Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…Is decadence cyclical, or it just keeps on getting worse and worse? I think that it can be cyclical. One way to look at it is that, under my definition, it’s a very normal thing for human societies to enter into, perhaps much more normal than the kind of dynamism that we have taken for granted in the US. And to the extent that it reflects patterns of prosperity leading to torpor and stagnation, you would expect a kind of cyclical phenomenon, right? To take the demographic example, you have real, substantial demographic decline in the Western world. Some of that just reflects the fact that we had this huge influential generation, the baby boom generation, that didn’t have nearly as many kids as their parents did and has sort of bestridden our world for a long time. It’s possible — it’s sort of a subtheme of the book that, as the baby boom generation passes to their reward, that decadence will ease a little bit, and there’ll be more room for young people to do creative things and attain positions of power and all these kinds of things, and the demographic landscape of Western societies will change a little bit. So in that sense, I think you can tell a cyclical story and certainly can see cyclical stories in history. I do think, though, that if you just push existing trend lines in the Western world forward, you would say the decadence is likely to deepen, at least over the next 25 to 40 years. Right now, just to stay with fertility, there does seem to be a kind of low fertility trap that countries get into, where you have small families. Growth and vigor slow down, and in that landscape, there’s less support for having children. So fertility rates stay low, and that drives economic growth rates lower, and those things feed on one another. That’s why I spend a certain amount of the later parts of the book talking about scenarios that are more disjunctive, where you need something unexpected and dramatic to happen to shift things. Maybe that’s a particular invention that we’re on the cusp of reaching, or maybe it’s a religious revival that we don’t expect. I think the decadence we have now requires some sort of disjunctive event to shift us out of it, which could very well happen. But if you just plot the course of the United States forward to 2050, I would say that we stay decadent. Maybe the problem with the low birth rate — it’s not that kids aren’t fun, but men are not fun. So once women have some wealth or employment opportunities at all, they don’t need men as much. Those men don’t compete as much to marry those women. You have families forming later or not at all, or there’s high rate of single motherhood of course. But you’ll just have fewer kids. What would possibly reverse the problem of men simply not being that much fun?…

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