The Amish Fertility Miracle (Part 2)

How the Amish are maintaining their impressive birthrates, and what they can teach us about the global demographic collapse

If you haven’t read part 1 of this article, you should start there. This second part will build on the information I presented in part one. I’m going beyond just presenting the facts, to try and break down the broader principles behind what makes the Amish culture exceptional and whether any of those principles can be applied to solve the challenges facing the broader cultural landscape.

In part 1, I walked through the life of a typical Amish person, male or female, and attempted to highlight some specific characteristics of their culture that contribute to their default large family size. I’m of course making some assumptions in doing that, and you might disagree with my opinion on the relative impact of various cultural factors. But in general, I don’t think I made too many unreasonable inferences. I laid out the facts as clearly as possible, and didn’t go too far beyond that.

In this part, I want to go beyond the facts and into the realm of hypothesis and speculation. That means I don’t have scientific studies or hard data to categorically prove my points. So if you disagree, you’re absolutely welcome to do so, but don’t expect me to tenaciously defend my opinions with reams of hard data and irrefutable evidence. My purpose is to expand the conversation, not to present a definite solution to any perceived problem.

Is there a problem to solve?

For starters, not everyone agrees that globally collapsing fertility is, in fact, a problem to be solved. Although that’s definitely the dominate consensus in the alternative media space, and is reaching a wider audience thanks to the attention of figures like Elon Musk, the average normie still believes the debunked Malthusian hypothesis that human population is on an exponential trajectory to disaster. They’re more likely to view a collapsing global population as a good thing than as an unmitigated disaster in the making. If that’s your view, you aren’t likely to find my writing particularly compelling. But if you are interested in challenging that belief, I point out some of the potential implications of population collapse here.

If you’re already convinced that global below-replacement fertility is a problem to solve, then you’re in the right place.

Is there a solution?

The modern mind rarely stops to evaluate this question. As soon as a problem is presented, we immediately jump to searching for the ideal solution. That’s a foolish, and occasionally catastrophic, mistake. Before searching for a solution, it’s worth considering whether the possibility of a solution even exists, and more importantly, whether a potential solution would have unintended consequences less severe than the problem it’s intended to solve.

Often those questions can’t be answered until some attempts to find a solution have been made. But we should keep them at the top of our minds throughout the search. Otherwise we can easily find ourselves genetically modifying generally harmless diseases in the lab to make them deadly to humans as we search for a “solution” to disease, or cutting down and burning trees to produce electricity as we attempt to “solve” the climate.

When it comes to global fertility, I’ll give you my conclusion first. Yes, there are solutions to this problem. No, they almost certainly won’t be adopted on a large scale. And I’m not sure if that should be considered a failure.

That’s because of the nature of the problem. People act according to incentives. When global population was growing exponentially, that was because of the incentive structures influencing the choices of each individual. Now that the fertility rate has dropped dramatically, and global population is set to peak and collapse, that’s also because of the incentive structures influencing the choices of each individual. Globally.

That means something happened over the past few centuries that upset historical incentive structures globally. There’s every reason to believe that whatever happened was largely an emergent phenomenon. If it was, resetting the incentive structures would mean imposing, somehow, an incentive structure diametrically opposed to the naturally emergent structure. That somehow gives me pause. How certain are we that overruling a global emergent phenomenon is even possible, and if it were, less destructive than the alternative?

Because logically, the current trajectory will become unsustainable at some point. Fertility can’t continue to fall indefinitely, that trend ends in total extinction. So that leaves two alternative outcomes, absent the kind of global intervention I alluded to. One, it does continue to fall, and humans go extinct. I write that one off because it doesn’t align with my worldview, so as far as I’m concerned I know it won’t happen. You’re free to disagree. Or two, fertility continues to fall until the negative effects of falling population destroy the new global incentive structure of the past few centuries through the partial or total collapse of the emergent phenomenon underlying that structure. If you identify what you think that emergent phenomenon is, and conclude that it’s “too big to fail”, you should probably use some imagination and reconsider.

To take it one step further for the really esoteric thinkers, maybe the whole thing is less of a new concept and more of a certain phase of a larger cycle humans keep repeating throughout history. I’ll leave that one to your imagination.

What can we learn about potential solutions from the Amish?

