Nihilism Is Not a Life Plan

Spengler’s Universal Law #16: Small civilizations perish for any number of reasons,

 but great civilizations die only when they no longer want to live—David P. Goldman (How Civilizations Die, p. 122)

 

Back in college, a number of terms came up, from literary and philosophical movements that I didn’t have the background to understand. I remember struggling with them, and just generally having a distaste for some of these ideas—particularly for the literature related to them. Among the terms were existentialism and nihilism.

Using my dictionary from that time period isn’t that helpful. More commonly today, something existential, such as an existential threat, is related to the existence of a person, culture, or nation. That thing’s very existence is on the line. It’s a matter of life or death.

And nihilism tends toward believing in destruction first and foremost. Nihilism is basically a death wish—suicidal tendencies on a personal, cultural, or national level, or even larger.

By that definition, I would say today’s culture in nihilistic. Quite literally. It requires sex combined with sterility. A species that does not reproduce goes extinct. You could say this nihilistic cult is an existential threat to humanity.

According to David P. Goldman in How Civilizations Die, “The separation of sexuality from procreation in Greek culture helps explain the terrible demographic decay that Greece would suffer during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE” (p. 123). In short, the pattern of failure to want the culture to continue has been bringing down civilizations for millennia.

In that book, written in 2011, Goldman was hopeful that America was and would remain different from the other cultures in the world that were self-sabotaging, which he details in that book. He says,

Among the large industrial countries, there is one great exception to the declinist story: the United States. If a single characteristic makes America exceptional, it is the fact that American fertility has stabilized at replacement. In other words, as Europe and Japan reach the point of no return on the road to senility and depopulation, America will maintain its population, along with a healthy balance among age cohorts. In the second half of this century most of the great powers of the past—Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, and Japan, among others—will cease to function. A century later they will have ceased to exist. What makes America utterly and completely exceptional among the industrial countries, in short, is that it will still be here in a hundred years.

It is not that Americans in general are having children, but that Americans of faith are having children, and there are more Americans of faith than citizens of any other industrial country (p. 191-192).

A decade later, it may be that he might not be so optimistic for America. The culture of death is winning converts even among the religious.

In my religion, the culture of marriage and family remains strong. But even there, there has been an onslaught of well-meaning (?) reformers, who insist that a loving God must accept their version of morality, which would include homosexuality and transgenderism. There are several ways they’re missing the proverbial ark.

They forget that doctrine isn’t a matter of cultural pressure; it is a matter of revelation from God. Then the only question is, are we getting God’s word and understanding it?

President Dallin H. Oaks, Sunday, April 3, 2022
screenshot from here

This past weekend was our semiannual worldwide General Conference. On Sunday afternoon, President Dallin H. Oaks spoke. He is one of the three First Presidency members, who, along with the Twelve Apostles, lead and guide the Church. His talk was entitled, “Divine Love in the Father’s Plan.” In it, he said,

Fundamental to us is God’s revelation that exaltation can be attained only through faithfulness to the covenants of an eternal marriage between a man and a woman. That divine doctrine is why we teach that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.”

That is also why the Lord has required His restored Church to oppose social and legal pressures to retreat from His doctrine of marriage between a man and a woman, to oppose changes that homogenize the differences between men and women or confuse or alter gender.

In other words, doctrine is not going to change on this. He explains, or reminds us, that we believe family relationships are eternal. We don’t marry “till death do us part”; we marry “for time and all eternity.” The family—including posterity—is intended to continue in heaven. You can’t continue a relationship with posterity if you don’t have a relationship that produces posterity.

This is not to say that those who are infertile, or who miss the opportunity to marry and have offspring in this life are doomed. In fact, we believe that every blessing will be given to us in the next life, if we keep the commandments in this life.

But those in the current cultural death spiral are not infertile—except by choice.

The Institute for Family Studies had a piece earlier this week lamenting the current choice to remain childless, and how this is a symptom of hopelessness. Another piece on anti-natalism in the Deseret News shows examples of a couple of tweets about what a good life choice it is to have children, which were bombarded by hateful dissent.

Liz Wheeler tweeted: “Truly the saddest thing in the world is when people deliberately choose not to have children. The most wonderful, fulfilling, sanctifying thing is having a baby with your spouse. Have lots of babies.”

Liz Wheeler tweet, image found here

Meghan McCain tweeted: “The biggest and worst lie my generation was ever sold is that motherhood is a burden and something you could take or leave. But nothing in my life compares to being Liberty's mom—the sheer joy, fulfillment, privilege it is.”

