(no subject)
My post on the Massachusetts pregnancy pact has generated more debate than anything I have written in years. Thank Heaven (and thank the goodwill of my f-list) it has all been in a polite spirit - even when people disagreed radically. If there are still lurkers watching this LJ for things to be offended by, they will have to make a more than usually thorough job of misrepresentation and lying to make it suitable for fandom_wank.
However, it seems to me that, with few exceptions, everyone seems to have gone off at a tangent - including myself. A few of the earliest posters caught some of my point at least, for, like many members of the conservative end of the spectrum, they have been worrying about the fall in childbirth in Western countries - currently at or beneath replacement level in nearly every major Western country including Japan and (but for immigration) the USA.
That was not, precisely, the thing I had in mind, either. I am not, I hope, simple enough to jump up and rejoice because a fad for childbirth seems to have seized a number of teen-age girls in one place in the USA. It is rather the case that I had been looking for something like this - although, of course, not exactly in the startling and rather troubling form it actually took. The Gloucester pregnancy pact confirmed a number of views I had been forming.
As a historian, I have never been convinced by the panicked spread of the belief that "demography is destiny" - as Mark Steyn and many other conservatives insist. To the contrary, history shows that nothing is more easily influenced and altered by circumstances than demography. In the nineteenth century - the classic century of European demographic explosion - one country noticeably bucked the tendency to huge families and enormous migratory flows, and that country was not a minor one, but France, the centre of Europe. France had 30 million inhabitants in 1801 and 39 million in 1914, and most of the increase was made of immigrants from Italy, Spain and eastern Europe. French families preferred to have few children. At the same time - the very same time - the French of Quebec, similar to the French of the French countryside in religion, manners, language and birth, had one of the enormous birth rates even in the high-rise demographics of the nineteenth-century West. They managed to keep up with the immigration-driven growth of their English-speaking rivals purely by the delirious rate of their growth. Then, one day in the late nineteen-fifties, the Quebecois just stopped having children. Today, their growth rate is one of the lowest in the world, and the very nationalist party whose anti-clerical policies caused or helped the disaster looks with horror upon the real possibility of national dissolution. And to give another instance of the quirks and sudden changes to which demography is subject, were you aware that in the last few years, the birthrate in both Iran and Algeria has gone through the floor, and that both these countries are currently in negative growth territory? Demographic trends can change radically in little more than the space of a morning.
However, the collapse in natality across the West is an undeniable and troubling phenomenon. It is also a very recent one. The conservative consensus that it was caused by the Sixties and the triumph of abortion and contraception is not supported by the facts: the real collapse began in the eighties, under Ronald Thatcher. It was my generation, the generation that came of age in the eighties, that had no children.
My family is typical. My Boomer parents had three children, and nearly every one of their brothers and sisters had similar families - small, but not too small. Whether they thought of it or not, they certainly took good care that the Barbieri and Fanelli genes should be passed on. It was we who did not have any; of my parents' three children, only my sister had a baby, and she had to wait till she was 38. Our family has some peculiar problems - my sister had medical problems, my brother is tetraplegic - but nonetheless I think I can discern, from the lives and experiences of people like me, a few major causes.
In my judgment, the demographic perfect storm that struck the West from the eighties onwards is due to two or three main causes. The first is indeed due to the Sixties, but not to abortion or contraception. This may seem counter-intuitive, but abortion and contraception do not necessarily reduce the birthrate. Britain has one of the highest birth rates in the West, and also by far the highest rate of abortion (I do not know if statistics about contraception are even collected, but they are likely to say the same thing). Far from the immense and still growing British use of abortion reducing the birth rate, the two have grown together. The gay abandon with which English girls, especially of the notorious underclass whose existence troubles journalists and sociologists, have sex and abortions, is the same gay abandon with which they accept to have live children.
No: the Sixties trend that affected us as a generation was the triumph of divorce. And the reasons for this are ancient and deep. I discussed them here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/260448.html. Please read that article if you have not already.
The reasons for marriage to be severely endangered in the sixties were real and grave. We are not talking, as some conservative writers tend to imply, of a silly fad. It was a major crisis, as damaging as a lost war (and attended, incidentally, by a lost war). When we read that Betty Friedan's statement of her own female discontents became, in the early sixties, an instant best-seller, it is just not good enough, as David Horowitz does, to point out that the lady was a lifelong Communist. It is not in the power of Communist propaganda, any more than of capitalist enterprise, to manufacture a runaway best-seller; if you believe that Friedan's writings succeeded because of some diabolical Communist conspiracy, you might as well believe that JK Rowling's novels succeded because of some diabolical marketing ploy, rather than because they fill some evident need in our souls. Besides, if Horowitz had more brains, he would realize that Friedan's writings really worked against her politics: because the searing anger and frustration she conveyed so effortlessly had been experienced as the blameless Party hack wife of a Party hack husband, in a model Communist marriage. The issue went beyond Communism and anti-Communism: the frustations felt by an ambitious young Marxist woman married to another Marxist-Leninist resonated exactly with hundreds of thousands of ordinary Western women married to every shade of person.