Like I mentioned in part 1, looking at a group like the the Amish in this context is particularly useful. They exist as a sub-group within a larger environment, so that allows us to eliminate a lot of incorrect theories based on their similar circumstances. The Amish live on the same planet, breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat similar food, buy homes in the same housing market, work in the same labor market, etc. That casts significant doubt on a number of very popular theories on why people in America aren’t reproducing.

That leaves us to focus on the significant differences between Amish culture and mainstream American culture with full confidence that the real answer lies somewhere in those differences.

The structure of this article will be something of a stream-of-consciousness. I’m not going to attempt to isolate and breakdown every aspect of Amish culture independent of the whole, because that won’t be useful or accurate. I’m convinced that the factors influencing Amish fertility are best understood as parts of a larger structure, and not as cumulative independent variables. So I’m going to start by taking a birds-eye view of that structure, and then zooming in on how the various pieces support the whole.

Throughout the past few months, I’ve read a lot of material on this topic as I researched and refined my conclusions. To give credit where credit is due, I haven’t found anyone who expresses a view as coherent as the one

Johann Kurtz

gives in his article

It's embarrassing to be a stay-at-home mom

This is an excellent and well-thought-out piece, and one that’s rightfully gotten a lot of attention in the alternative media space. It’s only with a great deal of respect and serious hesitation that I disagree with any aspect of his work, and I do so in a spirit of advancing the intellectual discourse rather than any delusions of my superior knowledge or abilities as an author.

The role of status

The primary thesis of Mr. Kurtz’s article is that declining fertility is a consequence of a decline in the status of motherhood compared to the status afforded by various alternative life paths. While it wasn’t the only point I made in part 1 of this article, I did mention the relative status of parenthood within the Amish culture in various contexts. And a few months of research and reflection have convinced me that status is the correct starting point for understanding fertility, both within Amish culture and also more broadly. On that point, Mr. Kurtz and I fully agree. He says,

Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.

That seems to me like a fair assessment of the situation.

And Mr. Kurtz mentions the Amish specifically, so he’s aware of their unusual pattern and has integrated that data into his hypothesis. I believe he’s correct in doing so.

With that said, I want to dive a little deeper into the idea of status and how it relates to the Amish specifically. I think they can give us some insights into the topic that make more sense of the broader cultural landscape.

First off, let’s define status. Mr. Kurtz lays it out this way.

Status, or ‘social status’, is a key field within sociology. The term denotes a universal set of human instincts and behaviors. Status describes the perceived standing of the individual within the group. It denotes their social value and their place within the formal and informal hierarchies which comprise a society. It finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth).

Higher status individuals are trusted with influential decisions (power), participation in productive ventures (resources), social support (health), and access to desirable mates (reproduction).

Gaining status is a motivation for each individual to productively participate in society. Status is gained and maintained through approved behaviors (achievement, etiquette, defending the group) and through the possession of recognized ‘status symbols’ (titles, wealth, important physical assets).

As he points out, status is a relative game. One’s status is measured in relation to others in the group, not in relation to some objective metric.

In correctly understanding status, there’s a fine line between the concept of status as an end in itself, and status as a means to the benefits afforded by higher status. If there’s one fundamental complaint I have with Mr. Kurtz’s piece, it’s that he seems to lean too far into the concept of status as an end in itself. Taken to extremes, it’s the idea that status is somehow an arbitrary and external scale, and that if we can just manipulate or recreate that scale to place parenthood at the top, we can solve for higher fertility without changing any physical realities in the real world. I disagree with that concept of status.

If you look at the attributes of higher status, they’re all very much tangible, physical benefits. He lists four; power, resources, health, and reproduction. Power gives a person the ability to bend the behavior of others to their own tangible benefit. Access to resources is a direct physical benefit to a person’s survival and wellbeing. Health is also a direct physical benefit. And access to reproduction, while closely tied to emotional well-being, is also a distinctly physical benefit and one we’re hard-wired to respond to, given that the alternative is the end of that bloodline.

