Globalized Wealth and the End of the Sexual Revolution

Wealth made possible all the things we associate with the “Sexual Revolution”: effective contraception, abortion on demand, radical feminism, and the victory of the LGBTQI movement. However, if geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan is correct, much of that wealth will disappear over the next 20 – 30 years. Many people don’t immediately realize the connection between wealth and sexual liberalization. But that’s because we don’t live in a world where two out of three people grow food. Is that world coming back? In many countries and regions, the answer is most likely “yes.”

The End of Pax Americana

In his new book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization (New York: Harper Business Press, $16.95 [Kindle]), Zeihan argues that today’s wealth grew out of the Bretton Woods Agreement and the U.S.’s efforts to contain the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc. The commitment was to make the world safe, not so much for democracy as for the industrialization and capitalism that (we rationalized) would support democratic institutions. Backed by the U.S. Navy’s protection of transoceanic shipping, the so-called Pax Americana allowed many Third World countries to industrialize practically overnight.

Globalization didn’t just open new markets for international trade of finished products. It also allowed industries to globalize the manufacturing process. A car could be labeled “Made in America,” but many of its 30,000 parts could be assembled in other countries from components made in still other countries. The auto company itself could be incorporated in yet another nation, while its shareholders could be anywhere. More significantly, globalization allowed the mechanization and specialization of agriculture. Individual food items could grow in regions best suited for them. Machines allowed large chunks of national populations to leave the farm for the factory.

However, America’s ability to sustain the largest blue-water fleet in the world is diminishing, which will degrade our ability to protect international shipping. Boomers and Gen-Xers worldwide are leaving the workforce over the next 25 years, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. Zeihan argues that following generations won’t replace their numbers, taxable incomes, or investment capital, even as “demographic winter” places heavier social safety-net burdens on them. As shipping becomes more dangerous and foreign economies crumble, we’ll have to return many things to domestic production right when we’re losing workers to produce them. Goodbye, globalized wealth.

Agriculture, Wealth, and Women

In sum, the world is about to get poorer and hungrier. As his cover blurb puts it, Zeihan foresees “a world where countries or regions will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, fight their own battles, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and aging [emphasis mine].” However, Zeihan only fleetingly touches on how industrialization led to the birth of the women’s movement. He doesn’t connect it to sexual libertinism or the LGTBQI movement, possibly because Zeihan himself is gay. In fairness, it wasn’t his focus.

Agriculture is labor-intensive. Before modern machinery and healthcare, subsistence farming practically demanded that farming communities grow their labor forces through childrearing. Add to that pressure shorter lifespans and higher infant mortality, and you have a greater economic incentive to participate in reproduction. Young children could take on the lighter routine chores of farming life, freeing the adults for the heavier burdens. They were also forced to mature faster, trained to assume adult responsibilities earlier. I doubt that women had to be coerced into motherhood because they knew the stakes as well as men. Possibly better.

Cities are where merchants, craftsmen, and (eventually) governments congregate. Urban life required fewer children for survival, especially as more wealth led to better health. Economic specialization reduced the need for family participation. However, urbanization places higher demands on agriculture. Large-scale farming encouraged the development of enslaved labor, later obtained under the guise of tenant farming, which kept the need for children up. Occasional technological innovations made farming more efficient but didn’t break the patterns of life that kept most women at home. Women who worked outside the home mostly did so from necessity rather than choice.

Wealth and the Baby Spigot

Industrialization put urbanization on steroids. More food, more machinery, and better healthcare reduced the demand for children while opening “masculine” jobs to women. Because population growth was no longer perceived as an “all-hands evolution,” breathing room opened for LGTBQI persons. Reduced pressure to participate in economic life meant less pressure on children to mature, increasing the length and expense of childhood. Depending on your perspective, children were either long-term investments or money pits. Children didn’t become a burden until they stopped being an economic must-have. Less than 70 years passed between the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act and Roe v. Wade.

