Spengler at the Asia Times looks at whether it possible to have a society in which value is determined simply by market price. He cites the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s “prophetic” prediction of what would happen when the means were decoupled from the ends.
“President Roosevelt is magnificently right,” John Maynard Keynes wrote of president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision to devalue the American dollar in 1933. If any economic policy stance deserves such praise today, it is that of Pope Benedict XVI, whose views on ethics and economics occasioned a flurry of comment last month. Italy’s Finance
Minister Giulio Tremonti observed, “The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found” in a 1985 paper (see Market Economy and Ethics, Acton Institute) by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, which Tremonti called “prophetic”. I don’t know whether it was prophetic, but the future pope was right, and magnificently so.An unethical economy, he argued, will destroy itself, and economics cannot determine whether any activity is ethical or not. Internet stock valuations, the market delusion of a decade ago, presumed that pornography, gaming, music downloads and shopping would be the driving forces of the future economy. It is easy to ridicule this Alice-in-Wonderland accounting after the fact, just as it is easy to laugh at television advertisements that even today urge Americans to buy homes because their prices double every 10 years (for example this commercial by the National Association of Realtors posted on YouTube). But what should we say of an economy based on consuming as much as one can without troubling to bring children into the world?
The core of Ratzinger’s argument was the assertion that capitalism promised to free us from morality; that it offered the prospect of not “having to depend on the morality of its participants” that “the true play of market laws best guarantees progress and even distributive justice … and perhaps even more astounding presupposition, namely, that the natural laws of the market are in essence good (if I may be permitted so to speak) and necessarily work for the good, whatever may be true of the morality of individuals.”
But I’m not sure it is true that people looked to the markets to be the oracle of morality. What may truer to assert is that many believed it would measure our beliefs and thus obviate the need to refer to the sacred texts. Instead of the texts we would have the “wisdom of crowds” which would stand as a proxy for everything we held holy. What it did not envision was the prospect of a society in which nothing was held sacred.
If you wanted to know what was right there was no need to meditate or reflect on the tradition. All you had to do was test market an idea or take a poll. Bill Clinton was famously said to ask his pollsters what he should believe today. But it’s not the pollster’s fault nor the market’s. Just Bill’s. Today it is perfectly respectable to argue that because “six out of ten Americans oppose the war in Iraq” then the Iraq policy is wrong, just as it possible to say that since 9 out of 10 dogs like a particular pet biscuit the product is best. The market simply reflected our ethical values. Maybe the reason we don’t make time to raise children and save for their future welfare is that we don’t want it as much as “pornography, gaming, and music downloads”. Capitalism unfortunately, gives us what we want and if we don’t want what we get, we should ask the mirror.
Spengler’s greatest fear is for the future. He argues that the West is behaving like it doesn’t want to live. But then, this may be the consequence of caring only for the present. The “me generation” got its name for a reason. Spengler says we are consuming our seed corn. What’s the problem with that if we don’t care about the future? Spengler sees catastrophe coming, even for markets.
Underlying the crisis is the Western world’s repudiation of life, through a hedonism that puts consumption or “self-realization” ahead of child-rearing. The developed world is shifting from a demographic profile in which the very young (children four years and under) outnumbered the elderly (65 and older), to a profile with 10 times as many retirees as children aged four or younger. Economics simply never has had to confront a situation in which the next generation simply failed turn up.
And when nobody turns up in that barren future, everything — including markets — will die. “Markets are part of society, and if society passes the demographic point of no return, the market will die along with all other social institutions.” But is that the market’s fault? For much of capitalism’s history, including the first sixty years of the 20th century, the markets supported a growing population and indeed made it possible.
If markets are pandering to our demographic collapse by promoting buy now pay later schemes, one reason may be that our intrinsic values have changed. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the tacit rules of Western culture — a combination of Judaeo-Christianity and rationalism — made people “value” certain activities. But when Judaeo-Christianity and rationalism were supplanted by whatever one wants to call the shapeless ideologies that have come into vogue — something we loosely refer to as post-modernism or political correctness — we no longer valued them. Cardinal Ratzinger was right to believe that values and the market place did not exist independently. Where he may be partly mistaken is believing that markets solely drive our values. They are a powerful feedback mechanism, but the circle begins with ourselves.
John Paul II often spoke of the “culture of death”. It would be a mistake to think this was a narrow reference to abortion. It really refers to a loss of belief in our own worth. Many no longer believe that our own culture is worth defending; our beliefs worth spreading; and our societies worth surviving. And if we believe this, the market will provide.
Here’s Alec Baldwin in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross describing what’s important in a salesman’s life.
embedded by Embedded VideoYouTube Direkt
Economics is applied ethics.
About demographics, it was a common refrain among feminists to say, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Well, if a woman doesn’t want a man, she can go kiss a bicycle. Bicycles can’t father children.
Wretchard –
You and I have profound disagreements on the NATURE of the collapse of the West. Yourself, the essayist “Fjordman” at Gates of Vienna (I recommend it highly), Paul Belien of Brussels Journal, the Pope (Benedict XVI), essayist Takuan Seiyo (Brussels Journal) and many others have pointed to Christianity being supplanted by a “post-Christian” society.
I differ completely.
I think there is compelling evidence that post-Christian Europe is merely a symptom. Of the same huge social changes driven by technology (yes we live in a Sci-Fi World). Iran has the same problems, the same demographic collapse, the same collapse of social systems and public morality (and all the brutal hangings in public of 16 year old girls for “adultery” won’t and has not changed that).
It is not Communism, Marxism, Feminism, Gramscian conspiracies, or anything else that could cause such a huge shift so quickly in places all across the world, including many that are profoundly un-Christian and un-Western.
No. It is the Pill, the Condom, and increased wealth for women that has brought about that change. If women can control their own fertility (they can) they can and do live the “Sex and the City” lifestyle, or the “New Girl Order” that Kay Hymnowitz describes in City Journal.
Women, if they have a choice at all, would prefer not to have children (on balance, many do but not “enough” and certainly not in the numbers to keep populations from declining dramatically). They would prefer to be sexually active as long as possible (the world-wide beauty industry DWARFS that of Military Spending). They prefer to live in “glamorous” cities where “important” things happen and are fascinated by dynasties and bloodlines and royalty in various permutations, along with charismatic outsiders. Obama got 70% of single women’s votes, and similar candidates in the Philippines or Malaysia or other countries with high female literacy and incomes would likely get similar results.
Single women are of course for obvious reasons highly resistant to any military spending or action, love “diversity” and hate with a passion the “ordinary” “straight White Males” who they spend much of their days trying to navigate past.
Worldwide, “the West” changed from 1965-1990 or so (this includes China and much of Asia) from a place where people got married in their late twenties or so, at the latest, to one where they hardly get married at all. This was the result of women’s own choice, by enabling technology that is cheap and reliable.
It will not change. It is irreversible. The West is becoming a civilization of single mothers, and somewhat feral children who grow up circumstances radically different. As a consequence of that, long term, we will see society more resembling that of the British White Underclass depicted by Dalrymple, or that of your average Rap Video, than anything else. Gender segregation, loss of male cooperation, Big Man posturing, and random brutality.
Future Time orientation requires a nuclear family. Which was killed, inevitably by cheap and effective contraception. It is not ever coming back.
The market, left to its own devices, is moral. Criminality and stupidity are punished eventually, if not immediately. Honesty and efficiency are rewarded. It is the attempt to decouple the market from the reality of risk, reward and failure that is immoral.
I think BXVI is sort of right. And Whiskey is on to the cause. Sort of. Markets are totally dependent on the honesty of the participants. Fathers teach morality either by instruction or example or both. Culture is transmitted by the family. Those without family have no culture. If the zeitgeist becomes corrupted by too many without culture the society begins to come apart.
I dont think America has reached the tipping point. It aint far, but not yet. Lots closer in the cities, but not Out There.
But the question is how to fix?
I think it is possible we’re at the beginning of a reiteration of one of the Great Awakenings. Just a feeling, but I think somethings afoot. I really cant put a finger on a fact or trend to support it. Maybe its clinging in hard times. Maybe its hope.
Wrichard writes:
“Instead of the texts we would have the “wisdom of crowds” which would stand as a proxy for everything we held holy. What it [i.e., the market as measure] did not envision was the prospect of a society in which nothing was held sacred.”
If you find the first paragraph tedious, proceed immediately to the next post.
Philosopher of science Michel Serres, in “The Natural Contract,” suggests that the opposite of “religion” is not “no religion/athesim” but “negligence.” Religion is, etymologically speaking, a binding up, a gathering together. “No religion” does not gather up except temporarily in new scientific theory. Religion as legislated autority generally fails to survive scientific advance. The negligence begins.
