Cultural surrender: a comment from a reader

Why the negativity?

skaladom wrote a long and thoughtful comment to my last post. Here is the whole thing:

The world you're describing is more or less the world around me and my friends, and we're doing... fine enough I guess? Your description is accurate enough, but why the negativity? What “enemy” did we surrender to? I'm writing this as a GenX from Catalonia, Spain, to be clear ­— Europe is not a monolith.

Take marriage; you know the meme, “I love you so much that I'm going to summon the power of the state to tie you to me”. People my generation, and maybe even 10-15 years before, started losing the association that formal marriage made the couple real. And they did... plenty OK enough. People still pair up, many still go for long-term relationships, the lifelong thing is no longer the rule, but 15-20 years is still pretty common, and they manage, just like any couple, formally married or not, because the real job is to figure out how to grow together, whether you signed a marriage or a civil partnership or nothing much. There's still about as many men as women, and as far as I can see, we're mostly managing to find each other.

You say the marriage market is “dysfunctional”, but given the aggregate differences between men and women, has it ever not been so? Or were people just putting up in silence? The big difference I can see these days is that people no longer need to put up with an abusive partner, or a useless one. And that seems to be mostly on the side of women dropping men who are not up to the job. That strikes me as a good thing all things considered; these guys are being invited to step up, and if they don't, then staying apart is probably the least dysfunctional outcome. Three cats beats an abusive husband, or a sexually entitled man-child, every day of the week.

Marriage is also a fashion thing. Nowadays it's kinda back in fashion, people whose parents didn't bother are now doing big weddings. Good for them if they like it! Fashions go up, fashions go down.

Many people are ignorant about Christianity... maybe they even dabble in horoscopes Wicca or Tarot or Chakra healing. So what? None of these things are literally real, and they all have plenty of use as ways to deal with one's changing emotions and with a changing world. I'd even say that low-status female-coded street spirituality does a better job at this than high religion, which is all tied up in top-down hierarchies with highly dysfunctional authoritarian tendencies.

Then the middle classes don't preach what they practice... welcome to common social hypocrisy? The social world is always a mess, structurally so. We're status-sensitive apes, what can you even expect?

And yeah, birth rates are down. When you give people an actual choice in reproduction, and then create a highly competitive, individualistic world with ever growing expectations on parents, then few people find themselves up for the job!

First, I’m glad someone recognized my picture of middle class attitudes. I could easily have off-base intuitions or unrepresentative experiences. It is good to get some confirmation. Second, thanks to skaladom for making me think about and articulate my views a bit more. Arguing wakes me up mentally. Also, I think many people probably share some of these views, so they are worth responding to.

At the broadest level: are we doing “fine, I guess”? I obviously don’t know any individual’s situation. Here is what we know in aggregate: birth rates are substantially below replacement throughout Europe, and have been for fifty years.

Is that fine? For sure, it’s fine for any individual to have children or not, as they prefer. But that intuition, based on individual choice, doesn’t scale up well for two reasons.

First, Europeans aren’t having fewer children just because they all suddenly decided they wanted fewer children. Children are not goods that you simply choose individually. Having them takes huge time, effort and commitment. People still strongly prefer to have them as part of a couple (if you’ve spent any time childrearing alone, you’ll know why). This means that the market for children is tied into the market for partners. And these markets can fail in numerous ways. In particular, when marriage contracts become less binding, then having a child involves risking that your partner will walk away and leave you, literally, holding the baby.

Of course, if marriage contracts are too binding, there are other risks, as skaladom mentions. Is that what’s going on? Are divorces mostly women dropping abusive or incompetent men? That seems an extreme interpretation. In the UK, about 40% of marriages end in divorce. Maybe 40% of the men here are worse than being single, but I’d want some evidence before believing that. Another puzzle: if marriage was so risky back then, because it could trap you, why was it so popular, and why is it much less popular now that easy divorce has made it supposedly safer? Maybe social pressure made people marry? But one can explain anything that way…. My story is simpler. Marriage is a contract where two people commit to each other, giving each the security they need to raise children. Divorce reform made it easier to get out of the contract. So then there was less point in marriage.

