Posted on 02/25/2008 1:13:10 PM PST by Caleb1411
Civilization depends on the health of the traditional family.
That sentiment has become a truism among social conservatives, who typically can't explain what they mean by it. Which is why it sounds like right-wing boilerplate to many contemporary ears.
The late Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman believed it was true, but he also knew why. In 1947, he wrote a massive book to explain why latter-day Western civilization was now living through the same family crisis that presaged the fall of classical Greece and Rome. His classic "Family and Civilization," which has just been republished in an edited version by ISI Press, is a chillingly prophetic volume that deserves a wide new audience.
In all civilizations, Zimmerman theorized, there are three basic family types. The "trustee" family is tribal and clannish, and predominates in agrarian societies. The "domestic" family model is a middle type centering on the nuclear family ensconced in fairly strong extended-family bonds; it's found in civilizations undergoing rapid development. The final model is the "atomistic" family, which features weak bonds between and within nuclear families; it's the type that emerges as normative in advanced civilizations.
When the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, the strong trustee families of the barbarian tribes replaced the weak, atomistic Roman families as the foundation of society.
Churchmen believed a social structure that broke up the ever-feuding clans and gave the individual more freedom would be better for society's stability and spent centuries reforming the European family toward domesticity. The natalist worldview advocated by churchmen knit tightly religious faith, family loyalty and child bearing. From the 10th century on, the domestic family model ruled Europe through its greatest cultural efflorescence. But then came the Reformation and the Enlightenment, shifting culture away from tradition and toward the individual. Thus, since the 18th century, the atomistic family has been the Western cultural norm.
Here's the problem: Societies ruled by the atomistic family model, with its loosening of constraints on its individual members, quit having enough children to carry on. They become focused on the pleasures of the present. Eventually, these societies expire from lack of manpower, which itself is a manifestation of a lack of the will to live.
It happened to ancient Greece. It happened to ancient Rome. And it's happening to the modern West. The sociological parallels are startling.
Why should expanding individual freedoms lead to demographic disaster? Because cultures that don't organize their collective lives around the family create policies and structures that privilege autonomous individuals at the family's expense.
In years to come, the state will attempt economic incentives, or something more draconian, to spur childbirth. Europe, which is falling off a demographic cliff, is already offering economic incentives, with scant success. Materialist measures only seem to help at the margins.
Why? Zimmerman was not religious, but he contended the core problem was a loss of faith. Religions that lack a strong pro-fertility component don't survive over time, he observed; nor do cultures that don't have a powerfully natalist religion.
Why should we read Zimmerman today? For one thing, the future isn't fated. We might learn from history and make choices that avert the calamities that overtook Greece and Rome.
Given current trends, that appears unlikely. Therefore, the wise will recognize that the subcultures that survive the demographic collapse will be those that sacrificially embrace natalist values over materialist ones — which is to say, those whose religious convictions inspire them to have relatively large families, despite the social and financial cost.
That doesn't mean most American Christians, who have accepted modernity's anti-natalism. No, that means traditionalist Catholics, "full-quiver" Protestants, ultra-Orthodox Jews, pious Muslims and other believers who reject modernity's premises.
Like it or not, the future belongs to the fecund faithful.
It still seems to me that he's setting up a dichotomy, but you might be right after all.
Was that supposed to be an insult? Because it actually made me crack up. This might come as a shock to you, but not everyone one FR is a Christian.
Honestly, I had never heard that definition of Cougar until just a week ago.
I was going to say that if you cant find the young men then you have to make them yourself, but that’s just well....icky.
This isn’t my family, though my great-grandmother had 16 kids. This is the great Duggar family, the future of this country.
If you ever read Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal, he brings up the “Roe Effect”, essentially the states with the lowest birthrates, also have high abortion rates, and also are the most liberal. Essentially they are aborting away future voters into irrelevency.
Jim Bob Duggar is a Conservative rebublican, and you see 17 future republican votes in this picture.
Omg that womens Vagina is like a clown Car
Heh. Just celebrated the birth of my 20th grandkid.
I'm for the solid satisfaction of child-blessed marriage.
It does save you from the leprosy of loneliness. Over the long run, that counts for a lot.
You are going to be mighty lonely when you are in your seventies and all your friends are dead. I hope the memories of your last vacation or useless toy you bought will sustain you then. When you pass, I hope you realize that within a few weeks, people will forget that you ever existed, and you will have no impact on the world whatsoever.
When I am old, however, I will be comforted by may family, and when I die, I will live forever, in the genes of my decendents.
Sex with a purpose is so not hot.
Oh, I love you, too, sweetie!
Count me in for now too!
It’s also odd is that Dreher is describing the Victorian family as “atomistic.”
How are you?? I haven’t stumbled on you in ages!!
Oh yeah *lol* Marriage, work and now nursing school ruined my home freepathons :D
Unless your kids don’t like you. Really the idea of breeding so you’ll have company in your dotage and genetic immortality is pretty lame, shallow and ego driven. Kind of funny how many people call those without kids egotistical and shallow then throw around their even more egotistical and shallow reason to have kids.
If you wanna have kids great, enjoy them. Not everybody likes kids though. I have never liked kids, I can remember as far back as age 5 clearly preferring the company of adults. Don’t like em, never liked em, never gonna like em. And if you don’t like that TFB.
LOL! Yeah, but you’re going to nursing school! That’s great!
Keeps me busy that’s for sure. Thanks for remembering me :-)
I agree. But who...?
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