Serres writes at some length about the human tension between “law/judgment/legislation” and “science/knowledge.” Science (Galileo is the archetype here) challenges received wisdom and legislated morality and ways of knowing. The legislators must and do give way eventually before science. The problem, of course, is that science desires to establish its own legislative/judicial hegemony (think fetal stem cells, global warming), establishing its own orthodoxy. New science will challenge the old.
Every system opens itself to participation of parasites. Self-interest provides the motivation for both host and parasite. The inevitable interruption/static results in new configurations (see Serres, different book, ‘The Parasite.’)
Can there be, then, sources of value? Perhaps a modesty of scientific endeavor, Serres suggests, might be hoped for, and a kind of transformation of the intelligentia into “troubadours of knowledge.”
But how can this new development of value happen, one must respond to Serres, when science drives us to think of ourselves as autonomous beings, or as mere biological constructs? If we have no sense of a human being as part of a communion/church, under God, then what social construct can present itself as a source of value? The Catholic Church has a comprehensive teaching, but it appeals mainly to believers and is, in any case, invalidated by the societal emphasis on empiricism/science. The rest is noise.
The Ummah currently has an advantage in this regard of clarity of value. (It might be interesting to consider why the West opens itself to Islamic parasitism, i.e. Muslim participation in a system that the ‘parasite’ has no interest in perpetuating beyond what the system can provide towards its own ends.)
Which was killed, inevitably by cheap and effective contraception. It is not ever coming back.
Cheap and effective contraception, pharmaceuticals, doctors and careers are all enabled by the economic and technological apparatus of the modern economy. They don’t exist in a vacuum. Most of the carers in Australian homes for the aged and indeed a growing percentage of the hospital staff, consist of immigrants from high birth rate countries. But eventually the day comes when demography makes it impossible to sustain a demand, provide the manpower to care for the elderly and pay the taxes for social security. And in that ruthless world it is not clear that a childless couple will be at any particular survival advantage.
Then who will produce the pharmaceuticals or even administer them? Civilization is not a given, something we have, proof against all vicissitudes. Civilization is in a constant struggle for survival against entropy. If we don’t fix what’s broke, bread lines can come back. Wars can come back. And big families can come back. I am almost tempted to say “will”. The how may differ. Our test as humans is whether to choose to amend ourselves by choice or have our behavior changed by necessity.
The collapsing West is born of the marriage of Christianity with socialism in the mid-19C, a theology and ideology both celebrating the ‘virtue’ of being the victim. The West could have continued its cultural dominance with only one of the two nihilisms, but the combination has proven to be too toxic: Marx and Hitler from the land of Luther and the Holy Roman Empire are not merely abstractions: They represent the marriage of Christianity and socialism at its most obvious toxicity. Even with the two extremes of Marxism and National Socialism gone and discredited, the slow internal rot continues, as Nietzsche warned long ago.
Spengler is a bright man, and the Pope is brilliant, but neither of them is up to Nietzsche for accuracy.
First, There is a difference between immoral goods and service and a “corrupt economy”, and Spengler (and perhaps you, wretchard) is rather putting words in Benedict’s mouth here. Benedict was talking about a broader moral order in society here, not making a distinction between regulated and free markets. Markets cannot address the moral impulses of people or the lack there of. Benedict’s wartime experiences should serve to expose the difference between society and markets and morality’s place in either, and no doubt this experience does inform him. Spengler would do well to examine his hypocrisy here for his daily comforts are deeply dependent on economic freedoms no matter how these freedoms may avail the pornographer.
In fact, this is really a specious argument by way of guilt by association. Pornographers are a result of freedom of speech, not freedom of the markets. Spengler by nature, education and class does not like those grubby business people. What vulgar upstarts they are! Not half so cultivated as he is, no doubt. So this is just a veiled, left of center attack on free markets originating from a privileged, elitist seat, and it uses a false and dishonorable rhetoric to do so.
Second, most of the corruption that we are seeing in the “marketplace” is due to government intervention or the failure to enforce laws. Herein lies the “decline”. The current diaster is not due to “deregulation” or “evil capitalism” but rather government either influencing the markets for fun (as in social engineering and electioneering) and profit, and failing to hold institutions like Moodys or AIG to the spirit and letter of the law. It is amazing that they go unchallenged in this slander of free markets and capitalism, and I suspect this is due to the fact that those that would normally challenge them are waiting, hat in hand, for government checks. Were we to actually try capitalism and free markets now, the problems would take care of themselves be less severe in the long term. If we had relied on free markets in the first place none of this would have happened at all. Key constituencies and hidden backers, however, would suffer for their idiocy and perdifery, and this our current “representatives” will not have.
In fact, market capitalism has hardly had a chance to prove itself at all, government keeps getting in its way. Politicians fear a free, capitalistic system for they cannot thrive within it — they produce nothing of value whatsoever.
Third, governments, or the electorate as such, possess no deeper vision of how to manage economic matters than do purely economic actors. They do markedly worse when they are tell other people what to do with their own hard earned money. A government were unions hold sway will act as little more than buccaneers.
Lastly, capitalism and free markets are techniques, not ideologies, moral codes or religions; they are certainly not “cultures” or “civilizations”, a point that is often missed. These techniques are cradled inside of a larger set of principles, concepts, beliefs and traditions that we call our civilization and our common culture. Morality in economics are a reflection of these things and not the other way around. One can no more look for morality in free markets than one can assume that the empirical method leads to sanctity. Guns do not kill, people do. Still, a mark of a moral culture is that people get to keep what they earn, and that the individual decides moral issues either in private live or the ballot box (assuming a respect for the bill of rights, of course).
This is the irony of Spengler’s grousing about decline. He complains about the very thing that is one major component of what will save the West: Free enterprise and private initiative. He also does not what to confess to what damage the elites have done to thie broader civilization that the economy sits within. It is old school elitists like Spengler who sit in their private clubs and parliaments turning up their noses at those that seek wealth that are the problem and a major source of our “decline”. They have worked to destroy everything else and now thy attack commerce and those that pursue it (not to mention mocking those childish Christians and all their bible banging). It is they who are are full of moral rot and it is they that decades ago did not stand up to the collectivists when they made a run for power. They need to get out of the way.
Free markets for free men.
Why seek a single explanation?
Here are a few others:
- Acceleration of the rate of technological change (doubling every 18 months – see Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near) which may be approaching (and eventually going past) the range of natural human adaptation.
- “Conformity Enforcers” losing control of the broad middle because the economic advantage belonged to the “diversity generators”. See Bloom’s Global Brain.
- Noise vs. Signal. How much of what discuss is false positive? What is the trend-line? What is the instrumentation for such statements?
- Model error. See Global Warming as a mark-to-model rather than a mark-to-reality.
Cheers,
FtF
For an understanding of the deviance of global markets, I recommend Pundita’s post today.
She calls this phenomenon “black globalization,” but Nils Gilman originally called it “deviant globalizatiion”.
Nils Gilman on black globalization, the world as it is today, and how it got that way
On that post she has a link to his video at the Futurists’ Conference (in Lucerne) from this past October.
If you click on her post you can see his pre-interview post on his own blog, written in August, in which he discusses the phenomenon of deviant globalization.
Her reference to his new book, “Mandarins of the Future” — a book that will definitely be in my future reading list.
Pundita says..well, never mind. She says any number of intriguing things, and not all of them are visions of an ugly future.
She is always worth reading, but this post in particular stands against the simplicities of Spengler (much as I enjoy reading him)…
Spengler is blowing smoke, as he sometimes does. Pope Benedict is simply articulating another papal (and, in Benedict’s case, you’d have to say also ‘pre-papal’) variant of what Thomas Sowell (in A Conflict of Visions) called the “unconstrained vision.” Like pontiffs since at least Leo XIII in the latter 19th century, the Pope just ‘knows’, for example, that there is SOMETHING that distinguishes a ‘just’ price from a true market price, a ‘just’ wage from a true market wage. The Sacred Pontiffs have told me repeatedly that the distinction is plainly there if I just look. I still can’t find it.
The error is in assuming that there is something explicitly ‘moral’ about a price or a wage to begin with. This is the fundamental problem with then Cardinal Ratzinger’s analysis, cited by Spengler. The possibility that prices and wages are just information, like the temperature outside your window, is dismissed. It just has to be that what begins as discrete personal moral encounters between countless human beings can never turn into mere ‘information’, even as a summation of millions of exchanges. Things seem to be bad just now, and maybe even getting worse, but post hoc still does not equal propter hoc, even if it’s the Pope’s analysis we’re discussing.