Going back to fertility, if we look at people’s expressed preference for children, they want more than they end up having, and they intend to have more than they end up having.

(Some people, e.g. Lyman Stone, think that you can’t take expressed preferences seriously as a measure of true preferences in this domain. I sympathize with this point of view, but in the presence of market failures you also can’t take behaviour as a measure of true preferences. We can take people’s behaviour as reflecting their preferences for children under our current institutions, but we simply don’t know how many children people would prefer under alternative institutions, or which institutions (and corresponding numbers of children) they would prefer overall. I also think that most people have at some point thought seriously about how many children they would like, and their expressed preferences probably reflect that.)

It is hard to reach my age without knowing many people who have suffered deeply because they did not form the relationships, and start the families, that they wanted.

In short, if our longrunning shortfall in fertility were truly just a reflection of changing individual preferences, then that would be fine — modulo my second concern, see below. But it isn’t. In particular, skaladom is mistaken that couples are still managing to find each other OK. Increasing numbers of people are not doing this and are ending up alone.

What about skaladom’s alternative explanation: a competitive, individualistic world? First, this seems a little fuzzy — rather like invoking “capitalism” (or even: “late capitalism”) to explain any trend they deplore. Second, I don’t know any evidence linking social competitiveness to low fertility. The US is usually thought of as very competitive and individualistic, and it has higher fertility than Europe. Whereas there is fairly solid evidence linking institutions like divorce law reform to fertility. So, I prefer my explanation.

One pill makes you small

The second reason to worry about fertility is what happens when a population shrinks. Many people have perhaps not fully internalized this.

Economically, people get old, stop working, and eventually need to be cared for. This burden always devolves on working-age people, whether directly (families who care for elderly parents) or indirectly (a pensioner buys goods and services from working-age people, in exchange for money he has saved, or using a state pension paid for by taxation of working-age people). A shrinking population increases this dependency ratio. Labour is more expensive, and the tax base is smaller.

People who are not having children are effectively expecting other people’s children to support them in future. That expectation may not be fulfilled. Personally, I strongly believe that my children should not pay taxes to support a large older generation who have voted themselves primo healthcare and generous pensions, and I will discourage them from doing so. Maybe other people’s children will be more generous than me! Or not: maybe instead we will see large-scale emigration towards low-tax economies, in the Middle East, for instance.

The long term consequences of population decline are more than economic. In the long run, cultures that do not sustain themselves cease to exist. The American Shakers made beautiful furniture. But the Shakers believed it was wrong to have sex. As a result, as Wikipedia puts it: “many… Shaker settlements are now museums”.

For a concrete sense of how this plays out in a modern society, you could look at South Korea. South Korea has had an extraordinary burst of cultural influence, from K-pop to films and TV serials. We watched My Mister this year. It’s a beautiful, subtle romance. But one of its subthemes is old people who are worried there will be nobody to give them a decent funeral. The South Korean population is falling dramatically. It would take a lot to change that, since population decline is a very inertial process. South Korea’s cultural efflorescence is unlikely to last long, simply because there won’t be enough South Koreans to sustain it. Its cultural importance in fifty years is more likely to be similar to, say, Poland. That’s assuming fertility bounces back. If it continues to drop, then… well, where’s the bottom? Culture is a resource which is more valuable when it is more widely shared (think of speaking a language, for example). Below a certain point cultures are not worth investing in.

Does that matter? Some people may be tempted to shrug and say “so what if my culture fades away in the future?” I do not find this an appealing point of view. I think it comes from a similar impulse to the argument, often voiced in casual conversation, that it would be “better for the planet” if the human race died out. People making these arguments simply haven’t thought about what they are saying. Nobody should welcome the decline and extinction of their language, values and way of life.

