in fundamentalist religion is the answer.

Now lets extend Andrea's point about economics further and connect it to the environment. Pre-industrial revolution life really, really sucked for human beings. Our lives were short and brutal. Consider the fact that infant mortality rate in the American British colonies was about 50% and that was considered markedly good odds in comparison to Europe.

By any metric you care to use to measure material well being human beings are dramatically better off than we are then.

The fact is that our quality of life is balanced against the amount of people we have. Better material quality for each person (e.g. health, wealth, basic needs met etc) means less resources to allocate to each person. So the argument to have more children must account for the costs to the environment and society in general.

How much poorer, unhealthier, etc should we be in order to have big families? What material sacrifices should we make to obtain these cultural benefits? And how does that account for the environmental costs of doing so?

I recall Rod posting a link to an environmental website that tracked the environmental impact that a person has on the environment. From what I understand, the only reason the West is so affluent and wasteful arises from the fact that we use most of the Earth's resources, and that it would take several Earths to provide the standard of living that the Global North enjoys to everyone else.

Heck, you have to remember only a few decades ago, women could be going through constant miscarriages just due to something as easily treated as Rh factor.

Decades before that, and a C-section was a maternal death sentence, since they didn't sew you back up. Just figuring out that washing your hands during a delivery (only a century or so old discovery) reduced one of the nastiest causes of maternal death, childbed fever.

People really don't understand how far we've come, and how what we now think of as minor conditions we don't even remember having during our pregnancy commonly resulted in miscarriage, a dead mother, or both.

I must confess, I don't understand this at all.

Having an large aging elderly population requiring care by a small young population is, of course, a problem, but that problem is, forgive my bluntness, rather self-correcting, isn't it?

It might be a sucky decade or two, but I'm failing to see how this could lead to the downfall of civilization. At worse, it will just result in the young abandoning the old, or the youth basically being enslaved, but the whole problem should end by 2030 or so unless someone discovered immortality when I wasn't looking.

And that imbalance isn't due to too few children, it's due to too many children 60 years ago that interrupted the traditional downward slope of less children as societies become more prosperous.

Is someone going to clue me in on the danger here?

Besides the 'Our populations will be replaced with people from other cultures' silliness, which a) isn't a big deal, we do an amazing job of turning random people into Americans, and b) is trivially stoppable anyway.

Sweeping generalizations assuming the continuation of given trends indefinitely are either prophetic, or they're just sweeping generalizations. One never knows for sure.

My wife and I are in our 50's. We waited five years to have a child (grad school) then waited another few years (job/career turmoil and uncertainty, then relocation to a place where housing was very expensive). Then, for reasons that we will never truly know, we tried to conceive, and couldn't. Result: one child.

I don't know whether out story can be considered "typical", but some of its external factors certainly are or were. Our newlywed years coincided with 16 percent interest rates and stagflation. We made a decision in that time frame to have a child, and brought him home to a 950 square foot condo. We relocated six times in the first ten years of marriage. Moving is stressful, it nickels and dimes your household budget in all sorts of ways, and it catapults a couple out of the continuity of friendships capable of sustaining the support network young parents -- most especially young moms -- need. In the place where we moved three months after our son was born, and lived for 14 months, my wife would wheel our toddler son in his stroller to a mall and do circuits with him simply to get out of the house. We moved from that location to the high housing cost location, and spent three years working two weekends out of three on major projects on our fixer-upper. Which we sold for a bundle, and moved yet again to our sixth location, with a lower housing cost, where we could afford one heck of a house -- and as a consequence found, once the movers had pulled away, that we had catapulted right out of our peer group, and that there were very few other young families with kids for blocks around.

In that span of time, I can remember making decisions to defer having another child because things were too crazy financially and or in terms of activities. Once we opted for a first-ever splurge vacation and our first trip to Europe when we had been married nine years. I suppose some might say we could have used that sum of money (no we didn't borrow) as the finanical justification to have another child. Well, that was next, and we moved again, and my wife became ill for a while, and that -- it seems -- started the cycle from which childbearing never realized itself as an option.