Meghan McCain tweet, image found here

Neither of these statements ought to be controversial. They are simply a personal expression of joy over having and raising children. Why the refusal to allow such an expression?

Because the cult of nihilism is a religion, and these expressions are heretical. They feel threatened by our disagreement with them.

gif found here

Ryan T. Anderson, in an essay used as the forward to the book Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl R. Trueman, describes the adoption of a non-reality-based sexuality. He says,

Whereas for most of human history our sexual embodiment was a sheer given, allowing us to unite conjugally and form families, the modern therapeutic turn inward counsels people to be true to their inner sexual desires. What was once simply self-evident, that a boy should grow up to be a man, become a husband, and assume the responsibilities of a father, now entails a search to discover an inner truth about “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” based on emotions and will, rather than nature and reason.

This turn away from evidence and the world around us to some other, inner source of information has led to an inevitable politicization:

If our sexuality is our deepest and most important inner truth, and politics is about the promotion of the truth, then it was inevitable that sex would become politicized.

He’s not describing what should be here, or even what is actually truth; he’s describing what he sees happening in this sexualizing culture. He adds,

Whereas cultures used to cultivate the virtues that made family and religion flourish, in modernity the law would be used to suppress these institutions. They stood in the way of sexual “authenticity,” and politics sought to create a world where it was safe—and free from criticism—to follow one’s sexual desires. Hence, the push to redefine marriage legally was never really about joint tax returns and hospital visitation, but about forcing churches to update their doctrines and bakers to affirm same-sex relationships.

We are indeed in a religious war.

This new religion insists on decoupling sex from procreation. It has a preference for perversity and sterility, rather than natural familial love and procreation. And it plans on enforcing its tenets on the unwilling with greater skill and intensity than any previous inquisition.

However, it is a religion without hope for a future.

As light always overtakes darkness, a religion that values life—and bringing up life in a family—will overtake a religion against life. Because, to survive requires producing a next generation to pass along a culture to. A cult that despises reproduction cannot outlast its adherents. Nor does this cult want to survive. It is nihilistic. It is by definition suicidal. So we must resist it—and outlast it—by doing what civilizations do to thrive: honor God and protect the family.

The Unconstitutional Executive Order

Unconstitutional: “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.” Apparently the president thinks it means, "Something I'm not willing or politically ready to do at this time, but is subject to change on my whim."

There are collections of video of Obama saying, at least a couple dozen times, that acting on his own to change immigration law is unconstitutional (example below). Then, of course, he did that just last Thursday, claiming this was clearly within his power. Was he lying or misinformed before? Or is he lying and misinformed now. Since the Constitution hasn’t changed in the interim, it isn’t possible for him to be right on both sides.

 

 

There is also a chart going around comparing how many executive orders each president has enacted per year. FDR was by far the most extreme, enacting around 290 per year—for more years than any other president, to boot. George W. Bush has fewer (about 36 per year) than Reagan (about 47 per year). Obama is only slightly lower than George W. Bush, at 33-ish.

But this is the wrong question. Of course it is legal for a president to give executive orders. The purpose of an executive order is to direct the people working under him as to how to execute the laws duly enacted by Congress. Executive orders are meant to be procedural. And they must be simply a way to see to the carrying out of the laws; they cannot change the laws or create new laws.

Much has been made about the executive order by Reagan to allow for amnesty back in 1981—which was a directive on how to go about executing the decision made by the democrat-led Congress. There isn’t an issue with the legality of that executive order—although plenty of people can see that the failure to close the border as promised simply invited more of the illegal immigrant problem, rather than resolving it.

The question for last Thursday’s edict isn’t whether the president has the right to give an executive order; he does. The question isn’t whether he can act on immigration policy; he can, as Reagan did. But only as Reagan did—following the law as defined by Congress, following the Constitution.

If you have a president, say Reagan, who uses executive orders liberally but perhaps not even a single time for any purpose but directing the executive branch in how to keep the law, then you have no executive order problem. Then, suppose you have another president, say Obama, who less frequently gives executive orders but often as an edict to create law rather than to follow laws set by Congress, then each of those offenses is breaking the law. Party doesn’t matter. The policy itself—along with its efficacy or intent—doesn’t matter. The color of the president matters not a whit. What matters is the breach of the law.

The president cannot act extralegally. He cannot make law. We do not live in a monarchy, dictatorship, potentate, banana republic, or any other tyranny. We live in a constitutional republic. We have a written law granting only limited enumerated powers to the federal government, so that our God-given natural rights are not infringed.

