Patriarchy the Only Answer

For a generation and more we have been told that the patriarchy is the beginning and the end of all our problems.

But now comes Phillip Longman to argue that patriarchy may be our only hope if we want to get out of the current birth dirth.

And this is not some whacko writing in a right-wing magazine funded by the Scaife Foundation. Phillip Longman writes in Foreign Policy.

In The Return of Patriarchy, Longman argues that the people have turned away from making babies before, usually in luxurious ages like our own. There was a birth dearth in the Roman Empire, and why not? Who needs the rigors of bread-winning and putting up with the demands of women?

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.

And women in a luxurious society have their diversions too: shopping, education, friends, shopping, travel, and shopping.

The problem is that worldly, secular people that don’t have children don’t have children. They die out. And the people that have children, the people out in the exurbs that attend megachurches, they get to inherit the earth.

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.

If you look ay the cultural attitudes of a patriarchy, they tend to encourage people, men and women, to invest more in their children. Men want their name to extend into the next generation, and women find that their best opportunities in life coincide with childbearing and childraising. And, of course, the people that have the most children inherit the earth.