This does not lead directly to demographic collapse. Friedan herself had three children. The divorce generation convinced themselves that they could still have children, in fact that they would probably do a better job of raising them than their narrow-minded, authoritarian, constrictive parents. This was also the age of Dr.Benjamin Spock. What they had not bargained for was the effect of divorce itself. There is no such thing as unbitter divorce; whatever good or bad reasons there may be for it (and by God, there can be good reasons a-plenty!), it amounts to rending apart what had been intended to be together. Each partner loses something that he or she had invested in, a fundamental part of his or her past. Hence divorce battles are famously bitter. But even more bitter are the months or years leading up to the inevitable collapse; times of screaming violence or sinister silence, times of bitter, unavailing and ever-mounting mutual resentment. And the children experience every single one of these moments. Contrary to popular belief, divorce itself often comes as a relief to children of a divided family - until they realize that it has by no means put an end to the argument, the bitterness, the toing-and-froing, and the too careful and too detailed divisions of everything in sight, including time with the children themselves.
If this happens in your home alone, it is bad enough. If it happens in the whole of society, if you see it happen time after time among your friends and relatives, it shapes your life. And those of us who grew up in the shadow of a widespread, widely agonizing, often violent series of dissolutions, could not help but approach any idea of relationship with fear and a complete lack of self-belief. Hence the disastrous popularity of the idea of cohabiting, either as a long-term trial for marriage, or as an alternative to the terrors of marriage. The subtext is that if things go wrong as our generation has so often confusedly and agonizingly seen them go wrong as children, there is an escape. In point of fact, the idea of escape is itself delusional; you have still dedicated years of your life to a pseudo-family, so you have all the pain of divorce without even the legal protection. (In point of fact, most Western jurisdiction have been developing, in response to widespread demand, legal instruments for cohabitation that approach divorce.) And the pull outwards rather than inwards brings out the very terrors and anger you have learned as a child to associate with divorce, and the learned behaviour of cruelty and vindictiveness. Some statistics claim that violence between partners is eight times more frequent among cohabiting couples than among married ones. But there is a more fundamental point: that this whole notion arises from, and tends to reinforce, the very inner fear, the very lack of self-belief and confidence, which our generation has learned as children, and which eats away at our stability.
This, then, is the first wind of Hell that goes into the making of the perfect demographic storm: the collapse of the relationship between male and female. Our generation is the generation of the children of divorce. In a hideous caricature of what Jesus said to be true of Paradise, we neither marry, nor have children.
The second factor is the collapse of the career structure for most men and women. Our generation saw it happen in the seventies and eighties; sometimes, especially in Britain and the USA, saw it being pursued as a matter of deliberate policy. WE grew up with the melancholy sound of Bruce Springsteen's "My home town" ringing in our ears: Foreman says, these jobs are going, boys, and they aren't coming back - to your hometown... - or that of any one of a million other messengers bringing the same message. Our fathers had queued up at the doors of personnel managers for big companies, looking for jobs they expected to keep for decades, to make careers on, to marry and have children on, to use to support long-term debt to buy and furnish a home and car. We knew from the moment we left school that work was scarce, hard to find and easy to lose, impermanent, desperately needed, and yet that, whatever we got, it would not last us long. The great English writer and journalist, Keith Waterhouse - himself the wonderful, articulate voice of the previous generation - had an epiphanic moment when he realized what this had done to the young of the eighties: when he saw a pleasant-looking, well-dresed young man bursting out of an office and running up to an equally pleasant-looking, well-dressed young woman, and telling her in tones of ecstasy: "I've got the job!" "Wonderful! You lucky dog!" answered the girl, and they went off skipping and all but dancing down the street. Waterhouse did not even know what job this was supposed to be; he was just struck, indeed horrified, that the very thought of having a job, any job, should cause such unrestrained joy, especially among a pair of people who did not look like beggars. The need to get and keep a job became the central feature of our lives; and as a result of woman's lib, as much of women's as of men's lives. Relationships, let alone children, lost importance. In the pursuit of work, of pleasing the boss, of avoiding the ever-present axe, we accepted conditions that would have made our fathers strike: unpaid overtime rose to giddy heights, benefits were cut, employees competed over which one could stay in the office longer and give the biggest impression of work done. And, I repeat, women were in there on the same level as men - competing for the same jobs by the same means.
It was in this environment that the idea really developed that a child is a nuisance, a danger to that all-important job, a threat to your future - rather than being the future. The neurotic pressure to perform perform perform, the constant downsizings and the constant increase of the responsibilities laid on the surviving employees, taught women to regard a child as a hindrance and a pregnancy as a catastrophe. Abortion, already entrenched in society for reasons I have discussed elsewhere, started being suggested none too subtly to any female employee foolish enough to get herself "in trouble"; with the equally unsubtle alternative of a pink slip (a P45, for you Britons). European governments, it must be admitted, saw the disaster coming and did what they could (short of making abortion illegal, which was unthinkable) to force employers to accept the obligations of mothers, and indeed of fathers. But a law can do little to alter a prevailing mentality. Employers regard babies as the enemy; they will do anything they can to avoid taking on an employee with encumbrances, and to get rid of one who develops them. From their point of view, you can hardly blame them. And employees are perfectly aware of the fact. Once a person had a job in order to have a family. Now they are encouraged not to have the family, in order to keep the job. The result we see all around us.
