THE RETURN OF PATRIARCHY
By Phillip Longman
Foreign Policy
March/April 2006

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3376&print=1

Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all.
Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to
stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct?
Hardly. It¹s more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it
or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into
families who believe that father knows best.

³If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do
without that nuisance.² 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. ³Since
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.²

With the number of human beings having increased more than six-fold in the
past 200 years, the modern mind simply assumes that men and women, no matter
how estranged, will always breed enough children to grow the population‹at
least until plague or starvation sets in. It is an assumption that not only
conforms to our long experience of a world growing ever more crowded, but
which also enjoys the endorsement of such influential thinkers as Thomas
Malthus and his many modern acolytes.

Yet, for more than a generation now, well-fed, healthy, peaceful populations
around the world have been producing too few children to avoid population
decline. That is true even though dramatic improvements in infant and child
mortality mean that far fewer children are needed today (only about 2.1 per
woman in modern societies) to avoid population loss. Birthrates are falling
far below replacement levels in one country after the next‹from China,
Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, to Canada, the Caribbean, all of Europe,
Russia, and even parts of the Middle East.

Fearful of a future in which the elderly outnumber the young, many
governments are doing whatever they can to encourage people to have
children. Singapore has sponsored ³speed dating² events, in hopes of
bringing busy professionals together to marry and procreate. France offers
generous tax incentives for those willing to start a family. In Sweden, the
state finances day care to ease the tension between work and family life.
Yet, though such explicitly pronatal policies may encourage people to have
children at a younger age, there is little evidence they cause people to
have more children than they otherwise would. As governments going as far
back as imperial Rome have discovered, when cultural and economic conditions
discourage parenthood, not even a dictator can force people to go forth and
multiply.

Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of
people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood.
Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why
then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.

Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular
value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of
proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life,
and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it
degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high
among the affluent, while also maximizing parents¹ investments in their
children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it.

Through a process of cultural evolution, societies that adopted this
particular social system‹which involves far more than simple male
domination‹maximized their population and therefore their power, whereas
those that didn¹t were either overrun or absorbed. This cycle in human
history may be obnoxious to the enlightened, but it is set to make a
comeback.


The Conservative Baby Boom

The historical relation between patriarchy, population, and power has deep
implications for our own time. As the United States is discovering today in
Iraq, population is still power. Smart bombs, laser-guided missiles, and
unmanned drones may vastly extend the violent reach of a hegemonic power.
But ultimately, it is often the number of boots on the ground that changes
history. Even with a fertility rate near replacement level, the United
States lacks the amount of people necessary to sustain an imperial role in
the world, just as Britain lost its ability to do so after its birthrates
collapsed in the early 20th century. For countries such as China, Germany,
Italy, Japan, and Spain, in which one-child families are now the norm, the
quality of human capital may be high, but it has literally become too rare
to put at risk.

Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic
problems that dominate today¹s headlines. The long-term financing of social
security schemes, private pension plans, and healthcare systems has little
to do with people living longer. Gains in life expectancy at older ages have
actually been quite modest, and the rate of improvement in the United States
has diminished for each of the last three decades. Instead, the falling
ratio of workers to retirees is overwhelmingly caused by workers who were
never born. As governments raise taxes on a dwindling working-age population
to cover the growing burdens of supporting the elderly, young couples may
conclude they are even less able to afford children than their parents were,
thereby setting off a new cycle of population aging and decline.

Declining birthrates also change national temperament. In the United States,
for example, the percentage of women born in the late 1930s who remained
childless was near 10 percent. By comparison, nearly 20 percent of women
born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives
without having had children. The greatly expanded childless segment of
contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the
feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no
genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the
next generation compare with that of their parents.

Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child
replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child
families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby
boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of
children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the
children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer
women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the
emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be
descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made
childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence
to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one¹s
own folk or nation.

This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American
culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism.
Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility
rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry.
It may also help to explain the increasing popular resistance among
rank-and-file Europeans to such crown jewels of secular liberalism as the
European Union. It turns out that Europeans who are most likely to identify
themselves as ³world citizens² are also those least likely to have children.

Does this mean that today¹s enlightened but slow-breeding societies face
extinction? Probably not, but only because they face a dramatic,
demographically driven transformation of their cultures. As has happened
many times before in history, it is a transformation that occurs as secular
and libertarian elements in society fail to reproduce, and as people
adhering to more traditional, patriarchal values inherit society by default.