But already in the present, you can feel what it is like to live in a declining culture. Europe feels old. In fact, sometimes it feels like an old people’s home. The talking heads on the media are old. Art and culture has ossified: what new musical genres have there been since the millennium? Politics is obsequious to the pensioner demographic. In the economy, European failure to innovate is an old punchline. Sure, the continent is comfortable, so long as you don’t want a future.

I am leaning hard on demographics to explain why I’m not a fan of where Europe is heading. Charles Murray’s book has more on the mechanisms of why families, work and religion matter. Not everybody will agree. Some people reckon we can return to steady-state population by being more feminist. I think that is advice to keep digging:

Alternatively, some may think that low fertility is solely due to institutional changes, like easy divorce and state pensions. These are certainly easier to measure. But it seems likely that attitudes help too. In particular, I notice that religions which haven’t undergone the cultural transformation I described don’t have shrinking populations, even when their members live under modern Western laws and institutions. So, I suspect that they will inherit the earth.

That doesn’t mean I want to return to the past! It would be great if modern Europeans could find a way to preserve the best of their values while also preserving their actual population numbers. But that will not happen without effort and certainly not if Europeans take the position that “everything is fine”. And if you don’t make the effort, well, then you can’t complain if the future looks religious or fundamentalist, and your secular culture is what fades into the past.

“Going well so far”

After all this, many people may simply say “I prefer this way of life, and I’m OK with the risks you’ve described”. If so, I can’t stop you! I can’t, and wouldn’t want to, enforce my views on anyone. There may be many people who, after serious thought, are fine with modern European middle class culture the way I’ve described it.

I’ll explain my attitude to those people with a metaphor. Imagine that someone is deeply convinced that it’s good to jump out of sixth-floor windows. Self-defenestration! He loves it, and he goes around recommending it to anyone who listens.

I would try to discourage this person and change his mind. But if that proves really impossible, if he’s dead set on the leap, and especially if his ideas are having an influence, then at some point, my view becomes: it’s better if he practices what he preaches, and leaps from a sixth-floor window. Firstly, because afterwards, he won’t be around any more to encourage other people to jump from windows. Secondly, because his example will show others that jumping out of windows is not, in fact, a good idea.

European culture is jumping out of a sixth-floor window. I would like to persuade some people not to. But to those who truly can’t be persuaded, I’d say: okay, go on and jump. One day, there may be a great museum about you.

Shaker chair

What has Christianity done for us?

One last point. skaladom says that “low-status female-coded street spirituality does a better job… than high religion” with its “top-down hierarchies with highly dysfunctional authoritarian tendencies.” I’d say this exemplifies my point that the middle classes don’t know much about Christianity!

Christian doctrine contains many things: stories most educated people now think are myths (Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark); stories that some think are myths and others believe, like the Resurrection; deep truths about humanity and the world, like the idea from Galatians, that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, male nor female. For sure, there’s authoritarianism in many Christian churches, including the largest denominations. As against that, here’s an incomplete, top-of-the-head list of Christianity’s moral contributions: a continuous egalitarianism and concern for the weak, starting with the Sermon on the Mount. The preservation of Roman culture, values and literacy after the end of the Western empire. The Truce of God and the Peace of God. The cult of chivalry to rein in medieval thugs on horseback. Religiously-motivated struggles against serfdom, and later against Atlantic slavery. The concern for human rights, in the colonial context, of Fr Bartolomé de Las Casas. The worldwide spreading of literacy (and as a result democracy) by Protestant missionaries. Oh, and Reverend Martin Luther King. For sure, there is plenty to say on the other side.

How do Tarot and horoscopes compare? Female-coded they may be; they’re still one hundred per cent bullshit. Stars don’t determine our fate and cards can’t tell our future. Sure, some practitioners may have deep psychological empathy and insight — like any shyster. These forms of spirituality have also contributed essentially nowt to human history. (I guess you could try to make a case for John Dee or something.) If you think that, for spiritual succour of the individual or the community, the resources of Tarot compare with Christianity, you don’t know Christianity.