As to the worldwide fertility decline (sometimes called ‘demographic winter’) first introduced in this thread by Whiskey, THE most significant work on the causes of ‘demographic winter’ that I have come across comes from the little-noticed work of the little-noticed John Mueller (he proudly states that he is not ‘Dr.’ John Mueller). Raw academic status, rather than the power of analytical results, must be extremely important in some areas in social science, because John Mueller’s simple logistic regression equation accounts for tremendously more of the variance in fertility decline worldwide than any other model, yet this and his other studies remain almost totally unremarked.
Go to this link. Then find ‘View as pdf’ at the top right, click on that, follow the directions that pop up and download the pdf of the paper, and read the whole thing.
It is a remarkable paper in so many ways: a re-starting of the entire field of economics, to include, for example, the insights of St. Augustine; and using this more complete view of human economic nature to tease out factors that can account for variance in fertility decline worldwide.
Just by the way, Mr. Mueller found that a recent history of a population having lived under totalitarianism, as a simple on-off variable, accounted for as much of the variance in fertility as any of the other models out there, including those by a Nobel Prize economist.
Contraception may have enabled the New Girl Order, but it truly depends on a high level of wealth and civilization — one in which a woman has no need of protection from a particular man, because “society” does that for her. As Wretchard points out, that level of civilization is not a given. It in turn depends on almost all men voluntarily accepting their “deal” in society. If even 1% decide that barbarism is better than playing by the rules, then the whole thing falls apart.
Now ask: Are men getting a good deal? If not, how long will they take it before something changes.
I think the New Girl Order is unstable. It is a bubble. The question is, does it explode, or does the air leak out slowly?
Well i think that notion of 19th century Christianity and its dabbling in collectivism has some truth to it, but there is a lot more to it than what has been ementioned here.
Our crises is rooted in WW1 and four fundamental failures that were made manifest there:
1) The failure of the old aristocratic order to rise above their many decadences, fears, cowardices and petty narcissisms.
2) the multiple social and spiritual failure of institutional Christianity to address the real issues of the 19th century. And yes, these issues include collectivism, but they mostly are the two main points of the European (and American) experience of the time: Economic and political liberation of the common man and great technological and economic advance.
3) Colonialism. This is of course related to 1 and 2 above.
4) The failure of the Bourgeoisie of Europe (but not of America) to establish an order or alternative that addressed the failures of the aristocracy or institutional Christianity in Europe (or numbers 1,2 and 3 above). They merely aped their “betters”.
Bismarkian socialism could well have been unhitched from Catholicism, and in any event, this is was not a continent wide phenomena.
Fascism may have been a parody of Christianity, as are socialism, communism and all other forms of collectivism, but neither Fascism or Socialism were in any sense “handmaidens of the Church”, they were its sworn enemies.
The Church was in a quite decadent state in the mid and late 19th Century. It made a grave arror in promoting “Christian Socialist” parties, and in my book, did it rather cynically. During the same period, they sought out the European aristoracy and tried to buttress their position hoping that it would save them from “decoratic man”. They played both ends of the political spectrum and this did not serve them well at all. It is the greatest of ironies that reformers like Franz Josef found the Vatican and the Austro-Hungarian Church hierarchy to be one of his greatest obstacles.
But what they should have done is address the issues mentioned above; seen them as enevitable instead of trying to resist them. It was a failure on all levels.
I imagine that the experiences of the French Revolution and Napoleonic War weighed to heavily open them. It was a sort of reverberation of the Reformation.
We often talk about “Romanticism” as an artistic movement, but during this time there was a “Romantic movement” in the Roman Catholic church. They sought to fight what they precieved as the Jacobian heresies of The Enlightenment, to have yet another stab at a counter-reformation. They promulgated this myth of a more pious “age of Christendom” in the medieval ages, a completely fraudulent notion. (This is why we here in America have all of the odd “Pseudo-Gothic” churches built out of cement, and associate Gregorian Chant with high religious services, btw.) This mythology took some pretty loony turns: Placing Mozart on the proscribed list of composers, for example.
But they should not have done any of this. They should not have tried reactionary politics or collectivist politics. The reasons that they did not are many, and most of them are not all that noble.
So we are still swapped by the events of WW1.
Things can still be set right, BTW, it will just require some will, and perhaps some split blood as well. It means war with the left.
Johnclub: yes, I am with you here, but I really think Spengler is putting words in Benedicts mouth here.
I do not see Benedict as a socialist or arguing for a “just wage” in the sense that socialist and communists do. I suspect that he understand just how cynical and political motivated such plaints are.
I believe he is arguing for a return to the christian basis of our civilization. I would suggest that the frustration you have with his argument is with the notion that there was this more pious age were wages were taken as something other than what they actually are, and we need to return to them. This would seem to be an affliction of 19th, 20th and now 21st century Popes.
But Benedict has come out strongly against socialism.
Spengler is an upper crust elitist either in the American or English diplomatic corp. He has to be taken with a grain of salt. Great style though.
Spengler is off the mark here. Free markets per se are irrelevant to declining birth rates. Whiskey correctly points out that birth rates have fallen precipitously worldwide. The fall has been independent of whether markets are free or countries are poor. For most folks children are less than a joy to raise. It is expensive and hard work. Given their druthers they’d just as soon have none. Three motivations have worked against this preference in the past: sex for fun, religion, and need for a source of care in ones dotage. Whiskey explains how cheap contraception lets folks have their fun without being stuck with children. Religions that preached, “be fruitful and multiply…” have been shoved aside by a religion of environmentalism that preaches, “don’t multiply you greedy parasite.” Finally, the welfare state with its many varieties of Social Security “guarantees” care in ones old age by other peoples children and money. The net result is that only those who are stuck in a benighted past or genuinely enjoy children continue to have them.
I think, that the system will eventually self-correct with large families as Wretchard suggests. Social Security schemes when seen in terms of their effect on birth rates turn the next generation into a sort of commons. The tragedy of the commons will soon be upon us.
decratic man = democratic man
Civilization decline at the loss of its founding morals, all great and long lasting civilizations do a bell curve, usually starting one after another but not always, occasionally decades can separate them, the beginning culture pursues a purity in its morals and then near the top of its bell curve is when the culture starts to “Progress” (which is in reality “regression” back to the chaos it started from) out of its founding morals, the downward bell curve has started, one can usually spot the steep downward curve of the bell curve by specific leaders or events (i.e. “the Pill, free love” cultural leaders breaking the founding rules (laws) with impunity i.e. Nixion B&E, Bill Clintons what “is” is) the sides of the bell curve can be years to hundreds of years, all dependent on the strength of it morals and its interaction with other cultures in the world, even religions can be seen on a bell curve.
This “decline” i being foisted on us my the left and the tranzi elites. They have been harping on this for more than a century. It need not happen at all.
Let us stop being snookered into it. Let us resist it.
America in particular has not experienced the sort of tumult that generally engenders such a decline. We have been through much worse in our history.
What we have to do is boot the Left out, they are the problem.
I being=is being
I’m currently in the middle of “The Fourth Turning,” by William Strauss and Neil Howe. Their thesis is that there is a 80 – 100 year cycle that contains four distinct phases that correspond to generations. They are Crisis, High, Awakening and Unravelling.
During a Crisis, people come together to rebuild a disintegrating society. That corresponds to the Great Depression and WWII in recent history. After this, there is a High, where the culture is unified around a new social order. Think of 1950′s America. I suspect many people here look back fondly at such a time. It was a time when men were men and women stayed home and raised large families.
After the High, there is an “Awakening” in which the young adult generation questions the stodgy old institutions of the High and overtuns much of the social order. Think 1960′s America. Some of this questioning has good results, such as civil rights for blacks and some bad, such as the disintegration of the family and the resultant crime wave. Then comes an Unravelling. With the old institutions shaken, people of this generation drift apart. There is no monoculture. Everybody is out for himself. I think this describes the mood of today. Our culture has come unmoored, and we are drifting. There is a general unease. Everybody has a feeling that there is a crisis around the corner. There is a sense that “the center cannot hold,” as Yeats said.
I have a strong feeling that the whole system is about to come crashing down. The economy is played out, what with a trillion dollar deficit. Something Bad is going to happen and we are powerless to stop it. What exactly happens is not as important as our reaction to it. Europe responded to the last crisis with Fascism and Stalinism. America got FDR and Socialism Lite. I shudder to think what may happen now with as our enervated culture faces economic collapse or mass casualty terror attacks, or both.
I doubt much of the problem stems from free markets and free enterprise. Probably the most conventionally moral people I know run small businesses.