At least as long ago as ancient Greek and Roman times, many sophisticated
members of society concluded that investing in children brought no
advantage. Rather, children came to be seen as a costly impediment to
self-fulfillment and worldly achievement. But, though these attitudes led to
the extinction of many individual families, they did not lead to the
extinction of society as a whole. Instead, through a process of cultural
evolution, a set of values and norms that can roughly be described as
patriarchy reemerged.


Population Becomes Power

In the primordial past, to be sure, most societies did not coerce
reproduction, because they had to avoid breeding faster than the wild game
on which they fed. Indeed, in almost all the hunter-gatherer societies that
survived long enough to be studied by anthropologists, such as the Eskimos
and Tasmanian Bushmen, one finds customs that in one way or another
discouraged population growth. In various combinations, these have included
late marriage, genital mutilation, abortion, and infanticide. Some early
hunter-gatherer societies may have also limited population growth by giving
women high-status positions. Allowing at least some number of females to
take on roles such as priestess, sorcerer, oracle, artist, and even warrior
would have provided meaningful alternatives to motherhood and thereby
reduced overall fertility to within sustainable limits.

During the eons before agriculture emerged, there was little or no military
reason to promote high fertility. War and conquests could bring little
advantage to society. There were no granaries to raid, no livestock to
steal, no use for slaves except rape. But with the coming of the Neolithic
agricultural revolution, starting about 11,000 years ago, everything
changed. The domestication of plants and animals led to vastly increased
food supplies. Surplus food allowed cities to emerge, and freed more people
to work on projects such as building pyramids and developing a written
language to record history. 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, ³a Pyrrhic victory,² and Pyrrhus could only conclude that
³another such victory over the Romans and we are undone.² The Romans, who by
then were procreating far more rapidly than were the Greeks, kept pouring in
reinforcements‹³as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city,² 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 today¹s 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. ³In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of
children and a general decay of population,² lamented the Greek historian
Polybius around 140 B.C., just as Greece was giving in to Roman domination.
³This 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.² 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.


Father Knows Best?

Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different
stages. What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively
serve to maximize fertility and parental investment in the next generation.
Of these, among the most important is the stigmatization of ³illegitimate²
children. One measure of the degree to which patriarchy has diminished in
advanced societies is the growing acceptance of out-of-wedlock births, which
have now become the norm in Scandinavian countries, for example.

Under patriarchy, ³bastards² and single mothers cannot be tolerated because
they undermine male investment in the next generation. Illegitimate children
do not take their fathers¹ name, and so their fathers, even if known, tend
not to take any responsibility for them. By contrast, ³legitimate² children
become a source of either honor or shame to their fathers and the family
line. The notion that legitimate children belong to their fathers¹ family,
and not to their mothers¹, 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. Patriarchy also leads men to keep having
children until they produce at least one son.

Another key to patriarchy¹s evolutionary advantage is the way it penalizes
women who do not marry and have children. Just decades ago in the
English-speaking world, such women were referred to, even by their own
mothers, as spinsters or old maids, to be pitied for their barrenness or
condemned for their selfishness. Patriarchy made the incentive of taking a
husband and becoming a full-time mother very high because it offered women
few desirable alternatives.

To be sure, a society organized on such principles may well degenerate over
time into misogyny, and eventually sterility, as occurred in both ancient
Greece and Rome. In more recent times, the patriarchal family has also
proved vulnerable to the rise of capitalism, which profits from the
diversion of female labor from the house to the workplace. But as long as
the patriarchal system avoids succumbing to these threats, it will produce a
greater quantity of children, and arguably children of higher quality, than
do societies organized by other principles, which is all that evolution
cares about.

This claim is contentious. Today, after all, we associate patriarchy with
the hideous abuse of women and children, with poverty and failed states.
Taliban rebels or Muslim fanatics in Nigeria stoning an adulteress to death
come to mind. Yet these are examples of insecure societies that have
degenerated into male tyrannies, and they do not represent the form of
patriarchy that has achieved evolutionary advantage in human history. Under
a true patriarchal system, such as in early Rome or 17th-century Protestant
Europe, fathers have strong reason to take an active interest in the
children their wives bear. That is because, when men come to see themselves,
and are seen by others, as upholders of a patriarchal line, how those
children turn out directly affects their own rank and honor.

Under patriarchy, maternal investment in children also increases. As
feminist economist Nancy Folbre has observed, ³Patriarchal control over
women tends to increase their specialization in reproductive labor, with
important consequences for both the quantity and the quality of their
investments in the next generation.² Those consequences arguably include:
more children receiving more attention from their mothers, who, having few
other ways of finding meaning in their lives, become more skilled at keeping
their children safe and healthy. Without implying any endorsement for the
strategy, one must observe that a society that presents women with
essentially three options‹be a nun, be a prostitute, or marry a man and bear
children‹has stumbled upon a highly effective way to reduce the risk of
demographic decline.


