And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Steven won't give his arm
to no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
and I'd rather have my country die for me.
How did we journey, in the space of 6 short years, from JFK's famous speech to the Jefferson Airplane's drug-induced, summer of love, response? And what does this have to do with the Demographic changes we are seeing in our culture?
In the last couple of days, first Glenn Reynolds, and then Donald Sensing, wrote interesting pieces looking at some of the factors that have led to a Demographic threat to America. In The Parent Trap, Glenn Reynolds commented on the various social costs of having children:
In these sorts of ways, parenting has become more expensive in non-financial as well as financial terms. It takes up more time and emotional energy than it used to, and there's less reward in terms of social approbation. This is like a big social tax on parenting and, as we all know, when things are taxed we get less of them. Yes, people still have children, and some people even have big families. But at the margin, which is where change occurs, people are less likely to do things as they grow more expensive and less rewarded.
Donald Sensing agrees; in The vanishing American family, he points out that while the financial costs of raising a child are extremely high, the social costs are, if anything, more egregious:
Since 1970 or so the feminist movement has continuously and often rabidly devalued mothering as something successful women do. Motherhood has been propagandized (even demonized) as what losers do when they can’t hold down a real job, or better yet, a profession. The social pressure on young women to “succeed” at something before having children - even before getting married at all - is huge. More and more women who have babies are having them at later ages, and this fact tends to push down the total number of babies a woman will have. A woman whose firstborn comes along when she’s 30 is a lot less likely to have three more kids than a woman who first gives birth at 23.
Implicit in both of these formulations is the heightened Narcissism of the child bearing cohort. This is a result of trends which began with the post-war "baby boom" cohort which came of age in the 1960s. In Part III of my series on Narcissism, Disintegration, Suicidality & the Fall of the West, I described how the confluence of material abundance and the decrease in childhood mortality led to smaller families in which each individual child was imbued with enhanced parental emotional investment:
[Prior to the modern era] Most children were not the center of their parent's universe in their earliest years, usually having to share their parents attention with multiple siblings; they had to learn to share at an early age. Furthermore, children who enter a world in which deprivation and loss is an all too real threat have minimal opportunity to develop over-abundant narcissistic expectations; no parent could afford too much of an emotional investment in a single child when the risk of losing children approached 50% before age 5:
After World War II, with the widespread use of antibiotics and vaccines, child mortality declined to <2%. The baby boomer generation became the first generation in the history of man which was born into a world in which the vast majority could be confidently expected to reach adulthood. After the horrendous blood letting of WWII, newly returned GI's and the women who had been left behind formed families at record paces, moved to the suburbs, and created a now (retrospectively) idealized life style which included ever increasing availability of material goods and an ever decreasing risk of the natural ills that man had always been subject to. Because there was less need to have many children in order to support one's old age (Social Security had an important part in this, as did the movement off the farms) and the expectation was that all the children would survive and thrive, the parents were able to make a much greater investment, emotionally and financially, in their fewer children. Children with few siblings were much more likely to remain the center of their parents universe for extended periods of time. Further, the nartural inclination of all parents who love their children to protect them from the vicissitudes of life lead to parents raising children who had very little first hand experience of deprivation or disappointment. The extended time and the increased intensity of the child's position as center of the universe led to many baby boomers developing narcissistic pathology.
The first baby boomers were teenagers in the 1960s and the '60s were a tumultuous time. The assassination of John F Kennedy derailed the narcissistically enhanced idealism of the generation; further blows that followed, including the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, damaged further the belief that the future could be a better and more perfect place. However, JFK's murder was crucial.
Dr. Sanity has a superb post on THE NARCISSISTIC DIALECTIC, in which she describes the developmental lines of Narcissism and the effects it can have when the two opposing narcissistic lines are never fully integrated:
It is because of the slow separation of Self from Other--Child from Parent-- that the two developmental lines come into being. The first line Kohut refers to as the “Grandiose Self”(or idealized self image) and the second is referred to as the “Idealized Parent Image”. Both of these images represent psychological attempts to save the original experience of "perfection" by the infant when the Mother (Other) and the infant (Self) were “one”.
This post and her follow-up post, on THE NARCISSISTIC SYNTHESIS, offer an extremely useful framework for understanding the appeal of totalitarian systems and charismatic leaders.
John F Kennedy, with his movie star good looks, his youth, his beautiful family, his personal trials and tribulations which he handled with such grace and character, was nothing if not charismatic. He was a leader who could fit as an "Idealized Parent Image" for a generation which had been weaned on the belief that nothing and no one was more important than them. His death hit the generation in a most powerful way.
In children who lose a parent at a young age, there is almost always a reactive grief and anger at the surviving parent. After all, parents are the protectors of their children; they are the ones who pick them up and kiss their boo-boos, and tell them everything will be all right. When a parent is lost, that sense of predictability and safety is lost and the child takes out his inchoate pain and rage on the person they hold most responsible for their well being, the person who let them down by "allowing" their father, or mother, to die. (A similar dynamic, even more complicated and conflicted, often causes terrible problems for the children of divorce.)
Since the advent of muscular secularism had already begun doing its work of devaluing God ("God is dead" proclaimed Nietzsche, who looked to man to fill the vacancy), there was no external "Idealized Parent Image" to take its place.
The 60s became a celebration of "ME"; sex and drugs and rock & roll became a mantra because if I am all there is, my sensations and my pleasures are all that matter. Instead of JFK's charisma corralling his young followers into helping others, we had Timothy Leary's charisma leading his flock into a celebration of the inner ecstasy of LSD.
The Narcissist sees no one outside of himself as having enough worth and value to risk any of his own gratification. A charismatic leader can harness their inner emptiness for an over-valued Utopianism, but the history of most revolutionaries and "do-gooders" is that the needs and wishes of the "victims" they set out to help almost never enter into the psychic equation of value.
Both Glenn Reynolds and Donald Sensing describe manifestations of such a psychological construct. Parenting is a sacrifice; it requires valuing the welfare of someone else more than one's own happiness. It requires tolerating a new, unique, individual finding his own path even if it is not the favored path of the parents.
Please hold off on your e-mails and comments telling me that I am calling all single people selfish; that could not be further from the truth. People decide not to have children for all sorts of reasons and much of the time their narcissistic pathology doesn't enter into the calculation. However, on the margins, a society that has exalted the individual as its highest value, is a society that will have many individual members who do not know how, or are poorly equipped psychologically, to make the difficult compromises necessary to raise children. In such cases, eschewing children in favor of "self actualization" becomes the choice of enough people that Demographics are effected. When this is combined with a loss of faith in one's society (as seems to be so prevalent in Europe, where nothing but the profane is sacred), a staggering financial burden, and social opprobrium, Demographic decline can border on Demographic suicide.