Re: Religion, Patriarchy, and the Future

Jane wrote:

So, here's some fun:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3376&page=0

He's mostly talking about Western Europe, but the analysis applies
here.

Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com


Hi Jane,

My first reaction is that author, Philip Longman, assumes his conclusion at the start and then hopes you never notice that he does not prove it. He says (first page):

"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."

A rabbit out of a hat. He goes on to give examples, especially relying on Roman history (which he claims applies to the Greeks without evidencing it). Rather than blank-faced acceptance of patriarchy as the answer and salvation of humanity in recurring periods of human history, why not look at the possibilities?

1 . Societies do decline and are overrun by societies of lesser sophistication. Example, uncultural Sparta defeated Athens rich in literature, history and philosophy. So maybe the proposition he states is not true. Maybe, like flowers, societies grow, blossom, wither and die, to be replaced by other societies going through the process.

2. Techonology. In "The Robber Bride", Margaret Atwood has one of her characters postulate that the history of the world is the history of warfare and that the history of warfare is the history of technology. Thus, the Athenians defeated a huge invading army at Salamis. Thus, Henry V defeated a huge French army at Agincourt. Thus, now, the western world could obliterate the masses in the rest of the world in an all out war.

3. Disease. This relates somewhat to technology. Societies with fewer resources and larger populations are subject to many more diseases and to many more rampaging diseases. North America and Europe never think of malaria, but it kills millions more people in the developing world every year than any disease we pampered few ever worry about. Developing countries have always had higher birth rates because death rates are so high. Then there are parasites, tiny worms that burrow into your feet if you walk barefoot in most of the world - but not in North America or Europe - and debilitate and kill many more prople each year. Add to these particular evils the fact that the more crowded a society, the greater the risk of spreading a disease once it emerges. And while on the subjectof disease, consider the Black Plague that wiped out 1/3 of continental Europe in the 14th century. Did society disappear? No. A renaissance followed, which included Christine de Pisan, perhaps the first feminist writer. So, it does not follow that rapid declines in population signal the death of that society.

4. The implied presupposition of the author is that if lower class humans reproduce they will have lower class children who will have the values of their parents. This is never been proven. The sterilization cases of the 30s with some infamous ignorant judge shouting "Three generations of imbeciles is enough" ignores the reality that in a non-inbred society, intelligent parents can have idiots for children and less intelligent parents can have geniuses for children. And my observation has always been that any given generation tends to react against the values of the previous one. That is how we get political shifts from left to right in succeeding generations. The conservatives can no more hold the future than liberals could in the 60s.


Enough, or this will turn into a dissertation.


Francis A. Miniter


Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work --
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

-- Carl Sandburg
.

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