Ok, I have to tear The Return of the Patriarchy a new one. This is one of those rare articles that lays out, in no uncertain terms, what the other side is thinking. Which allows for a clear, unambigous response as to why they’re wrong.
The first, and most important question, is why does this even matter? So populations are shrinking- that’s a bad thing? One of the reasons is that you can’t have a global empire without a large, growing population. As Phillip Longman himself says:
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.
High tech weapons, like smart bombs and unmanned drones are good for defending yourself. Heck, half a dozen nuclear weapons is a wonderfull deterrent to invasion- just ask Pakistan, Israel, or Iran. They just aren’t sufficient to oppress other people.
If anything, this differential is becomming greater over time. It’s not so much the technology itself is important, as the creativity that creates the technology. It required creativity to invent lasers and microchips, and creativity to put them together to turn an old-fasioned dumb bomb into a smart bomb. Similiar examples are easy to come up with. Nothing is more dangerous than an engineer who has defined your existance as the problem- engineers have a real good track record of solving (removing) problems. To quote mercedes Lackey:
“That’s what happens when ye piss off an engineer, lad,” Sam continued at a slightly lower volume. “We keep pitchin’ things at ye until something works.”
To date, that creativity has been primarily in the United States. Which is why we have the strongest military on the planet (well, that, and we’re spending as much on our military as the rest of the world put together, but that’s a different debate). Our strength rests on our creativity. What we need is not more people- but more engineers, more scientists, more programmers, more creative technologists.
And this is just with the technology we already have. Technology is continually being developed, and in another 10, or 50, years, the stuff we have now will be as out of date and useless as the German Tiger Tank would be today- it was king of the battlefield fifty years ago, but it’s tinfoil and cardboard to modern weapons. The problem is that we’re shipping a lot of technological creativity overseas- to places like India and China and Russia. If we follow Phillip Longman’s suggestion, we’ll end up trading places with these countries- with the United States having a growing, impoverished, technologically backwards population, while countries like China and India have shrinking, wealth, technologically sophisticated populations. And we still won’t be able to rule the world- because all of our boots we can put on the ground, even with their smart bombs and umanned drones, will be nullified by China’s and India’s nanotechnological or bioengineered weapons. Or who knows what else.
Frankly, I have no interest in a global military empire. It’s too much damned work for too little reward. Which is the real problem we’re facing in Iraq. It’s not that we don’t have enough people. We have over ten times as many people as Iraq does. It’s that we’re not willing to pay the price to do Iraq properly- which means a draft. Oh, and higher taxes. Mr. SUV driver with a dozen “support the troops” magnetic bumper stickers- your kids get to go carry an M16 through the deserts of Iraq, and you have to pay more taxes. Now do you still support the war? Heck no. We’re all for the war if other people are fighting and paying for it. When we have to pony up ourselves, the balance changes. This isn’t a population problem. Wether or not we have the population to control the whole world is a different question- we aren’t willing to bear the burden required to even control Iraq. Global empire rewards the few at the expensive of the many- no wonder the many aren’t willing to pony up.
This fits in with another point I make. Broadly speaking, since we humans stopped being hunter-gatherers, we’ve had three broad phases, each phase defined by where the wealth comes from. In the first phase of human history, from the dawn of agriculture to only a few hundred years ago, wealth came from land. Land was the headwaters, the source of all wealth. In this era, the wealthy and powerfull were those who controlled the land. Then we invented mas production, had the industrial revolution, and the real source of wealth changed from land to factories and machines (’the means of production”). Now the wealthy and powerfull were those who controlled the machines and factories. But we’re entering into a new era, the information age. Now, the source of wealth and power is not land, and not machines and factories, but instead the producers of information- specifically, talented and skilled individuals. It makes no more sense for talent and skill not to be maximized in this era than it did to let factories idle and machines rust, or land to lay fallow, in previous eras. This isn’t just about national defense (although that certainly is a topic), this is about having national wealth and power. Simply because the package the skill and talent comes has a different skin color, or has innie reproductive organs instead of outie, or what have you, is as irrelevent as what color the factory is painted. We can not afford to allow skill and talent to lie fallow in any individual.
