So I’m listening to Andrew Klavan. He said that the reason we are having a population implosion in the West is because the relationship between men and women is out of whack.
That’s when it hit me – why there is so much focus on sexual sin in scripture. It’s one of the primary critiques of “traditional Christian values,” especially Evangelical values: we are obsessed with sex.
Think of this from the perspective of someone who experiences God as directly as he experiences forests and Mountain Dew: it strikes me that God’s deep interest in human sexuality amounts to something really simple: humans are His creation. His life’s work, if you will: we are his passion project, and He wants the project to succeed.
A critical population mass is required in order to sustain an economy. More importantly, a critical population mass is required in order to sustain the population itself – when birth rates decline for more than a generation or two, its almost impossible to turn that around.
All the things we do to sterilize ourselves, from “sexual imperialism” (ie, power- and wealth-based polygamy, which is actually what we are moving toward today… a controversial claim that’s really difficult for most people to accept) to abortion, have led to a stark decline in our population, and the resulting cracks in our economy are already starting to show. With as concerned as we are about global warming and reaching a “point of no return” in terms of global mean temperature, we’ve neglected a much greater, existential threat to human existence: the decline of human existence ITSELF. A weaker economy leads to less access to resources, leading to further population decline, and so on…
Now to my comment about polygamy. Statistics are showing something pretty startling: in our sexually libertine society, we are rapidly approaching and asymptotal trend where 80% of women are going to be voluntarily pairing with about 20% of men. “Advances” (I’ll save the antifeminist sermon for another day) in how we see gender roles have done little to overcome the vast majority of women’s evolutionary instincts: despite what we think, the way we feel in our bodies – and that includes who and what we are instinctively attracted to – hasn’t changed at all. Most women are still primarily interested in men who they perceive as having the ability to “protect and provide,” even if those signals are being transmitted on a subconscious level. Which, in the animal kingdom (and until the last 1500 years or so in the human kingdom) translated directly to competition for resources.
All other things being equal, we are going to end up back in a situation where the “top” 20% or so of men are the only ones engaged in perpetuating the species – and we’re already seeing a trend where the “losers” are leaving the game as more and more young men “check out” to watch porn and play video games. (I’m afraid there could be an apocalypse over this, BTW. You can’t just repress the most powerful biological urge in the universe, in 80% of the population, and not expect things to go horribly wrong. Just look at what sexual repression has done to Muslim communities. As unacceptable as it is to lash out violently in response to sexual frustration, I think there must be a point where enough young men become frustrated enough, that it boils over into a horrifying catastrophe like the one we saw on October 7th, 2023 – in which *sexual* violence figured prominently. I believe that the wealthiest and most powerful men in ancient times started wars specifically in order to deal with this problem – to send the “weaker” men off to vent their rage in mass, mutual die-ins rather than cause trouble at home. And here’s a reminder in case you missed it at the beginning: there is NEVER ANY EXCUSE for mass shooters or other evil individuals to lash out violently against innocent victims in response to their sexual frustration. If you’re seeing yourself in any of this “apocalyptic” language, GET HELP.)
In other words, counter-intuitively, the population size declines *faster* when people are sexually “liberated,” because there are – again, counter-intuitively – many fewer people participating. And the ones who do get to participate often end up voluntarily sterilizing themselves by various means in order to avoid dealing with the usual consequences (pregnancy) of their pleasures.
Of course God (or at the very least, the writers of the Old Testament – some of the most advanced thinkers in human history) had the perspective to see these outcomes several generations in advance. His primary concern in the Old Testament was the preservation of *His* people – and traditional Jewish sexual ethics have stood the test of time for that purpose. In spite of wave after wave of attempted genocides – something without any paralleled in human history – the Jewish population is one of the few distinct culture groups – maybe even the only one – that has managed to survive for many thousands of years.
Maybe if we value the enlightenment and it’s contributions to human flourishing, we should take a lesson or two from those “illiterate, iron-age goat-herders;” or, as we might want to call today’s version of them, “backward, sexually-repressed Bible-thumpers” – before the West sterilizes itself into extinction, along with everything it has ever built.
Oh, and to correct the record: they were shepherds, not goat herders.
And to correct it again: if they were illiterate, how did they manage to produce more written works than any other iron-age civilization?