I attended a small book signing with author Rob Henderson last year. Rob is kind of a less-right-wing JD Vance, similar life trajectory (foster care, Marines, Yale) and now writes on social psychology. One of the attendees asked Rob about birthrates. His answer was extremely interesting. He was kind of thinking aloud (paraphrasing):
"What if we don't have an instinct to have children?" [we all laughed] "No, no, hear me out. We have an instinct to have sex (especially men)." [we laughed again] "We've known for millennia that sex produces babies. And when that happens, we have an instinct to take care of babies (especially women). For nearly all of human history, these 2 instincts were sufficient to ensure reproduction of the species. Then we invented The Pill. Reliable, pharmacological birth control forces us to choose whether to have kids. And it turns out, we don't appear to have an instinct to reproduce. We may be the only species on the planet that doesn't."
Rob is onto something very big here, and it ties into exactly what you're saying in this piece.
I am a say-at-home father of 3 late teenage girls. I am a feminist in the sense that I want them to have every opportunity available to them that they would have if they were boys. But mostly I want them to have lives of meaning and goodness. What if modern feminism is antithetical to that? What if laws that encourage my daughters (and everyone else's) to compete with men render them spiritually impoverished and familially barren as individuals and produce a society that no longer sustains itself? I don't have answers for this, but increasingly, I fear that modern feminism is a collective suicide pact, a deathwork as Phillip Rieff would say. I don't want my daughters growing old in a deathwork culture.
It's true that the return of a stable peasantry is neither likely nor desirable, but I do think we need to look at a fundamental issue that the English "distributists" of the early 20th C. had a better handle on: sufficient ownership of productive property. They were drawing directly upon early Catholic social teaching, and advocated not only "back to the land" solutions but also using technology to increase the possibility of individual ownership rather than decrease it. That's the problem with modern industrial economies today: "efficiency" (rightly criticized in this article) demands the continuous removal of the human being from labor, which likewise means not owning the means of production as well. The result is a bias towards centralization, consolidation, and automation. That's the fundamental problem. Are we surprised, then, when various firms seem "too big to fail," as in the late 2000s? We're headed that way again. Unregulated high-tech, big capitalism inevitably results in fragility, both for individuals and for whole societies. And nobody wants to have kids when they constantly feel economically insecure.
I am afraid, this is a false anslysis. Even in countries like the Nordics, with plenty of family friendly legislation, women have around 1.5 kids. And most of that is brougth by inmigrant women not at the workforce.
Spain is extremely feminist, and has 1.1 fertility rate.
Moreover, when women are successful, they use not to get married. Hypergamy is real, and in the absence of men as a higher group, women dont get married. Women dont see men as equal: they want men to be more than them.
The most successful society in history has been the western liberal society witth separated spheres.
In addition, in the lack of affirmative action and DEI programmes, women (as a group) are not capable to bring the same value as men: still today there is a gender gap of 10 to 20% in most western countries.
We are obsese with equalizing men and women, when the reality has proven that they are not equal biologicly nor from a psicological point of view.
Men are keen to work and provide. Women are keen to nurture.
There are of course exceptions to this rule (20 to 30%), but the reality is men have no other option than work if they want to being value, while women can bring birth.
The past 40 years has been a catastrophy in all senses, increasingly in the past 20 years.
Most women in the 80s were Happy (actually, stats shows than women were happier during the 50 than now). Suicide, drug consumption have peaked.
Before the industrial Revolution women have worked until they have kids or at home. And in all societies before Industrial Revolution men were at the top, which ensure that women wanted to marry them and were prepare to abandon work outside work.
Something is not feasible now (except if remote work becomes the rule, which is unlikely).
Even most women dont want to work oustside home now, but they cannot avoid this, as we have fallen in the double income trap.
Destruction of the family has lead to the destruction of the society. Feminism has fallen. As always in history: that the reason why there is no survaciving Matriarchy.
While it seems clear that everyone worked in premodern society, it’s a bit unrealistic to suggest that “separate spheres” was a recent, reactionary invention. Imagine explaining to your grandparents that we have women in combat now. It’s probably fair to say that separate spheres in some fashion was the default mode of every civilization from time immemorial until about 50 years ago.
The deep cause of the fertility crisis is probably the loss of the separate spheres and of the deeper sense of vocation attached to the sexes. That’s why pro natal policies aren’t having much impact where they have been attempted.