This, then, is the perfect demographic storm that has struck our generation: the collapse of marriage, caused by social pressures articulated and indeed encouraged by the left; joined with the collapse of the career structure that underpinned the family, caused by economic pressures articulated and indeed encouraged by Ronald Thatcher. If we divide the world into right and left, then nobody is innocent. I would add, as a third factor, the colossal yet uncounted and unmeasurable burden of guilt, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that exists among many of the women, and at least some of the men, who have followed the supposedly guilt-free path of abortion; and the dissociation of sex and procreation, prophetically condemned by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae. The effect is a society of forty-year-olds, quickly turning into a society of fifty-year-olds. People my age find themselves melanchonically wondering where the time has gone.
I have, however, long had a feeling that this situation was artifical and could not last. I felt change would come from somewhere, and at one point imagined that I could see it coming in the rise of conservatism across the West, the increasing dissatisfaction with current conditions. However, this was a movement mainly of people like me - dissatisfied former boomers and their children - and the more I became familiar with the imaginative and moral world of the new generation, our children, the more I realized that it did not apply to them. That is not always and everywhere the case: there are such things as young conservatives, and the children of homeschooling parents. But these are themselves aware that they are something like a fringe movement, dwarfed by the numbers of generation-x children who have grown up in the ordinary pieties and who simply do not speak the language we do.
My point of contact with the younger generation, and especially with girls, has been Harry Potter fandom. As redcoast pointed out to me some time ago, HP fandom is unusual even among fandom groups for being a first-generation product - the gathering largely of people who had fallen in love with JKR's world as children and had grown and socialized themselves into fandom. (She described it as a "feral fandom", without any of the social protocols and worldly wisdom that older established fandoms and fandoms which appeal to older readers, from Star Trek to superheroes to Sherlock Holmes, tend to develop.) That makes it, in my view, a particularly good observation point for a culture historan - like me - to observe cultural trends.
Many results can be described as discouraging. There is the enormous prevalence of slash. (When I tried to describe this to my mother, an educated Boomer, she asked me among what kind of perverts I had fallen - this is the distance between Boomer average and contemporary average. I assure you, Mum, they are perfectly ordinary contemporary girls.) Even more significant, there is the habit of playing with "ships" as if they were interchangeable; read the "Help! I am looking for..." column in Fiction Alley Park, and wonder. ("I want stories about Harry/Salazar" - and they find them, too!) These are both, as johncwright pointed out, symptoms of the disastrous belief that relationships are wholly interchangeable; and, I would add, that they are an end in themselves, with no future prospec, no further family dimension, and no inherent connection with procreation. And, I would add, that they are to be chosen like candy in a shop - "I want Harry/Salazar..." It ha s been said that the success of the Harry Potter world is itself a symptom of a universal need for a cleaner, a more morally defined world, a world in which right and wrong are dominant categories; but even granting that this was the case (and not all HP fans seem enamoured of the concept of right and wrong), who gets to define what is right and what is wrong? There are quite a lot of HP fans who would adore to cast Voldemort as a Christian conservative. Remember the tag that was going around for a while - Are you a Dumblecrat or a Voldepublican?
However, side by side with this sort of attitude, I was interested and struck to notice another.I think the HP fanfics I have read, with the odd exception obviously written by older and more cultured types, are a pretty good indication of the mind of the modern young woman. And in some ways it is clearly the result of what modern culture has made them - for instance, the universal assumpion that there is no moral difference between homosexuality and straight sexuality, the fascination with slash, etc. I mention the things which are relevant to what I want to say, because what I was on about here had to do with childbirth.
Now there is a sub-genre in which one of the female heroines gets pregnant. It is usually Ginny, more rarely Hermione, and it is usually too early in her life - and the author tends to say so. And the interesting thing is that, though abortion is mentioned as a possiblity in every fic I have read, it is NEVER chosen. The heroine ALWAYS keeps the baby. And that includes the splendid fic "Fractured Triangle" by Fyre, in which Hermione is the victim of a vicious rape by Lucius Malfoy, who then nearly murders her. And in spite not only of his rape but of his murderous assault, she keeps the baby, and the writer presents this as a heroic act. "It's not the baby's fault," says Hermione; and again, "it isn't a monster - it is a little person." And bear in mind that when Fyre wrote this, she was about nineteen herself. A very talented nineteen, but nineteen.
