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Notes -
A few choice cuts from the English Anti-Suffragist platform.
Every time this brand of gender-relations pessimism comes up, I have the same incredulous reaction, and I think it comes down to one underlying sentiment:
We have seen this one before. The anti-suffragists were sure voting would tear apart a fragile equilibrium between the sexes. They asserted the existing division of manual and domestic labor was not only stable, but optimal, and any changes would be disastrous for the State. If TFR data was available in 1910, I imagine it would have been quite the talking point, but without it, they could only mutter about “taxing of energies.” Their confidence was preserved for posterity on the public record, not just in the ephemera of YouTube comments.
So when you suggest that this time, TikTok is going to do what the assembly line could not, that influencers are more reflective of a culture than yellow journalism, that our economic circumstances are more stressful than two World Wars and a Great Depression? I remain skeptical. The fabric of society isn’t as fragile as you think.
Suffrage did though. Gender relations are permanently changed, no one can come up with a way to combine liberated women and high TFR(and even if the selection hypothesis is true, it appears to just be selecting for women who choose ‘babies’ over ‘liberation’), and the male labor force participation rate did drop and no one knows how to raise it again.
Is it possible that there’s alternative reasons? Yes, but suffrage was an inflection point.
To be clear, I don’t deny that the early 20th century saw radical change in Western gender relations. Whether those were downstream of suffrage or of information technology or of massive casualties is kind of a moot point. Four generations later, though, we’re still ticking, and even enjoyed a couple years of uncontested hegemony.
What is it about TikTok that will push birth rates further than suffrage? Than women’s lib?
Except his point is that we never actually got to some new, equilibrium as you're implying. This isn't like Christianity replacing paganism and religious life just continuing on; it's more like the collapse of religion in the 20th and 21th century. At least right now.
In terms of fertility rate we're still "ticking" but it was never fixed. The birth rate is below replacement in most industrialized societies with serious potential consequences
This is akin to saying, of climate change, "yes, we thought it was doom and gloom when we wondered how to feed the horses but we came up with coal. We thought we would have to burn coal but we came up with more effective recycling and nuclear power". Yes, we did. Things did improve. But the underlying issue is unsolved. We're still degenerating, on a climate level.
Pictured, life just continuing on
I specifically put "religious life" in there to account for such a response.
I thought I was being silly with my endless qualifications that always bloat my posts.
You're right, Augustine wrote one of the most important books in Christian theology specifically to help contemporaries deal with the fall of Rome intellectually because it wasn't important and everything was going on as usual.
My response is: and a lot of the Bible was written in response to the disasters against Assyria and Babylon.
Apocalypticism is a result of the failures against the Greeks and Rome which were so bad that many basically decided that the world would have to end - and soon- in order to resolve them. Instead of simply abandoning their faith (like us, increasingly) they found a new interpretation.
Apologetic responses to geopolitical disaster are a part of religious life continuing. That's what religion does. It doesn't - inherently- mean that religion is actually at risk of not continuing.
The Babylonian Exile didn't lead to the abandoning of Judaism, it lead to its creation.
It seems like the bone of contention here is the "just" in "just continuing on" so I'll just retract it: of course there was upheaval and the word implies a more cavalier attitude than intended. What I meant was that Christianity undid the Temples and pagan life but it replaced it with a self-sustaining, alternate hegemonic religious framework (that inherited a lot too). Maybe we will settle on a similar framework ourselves but what seems to be happening is that Christianity is degenerating and we don't seem to have a new hegemonic religious system
Similarly, we haven't actually replaced the fertility regime we had with a self-sustaining one, we simply punted the problem. Thus we're closer to the "Rise of the Nones" situation today than a "Conversion of Constantine".
Surprised we got so deep in the weeds of this analogy.
I love getting deep into the weeds from throwaway quips.
Isaiah 36:18 {General of the King of Assyria Speaking, Hezekiah being the current king in Jerusalem}
Your point about what we understand as Judaism flowing from the Babylonian captivity, and Christianity surviving the fall of Rome, are true; what you miss is that they are extraordinary. Where are the gods of Hamath and Arphad? They died, their people went into captivity and their religions died. The survival of a religion past the destruction and enslavement of its homeland is historically rare, typically conquest leads to the death of the culture and the assimilation of its people, at best the gods might survive in syncretic form.* The bane and the brothers of the late Romans, Persian Zoroastrianism would be consigned to the margins by the Muslim conquest of Persia, only remnants remain scattered abroad.
So, in a sense, you are right that religious life just kept right on, it is possible to tell the history of Christianity from a 10,000ft view without dwelling on the fall of Rome. But that skates over how extraordinary it is, the effort it took from great men, from saints and prophets and doctors of the church, to make that happen. Christianity and Judaism underwent many changes that allowed them to survive, the readings of the old texts are different and new texts and doctrines had to be invented. To say from a contemporary perspective that everything just went right along is conflating major differences.
*Ovid, Virgil and Plutarch, three of my favorite classical authors, were explicitly trying to tie the now dominant Roman culture to the now-enslaved but beautiful and profound Greek culture. In many ways, in the form of the Greek speaking Eastern empire centered on Constantinople, the Greek hybrid culture would outlive the Latin culture of Rome itself. But that was another tremendous effort by a collection of geniuses. We still have the schoolboy assignments from great Roman leaders asking whether Alexander could have conquered Rome!
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