Quote: (09-22-2012 01:31 AM)RawGod Wrote:
Feminism or liberal culture will not just die off because these social strata have below replacement-level rates of reproduction.
It might not disappear, but they would be delusional to think that this trend will have no long term impact on them. History isn't on their side.
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While genetic lines will disappear, fresh blood is always at hand to adopt the ideas of the dominant culture. Simply put, the conservative family in Iowa sends their kid to college and then they go live in New York and become a liberal.
Fresh blood is not a given these days. Conservatives have much higher retention rates today than they did 50 years ago, and they'd holding on liberal college or not.
Furthermore, fresh blood is not your blood-it can differ in small but tangible ways that ultimately create an altering of the dominant culture should their numbers increase significantly enough in proportion.
Example: immigrants. Immigrants may help boost the left in a nation where the left is dying, but in the long term even integrated immigrants maintain small, but crucial cultural differences (ex: Blacks and hispanics in usa = far more socially conservative than many whites, though they are otherwise liberal, left leaning).
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In fact, elites have always had low birth rates going back to the Hellenistic Greeks, the Romans, and the Chinese. They survive by recruitment and co-opting of the more fertile lower classes.
This is fantasy. No culture can sustain itself with the kind of below-replacement fertility we see today, nor has it historically been done. Elites have, in fact, had high fertility rates in the past for much of their history, to go along with higher survival rates. Their declines did not tend to come until the twilight of their civilizations.
This article handily illustrates that better than I can:
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"If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance." So proclaimed the Roman general, statesman, and censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, in 131 B.C. Still, he went on to plead, falling birthrates required that Roman men fulfill their duty to reproduce, no matter how irritating Roman women might have become. "Since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure."
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But the most fateful change rendered by the agricultural revolution was the way it turned population into power. Because of the relative abundance of food, more and more societies discovered that the greatest demographic threat to their survival was no longer overpopulation, but underpopulation.
At that point, instead of dying of starvation, societies with high fertility grew in strength and number and began menacing those with lower fertility. In more and more places in the world, fast-breeding tribes morphed into nations and empires and swept away any remaining, slow-breeding hunters and gatherers. It mattered that your warriors were fierce and valiant in battle; it mattered more that there were lots of them.
That was the lesson King Pyrrhus learned in the third century B.C., when he marched his Greek armies into the Italian peninsula and tried to take on the Romans. Pyrrhus initially prevailed at a great battle at Asculum. But it was, as they say, "a Pyrrhic victory," and Pyrrhus could only conclude that "another such victory over the Romans and we are undone." The Romans, who by then were procreating far more rapidly than were the Greeks, kept pouring in reinforcements -- "as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city," the Greek historian Plutarch tells us. Hopelessly outnumbered, Pyrrhus went on to lose the war, and Greece, after falling into a long era of population decline, eventually became a looted colony of Rome.
Like today's modern, well-fed nations, both ancient Greece and Rome eventually found that their elites had lost interest in the often dreary chores of family life. "In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and a general decay of population," lamented the Greek historian Polybius around 140 B.C., just as Greece was giving in to Roman domination. "This evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life." But, as with civilizations around the globe, patriarchy, for as long as it could be sustained, was the key to maintaining population and, therefore, power.
Western civilization has been here before. Low fertility
became a norm, it was not born one.
The cycle made itself clear. Patriarchy begins, and it begets high fertility. That mass of manpower begets dominance, and eventually higher living standards. That breeds complacency, and the downfall of the patriarchy. That, in turn, breeds low fertility and decline of the civilization as a whole. The modern west (certainly most of Europe and East Asia, if not all of its former colonies) is on that last step.
The Greeks and the Romans in particular did not begin and end with low fertility-they began with strong fertility rates in their patriarchal dawns, and ended with very low fertility. The Roman Patrician elite died out as a result of this-they did not begin that way, but by the end of the Republic they simply weren't fertile enough to resist the onslaught of outsiders and formerly "lowborn" among them as they had historically done, preventing them from keeping their hold on power. That fertility decline played a significant role in the eventual demise of both civilizations, and the words of more than one stateman from each civilization illustrate that there was concern over this development within the elite.
In many ways, we may be replaying their old reality.