Dreher Discovered Zimmerman...

Before I did. I need to read the book, mind--this is all drawn from other people's discussions of it--but what I'm hearing makes perfect sense of a lot:

Z. argues that "familism" -- the idea that a fundamental purpose of civilization is the empowerment and enabling of the family -- is absolutely key to the health of any civilization. He further says that the absolute key to the health of familism is ... religious faith. Not Christian faith specifically (this is not a religious work), but real faith in divine purpose. Nobody undertakes to have a large family because it's fun, or, in advanced societies, because it's economically beneficial. They do it because they believe that's what people do. In other words, they believe that children are a blessing from God, and that we humans are participating in the divine will by begetting children and raising them up to carry on our civilization. Absent a real belief in a transcendent source of life and morality, one that sanctifies material and personal sacrifices necessary to propagate children, a society will begin to overvalue material position and advantage, and will stop having children -- or at least enough children to guarantee the long-term health of the civilization. Decay inevitably follows, and can only be reversed when the suffering civilization finds its way back to familism...

What Zimmerman did not anticipate -- what few sociologists did -- was the postwar Baby Boom. That appears to have been only a speed bump on the road to our dismal demographic destiny. Of course the Quebecois birth rate collapsed, with the Roman Catholic religion, in the 1960s. And now, Mexico is headed rapidly toward an infertile future. In fact, UN demographers say that in this century, population in 3/4 of the world will shrink as women cease to have babies at replacement level or above.

You might say: well, fine, at least the decline we're going to suffer will remain relative to everybody else's. There's something to that, but it overlooks some important facts. First, knowing others have it just as bad elsewhere hardly ameliorates the real suffering that our society will have to deal with as it ages, without a sufficient number of people to care for the aged. Second, if decline is across the board, then in the demographic race to the bottom, the last group with people left standing inherits what's left of the civilization...

What can be done? Zimmerman seemed resigned to the belief that nothing much could stop this process, though he rather weakly expresses a hope in the final pages that intellectuals will understand the forces driving the phenomenon, and work to turn things around. It's a curious conclusion coming from a man who excoriates in the same pages intellectuals and academics for turning a blind eye to the realities around them. For someone who identifies religious faith as vital to familism, and in turn to civilization, he seems curiously unwilling to imagine that a revival of faith could turn things around. In his accompanying essay, Bryce Christensen says Zimmerman's friend and Harvard colleague Pitirim Sorokin, who founded the university's sociology department, saw that only a revival of religion could resurrect Western civilization from the collapse he view as inevitable. From Christensen's essay:

"Nobody can revive the dying sensate order," Sorokin admitted. He therefore anticipated that the collapse of the sensate [materialist] culture would mean "tragedy, suffering, and crucifixion for the American people." but he envisioned a future in which a chastened and humbled people would recover strong marriages and strong family lives as they listened to "new Saint Pauls, Saint Augustines, and great religious and ethical leaders."

Ah, where have we heard this before? From our old friend Alasdair MacIntyre:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the more misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age . . . and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. . . . What they set themselves to achieve—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. . . . This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another—and doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

One last point. The Christian religion is all but deceased in Europe, but America is held up as an example of a place where religion is still vital to the life of the society. That being the case, why are most American Christians not having any more children than anybody else? What does that say about the nature of American Christianity? I bet Philip Rieff would have an answer to that question.

Fascinating stuff that I'm just discovering. The comments are interesting as well--some guy appears to think that this theory calls for women to become "broodmares" (his word, not mine). I don't think so. It merely calls women to be open to motherhood, to the possibility that having more than 2 children is a good thing, that children, in fact, are a good thing. It requires the belief that people are more important than politics, than a job, than money, than most other this worldly things. Is that so strange? Once that belief is held, bringing new people into the world would not seem so outlandish.