'Many traditional conservatives seem to have this conceit that at some point America will “come to its senses,” or that if the country stays on its current path, somehow reality itself will impose discipline, which will lead to a crash, which will cause people to repent.
Few of them consider the possibility that the left and its cultural influences could win and the country still go on basically fine. This is basically the scenario Greer paints, and it’s far from unlikely.'
You think that scenario is far from unlikely? The left and its cultural influences are poison, to birthrates, mental health, and many other topics that have been discussed in your columns. How could the country still go on basically fine?
Even the Soviet Union, a much worse country by any measure, lasted 70 years - even in the face of massive external wars and pressures. Rome lasted hundreds of years after its decline set in. Why would the USA experience some major collapse or reversal in a very short period of time?
I guess I don't understand your phrase "basically fine" if it applies to the Soviet Union. Does it just mean that the country, as a political entity, has not dissolved?
Consider Rome. A slave society based on great evil. And it yet remained technologically advanced, largely peaceful internally, great economy, lots of cultural flourishing. It went on like this for a very, very long time. Choosing the "wrong" moral approach did not cause them to fail in the short term. If you read the Old Testament, there are endless laments about the wicked prospering, and wondering why God wasn't doing anything. The parable of Lazarus and the rich man shows that a reckoning often lies beyond this world.
So, to continue to clarify, your only criterion is avoiding dissolution of the political entity. No matter how much human misery is produced in the nation or empire, it is "basically fine" if the nation or empire continues to exist.
Basically fine = continues to function well on operational criteria. Conservatives have tended to believe that choosing the wrong policy will result in collapse or something of that nature, leaving them to pick up the pieces. But what if that doesn't happen.
I went over to First Things to read Reno's response to you, Aaron. He's obviously a smart guy, and he writes very well (although perhaps not quite with Neuhaus's snap), but I think he's missing the point on Dewey, especially.
Reno argues, essentially, that nobody reads -- or cites -- Dewey that much anymore, so his influence has waned. But I work in the education field, and I see the influence of Dewey and his contemporaneous progressives *everywhere*. Dewey's pragmatic, progressive vision of education is the very air that's breathed amongst professional 'educators'. No one argues for or cites that which is ubiquitous.
X/Twitter is a tough game, one would think a million views on a topic like that would be worth 10K new followers.
If you were someone like Richard Florida, by exploring every subtlety of your article and X post you would now be set for the next 5 years. At least two books, regular articles in mainstream media and many speeches. I understand that you are an analyst at heart and this is not your approach, but maybe you could develop a broader discussion around this topic that more people would relate to, it is clear there is interest.
I read a popular South Korean novel earlier this year, 'Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop' by Hwang Bo-Reum. A sweet story about a lady who runs a bookshop. What struck me about it, however, was how anti-romantic relationship it was. (Spoilers coming up:) Pretty much no one in the book is in a happy relationship. They're either unhappily married, or else happily single or divorced. We're treated to a few lengthy discourses on how liberating divorce is. The heroine looks for a while like she's going to get together with the love interest ... but ultimately she doesn't. In their downtime, the characters are happiest when they're chastely chilling with friends of their own sex. The novel really goes out of its way to rub all this in.
The novel, note well, is not a screed by some blue-haired harpy; it's thoroughly mainstream. I was lent it by a conventional, politically middle-of-the-road (and of course single) Korean friend. Admirable as Korean culture is in so many ways, there really does seem to be something unhealthy going on there where marriage and fertility are concerned.
Romantic love, at least within marriage, is still a relatively novel concept in most East Asian cultures. I remember some years ago a major ministry (IIRC it was Open Doors) happened to do a marriage seminar for Chinese pastors and their wives. It was received enthusiastically, with many saying something like, "We have never heard any of this before."
One might assume leaders in the Church would at least know Christian concepts of marriage, but since so much of it is culturally-determined, in practice, that's a flawed assumption.
Thanx for the video of Lutheran theologian Jordan Cooper , it makes me feel better about my career and life(retired now). I very much look forward to his book on Luther, and Luthers’ view of the stations in life and their duties.
His book on Liturgical Worship has been very helpful as I was raised Catholic, was evangelical for four decades (Assembly of God and Cavalry chapel), became LCMS as result of looking for a church choir to sing in 5 years ago.
I had no idea 🤔you could celebrate a liturgy and still be a faithful son of the reformation‼️
I'm sure Cooper would phrase it differently, but Lutheranism has a strong "bloom where you are planted" vibe in which you should resignedly remain in the station you were allocated in life.
