Will the world soon experience a return of patriarchy? That is the question raised by Phillip Longman in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Policy.
The magazine's cover features a rather stunning headline: "Why Men Rule – and Conservatives Will Inherit the Earth." That headline would be surprising in almost any contemporary periodical, but it is especially significant that this article should appear in the pages of Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The publication of this article set a good many heads to spinning.
Phillip Longman is Bernard L Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is a well-respected author and researcher, whose books have included The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do about It (2004). In his previous works, Longman has projected how falling birthrates throughout advanced societies will lead to financial, political, social, and demographic decline.
In this article, he pressed his argument to the next stage – announcing the return of patriarchy – the concept of male leadership – as essential to a recovery of higher birthrates and reproduction.
"With the number of human beings having increased more than sixfold in the past 200 years, the modern mind simply assumes that men and women, no matter how estranged, will always breed enough children to grow the population – at least until plague or starvation sets in," Longman explains.
"Yet, for more than a generation now, well-fed, healthy, peaceful populations around the world have been producing too few children to avoid population decline. That is true even though dramatic improvements in infant and child mortality mean that far fewer children are needed today (only about 2.1 per woman in modern societies) to avoid population loss. Birthrates are falling far below replacement levels in one country after the next – from China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, to Canada, the Caribbean, all of Europe, Russia, and even parts of the Middle East."
Throughout human history, a persistent fall in birthrates has served as a harbinger of cultural decline and a warning of cultural collapse. The reasons for this are many, but center in the fact that the cause of falling birthrates is often a loss of social cohesion and confidence and the effect of falling reproduction rates is a decline in economic prosperity and erosion of the social structure.
Put simply, a significant fall in birthrates means that, in the next generation, there will be fewer workers, parents, consumers, and contributors to the common welfare. As societies age, a greater percentage of the population tends toward the older end of the age spectrum – representing greater dependency and less economic contribution.
As Longman explains, many countries have attempted to address falling birthrates with aggressive encouragement for couples to have multiple children. Singapore offers "speed dating" events to citizens, intended to encourage young people to marry and have children. In Europe, the government often seeks to incentivize children by offering tax incentives and state-financed daycare systems.
In the end, these efforts seldom work. "As governments going as far back as imperial Rome have discovered, when cultural and economic conditions discourage parenthood, not even a dictator can force people to go forth and multiply," Longman observes. "Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy." Continue >>
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What happens to everyone's assets after the Rapture?
It is indeed difficult for people to understand that God designed this existance. If He had created woman first then woman would be the head (1 Timothy 2:9-15). Just like with any other thing that is created (by man too) there may be more than one way it could have been created.
The key issue is respect for the creator by using the creation the way the creator intended. God created one man and one woman for life. This would, by its very nature, would mean dad was to be around and being the leader of the home.
One of the main problems is that men haven't realized their value in Christ and therefore have a difficult time showing their family their value in Christ. Feminists tried to get their value by being accepted by men! They wanted to be viewed as equal by men did they not? Woman should never degrade themselves in such a way. Woman are congruant (sp). They are quite different but have the same VALUE to Christ and therefore should to men. They are uniquely created to compliment what man does. It's a team concept.
Here's one for the twist your brain catagory... Was Adam in charge in the garden or was it after the fall that God put that in place? Could it be that man being in charge is a result of sin and that as Christians the Biblical relationship between husband and wife is simply to be an illustration of Christ and the Church?
P2
Today we live in western societies that act in the fashion of a mother.
If you are born in most western countries, generally no matter who you are and what you do, and whether you disobey the rules, you are considered a citizen...to the detriment of our countries and society.
This love is a lawless one, and ultimately conditions what has been deemed as oikophobia. The oikophobes of our day have the freedom to hate their own countries and to plan deceitfully against their own mother countries...yet they are still considered its children by default..
It is about time that we start calling our countries fatherlands once again. Where to be called a citizen, one has duties and obligations that have to be met, and not just be born there to receive all its benefits...
And it is about time that our societies recognize the intrinsic roles of a father and mother in a family. We cannot have two mothers or two fathers.
We need a father and a mother so that unconditional love and acceptance from the mother can be balanced with conditional love based on the rule of law...from the father..
And neither do we admit or will ever submit in the liberty of our human spirit to a god that does not have the virtue to call itself mother or father. Such a god is a monster...and our lands are not to be monsterlands...
Here humans are treated and act like monsters...in the virtue of their vile and monster god.
What love is this? When suicide and mass murder is worshiped as a virtue of a monster god?
Only a monster god cares nothing for the lives of its worshippers to call them to suicide and outright murder. Who would not pray?
God our Father...
or to sing:
This is my Fathers World
and to my listening ears
all nature sings and round me rings
the music of the spheres.
This is my Fathers World
I rest me in the thought
of rocks and trees, of skies and seas
His hands the wonders wrought....
P1.
Daily we are being brainwashed into believing that a father and mother are no different than 2 female parents or 2 male parents. We have absorbed these ideas w/o question, but ultimately to the detriment and the abasement of our societies.
There are differences between how a father and how a mother interact, and we ought to care how our children are brought up.
The mothers perspective is molded from the fact that the child begins as a part of her. Having given birth to the child she cannot deny that it is hers. Hence, their future interaction is one that is built on an automatic and established position of acceptance from the mother. The love and parenting of the child is premised on this very undeniable condition.
A father does not birth the child, and therefore cannot know whether the child belongs to him.. Hence, a fathers love is conditioned on the basis of how the child interacts with the father.
A father begins to establish a means of interaction that is based on whether a child obeys or disobeys. Hence the child is conditioned to the father through the rules of the father as he tests obedience.
A child belongs to his/her father as the child grows up according to the expectations placed upon him by the father. The child shows his love for his father by following the fathers rules.
A few corollaries can be drawn from this.
1. The Christian God calls himself Father and not mother, because it is only those that strive to obey God(as a positive act of response to His love) that can be expected to be called His children, and continue to receive His love.
2. In our European societies we used to refer to our lands as fatherlands for a reason.
Those who love their country will obey its rules. (Christian rules for a land that stem from God the Father.)
Those that do not obey the laws of their country cannot love their country or be considered its children.
Mohler is correct when he distances patriarchy away from muslim culture.
IAllah does not refer to himself as father...and hence shows that fatherhood in islamic culture is not understood as much as tyranny is....hence islamists are not even children, but slaves to allah...the tyranny ...
In Christianity God refers to Himself as Father...as a result we are His children...
But before Jesus' coming back, the ones of Satan will prevail, and those who love Jesus will suffer from them as foretold in Bible.
there is definitely nothing wrong for patriarchy. Feminists are definitely of Satan. It is God's design and assignment.
Finally, someone senses the problem of couple w/o marriage and children.