Alternatively, you have Ginny being made pregnant by Harry. At least one of the fics I have read (It Happened One Night by SunDevil05 - http://www.siye.co.uk/siye/viewstory.php?sid=705), features a terrifyingly realistic account of childbirth - one that would satisfy even PrivateMaladict - and a nastily credible account of everything that poor Harry and Ginny would have to go through before people get used to their early pregnancy and marriage. And the point is that, without exception, all these fics present the heroine as keeping the baby, and bringing it up, and those which feature a heroic character - in particular, Harry - present him as heroically standing by her and taking his share of the responsibility. In "Fractured Triangle", Ron accepts Hermione's baby and resolves to treat him as his own. (After he gives Lucius Malfoy a beating so savage and so, shall we say, to the point, that it is doubtful whether Lucius will ever be able to impregnate anyone again!) This is the picture of heroism and moral steadfastness that these young female writers have developed.
One of my friends, to whom I was saying something of this kind, commented that it was entirely unsurprising. Have you ever, in your life, met a nineteen year old who *honestly* thought abortion was a good thing? I know a handful who would insist it was, or at least so insist in public--but I can't believe they actually feel the way they claim to think; the usual "but I wouldn't myself" usually creep in as an admission that what they've been taught to say they think is at odds with what they *do* think. That is her experience, though I am not sure it is mine; certainly, however, this kind of stories shows that there is at least a section of young girls coming up who has looked childbirth in the face, has seen the worst that can be said of it, and still regards it as heroic and central. The truth is that any stories around which present abortion as good or desirable are stories written by middle-aged men or older women, and they are written professionally for Hollywood - e.g. the already old Michael Caine vehicle The Cider House Rules. I would be surprised to see any such story in HP fandom, and if it happened I would expect it, first, to be outnumbered by the have-the-baby ones, and second, to present the decision as painful and alienating.
Now what struck me about the Gloucester pregnancy pact, is that it seemed to me pretty much the practical version of this shift in values. An important part of the heroine-gets-pregnant sub-genre is that the heroine is always underage, and most adults feel that she is probably unfit to have a baby. She invariably proves them wrong. This is the imaginative result of a generation that has been pelted with warnings about safe sex and pregnancy virtually from when they could read - and instead of developing a fear and revulsion of pregnancy and babies, appears to have got used to the idea. I laughed with contempt when one of the Gloucester officers said that perhaps they should try to improve their sex ed. You poor fool, don't you understand that it is exactly sex ed that has done this? You have got your children used to thinking of procreation; but you could not convey the terror of procreation you yourself learned at work or in the unemployment queues. Work, to these children, is far in the future. When you are 16, 20 is an enormous amount of time away. And without that, human nature reasserts itself. Sorry, curia_regis; I know we have discussed this matter already; but I insist on using the terms human nature as I understand them. And however much variation there may be, most human beings love babies. They certainly are more directly attracted to them than to some distant notion of a job. (That is why, by the way, the sense of vocation makes so much difference.)
This is not even entirely a good thing. There are a lot of things about this phenonemon I would easily do without; in particular, the assumption that fathers are at best a variable of the childbearing process. These girls promised to help each other; that is, they had both a clear idea that a young mother needs help, and a strong belief that they could not turn to anyone else for the help they would need. In that one recognizes the terrorizing message that sex ed tries to convey - the baby as a burden that the mother must bear alone; and I think that they probably underrated most of their families and at least some of their boyfriends. But it is a realistic, and, if anything, a too cynical and pessimistic assessment of the facts. Sure, I am associating this with stories in which Harry and Ron show the most ironbound loyalty to their girlfriends, later wives; but then Harry and Ron are heroes out of books, and clearly the Gloucester girls did not expect the fathers of their children to be heroes out of books. They had fully got the message of three generation of cohabitation, divorce, and instability. The only way in which they prove immature and optimistic - though I must admit it is a serious way - is the implicit expectation that high school friendships would last for a lifetime, or at least long enough to bring up children together.
This is something altogether new, and not wholly good. Like the imaginative world of Buffy, it features teen-agers helping each other and being left virtually alone by the older generation, against a world of infinite menace and struggle. There is no direct way from here to what I would like to see - a strengthening of the family, especially the extended family. (Given the tone in which I have been speaking, it is as well to remember that at least a half of marriages, even now, do not end up in divorce, and most families tend to remain cohesive.) But it is something both new and, in my judgment, important, the point in which the perfect storm begins to break up.
My point, and the reason why I intercalated the Dylan song, is that it is one of those moments where a real culture change becomes manifest. And it is one I suspected had been coming for a while, although I was not sure where to look for it. I saw it coming in HP fanfics - which are as close to the voice of the inchoate masses as you can very well get. This accounts for a not wholly warranted triumphant tone in the original article: not that I am pleased with everything I see, but that I am pleased that something I thought might happen, does seem to be happening. Underlying all my thinking was a basic sense that human nature will, indeed that it must, reassert itself against the umpteenth attempt to treat it as a blank slate for the Enlightened Minority to write upon as it pleases. Such revolts and such reassertions are rarely perfect manifestations of good will. They can be scary; they can bring about unforeseen results and downright vicious ones. That is why fear and hysteria is part of the reaction. As old Bob Dylan made clear. After all, when the earth shakes, you do not exactly feel settled and happy, do you?
