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Throughout history, the happy convergence of men and women — and their by-product, children — has driven human civilisation. No less than Freud saw this need for family as intrinsic: “Eros and Ananke [love and necessity],” he writes in Civilisation and its Discontents, “have become the parents of human civilisation too.”
Yet today we are lurching towards a society where sexual intimacy and family life are being undermined at the most basic levels. The impact can be seen in shifting dating patterns and declining rates of marriage, family formation and childbirth. And this is no longer a Western disease; a majority of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level; by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to experience population decline.
To some extent, the roots of this war between the sexes is economic, exacerbated by the global “cost-of-living” crisis stemming from house price increases relative to incomes, higher energy and food costs. With hopes of a steady career and home ownership fading, many young people now choose to, or are forced to, adopt a lifestyle incompatible with marriage and family.
This is most evidenced in the West by the rapid shift away from not only family but heterosexual engagement overall. But in East Asia, the breakdown in male-female relations is if anything, starker. In Japan, for instance, the harbinger of modern Asian demographics, one in four people in their twenties and thirties are virgins. Indeed, the Japanese even have a term — herbivores — for the passive, desexed generation of young men.
So too with China, which, despite once being renowned for its strong familial culture, is now home to 200 million unmarried adults. Once virtually unimaginable, the proportion of adults aged 17-36 living alone in China has risen to nearly 70%. Marriage and childbirth, notes one Chinese Gen Z, have become “almost synonymous with the stress of life for us young people”.
And this does not simply represent a demographic crisis — but inevitably a political one too. We cannot know the political implications of the current war of the sexes in societies such as China and Russia, where civic life is strictly controlled. But in the US, new fractures are becoming more pronounced. Most obviously, women, particularly single women, now provide the base for progressive politics. Similarly in Canada, according to a 2020 poll, women favoured the Liberals by two to one while men slightly tilted to the conservatives.
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SubscribeTo describe a decline in sexual relations as a war between the sexes is sensationalist hyperbole.
Yes, but he did talk about the political gap as well. I can see that getting bigger. As more men give up on romance they will be less inclined to hold the liberal views that they hope will endear them to women.
The demographic collapse is not hyperbole.
I agree that the demographic collapse is a serious problem, but suggest that describing the cause as ‘war between the sexes’ is hyperbolic, and unhelpful. There are a number of reasons why people aren’t pairing up- economic, lack of confidence in the future, a general breakdown in what constitutes society, increasing levels of selfishness, and the confusion around what constitutes a meaningful life.
And full access to porn from the age young boys get their first smartphone.
Quite so, the effects of this have been disastrous.
I don’t understand how this contributes to people not pairing up.
Access to porn can create unrealistic expectations of sex leading to inability to form meaningful relationships.
Okay, Not so much not pairing up but damaging the relationship. But if we’re talking about a relationship that is unsustainable then there may be, and probably are, other factors besides sex. It’s interesting how, whatever the reasons are, they seem to override the need for companionship.
“…they seem to override the need for companionship.”
But they don’t, actually. They can fulfill the immediate need for sexual release, but any need for intimate companionship remains unsatisfied. And companionship is a longer term proposition and it goes unaddressed.
Which I believe is what we are seeing today.
Because then you don’t need a partner in order to experience sexual fulfilment.
How so?
That’s the right question. Not experiencing the fulfilment of a mutually supportive sexual relationship – for both sexes – is to not understand what the word “fulfilment” means in this context.
I’d want to unwind what happens during sex.
I think that the male and female basic sex drives differ in that the common male sex drive is frequent and insistent, while the female drive is cyclical and insistent. This leads to males wanting sex at time that female are much less motivated by drive. So they compromise if they seek a longer term commitment from the man.
If this repeats sufficiently, a non-sexual bond develops between them–intimate companionship–and both sexes feel benefited by this.
But such a connection typically does not happen during the early sexual encounters.
