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REYNOLDS |
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Marriage: The Future
by John Mark Reynolds [author,
academic] 6/25/08
Will we be able to sustain our population and our institutions?
We do know that the Nordic countries and other parts of Europe are engaged in a social experiment in whether marriage can fade away and culture survive. So far the experiment appears promising, but the returns are superficial. European countries have not needed to defend themselves against an aggressive adversary in decades.
The numeric tipping point (when traditional Jewish and Christian ideas were largely rejected about marriage) did not come until a few decades ago.
None of these regions have had to spend the money to defend themselves, because the United States has done it for them. Those days are coming to an end. What if Sweden faces an aggressive and nuclear Russia? What if Iceland no longer can rely on the United States to protect the sea lanes?
Contributor
John Mark Reynolds
John
Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of
the Torrey Honors Institute and Associate Professor
of Philosophy at Biola University.His
personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and
his blog can be found at http://scriptoriumdaily.com.
[go to Reynolds index] |
It is important to remember just how new the European experiment is. At the end of the Second World War, all these nations still had large traditionalist populations. The transition to a “post-marriage” culture is very new (in historic terms).
Nordic nations also have not yet tried sustaining their large social services and welfare states with declining populations. While Nordic countries are seeing a small “baby boom,” they will still experience declining numbers of workers to pay for all the benefits they now have. Cuts to date have been relatively superficial compared to those that are coming. Even these cuts are predicated on an “ever better” world where the fifty years of post-War growth are sustained.
Surely, this is too optimistic. Bad things happen.
Extreme libertarians and secularists are sanguine about the ability of high tech and post-modern culture to sustain the various natural disasters, political, and external shocks such societies will inevitably face. They will all be managed.
Traditionalists, and I am one them, are pessimistic about their chances. Such cultures seem, in fact, uniquely unstable and unable to face severe pressures without massive, indeed revolutionary changes. Their members are very urban and highly specialized. Family structures are not deep (as in traditional extended families). The “perfect cultural storm” that will come and test Europe will show what will come.
This is especially true if the US becomes more isolationist and begins to weaken its commitment to Europe and the Pax Americana begins to fade. To date the past few decades have seen Europe free to experiment under the traditionalist protection of the United States.
Who will protect the sea lanes?
Something like the Great Depression was difficult for any culture to weather. What will happen when something like this happens (and bad things inevitably happen) to a culture that lacks the family ties early cultures had?
We will see if the transition to a post-religious and post-marriage (to the extent that it happens) society is sustainable, but the results will not be known for decades, perhaps not a century.
Cultures are likely to muddle through at present, but as the ideological props for the old institutions fade, then (at the very) least there will have to be widely agreed on cultural reasons to sustain them. At present, I don’t see what those props will be . . . but perhaps the “soft secularism” of Western Europe will develop them. At the moment, these nations are sustained by inertia and the fact that things are going pretty well.
In the meantime, those of us who believe monotheism is good, true, and beautiful will continue to sustain the old ways in our small communities. If left alone, we (oddly) may help sustain the larger external culture against the shocks they sustain. Will we left alone?
If Mormons in Utah (to pick one group) are allowed to essentially govern themselves, create their own institutions, and sustain them will they win or lose the competition with the more secular areas of the nation (such as Western Oregon)? We do not really know what the outcome will be. They will become more numerous, but numbers (as failed states in some parts of the world) alone are not destiny.
However, if Mormons in Utah sustain (as they have) republican forms of government and are allowed to sustain a culture as free as John Kennedy’s America (school prayer, restricted access to things like porn), but no more libertine, then it is at least arguable that they would win an “attractiveness” or “sustainability” argument with Western Oregon. They would have numbers and an attractive infrastructure.
The values of today in Western Oregon would look like an odd aberration.
Which would be more attractive Mormon Utah or secular coastal areas? There are reasons to bet on either one.
I hope we get to see.
Of course, this assumes that voters in Western Oregon, or the country as a whole, would allow pockets of traditionalists to begin to set up structures (Internet fences?) to help raise their children and shape their culture as they see fit. The experience of smaller institutions, like the Anglican church, in such situations is not promising.
Like all victors, extreme agents of change talk about allowing their traditionalist opponents the right to compete as smaller, protected communities until that competition heats up. When there is any chance that the competition would be lost or the “virus” of traditionalism will extend (freely) to the next generation, then cries for uniformity begin.
The experiment might fail and then those invested in the experiment would be tempted to use power to prop it up. (The traditionalist about marriage is in a different position, of course. He or she knows through thousands of years of actual experience that the institution of traditional marriage can help him or her stand any number of cultural changes.)
Fortunately for Jews and Christians, the dangerous social experimentation taking place in limited ways in Western Europe and North America is limited. Opponents of traditional marriage do not often recognize their own extreme ethnocentrism and their geographic limits. While they have hi-jacked (in the last few decades) some of the most desirable regions of the world in which to live, they have yet to show they can sustain them. Other areas of the world, more traditional, such as China (with its burgeoning Christina population) may prove repositories for alternatives if they can shake the secularism that has consumed them for the last half-century. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa, with Christian populations and Marxist trained ruling classes, also have this hope. ExileStreet
copyright
2008 John Mark Reynolds
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