Jim's Blog

Gibbon called the art and literature of the latter days of the Roman Empire “the second childhood of human reason”.

Back in the days when European art was the greatest the world has ever seen, the wealthy and powerful Cornaro family patronized the artist Bernini because he was a great artist.  Because high status people like the Cornaro family patronized great artists, great art was high status, and, circularly, the Cornaro family gained status by patronizing great art, such as The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which features the Cornaro family as much as a Coca Cola advertisement features coca cola.

Similarly, in Restoration England, high status people patronized science because it was high status, and it was high status because high status people patronized it, starting with King Charles the Second.

Then the government gets into funding art.  But the large bureaucratic government funding organization inevitably gets captured by recipients, as Cornaro family could never be captured, as King Charles the Second could never be captured.  Funds are distributed for grantsmanship, not art quality.  The greatest experts in grantsmanship could draw no better than a small child.

So drawing like a small child comes to be deemed high status.

Neo reactionaries are fond of authority, but need to remember that there is lot that centralized authority cannot do, starting with operate a modern economy.  Large organizations suffer from diseconomies of scale, and a severe agent/principal problem.  Without aristocrats, kings are not much good.

Our best hopes for a high tech future, for avoiding a dark age, are consuming the genes needed for a high tech future. Smart people go to Hong Kong and Singapore and fail to reproduce.

Singapore has taken numerous measures, similar to those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus, to improve fertility, which will doubtless be as ineffectual as those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus.

Just as the cure for Chinese poverty was to import the economic laws and customs of Hong Kong into Shanghai, the cure for Singaporean infertility is to import the marital laws and customs of Timor Leste, where women cannot own property, because they are wards of their parents until they become wards of their husbands.

Dubai already has a system where low status expat workers are effectively wards of their employers. This typically applies to Indian construction workers (who are all male and unaccompanied by their wives and families) and Filipino “maids”, who are all female and normally single when they arrive. If an employee’s sponsor is her employer, the employee is effectively a ward of the employer. A higher status employee usually has the free zone authority is his sponsor, not his employer, even though his employer asked the free zone to sponsor the employee so the process looks very similar.

An employee sponsored by her employer normally resides in accommodation provided by the employer. The employee cannot change jobs without her employers permission. If the employer dismisses the maid, he normally cancels her visa, her bank accounts, her phone, and gives her a ticket back to her homeland. He has to give her a ticket out, because he paid a deposit to obtain her work visa, and because if she fails to leave by her employer’s fault, the employer is in trouble. If the employer cancels his employees visa, he is supposed to provide the employee with the means to leave. Often however, she fails to show up by her fault, in which case the employer still loses his deposit, so if he can, he drags her off to the airport whether she will or not.

Male Indian construction workers seldom do a run. If fired, they leave without any drama. “Maids” frequently do a run and fail to show up at the airport, because the usual cause of a falling out with her employer is raging hormones. If she does a run, her phone stops working, her credit cards stop working, her bank account stops working and if she does not withdraw any money in her bank account in a timely fashion, she loses the money. She cannot get a new phone, bank account or legal accommodation, and is subject to a large fine for every day she fails to show up. If caught, and unable to pay the fine, goes to jail for considerable time, then is sent out of the country and forbidden ever to return.

Sarah Perry argues that children have been nationalized, have become property of the state and ceased to be the property of their parents, so have become a cost to their parents and a profit to the state, so parents decline to produce so many.

Makes sense, certainly part of the story, but not what I seem to observe, not the main story.

What I seem to see happening is that the major cost deterring people from children is not economic, but rather loss of female sexual autonomy.  If a woman has children during her fertile years, then she is not longer able to respond promptly to a midnight booty call from Jeremy Meeks.

Your feelings differ from mine?  Let us look at Augustan Rome.

The Augustan reforms made children the property of their parents, but the wife even less the property of her husband than in the modern west.  Fertility continued to collapse, to levels that may well have been substantially lower than modern western levels.

On the other hand, the Pauline reforms, which were that a man and his wife were one person, and that person the husband, that the wife was part of the husband, did help substantially with fertility.

Further, I don’t think the nationalization of children is really separable from feminism.  Women really cannot look after themselves.  They will either attach to their fathers, their husbands, or Uncle Sam the big Pimp.  Thus feminism, in practice, means that children become the children of Uncle Sam the big Pimp.   If you denationalized children, women would spontaneously submit to patriarchy.  Conversely, if you enforce patriarchy, the patriarchs will claim their children.  To maximize fertility, need that form of patriarchy in which women attach to their husbands, rather than their fathers, and females are rationed out at only one wife per male, so that as many males as possible have incentive to attach to society, to work, and to invest in posterity.