In the name of the father
In the name of the father
Low birthrates will push society towards vast, but historically predictable, political change, writes Phillip Longman
March 25, 2006
The Austrailian
ACROSS the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It's more likely conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe father knows best.
"If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance." So proclaimed the Roman general, statesman, and censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, in 131BC. Still, he went on to plead, falling birthrates required that Roman men fulfill their duty to reproduce, no matter how irritating Roman women might have become. "Since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure."
With the number of humans increasing 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 -- at least until plague or starvation sets in. It is an assumption that not only conforms to our long experience of a world growing ever more crowded, but which also enjoys the endorsement of such influential thinkers as Thomas Malthus and his many modern acolytes.
Yet, for more than a generation, 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 another, from China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea to Canada, the Caribbean, all of Europe, Russia and even parts of the Middle East.
Fearful of a future where the elderly outnumber the young, many governments are doing whatever they can to encourage people to have children. Singapore has sponsored speed dating in hopes of bringing together busy professionals to marry and procreate. France offers generous tax incentives for those willing to start a family. In Sweden, the state finances day care to ease the tension between work and family life. Yet, though such explicitly pronatal policies may encourage people to have children at a younger age, there is little evidence they cause people to have more children than they otherwise would.
Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilisation. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.
Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximising parental investment in their children. No advanced civilisation has yet learned how to endure without it.
Through a process of cultural evolution, societies that adopted this social system - which involves far more than simple male domination - maximised their population and therefore their power, whereas those that didn't were either overrun or absorbed. This cycle in human history may be obnoxious to the enlightened, but is set to make a comeback.
The conservative baby boom: The historical relation between patriarchy, population and power has deep implications for our own time. As the US 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 US lacks the 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.
Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic problems that dominate today's headlines. The long-term financing of social security, 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 US has diminished for each of the past 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 less able to afford children than their parents, setting off a new cycle of population ageing and decline.
Declining birthrates also change national temperament. In the US, for example, the percentage of women born in the late 1930s who remained childless was near 10 per cent. By comparison, nearly 20 per cent 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 per cent of baby-boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 per cent of children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from 11 per cent 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.
This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among US states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 per cent higher than in states that voted for Senator 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 those Europeans 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.
At least as long ago as ancient Greek and Roman times, many sophisticated members of society concluded that investing in children brought no advantage. But, though these attitudes led to the extinction of many individual families, they did not lead to the extinction of society as a whole. Instead, through a process of cultural evolution, a set of values and norms that can roughly be described as patriarchy re-emerged.
Population becomes power: In the primordial past, to be sure, most societies did not coerce reproduction, because they had to avoid breeding faster than the wild game on which they fed. Indeed, in almost all the hunter-gatherer societies that survived long enough to be studied by anthropologists, such as the Eskimos and the bushmen of southern Africa, one finds customs that in one way or another discouraged population growth. In various combinations, these have included late marriage, genital mutilation, abortion, and infanticide. Some early hunter-gatherer societies may have also limited population growth by giving women high-status positions. Allowing at least some females to become priestess, sorcerer, oracle, artist and even warrior would have provided meaningful alternatives to motherhood and thereby reduced overall fertility to within sustainable limits.
During the eons before agriculture emerged, there was little or no military reason to promote high fertility. War and conquests could bring little advantage to society. There were no granaries to raid, no livestock to steal, no use for slaves except rape. But with the coming of the Neolithic agricultural revolution, starting about 11,000 years ago, everything changed. The domestication of plants and animals led to vastly increased food supplies. Surplus food allowed cities to emerge, and freed more people to work on projects such as building pyramids and developing a written language to record history. But the most fateful change rendered by the agricultural revolution was the way it turned population into power. Because of the relative abundance of food, more and more societies discovered that the greatest demographic threat to survival was no longer overpopulation, but underpopulation.
Like today's modern, well-fed nations, both ancient Greece and Rome eventually found that their elites had lost interest in the often dreary chores of family life. "In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and a general decay of population," lamented the Greek historian Polybius about 140BC, just as Greece was giving in to Roman domination. But, as with civilisations around the globe, patriarchy, for as long as it could be sustained, was the key to maintaining population and, therefore, power.
