If this man and his theory was correct, I’d be knocked up with my third kid, barefoot and pregnant at home, wearing funky knee length underwear with Masonic drawings on it and baking my bread from scratch. He assumes that people are not individuals, that they operate exclusively with a herd mentality, and that they are unchanging and fixed from the moment of birth through death.

I don’t even see anything in any of the historical patterns I know of that could bear out what he is saying. To me it just sounds like wishful thinking.

To my observation, what will be important to the survival of a nation, outside of their control of natural resources, will be the value of their human capital.

Longman points to the Roman’s successes in battle based on the higher number of citizens available for the military. Rome had mandatory service for some classes and also harbored a large pool of slave labor.

Most of the work to be completed in the times up to the present industrial/technical age have demanded more quantity of human capital than quality. Today that does not hold as control or survival of a sovreign nation lies more in the value of the human capital they have.

In other words, I’d posit that ten tomato pickers from Juarez, Mexico might be equal in value to one software developer in Bejing or a scientist in Stockholm. Although tomato pickers are important, their investment is not as great and thus their value is lower. In countries that have high birthrates, many tomato pickers may abound, but skilled, educated labor will be scarce as the higher birth rate sucks up even most of the resources of the country. If the country chooses to not invest in their population, or cannot, then they have less human capital to compete globally.

Leaving Bush and some of the crackpots of the world out for now, most of the world must survive by negotiating with eachother over resources, trading back and forth for survival. Those countries that cannot or will not struggle to survive, or like in America’s case, not only struggle to survive, but struggle with the negotiation model completely and threaten their own survival. Also, to make war and conduct invasions as in Roman times would be foolhardy and detrimental to future trade status.

The days when Hannibal took the mountain and moved forward are gone, although we know that anyone can behave that way, as Bush has so well illustrated, the warrior mode does not work well in the long run. No one these days is hanging natives by their ankles, raping their children and running off with the gold without at least some serious ramifications on the global diplomacy front. Well, alright, not major countries at least.

Well, alright, not in their own countries at least. But even social systems as apartheid that support (and the system remains) wholesale raping of a people’s own resources, or the slave trade upon which the south was based.

The south lays in a shambles to this day because its economy was based on exploitation. The mill industry of the east died when slavery and came to an end.
My point being that economies and political constructs based on human exploitation cannot survive in the same manner as they did even one hundred years ago. For Longman to construct a thesis for our future based on social constructs of thousands of years ago, or even 200 years ago is silly.

Also, the post ignores what many have mentioned and that is that both conservatives and liberals tend to reduce their reproduction as their incomes and living standards rise. Women don’t want to reproduce in large numbers and neither do men. When given other options, as Longman knows, women and men will choose to opt out of parenting or scale it down.

But, this is more an economic issue I’d posit than an ideological issue. I feel just as comfortable making the assumption from my own observation, that those who choose to reproduce at higher numbers are by and large, not the most educated and thus not economically viable of people. There are exceptions to this rule, but as I said, by and large the most uneducated, unskilled and thus, most tending toward high birthrates will be the least prepared to contribute to society and also the least likely to participate in the political realm.

This bears out all over the world as studies have shown that birth rates rise in countries where war, famine or anarchy abound. Some might say this is evidence of the human effort to survive. In America, those families that reproduce more have less to lose, less equity, less savings or retirement and thus less concern for the usurpation of their resources that baby making demands. They are the ones that reproduce at the greatest numbers.

A large number of the poorest families, first generation immigrants included, tend to shy away from political participation, including and most importantly, voting, unless assisted or spurned to action by a sense of connection with the rest of society.

Also, conservatism as described by Longman, assumes an anglo-american, euro-centric conservatism which although in the minds of old white male pundits, doesn’t necessarily encompass the kind of political or social bent that many people and young people reflect.

Also, as people enjoy the comforts bestowed upon them through a free educational system, the concept of equal rights under the law (I say the concept) and the protection and acceptance of minorities, social conservatism as a white male patrirachal construct begins to fall apart. This is exactly what is happening and persons like longman who for whatever reason, I personally cannot relate to, cling to roman history as the high point of humanity, wring their hands at the thought that in many ways, we now make the Romans look like mere barbarians while we slowly move farther and farther away from caesar and his ranks.