I was raised in a lower middle class neighborhood in Southeast Portland OR. My dad was a railroad carman (inspector). The Air Force put me in technical path in electronics where I lived out my working years.
I suspect my dad would have seen me as a white collar worker, if he had witnessed me move between the Electronics laboratory and my cubicle.
My technical school associate degree and numerous federal licenses qualify me as an uneducated man, to those who hold the chivalric crests of the bachelors, masters, and PhD.
It’s easy to look at the vast differences in prosperity between North Korea and South Korea and conclude that South Korea has won… but when the South Korean birthrate is the lowest in the world while North Korea is still around replacement level, who will have really won 50 years from now?
NK's population is probably also below replacement, though markedly higher than SK.
NK maintains its fertility advantage not by pursuing what's next, but by trying to keep itself socially frozen in time. There's a reason no regime on Earth resembles the Kim regime: entropy is acting against it. The House of Kim will fall, and when it does, NK will become more of a "normal" country, whether that means more like the PRC or more like SK. When the shock comes, fertility can easily drop lower than ever. Just look at Eastern Europe. Also, at that time, all the young people in the North will want to move South.
I do think the question of South Korea's future is interesting though, especially as their population pyramid is about to get very weird much sooner than 50 years from now -- closer to 20-30. Will it allow itself to depopulate, or will it invite in mass immigration? Would it even be able to attract enough immigrants to make a difference? Indonesia and the Philippines have the numbers and near-replacement TFRs -- but dropping fast, and Korea is a cold and alien place for them.
South Korean culture is extremely popular across the world and especially in Southeast Asia, so I don’t think there would any lack of women willing to move to SK and marry into Korean society. The future, then, would probably look more mixed: half-Korean, half-SEA/EA/white/black kids will be more common. Korean society would likely have to change its idea of Koreanness to one more like the West.
The same goes for the other East Asian countries. China is solving its gender imbalance by having their men go to Africa to work and find wives. Whether or not Chinese society will see half-Chinese half-African kids as truly Chinese will be interesting to see play out… but nothing the government couldn’t socially engineer.
Japan… no idea. Japan has always been an oddball when it comes to anything.
You know, that’s actually a really interesting thought that I hadn’t given due consideration to. Could the “passport bro” scale up to the point of becoming demographically relevant and perhaps even normative, in response to a revolt against marriage by native women?
In effect, this would forge a new people much as the Mestizo populations of Latin America were forged by a combination of Spanish men and local women — but with the direction of migration in reverse.
Though my understanding of the math is that SK’s rapid aging and the initial stages of its depopulation spiral are basically a fait accompli at this point. The thickest part of their population pyramid is 50-54 years old today. So things are going to keep getting weirder for a good while, unless you think lots of today’s 50-year-old S. Korean men are going to suddenly start taking foreign wives and having 3 kids with them.
But maybe today’s S. Korean 10-year-olds or 20-year-olds will start doing that, and that’s how they’ll arrest the spiral. Maybe.
Possibly. No one can accurately predict the future, because never in thousands of years of human civilization have we had below-replacement fertility for much of the world. It used to be that there were too too many people being born (see Malthus and the “population bomb” predictions), but now there’s too little. But I do think that Asia will have “Mestizo” populations as women in developed countries don’t want to have kids while women in less developed countries are happy to marry a men from a more developed country.
It’s possible that South Korea will also just turn things around in terms of their gender war. The west had hundreds of years of liberalism before second-wave feminism took off, so feminism wasn’t so drastic a change. While South Korea changed so much in a few decades. Maybe things just have to settle down.
I agree with your first paragraph. Incidentally, I've started working on some essays on the fertility crash in my spare time. A lot of it is just collecting ideas from other people that I find interesting. If I ever finish enough of them to get started, I'll launch a Substack with them. I consider it most likely the macro-historical event of our age.
The fate of the West is really the whole question. Is fertility in the West stabilizing and NE Asia possibly converging towards it? Or is fertility in the West converging towards NE Asia?
Also we don't really know what life in an ultra-gerontocratic South Korea, circa 2050, is going to be like. Will it create opportunities for young people that ultimately encourage family formation and breaking the cycle? Or will it make life as a young person even more unpleasant and family formation even less normative, encouraging emigration and a population death spiral?
RE: fertility trends--I suspect, though I can't prove, that this is a self-correcting problem as the people who don't want kids die off without kids and the people who do want kids raise kids who want kids. By 2100 or so, I think the West will be back at replacement.