So yes, males can feel a mechanical sexual fulfillment from pornography and masturbation. They lack the interpersonal fulfillment of a longer-term sexual relationship, but really, if they haven’t already experienced such a bonding, they can do fairly well without it. Women less so, I think.
Young women see this stuff too, most of which is not very friendly, and are aware of how popular it is with their male acquaintances. Imagine how that must make them feel.
Previously, everyone knew that men have filthy imaginations but no one had to actually see it. It took some effort to find real porn back then.
Women are not always angels in this department. The difference is more that women vary on a larger continuum than men – from really not liking sex at all right through to being into some pretty wild stuff.
I agree with this *range* but would add that within my experience, the *frequency* of biological need is much more in males.
This is to say that while women can be more uninhibited than men, they are less frequently driven to the sex act.
I think that both sexes no longer feel the need to make behavioral compromises to each other in order to feel “fulfilled” in the short term. I’m using “fulfilled” term to represent the popular idealized concept of a satisfactory and stable life for the immediate the future.
I came of age before widespread and available birth control was available. At that time young males felt driven to find sexual release, and both masturbation and homosexuality were stigmatizing, so the sole outlet was a receptive female.
From the opposite side I’m going to have to speculate, but please take this as an honest and well-meaning speculation. Females of the era felt the need for security and protection; direct sex drive much less so. High earning employment was not a readily available option, (implying, correctly I think, that security and protection can be purchased) and security and protection was a role associated with a strong male.
So you had at that time males motivated to seek females, and females were receptive to male attentions with the end result of marital bonding, ideally. All of this was supported by popular social norms in no uncertain terms. All of this activity, that by implication led to permanent pair bonding, was lauded.
But as birth control and advanced employment opportunities emerged, females no longer required males to provide lifetime security and protection: these could be purchased with money by selective housing. Similarly, financial security into the future is also covered by salary, and the inconvenience of pregnancy can be avoided at will so heterosexual encounters can become recreational, or cathartic only. A personal relationship need not develop.
And ultimately, why have any real commerce with a male, at all? In my judgement males can be very demanding and insensitive in ways that make feminine sensibilities uncomfortable. I know this from looking within myself, over the years, but much of it is directly related to insistent and fairly frequent sex drive, with only a rudimentary need to permanently bond with a female.
So if homosexual encounters become de-stigmatized, why is it necessary to accommodate typical male behaviors (including reflexive dominance), which can be annoying and unsettling?
And if you reverse this, it also allows men to have sexual release without any compromises toward feminine sensibilities, especially personal bonding. And for men’s relatively insistent and frequent sexual needs, ready availability of pornography starting at any age, combined with a movement toward non-judgmental attitudes over masturbation, from the male side there is no reason to compromise to achieve a level of mechanical satisfaction.
So neither sex feels any need to achieve a palliative level of sexual satisfaction that includes any sort of compromise, at all.
But since all of these self-gratifying behaviors are short-term, what’s left out of the equation is the *personal* relationship that ideally develops between a man and a woman in a heterosexual union of some sort. And this lack of a relationship is, I believe, harder on females because they also carry a maternal drive, which requires some form of male participation, even if by proxy, and this drive has very long-term requirements. Contrasted to the male biological drives, these tend to require some level of extended external support.
Anyway, it looks to me that this lack of interpersonal relationship between the sexes is perhaps the largest source of social malaise that we see around us every day. And because the immediate biological drives are easily satisfied for both sexes, only the long-term drive to bear children is a roadblock, but it can be overcome by artificial insemination, so…
Exactly
The reason you list all seem to me to be situations that would *encourage* individuals to cluster for mutual support.
Agreed but that is not because of a war between the sexes…
Possibly. But to describe it as an emerging phenomenon in an already-established battle of the sexes is not.
I think you are right about the pre-existence of the “battle”, but I view it as a mis-match. It works this way, I think…
Most males want/need sexual release more frequently than most females. Males are consistently dirven while females are cyclically driven. What it amounts to is that mostly, men will be *ready* all gthe time,and it is necessary to be ready in this manner to hit the cyclkical requirements of procreation. This is an evolved response to compensate for the human male’s inability to reliably detect female estrus.