But Longman missed this curve, and assumes that numbers = power. He goes on to compare our culture with the Greeks and Romans when they were dwindling in numbers:
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 around 140 B.C., just as Greece was giving in to Roman domination. “This evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life.” But, as with civilizations around the globe, patriarchy, for as long as it could be sustained, was the key to maintaining population and, therefore, power.
In Rome’s, and Greece’s, day, numbers were power- and technology changed only slowly, over the course of millenia. The training and discipline of Ceasar’s legions was such that he could have defeated equally sized or larger armies of a thousand years later. But in the modern era, using technology even just fifty years out of date will doom you, even with signifigant advantages in numbers. In the first gulf war, when we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait (making that country safe for oil-rich religous fantic despots), our forces were severely outnumbers. I’ve heard estimates that Saddam’s army might have been only three times the size (by nose count) as our army, or estimates that it may have been ten times as large. I don’t know. However, I do know that the fourty to fifty year technological advantage we had (Saddam was mainly armed with WWII/50’s vintage Russian cast-offs) turned it into a life fire exercise for us, with causalities less than the carnage inflicted by an average number of Memorial Day auto accidents.
Another mistakes Phillip Longman makes is assuming that the investment a society makes is linear with respect to the number of children it has:
At least as long ago as ancient Greek and Roman times, many sophisticated members of society concluded that investing in children brought no advantage. Rather, children came to be seen as a costly impediment to self-fulfillment and worldly achievement.
The assumption here is that fewer children = less investment in children. I don’t see that- rather, I see it as much more likely that the total investment in children is (more or less) a constant, and thus the more children a culture has (per capitia), the less it spends on each child. This investment/spending could be money, it could be time, whatever. Halve the number of children, and you double the amount invested per child, because the overall total investment in all children remains constant.
This is important, because maximizing the skill and talent of a child is an expensive proposition- both in monetary terms and in social/time terms. Raising a child to be a subsistance farmer simply isn’t that difficult, and doesn’t require that much of an investment in the child. Raising that same child to be a hardware engineer or industrial chemist takes a heck of a lot more effort and money. If the investment per child starts dropping below a critical threshold, we stop raising new hardware engineers and industrial chemists, and then countries who are investing sufficient per child start lapping us. Remember that in brutal national defense terms, ten people with machine guns, tanks, and jet fighters are a hell of a lot more effective than a thousand people with spears.
Worse yet, “conservative”/patriarchial spending priorities tend to reflect this pre-technological (dare I call it “stone age”?) world view, where the total number of children is important, but the investment per child is unimportant. Witness the constant attempts by Republicans and Conservatives to cut public education, cut head start, cut school lunch programs (”ketchup is a vegitable”), cut welfare, including welfare directed towards kids. Also notice that we as a corporatist society is policies which, while not directly aimed at hurting children, do. One of the things it takes to raise a child right is time by the parents. Which is time not spent by the parents at work. One of the reasons we generally don’t have a stay at home parent anymore is that most families can not afford to have their income halved- not and still be able to afford the house, car, cloths, food, gas, heat, electricity, etc. And there’s no pushback by the conservatives against the increasing amount of time work is demanding. Does anyone actually work a fourty hour week anymore? Well, one of the things that the extra work time cuts in to is child rearing time.
If all you care about is the total number of children betting begat, then these policies make sense- and you can be opposed to policies like stricter enforcement of the 40 hour week rules, higher minimum wages (so people don’t have to work three jobs to pay for rent), requirements for more generous vacation time (Europe gives six weeks- why is the US average two?) and family leave time requirements, etc. Policies that give parents more time to spend raising their children. As well as the more obvious stuff, like funding public education. But this is all socialist/liberal/anti-patriarchial sort of policy initiatives. These are the policies promoted by people seeking to maximize the per-child investment, and not bothering to maximize the total number of children.