Can a president act beyond those enumerated powers? Presidents have. This president does. But not legally. Presidents have typically gotten away with exertion of power beyond what is granted depending on their popularity. That is not the case now. This president isn’t popular. His policies are not popular. His edicts are notably unpopular. He acts in the face of those negatives.

So the next question is, How do we react, to limit the damage of his acting beyond his authority in direct conflict with the limits guaranteed in our Constitution?

The constitutionally designed response is impeachment. But, despite his lack of popularity or approval, he does have media control, so the fear in the hearts of congressmen is significant. Impeachment is time consuming, and takes a sizable measure of focused energy and political capital. It’s not going to happen when this man has only two more years in office.

So, the additional steps are to stonewall the illegal acts. Defund anything that relates to executing his orders. Targeted defunding—not just refusing to agree to a continuing resolution to keep spending as the president sees fit, as an alternative to shutting down the government. One advantage of now having a GOP Senate is that we can actually pass a budget—something the democrat-led Senate has failed to do every single year. It’s easier to target spending in an actual budget, so that’s a good thing, if the Congress will have the stomach to do their job.

Additionally, Senator Ted Cruz is suggesting that no political appointments should be approved until the president rescinds his illegal orders. He should not be empowered by sycophants who will act on his orders in contrast to law. Interesting idea. I hope it works.

There are also lawsuits. Texas Attorney General (and Governor-elect) has already filed a lawsuit based on the significant damage to the state caused by the president’s insistence on a porous border. It may be that courts can suspend the immediate enactment of any illegal order. I’m also in favor of states taking on the role of border enforcement when the federal government fails—and then find ways to charge costs to the federal government for whatever it costs each border state. I don’t think such a system has been found yet. Texas is taking money out of its own budget to defend the international border.

While mostly we’re talking today about the illegality of using an executive order to make law, we can talk briefly actual immigration policy. The answer is relatively simple, if not easy. It could already have been done by an administration serious about a solution: close the border (funding was supplied almost a decade ago, but not used for that purpose); make it impossible for illegals to work here or to get social benefits here—thus ending any incentive to come here illegally. Any costs for medical care, incarceration or deportation of illegals should be billed to the home nation that the illegals will be deported to—costs could be deducted from foreign aid, or specific tariffs on imports from those nations until debt is paid. That’s a side issue, but the intent is to stop those nations from encouraging their citizens to come here and send dollars home.

There’s no need to wait to improve the bureaucracy; make it a smooth and efficient process to come here legally. There is nothing stopping the executive branch from doing its job better immediately. Resolving bureaucratic red tape would change the dynamics of the argument from the start. There is no need for “comprehensive immigration reform” in order to improve the process.

What the president and others mean by “comprehensive immigration reform” has been, and continues to be, naturalize illegals with the intent of creating more dependent citizens who will vote democrat. While there is reason to feel sympathy for those caught up in the useless-bureaucracy-combined-with-porous-border up until now, the solution for individual cases cannot be handled until the border is secure and the bureaucracy is fully functioning.

One indicator that the president isn’t persuading the public to his way of thinking is this Saturday Night Live skit, going viral, a parody of the Schoolhouse Rock “I’m Just a Bill.” Enjoy.

 

Why Civilizations Die: Part II

This is Part II on David P. Goldman’s ideas from How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too). Part I is on fertility decline. Today we cover the idea that secularization and fertility decline go together.

Goldman suggests that sociologists have been wrong in the way they include religion as just one factor among many, when looking at a civilization, no more important than political structures, language, and climate, for example. But religion, he says, is a more important factor in civilization success than any other.

In the introduction, Goldman asserts,

The repudiation of life among advanced countries living in prosperity and peace has no historical precedent, except perhaps in the anomie [breakdown or loss of social norms, uprootedness] of Greece in its post-Alexandrian decline and Rome during the first centuries of the Common Era. But Greece fell to Rome, and Rome to the barbarians. In the past, nations that foresaw their own demise fell to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Plague, Famine, and Death. Riding point for the old quartet in today’s more civilized world is a Fifth Horseman: Loss of Faith. Today’s cultures are dying of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies (p. xiii).

What is this loss of faith? Where does it come from? Can we see it coming and prevent it? Because knowing that most of the world is in collapse is rather overwhelming if we can’t learn something useful from the awareness.