However, it seems to me that, with few exceptions, everyone seems to have gone off at a tangent - including myself. A few of the earliest posters caught some of my point at least, for, like many members of the conservative end of the spectrum, they have been worrying about the fall in childbirth in Western countries - currently at or beneath replacement level in nearly every major Western country including Japan and (but for immigration) the USA.
That was not, precisely, the thing I had in mind, either. I am not, I hope, simple enough to jump up and rejoice because a fad for childbirth seems to have seized a number of teen-age girls in one place in the USA. It is rather the case that I had been looking for something like this - although, of course, not exactly in the startling and rather troubling form it actually took. The Gloucester pregnancy pact confirmed a number of views I had been forming.
As a historian, I have never been convinced by the panicked spread of the belief that "demography is destiny" - as Mark Steyn and many other conservatives insist. To the contrary, history shows that nothing is more easily influenced and altered by circumstances than demography. In the nineteenth century - the classic century of European demographic explosion - one country noticeably bucked the tendency to huge families and enormous migratory flows, and that country was not a minor one, but France, the centre of Europe. France had 30 million inhabitants in 1801 and 39 million in 1914, and most of the increase was made of immigrants from Italy, Spain and eastern Europe. French families preferred to have few children. At the same time - the very same time - the French of Quebec, similar to the French of the French countryside in religion, manners, language and birth, had one of the enormous birth rates even in the high-rise demographics of the nineteenth-century West. They managed to keep up with the immigration-driven growth of their English-speaking rivals purely by the delirious rate of their growth. Then, one day in the late nineteen-fifties, the Quebecois just stopped having children. Today, their growth rate is one of the lowest in the world, and the very nationalist party whose anti-clerical policies caused or helped the disaster looks with horror upon the real possibility of national dissolution. And to give another instance of the quirks and sudden changes to which demography is subject, were you aware that in the last few years, the birthrate in both Iran and Algeria has gone through the floor, and that both these countries are currently in negative growth territory? Demographic trends can change radically in little more than the space of a morning.
However, the collapse in natality across the West is an undeniable and troubling phenomenon. It is also a very recent one. The conservative consensus that it was caused by the Sixties and the triumph of abortion and contraception is not supported by the facts: the real collapse began in the eighties, under Ronald Thatcher. It was my generation, the generation that came of age in the eighties, that had no children.
My family is typical. My Boomer parents had three children, and nearly every one of their brothers and sisters had similar families - small, but not too small. Whether they thought of it or not, they certainly took good care that the Barbieri and Fanelli genes should be passed on. It was we who did not have any; of my parents' three children, only my sister had a baby, and she had to wait till she was 38. Our family has some peculiar problems - my sister had medical problems, my brother is tetraplegic - but nonetheless I think I can discern, from the lives and experiences of people like me, a few major causes.
In my judgment, the demographic perfect storm that struck the West from the eighties onwards is due to two or three main causes. The first is indeed due to the Sixties, but not to abortion or contraception. This may seem counter-intuitive, but abortion and contraception do not necessarily reduce the birthrate. Britain has one of the highest birth rates in the West, and also by far the highest rate of abortion (I do not know if statistics about contraception are even collected, but they are likely to say the same thing). Far from the immense and still growing British use of abortion reducing the birth rate, the two have grown together. The gay abandon with which English girls, especially of the notorious underclass whose existence troubles journalists and sociologists, have sex and abortions, is the same gay abandon with which they accept to have live children.
No: the Sixties trend that affected us as a generation was the triumph of divorce. And the reasons for this are ancient and deep. I discussed them here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/260448.html. Please read that article if you have not already.
The reasons for marriage to be severely endangered in the sixties were real and grave. We are not talking, as some conservative writers tend to imply, of a silly fad. It was a major crisis, as damaging as a lost war (and attended, incidentally, by a lost war). When we read that Betty Friedan's statement of her own female discontents became, in the early sixties, an instant best-seller, it is just not good enough, as David Horowitz does, to point out that the lady was a lifelong Communist. It is not in the power of Communist propaganda, any more than of capitalist enterprise, to manufacture a runaway best-seller; if you believe that Friedan's writings succeeded because of some diabolical Communist conspiracy, you might as well believe that JK Rowling's novels succeded because of some diabolical marketing ploy, rather than because they fill some evident need in our souls. Besides, if Horowitz had more brains, he would realize that Friedan's writings really worked against her politics: because the searing anger and frustration she conveyed so effortlessly had been experienced as the blameless Party hack wife of a Party hack husband, in a model Communist marriage. The issue went beyond Communism and anti-Communism: the frustations felt by an ambitious young Marxist woman married to another Marxist-Leninist resonated exactly with hundreds of thousands of ordinary Western women married to every shade of person.