But this means that males may well be rejected when they are ready by females who are neither cyclically driven, nor feel the need to compromise by having sex, anyway.
Females don’t like domination any more than males, and yet males routinely seek to dominate in whatever circumstance they find themselves, thus forcing the females to compromise *if they want consistent male attention*.
It’s a tension resulting from mis-matched sex drives.
Interesting article, but I think it leaves out a vital element in the argument, which is the internet. The contemporary tendency to live, as a single person, is being helped along by people spending time in the semi-satisfying, virtual world the internet offers.
We humans are becoming increasingly dehumanised. I think it actually began with contraception, especially the Pill, which artificially and effectively modified women’s bodies, to enable them to have an erotic life free of the fear of pregnancy. Of course it also meant they were more reliable as workers in a capitalist society (frame that as ‘free to pursue a career’ if you prefer).
Now, as the battle between the sexes has become a war, or is it a stand off ? people have the virtual world that the internet offers to comfort them in their aloneness, as well as influence them to accept the new reality. Who needs a ‘misogynistic’ bloke or a carping feminist to live with when you can have it all your own way in peace instead ?
Imagine no internet and no mobile phone, people would have to interact again, face to face. Will it ever be that way again ? I hope so for our sake.
Although some people go to extremes of isolation, most i think are looking to find a balance between private space and social interaction, which may or may not include an intimate relationship.
Those who’ve never known other than living with the internet will have to negotiate this without the benefit of having known how it was entirely possible to live without it. I find, in ‘later life’ the need for my own space whilst enjoying a very strong relationship with an equally independent woman. We wouldn’t have met without the internet, so we might well have been more isolated without it.
We both have children and grandchildren, so it’ll be fascinating to witness how this develops. I remain optimistic. Life goes on, just differently.
There’s definitely a good, if not wonderful side to the internet (that’s half the trouble unfortunately). I was just pointing out how it may be contributing to the situation described in the article.
That’s the problem with most things we humans create is’nt it ? There’s almost always a good side and a bad side.
Yes, and it could be said the internet is a reflection of our humanity, amplified and ubiquitised (if that’s a word!). Coping with what’s being reflected back to us is something we’re only just beginning to navigate our way around; i’m more optimistic we’ll succeed than many, who seem to become dragged down by the downsides.
Yes. But the internet has that very insidious additive quality built right in.
For instance, many artists I know freely tell me that they used to draw, sketch or doodle all the time. It was a default activity since they were kids. But starting when they got their first smart phone they lost that habit and now they just pick up their phone instead.
The phones themselves have changed our very nature even more than the first decades of TV did.
Yes, but being on the internet itself is not a bad thing. It’s what you spend your time engaged with that makes the difference. The internet has given me access to vast amounts of information on any subject i’m involved with at the time.
That ‘vast amount of information’, the original promise of the internet, is truly a blessing.
On the other hand the addictive quality is a deliberate built-in feature controlled by the tech companies. It could and should be held in check by legislation.
I’m not holding my breath.
Personally, I hate the control that the internet has over our lives but I don’t think that it is dehumanising because this starts earlier, with the birth of a child.
As you say, the Pill started it all. In the old days a man met a woman and a baby was the result – a sort of collateral damage. The babies and children needed feeding and clothing and that was it. Today, as babies are delayed and delayed, when they finally arrive they are to be treasured and treated as young gods, to be swaddled in cotton wool as a protection against damage, to be kept in the house away from the evils lurking outside. So instead of teaching the children to be adults and how to interact with other adults as a preparation for life, the children are not sufficiently prepared to deal with the life outside. Much safer to cuddle up with the internet.
And here is the problem. Having children is a biological function to keep the race alive. But today it is well known that there are too many people. So the thinkers, the educated middle classes, see their careers as more important – which is fine except that not everybody is part of the educated middle classes. Today we are not experiencing a transition to zero people but a movement to a point when no-one has the experience to contribute to UnHerd.
