The Return of Patriarchy

[Luthor Rex]

The Return of Patriarchy

Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best.

The liberal who wrote this article, thinks this is a bad thing, but let's move on...

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.

There was a Pook article that briefly touched on this, but I don't remember which one right now.

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 civilization. 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 maximizing parents' investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it.

Through a process of cultural evolution, societies that adopted this particular social system -- which involves far more than simple male domination -- maximized 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 it is set to make a comeback.

Again, the author of this article is a liberal and isn't exactly pro-patriarchy.

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....

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.

This, I believe, is the real threat that decadence and hedonism represent: when enough people do not participate in the serious business of living and producing the next generation a civilization depopulates itself and thus makes itself vulnerable to foreign invasion militarily and financially weak economically.

With their focus on "fun" and "me, me, me" what the Sex and the City crowd are really signally is their own infertility.

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.

This is also important because most people vote the way their parents did, and because there is a biological basis that leads people to be liberals or conservatives.

Once again we are shown that this really is still the Darwinian Struggle: whoever makes the most babies has the strongest influence over the future.

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.

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.

This kind of cultural transformation happened in ancient Rome as well (the article repeatedly mentions this).

Under patriarchy, "bastards" and single mothers cannot be tolerated because they undermine male investment in the next generation. Illegitimate children do not take their fathers' 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 honor or shame to their fathers and the family line. The notion that legitimate children belong to their fathers' family, and not to their mothers', 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 produce at least one son.

Another key to patriarchy's evolutionary advantage is the way it penalizes women who do not marry and have children. Just decades ago in the English-speaking world, such women were referred to, even by their own mothers, as spinsters or old maids, to be pitied for their barrenness or condemned for their selfishness. Patriarchy made the incentive of taking a husband and becoming a full-time mother very high because it offered women few desirable alternatives.

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.

Thus, the evolutionary based motivation for shaming slvts, and why it is in all our best self-interest to do so.

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. Roman aristocrats, for example, eventually became so reluctant to accept the burdens of heading a family that Caesar Augustus felt compelled to enact steep "bachelor taxes" and otherwise punish those who remained unwed and childless. Patriarchy may have its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood in a luxurious society -- nights spent enjoyably at banquets with friends discussing sports, war stories, or philosophy, or with alluring mistresses, flute girls, or clever courtesans.

I'm guessing the patriarchs of old didn't do much hard partying.

 

[Luthor Rex]

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 distinct minority of French women (most of them presumably practicing Catholics and Muslims) produced more than 50 percent of all children born to their generation, in large measure because so many of their contemporaries had one child or none at all.

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 postwar 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 wouldbe fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

It would be nice if the feminist enemy was never born.

 

[Zarky]

Yay another bitter male thread! I'd only seen one lately. Guys, this is a board on how to get laid, not a board for discussing why you have no balls left.

 

[taiyuu_otoko]

Yay another bitter male thread! I'd only seen one lately. Guys, this is a board on how to get laid, not a board for discussing why you have no balls left.

Plus One.

 

[kingsam]

plus two !

(if there was better moderation these stupid bitter threads could be stopped)

 

[omkara]

Yay another bitter male thread! I'd only seen one lately. Guys, this is a board on how to get laid, not a board for discussing why you have no balls left.

Yay, another douchebag trying to act superior to others who adds nothing to the conversation. Why even bother commenting on threads that you're not interested in?

 

[Luthor Rex]

Yay another bitter male thread! I'd only seen one lately. Guys, this is a board on how to get laid, not a board for discussing why you have no balls left.

Yay, way to completely miss the point!

Reading comprehension FTW!

 

[taiyuu_otoko]

Yay, way to completely miss the point!

Reading comprehension FTW!

For those of us that are reading comprehension impaired, can you summarize the point in two or three bullet points, as well as a suggested plan of action?

Thanks