This does not lead directly to demographic collapse. Friedan herself had three children. The divorce generation convinced themselves that they could still have children, in fact that they would probably do a better job of raising them than their narrow-minded, authoritarian, constrictive parents. This was also the age of Dr.Benjamin Spock. What they had not bargained for was the effect of divorce itself. There is no such thing as unbitter divorce; whatever good or bad reasons there may be for it (and by God, there can be good reasons a-plenty!), it amounts to rending apart what had been intended to be together. Each partner loses something that he or she had invested in, a fundamental part of his or her past. Hence divorce battles are famously bitter. But even more bitter are the months or years leading up to the inevitable collapse; times of screaming violence or sinister silence, times of bitter, unavailing and ever-mounting mutual resentment. And the children experience every single one of these moments. Contrary to popular belief, divorce itself often comes as a relief to children of a divided family - until they realize that it has by no means put an end to the argument, the bitterness, the toing-and-froing, and the too careful and too detailed divisions of everything in sight, including time with the children themselves.
If this happens in your home alone, it is bad enough. If it happens in the whole of society, if you see it happen time after time among your friends and relatives, it shapes your life. And those of us who grew up in the shadow of a widespread, widely agonizing, often violent series of dissolutions, could not help but approach any idea of relationship with fear and a complete lack of self-belief. Hence the disastrous popularity of the idea of cohabiting, either as a long-term trial for marriage, or as an alternative to the terrors of marriage. The subtext is that if things go wrong as our generation has so often confusedly and agonizingly seen them go wrong as children, there is an escape. In point of fact, the idea of escape is itself delusional; you have still dedicated years of your life to a pseudo-family, so you have all the pain of divorce without even the legal protection. (In point of fact, most Western jurisdiction have been developing, in response to widespread demand, legal instruments for cohabitation that approach divorce.) And the pull outwards rather than inwards brings out the very terrors and anger you have learned as a child to associate with divorce, and the learned behaviour of cruelty and vindictiveness. Some statistics claim that violence between partners is eight times more frequent among cohabiting couples than among married ones. But there is a more fundamental point: that this whole notion arises from, and tends to reinforce, the very inner fear, the very lack of self-belief and confidence, which our generation has learned as children, and which eats away at our stability.
This, then, is the first wind of Hell that goes into the making of the perfect demographic storm: the collapse of the relationship between male and female. Our generation is the generation of the children of divorce. In a hideous caricature of what Jesus said to be true of Paradise, we neither marry, nor have children.
The second factor is the collapse of the career structure for most men and women. Our generation saw it happen in the seventies and eighties; sometimes, especially in Britain and the USA, saw it being pursued as a matter of deliberate policy. WE grew up with the melancholy sound of Bruce Springsteen's "My home town" ringing in our ears: Foreman says, these jobs are going, boys, and they aren't coming back - to your hometown... - or that of any one of a million other messengers bringing the same message. Our fathers had queued up at the doors of personnel managers for big companies, looking for jobs they expected to keep for decades, to make careers on, to marry and have children on, to use to support long-term debt to buy and furnish a home and car. We knew from the moment we left school that work was scarce, hard to find and easy to lose, impermanent, desperately needed, and yet that, whatever we got, it would not last us long. The great English writer and journalist, Keith Waterhouse - himself the wonderful, articulate voice of the previous generation - had an epiphanic moment when he realized what this had done to the young of the eighties: when he saw a pleasant-looking, well-dresed young man bursting out of an office and running up to an equally pleasant-looking, well-dressed young woman, and telling her in tones of ecstasy: "I've got the job!" "Wonderful! You lucky dog!" answered the girl, and they went off skipping and all but dancing down the street. Waterhouse did not even know what job this was supposed to be; he was just struck, indeed horrified, that the very thought of having a job, any job, should cause such unrestrained joy, especially among a pair of people who did not look like beggars. The need to get and keep a job became the central feature of our lives; and as a result of woman's lib, as much of women's as of men's lives. Relationships, let alone children, lost importance. In the pursuit of work, of pleasing the boss, of avoiding the ever-present axe, we accepted conditions that would have made our fathers strike: unpaid overtime rose to giddy heights, benefits were cut, employees competed over which one could stay in the office longer and give the biggest impression of work done. And, I repeat, women were in there on the same level as men - competing for the same jobs by the same means.
It was in this environment that the idea really developed that a child is a nuisance, a danger to that all-important job, a threat to your future - rather than being the future. The neurotic pressure to perform perform perform, the constant downsizings and the constant increase of the responsibilities laid on the surviving employees, taught women to regard a child as a hindrance and a pregnancy as a catastrophe. Abortion, already entrenched in society for reasons I have discussed elsewhere, started being suggested none too subtly to any female employee foolish enough to get herself "in trouble"; with the equally unsubtle alternative of a pink slip (a P45, for you Britons). European governments, it must be admitted, saw the disaster coming and did what they could (short of making abortion illegal, which was unthinkable) to force employers to accept the obligations of mothers, and indeed of fathers. But a law can do little to alter a prevailing mentality. Employers regard babies as the enemy; they will do anything they can to avoid taking on an employee with encumbrances, and to get rid of one who develops them. From their point of view, you can hardly blame them. And employees are perfectly aware of the fact. Once a person had a job in order to have a family. Now they are encouraged not to have the family, in order to keep the job. The result we see all around us.