“But today it is well known that there are too many people.”
Did you mean to say this? If there’s a problem with declining relationships and fertility rates then maybe that’s a good thing. But are there too many people and if so too many people for what? What is the problem, a declinging birth rate or declining relationship rate,
and because of improved healthcare many babies who would have been too weak to survive now do so, so the gene pool is being steadily degraded.
That is proved beyond a doubt with every trip to a Walmart. Sadly.
Boy, that statement implies a whole lot!
I’m afraid that doesn’t make any sense. Not all conditions are genetic. And those with serious genetic weakness would surely be a small minority because of their genetic weakness. If the gene pool was being degraded then there would be less people surely.
A quick reply is not possible. I was going through a Malthusian moment.
It is important to understand the reasons for thinking about human population levels.
For example, the only real and effective answer to climate change that exists for the foreseeable future in a significant reduction in human population.
But if one is considering the social policies that require a continued population growth, then the population needs to expand.
Quite agree. The author assumes that single people are lonely, tragic and hopelessly lost. No doubt many are, yet people are choosing this lifestyle and will be perfectly happy and content with it, especially with the comforts that modern technology brings.
It’s not a ‘problem’ that needs solving, it’s the evolution of human society on the foundation of education, technology and liberation. Celebrate it, because it’s here to stay.
Oh, it’s ‘way, ‘way too early to see if this is a sustainable evolutionary trend, or an evolutionary dead-end.
Feminism identified men as the enemy; as patriarchal oppressors of women.
Whether this is an accurate assessment is irrelevant. It’s become an accepted fact.
Regardless, it’s hardly surprising that today there’s increasing animosity and distrust between men and women, which results in fewer marriages and children.
The intrinsic bias of the legal system and family courts in favour of females is a compounding factor.
The current path is not going to change… if anything it’s only going to accelerate.
The government is going to have to deal with a rapidly shrinking population in perpetuity.
” Who needs a ‘misogynistic’ bloke or a carping feminist to live with when you can have it all your own way in peace instead ?”
Yes. Exactly.
It takes care of the short-term, and humans are very poor and inconsistent in dealing with the longer-term.
I’m not sure about these stories that largely consist of referencing other stories or statistical research. And i’m not convinced by stats either.
”The impact can be seen in shifting div > p:nth-of-type(2) > a”>dating patterns and div > p:nth-of-type(2) > a:nth-of-type(2)”>declining rates of marriage, family formation and div > p:nth-of-type(2) > a:nth-of-type(3)”>childbirth.”
This reference to a decline in marriage gives no facts about declining rates of marriage. In fact the story is largely about infertility and it mentions, only in passing, that the decline in marriage needs to be considered in relation to infertility numbers.
There may be something going on with relationships between the sexes but I don’t think articles like this really tell us anything.
‘A young man shouldn’t marry yet; an old man should never marry.’
A simultaneous question is the increased proportion of the population with many children, already a source of problems in Israel.
“What is needed is nothing less than a rediscovery of romantic love and embracing the value of nurturing offspring.”
I am not at all sure this is the answer. Unless what it means is that we need to innovate our way to a future in which this is a by-product of other advances in the human condition.
The nuclear family – a thing that I support in theory and the obvious decimation of which I regret – came to be a norm simply because it was the most effective means of meeting a number of different human needs within viable social norms of the time and place. But those needs were themselves a product of time and place, and they are changing.
I don’t think it is any longer possible, for instance, for the nuclear family to work without the traditional sex-based split of roles and responsibilities. I don’t say this because I want to return to such things, I’m just observing that if we want to destroy the particular norm of traditional sex-based splits of roles and responsibilities, the traditional nuclear family is going to be a casualty of doing so. What we cannot afford to do is destroy the norm in question and then complain that the consequences are both unexpected and a social justice issue. That’s how stupid children behave, not rational adults.