'Many traditional conservatives seem to have this conceit that at some point America will “come to its senses,” or that if the country stays on its current path, somehow reality itself will impose discipline, which will lead to a crash, which will cause people to repent.
Few of them consider the possibility that the left and its cultural influences could win and the country still go on basically fine. This is basically the scenario Greer paints, and it’s far from unlikely.'
You think that scenario is far from unlikely? The left and its cultural influences are poison, to birthrates, mental health, and many other topics that have been discussed in your columns. How could the country still go on basically fine?
Even the Soviet Union, a much worse country by any measure, lasted 70 years - even in the face of massive external wars and pressures. Rome lasted hundreds of years after its decline set in. Why would the USA experience some major collapse or reversal in a very short period of time?
I guess I don't understand your phrase "basically fine" if it applies to the Soviet Union. Does it just mean that the country, as a political entity, has not dissolved?
Consider Rome. A slave society based on great evil. And it yet remained technologically advanced, largely peaceful internally, great economy, lots of cultural flourishing. It went on like this for a very, very long time. Choosing the "wrong" moral approach did not cause them to fail in the short term. If you read the Old Testament, there are endless laments about the wicked prospering, and wondering why God wasn't doing anything. The parable of Lazarus and the rich man shows that a reckoning often lies beyond this world.
So, to continue to clarify, your only criterion is avoiding dissolution of the political entity. No matter how much human misery is produced in the nation or empire, it is "basically fine" if the nation or empire continues to exist.
Basically fine = continues to function well on operational criteria. Conservatives have tended to believe that choosing the wrong policy will result in collapse or something of that nature, leaving them to pick up the pieces. But what if that doesn't happen.
I went over to First Things to read Reno's response to you, Aaron. He's obviously a smart guy, and he writes very well (although perhaps not quite with Neuhaus's snap), but I think he's missing the point on Dewey, especially.
Reno argues, essentially, that nobody reads -- or cites -- Dewey that much anymore, so his influence has waned. But I work in the education field, and I see the influence of Dewey and his contemporaneous progressives *everywhere*. Dewey's pragmatic, progressive vision of education is the very air that's breathed amongst professional 'educators'. No one argues for or cites that which is ubiquitous.
X/Twitter is a tough game, one would think a million views on a topic like that would be worth 10K new followers.
If you were someone like Richard Florida, by exploring every subtlety of your article and X post you would now be set for the next 5 years. At least two books, regular articles in mainstream media and many speeches. I understand that you are an analyst at heart and this is not your approach, but maybe you could develop a broader discussion around this topic that more people would relate to, it is clear there is interest.
I read a popular South Korean novel earlier this year, 'Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop' by Hwang Bo-Reum. A sweet story about a lady who runs a bookshop. What struck me about it, however, was how anti-romantic relationship it was. (Spoilers coming up:) Pretty much no one in the book is in a happy relationship. They're either unhappily married, or else happily single or divorced. We're treated to a few lengthy discourses on how liberating divorce is. The heroine looks for a while like she's going to get together with the love interest ... but ultimately she doesn't. In their downtime, the characters are happiest when they're chastely chilling with friends of their own sex. The novel really goes out of its way to rub all this in.
The novel, note well, is not a screed by some blue-haired harpy; it's thoroughly mainstream. I was lent it by a conventional, politically middle-of-the-road (and of course single) Korean friend. Admirable as Korean culture is in so many ways, there really does seem to be something unhealthy going on there where marriage and fertility are concerned.
Romantic love, at least within marriage, is still a relatively novel concept in most East Asian cultures. I remember some years ago a major ministry (IIRC it was Open Doors) happened to do a marriage seminar for Chinese pastors and their wives. It was received enthusiastically, with many saying something like, "We have never heard any of this before."
One might assume leaders in the Church would at least know Christian concepts of marriage, but since so much of it is culturally-determined, in practice, that's a flawed assumption.
Thanx for the video of Lutheran theologian Jordan Cooper , it makes me feel better about my career and life(retired now). I very much look forward to his book on Luther, and Luthers’ view of the stations in life and their duties.
His book on Liturgical Worship has been very helpful as I was raised Catholic, was evangelical for four decades (Assembly of God and Cavalry chapel), became LCMS as result of looking for a church choir to sing in 5 years ago.
I had no idea 🤔you could celebrate a liturgy and still be a faithful son of the reformation‼️
I'm sure Cooper would phrase it differently, but Lutheranism has a strong "bloom where you are planted" vibe in which you should resignedly remain in the station you were allocated in life.