It is true that economics, as a discipline, eschews “morality” because it deals with the quantifiable. But it does contain the concept of “Moral Hazard.”
The word “Capitalism” itself is leftist terminology. And much of what Spengler identifies as its failings results from the Left’s war on Free Markets and Free Enterprise. When out of power the left tends to push pornography, gambling, alternative life styles, free love and drugs. It’s a good way to build a movement while destabilizing society. In power they tend to turn prudish while turning great swaths of society into wards of the state.
I see a big threat to the economy in the organization of noble Cartels in the name of fighting global warming (“Cap and trade” will result in a Cartel) and to administer all these bail outs. We’ve got an automotive Cartel on the way — and it will have to include the foreign makers already established in the US market. Soon you will be paying $10,000 more for a car than you should. These Cartels, together with the politicization of the economy and the arrival of the hyper regulatory state, will choke off economic growth. This will be blamed on “Capitalism,” of course. And a few highly paid “Capitalists” will be kept around to take the blame. They will be unemployed actors.
Whiskey: If women can control their own fertility (they can) they can and do live the “Sex and the City” lifestyle, or the “New Girl Order” that Kay Hymowitz describes in City Journal.
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, if women can have this kind of freedom, then it makes perfect sense for them to embrace this “New Girl Order” over what Kay Hymowitz describes in a more recent City Journal article here: “Child-Man in the Promised Land” Did you read that one as well? If you have, then it’s hard to understand why you keep insisting on laying the entire blame for The End of the World as We Know It all at the doorstep of young women. They don’t make their choices in isolation, you know. Reading Hymowitz’s article on 18-34 year-old young single men is enough to make one wonder how there can be ANY married women in this age group at all.
The absence of traditional Judeo-Christianity in the public life of modern society leaves both men and women with no reason to reject a Me-Generation preoccupation with self. You can attend the church of your choice of course but once you leave the premises you’d better keep all that stuff to yourself. I’m not talking about proselytizing, which is often a badgering imposition, I mean any mentioning of it at all, period. Of course, there’s the understandable desire to avoid offense, but it’s more than that. Displaying a serious attitude towards God, or the notion of God – his will, his commandments, his providence, etc., verges on an embarrassment in open society. It’s inappropriate now and has lost any relevance for huge numbers of people, either explained away as a fairy-tale or because we don’t want to be held to account.
It is a spiritual paradox that choosing life requires self-sacrifice. That seems to be something we’re increasingly averse to doing. We don’t want to suffer anything and we shouldn’t have to. Therefore, let government bail us out and let us be free from childraising to go on in the merry way of Carrie Bradshaw or the juvenile man-child. Were we still steeped in the old ways, our old foundation, unembarrassed, we would NOT be staring into the abyss.
Wretchard: Worldwide, “the West” changed from 1965-1990 or so (this includes China and much of Asia) from a place where people got married in their late twenties or so, at the latest, to one where they hardly get married at all.
Hardly get married at all? I have to call bolshevik on that, W. Here’s the number of US marriages in census years since 1900:
1900 709,000
1910 948,000
1920 1,274,476
1930 1,126,856
1940 1,595,879
1950 1,667,231
1960 1,523,000
1970 2,158,802
1980 2,390,252
1990 2,443,489
2000 2,329,000
After that, we can look by individual years up to 2005:
2001 2,327,000
2002 2,256,000
2003 2,187,000
2004 2,279,000
2005 2,230,000
I don’t see a precipitous drop off in marriage, or any major decline that would make me lament the decline of nuptials in the West, other than the curious activity of some people to deny marriage equality to other people if they were of different races (up until 1967) or of the same genders (up until today).
The US is the one major Western country that is at replacement population growth. As for the rest, they are heading for a kind of demographic doom. By 2050, 30% of the developed nation’s population will be over 65 compared to 6% in 1950. In contrast, the children will have largely gone. The percentage of children under four will have dropped from 10% to 3% over a comparable period. That’s to say the percentage of people over sixty five will have quintupled and there percentage of children reduced more than three fold. And yet what are worried about? Carbon footprints. What we should worry about is how we’ll pay those social security checks.
For Whiskey, you can find some interesting confirmation of your views in The Decline of Males by Lionel Tiger. http://www.amazon.com/Decline-Males-First-Unexpected-World/dp/0312263112/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228962987&sr=1-1
Wretchard — You are correct. However, the contraceptive factories of condoms and the pill can keep running long enough to keep most of the “West” including Asia running along from variants to say, France and Greece and the UK, beset by poor, un-Western Islamic populations with subjugated women and the constant street and PC battles to further Islamicize society into Big Men and Harems (with slaves and jihadis outside), to say ever-declining Japan, awash in weird tentacle pr0n stuff.
The US birthrates are propped up by Mexican immigrant (largely single) mothers. Its unlikely their children will vary significantly from what they were in Mexico. Or be willing to support older, childless Anglos or Blacks.
Ruby — Single women outnumber married women for the first time, in US History. Also marriage rates are dramatically declining, and the age of first marriage is ever increasing (probably related to high divorce rates). The nuclear family is essentially dead. I’ve blogged on this extensively, the data from the US Census Bureau show it pretty much dead — White illegitimate rates went from 4% in 1965 to 41% in 2006. Hispanic is even higher, Black is 70%. Your table does not go by percentage of population. Men age 25 were married at least once 70% from 1940-44, and declined to less than 40% by 1974. In 2004, that had declined to 17% for the age bucket 20-24 (ever married).
Let’s review: 1940-44, men age 25 were 70% married. By 2004, men age 20-24 were only 17% married. While not a true apples to apples comparison, you can’t miss the huge trendline.
Karen — Hymnowitz misses the mark. In both Child-Man and the Love in the Time of Darwinism post, up currently at City Journal, she as an older woman, can’t understand the reality of the Pill and Condom: around 70% or so of single women monopolized by about 30% or so of men. That’s the reality of “soft polygamy” and too many young men with no hope or connection to women simply out of any ambition and retreat to childish diversions. She also uses Apatow movies instead of stats and real-life studies to butress her points and makes frankly STUPID comments such as “most people are too busy getting their master’s to date in their twenties.” US Census Bureau has stats: only between 6-9% of men or women depending on age groups have Masters or better. I’m just Joe Blow and *I* could find that info in five minutes at the Census Bureau. Older women in particular have no clue as to how RADICALLY different sexual behavior is for women or what younger people are like in social behaviors. The latest survey, which take with a grain of salt, has the average age of British women’s loss of virginity at 16, nine sexual partners by age 21, two more than men that age, with 25% women having MORE than ten partners five years past virginity, compared with only 20% of men 5 years past virginity. Fifty percent admitted cheating on a partner, half of those admitted to being unfaithful more than once. However 99% say a male partner cheating would cause them to dump them.
The pill and condom enables women to chase after and have sex with the few high testosterone, high status, high powered men. Of which there are only a few. Then as the fertility window closes, women complain about the quality of men they have to choose from (mid thirties onward) and pursue single motherhood on their “own” terms. The survey above demonstrates MARKET POWER by women, who do the deciding, who are pursued by men their own age and men ten years older (in prime desirable years aka 22-32) and perhaps even cohorts 15 years older. Who have sex with men who are spendthrifts but avoid thrifty men (note no link for women between spending and sex).
The pill and the condom change women’s selection to pure physical and emotional stimulation of the moment. This is a radical change from selection critieria of “good husband and father” since neither are needed with wealth and state money and most critically control of their own biology.
People are not being single, mostly childless people, with motherhood defined as single motherhood because they rejected God or Christianity. They rejected God and Christianity as a side effect of society being skewed to single female norms. Which was enabled by the Pill and the Condom.
Great thread.
Supply and demand are products of human nature.
Work is essential to happiness, and work creates supply. The most unhappy people I know are people who either do not work, or do work that has no value to others. Supply, then, is the natural result of our pursuit of happiness.
We must sustain ourselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and that activity creates demand. There is nothing per se wrong about consumption; in fact, consumption can be a positive good (e.g. eating to sustain health). Demand, then, is also the natural result of our pursuit of happiness.
There are only two ways to reconcile supply and demand: a market and a queue. In the US, we have largely relied upon markets to perform this reconciliation function. Markets rely on information distributed from the bottom up, usually in the form of a price, and decisions to increase supply are made when prices grow high.
Queues, on the other hand, rely upon time, and were the preferred clearing mechanism of collectivist systems. They require humans to wait for goods and services distributed from the top down, and decisions to increase supply are made when queues grow long.
If there is a claim for the “moral” superiority of markets, it is that they waste less of that most valuable and limited of resources, human time. Time used standing in a line cannot be used to raise children, write novels, or make widgets.