And while it is perfectly possible to reverse traditional roles in the family and for same-sex couples to raise families perfectly well, that does not imply that such measures are extensible to society in general: ie, these are examples of how things can be done differently, but they do not fulfil the much more demanding requirements for becoming a norm. There are lots of men who will accept a homemaker role, but there are also lots of men who never would, there is an increasing number of women who won’t, and this is partly what explains the rise in childlessness and single lives.
My point here is that I don’t think we are going to solve this problem by harking back to a different age when society had norms that appear – with the dubious benefit of a form of hindsight that looks a little like it’s through rose-tinted spectacles – to be the answer to the problem. The problem is that those norms don’t work any more, not that we stopped using something that worked.
I think “norms” usually establish themselves in an evolutionary sort of way, ie, they evolve naturally over time in response to circumstances or “needs” as you say. This is why ideas like ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘the oppression of women’ are fallacies.
Whatever human behaviour potentiates human flourishing will become “a norm” in fact.
Artificially engineering behaviour by edict is bound to cause trouble.
“Artificially engineering behavior by edict” is always a “Brave New World”.
I wholly agree. Social engineering doesn’t work even when carried out by clever and honourable people, and certainly not when done by the kind of clowns who are instinctively drawn to the prospect of imposing their ideas on everyone else.
Unfortunately, the new norm has already arrived. And it’s pretty miserable. We, as a species, are good at living in misery. We’ve had a lot of practice. So what we need isn’t any old “norm”. We need a better one.
A Good World War can quickly fix things.
.
But there is a more humane solution – to deprive women of the right to vote (but not the right to be elected!).
If there are lots of lonely men, and lots of lonely women, the solution appears to be staring us in the face. Get these people together!
So why is this not happening? Have we produced generations of people who are unlovable even to the desperate? Are everyone’s expectations too high? Are we lonely, but incapable of making relationships work? Are our views of the opposite sex now so negative that we would rather be unhappy alone?
I find that many people are alone and lonely precisely because they don’t make the effort to call people, to organize get-togethers, or even to reciprocate when first invited to an occasion. Rack it up to a combination of laziness and selfishness – inertia!!
Many people are just too selfish these days to maintain a healthy relationship. It’s really that simple.
I don’t think anything is that simple. What people are we talking about? And i’m not sure what “many” means. If it means most then the larger part of society are engaging in healthy relationships, far more than those choosing not to do it. But you’re talking about maintaining a relationship when the problem appears to be in not even beginning them. I find it hard to believe that people would choose loneliness over even attempting to start a relationship, that people just refuse to engage because they’re selfish. So to me there are other things behind this situation, if it’s really as big a problem as suggested.
Good point, but perhaps it is that people are losing the habit, and therefore the ease, of interacting with each other face to face as a result of the single life. Also, babies and children learn to read faces and therefore other people by having a close bond and relationship with their mothers during the first few years of life, take that learning experience away and even face to face interaction becomes fraught and difficult.
Combine those problems with the internet, identity politics and the readiness to take offence, or feel self-righteous hostility towards certain groups, then your field of potential friendships becomes increasingly narrow, your sense of self more and more vulnerable. A vicious circle.
Presumably the majority of schools are still co-ed. School is where you begin to interact with the opposite sex, then the workplace. It as always a bit of a challenge as a young male to take your relationship with girls a bit further than just friendship. But despite the anxiety you do it, You take your knocks and learn along the way. But the girls did not make it easy. You needed a group of friends, male and female, to absurd the knocks. That’s how you got feedback too. But things came together somehow. This does suggest to me the importance of socialising. How does it work these days?
“How does it work these days ?”
I don’t know, but the news seems to suggest problems, apparently boys assaulting girls regularly (alleged), boys doing less well academically (evidence based) and young people generally not trusting each other as much (hearsay).
Personally, my experience during the late 1960s and 70s was co-ed primary schools but a girls high school from 11 – 18 yrs, for which I am grateful. We mixed with boys in our spare time via family and neighbour connections, common interest pastimes, at discos and parties, all great fun with a few broken hearts and tears along the way. School was a respite from the excitement of boys.
