“BIRTHRATE” IS THE LATEST BUZZWORD with good reason: talking
democracy won’t work without thinking demography. Power to the
people as a political principle depends on what kind of
people you’ve got — and the balance of power between your country
and its competitors depends in turn on how many people
you’ve got. Five years ago Pat Buchanan, in The Death of the
West,
warned, “As a growing population has long been a mark of
healthy nations and rising civilizations, falling populations have
been a sign of nations and civilizations in decline.” Europe
and Australia must reckon with the numbers as the
Muslim world exports a generation of testy youths the West cannot control. (China, land of aborted females, lords
its excess of males over East Asia in similar fashion.) To the
West, terrorism is a threat shaped by poor cultural management in
the Middle East — even deliberate manufacture — of angry young
men, “radical losers” born in a world that denies the
reward of order and family.
Meanwhile, as Michel Houellebecq knows, the West turns out radical losers of its
own: in Philip Rieff’s shorthand, our “culture is producing more
and more serial killers.” Tom Wolfe tartly notes (“Prolegomena to
Any Future of Human Sexuality,” TAS, March
2006) that free love “comes with a price. Populations set free by
the sexual revolution must necessarily plummet” — as those locked
in the pleasureless dark ages skyrocket. How can the West maintain
order and family to begin with, in a culture that has no use for
any authority — particularly the ur-authority of fatherhood?
AGAINST THE ODDS, Phillip Longman, in Foreign Policy,
foretells the
return to patriarchy, in which increased childbirth and family
honor save our civilization from death amid the dissipated leisures
of personal prerogative. Longman encompasses the usual suspects,
like hip vanguard feminism, in a bigger target — the cultural urge
to mortgage future life on the fleet satisfactions of the present.
His patriarchal return is the Darwinian necessity of a thriving
civilization, in which those who think demography is possible
without family edit out genetically their own predilections toward
autonomous pleasures:
when they look around for fellow secularists and
counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find
that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally
never born.
The cultural death wish of the non-parents is visited upon the
non-children — whereas those who prize family, in size, honor, and
achievement, join a female incentive for growth and life to a male
incentive for purpose and order. Longman lauds this outcome, even
if it’s less than natural:
The notion that legitimate children belong to their
fathers’ family, and not to their mothers’, which has no basis in
biology, gives many men powerful emotional reasons to want
children, and to want their children to succeed in passing on their
legacy.
He should add, to prove the point, that civilization has no basis
in biology either. The civilizing act (as I have discussed
here and
here) is the tying of the male to the family,
and the family to the male. Tribalism itself is not to be taken for
granted; for the bonds of blood to transcend it, even more is
required. The bargain by which this is accomplished is the healthy
patriarchy — the robust, preeminent family with successful
fathered leadership.
THE KEY TO DEMOGRAPHIC quantity reveals itself as quality, with the
family as the unit of measurement. Beyond the creation of “powerful
emotional reasons to want children,” the patriarchal attitude
provides males with powerful reasons to love the children
they sire. The male ego is channeled constructively, not
destructively, from himself into the acculturation of his
offspring. This is the key to successful male leadership of the
family. Sons unloved by fathers are destroyers; daughters unloved
by fathers are destroyed. For the male, the process of
acculturation itself is the transference of the constructive ego
from father to son. Longman’s “powerful reasons” accrue not just to
the male himself, but to his family and to society at large. This
is how men have been civilized.
Patriarchy sustains family power by changing the social measure
of attractiveness to suit the ends of family. Only in tyrannies of
patriarchy (which Longman rightly identifies as weak, collapsing
societies) are women forced to create families with men to whom
they are not attracted. The woman liberated from that tyranny
should be society’s quality control: she can afford to be picky,
selecting men based on their attractiveness as potential
fathers.
Instead, to our doom, too many of our liberated girls seek at
random from unworthy males the most basic kind of approval, the
approval of last resort — sexual. And our boys, from whom the
responsibility of patriarchal training has been stripped, lose the
capacity to select women based on their attractiveness as potential
mothers. To ever grow up — to become parents — girls and boys
must be primed and conditioned to function in mothering and
fathering roles. It has always been more burdensome to civilization
to accomplish this for the male. This is why men have been
civilized. Now we have taken on the unbearable burden — of
decivilizing our men while assaulting even the female capacity to
love and to nurture.
Contrary to the cult of sexiness that makes a worship of that
assault, physical attractiveness is only a single piece of the
whole. Naturally, nobody wants an ugly mate — but the physical
beauty of youth is, just as naturally, a fleeting condition. The
only permanence plastic surgery can achieve is
Duck Face. The requirements for family success, by contrast,
are enduring but not monstrous. They must last longer than physical
beauty in order to work — and, indeed, measure beauty at the
family, not the individual, level. Young beauty serves a key role
in initial attraction, of course, but that role is one that must be
mediated by social norms in order to make will, not luck, the
source of accomplishment.
WHAT THIS MEANS is that patriarchy as a tool of civilization is
incredibly capable of conditioning and making useful all but our
most radical of radical losers. It is harder to make an orderly and
pleasant man than it is an orderly and pleasant woman, but the
results are vital to a thriving civilization. The needs and desires
of the humble man are powerful but few, and under the right
conditions of cultural order they can be satisfied to the benefit
of the whole society. The more civilized our men — that is, the
better they lead families — the more true freedom of choice our
quality-controlling women enjoy. Everybody wins — individual like
family, family like society.
One of the most important roles of patriarchy, therefore, is its
cultural antagonism against radical loserhood — call it, by
antonym, the production of conservative winners. It’s the
hard work of minimizing male losers, and maximizing the extent to
which they deserve, from a social standpoint, to be marginalized as
such. This is a less fashionable definition of social justice, one
that used to prevail. From a moral or spiritual standpoint, no one
“deserves” to be in the gutter of the commonweal — but the
perceived legitimacy of the patriarchal cultural order is a social
requisite for the charitable sense: “There but for the grace of God
go I.”
When a culture reaches agreement that the social stations of its
constituents are just, the status quo becomes a foundation for
cultural accomplishment. Today, unfortunately, we must remind
ourselves of such simple truths. We skip the basics at our peril.
The first step in the success of a civilization is survival, and in
that department, the demography of family, and fatherhood, is our
bread and butter.