I’ve noticed how post liberal writers pretty consistently aim for this middle ground of rejecting “radical” feminism while strenuously defending the “good” kind. But might that be like those who praise moderate or classical liberalism as the “good” kind of liberalism against radical progressives. All forms of feminism just like all forms of liberalism are premised on a minimalist account of the person as a lone agent whose dignity is premised on unrestricted life choices. Both are premised on a lack of givenness to human life. There is no telos, no Summum bonum to anything.
The role of government is to tax to the maximum. Since the former role of women was not taxable, it became the function of government to force women into a taxpaying role. In order to accomplish this, they needed full time warfare to take men out of the factories, creating a demand for replacements, and to entice women into those jobs, they had to create a new demand among women for the "freedom" to work outside the home.
Who benefits by having women employed outside the home? Not women, and not families, and not businesses. Women had to be enticed to put aside the raising of children to work in crowded factories, offices, and factories, often doing dangerous work in unsanitary conditions and being regularly pestered for sexual favors by bosses and fellow workers who had no interest in them for any other purposes. Nine to five. What a way to make a living, et cetera.
During WW I and II, it was heavily promoted as patriotic: Rosie the Rivetter was just one example. Government heavily supported women's liberation to sell women on becoming financially important and independent. Why should they work in the home for no pay and with no thanks or encouragement beyond clothes on their backs and food in their stomachs and a grudging sex life? Out there were exciting careers and wide horizons. Rewards, respect, and appreciation. No comparison to being slaves to husbands and children, locked away from life rather than living!
You deserve better! But did you better yourselves?
What became of families? Junk food microwaved and self served in front of the TV. Children hustled off to school at earlier ages and for more years. Day care. Less cause required for divorce growing into no fault. Until death do we part very quickly became until I find someone else or until my indiscretions are found out. Then, why get married at all?
Businesses had to train women to do unfamiliar tasks, for eight to twelve hours, at a stretch. Supervisors and managers had to learn how to maneuver through unfamiliar moods and interrelationships, desires, demands, and emotions.
The only true beneficiaries were governments. School systems expanded greatly. And taxes grew exponentially. While income didn't anywhere close to being doubled, most of the increase was taxable at higher rates, at least in the earlier stages, before marriages deteriorated. And government employment was the last industry to be impacted by women.
I attended a small book signing with author Rob Henderson last year. Rob is kind of a less-right-wing JD Vance, similar life trajectory (foster care, Marines, Yale) and now writes on social psychology. One of the attendees asked Rob about birthrates. His answer was extremely interesting. He was kind of thinking aloud (paraphrasing):
"What if we don't have an instinct to have children?" [we all laughed] "No, no, hear me out. We have an instinct to have sex (especially men)." [we laughed again] "We've known for millennia that sex produces babies. And when that happens, we have an instinct to take care of babies (especially women). For nearly all of human history, these 2 instincts were sufficient to ensure reproduction of the species. Then we invented The Pill. Reliable, pharmacological birth control forces us to choose whether to have kids. And it turns out, we don't appear to have an instinct to reproduce. We may be the only species on the planet that doesn't."
Rob is onto something very big here, and it ties into exactly what you're saying in this piece.
I am a say-at-home father of 3 late teenage girls. I am a feminist in the sense that I want them to have every opportunity available to them that they would have if they were boys. But mostly I want them to have lives of meaning and goodness. What if modern feminism is antithetical to that? What if laws that encourage my daughters (and everyone else's) to compete with men render them spiritually impoverished and familially barren as individuals and produce a society that no longer sustains itself? I don't have answers for this, but increasingly, I fear that modern feminism is a collective suicide pact, a deathwork as Phillip Rieff would say. I don't want my daughters growing old in a deathwork culture.
It's true that the return of a stable peasantry is neither likely nor desirable, but I do think we need to look at a fundamental issue that the English "distributists" of the early 20th C. had a better handle on: sufficient ownership of productive property. They were drawing directly upon early Catholic social teaching, and advocated not only "back to the land" solutions but also using technology to increase the possibility of individual ownership rather than decrease it. That's the problem with modern industrial economies today: "efficiency" (rightly criticized in this article) demands the continuous removal of the human being from labor, which likewise means not owning the means of production as well. The result is a bias towards centralization, consolidation, and automation. That's the fundamental problem. Are we surprised, then, when various firms seem "too big to fail," as in the late 2000s? We're headed that way again. Unregulated high-tech, big capitalism inevitably results in fragility, both for individuals and for whole societies. And nobody wants to have kids when they constantly feel economically insecure.
I really wish distributism was taken more seriously, Father. Thank you for bringing it up.
Modern capitalism focuses on consumptive private property: you too can own this 4 bedroom home in the burbs.
Distributism focuses on productive private property: you can have the tools to make a living.