Father knows best?: Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different stages. What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively serve to maximise fertility and parental investment in the next generation. Of these, among the most important is the stigmatisation of illegitimate children. One measure of the degree to which patriarchy has diminished in advanced societies is the growing acceptance of out-of-wedlock births, which have now become the norm in Scandinavian countries, for example.
Under patriarchy, bastards and single mothers cannot be tolerated because they undermine male investment in the next generation. Illegitimate children do not take their father's name, and so their fathers, even if known, tend not to take any responsibility for them. By contrast, legitimate children become a source of either honour or shame to their fathers and the family line. The notion that legitimate children belong to their father's family, and not their mother's, which has no basis in biology, gives many men powerful emotional reasons to want children, and to want their children to succeed in passing on their legacy. Patriarchy also leads men to keep having children until they have at least one son. Another key to patriarchy's evolutionary advantage is the way it penalises women who do not marry and have children.
To be sure, a society organised on such principles may well degenerate into misogyny, and eventually sterility, as occurred in 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 labour 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 organised 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 honour.
Under patriarchy, maternal investment in children also increases. As feminist economist Nancy Folbre has observed, "Patriarchal control over women tends to increase their specialisation in reproductive labour, 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.
Patriarchy and its discontents: Patriarchy may enjoy evolutionary advantages, but nothing has ensured the survival of any particular patriarchal society. One reason is that men can grow weary of patriarchy's demands. Patriarchy may have its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood. Women, of course, also have reason to grow weary of patriarchy, particularly when men themselves are no longer upholding their patriarchal duties.
Historian Suzanne Cross notes that during the decades of Rome's civil wars, Roman women had to learn how to do without men for prolonged periods, and accordingly developed a sense of individuality and independence. Few women in the upper classes would agree to a marriage to an abusive husband. Adultery and divorce became rampant.
Often, all that sustains the patriarchal family is the idea that its members are upholding the honour of a long and noble line. Yet, once a society grows cosmopolitan, fast-paced, and filled with new ideas, new peoples and new luxuries, this sense of honour and connection to one's ancestors begins to fade and with it any sense of the necessity of reproduction. "When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pros and cons," Oswald Spengler, the German historian and philosopher, once observed, "the great turning point has come".
The return of patriarchy: Yet that turning point does not necessarily mean the death of a civilisation, only its transformation. What was once the Roman empire remained populated. Only the composition of the population changed. Nearly by default, it became composed of new, highly patriarchal family units, hostile to the secular world and enjoined by faith either to go forth and multiply or join a monastery. With these changes came a feudal Europe, but not the end of Europe.
We may witness a similar transformation during this century. In Europe today, for example, how many children different people have, and under what circumstances, correlates strongly with their beliefs on a wide range of political and cultural attitudes. For instance, do you distrust the army? Then, according to polling data assembled by demographers Ronny Lesthaeghe and Johan Surkyn, you are less likely to be married and have kids than those who say they have no objection to the military. Or again, do you find soft drugs, homosexuality, and euthanasia acceptable? Do you seldom, if ever, attend church? For whatever reason, people answering affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live alone, or in childless, cohabitating unions, than those who answer negatively.
The great difference in fertility rates between secular individualists and religious or cultural conservatives augurs a vast, demographically driven change in modern societies. Consider the demographics of France, for example. Among French women born in the early 1960s, less than a third have three or more children. But this minority of French women (most presumably practising Catholics and Muslims) produced more than 50 per cent of all children born to their generation, in large measure because so many of their contemporaries had one child or none at all.
Many childless, middle-aged people may regret the life choices that are leading to the extinction of their family lines. The plurality of citizens who have only one child may be able to invest lavishly in that child's education, but a single child will only replace one parent, not both. Meanwhile, the descendants of parents who have three or more children will be hugely overrepresented in subsequent generations, and so will the values and ideas that led their parents to have large families.
One could argue that history, and particularly Western history, is full of revolts of children against parents. Couldn't tomorrow's Europeans, even if they are disproportionately raised in patriarchal, religiously minded households, turn out to be another generation of '68?
The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of modern societies married and had children. Some had more than others, but the disparity in family size between the religious and the secular was not so large, and childlessness was rare. Today, by contrast, childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have just one. Tomorrow's children, therefore, unlike members of the post-war baby-boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents' values, as always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travellers were quite literally never born.
Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or not.
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 individualism and submit to father.
Foreign Policy magazine
Phillip Longman is Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (Basic Books, 2004).
