A nonsensical article. Patriarchy is doomed for the simple reason that men can no longer afford to support large families. In addition, neo-liberal regimes, which depend more and more on lowering the standard of living for workers and which love a "flexible" workforce cause families to unravel in the process of chasing jobs and upward mobility. Patriarchy is also doomed because men are more fragile, biologically and emotionally, than women, and the extremely toxic/stressful modern environment is causing them to short circuit -- more mental illness, more physical illness, less ability to accept any form of discipline, less motivation to want to support large families, etc.
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Yes, the article is indeed nonsense.
And the curious thing is that Longman's argument is, in a broadly defined way, from 'the left' placing it squarely in the growing canon of ostensibly 'left' or 'liberal' positions that borrow heavily from rightward concerns (the 'cruise missile liberals', such as Paul Berman, who cheered on War Plan Iraq were, until their recent silence for obvious reasons, a vivid example of this sort of thing).
Note his key worry (buried very deeply in the Foreign Policy article M. Hoover pointed us to) expressed in this New America piece, “The Geo-Political Implications of Global Aging” -
Worst-Case Scenario (20 to 50 years). Some biologists now speculate that modern humans have created an environment in which the “fittest,” or most successful individuals are precisely those who have few, if any, children. As more and more of the human race finds itself living under urban conditions in which children no longer provide any economic benefit to their parents, but are rather costly impediments to material success, people who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves. And many others who are not so successful will imitate them.
“The great range of conditions under which fertility has begun to fall all over the developing world,” notes Alaka Malwade Basu of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, “and the most potent correlates of such decline – education, exposure to the mass media, exposure to the ideologies (rather than the material trappings) of modernization—strongly suggest that the urge to control fertility and to have fewer children than one’s parents comes largely from wanting to do what others do.”
[...]
full at --
<http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&DocID=2205>
I imagine his response to your points about the un-affordability of large families, neo-liberalism's demands for labor flexibility and “sickness unto death”, existential male fragility would be to say that none of these things hobble the men he's talking about who have opted out, as much as possible, from modern styles of living.
His concern is that (strongly religous, I assume) ultra conservatives will continue to produce large families in defiance of the general downward trend he sees as a crisis-level problem. These ultras, with their vast armies of well disciplined children, will “inherit the Earth” and a new age of patriarchy (along with other ills) will be upon us.
It's an extraordinary stretch.
His proposed solutions are even more incredible but I've already written too much about this fellow so it's time to stop.
.d.
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Quantum mechanics is the coolest thing ever invented, ever.
Sean Carrol, physicist