Different times.
The picture of the author is not Joel Kotkin. Or Joel Kotkin is not the author, unless there are now two Joel Kotkins writing for UnHerd.
In sharp contrast, an increasing proportion of men, particularly in the working class, are embracing Right-wing causes.
When the left side of the spectrum has been explicitly anti-male for multiple generations, this falls under the heading of foreseeable consequences. In the US, at least, every initiative aimed at opening new doors for women has come at the expense of shutting them for men, as if the whole thing is a zero-sum game.
The results include female-heavy college enrollment, which skews the dating pool on campus and later, in the real world. It’s why we’ve had the rash of social media videos in which 30ish professional women claim, through bitter tears, how happy they are being alone. It’s why there is a generation or so of aimless young men who are more interested in video games than dating.
The article speaks to societal norms such as romantic love and having children while ignoring that almost anything that smacks of a traditional life has been steadily attacked while the aberrant has been normalized. If there is a plan to remake society, one would be hard-pressed to find a better starting point than the destruction of the nuclear family.
Agreed. The war on “toxic masculinity” without any plausible role models for “healthy masculinity” hasn’t helped men. And — if we’re concerned about declining families, birth rates, and heterosexual couples — the emphasis on careers over motherhood for women hasn’t helped either. Finally, add the praise that society heaps on single-parents, and it’s no wonder that the family is in collapse.
A paranoid person might flip your last sentence: If you want to completely remake society, you have to start by destroying the family. The family gives stability to individuals and helps them resist massive societal changes.
Nothing in the comments about the author’s use of the terms liberal vs. right-wing. It’s very telling. I never understood why believing in borders, God and fiscal responsibility is described as right-wing.
Same situation with “pro-choice” vs. “anti-abortion”.
Why isn’t “pro-life”, which is the term used by such folks, ever acknowledged by those on the left? Any author that practices such bias loses their credibility instantly.
Not mentioned here is the overwhelming impact PORN is having on our society. A simple search on google scholar will bring up up myriad studies, books, social media and essays with much to say on the subject. Young women are frightened to the point of delaying entering into any relationships with men even after a glimpse of porn. Some young women have reported transitioning to the other gender to avoid sex with men. Most men have reported becoming impotent with a real woman after too many hours watching porn. Expectations of women to perform as portrayed in porn are beyond the boundaries of most women and indeed are causing increasing bodily injuries that woman have rarely had. The question is why no political movement is tackling this issue that threatens the very underpinnings (aside from climate change) of our society?
Sounds a bit hysterical to me. Doubtless there are people who are badly affected by porn, just like drinking, gambling, eating too much etc. But it’s not the end of civilisation.
More likely men are using porn because they don’t have a girlfriend, or remain unsatisfied even if they have.
Do female masturbatory habits have any similar negative effects? Does use of vibrators make it hard for women to achieve orgasm normally? Do they become less motivated to enter into a relationship. Do they become desensitised in any way? Does watching fake men in films (even mainstream twaddle like Top Gun Maverick) make it harder for them to become aroused by average men?
Or is it just male behaviour that is problematic?
I believe we in the near future – already now – (will) see a lot of family widows and widowers. By that I mean that the disintegration of families leave, in particular, the one parent families in a fragile position. This is strengthened by the collective urge to pursue an individual direction in life free from the parental boundaries and limits, which are presented as too narrow etc., instead of giving the whole picture of the importance of families, relationships, limits, tasks, obligations which all of them give the notion of freedom its content. Many years ago there was an English study stating that young people found it boring being grown up and that having children was not funny. If absence of boredom and fun are the key notions and guiding lines into a grown up life then no wonder young people remain life long toddlers.
As an aside, and what does somewhat explains the lower commitment levels from a male point of view – what is really ridiculous is that, on one hand, it has become perfectly acceptable for women in particular to talk about a”sex war” and paint men as some kind of oppressor class. And as this report points out, women largely vote for “progressive” causes that undermine the country and culture and are hostile to men and masculine values.