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18588498%255E28737,00.html
Low birthrates will push society towards vast, but historically predictable, political change, writes Phillip Longman
March 25, 2006
The Austrailian
ACROSS the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It's more likely conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe father knows best.
"If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance." So proclaimed the Roman general, statesman, and censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, in 131BC. Still, he went on to plead, falling birthrates required that Roman men fulfill their duty to reproduce, no matter how irritating Roman women might have become. "Since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure."
With the number of humans increasing 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 -- at least until plague or starvation sets in. It is an assumption that not only conforms to our long experience of a world growing ever more crowded, but which also enjoys the endorsement of such influential thinkers as Thomas Malthus and his many modern acolytes.
Yet, for more than a generation, 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 another, from China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea to Canada, the Caribbean, all of Europe, Russia and even parts of the Middle East.
Fearful of a future where the elderly outnumber the young, many governments are doing whatever they can to encourage people to have children. Singapore has sponsored speed dating in hopes of bringing together busy professionals to marry and procreate. France offers generous tax incentives for those willing to start a family. In Sweden, the state finances day care to ease the tension between work and family life. Yet, though such explicitly pronatal policies may encourage people to have children at a younger age, there is little evidence they cause people to have more children than they otherwise would.
Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilisation. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.
Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximising parental investment in their children. No advanced civilisation has yet learned how to endure without it.
Through a process of cultural evolution, societies that adopted this social system - which involves far more than simple male domination - maximised their population and therefore their power, whereas those that didn't were either overrun or absorbed. This cycle in human history may be obnoxious to the enlightened, but is set to make a comeback.
The conservative baby boom: The historical relation between patriarchy, population and power has deep implications for our own time. As the US 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 US lacks the 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.
Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic problems that dominate today's headlines. The long-term financing of social security, 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 US has diminished for each of the past 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 less able to afford children than their parents, setting off a new cycle of population ageing and decline.
Declining birthrates also change national temperament. In the US, for example, the percentage of women born in the late 1930s who remained childless was near 10 per cent. By comparison, nearly 20 per cent 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 per cent of baby-boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 per cent of children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from 11 per cent 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.
This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among US states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 per cent higher than in states that voted for Senator 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 those Europeans 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.
At least as long ago as ancient Greek and Roman times, many sophisticated members of society concluded that investing in children brought no advantage. But, though these attitudes led to the extinction of many individual families, they did not lead to the extinction of society as a whole. Instead, through a process of cultural evolution, a set of values and norms that can roughly be described as patriarchy re-emerged.
Population becomes power: In the primordial past, to be sure, most societies did not coerce reproduction, because they had to avoid breeding faster than the wild game on which they fed. Indeed, in almost all the hunter-gatherer societies that survived long enough to be studied by anthropologists, such as the Eskimos and the bushmen of southern Africa, one finds customs that in one way or another discouraged population growth. In various combinations, these have included late marriage, genital mutilation, abortion, and infanticide. Some early hunter-gatherer societies may have also limited population growth by giving women high-status positions. Allowing at least some females to become priestess, sorcerer, oracle, artist and even warrior would have provided meaningful alternatives to motherhood and thereby reduced overall fertility to within sustainable limits.
During the eons before agriculture emerged, there was little or no military reason to promote high fertility. War and conquests could bring little advantage to society. There were no granaries to raid, no livestock to steal, no use for slaves except rape. But with the coming of the Neolithic agricultural revolution, starting about 11,000 years ago, everything changed. The domestication of plants and animals led to vastly increased food supplies. Surplus food allowed cities to emerge, and freed more people to work on projects such as building pyramids and developing a written language to record history. But the most fateful change rendered by the agricultural revolution was the way it turned population into power. Because of the relative abundance of food, more and more societies discovered that the greatest demographic threat to survival was no longer overpopulation, but underpopulation.
Like today's modern, well-fed nations, both ancient Greece and Rome eventually found that their elites had lost interest in the often dreary chores of family life. "In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and a general decay of population," lamented the Greek historian Polybius about 140BC, just as Greece was giving in to Roman domination. But, as with civilisations around the globe, patriarchy, for as long as it could be sustained, was the key to maintaining population and, therefore, power.
Father knows best?: Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different stages. What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively serve to maximise fertility and parental investment in the next generation. Of these, among the most important is the stigmatisation of illegitimate children. One measure of the degree to which patriarchy has diminished in advanced societies is the growing acceptance of out-of-wedlock births, which have now become the norm in Scandinavian countries, for example.