The most distributist professions I can think of are auto mechanics and chefs.
(Note, to see how unknown this philosophy is, my spell checker flagged "distributist" above. It doesn't flag "capitalist" or "communist" though.)
I am afraid, this is a false anslysis. Even in countries like the Nordics, with plenty of family friendly legislation, women have around 1.5 kids. And most of that is brougth by inmigrant women not at the workforce.
Spain is extremely feminist, and has 1.1 fertility rate.
Moreover, when women are successful, they use not to get married. Hypergamy is real, and in the absence of men as a higher group, women dont get married. Women dont see men as equal: they want men to be more than them.
The most successful society in history has been the western liberal society witth separated spheres.
In addition, in the lack of affirmative action and DEI programmes, women (as a group) are not capable to bring the same value as men: still today there is a gender gap of 10 to 20% in most western countries.
We are obsese with equalizing men and women, when the reality has proven that they are not equal biologicly nor from a psicological point of view.
Men are keen to work and provide. Women are keen to nurture.
There are of course exceptions to this rule (20 to 30%), but the reality is men have no other option than work if they want to being value, while women can bring birth.
The past 40 years has been a catastrophy in all senses, increasingly in the past 20 years.
Most women in the 80s were Happy (actually, stats shows than women were happier during the 50 than now). Suicide, drug consumption have peaked.
Before the industrial Revolution women have worked until they have kids or at home. And in all societies before Industrial Revolution men were at the top, which ensure that women wanted to marry them and were prepare to abandon work outside work.
Something is not feasible now (except if remote work becomes the rule, which is unlikely).
Even most women dont want to work oustside home now, but they cannot avoid this, as we have fallen in the double income trap.
Destruction of the family has lead to the destruction of the society. Feminism has fallen. As always in history: that the reason why there is no survaciving Matriarchy.
While it seems clear that everyone worked in premodern society, it’s a bit unrealistic to suggest that “separate spheres” was a recent, reactionary invention. Imagine explaining to your grandparents that we have women in combat now. It’s probably fair to say that separate spheres in some fashion was the default mode of every civilization from time immemorial until about 50 years ago.
The deep cause of the fertility crisis is probably the loss of the separate spheres and of the deeper sense of vocation attached to the sexes. That’s why pro natal policies aren’t having much impact where they have been attempted.
I’ve noticed how post liberal writers pretty consistently aim for this middle ground of rejecting “radical” feminism while strenuously defending the “good” kind. But might that be like those who praise moderate or classical liberalism as the “good” kind of liberalism against radical progressives. All forms of feminism just like all forms of liberalism are premised on a minimalist account of the person as a lone agent whose dignity is premised on unrestricted life choices. Both are premised on a lack of givenness to human life. There is no telos, no Summum bonum to anything.
The role of government is to tax to the maximum. Since the former role of women was not taxable, it became the function of government to force women into a taxpaying role. In order to accomplish this, they needed full time warfare to take men out of the factories, creating a demand for replacements, and to entice women into those jobs, they had to create a new demand among women for the "freedom" to work outside the home.
Who benefits by having women employed outside the home? Not women, and not families, and not businesses. Women had to be enticed to put aside the raising of children to work in crowded factories, offices, and factories, often doing dangerous work in unsanitary conditions and being regularly pestered for sexual favors by bosses and fellow workers who had no interest in them for any other purposes. Nine to five. What a way to make a living, et cetera.
During WW I and II, it was heavily promoted as patriotic: Rosie the Rivetter was just one example. Government heavily supported women's liberation to sell women on becoming financially important and independent. Why should they work in the home for no pay and with no thanks or encouragement beyond clothes on their backs and food in their stomachs and a grudging sex life? Out there were exciting careers and wide horizons. Rewards, respect, and appreciation. No comparison to being slaves to husbands and children, locked away from life rather than living!
You deserve better! But did you better yourselves?
What became of families? Junk food microwaved and self served in front of the TV. Children hustled off to school at earlier ages and for more years. Day care. Less cause required for divorce growing into no fault. Until death do we part very quickly became until I find someone else or until my indiscretions are found out. Then, why get married at all?
Businesses had to train women to do unfamiliar tasks, for eight to twelve hours, at a stretch. Supervisors and managers had to learn how to maneuver through unfamiliar moods and interrelationships, desires, demands, and emotions.
The only true beneficiaries were governments. School systems expanded greatly. And taxes grew exponentially. While income didn't anywhere close to being doubled, most of the increase was taxable at higher rates, at least in the earlier stages, before marriages deteriorated. And government employment was the last industry to be impacted by women.