But when it comes to marriage and relationships, those same women expect a high earning, “traditional” man – and wouldn’t even look at “low status” men – who would end up.shouldering the burden of paying the mortgage and child support, even after divorce. Or expect men, those men they are supposedly at war with, to continue to do the heavy lifting in terms of the military, infrastructure, etc.
All that would make the average man wonder – would you enter a long term relationship and commit your lifetime earnings to someone who regards you as the “enemy”, only interested in you as a cash cow, and is likely to make your house a battlefield?
Sadly, I think this is part of the situation, but I wonder if it will last, change happens all the time. Only 60 years ago (within my lifetime) none of us could have imagined life being as we live it now, and I do know some young people who are happily married and committed to each other with families, it is’nt hopeless.
To say that 60 years ago none of us could have imagined life as we now live it, isn’t wholly accurate. Numerous writers have warned us what life might be like if certain ominous trends aren’t halted. Much science-fiction has been concerned with what can happen when people turn over control of vital aspects of their lives to computers. So, while the situation isn’t hopeless, it’s difficult to be optimistic when the attitude that regards every new technology foisted upon us as “progress” by definition persists.
In 1995 a Church issued a document entitled “The Family a Proclamation to the World” in which they outlined the importance of family one particularly important paragraph came at the end
> Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.
It seems that they were quite prophetic if the current state of the world is anything to go by.
The world changes and the Cassandras predicting gloom and doom aren’t always right. We are in a transition period both politically and culturally. GenZ has upended culture more than any generation since the Boomers. Neoliberal economics has decimated the working class and created a chasm between an educated middle class and less educated workers. This divide has polarized and paralyzed our politics. Technology is doing more harm than good, social media and now AI fuel our discontent. Still, no one knows what the future will be like, and we would all be happier if we didn’t worry about it so much.
“Educated middle class” is an oxymoron.
The more educated people there are, the lower the average IQ of the “educated”. This is an obvious fact.By moving production to developing countries, corporations grow fat and are able to increase the bureaucratic apparatus, filling it with stupid and, as a result, aggressive and hysterical slackers, whose only merit is having a university degree. This scheme works until the first more or less serious shock. What we see now, COVID, then 2 wars, perfectly illustrates the complete inability of the West to respond to the challenges of the times.
Because of the various references above and below the line to “the nuclear family” as being the norm, here is my regular reminder that the 1950s were not the historic norm. (I apologise, I’m bored with myself for making this point yet again but so many Unherd contributors above and below the line have yet to break free from the notion that baby boomer childhoods were typical of all of history).
1. Women everywhere have always worked including in dirty, dangerous and manual jobs. These include:
– coal mining (England till the 1830s, France till 1850s);
– farming: peasantry/ plantation slaves/ smallholders;
– prostitution;
– nursing the elderly and sick, all varieties of bottom-wiping before antibiotics, sewers or hygiene;
– laundry;
– dung collecting for various purposes;
– small brewers;
– tea pickers / rice pickers / coffee and chocolate harvesters;
– the people who make your iphone/ipad/other electronics;
– mill workers / weavers / spinners (paid less than men so in lean times there were whole northern English towns where more women worked than men and husbands had to stay home with the kids);
And yet, historically, most of these women had kids. The 1950s ad-men style nuclear family wasn’t what held society together – if anything it evicted grandma and grandad from the ideal home (although not from many working class homes) and so was less socially cohesive than previous generations’ norms.
2. Men as well as women weren’t paid in money for much of history. Peasants were often paid in kind and by household.
3. Men (in the UK) achieved universal suffrage only 10 years before women (1918 vs 1928). Again, this didn’t stop people finding partners and having children (although the mass slaughter of young men in WW1 had an effect).
So women working (always have), women being paid and women voting are not the culprits of low birth rates.
What is? It’s the economy, stupid.
It is helpful I think to differentiate between “the nuclear family” and “the family”. ‘The nuclear family’ as a concept only appeared within academic studies in social sciences and anthropology during the 20th century, whereas ‘the family’ is ancient – from the Latin word familia for household.