Or post random thoughts on the Belmont Club.
L3
whiskey @ #3
I have a different take on your assertion that single females are the death of fertility and the family unit. You might want to take a look at Robert Chandler’s latest book, “Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, The Global New Left, and Radical Islam.” He argues, and I agree with him, that it really is the hugely successful implementation of Antonio Gramsci’s strategy for collapsing capitalism. The dagger was aimed right at Christianity and the family. The kids are being primed to be reductionist, hedonistic atheists early in school. They are not aware of the people who set it all in motion nor the provenance of the ideas and symbols that form their consciousness of themselves, their society and its narratives.
There is an endgame in all of this and it’s not The Pill and “Sex and the City.” Those serve another master and that master is not female.
Herb (#5): I think BXVI is sort of right. And Whiskey is on to the cause. Sort of. Markets are totally dependent on the honesty of the participants. Fathers teach morality either by instruction or example or both. Culture is transmitted by the family. Those without family have no culture. If the zeitgeist becomes corrupted by too many without culture the society begins to come apart.
Culture is also transmitted by interactions with others, both in person and through communications media. In our case, instant, on-demand media with global reach and scope, which enables its users to create their own unique cultural experience, which no one else can fully relate to, from virtually infinite combinations of a dizzying array of sources. Every child born into what passes for Western civ in the 21st century can’t help but be immersed in this same media environment, and grow up taking it, and the attendant ability to become, for all intents and purposes, a culture unto oneself, for granted.
The dilemma this creates, of course, is that it robs even family of its effectiveness as a cultural transmission mechanism (if by “effectiveness” we mean the ability to make the transmitted culture stick with its recipient intact). Admittedly, it does seem rather silly to go through so much effort to pass on culture to the next generation, much less expect the next generation to pass it down in turn, when the global cafeteria culture makes the chances of what you’re trying to pass down surviving intact in the minds of your recipients long enough to be passed down again so slim.
Have you read Brides Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition?
Over the past two centuries, weddings have not only become commercialized, but they have become increasingly feminized. What is there in a wedding for a man? The message of a wedding ceremony must show how a man doesn’t lose any of his masculinity through getting married. When it is customary for the woman (or the woman’s mother) to control the entire proceedings, when businesses cater to a woman’s taste (and not a man’s), when television is full of “Bridezillas”, and when most churches are getting increasingly feminized, this is a problem.
Is a large segment of young men acting like Peter Pan? Yes. Is it a backlash against feminism? Yes and no. Overtly, it is a backlash against feminism. However, it is more fundamentally a masculinist internalization of most aspects of radical feminism. Radical feminists never asked themselves what would happen if men actually accepted their ideas. Feminists and the counterculture demolished the social desirability of the old-fashioned family without constructing anything to take its place, except perhaps daycare and sperm banks.
An episode of Lobo about thirty years ago had an episode where the women went on strike against the men. As a child, that episode scared me. I also understood only too viscerally that a husband’s threat to leave the family was always more realistic than a wife’s threat. Lysistrata was implicitly misogynist in ancient Greece because of the unstated existence of prostitution in Athens. Men with money always had recourse to the courtesan; women did not.
Does a woman really need a man? Marriage can only work if a woman needs a man and a man needs a woman. As it is, modern America has become a land where women are supposed to work, children are supposed to grow up in daycare when they aren’t in school, sperm banks are supposed to cater to a woman’s desire for children, and nursing homes become prisons to dump the elderly. It seems as though there has been a long march of social progress to make the family obsolete.
Patriarchy can work. Matriarchy can work. The extended family can work. An equal partnership can work. But telling children how the old ways are bad without creating any alternative leads to Peter Pan. If a man can be a responsible husband and father in modern America without feeling emasculated, that would be good. As it is, the existence of sperm banks ensures that if a woman wants to get pregnant, she doesn’t need a man anymore.
whiskey,
Most of the Catholic women in the families I knew from my childhood went on the Pill because they and their husbands could no longer afford five, six, seven, eight or more children families on their husbands’ incomes. Our parents loved children and they loves us children, but there are limits to what can be achieved with limited resources. My wife and I have two daughters and we made a conscious decision to have only two children for very sound reasons: we wanted to be able to afford to send them to private schools and help them later on with college. Not pay for all of it (they have to do their share too), but help them achieve it. The public school system is just rotten and incompetent. My wife and I were blessed that our parents could afford to send us to Catholic schools, but in those days there were a lot more religious sisters, brothers, and priests to staff the schools. We got good educations because of it. And while my wife and I have a very good income, we don’t live the high life. And we don’t believe in giving the girls everything they want. For example, we’ve told them they have to earn the money for their first cars; so they had best save their money from part time jobs – and we limit their hours of work so that school has the top priority. They don’t get the most “in” fashions. Since they go to Catholic schools, they only have to worry about uniforms, not fashion statements. I highly recommend this way of going about it, but interestingly in the public schools it is the teachers and not the students who are most opposed to having uniforms instead of fashion. The kids like it because it sets a tone that school is a place of business and takes a lot of the pressure to impress peers off their backs.
You can buck the trends and raise your kids right. Having fewer kids is not inherently selfish. It’s just being smarter. Our mothers, God bless them, often were at their wits’ end having to deal with so many kids. I came from a family of six kids – I was the oldest. I understood what Mom was going through every day.
Marriage rates should be for % of adult population. Given that the population has doubled over the last 60 years it sure looks like a declining rate to me.
Adam Smith was a Professor of Moral Philosophy. Really that meant that he taught 4 year long courses to what we could consider very hard working under 20 secondary school students. We have a compilation from his first year Ethics course in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He makes it clear that the cultivation of “sympathy” is essential for all further social activity. That would include his subsequent lecture courses in Rhetoric, Jurisprudence and Political Economy. We do not have his work for the middle two subjects. The Wealth of Nations is of course the culmination of both his life’s work and of what was intended as a systematic train of thought based on a moral perspective.
The interesting thing about societies is that they are systems. There are a wide range of strong and weak linkages between aspects of social behavior, and these linkages make the system difficult to change – this is both good news and bad news.
Scanning through this thread, a number of causes are proposed for the decline of the West:
- Widespread availability and use of artificial contraceptives
- Fertility rates below replacement
- Decline of religious observance
- Disappearance of shared notions of what constitutes good behavior
- Failure of an aristocratic order and the notion of legitimate authority
- Accelerating technological change
- Spread of markets as the preferred mechanism for reconciling supply and demand
- Ubiquity of pornography, gaming, and music downloads
- Rampant illegitimacy
- Social benefit systems that lower the cost of being a single mother
- Rejection of God
- Narcissistic behavior by young men and women
- Foreign aid transfers from wealthy to poor countries
And this is by no means a complete list, even of this thread. But if you scan this list, you can clearly see that virtually all of its elements are related to every other, with varying degrees of strength.
What these linkages mean is that it is virtually impossible to simply change one component – the forces holding each component in equilibrium are too strong to be overcome in isolation. Want to reverse the narcissistic behavior of the young? Try doing that without attacking porn, strengthening religion and the sense of the sacred, re-establishing the legitimacy of authority, or reducing contraceptive use. Good luck.
The struggle to reclaim the West, than, is not a series of battles. It is a war. A culture war. For it must be fought on all fronts to be won, and each front represents a critical part of the battle. Was victory over the Axis Powers simply the result of the invasion of Normandy? No. It required engagement in Italy, the Eastern Front, the Low Countries, North Africa, the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Philippines, Midway, Guadalcanal, and finally German and Japan. So too this cultural war is a multi-front engagement.
Unfortunately, this war is a much harder, much more expensive, and much more time-consuming project than simply changing a single component of the list, and is made even more complex because some components are good (e.g. rapid technological progress) and there exist other competing ideologies which are playing the game (e.g. radical Islam).
But the most problematic challenge facing us is that despite centuries of thought and reflection, we have not yet formulated a coherent philosophy that reconciles modern economics with our theological beliefs. The current proposed formulae – social justice, utilitarianism, sustainable development, fair trade, Sharia, corporate social responsibility, etc. – are all deficient at a fundamental level. They either fail on the spiritual level, the physical level, or both.
And yet these two spheres can be reconciled. We have seen this repeatedly throughout history, and there live among us today tens of millions of people in whom these spheres peacefully coexist with and mutually reinforce each other. In the ebb and flow of human development, there are always setbacks, and it is those setbacks with prepare the soil for the next season of growth.
So we should not despair. It took more than a millenium for philosophers to reconcile Athens with Jerusalem. We’re only a couple of centuries into the reconciliation of Rome with Manhattan, and I sense that we’re closing in on the cultural solution.
Faster, please.