Under patriarchy, bastards and single mothers cannot be tolerated because they undermine male investment in the next generation. Illegitimate children do not take their father's name, and so their fathers, even if known, tend not to take any responsibility for them. By contrast, legitimate children become a source of either honour or shame to their fathers and the family line. The notion that legitimate children belong to their father's family, and not their mother's, which has no basis in biology, gives many men powerful emotional reasons to want children, and to want their children to succeed in passing on their legacy. Patriarchy also leads men to keep having children until they have at least one son. Another key to patriarchy's evolutionary advantage is the way it penalises women who do not marry and have children.
To be sure, a society organised on such principles may well degenerate into misogyny, and eventually sterility, as occurred in 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 labour 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 organised 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 honour.
Under patriarchy, maternal investment in children also increases. As feminist economist Nancy Folbre has observed, "Patriarchal control over women tends to increase their specialisation in reproductive labour, 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.
Patriarchy and its discontents: Patriarchy may enjoy evolutionary advantages, but nothing has ensured the survival of any particular patriarchal society. One reason is that men can grow weary of patriarchy's demands. Patriarchy may have its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood. Women, of course, also have reason to grow weary of patriarchy, particularly when men themselves are no longer upholding their patriarchal duties.
Historian Suzanne Cross notes that during the decades of Rome's civil wars, Roman women had to learn how to do without men for prolonged periods, and accordingly developed a sense of individuality and independence. Few women in the upper classes would agree to a marriage to an abusive husband. Adultery and divorce became rampant.
Often, all that sustains the patriarchal family is the idea that its members are upholding the honour of a long and noble line. Yet, once a society grows cosmopolitan, fast-paced, and filled with new ideas, new peoples and new luxuries, this sense of honour and connection to one's ancestors begins to fade and with it any sense of the necessity of reproduction. "When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pros and cons," Oswald Spengler, the German historian and philosopher, once observed, "the great turning point has come".
The return of patriarchy: Yet that turning point does not necessarily mean the death of a civilisation, only its transformation. What was once the Roman empire remained populated. Only the composition of the population changed. Nearly by default, it became composed of new, highly patriarchal family units, hostile to the secular world and enjoined by faith either to go forth and multiply or join a monastery. With these changes came a feudal Europe, but not the end of Europe.
We may witness a similar transformation during this century. In Europe today, for example, how many children different people have, and under what circumstances, correlates strongly with their beliefs on a wide range of political and cultural attitudes. For instance, do you distrust the army? Then, according to polling data assembled by demographers Ronny Lesthaeghe and Johan Surkyn, you are less likely to be married and have kids than those who say they have no objection to the military. Or again, do you find soft drugs, homosexuality, and euthanasia acceptable? Do you seldom, if ever, attend church? For whatever reason, people answering affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live alone, or in childless, cohabitating unions, than those who answer negatively.
The great difference in fertility rates between secular individualists and religious or cultural conservatives augurs a vast, demographically driven change in modern societies. Consider the demographics of France, for example. Among French women born in the early 1960s, less than a third have three or more children. But this minority of French women (most presumably practising Catholics and Muslims) produced more than 50 per cent of all children born to their generation, in large measure because so many of their contemporaries had one child or none at all.
Many childless, middle-aged people may regret the life choices that are leading to the extinction of their family lines. The plurality of citizens who have only one child may be able to invest lavishly in that child's education, but a single child will only replace one parent, not both. Meanwhile, the descendants of parents who have three or more children will be hugely overrepresented in subsequent generations, and so will the values and ideas that led their parents to have large families.
One could argue that history, and particularly Western history, is full of revolts of children against parents. Couldn't tomorrow's Europeans, even if they are disproportionately raised in patriarchal, religiously minded households, turn out to be another generation of '68?
The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of modern societies married and had children. Some had more than others, but the disparity in family size between the religious and the secular was not so large, and childlessness was rare. Today, by contrast, childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have just one. Tomorrow's children, therefore, unlike members of the post-war baby-boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents' values, as always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travellers were quite literally never born.
Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or not.
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 individualism and submit to father.
Foreign Policy magazine
Phillip Longman is Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (Basic Books, 2004).
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18588498%255E28737,00.html
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