This, then, is the perfect demographic storm that has struck our generation: the collapse of marriage, caused by social pressures articulated and indeed encouraged by the left; joined with the collapse of the career structure that underpinned the family, caused by economic pressures articulated and indeed encouraged by Ronald Thatcher. If we divide the world into right and left, then nobody is innocent. I would add, as a third factor, the colossal yet uncounted and unmeasurable burden of guilt, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that exists among many of the women, and at least some of the men, who have followed the supposedly guilt-free path of abortion; and the dissociation of sex and procreation, prophetically condemned by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae. The effect is a society of forty-year-olds, quickly turning into a society of fifty-year-olds. People my age find themselves melanchonically wondering where the time has gone.
I have, however, long had a feeling that this situation was artifical and could not last. I felt change would come from somewhere, and at one point imagined that I could see it coming in the rise of conservatism across the West, the increasing dissatisfaction with current conditions. However, this was a movement mainly of people like me - dissatisfied former boomers and their children - and the more I became familiar with the imaginative and moral world of the new generation, our children, the more I realized that it did not apply to them. That is not always and everywhere the case: there are such things as young conservatives, and the children of homeschooling parents. But these are themselves aware that they are something like a fringe movement, dwarfed by the numbers of generation-x children who have grown up in the ordinary pieties and who simply do not speak the language we do.
My point of contact with the younger generation, and especially with girls, has been Harry Potter fandom. As redcoast pointed out to me some time ago, HP fandom is unusual even among fandom groups for being a first-generation product - the gathering largely of people who had fallen in love with JKR's world as children and had grown and socialized themselves into fandom. (She described it as a "feral fandom", without any of the social protocols and worldly wisdom that older established fandoms and fandoms which appeal to older readers, from Star Trek to superheroes to Sherlock Holmes, tend to develop.) That makes it, in my view, a particularly good observation point for a culture historan - like me - to observe cultural trends.
Many results can be described as discouraging. There is the enormous prevalence of slash. (When I tried to describe this to my mother, an educated Boomer, she asked me among what kind of perverts I had fallen - this is the distance between Boomer average and contemporary average. I assure you, Mum, they are perfectly ordinary contemporary girls.) Even more significant, there is the habit of playing with "ships" as if they were interchangeable; read the "Help! I am looking for..." column in Fiction Alley Park, and wonder. ("I want stories about Harry/Salazar" - and they find them, too!) These are both, as johncwright pointed out, symptoms of the disastrous belief that relationships are wholly interchangeable; and, I would add, that they are an end in themselves, with no future prospec, no further family dimension, and no inherent connection with procreation. And, I would add, that they are to be chosen like candy in a shop - "I want Harry/Salazar..." It ha s been said that the success of the Harry Potter world is itself a symptom of a universal need for a cleaner, a more morally defined world, a world in which right and wrong are dominant categories; but even granting that this was the case (and not all HP fans seem enamoured of the concept of right and wrong), who gets to define what is right and what is wrong? There are quite a lot of HP fans who would adore to cast Voldemort as a Christian conservative. Remember the tag that was going around for a while - Are you a Dumblecrat or a Voldepublican?
However, side by side with this sort of attitude, I was interested and struck to notice another.I think the HP fanfics I have read, with the odd exception obviously written by older and more cultured types, are a pretty good indication of the mind of the modern young woman. And in some ways it is clearly the result of what modern culture has made them - for instance, the universal assumpion that there is no moral difference between homosexuality and straight sexuality, the fascination with slash, etc. I mention the things which are relevant to what I want to say, because what I was on about here had to do with childbirth.
Now there is a sub-genre in which one of the female heroines gets pregnant. It is usually Ginny, more rarely Hermione, and it is usually too early in her life - and the author tends to say so. And the interesting thing is that, though abortion is mentioned as a possiblity in every fic I have read, it is NEVER chosen. The heroine ALWAYS keeps the baby. And that includes the splendid fic "Fractured Triangle" by Fyre, in which Hermione is the victim of a vicious rape by Lucius Malfoy, who then nearly murders her. And in spite not only of his rape but of his murderous assault, she keeps the baby, and the writer presents this as a heroic act. "It's not the baby's fault," says Hermione; and again, "it isn't a monster - it is a little person." And bear in mind that when Fyre wrote this, she was about nineteen herself. A very talented nineteen, but nineteen.