Goldman proposes that there is a relationship with our need to overcome death. Is there something of who we are that lives on? “The truth is that humankind cannot survive without faith, specifically faith that our lives have meaning beyond the mere span of our years. Civilizations that lose their faith also lose their desire to continue and fail to reproduce themselves” (p. 16).

Simple faith in a religion equals sustainable fertility—but it is not enough. If the faith is tied to culturalism or nationalism (seeing the tribe or nation as central), the faith slips once the other purpose fails. Once a traditional society—one of believing people, usually rural and agrarian—enters the modern world (high education, urbanized, governmental usurpation of family responsibilities such as caring for the elderly), the clash frequently leads to secularization hand in hand with drop in fertility.

Goldman examines several places where fertility decline was sudden, and coincided with a precipitous decline in religious observance: Quebec, Poland, Spain, and Ireland. From the mid-1930s for several decades,

Quebec was more Catholic and more fecund [had a higher fertility rate] than any province in the industrial world. In 1960 attendance at mass was 88 percent, the highest in the Catholic world, and the average Quebecoise had four children. By the 1980s the fertility rate had fallen to just 1.5, and Mass attendance to 20 percent (p. 180).

Quoting a report by Catherine Krull and Fran Trovato, called “Where Have All the Children Gone,” the book notes,

By 1982, more than 42 percent of Quebec men and women still in their reproductive ages had undergone voluntary sterilization. Moreover, in the period 1978-1998, abortion increased from 17.9 per 100 live births to 41. The 1998 figure is in fact much higher than the ratio for the same year in Canada as a whole” (p. 181).

The failure of the culture coincides with the failed efforts for Quebecois nationalism (separatism from the rest of Canada and preservation of French language and culture). Religion there was tied together with the sense of chosen-ness. When the dream died, religious belief died with it.

Poland’s fertility collapse is somewhat similar. In the 1950s, Polish families had 3-4 children. By 1979 (when Pope John Paul II visited), families still had 2-3 children, a drop, but still high by industrial world standards. Now, a single generation later, fertility is at 1.25 (children per woman), about half replacement level, and among the lowest in the world. What happened? The Cold War ended. That should have been a good thing. But Poland had viewed its Catholicism as resistance to Soviet-imposed atheism. Their faith and heroism contributed to the end of the Cold War. But without the need to resist, they seemed to lose their purpose—along with their reason for survival.

In Ireland there is the usual secularization pattern: rising prosperity and urbanization. But just as in Quebec and Poland, “the Irish stopped having babies and families—and shortly afterward stopped going to church” (p. 185). In 1965 Irish women had four children. By 2010, that number was two. And Mass attendance dropped from 91% in 1973 to 34% in 2005. This coincides with the cease in hostilities against Great Britain.

Spain was another country that combined nationalism and Catholicism, particularly under Francisco Franco.  The fertility plunge began in 1975, the year Franco died. Up till then, Spain had enjoyed one of the highest fertility rates in Europe, around 3 per woman (about 2 more than the rest of Europe). Within a mere twenty years Spain plummeted to the lowest fertility in Western Europe. Spain was “the most extreme turn away from family life observed anywhere in the world—until Iran’s population plunge of the past fifteen years” (186).

When a culture either achieves some grand goal it is seeking, or recognizes that it is doomed to failure regarding that goal, it loses its will to live. But if it’s going to lose the will to live either way, where is there hope?

Hope must be what we find when we look at the exceptions, particularly America and Israel. What is different about these two nations that allows for faith to continue, even to thrive, in the modern world? Goldman describes the difference as having to do with our understanding of God, his covenants with us, and inalienable rights. And it comes down to what we choose to love. More on that in the next post.

Why Civilizations Die: Part I

At Spherical Model, I propose that civilization requires certain things to thrive: belief in God, who grants us unalienable rights, and therefore obedience to God’s law; and in order to perpetuate the belief and train in the civilized behavior, families are the basic unit and must be honored and nurtured. My way of organizing the ideas may be unique, but these beliefs about civilization are more widely understood. So when I hear a book title like How Civilizations Die, my interest is piqued, to see if this supports my thesis or adds additional insight.

How Civilizations Die(And Why Islam Is Dying Too) came out just last year. The author is David P. Goldman, online columnist “Spengler,” whom I admit I was not aware of (read an explanation of his column themes here ). The original “Spengler” authored the pessimistic work The Decline of the West, so Goldman took the name in irony. Sometimes with such a book, I end up having to study and reread, and write down quotes. This is one of those.

It does indeed support my basic Spherical Model thesis about civilization. But while I mainly outline the positive requirements for civilization, he covers the much broader subject of what doesn’t work, and along the way reveals what works. There’s a lot in here, and I’m still developing how to write about it, but I think I will spend two or three blog posts on it.