Along with that, there’s also the complex overlap between achievements that increase status and benefits conferred by higher status. If someone acquires a lot of wealth, that’s going to increase their relative status. But access to wealth-increasing opportunity is also a benefit of higher status. Similarly, acquiring a desirable mate definitely increases a person’s status. But achieving higher status by acquiring wealth also opens up the opportunity to attract a more desirable mate. All of these things are very closely entwined, and in my opinion, are the reason why status is such an existential concern. As Mr. Kurtz points out, a person can experience severe distress from loss of status, even if their own situation seems to be unchanged and they only lost status because others advanced faster. That makes sense when you consider that a relative loss of status still makes it more difficult to access the resources needed to maintain one’s status moving forward. So even if one’s absolute condition hasn’t changed, the fear that lower status could be the beginning of an irreversible downward spiral is very real.

With that in mind, I’m going to look at status in the Amish culture as closely tied to physical reality, and not only as a mental scoreboard to be manipulated at will.

In part 1, I mentioned status here.

When it comes to status, the benefits are just as clear. Amish life revolves around family, and nothing is higher status than a thriving family of your own.

That’s the bird’s-eye view of family and status in the Amish culture. But it’s not enough to stop there and say “we just need to create a status hierarchy that places motherhood at the top like the Amish have” and leave it at that. The important part is why the Amish status hierarchy, and the mainstream status hierarchy globally until 200 years ago, placed parenthood so high up the scale.

I don’t believe that hierarchies, including the status hierarchy, develop in a random way. I think they are, at least originally, rooted in physical realities. In other words, the status hierarchy elevates certain things because those things are useful markers of value to the group. Wealth is high-status because it implies competence and ability, which is a valuable asset to the group. Without competent people working hard and being productive, the group will be impoverished. Similarly, parenthood is high-status because reproduction is an existential concern for the group. Without it, the group goes extinct.

These status markers are enforced by the feedback loop of physical reality. If a group attempts to function with wealth way down at the bottom of their status hierarchy, the group will be poor and unsuccessful and will be dominated by a group with a functional status hierarchy. If a group attempts to function with parenthood way down at the bottom of their status hierarchy, as the mainstream culture is currently doing, they’ll go extinct and be replaced by the Amish. Hyperbolic, maybe, but I’m trying to illustrate the point. There may be a lag in the feedback loop, but reality is inevitable.

What keeps status hierarchies largely functional is that desirable behaviors tend to cluster. Incentive structures align to keep it that way. Working hard results in higher income, which increases status. Higher status and more disposable income are powerful motivators.

Beyond that, functional societies are incentivized to “help” the feedback loops of reality with social institutions. Honesty is important in maintaining a functional, productive high-trust society. So we put thieves in prison rather than letting them use their stolen wealth to increase their status, turning our society into South Africa and destroying our wealth to the point that we become globally non-competitive. These social institutions serve a very important purpose, but they begin to break down when the lag between cause and effect becomes too big for the average person to understand. At that point, they lose their public support and can no longer function, and shorter-term incentive structures “reset” the status hierarchy. Then we end up with things like a status hierarchy that no longer penalizes divorce, even though the long-term effects are devastating, because the average person can’t see past their own short-term incentives.

So let’s look at the Amish status hierarchy around family and children. Why is a large family still high-status in that culture?

One could first look at the effects of peer pressure and social conditioning. Most Amish children grow up in large families, surrounded by peers in equally large families. As they mature, they see their peers get married at a young age, and have children at a young age. Doing otherwise means swimming against the current, not fitting in with the group. And fitting in with the group is itself a kind of status marker.

While that’s certainly a powerful incentive, it doesn’t explain the difference between the Amish and broader culture. After all, that was everyone’s experience a few centuries ago at most. If inertia were enough to keep the Amish at a 6 TFR, why would everyone else fall below 2 over the same period? So while the lack of exposure to large families is a commonly invoked reason for falling birthrates, it doesn’t explain how we got here to begin with.

Mr. Kurtz has this to say about the changes brought about by the Enlightenment.

Thus the Enlightenment initially opened up new status opportunities for men (success) whilst undermining those that supported women (virtue). We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

Over time, this set of status mechanics spread, intensified, and deepened, particularly during the process of urbanization during the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately this culminates in today, when the standard introductory question has become ‘What do you do?’. This is because the most effective way to gauge the status of one’s interlocutor is to understand their level of success within our meritocracy. Unfortunately, ‘I’m a mother’ is not a good answer to this question, because this conveys little status within a success framework, which is usually the operative one. Women are, understandably, hesitant to be continuously humiliated in this way, and will make whatever tradeoffs are necessary to ensure they have a better answer.

