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March 2, 2006

The theists will out breed the rest

Last year I was reading The End of Faith, and I had a lot to say about the role of faith.

My closing remarks were this:

Secular liberalism delivers great wealth, but current demographic evidence suggests that their number gradually is replaced by religious immigrants or not all, what then? If, two hundred years from now, there are a quarter as many people living in the rich world, will it be judged a success, no matter how rich they are? Can an ideology that jeopardizes the genetic connection to posterity of its subscribers be unequivocally successful?

This idea has hit the mainstream press. An article in the March issue of Foreign Policy, The Return of Patriarchy, Phillip Longman discusses how the conservatives (and near synonymously faithful) are going to inherit the earth. Not that this is good or bad, just that it is going to happen and there isn't a lot that public education or tax policy can do to change it.

Essentially, his argument is that globally, conservative, faithful, male-headed households are out breeding the rest of us. As a result, the vast majority of the next generation will be within a more conservative, larger family, and more faithful context. For example, 50% of all the children born to women born in France in the 1960's, were born to women with 3 or more children. As more couples have one child, those that choose to have 3 or more have a humongous impact on the demographics of the next generation. They may even have a higher survival rate. He notes that the aging of the West will put tremendous pressure to cut back on welfare state benefits. Those with
larger extended families to draw upon will suffer less from misfortune. Those raised in larger, conservative families are also more likely to have such families themselves, so this could have knock-on effects. That's one way thatGenghis Khan has 16 million living descendants.

And it seems, this has happened before. Adultery, divorce, homosexuality, opportunities for female employment and ideas about their empowerment had severe demographic consequences on the progressive elements in Greek civilization. Ultimately this contributed to the Roman civilizations taking them over and the Germanic tribes outlasting the Romans.

Posted by OneEyedMan at March 2, 2006 3:52 PM

Comments

That was a very interesting article.
I'm actually pretty convinced that the general trend being described is actuate, but at the same time I think that the author is probably not as on top of his history as one would think.



I'm also quite bothered by his implicit claim that china's birth rate has fallen below replacement levels because of the fall of patriarchy. (I wonder if there one-child laws might have anything to do with the population decline?) China has been working its butt off to get the birth rate down.



My Roman history is not nearly good enough to go up against him on a claim that Rome was rocked by massive demographic cycles of patriarchy, and that one of them eventually lead to its fall to a more patriarchal society from the north. But the claim does smell funny to me. If I wasn't at work I would take some time and research it.



It seems to me that he is describing two basic trends that counteract each other. One is the natural liberalization of societies over time, and the second is a demographic trend dragging them back in the direction of patriarchy and by implication conservatism. This seems pretty plausible to me. The part where I become curious is that he assumes that this happens cyclically. I would assume that you would just get a steady flow in each direction particularly as transportation becomes better.



So for me the real question is which will happen faster, the fall of liberals to infertility or there conversion of conservatives. I'm guessing from the increasing urbanization of the country that trend two is currently winning out, but I haven't thought about it enough to make a guess on the future.

Posted by: giblfiz [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 3, 2006 10:55 AM

A simpler question might be, "why aren't we all conservatives?" Wouldn't this process suggest that regardless of the initial distribution of liberal and conservatives in prehistory, that this process would have made as all strongly conservative.

Obviously there are survival benefits to liberalism as well, although Longman convinced me that liberalism has definite demographic disadvantages. The reason that demographics isn't a steady equilibrium may have to do with the differences in their advantages. Conservative ideas seem to insure a large number of babies, while liberal ideas probably raises the likelihood that an individual child survives into adulthood.

In a highly liberal society (like our own), a conservative can free ride on the survival benefits of general liberalism, while still having a larger family. In a highly conservative society, listening to scientific ideas on hygene, teaching your daughters to read, a temperament willing to experiment with crop rotation, all of that bears larger demographic rewards, even if as a result you don't have as many children. The fact that a generation of humans takes about 20 years to grow and educate, and human ideas are slow to change and we begin to see how switching between these demographic strategies could exist on lags of at least 20 years.

Posted by: TheOneEyedMan [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 3, 2006 1:01 PM

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