Marriage, Fertility, and a Civilization in Decline

Fertility is not a disease

and isn’t it me and herself when the world was young

One of my very favorite songs EVER is “Bus Stop” by the Hollies. I like it so much, it was the first song I added to my playlist, “Folk Rock Is My Jam.” The song, written by Graham Gouldman, who later came to prominence as the bassist and one of the singers in the art-rock band 10cc, is a lovely capture of love and its telos. Everything about the song is perfect—the 12-string acoustic guitar work, the bass line, the tasteful drumming, not to mention those amazing Hollies harmonies.

What’s even more amazing is that the song extols the kind of falling in love that leads to marriage. The second verse:

That's the way the whole thing started
Silly but it's true
Thinkin' of a sweet romance
Beginning in a queue

Came the sun, the ice was melting
No more sheltering now
Nice to think that that umbrella
Led me to a vow

The chorus:

Every mornin' I would see her waiting at the stop
Sometimes she'd shopped and she would show me what she bought
All the people stared as if we were both quite insane
Someday my name and hers are going to be the same

Here’s the thing: I don’t think a song like this would be released today, at least not to wide popularity and acclaim. Married love—at least this kind of married love—seems to have become passé. Seriously, can you think of a contemporary song that upholds such an ideal? I can’t.

And that’s a shame.

But it’s not a surprise.

It’s not a surprise because we have been propagandized up to the eyeballs with the rhetoric of scarcity—that we have limited resources, too many people on the planet, and WE HAVE TO ACT NOW! The only rational response to such hysteria? Bullshit.

Nature is super-abundant. I know this from experience. I’m a biodynamic farmer and I deal with nature and her super-abundance every day. On our little ten-acre farm we grow more than enough vegetables for ourselves (we have less than an acre in cultivation—and if we weren’t growing for other people, we could feed ourselves from half of that space). We also have five lambs that graze on about an acre of pasture. The rest of our land is woods and water, and filled with deer. We raise honeybees, tap maple trees, forage mushrooms, nuts, and fruit (the blackberries are insane this year!). We can’t even keep up with all this abundance.

Nevertheless, fertility has been under attack throughout what used to be called Western Civilization, certainly over my lifetime. In 1968, The Population Bomb appeared, an ace piece of propaganda written by Paul and Anne Ehrlich and a watershed moment in hysteria and social control. The juggernaut of insanity has not slowed, but only accelerated, leading to the current moment and the calls by the WHO and other “stakeholders” (stakeholders in what, exactly?) that the human population needs to be reduced (they don’t say which sectors of the population, oddly enough—but I bet you can guess). I wrote about this recently.

Indeed, people like these have pathologized fertility—and not just human fertility—to the point where they actively pursue what can only be called a “soft genocide.” No one is going to just come in incinerating populations of useless eaters—we’re far too civilized now. We’ve known, for example, that the mRNA Covid vaccines attack the testes and, especially, the ovaries—which cannot be a good thing. And this is verified by Pfizer’s own documents—those they wanted to hide for seventy-five years, until after we were all dead. As some of you already know, this even impacted my own family, when my wife was infected by the mRNA vaccines in April 2021 through vaccine shedding which led to a turbo cancer of the endometrial lining. It might be a conspiracy theory to you, but it’s real life to us. Add to that the increasing levels of aluminum in soil—which decreases soil fertility. Where did this aluminum come from? It didn’t just fall from the sky…or did it?

So we have “population control” coming at us from two directions: from an active propaganda program, and via more surreptitious methods. As a result, a lot of people are mindlessly content to accept the decrease in human fertility (it is estimated that male sperm counts are down nearly 65% since 1973) as a societal good. As a result, fertility is (and has been at least since the days of sociopath Margaret Sanger) treated like a disease. (Mary Harrington’s book Feminism Against Progress is excellent on this).

Parallel to this sad trajectory has been the decline of the importance of marriage (and I’m talking traditional husband-wife marriage here—the kind that produces offspring) and the reciprocal normalization of promiscuity and pornography. It’s really a weird and dystopian phenomenon.

Contributing to this cultural collapse, the lockdowns of 2020-22 compromised not only the educations of school-age children, but negatively impacted the prime dating years of a generation. Hence the reciprocal rise of OnlyFans culture. It is so, so sad a spectacle.

But this is what you get with a culture trained by its social engineers to downplay the importance of marriage and to question the value of having children. As a recent New York Post article promotes, living a childless marriage is SO MUCH FUN!

Now, it may be that some other factors are at play in the decrease in fertility—but that doesn’t explain why governments—and even the Church—seem to be remarkably unmoved by these dire statistics. Why do you think that is?

Of course, a number of my Christian brothers and sisters will suggest this wouldn’t have happened if the West had remained Christian. I don’t think that’s true, at least not entirely. There is something to be said about Marcel Gauchet’s observation that Christianity is the religion for leaving religion. In fact, as I have argued all too often, the seeds of this destruction were planted when celibacy/monasticism became the default “higher way” in Christian culture after monks started to call all the shots. Now, I’m not against monasticism, per se, and a lot of good things have come from it—but once a group gets political power, as happened with the monks in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, those in power begin to order society in their own image and likeness. Somewhat sadly, this is where I part ways with my friend Sebastian Morello and Paul Kingsnorth—and I can live with that (so can Sebastian, by the way). I write about this in the chapter on marriage in my book, Sophia in Exile, so I won’t rehash it all here. But I do have a scientific formula proving my case:

CELEBRATE > CELIBATE

Marriage—and bearing children—is the default setting, which is why the Bible begins with a wedding and ends with one. It is also why Christ calls himself the Bridegroom and why his first miracle occurred at a wedding. And at a wedding, after all, the order of the day is celebration.

I don’t have a remedy to this situation, certainly not at a large scale. But I do hope that we can return—and soon—to a cultural norm that celebrates courtship, and marriage, and babies. It really is an affirmation of life and why it’s worth living. In my latest poetry volume, Mythologies of the Wild of God, I have a poem on this subject, inspired in great part by my master in Pagan-Christian revelry, Robert Herrick:

THE PRIEST AND LORD OF ALL GOOD THINGS

The priest and lord of all good things,
Of ambergris and linnet’s wings,
Gives to the time the lie,
Says “Live before you die;
To find the way to grace,
Find a love to embrace;
Lift a glass, sing a song,
Then your life will be long.
This way you praise the Lord of All,
So praise him, praise him, one and all.

“Sing marriages and carriages
(Two things the devil disparages);
And, of all good things best,
Babes nursing at the breast;
And kisses on the cheek,
Without which we grow weak.
So burn your candle bright;
Set all the world alight.
This way you praise the Lord of All,
So praise him, praise him, one and all.

“Think more on heaven, less on hell
And then you’ll do things very well.
The living and the dead
All in the dance are led,
The powers to beguile
With laughing all the while.
Then joy in all good Things
The Lord and Master brings.
This way you praise the Lord of All,
So praise him, praise him, one and all.”

So let’s have a nice round of applause for courtship, marriage, and procreation.

One of my favorite songs ever, which always reminds me of the missus.