I think he’s onto something here. The Enlightenment did bring significant changes, and I want to zero in on the effects of the Industrial Revolution specifically. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the family typically functioned as the primary economic unit. Wage labor was less common, and subsistence farming was widespread. In that system, every member of the family, and often the extended rather than the nuclear family, worked together to support the family unit. While there were gender roles, the husband and father’s work in the fields was less distinct from the wife and mother’s work in the home. Both often worked in directly complementary roles, for example the wife and daughters milking the cows while the father and sons fed, watered and cared for the animals. The “paid work” was just as often selling butter churned by the wife as selling grain the husband raised and harvested. There was not a distinct breadwinner versus homemaker role, all work was directly and clearly in support of the family as a whole. In that scenario, the question “what do you do?” would have been silly, and “I’m a mother” wouldn’t be fundamentally different than the husband’s answer of “I’m a farmer.” Status from an economic perspective would be clearly understood as a cooperative achievement. And since children were part of the economic unit, a large family had a very quick and direct economic feedback loop to higher status.

With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of wage labor, the primary economic unit became the individual rather than the family. Along with that came the invention of household appliances that drastically reduced the burden of domestic labor. Suddenly the financial status of the household was entirely dependent on the breadwinner. There’s no fundamental reason that should lower the status of the homemaking wife. As Mr. Kurtz pointed out, before the Enlightenment, a woman’s status was modified substantially by her husband’s status. And I would argue that’s still that case at the extremes. I doubt the wives of wealthy entrepreneurs and sports stars get asked “what do you do?” very often in their social circles. But what did happen is that the reduced burden of domestic labor gave women the potential to contribute to the family outside the homemaking role, and they began to demand more freedom and opportunity to do so. As they shifted more into that financial status hierarchy, it created a direct status tradeoff between career and children. Like Mr. Kurtz pointed out, “women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport)”.

The Amish managed to maintain the traditional status hierarchy by saying “no” to that demand. Amish women do not have independent access to education, commerce, politics, or sport. They don’t have the option of pursuing those status markers within the Amish culture.

As you can imagine, I don’t believe this approach will be implemented on a wider scale. I don’t see it happening across liberal democracies, since the bridge of universal suffrage has already been crossed.

The Amish maintain their social structure through their insular lifestyle and their severe ostracization of those who choose to leave. It’s a significant tradeoff to young people, so much so that most choose their family and community over the opportunities of the broader culture. The evidence shows that, given the opportunity with no significant tradeoff, most young women choose education and career over marriage and children.

Here’s the thing about this post-Enlightenment status hierarchy; it’s societal suicide. That much is obvious. So given that status hierarchies exist to serve group interests, this one is obviously terminally defective. So how did that happen? In my opinion, the underlying problem is that the lag time between anti-social behavior and its consequences has been inflated by the Industrial Revolution to the point that the social institutions meant to punish anti-social behavior have collapsed, and the short-term incentive structures now point away from parenthood.

The Amish have escaped that effect by creating a “moat” around their social group. Within that group, they artificially exclude certain things that aid and encourage anti-social behavior, and artificially enforce certain feedback loops that have become disconnected as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

I’ll give some examples.

One of the primary feedback loops for high fertility is that if you don’t have children, you have no one to care for you when you’re old and unable to work. In the bad old days of subsistence farming, there was no such thing as “saving for retirement”. Every year was a struggle for survival, and there were no functional financial instruments available to save and invest for decades in the future. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, and most importantly led to the creation of pensions and public welfare systems. Now anyone without children to care for them could be cared for in old age by one of these financial schemes. Did that fundamentally solve a problem? No, not at all. Look at the bankrupt state of global public pension schemes today, and the imminent collapse they face as the result of (checks notes)… too few young workers to support each retiree. Turns out, society actually does need everyone to have enough children to support them in old age. The Industrial Revolution just broke the direct feedback loop, so everyone doesn’t get to see the poor souls without children begging on the street or sent to the poorhouse in their old age, and can therefore conclude that not having children is a purely personal choice and won’t have any effect on their lifestyle at age 80. The Amish took a different approach. They are exempt from Social Security. They don’t pay into it, and they aren’t eligible to collect it. They can see from a young age that children care for and support their elderly parents. They know that if they don’t have children and grandchildren, their elderly years will be much more difficult and depressing. They don’t get fed any dishonest media narratives portraying some rosy alternative reality. The historical status hierarchy rewarding large families remains intact.