He describes his theme as following the direction of German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, and then giving it broader application: the mortality of nations and its causes, Western secularism, Asian anomie [breakdown or loss of social norms, uprootedness], and unadaptable Islam.

I think I will simplify somewhat. Here are his basic themes:

·         Population decline is the identifying symptom of a culture in decline.

·         Culture declines when it secularizes.

·         Culture decline is inevitable if culture is formed on the wrong basis.

o   Ethnicity, location, and history are the wrong bases for culture.

o   Belief in God-given individual rights is the right basis. 

Population Decline

Goldman pulls no punches. This is from the introduction:

As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98 percent over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid (p. ix).

I’ve been interested in population decline for quite a while, and have occasionally written on it. But Goldman presented not only a lot of specificity, but also information I didn’t have before. I was unaware, for example, that much of the Muslim world is experiencing a plunge in fertility rates. Here’s the Iranian situation for example:

Today there are more Iranians in their mid-twenties than in any other age bracket. But they are not reproducing. An educated twenty-five-year-old Iranian woman today probably grew up in a family of six or seven children, but will bear only one child. The consequences will be catastrophic. Today there are nine Iranians of working age for every elderly dependent. By 2050, when the bulge in Iran’s population will be at retirement age, there will be more Iranians in their mid-sixties than in any other age bracket—seven elderly dependents for every ten working Iranians. The country produces just $4,400 per capita [adjusted constant dollars], about a tenth of America’s GDP, and most of that comes directly or indirectly from oil and natural gas reserves—which are running out.

It’s already too late to fend off the population decline…. Aging populations present a danger even to rich countries with well-funded public pension systems. For poor countries with a primitive social safety net or none at all, a graying society will be a disaster (p. 2).

The speed of the fall of fertility in the Muslim world is startling. Worldwide fertility has fallen over half a century from 4.5 children per woman to about 2.5. But in the Muslim world in the last fifteen years, the rate has fallen two to three times faster: Iran by six children per woman, Turkey by five, Pakistan by a little more than three, and Egypt and Indonesia both by four.

The few Muslim pockets retaining fertility are those with higher illiteracy. Another factor is religious practice—more frequent attendance at the mosque equals higher fertility. In short, they retain high fertility if they remain in a traditional Muslim world and have not entered the modern world. But remaining outside the modern world also means being unable to employ and feed the population. And that’s a serious problem, but it’s worse for those with higher literacy: Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria. There the lack of children means the lack of hope for a future.

Goldman warns, “Whereas Europe tends toward pacifism because it knows it has nothing to gain from aggression, Iran tends toward belligerence because it knows it has nothing to lose” (p. 7).

I am disturbed that higher literacy tends to correlate with lower fertility. Education is a good thing, in itself. So the other factor, faith, must also be significant. In just about all the ways you can think of “faith,” Goldman says, “Demographic winter arises from a crisis of faith” (p. 16): loss of adherence to a specific religion, loss of faith in one’s culture, loss in faith in personal or national purpose and value.

We’ll focus more on faith in the next couple of posts. But there’s one more factor to look at regarding demographic demise: economics. Somewhere during the past century children changed from being an economic asset to being a cost. Some of this is a shift from rural farm labor to urban labor.

We used to ask questions like, “How many children do I need to help me work and then support me in my elderly years?” The answer on a subsistence farm is five. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when life expectancy was lower, that was equal to the number needed to keep the population stable. And it was how many children women bore in 1950, when 70% of the world lived in farming communities. In 1800 90% of Americans lived on farms, and women bore an average of seven children. By 1900 only 50% lived on farms, and fertility had fallen to four children per woman. In 2000 US fertility dropped to two.

People have stopped thinking of children as an economic asset. We don’t use them for child labor, and we don’t expect them to directly care for us in our old age—that has shifted to a collective care. In other words, our children pay a rising portion of their wages to the government, which doles out elderly care as it sees fit. So there is a disconnect between the number of children an individual has and the amount of care he receives in old age.

The disconnect means there is no incentive to personally have more children. We look at the quarter million dollars it costs to raise a child, and think about whether we would prefer to spend that income on ourselves instead. The only social reason to have children who contribute to collective elderly care is altruism; there is incentive to freeload.

Those who have a “faith” reason for having children, however, still have them. On the individual and national/cultural level, people who believe only in themselves fail to find something worth caring enough about to reach into the future.