Human Withering
In Which I Watch Some of the ARC Conference
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For those of you who missed my short livestream last night, here it is.
Because I’m flying along trying to get my life sorted out so that Matt and I can head South for the Our Bodies Ourselves conference in Hilton Head, all my posts this week are going to be free. They’re also going to be free because, in no particular order
Our fridge died over the weekend
I have two kids who spent the night throwing up
It does seem that when I fell on the ice I did something strange to my elbow
A beloved woman in our church was put on hospice last night
I’m not packed
and finally,
I have no talk
It appears to me that God is trying to strike me down. I’m not sure why he would do this right now, but maybe it’s to keep me from turning into someone like Pharoah who can’t understand anything, least of all the word of God. If you feel like it, pray for me, but mostly for our dear friend who will soon find herself face to face with her Lord, something I know she has longed for her whole life. As I said last week when Johnny Simmons died, I’m so jealous and happy for her, and so horribly grieved for myself.
In between all my laundry and everything, I’ve been slowly listening to some of the ARC talks that are showing up on YouTube. ARC stands for Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It’s one of Jordan Peterson’s attempts to save the world. Most of what I’ve watched has not blown my mind given how much time I spend online and how much reading I’ve done over the last few years. But I think it might be a good primer for those who don’t know what centrist right people are thinking about everything at the moment.
One talk, though, is shocking—the one about demographic collapse.
The part that’s shocking isn’t so much the numbers, which I’ve seen percolating up over the last few years. What amazed me was one of the reasons he gave for why it’s happening. The obvious reason that a country’s birthrate often begins to trend sharply down is in the aftermath of an economic catastrophe. But surely, when the economy improves, wouldn’t the birthrate go up? But it doesn’t. No, he points out that millions of people have become confused about basic biology. They don’t know when the best time to have children is. Women on every single continent into their late twenties and early thirties think it will be no problem to get married “sometime” and have children when they finally feel ready—like two or three children.
He puts up on the screen some pictures of men and women who end up with no families, grieved that this is so, especially because they discover too late that if they had arranged their lives differently, it might not have been thus.
The speaker, hang on, let me find his name….Stephen Shaw, explains what would have to happen for the graphs to turn around. Young people would have to have children again, and society would have to be ok with that happening. And the best way for them to have children would be for them to get married. But when the vast majority of influencers consider such an eventuality, they recoil in horror. They worry about the women not getting to enact all their desires, and the men being able to get rich. They discuss human flourishing in long-form podcast, the articles heaping up to make the point. And all the while, humanity is not literally flourishing, but literally withering away and dying. As Shaw says, it is basic mathematics.
And this point is confirmed by something I saw somewhere else—was it X? The observation that the IV debate shows what kind of children society finds especially valuable—those of rich, educated, older people. Very young people having children is scary and therefore guarded against by all right-minded people.
This seems like a good moment to pull in this podcast which you might have already seen, in which Louise Perry explains to Bari Weiss how she reverse-engineered the Biblical Sexual Ethic. After much honest study, she discovered that people waiting until marriage to have sex is really best, that people need help to find someone to marry, and that courtships should be brief and chaste. Bari exclaims in wonder over this astonishing revelation. How can this be? That happiness in love is to be found with one lifelong partner? Louise laughs and says, yes, isn’t it crazy?
Which is to say, it’s so tragic that we, as an entire world, are reaping the biological whirlwind. That to sew the seeds of free sex, it meant forgetting one of the most basic facts about humankind, that technology and education don’t actually make everything better if people can’t find their way to doing the basic thing—falling in love, getting married, and having a baby. No amount of technical innovation and sex education mitigates the embarrassing reality that direct human physical contact complicated as it is by matters of the heart is the way that God arranged the world.
Ok so, I have to pack and weep into my morning oolong. Have a nice day if you can manage it.
"Young people would have to have children again, *and society would have to be ok with that happening.* And the best way for them to have children would be for them to get married." I was talking about this with a 27 year old friend who is going to marry soon. She has an amazing career in classical music moving on an upward trajectory, but she and her husband to be want children. As a 55 year old mother of four, I told her that there is no better time to have children than when one is younger. It is easier physically and emotionally. She then asked me how old I was when our last was born. Just under 31. Her eyes got large. Our culture pushes "getting comfortable" before having children. Newsflash: Having children isn't comfortable. Children are quintessentially disruptive. And this disruption is good for us. We learn how much we need God, our spouse, and our extended family (both biological and spiritual) to meet our children's needs. I believe it is almost impossible to fully grasp how selfish one is until one is a parent. It will either make us better people through humbling us, or our hearts will be hardened as we refuse to put others before ourselves.
I am praying for your friend's suffering to be for the benefit of others until she dies in the flesh and for you and your community to be comforted as you mourn. May these "momentary light afflictions," inform you for your presentation and conform you to His image.
"Louise Perry explains to Bari Weiss how she reverse-engineered the Biblical Sexual Ethic."
This reminds me so much of a passage in Chesterton's "Orthodoxy":
"I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."