Through all this time, I think it is true that we did not take stock and determine that having a child (or another child) was "Job One", such that all other choices were reconciled to the decision to have a child, instead of vice versa. From other posts on other occasions, I know that this has been the case with other readers. I don't think of us as pursuers of self-gratification, nor as pursuers of the blessings of material life though, yes, we spent a little bit of "play" money here and there. We did without a second car until the sixth move and tenth year, and the cars we had were a Pinto wagon followed by an Escort wagon. I had reasonably well-paying jobs, but in an industry that through much of this period was in turmoil, and during which I survived no fewer than four reorganizations and downsizings.

When the time came to confront the fact that having another child was deeply problematic, we chose not to go through the expense and uncertainty of medical procedures, and chose not to go through the expense and the crap shoot of foreign adoption. We accepted our one child as the gift he has been.

Thinking back, I feel pretty certain that all that moving disengaged us from a network of friends whose experiences would have nudged us to prioritize having another child when it is possible that we could (again, not knowable), and who could have provided a network of support for us and especially for my wife. As anyone who has had children knows, child-raising takes a tremendous amount of energy and commitment of the spirit. It is greatly rewarding and greatly draining at the same time. Faced with circumstances of being "alone" and needing to reinvent ourselves during much of that period, we lacked the energy or the vision or the purpose to place trying to have a child first. And through this time we were in and out of church communities with each relocation. Several of those church communities proved to be invaluable in their ministry to us in different ways -- but, as mainline Protestant congregations, none were demographically centered around young families, at least as I recall the Catholic parishes in which I grew up in the late 50's and early 60's.

I guess my point is that for many in the middle class, a series of incremental decisions made in the teeth of various life experiences have led to smaller family size. It greatly oversimplifies things to accuse people of materialism or selfishness. But throw enough uncertainty into people's lives, and enough jarring change, and something usually winds up "giving". Sometimes it's the psyche. Sometimes it's the marriage. For us it was having more than one child. I'm not offering this with complaint or regret. I own the consequences of any choices we made through our "fertile" years. I don't think our story is universal, but I think we're far from alone.

Richard

Thanks for destroying Western Civilization with your one measly child, Richard. Take a bow.

Well, my great-grandfather went through three wives ... outlived them all. I guess he was too ornery to die. Such was life in those days. I think he had about 15 children by them.

Donny,

As one who has consistently reacted to you with disrespect, allow me a moment of serious reflection to suggest something: the principles about which you write are agreed with or reflected upon by many here and elsewhere; the difference is in your -- in my opinion -- narrowly focused view and your insisting that someone must be to blame.

I'm asking you to take a moment and see those who you so blithely label as people, not the labels. So long as you continue to start every point you try to make with demonizing a label, you will continue to lack the offerings of respect for your ideas.

Jaybird, I needed that.

Blessings,
Richard

DavidTC: "It might be a sucky decade or two, but ... the whole problem should end by 2030."

If we continue to have children below the replacement rate, the problem of too many old people supported by too few young people will continue indefinitely. The population will contract exponentially. There is no known instance of a civilization surviving such a contraction in population.

Of course we have Herb Stein's Law to consider: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." In other words, trends that can't continue, won't.

CORRECT ME IF I AM WRONG, BUT THE WORLD IS NOW 7 BILLION AND WILL SOON BE 12 BILLION. WHAT IS HE TALKING ABOUT HERE?

The economic/social downfall of the advanced (post)industrial societies in Europe and North America.

I don't buy the economics argument. I buy the materialist argument and the family argument.

A blue collar factory worker in 1920 wasn't going to go on a European vacation. Today, travel is an option for anyone who wants it. Having lots of kids is expensive though, and unless you accept a lower standard of living or travel, it's unattainable. Ditto for any other modern gadgets or amenities or larger living space you might desire.

The family argument also makes sense. Grandparents and extended family can help care for children.

Economics is just a scapegoat. People have enough money and they have family. They CHOOSE to buy things with their money (stuff, time, space) and they CHOOSE to live far away from family support systems.

