Rod Dreher has been writing for what seems like decades about the collapse of Christendom in the advanced nations of the Occident, with particular focus on the decline of fertility and demographic collapse alleviated primarily by immigration from outside.
Apart from the usual economic factors, he traces this to the sexual revolution driven by elite rejection of Christian belief and Christian morals.
He is one of those who write online articles about How to Live in Dark Times and about how the death of God in the West has precipitated a steep biological decline.
What he chiefly gets wrong is the relative importance in all this of the parallel declines of Christian belief and coerced observation of Christian morals.
He thinks the chief thing is that belief has fallen off, while I think that the chief things are that belief fell off enough among elites for them to end coerced compliance with clerical demands.
The radical drop in the birth rate is, I think, attributable mostly to that disappearance of coercion.
After all, recall what that change involved.
Almost impossible, if not flatly impossible, divorce has been replaced in most states with much more permissive arrangements.
Social and legal sanctions against pornography, sex outside marriage, adolescent sex, elective single motherhood, and homosexuality have diminished or altogether disappeared, and both abortion and the use of contraception have passed from illegal and seriously punished to lawful and widespread.
The fact is that until the middle of the 20th Century, the law throughout the Occident functioned as the secular arm enforcing the Christian code of sex and marriage with historically varying degrees of rigor – leaving aside, of course, the near absolute impunity granted epidemic clerical pedophilia at all times.
And without all that coercion for which Christianity provided a justificatory and consolatory rationale, it has turned out that neither men nor women are interested in undertaking the burdens involved in having and raising children at even the minimal replacement rate.
It is true, of course, that things might have gone otherwise.
In the West, at any rate, the sexual morality of the Christian churches, though of course based on Biblical divine commands, rested also comfortably on extensive Christian elaboration of strands of morality already native to the pagan Roman world, filtered through Stoicism.
Juvenal’s satires are perhaps the most famous literary examples of wholly pagan though quite fierce moral outrage at divorce, promiscuity, and homosexuality, though not the only examples.
And from the dawn of the Enlightenment through about the middle of the 20th Century elite rejection of Christian faith was by no means universally accompanied by rejection of Christian morals, or of the legal enforcement thereof.
On the contrary, in culture and politics both, liberals who opposed the political coercion of Christian belief nevertheless overwhelmingly and sincerely supported coercion of Christian morals.
That began to change and elites began to support the demands for liberation of people hitherto defined as sexual outlaws about the middle of the 20th Century.
Did that result from the previous rise, among the elites, of Jews and others who had not been educated by Christian clergy, at least not past high school if even that far?
The industrial revolution and the Gilded Age brought vast numbers of people into the political, social, and cultural elites who had not been educated right up through college by the Jesuits, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, or Protestant clergy.
Often they had had barely any formal education, at all.
These were the likes of Ford, Firestone, Edison, J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick, and so many others, and there was a vast cultural change over the entire Western world that their names represent.
These were people upon whose shoulders sat light as a feather the entire cultural heritage of the Latin West.
They represented and were themselves part of a virtual flood of the uneducated, overwhelming the Occident with new barbarian elites for many of whom spoke Robert Ingersoll and then, a bit later, H. L. Menken.
Does that begin to account for the rise, among the Enlightened and in elite opinion, of receptivity toward a new kind of toleration, not of religious unorthodoxy or diversity but of the sexual kind, pushing back the boundaries of acceptability to accommodate quondam sexual outlaws?
By the time of the GI Bill and the post-Second World War surge in higher education, the educational level of our elites had risen, again.
But much and maybe most of that higher education had been and would increasingly be at public or secular private schools, or at secularized though church-affiliated schools.
Perhaps that is why the post-Christian elites of the second half of the 20th Century were willing and able not only to progressively break the hold on law and custom of Christian belief but also Christian morals, making room in the light for forms of sexuality, sexual practice, and sexual identity heretofore excluded, forced into the shadows, and persecuted.
So by now we have Dreher and all of his ilk attributing the continuing progress of the sexual revolution, with the associated decline in fertility, to the growing power in academia of radical feminism, gender theory, and other sorts of sexual radicalism.
Not only have they missed – or maybe deliberately hidden – the role of coercion in all this, but they have missed entirely that the changes in elite outlook that made the sexual revolution happen occurred decades before the rise of such thought in academia, and resulted not from elite opinion in thrall to then non-existent radical academic opinion but from elite opinion emancipated by lack of education from not only academic opinion but also millennia of Western, Christian cultural and moral tradition.
Or so it seems to me right now.
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