by Guest: ”Walt”
Dec. 12, 2024

Starting between 1800 and 1870, in every place with any influence from the Industrial Revolution, birth rates have fallen consistently. It is a well-known fact that people used to have more kids, but now they don’t. Modern Western culture, having a particularly linear sense of time, explains this away with the Demographic Transition Model. This is where I would like to start this exploration, quite counterintuitively for an essay on decadence.

Said model posits a social change, brought on by modernity and access to contraceptives, in which the average age of marriage rises, marriage becomes a weaker institution, the number of children per woman falls, women delay having children, a higher proportion of children are born outside of wedlock, and people overall just value having children less. Instead, they place more value on hedonistic aims and their careers (which provide them the funding for greater hedonistic aims). For some closely related theories regarding present social trends, it is supposed that it is simply the next stage in human social development for us to be packed into cities like sardines while the countryside is hollowed out (urbanization). It is also assumed that, with the advent of contraceptives and the Enlightenment, silly old Christian social inhibitions around sexuality are made irrelevant. Thus, homosexuality, transvestism, prostitution, promiscuity, and all other manners of sexual deviancy, being natural (it is assumed), will inevitably become accepted, while ye olde Christianity withers away with each passing generation (secularization). It is rarely, if ever, talked about, but this series of social and political theories, which are widely agreed upon in academia today, collectively posit that weakened sexual norms, falling birth rates, late ages of marriage, weakened family structures, a weaker church, and the urbanization that drives all these trends are all inevitable social consequences of modernity that will never be reversed. Twenty-five percent of Americans, under the influence of similar ideas, believe that marriage is ”outdated.”

These assumptions form the predominating view on recent social developments around humans and how they live their lives, and these assumptions are predominately wrong. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that these must be what George Orwell was referring to when he said, ”There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

To explain why, we need to recast these trends in a cyclical (rather than linear) model of history by bringing up some parallels so we can then see the consequences of similar trends in other periods of history. The best documented and most familiar example was the late Roman Republic, in which many trends commonly thought specific to our era were prevalent:

-Just like today, amid widespread urbanization, birth rates collapsed to unsustainable lows, such that the last recorded member of the original patrician families died around 117 AD. Archaeogenetics shows that ethnic Romans were largely replaced in the city of Rome by those of Near Eastern ancestry by the birth of Christ, and then again by Northern European lineages by 200 AD.

-Like today, the average age of marriage increased, potentially to north of 30, though only for men.

-Like today, bisexuality became more common, such that comedies of the time even mocked purely heterosexual and purely homosexual men as two sides of the same picky coin.

-Like today, promiscuity increased, with elites throwing massive orgies that increasingly featured homosexuality and other, more extreme and violent manifestations of sexuality. (Related to this, pedophilic abuse became a larger social phenomenon, similarly to today. In Roman times, this was due to the cultural import of the Greek practice of pederasty, or the ritual homosexual abuse of young boys.)

-Like today, demographic collapse hit the countryside the hardest, and the former rural, farming backbone of the civilization slowly turned into a dispossessed urban mass.

-Like today, massive social programs were implemented to provide welfare for the dispossessed lower classes who formerly worked the land.

-Like today, faith withered with each passing generation, and society effectively turned agnostic.

Now, let us make a radical assumption and say that we are not, in fact, at the end of history; let us say that we have not, in fact, discovered the perfect society that will persist forever in its current basic form. How will these trends in our society impact its future? Using the precedent of Rome, morality will get looser and looser, people will get more depraved, and, as with the great Whore of Babylon-as Rome was subtly referred to in the Book of Revelations: ”Therefore one day her plagues will overtake her: Death, mourning, and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.”

The Demographic Transition Model is not real, but decadence certainly is. That both historians and the public consciousness have forgotten this in the last century is a travesty.