As another example, casual sex historically resulted in unplanned pregnancies, and without good employment opportunities or public welfare schemes, single mothers faced an extremely difficult life. With the invention of reliable contraceptives, legal abortion, good employment opportunities, court-mandated child support, and public welfare, casual sex no longer carries catastrophic consequences for women. Over the longer term, it leads to drastically reduced marriage rates, lower fertility rates, higher rates of single motherhood, dysfunctional children, and eventually societal collapse. The Amish fight this trend in various ways. First, the lack of employment opportunities for women means that they’re fundamentally dependent on family and community for support. And violating community expectations by engaging in sex outside of marriage puts that support in jeopardy. That’s a strong deterrent. The absence of sex education makes it much less likely that young people will feel comfortable engaging in casual sex without risking pregnancy, and much more likely that they’ll abstain altogether, given the significant social consequences. All on top of the religious teaching against it, which in my opinion is just additional icing on the cake. None of that does anything to diminish the human sex drive. So particularly for young men, that incentive structure makes early marriage a lot more appealing than it might otherwise be. Once again, the historical status hierarchy remains intact.

Another example would be lifestyle based. Although the Amish are no longer primarily subsistence farmers, they reject many of the modern conveniences that eliminated the labor involved in housework. Their insistence on distinctive clothing means the women still spend significant time sewing for the family. And all that clothing must be washed with much more primitive equipment than we’re accustomed to. Cooking is also more labor intensive, and eating out, ordering takeout, or buying prepared food are much less accepted. No microwave to heat up a TV dinner, or even last night’s leftovers. Gardening and preserving food is strongly encouraged. No vacuum cleaners for cleaning. Mowing the lawn might require a hand-pushed mechanical reel mower, not a ride-on garden tractor. The lack of cars makes staying home and caring for the household much less optional, for both men and women. And the large potential income disparity between men and women makes all men potentially attractive mates to all women. That eliminates the hypergamous trap we have now where the average man isn’t sufficiently high-status to attract the average woman, which leaves both groups single and frustrated while the majority of women chase an increasingly small group of men with the financial resources to actually improve their lifestyle. All those restrictions for the Amish make life much more comfortable as a team effort, for both men and women. Trying to do it all yourself would hardly be feasible. The alternative is to stay living at home with your parents, hardly a rewarding or high-status lifestyle in any cultural setting. In this case, the Amish have chosen to artificially restrict their access to the physical benefits of the Industrial Revolution. This is less about status, and more about creating conditions that make marriage a direct lifestyle benefit. Once again, it’s questionable whether all these modern technologies and conveniences can survive in an environment of collapsing global population. So the approach the Amish are taking may just be an artificial short-circuit of a feedback loop that will send us all back to the Dark Ages anyway. Regardless, they’ve managed to maintain the historical attractiveness of marriage, in this case by removing access to modern conveniences that allow us to effectively outsource labor in a way that makes the single lifestyle attractive. The attractive single lifestyle is largely historically unprecedented, and a direct result of the Industrial Revolution.

Many of the lifestyle choices of the Amish culture are less about direct effects, and more about maintaining the “moat” that keeps their culture somewhat isolated from the broader society. This makes a lot of sense when you understand that status is “the perceived standing of the individual within the group.” If you want to create your own status hierarchy, you have to create your own coherent group. The Amish severely restrict their exposure to the media and culture of the broader society. That’s a very effective way to maintain a coherent group. Amish young girls don’t feel the same pressure to pursue higher education and career over marriage and motherhood, because they don’t see a billion media references praising career and denigrating motherhood before they’re 18. And they don’t see a million “boss babes” on social media, TV, and Netflix shows flaunting the single lifestyle and bashing the patriarchy in heels. Instead, they see and hear their mothers, grandmothers, and aunts joyfully caring for and loving their large families, praised and supported by their devoted, hardworking husbands. The evidence shows that a free market in media doesn’t result in glowing depictions of parenthood that lead young people to reject career opportunities and pursue marriage instead. You can ask yourself why that might be, but that’s what history shows.

