Calling it “decadence” doesn’t just mean you think it’s bad sex. It means you think it will destroy the nation, the West, or maybe even the white race.

Decadence and Fertility

It certainly does mean you think it’s bad sex, though.

And it’s been part of the Christian myth of the “fall” of the Roman Empire since forever that a truly impressive amount of pagan sexual wickedness (as determined by the incredibly repressive and bigoted traditional Christian sexual morality) did the place in when in fact the empire collapsed on their watch – the Christians’, I mean – when it was overrun by vast hordes of inassimilable barbarians.

Another conservative myth is that the welfare spending – bread “and circuses” – that became necessary to feed the free Romans who found themselves without resources because the rich who controlled everything had dispossessed them from their land and chosen to farm it with a vast population of slaves, destroyed the Republic.

Nothing like dependency and mooching to ruin a good thing, you know.

But that the Republic was replaced by a semi-hereditary military dictatorship was actually an achievement of the Roman senate that insisted on governing all of Italy and much of the Mediterranean coast with what was no more than a Roman city government controlled by the city’s rich.

Who the hell had reason to be loyal to that republic?

Anyway, Goldman and Douthat are right that the sexual revolution is partly responsible for the declining American birthrate among native-born working people.

That means that we have fewer shotgun weddings, fewer unwanted children, and notably smaller families in large part because contraception and abortion and the normalization of “recreational” sex have significantly cut into unwanted reproduction.

And how many are willing to say outright and in public that that is a bad thing?

Some, yes.

But not many.

True, to be fair, it also means that people have pretty much abandoned the ideas, common among the post-WW2 generation and earlier, that everyone has a duty to marry and have and raise children and that not to do so is selfish and deserving of scorn and shaming.

Except conservatives, of course, who continue to insist on exactly that same view.

That is, after all, the real point Pat Buchanan, Douthat, Goldman, and so many others are harping on when they condemn the new outlook of post-sexual revolution America as “decadent.”

To which, of course, I say phooey.

On the other hand, liberals are certainly right in pointing out that in contemporary marriages, thanks to the economy neoliberalism has given us, both parents have to work to make ends meet and that makes it much harder for people who want families to actually have and raise kids.

And so they are right that making provision for that by requiring such things as paid parental leave and special paid allowances aimed at enabling working couples to have and raise kids is genuinely needed.

But all of that aside, isn’t it nuts that everyone is pretending nobody ever wrote a book called “The Population Bomb”?

That nobody ever made the connection between the size of the human population and the threat of us over-grazing the planet, not only with respect to food and water but more broadly with respect to numerous non-renewable and even renewable resources?

Nor with the disappearance of numerous and significant animal and even plant species whose habitats are being overrun by civilization?

We need to shrink the human population and that includes the human population in the US.

Unless, of course, nobody now alive much minds that Soylent Green is coming.

It’s pretty far down the road, after all.

Après nous, le deluge?

PS. Liberal dismay at and guilt over eugenics and associated sterilization laws have led to a situation where even that liberal creation, the UN, has declared a human right to unrestricted and unrestrictable reproduction.

Madame Ghandi in India defied this for a time and the Chinese defy it, even now.

Liberals condemned Mrs. Ghandi only partly because she had made herself a dictator and they condemn the Chinese policy even today.

This outlook is not helping and will be even more unhelpful in the future.