Other Jim--that factory working in 1920 also didn't have access to reliable contraception, and sex was the only free entertainment he could access.

Populations can continue to grow even if fertility is below replacement rate due to population momentum. That and the fact the replacement rate varies between countries makes the whole thing a little hard to grasp.

Re the State's invasive "help" for the family, see the incisive review by Kenneth Anderson of It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton, published 12 years ago in The Times Literary Supplement:

http://kennethandersonlawofwar.blogspot.com/2006/12/re-issue-of-hillary-rodham-clintons-it.html

Nor does it ever occur to Clinton that the various state institutions in which she purports to locate a revived pioneer-style mutualism and community are nearly all "mediating" institutions, "clearing" institutions, deliberately constructed to provide not identification, but anonymity, as between donors and recipients, consumers and "flawed consumers". Clinton's village is not a village of shared, face-to-face interactions, but a universal commodities exchange of face-less, anonymous transactions. Commodity ex-changes have their virtues, as Clinton knows better than most, but affective bonds of the kind that matter to children are not among them...

Clinton's barely disguised message is that parents are agents of the state in raising children who, at bottom, belong to the state. It is a ringing surrender of the traditional (but, in America, always marginal) Left concerned with class power to the only widespread radicalism the United States has known in this century, the radicalism of the helping professions, the social-worker cops who are eager to sign up for, in Alexander Cockburn's words, the "therapeutic policing" of America's families, so to heal and nurture the body politic. Religion and God Almighty, schools, after-school programmes, day care, health clinics, Planned Parenthood, the Boy and Girl Scouts, and every non-profit organization able to put out a policy report on any subject can all be useful to the state's task of raising its children, Clinton tells parents - and mummy and daddy can be useful, too.

Clinton begins by saying that "whether or not you agree with me, I hope it promotes an honest conversation among us". It is quickly evident, however, that she intends a conversation with the parents of America in much the same way that my mother, when I was a child, intended many conversations with me - the conversation was not "honest" or "over" until I came to agree with her. Clinton's most strongly held belief is that biological parents are incompetent - as she repeatedly says, "parents . . . need 'expert' coaching" - and that unless they receive the training in parenting that she got through studying child development, and live under the "guidance" of social workers, medical professionals, child experts, and all the various "authorities" that Clinton promiscuously cites in her book, they will damage their children in endless ways, big and small...

Yet somehow, through it all, women have retained intelligence and the power of independent movement. So maybe power-breeding isn't the finest possible reproductive strategy, after all.

>>>>
Yet somehow, through it all, women have retained intelligence and the power of independent movement. So maybe power-breeding isn't the finest possible reproductive strategy, after all.
Posted by: sigaliris | February 5, 2008 8:22 PM
>>>>

Well, half their genes come from men...

(ducks)

Check this out, genetic ménage à trois:

Embryos created with DNA from 3 people

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080206/ap_on_sc/embryo_research;_ylt=Aqoc51qR9gj_OsDDxlYf4rSs0NUE

LONDON - British scientists say they have created human embryos containing DNA from two women and a man in a procedure that researchers hope might be used one day to produce embryos free of inherited diseases.
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Though the preliminary research has raised concerns about the possibility of genetically modified babies, the scientists say that the embryos are still only primarily the product of one man and one woman.

"We are not trying to alter genes, we're just trying to swap a small proportion of the bad ones for some good ones," said Patrick Chinnery, a professor of neurogenetics at Newcastle University involved in the research.

You're right, John E. And vice versa! So nature can't make us stupid without . . . oh, wait . . . . ; )

"I am continually flabbergasted by Rod favorably quoting all sorts of philosophers and thinkers denouncing sexual misconduct in society and then saying the solution is ...

Men should be studs.

And women should be broodmares.

The ironies simply boggle."

Larry, what color is the sky on your planet?

Larry, once again, I find it impossible to fathom the way you think. It's just ... so peculiar.

>Quoting...philosophers...then saying the solution is...women should be broodmares...

Just lie back and think of...Spengler*.

*Alt: Mark Steyn.