Across thousands of distinct cultural groups around the world, only a handful have rejected the dominant post-Enlightenment status hierarchy in favor of large families and traditional values. I’m not aware of any that managed it without significant insulation from the dominant culture. That tells me that the short-term incentive structure of modern society is more powerful than any historical cultural norms, and there is no passive solution that doesn’t involve collapse of that incentive structure and the civilization it rests on.

I could go into more detail on specifics of Amish culture and how they play into their status hierarchy. But you can read part 1 of the article and draw your own conclusions. I’m going to end with what’s sure to be a highly provocative list of requirements that would be necessary for the Amish status hierarchy to function across broader society. I don’t personally believe there’s any possibility of anything similar being widely adopted. And frankly, I don’t think it’s possible outside of a religious context, without the collapse of modern civilization as we know it. The collapse of modern civilization is the outcome I expect, although I’m happy to be proven wrong. So this is a philosophical exercise, not a policy prescription.

• End social acceptance of casual sex. Implement sever consequences for premarital sex or marital infidelity.

• End all forms of government financial support for the elderly. All elderly care is the responsibility of the family, or failing that, the church/community.

• End all government support for single mothers. Again, support for widows and those in other extenuating circumstances is the responsibility of the church/community.

• End all sex education in public schools. Sex education is the responsibility of the parents.

• Ban all forms of contraception, with significant penalties for violation.

• Ban abortion.

• Severely restrict access to higher education for women.

• End female participation in politics, including universal suffrage. One household, one vote. No voting by unmarried people, male or female.

• End the social and legal acceptance of divorce. No divorce permitted for any reason, and legal separation doesn’t allow for remarriage.

• End mandatory public education. Education is the responsibility of the parents.

• Ban negative messaging toward marriage and children in all forms of media.

• Severely restrict or outright eliminate social media platforms.

• Roll back child labor laws significantly.

I could add a few more, but I think that covers the essentials. If that sounds insane and offensive to you, I’m not shocked. This isn’t a policy prescription, and as I said at the beginning of the piece, I don’t necessarily believe that this is even a problem we should attempt to “fix”. The reason being, any government with the power to enforce these requirements on the world would be more concerning to me than the prospect of civilizational collapse itself. Civilization has collapsed before, many times throughout history. And we’ve always bounced back eventually. A global power of this magnitude might not be reversible.

But you should at least temper your shock and outrage with the realization that every item on that list was the accepted reality for most of human history, all the way up until the past few anomalous centuries.

My personal opinion is that too much obsession with this issue is probably a waste of time. Again, I don’t think any “solution” we come up with is likely to be less dangerous than the problem itself. I expect things to play out over a long period of time, and for the population decline to eventually degrade our interconnected, high-tech global civilization. Once many of the advances of the Industrial Revolution become widely unavailable, the natural incentive structures and status hierarchies will reemerge. And those incentive structures demand that men and women are natural allies, not enemies. We need each other, and the families we create together, to be a healthy, happy, flourishing, and productive society over the long term. If the prospect of losing our modern conveniences and going back to that world terrifies you, go befriend an Amish parent or grandparent. You’ll soon realize that they’re as happy and fulfilled in life as anyone you’ll ever meet. Life is a matter of perspective, not products. And my point in exploring this topic isn’t to spread doom, but to point out that we can make our own decisions and surround ourselves with like-minded people, and in doing so find peace and fulfillment in relationships and community instead of constantly chasing a dysfunctional, suicidal status hierarchy.

In conclusion, while writing this article, a stanza from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” kept coming to mind. It’s been over a hundred years since he penned these words, and the whole poem displays a prescience that’s positively uncanny. The seeds of the current issue were sown a long time ago, but there were people like him who saw the poisonous fruit coming even as the little plants were just emerging from the soil.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. 

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind. 

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome. 

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. 

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."  

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."  

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, 
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; 
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, 
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."  

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four–
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. 

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. 
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, 
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; 

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, 
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!