L3
“There is an even greater flaw in the theory of the free market, perhaps, and that is in the assertion that the market can form adequate expectations about the future profitability of firms and make proper judgments about allocation of capital. How do we explain away the misallocation of capital to Internet stocks during the late 1990s and to homes in the United States (and elsewhere) during the ensuing years?” from Spengler article
During the late Nineties, as investors found it harder to find outsized gains, it seems that “momentum” “investing” stared to have an irresistible appeal. Hence, the bubbles. It’s not even “investing” in the rational understanding of the term. It’s called speculation, which is nothing more than “the Greater Fool Theory.” When the dot.com bubble burst, those who got out early in that game then started to pile on into real estate and housing. Hence, the “flippers.” Instead of flipping tech stocks, these people started flipping homes. Speculators are not interested in the true intrinsic value of an asset. They just want to make sure they are selling into forward momentum, hoping that they are not the last ones holding the bag.
In the case of the flippers, many of them were using the sub-prime market if not as buyers then certainly hoping that there would be buyers who would over extend themselves to pay the higher price (and be the Greater Fool). This colossal mechanism for disaster was aided and abetted by the federal government.
The individual’s ethics are not off the hook on this one. I am a kind of capitalist, since I am a professional investor/analyst, and this does not automatically incline me to be immoral and stupid about how I go about my business. In my job my fiduciary responsibility is to make recommendations to my portfolio manager about companies, strategies, and products based upon rational valuations. So, I am conservative and value conscious. On my own behalf I invest in the same way. And as a home owner my wife and I purchased less house than what we were “pre qualified” for because we wanted to be cautious and because we are, by nature, modest people who would rather put the money into our kids’ educations, rather than ostentatiously show off to friends and clients. We buy what we need and not more.
If people make fools of themselves and if the market has inevitable hiccups (someone please tell the Pope and Spengler that we are not in a depression and no one and nothing has repealed the business/economic cycle)that is not the fault of capitalism. It is a moral failing that goes to their character formation and education. Look under the right hood.
We live in a fractured society. One in which people don’t trust large institutions, and instead coalesce in an ever changing variety of smaller social groupings that revolve around ideology, fashion, religions and so on. We have a cable television society, not the big three networks of old.
The baby boom generation that came of age in the mid 60′s to mid 70′s essentially destroyed the old order, but didn’t replace it with anything. They did not build a new culture, instead, they just left the old one in tatters. People were left to find their own way among hundreds of channels. Hence, multiculturalism, diversity, moral relativism, and lifestyle choices are all buzzwords.
Each person has his or her own set of beliefs and seeks out others who share the same quirks, fetishes, fashions and mind sets. We establish our own echo chambers and egg each other on into increasingly hardened positions. Everybody tends to do this, it is human nature. But there is no consensus among the various factions. We can’t even comprehend the thought processes of those in other factions.
But a fractured society like this cannot adequately confront our problems. There is no consensus, even though the mainstream media would like us to think otherwise. With Obama, they have attempted to force a consensus, and are trying mightily to shove a “dear leader” down our throats. But they are merely their own little consensus group, albeit one with a very loud echo chamber.
L3′s list at post #34 is a window on this fractured society. The items on the list are all symptoms of the same thing: a lack of trust in institutions, and the lack of cultural norms. I agree with Leo that there isn’t any easy way to fix this. Our culture and therefore society is coming apart at the seams. Something Bad is going to happen, so Bad that we can’t compromise our way out of it, or kick the can down the road, or look the other way and pretend all is well. The old will eventually give way to a new culture, with a singular purpose and cohesive identity. Whether that will be good (liberty) or bad (totalitarianism) remains to be seen.
And Whiskey, where do you get the idea that most women don’t want children? The desire for children is an incredibly strong one and most women look forward to having children. I admit there is a sub culture of trendy “sex in the city” types who either want no children or one or two boutique “display” children (father not necessary), but they are not the majority. Just one of many sub cultures in our fractured society. The drop in fertility rates is more due to the roadblocks placed in the way of having larger families. To have a large family is to essentially choose a significantly lower standard of living. Economic and social factors make having more children very difficult. I meet many women with one or two kids who wistfully tell me they originally wanted four or five.
In Italy, there is the phenomenon of “mama’s boys,” men who live at home into their 30′s. Italy’s birthrate has crashed. Why don’t these ‘boys’ grow up and leave home, marry and have kids? The reason is fundamentally and economic one: they don’t have any place to move to. There is lack of adequate housing. Economics drives people’s choices as much as other factors.
Dymphna, I should have mentoned in the post you reference that “Mandarins of the Future …” was actually published in January 2004, then published in paperback in February 2007. At first I was shocked to learn how long the book had been out. But on reflection it’s no great wonder that the book did not get as much as attention as it merited, given the era, which seems a thousand years ago considering all we’ve learned since then. It was at the time when the Iraq expedition, and all the expectations
that went with it, were falling apart, and Iran was taking center stage. But to everything there is a season. I think that those of us who have kept well informed about the struggle around the globe for democracy, the progress of transnational terrorism and crime, and the scaling back of high expectations that globalization would solve all the world’s ills are today much better prepared than in 2004 to absorb the lessons in “Mandarins.”
Wretchard’s post and the comments in response are dealing with a very important topic, of course. I haven’t yet had time to read Spengler’s column but this past year I’ve closely followed Mark Steyn’s essays on the demographics issue.
There seems to be a certain mathematical certainty about the doomsday scenario for ‘native’ European populations. But to make the leap that this signals the death of Western culture is to give too much importance to lines on a map. Ayn Rand — the heart and soul of Western thinking — is a huge hit in regions of China where entrepreneurship is the name of the game, and so is Christianity. Things are going to be different because nothing stays the same. But the truth is unchanging. The Western tradition has much truth, and no amount of political correctness can overturn that fact. The truths will not be lost, provided we keep telling them.
Whiskey, I don’t know how old Kay Hymowitz is; I’m an older woman myself but, even so, in my teenage years the pill was readily available, so poor old Kay must be really really old if she doesn’t, as you state, understand the reality of the pill and condom. The hedonistic behavior of many of today’s young women is an aberration and betrayal of their real nature, not an expression of their real nature after the destruction of historic restraints on it. For the most part, women who maintain this isn’t so are lying to you, or lying to themselves.
Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin and Frued are called the shapers of the modern mind.
What else can you expect from a collective that says that getting laid and getting yours is all there is?
The hedonistic behavior of many of today’s young women is an aberration and betrayal of their real nature, not an expression of their real nature after the destruction of historic restraints on it.
Poppycock!
You have it completely backward. This is not an aberration but a fact of nature.
The nature of female sexual morality was well know throughout history and in ancient times restraining it was a central part of the structure of society and its laws (go read the Torah or the Classical literature). This equally applies to the female tendency toward egoism and narcissism, not to mention the very real tendancy toward mediocrity shown by females, topics that are completely ignored in most discussions of feminism, at least when a female is in the room.
It is the realization of Karen’s ideal of womanhood that is the aberration. Karen’s ideal of female primness is mostly a 19th and 18th century Western creation and one mostly limited to the middle classes, and was scarely beleived even then. It was, BTW, not just contraception that held female immorality in check, in fact this was probable the most minor thing.
You are completely wrong about your own sex.
Feminism is a sign of deep decadence in the West. It cannot endure it long and even merely survive, let alone dominate. The emerging and reawakening civilizations in Asia are strongly masculine and have utter contempt for the West’s modern conception of the female. They will dominate our grand children. It will not be the cause of the the dwonfall of the west but it does signal this downfall.
(Oh, and young females are nothing like like young women where 40 and 30 years ago, back then they were actually close to being women, rather than merely female. They had their mothers example. Young women today have their narcissistic Boomer mothers as “role models”. It has not worked out to well.)
How these feminists will be detested in history. Of course, in their arrogance they do not care, but the feminist notion that thy are some sort of moral vangaurd is a tragic of an error as it is a comic one.
Spengler asside, the basic premise of then Cardinal Ratzinger’s paper was that markets if they are to act free and remain free require that the actors trust one another and that they act in good faith. The problem with today’s markets are not that they are or are not free, anyone with cash is free to join in, it is that there are so many sharks in the water that anyone with cash would be a fool to dive in.
I have no expectation that a broker, a banker, an insurance company salesman, or a mortgage lender have as their interest leading me to meet my financial goals. In fact, it is quite obviously the opposite. Now we have non working markets being exploited by non working governments and all these non working folks (not to be confused with the unemployed as these folks get paid extravagantly for all of their non work) saying all of this use of my money is for my benefit.
I have no reason to believe them.
Worse, I have no recourse.