Note that abortion plays into this as well. If you’re looking to maximize per-child investment (to maximize societial wealth via the maximization of skill and talent), then not having children when you’re not capable of financially or emotionally supporting them makes sense. But if you’re seeking to simply maximize the number of children irrespective of the quality of life they will have, then missing a chance to have a child is simply a waste. This is the core essence of patriarchy- that women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. If they aren’t, we aren’t maximizing the number of children we’re producing.
I will note one word that does not come up in Longman’s essay, and is very relevent to this issue- and that word is “Malthus”. Any discussion of population growth that doesn’t deal with Malthus is disingenious at best.
Now, digging into Malthus gets tricky. I contend, for example, that Malthus’ conclusions were false- not because his logic was false, but because his fundamental assumptions were false. Malthus assumed, simplistically, that 1) population was increasing exponentially, and 2) resources were only increasing linearly. Given that an exponential growth rate will, sooner or later, match and surprass a linear growth rate, Malthus predicted that population would, sooner or later, out run it’s supplies and starve and crash. The problem is that both assumptions were wrong. Population is not growing on a simple exponential curve- indeed, the UN now estimates that the global population will peak near the middle of this century and start decreasing- not because of some Malthusian catastrophe, but because of, in terms of Longman, the break down of the patriarchy. And resources are not limited to linear growth, but can often (and generally do) have exponential growth. This has come primarily from increases in technology. At the turn of the 19th Century, we were still in the early stages of the industrial revolution, and it wasn’t obvious the effect that the next two centuries of technological advances (which vastly ecplised the previous two millenia of technological advances) would have.
But the simplest disproof of Malthus is time. Malthus predicted, in his time, that the collapse would come soon- in no more than a few decades. I’ll give you a hint of when he made that prediction- he died in 1834. Not only did we not have a general starvation/collapse, we have more people not-starving currently than existed on the planet in 1834 (global population was about 1 billion in the 1830’s, smaller than China is today), and we have a higher percentage of people not-starving today. By just about any measure you care to make, we are better off per capita today than we were 180 years ago.
In the mean time, however, Malthus has been used as an excuse for most of the horrors of the 19th and 20th Century. The logic is simple (if wrong)- since everyone is going to starve and die anyways, I’ll prove my genetic superiority over them by making them starve and die first. This was the logic explicitly used by the English in encouraging and prolonging the Irish potato famine. At the height of the famine, when roughly two million Irish were starving to death, Ireland was the worlds biggest food exporter- mainly to England. Why bother feeding the Irish, when England is facing starvation in the not too distant future? Of course the predicted English famine never occurred. The same idea was used by the Nazis, by America when exterminating the Native Americans, and so on.
In effect, Longman is calling to make Malthus’ assumptions right. Which is what, I think, raises simply begging the question into real evilness. When the population growth curve is threatening to drop off an exponential curve naturally, as people just stop having quite so many kids, we need to put it back on that curve- by following policies which will slow the technological advance which allows resources to keep up, and even out distance, population growth. Long man is advocating that if Malthus is not right, he should be made right. Longman is advocating a policy which will lead to long term diaster, mass starvation, and genocide.
The last point I want to make is the demographic point. The political shift of this country to the right has not been because liberals are simply being outbred. There may, or may not, be a trend in that direction- but if it exists, it’s a trend over generations. The first birth control pill was introduced on the market only in 1960-all boomers predate birth control. Roe v. Wade wasn’t decided until 1973. The option for liberals to not have quite so many kids is still less than fifty years old, arguably less than 35. Heck, I predate Roe v. Wade by a good five years. There may be a trend there, but it hasn’t been going on long enough for it to explain the collapse in liberalism 1968-2007. Instead, what has been happening is that people who used to be liberals and/or Democrats are now conservative Republicans. It’s not that the population has changed, it’s that the people have changed their minds. And why that happened is a topic for a different post.
I’m not sure what, if any, effect the demographic changes in population growth will have. I do think that it’s not as simple as “more people = more votes = control of any democracy”. Educated people are much more likely to vote and engage in civic debate. Ten people who get off their duffs and actually vote are worth infinitely more, in terms of power in a democracy, than a hundred people who sit at home.
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