Ocean Frontier Fertility: Ecologically Imposed Patriarchy

In The Return of Patriarchy Foreign Policy’s Phillip Longman opines:

Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximizing parents’ investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it.

And I would add that no advanced white civilization has yet endured for the simple reason that none has learned what makes Europeans fertile.

As I’ve often pointed out before, there are two big exceptions to the decline of total fertility rates among whites, exemplified in the United States by Utah and Alaska. These two States correspond to the ancient dichotomy between socially imposed monogamy and ecologically imposed monogamy respectively. Utah has socially imposed male authority (via Mormonism which posits a father as priest to his family) and Alaska has ecologically imposed male authority. It is the latter that is the more natural for whites and it is why abandonment of the pursuit of frontiers, as occurred in 1972, is so destructive to white fertility. By frontiers I’m referring to physical, not political, frontiers. Although fighting wars can affect the operational sex ratio (unmated males/unmated females) in a way that enhances white fertility, it is a terminal euphoria, as shown by the post WW II baby boom generation. The frontiers I’m talking about increase the carrying capacity of a territory as happened in Europe during the retreat of the glaciers, during the neolithic, or during the expansion of North American crop cover. Although I’ve walked my talk for a long time now to open up space as a frontier, the wheels of the gods are now turning slowly in the right direction for the long journey there and it is time to pursue more immediate concerns. That is what this series of messages on “Ocean Frontier Fertility” will be about.

Posted by James Bowery on Friday, March 3, 2006 at 04:01 PM in Demographics
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Comments:

Posted by JRM on March 03, 2006, 06:09 PM | #

James,

Could you name some others who have had the idea that fertility explodes at the frontier? Not that I am a social conformist, but I would like to see what they have to say on it.

Posted by Søren Renner on March 03, 2006, 06:21 PM | #

Very, extremely, much-of-a-muchnessly interesting post. Everyone knows which side of the cornucopianism vs malthusianism argument I take; but I will put that aside and listen. I am reminded of something Freeman Dyson wrote about.

Posted by James Bowery on March 03, 2006, 09:04 PM | #

JRM—the “idea” that fertility explodes at the frontier is not so much an idea as an observation when looking at the American West. Moreover, it is important to understand the neolithic revolution’s contribution to carrying capacity via cultivation of the land here.

I don’t think it is considered estoteric knowledge that the spread of agriculture resulted in a profound increase in the fertility rates of the practicioners of agriculture—at the expense of the hunter gatherers who refused to adopt agriculture.

The American West was a similar story to this, with many of the native tribes refusing or lagging the adoption of cultivation. Here is an excerpt from an article appearing in the Journal for American Historians:

The robust baby-making of frontier families is especially interesting
because it ran against the national trend. In many other regions,
both in the city and countryside, the birth rate was dropping, in some
cases dramatically. Some social critics worried that unless old-stock
American parents picked up the pace, new immigrants from eastern and southern
Europe would dominate the land, including the western garden. Would
the millions of homes in the new country be filled by “our own children
or by those of aliens?” an essayist asked. Pioneer women would have
to answer: “Upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”

White mothers raising families in the West were not berthing lots of
babies because eastern newspaper columnists told them to, however.
They had their own practical reasons, stemming from circumstances closer
to home. Elsewhere in the country birth rates were declining partly
because more and more parents were depending less and less on their children’s
labor. Not so on the frontier. There, where families were starting
from scratch and often with little outside help, boys and girls were vital
parts of economic life.

More to the point, a pioneer household was an economic mechanism of
mutually-dependent parts. Here is a second way of thinking of families:
as a productive unit, often a remarkably effective and self-sustaining
one. Fathers did the heaviest labor—sodbusting, construction, and
fence-building on a homestead, mining in the camps, and various big-muscle
jobs in the new towns—and took off in search of other wage work when necessary.
Mothers handled the multitude of domestic duties, cared for barnyard animals,
gardened, and earned cash by washing, cooking, and sewing for others.

Children filled in wherever they were needed: hunting, weeding, gathering
wild plants, herding, peddling pies, delivering laundry, hawking newspapers,
caring for younger siblings, cooking, canning, and much more. The
frontier’s popular image is one of individualism and self-reliance, usually
in the shape of rugged adult males. But the transformation of the
nineteenth-century West could be more accurately pictured as a familial
conquest, an occupation by tens of thousands of intradependent households.

Related families frequently settled together. Once again, this
contrasts with the common impression of bonds of kinship shattered among
isolated pioneers. Take, for instance, the Oklahoma land rushes.
These mad scramblings might seem the outstanding instances of atomizing
individualism, but in fact boomers often made the runs as extended families,
grabbing neighboring claims or swapping around so they ended up among relatives.
Most rural counties quickly became interlocking networks of families and
sometimes of former neighbors, instant communities of tested kin and friends
upon whom others could count for help and continuing support.

This pattern of settlement in which groups of families settled together
was one of the few points the West’s diverse population held in common.
Native-born pioneers of Anglo stock, Germans from Russia, Japanese, Czechs,
Basques, and the many Latino groups from the south all understood the advantages
of living near relatives who helped with the multitude of jobs and who
could step in during a crisis. The arrangement continues today.

Koreans, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Salvadorans, Filipinos, and Native Americans
leaving the reservations all tend to cluster among kinfolk. This
familial webbing has always been a key to understanding the social landscape
of the West.

As a productive unit, the western family was an extraordinarily efficient
machine of environmental change. Its several parts worked together
to transform the land, for better or worse. The results are most
apparent in rural regions. Fathers broke the sod, then children harrowed
the turned soil, pulled native weeds, and tended cattle and sheep—hoofed
invaders that were given protected possession of land essential to herds
of wild grazers. Fathers and children also killed outright enormous
numbers of bison, deer, antelope, elk, and other indigenous animals, which
then were butchered, cooked, and served by mothers to fathers, daughters,
and sons who, newly refueled, continued to alter their physical environment.

Posted by slinker, sailer, toldya, sly on March 04, 2006, 12:41 AM | #

And what happens when Professor Michael Hart shows up at the new frontier, demanding admittance, and screaming that you are a F--king Nazi, if he is not let in?

White gentiles need to be innoculated against chutzpah. The sheer gall of certain people can stun the senses, leaving the victim defenseless against a concentrated memetic attack.

Posted by James Bowery on March 04, 2006, 01:28 AM | #

We’re at the stage of scientific understanding of human genetics and their relationship to politics where the opening up of any substantial frontier will do two very critical things:

1) Make being realistic very rewarding

2) Provide breathing room and self-sufficiency.

You can bet your bottom dollar the Michael Harts of the world will (continue to) do everything they can to prevent any frontier from being opened up unless it is under the authority of something like Speilberg’s fantasy portrayed in ”Seaquest” where the “United Earth Oceans” hire “trustworthy” guys like Roy Schieder to police the “outlaws”.

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