And now you want me to get married and raise a bunch of kids so i can pressure them to get good grades or so I can sell them to what ever meets my fancy and keeps the mullah off my back. Yeah, right.
Radical feminists never asked themselves what would happen if men actually accepted their ideas.
That’s because so many of them are narcissists, for whom men don’t really exist except to directly (divorce, excessive child support) and indirectly (taxes) steal from.
Why don’t these ‘boys’ grow up and leave home, marry and have kids? The reason is fundamentally and economic one: they don’t have any place to move to. There is lack of adequate housing.
That lack is intentionally created by “smart growth”, “densification”, “affordable housing setasides”, and other such things championed by the political left.
Don’t forget the social aspects: boys see girls doing things like wearing “boys: throw rocks at them” t-shirts and rightly ask “why should I want a relationship with somebody who publicly insults me?”
We live in a fractured society. One in which people don’t trust large institutions, and instead coalesce in an ever changing variety of smaller social groupings that revolve around ideology, fashion, religions and so on.
In my opinion multiculturalism is largely responsible for this, because it teaches that one can and should abandon Western European culture and vales.
Wadeusaf (#41): And now you want me to get married and raise a bunch of kids so i can pressure them to get good grades or so I can sell them to what ever meets my fancy and keeps the mullah off my back. Yeah, right.
You might have added, “and so they end up inheriting the very sort of man-made hell that having lots of kids was supposed to prevent”.
As I’ve noted here before, when it comes to passing down culture, having kids is like voting in a presidential election – your own “vote(s)”, taken as part of the big picture, mean next to nothing in determining the final outcome. In other words, it’s a classic free-rider scenario, but with a cruel twist: If/when this does lead to a cultural breakdown, the people that were supposed to have been able to stop it (i.e. your kids) end up just getting swept away into it instead. And of course, awareness of this twist provides even more disincentive for participation. (“Why have kids if chances are I’d just be condemning them to live through such a nightmare?”)
“They did not build a new culture, instead, they just left the old one in tatters.” by elby @36
That is what Antonio Gramsci’s disciples of cultural Marxism intended. “Teachers of destruction” are what they are called. Gramsci held that the key to inserting revolutionary consciousness is to destroy Christianity and destroy the family. They are having some success at this, don’t ya think? Young men siring kids strewn about the landscape and in the abortion clinics, with females raising the kids who aren’t aborted. Kids being taught that erotic attraction to the same sex or both sexes is cool and natural, heck, the ACLU does not even have a problem with bestiality. Free sex! Young women who are trying to ape the shallow women in “Sex and the City.”
Not all of us Baby Boomers like this state of affairs and have tried to live counterculturally to the counterculture.
L3 writes:
“But the most problematic challenge facing us is . . . we have not yet formulated a coherent philosophy that reconciles modern economics with our theological beliefs. . . . And yet these two spheres can be reconciled. . . . So we should not despair. . . . I sense that we’re closing in on the cultural solution.”
Many thanks to all who have weighed in, providing an interesting 360 degree review of the question. Good to hear input from women, especially.
One of the Powerline writers the other day recounted Orson Bean’s conversion story. It was a good one. Ultimately each person makes his or her own life decision. But when you hit bottom, the 12 Steps look like a way up and out. No market questions. No economic issues. Just a person and a way ahead, one step at a time. When I look at markets, economy, and value questions, the 12 Steps look like a sound model applicable to a national understanding of individuality and relationship to family, community, and nation. How closely national movements conform to these steps might provide an indication of how successful they are likely to be. Understanding at the same time, of course, that every kind of huckster will try to market a fake version of the real thing, as one would expect in Vanity Fair (Bunyan’s, that is).
Nietzsche is indeed the great diagnostician of the culture, as Duoist notes in number 8, above. An economy of consumption that aggrandizes and intensifies some undesirable aspects of human nature does not lend itself to a cure.
How the healing will begin, if it does, is not clear; but I suspect it will involve a return to self-evident enduring values, as we see them surfacing again and again in some of our mass media (Dark Knight? Juno?)
Perhaps president-elect Obama has the moral capital to lead the nation? Moral capital, yes. But I suspect his soul resembles a hall of mirrors. Steady George Bush, on the other hand, is a 12 Step man, literally and figuratively.
The real Oswald Spengler wrote:
“…When reason have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births. The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who “belongs to herself” – they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful…
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which last for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements…
Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the provincial cities at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn at the end of the evolution, stand empty, harbouring in their stone masses a small population of fellaheen who shelter in them as the men of the Stone Age sheltered in caves and pile-dwellings. Samarra was abandoned by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital, was an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the great Maya cities must have been in that condition even in Cortez’s time. In a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward we read of old, renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empty, crumbling shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and the amphitheatre is a sown field, dotted with emergent statues and hermae. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable.”
Although I have a catholic viewpoint on world-history and identify with the “fellaheen” of Spengler, his words are wise and prophetic beyond belief.
fred, so the left took advantage of the mood of the 60′s, one in which the established culture was questioned. We all see the results for ourselves. We shouldn’t let that happen again. We should not let the left take advantage of any upcoming crisis and turn it to their ends.
Imagine that a cataclysmic event happens, say hyperinflation and the complete devaluation of the dollar. Economic life grinds to a halt. People are panicked and ready to throw aside their (now seemingly petty) differences and work together. What happens if Obama and the left take advantage of that mood? What happens if the right and the concepts of self reliance take advantage of that mood? Same crisis, way different outcomes. The questioning of the 60′s could have turned out better had the left not taken advantage of it. We need to be prepared to lead during the coming crisis, and not let the left take advantage of it.
It seems to me that neither Benedict nor “Spengler” are trashing the free market but rather a particular ideological interpretation of it as something self-regulating. But of course the political or ethical must always provide the frame to any marketplace. They are merely pointing out the anthropological truth: that all economic behavior rests on ethical understandings and organization.
To me, the free market – ideally, the place where everyone gets the same price, whatever his social relationship, or lack thereof, to the seller – is inconceivable without recognizing the centrality of a Christian sensibility (though it may be possible to have a sustainable “secular” form thereof). This is because the free market depends on trust in the sacredness of decentralized individuals, in the potential of each person to share in the personhood of Christ – to act meaningfully and usefully on his own account – and not be reliant on deferring to institutionalized status systems.
neither is…
The primary reason why couples in the industrialized world are not having huge broods of children is economics. The cost of housing is particularly steep. Back when my parents first married, before they bought their first house their rent was one quarter of Dad’s take home pay. They paid a little more than $8K for their first house in 1960 – a fixer-upper house, with a mortgage of, again, one quarter of Dad’s take home pay. Compare that with today’s rents and mortgages, even if more modest apartments and homes.
A lot of couples are willing to live less opulently for the sake of children. But they rightly will not live in conditions of poverty or just above it, just to have half a dozen kids or more. And it does the kids no good to live in tight, expensive quarters while the parents struggle. And today who could afford a lot of kids and a stay-at-home other when it really does take two incomes for most people to make ends meet?
It’s easy for some to pontificate about how immoral today’s couples are for having fewer children.
All of Israel’s ancient enemies were polytheists. They worshipped gods made of wood metal and stone. They were gods of the earth sky ocean fertility and prosperity. All these gods had different names. But the temple practices all over included human or child sacrifice, temple prostitution, and homosexuality in the priesthood.
In fact, with variations this was the common lot of most of the world at the time of Jesus.
Whatever else you have to say about him–up until the last thirty years Jesus was responsible for extending Jewish practice to the rest of the world. That included pushing aside human sacrifice, temple prostitution and homosexuality in the priest hood. This was the case — even in areas that don’t practice Christianity–including islam. (and yes I know there are plenty of exceptions.)
It is no accident that Roe V Wade has coincided with the sudden embarrassing rise in power of homosexuals in the west. Homosexuality and human sacrifice are two sides of the same coin.
We are witnessing the return of the ancient pagan religions.
This is why westerners without christianity are no better than jungle bunnies. They are as much prey to moslems as African animists. The moslems know about the old gods. In this they have something to offer.
It is the job of men of good will to offer something better. He is Jesus.
Wretchard – excellent article and many excellent posts. Much to ponder.