Patriarchy and Its Discontents

Patriarchy may enjoy evolutionary advantages, but nothing has ensured the
survival of any particular patriarchal society. One reason is that men can
grow weary of patriarchy¹s demands. Roman aristocrats, for example,
eventually became so reluctant to accept the burdens of heading a family
that Caesar Augustus felt compelled to enact steep ³bachelor taxes² and
otherwise punish those who remained unwed and childless. Patriarchy may have
its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood
in a luxurious society‹nights spent enjoyably at banquets with friends
discussing sports, war stories, or philosophy, or with alluring mistresses,
flute girls, or clever courtesans.

Women, of course, also have reason to grow weary of patriarchy, particularly
when men themselves are no longer upholding their patriarchal duties.
Historian Suzanne Cross notes that during the decades of Rome¹s civil wars,
Roman women of all classes had to learn how to do without men for prolonged
periods, and accordingly developed a new sense of individuality and
independence. Few women in the upper classes would agree to a marriage to an
abusive husband. Adultery and divorce became rampant.

Often, all that sustains the patriarchal family is the idea that its members
are upholding the honor of a long and noble line. Yet, once a society grows
cosmopolitan, fast-paced, and filled with new ideas, new peoples, and new
luxuries, this sense of honor and connection to one¹s ancestors begins to
fade, and with it, any sense of the necessity of reproduction. ³When the
ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard Œhaving
children¹ as a question of pro¹s and con¹s,² Oswald Spengler, the German
historian and philosopher, once observed, ³the great turning point has
come.²


The Return of Patriarchy

Yet that turning point does not necessarily mean the death of a
civilization, only its transformation. Eventually, for example, the sterile,
secular, noble families of imperial Rome died off, and with them, their
ancestors¹ idea of Rome. But what was once the Roman Empire remained
populated. Only the composition of the population changed. Nearly by
default, it became composed of new, highly patriarchal family units, hostile
to the secular world and enjoined by faith either to go forth and multiply
or join a monastery. With these changes came a feudal Europe, but not the
end of Europe, nor the end of Western Civilization.

We may witness a similar transformation during this century. In Europe
today, for example, how many children different people have, and under what
circumstances, correlates strongly with their beliefs on a wide range of
political and cultural attitudes. For instance, do you distrust the army?
Then, according to polling data assembled by demographers Ronny Lesthaeghe
and Johan Surkyn, you are less likely to be married and have kids‹or ever to
get married and have kids‹than those who say they have no objection to the
military. Or again, do you find soft drugs, homosexuality, and euthanasia
acceptable? Do you seldom, if ever, attend church? For whatever reason,
people answering affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live
alone, or in childless, cohabitating unions, than those who answer
negatively.

The great difference in fertility rates between secular individualists and
religious or cultural conservatives augurs a vast, demographically driven
change in modern societies. Consider the demographics of France, for
example. Among French women born in the early 1960s, less than a third have
three or more children. But this distinct minority of French women (most of
them presumably practicing Catholics and Muslims) produced more than 50
percent of all children born to their generation, in large measure because
so many of their contemporaries had one child or none at all.

Many childless, middle-aged people may regret the life choices that are
leading to the extinction of their family lines, and yet they have no sons
or daughters with whom to share their newfound wisdom. The plurality of
citizens who have only one child may be able to invest lavishly in that
child¹s education, but a single child will only replace one parent, not
both. Meanwhile, the descendants of parents who have three or more children
will be hugely overrepresented in subsequent generations, and so will the
values and ideas that led their parents to have large families.

One could argue that history, and particularly Western history, is full of
revolts of children against parents. Couldn¹t tomorrow¹s Europeans, even if
they are disproportionately raised in patriarchal, religiously minded
households, turn out to be another generation of ¹68?

The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all
segments of modern societies married and had children. Some had more than
others, but the disparity in family size between the religious and the
secular was not so large, and childlessness was rare. Today, by contrast,
childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have
just one. Tomorrow¹s children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby
boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively
narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some
members of the rising generation may reject their parents¹ values, as always
happens. But 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.

Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or
not. In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of
society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and
decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage, and
therefore spur even higher fertility. As governments hand back functions
they once appropriated from the family, notably support in old age, people
will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and
they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating
traditional religious values akin to the Bible¹s injunction to honor thy
mother and father.

Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their
underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and
a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and
Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process
similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which
no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a
patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and
submit to father.

.........

Phillip Longman is Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America
Foundation. He is the author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates
Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (New York: Basic Books,
2004).