Note: it is imperative that you close your tags. If you don’t, everything that comes after your comment will be italicized.

I’ve often wondered how far one must take the implications of this. Is a just world for women a world in which men do not inherit? Or is this a more general argument against property as such?

Also, I don’t know how a critique of Longman’s definition of patriarchy serves to respond to what I think is the basic thesis here: that patriarchy is better at reproducing itself than movements against patriarchy because, unlike them, patriarchy is explicitly invested in controlling women’s bodies to reproduce itself.

Trope, you made me splurt my hot chocolate.

Now, back to serious business: can anyone tell me how to do quotes in italics? I don’t think I can progress to level 3 patriarchy-blaming until I learn that.

Longman writes:

Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different stages. What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively serve to maximize fertility and parental investment in the next generation. Of these, among the most important is the stigmatization of “illegitimate” children. One measure of the degree to which patriarchy has diminished in advanced societies is the growing acceptance of out-of-wedlock births, which have now become the norm in Scandinavian countries, for example.

No. This argument merely abstracts patriachy from all of its content. It is not a strategy for maximizing human reproduction, it is explicitly a structure for reproducing the rule and wealth of men by exploiting women, as a class, to reproduce a society antithetical to their interests. In other words, the purpose of a patriachal structure of social reproduction is to reproduce patriachy, not society in general but a specific social structure.

Under patriarchy, “bastards” and single mothers cannot be tolerated because they undermine male investment in the next generation. Illegitimate children do not take their fathers’ name, and so their fathers, even if known, tend not to take any responsibility for them. By contrast, “legitimate” children become a source of either honor or shame to their fathers and the family line. The notion that legitimate children belong to their fathers’ family, and not to their mothers’, which has no basis in biology, gives many men powerful emotional reasons to want children, and to want their children to succeed in passing on their legacy. Patriarchy also leads men to keep having children until they produce at least one son.

Wrong again, and on all counts. Longman completely misses what is essential here; the patriachal mode of social reproduction exists to produce children as male property and in particular to produce male heirs. The social construction of fatherhood was a justification for the appropriation of children by men, which is self-evidently the purpose of ‘the rule of the fathers.’

Another key to patriarchy’s evolutionary advantage is the way it penalizes women who do not marry and have children. Just decades ago in the English-speaking world, such women were referred to, even by their own mothers, as spinsters or old maids, to be pitied for their barrenness or condemned for their selfishness. Patriarchy made the incentive of taking a husband and becoming a full-time mother very high because it offered women few desirable alternatives.

Longman here again misses the essential. Patriachy must compel women to reproduce because male class rule is antithetical to women’s interests and they therefore must be forced to socially reproduce patriachy. The mechanism, furthermore, was not incentive but compulsion. Women were forced to alienate their bodies to men in return for a subsistence because they were barred from realizing a subsistence through any means that didn’t involve dependence on men. The model of women as chattel property was not necessary to maximize human reproduction but rather to exploit women for the purposes of reproducing male class rule.

Anyone who fails to grasp that the essential nature of patriachy is to reproduce male class rule not ro reproduce humanity in general, when the very definition of patriachy is ‘rule of the fathers’ doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

If we accepted the notion that being born into a certain society meant implicity accepting everything that society presented as a given, then societies would never change — ever. They would be ossified in time with every generation doing everything in exactly the same way as it was done before. History shows us — contrary to what DeborahL asserts — that socities can change rapidly and dramatically, and these changes reflect a number of things, not just birthrates and demographics.

We all know that conservatism has seen an upswing in recent years. Can it be reversed? I don’t know.

I do doubt that we free-thinkers are breeding outselves out of existence because I don’t believe liberalism is a genetic trait. I think as long as we continue to try to change society, we can pass on our ideas and values to others around us. It’s when we go “oh, it’s all too hard and they’re beatng us” that we will indeed be beaten.