I was going to comment on Hymnowitz’s errors & cite that new British study, but Whiskey as usual beat me to the draw. Take it from someone in the trenches – there is no meaningful difference between the sexual mores of the men and women in my generation. Amongst my peers the “hookup culture” (which largely benefits Alpha Men) is a real thing. Although it is soewhat common to criticize promiscuous 20-something females as “slutty”, this does not deter women from infidelity or serial “hook-ups”. Monogamy is neither expected nor requested from either party in most heterosexual relationships. After all, we have been pushed to explore our sexuality and rebel against those yucky “Christianist” restraints on personal behavior. The results are prettty unfulfilling for men and women, although most refuse to admit it. The lack of commitment that Hynmowitz complains about arose precisely because women have been told that that is what’s healthy for them – an endless “Sex in the City” fantasy spent catering to the most physically appealing men. Sexual compulsiveness is convenient because it does not tie them to a house in the ‘burbs, cooking dinner for John every night, & two-point-whatever children.
Despite her cluelessness about teen-twentysomething sexuality, Hymnowitz does embody young females’ schizophrenia quite well. Women of my age rarely seem to question the sexual ethic preached by Gramscian “experts” – rather, they take out their frustrations on males. When a man does take an interest in a young lady’s personal life he’s “domineering”, “old-fashioned”, and “smothering her”. When he’s a detatched hooker-upper he’s “immature”.
And I also agree that a small number of “trendy” males sexually monopolize a large group of females. For all feminists’ ranting about what they look for in men, they are little more than fantasists just as inclined to pursue uber-macho Big Men as other women. Beta males who are introverted/academically inclined are indeed at a distinct disadvantage. For them, attempting relationships usually leads to social ridicule. At best they end up paired with the females too physically ugly to appeal to any males – after all, geeks and alpha males find the same attributes attractive. Maxim Magazine, video games, and porn are not necessarily part of some “Peter Pan” complex – they are an inevitable reaction to a new sexual marketplace. Hence the West’s failure to maintain population rates. In the past, religious and social customs of prior generations encouraged females to look beyond “bad boy”/tough-guy posturing. Although there were a few exceptions like the “swinger” craze of the 1970′s, marriagable females were usually dispersed amongst a broad range of male counterparts and expected to be faithful. A beta male could still hope to encounter a reasonably attractive female if he spent some time improving his “marketability”.
Now, Western women have been “liberated” and are left to their own devices. In the absence of social constraints, it looks like they are happy to revert to the sexual/social patterns seen amongst certain polyamorous creatures in the wild. Amongst Horses, antelopes, elephant seals, etc the females live in harems, a few “macho” males have a lot of sex, and many beta males never get to pass on their genes. Some say we aint’ nothin’ but mammals and that this lifestyle will work for humans. To see the flaw in that line of reasoning, please ask yourself when you last heard a Zebra mare talk about going on the pill…
streight arrow: Poppycock!
Well, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
I was responding to Whiskey’s description of young single females’ behavior of casual promiscuity as the underlying cause of the collapse of the West. He believes this started with the technological innovation of The Pill. I believe the behavior is driven by the Gramscian strategies that Fred described. In your reference to history in ancient times, yes, womens’ sexuality was indeed controlled by men (as was everything else), but it does not follow that had this control been lacking then women in ancient times would’ve been fornicating left and right of their own free will. (No need to cite some long-ago, rare, obscure, matriarchal tribe, as that would not prove anything.)
The nature of female sexual morality was well know throughout history and in ancient times restraining it was a central part of the structure of society and its laws (go read the Torah or the Classical literature).
The Torah proscribed adultery for both sexes. This restraint on both was deemed important enough to be included as one of The Ten Commandments. The focus, even in ancient times, was not exclusively on women.
…the very real tendancy toward mediocrity shown by females… I have no idea what you mean by this but the gratuitous slight leads me to think you may have some personal axe to grind. Actually, I think your position of “female immorality” as “a fact of nature” that needs to be “held in check” (which, as you say, was once accomplished via lack of contraception and Victorian primmness) is a belief that serves to compound the modern societal problem of babies having babies – it’s telling kids (specifically young girls) it’s natural and normal (and what kid wants to be abnormal?) and is the same message advanced by the Gramscians. Only difference is, for you, it’s to be deplored but nevertheless it’s the same message.
Karen,
Male or female, people who have spiritual and intellectual depth to them know that fornication is not exactly a healthy or mature habit. Now, my wife and I did have relations before we were married, but we were in love and we were engaged. It was a relationship that had a direction towards commitment. People who live like they do in “Sex in the City” are shallow, narcissistic, and downright mean human beings. They shut off their consciences, authentic emotions, and limit mature dialogue and friendship.
Gramsci rightly feared that a society that is anchored to the traditional values of Christianity, the family, and a strong sense of personal responsibility are not people who can be motivated by petty, materialistic envy. And the socialists rely on people being envious and materialistic. They want the mob to demand the theft of private property. Nothing is sacred to these people AND THEY KNOW THAT FOR THE REVOLUTION TO SUCCEED THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE PEOPLE MUST ALSO LACK A SENSE OF THE SACRED AND A SENSE OF DUTY.
I do not believe in disposable relationships of any kind. I don’t believe in tossing away lovers, friends, family, children, coworkers, etc. Human life and human beings have value beyond any instrumentalization of them.
As a former Leftist, I know these people and the expediency of their ethics.
If anyone will save America, it will be the white trash.* An Army of Sarah Palins, as it were.
* “White trash” as defined by deviant urban thought leaders.
You got that right Pete. We will out breed them.
Jim
Fred, amen. I think you have it exactly right in identifying materialism and envy as crucial characteristics to cultivate throughout society in order for a Gramscian order of things to predominate. And an already-existing acceptance of a materialistic, mechanistic explanation of human behavior, as opposed to the Christian view of humans created with a spiritual dimension to their nature – including the innate sense of right and wrong that St. Paul in Romans 1:14-15 said was written on the heart – has prepared the ground and smoothed the Gramscian progress. Disposable relationships, as you noted, require a damaged conscience; thus, the shallow, the narcissistic, the mean – but also, unfortunately, the foolish, the uncritical, the young-and-dumb.
The dominance of the human species over nature was due to our adaptability. Today’s Western young people are adapting to a world of excess energy where former constraints have been removed and new strategies for competitive success are required.
For a great summary of human sexual evolutionary behavior, read “Sperm Wars.”
http://www.amazon.com/Sperm-Wars-Infidelity-Conflict-Bedroom/dp/1560258489/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229107543&sr=1-1
When females have lesser need for male support in caring for progeny, they select for better genetic material as rated by other females. For example, one of my sons boosted of over a 100 female sex partners – just during his high school years!
For a case study of the world we’re heading to, visit the elephant seal colonies on the California Coast like Ano Nuevo (http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=523).
We live in the age of Augustus. Nero is coming, he may already be here.
Our collective future may be seen in the past of Rome.
It’s not so bad when you keep the barbarians out. It’s when you let them in to rake your leaves that you begin to have problems.
If Roosevelt was magnificently right about devaluing the dollar in 1933, we completely missed the evidence of that. 1937 was the worst year of the depresson.
Roosevelt was never magnificently right about anything. Nor was Keyes, until he admitted he was wrong about everything after reading Hayek.
If Razlinger argued that capitalism promised to free us from morality, he was referencing his own imagination, or people who hated capitilism.
Nobody that counts ever make that argument. Not Adam Smith himself, nor the Founders, who were attempting to make a commercial and not religious republic–and the anti-federalist were heard on that very issue. The Founders stated clearly that absent a religious and moral people, everything they did was a waste of effort.
The Catholic Church has a terrible record on economic freedom, and there is no freedom without economic freedom.
Karen, Fred: I consider envy to be the deadliest of the Seven Deadly.
Trying to make others as miserable of you imagine yourself to be is unspeakable.
In its ultimate form it means that since
personal death is inevitable, species extinction is mandated. Evil incarnate.
James Wilson: The Church of Rome has, IMO, made significant progress in economic freedom. Especially since John Paul IIs
encyclical of 1991 or thereabouts.
As far as I can see, their biggest hangup now is their confustion about what constitutes a “just” price. Once they realize that the just price is whatever insures an ongoing supply and can never be established by statute or regulation, their biggest hangup will be over and done with. Again: IMO.
I know at least 4 women and 2 men (all outside of my family) who were sexually abused in childhood. One denies that it ever happened, even though two of the others were witnesses… Now, abuse is not something that people are likely to talk about, so I wonder how many other people I know have been abused, but are too traumatized by it?
If one is abused, I imagine it must be extremely difficult to trust any authority figure, or to create a normal loving relationship, for how can you love someone you do not trust? And, I imagine that a lot of these people blame themselves, even though they’re not.
I wonder how much of the problems we see in the Muslim cultures (where I’m told, men prefer boys over women, and rape is considered the fault of the women) and here, are due to people who are just basically traumatized. It won’t take many for a society as a whole to be affected – one traumatized parent won’t be able to love their kids, spouse, and extended family very well, and may even continue the cycle.