I was raised in a lower middle class neighborhood in Southeast Portland OR. My dad was a railroad carman (inspector). The Air Force put me in technical path in electronics where I lived out my working years.
I suspect my dad would have seen me as a white collar worker, if he had witnessed me move between the Electronics laboratory and my cubicle.
My technical school associate degree and numerous federal licenses qualify me as an uneducated man, to those who hold the chivalric crests of the bachelors, masters, and PhD.
It’s easy to look at the vast differences in prosperity between North Korea and South Korea and conclude that South Korea has won… but when the South Korean birthrate is the lowest in the world while North Korea is still around replacement level, who will have really won 50 years from now?
NK's population is probably also below replacement, though markedly higher than SK.
NK maintains its fertility advantage not by pursuing what's next, but by trying to keep itself socially frozen in time. There's a reason no regime on Earth resembles the Kim regime: entropy is acting against it. The House of Kim will fall, and when it does, NK will become more of a "normal" country, whether that means more like the PRC or more like SK. When the shock comes, fertility can easily drop lower than ever. Just look at Eastern Europe. Also, at that time, all the young people in the North will want to move South.
I do think the question of South Korea's future is interesting though, especially as their population pyramid is about to get very weird much sooner than 50 years from now -- closer to 20-30. Will it allow itself to depopulate, or will it invite in mass immigration? Would it even be able to attract enough immigrants to make a difference? Indonesia and the Philippines have the numbers and near-replacement TFRs -- but dropping fast, and Korea is a cold and alien place for them.
South Korean culture is extremely popular across the world and especially in Southeast Asia, so I don’t think there would any lack of women willing to move to SK and marry into Korean society. The future, then, would probably look more mixed: half-Korean, half-SEA/EA/white/black kids will be more common. Korean society would likely have to change its idea of Koreanness to one more like the West.
The same goes for the other East Asian countries. China is solving its gender imbalance by having their men go to Africa to work and find wives. Whether or not Chinese society will see half-Chinese half-African kids as truly Chinese will be interesting to see play out… but nothing the government couldn’t socially engineer.
Japan… no idea. Japan has always been an oddball when it comes to anything.
You know, that’s actually a really interesting thought that I hadn’t given due consideration to. Could the “passport bro” scale up to the point of becoming demographically relevant and perhaps even normative, in response to a revolt against marriage by native women?
In effect, this would forge a new people much as the Mestizo populations of Latin America were forged by a combination of Spanish men and local women — but with the direction of migration in reverse.
Though my understanding of the math is that SK’s rapid aging and the initial stages of its depopulation spiral are basically a fait accompli at this point. The thickest part of their population pyramid is 50-54 years old today. So things are going to keep getting weirder for a good while, unless you think lots of today’s 50-year-old S. Korean men are going to suddenly start taking foreign wives and having 3 kids with them.
But maybe today’s S. Korean 10-year-olds or 20-year-olds will start doing that, and that’s how they’ll arrest the spiral. Maybe.
Possibly. No one can accurately predict the future, because never in thousands of years of human civilization have we had below-replacement fertility for much of the world. It used to be that there were too too many people being born (see Malthus and the “population bomb” predictions), but now there’s too little. But I do think that Asia will have “Mestizo” populations as women in developed countries don’t want to have kids while women in less developed countries are happy to marry a men from a more developed country.
It’s possible that South Korea will also just turn things around in terms of their gender war. The west had hundreds of years of liberalism before second-wave feminism took off, so feminism wasn’t so drastic a change. While South Korea changed so much in a few decades. Maybe things just have to settle down.
I agree with your first paragraph. Incidentally, I've started working on some essays on the fertility crash in my spare time. A lot of it is just collecting ideas from other people that I find interesting. If I ever finish enough of them to get started, I'll launch a Substack with them. I consider it most likely the macro-historical event of our age.
The fate of the West is really the whole question. Is fertility in the West stabilizing and NE Asia possibly converging towards it? Or is fertility in the West converging towards NE Asia?
Also we don't really know what life in an ultra-gerontocratic South Korea, circa 2050, is going to be like. Will it create opportunities for young people that ultimately encourage family formation and breaking the cycle? Or will it make life as a young person even more unpleasant and family formation even less normative, encouraging emigration and a population death spiral?
RE: fertility trends--I suspect, though I can't prove, that this is a self-correcting problem as the people who don't want kids die off without kids and the people who do want kids raise kids who want kids. By 2100 or so, I think the West will be back at replacement.