One of the aims of Marxism and the Left is to dismantle ‘the family’, they want people’s loyalty to be to the state, not to husband or wife, parents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, and their close associates.
The family is one of the greatest of threats to left-wing ideologies of all kinds and the Left seek to undermine or belittle it in whatever way they can.
As far as I can tell the article does not blame the decline of ‘eros’ and the birthrate on women working, being paid or voting per se, but it does suggest that the breakdown of the family is creating unhappiness and loneliness.
Some good points there, it is however education of women beyond anything else that has led to lower birth rates.
Stop paying old people to be childless. Childless people should get only one half of Social Security payments because taxes are not enough to keep the Universal Basic Income Ponzi scheme going for people that do not contribute two new members to the pyramid scheme. You both need to pay taxes your whole working career and have at least two functioning children to keep the scheme going. Low IQ immigrants are not going to plug the wholes in this welfare racket.
According to the authors, “[Harris] has also called for div > p > a”>Medicare for all, essentially replacing employer-based healthcare , until she decided to backtrack from this unpopular stance.”
Unpopular? According to The Hill, “Sixty-nine percent of registered voters in the April 19-20 survey support providing medicare to every American.” https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/494602-poll-69-percent-of-voters-support-medicare-for-all/
I would suggest looking at classes rather then countries. Some classes and subcultures are not signed-up for the war-of-the-sexes, feminist model. And they will be the winners, ultimately. Nature always wins in the end.
Darwin’s wife wrote that he was actually quite depressed by Darwinism. He was a lifelong humanist, and the conflict between modern conceptions of humanity and the conflicting scientific facts depressed him. That’s why others like Huxley made most of his arguments for him.
Of course, Darwinism has become a dirty word now. Woe is us.
I think it all comes down to economics. The “sex war” stuff is just over egged.
There are just too many opportunities now, people are afraid to commit to one person (fomo), cheating is too easy with the internet, couples don’t last, the surrounding conditions do not favour the building of nuclear families.
This is happening everywhere, in all cultures – as the article claims – so we need to wake up to the blindingly obvious common factor. The Internet has already changed face to face behaviour and it’s not going to stop. My kids spend far more time on digital information exchanges in one form or another than they do on personal contacts, for both work and play. My elderly neighbours blithely announce they don’t go to the supermarket any more, at all, Covid showed them they didn’t need to. When I was a kid I might have expected a couple of parcels once or twice a year, now it’s once or twice a day. Widows I know are swiping away on their phones and laughing at the sheer abundance of people who want to meet them. My GP is now replaced by a ‘physician associate’ who phones me – and it works very well. In my whole life I never went on a ‘blind date’, now every date is a date with a stranger. My street doesn’t talk over the back fence anymore – there’s a street What’s app group busily failing to get to know each other better. Whatever it is, it’s not community as I always understood it.
“Will we survive the sex war?”
No. I hope not.
We don’t deserve to.
Time’s up for the human race.
We’ve begun the slow inevitable decline.
There is no solution.
The earth will go on without us.
It isn’t romantic love that is needed. It is spreading the truth about climate change, that it isn’t a crisis and that it won’t destroy the planet. Every kid I know under the age of 30 experiences anxiety and stress from this global hoax. (That and the cost of living.) The progressive pervasion of the education system is responsible for much here.
The west is the culture of the self which is anathema to family culture
A huge number of people are incapable of prioritising anyone else, even for a few hours a week.
When a dependent parent/grandparent can be outsourced at the first sign of assistance requirement, we are quickly becoming a species of entirely selfish outputs.
Mothers and fathers despairing online about ‘loss of identity’ when required to prioritise a newborn is a wake-up call that comes rather late in life and is a product of a selfish personal development.
Me-time, rather than family time, is seen as an essential feature of every day. Declining mental health and population numbers are not unconnected.
The demise of the religious community structures have not been replaced satisfactorily.