Alternatively, you have Ginny being made pregnant by Harry. At least one of the fics I have read (It Happened One Night by SunDevil05 - http://www.siye.co.uk/siye/viewstory.php?sid=705), features a terrifyingly realistic account of childbirth - one that would satisfy even PrivateMaladict - and a nastily credible account of everything that poor Harry and Ginny would have to go through before people get used to their early pregnancy and marriage. And the point is that, without exception, all these fics present the heroine as keeping the baby, and bringing it up, and those which feature a heroic character - in particular, Harry - present him as heroically standing by her and taking his share of the responsibility. In "Fractured Triangle", Ron accepts Hermione's baby and resolves to treat him as his own. (After he gives Lucius Malfoy a beating so savage and so, shall we say, to the point, that it is doubtful whether Lucius will ever be able to impregnate anyone again!) This is the picture of heroism and moral steadfastness that these young female writers have developed.
One of my friends, to whom I was saying something of this kind, commented that it was entirely unsurprising. Have you ever, in your life, met a nineteen year old who *honestly* thought abortion was a good thing? I know a handful who would insist it was, or at least so insist in public--but I can't believe they actually feel the way they claim to think; the usual "but I wouldn't myself" usually creep in as an admission that what they've been taught to say they think is at odds with what they *do* think. That is her experience, though I am not sure it is mine; certainly, however, this kind of stories shows that there is at least a section of young girls coming up who has looked childbirth in the face, has seen the worst that can be said of it, and still regards it as heroic and central. The truth is that any stories around which present abortion as good or desirable are stories written by middle-aged men or older women, and they are written professionally for Hollywood - e.g. the already old Michael Caine vehicle The Cider House Rules. I would be surprised to see any such story in HP fandom, and if it happened I would expect it, first, to be outnumbered by the have-the-baby ones, and second, to present the decision as painful and alienating.
Now what struck me about the Gloucester pregnancy pact, is that it seemed to me pretty much the practical version of this shift in values. An important part of the heroine-gets-pregnant sub-genre is that the heroine is always underage, and most adults feel that she is probably unfit to have a baby. She invariably proves them wrong. This is the imaginative result of a generation that has been pelted with warnings about safe sex and pregnancy virtually from when they could read - and instead of developing a fear and revulsion of pregnancy and babies, appears to have got used to the idea. I laughed with contempt when one of the Gloucester officers said that perhaps they should try to improve their sex ed. You poor fool, don't you understand that it is exactly sex ed that has done this? You have got your children used to thinking of procreation; but you could not convey the terror of procreation you yourself learned at work or in the unemployment queues. Work, to these children, is far in the future. When you are 16, 20 is an enormous amount of time away. And without that, human nature reasserts itself. Sorry, curia_regis; I know we have discussed this matter already; but I insist on using the terms human nature as I understand them. And however much variation there may be, most human beings love babies. They certainly are more directly attracted to them than to some distant notion of a job. (That is why, by the way, the sense of vocation makes so much difference.)
This is not even entirely a good thing. There are a lot of things about this phenonemon I would easily do without; in particular, the assumption that fathers are at best a variable of the childbearing process. These girls promised to help each other; that is, they had both a clear idea that a young mother needs help, and a strong belief that they could not turn to anyone else for the help they would need. In that one recognizes the terrorizing message that sex ed tries to convey - the baby as a burden that the mother must bear alone; and I think that they probably underrated most of their families and at least some of their boyfriends. But it is a realistic, and, if anything, a too cynical and pessimistic assessment of the facts. Sure, I am associating this with stories in which Harry and Ron show the most ironbound loyalty to their girlfriends, later wives; but then Harry and Ron are heroes out of books, and clearly the Gloucester girls did not expect the fathers of their children to be heroes out of books. They had fully got the message of three generation of cohabitation, divorce, and instability. The only way in which they prove immature and optimistic - though I must admit it is a serious way - is the implicit expectation that high school friendships would last for a lifetime, or at least long enough to bring up children together.
This is something altogether new, and not wholly good. Like the imaginative world of Buffy, it features teen-agers helping each other and being left virtually alone by the older generation, against a world of infinite menace and struggle. There is no direct way from here to what I would like to see - a strengthening of the family, especially the extended family. (Given the tone in which I have been speaking, it is as well to remember that at least a half of marriages, even now, do not end up in divorce, and most families tend to remain cohesive.) But it is something both new and, in my judgment, important, the point in which the perfect storm begins to break up.
My point, and the reason why I intercalated the Dylan song, is that it is one of those moments where a real culture change becomes manifest. And it is one I suspected had been coming for a while, although I was not sure where to look for it. I saw it coming in HP fanfics - which are as close to the voice of the inchoate masses as you can very well get. This accounts for a not wholly warranted triumphant tone in the original article: not that I am pleased with everything I see, but that I am pleased that something I thought might happen, does seem to be happening. Underlying all my thinking was a basic sense that human nature will, indeed that it must, reassert itself against the umpteenth attempt to treat it as a blank slate for the Enlightened Minority to write upon as it pleases. Such revolts and such reassertions are rarely perfect manifestations of good will. They can be scary; they can bring about unforeseen results and downright vicious ones. That is why fear and hysteria is part of the reaction. As old Bob Dylan made clear. After all, when the earth shakes, you do not exactly feel settled and happy, do you?