Industrialization and the wealth it made possible destroyed sexual roles developed over millennia and made the very concept of sexual identity debatable. The development of effective contraceptives allowed us to recreationalize sex and forget its reproductive telos. They also made children disposable commodities.

Since 1945, childbirth rates in most industrialized countries have plummeted, many to below their replacement fertility rate. The later and faster the country industrialized, the faster its birthrate cratered. Of course, population growth didn’t immediately stop when the baby spigot shut off. The world population is still expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, with the U.S. hitting about 405 million by 2060. However, whether it will grow beyond that point is becoming more doubtful. Much of the former Eastern Bloc is already in population decline, as are Italy and Japan. China and Russia will eventually follow.

Zeihan argues that all modern economic systems rely on the expectation that more of their inputs are coming for their continued stability. More raw materials, more food, more investment capital, more demand, yadda-yadda-yadda. In that sense, they’re all pyramid schemes (or Ponzi schemes, take your pick!). None of them are equipped to deal with less. But less is precisely what we’re facing. Less labor, less demand, less consumption, less capital, and less disposable income. And because humans don’t come with built-in replenishment rate sensors, we won’t turn the baby spigot back on until it’s too late.

What Will Become of the Revolution?

What will the world look like in 2050? Zeihan has his list of potential survivors and casualties based on what he calls “Geographies of Success.” He also believes that climate change won’t be devastating everywhere and that some microclimates will improve agriculture while others worsen. However, his conviction that North America will escape relatively unscathed (“The Last of More”) is patently inconsistent with other arguments. We may not experience the widespread famines or the catastrophic industrial collapse that he foresees for regions like sub-Saharan Africa, the Far East, or Eastern Europe. We may devolve only to 1930 rather than 1800.

But we will notice that our world is ending. We won’t be able to not notice. It’s just a question of how long it takes us to connect the economic dots. Many things become obvious only in retrospect.

What will global collapse mean for the sexual revolution? Will pharmacies stop putting contraceptives and abortifacients on their shelves? Will women be relegated to the kitchen and the nursery again? Will communities start punishing homosexuality and transvestitism once more? I don’t know. Much depends on how the collapse plays out and how we pivot to survive it. Given our history since 1933, I suspect the U.S. government will continue to throw borrowed money at the problems as they arise, avoiding hard choices and keeping the economy propped up until we face a massive Greek-style debt crisis.

The real question, I think, should be: Is there a way to keep what was good about the sexual revolution alive while simultaneously dismantling everything bad?

The Catholic Church has a long memory, one that preserved the writings of the classical world. I think nations may return to Christ when the gods of Science, Technology, and Commerce have utterly failed them. And the Church will have a new opportunity to preach her social doctrine to a more receptive world. A future pope can elaborate on that doctrine to affirm the intrinsic dignity of LGTBQI persons even as the Church continues to defend traditional marriage and family. But if conventional domestic relations come back, it will be with women’s consent.

Why? Because most women have more common sense than do college-indoctrinated political activists. They just don’t hate and fear motherhood that much. And nobody likes to starve.

Conclusion

The human creature isn’t reducible to Homo oeconomicus; we are more than our demographic pigeonholes and economic niches. However, economics begins with survival at its most basic level: How do we get, distribute, and keep the resources we need to stay alive? Humanity can survive without all the accumulated wealth brought by technology, industry, and finance. We cannot survive without food and water. We also cannot survive without children. More than any other, these facts make procreation a cooperative effort, even a community effort. For most people, voluntary extinction is not a real option.

If ever women return to being primarily mothers and homemakers, the driver won’t be religion or politics but rather poverty. However, whether that means that women become second-class citizens will be up to us. The women’s movement has forced us to examine their contributions to history outside the family home, to realize that God gave men the perfect helpmate (Genesis 2:18-25). But it shouldn’t have come at the cost of denigrating the role women played inside the home. Because that’s the role that may save us in the wrack to come.