Something is changing, finally for the better. “Drive out Nature with a pitchfork,” says the old Roman reprobate Lucretius, “and she always comes back.”

We’ve just received our 14th or 15th invitation in this year’s wedding season. No kidding. We had ten or fifteen years of wondering, “Where are all the men for all these lovely young women?” Yearly, we’d have maybe one or two 40-something second marriages.  So where’s the next generation coming from…? Then suddenly the sheriff’s posse rides over the ridge and rescues the besieged young ladies from the ornery cattle rustlers. After a half-generation of lamenting the feeble Gen-Xers and Millennials – and a looming demographic winter, suddenly all these 25-35 year-old guys are manning up and getting the job done. They’re all marrying confident, family-ready, young women, and they’re all intent on having babies.

Phew!  Dodged that bullet!  These second- and third-generation victims of the Sexual Revolution were plainly failing to launch, endangering our whole civilization.  

The story was the same throughout the West. “Replacement rate” fertility is 2.2 children per couple, yet countries like Italy and Spain have dropped to 1.3, suffering “death by graying” and ghost towns.  (You can now by an abandoned Italian village for $10,000.) Only the United States had replacement fertility, averaging about 2.2, but that was unevenly spread between the liberal “blue” states (1.8) and the conservative “red” states (2.6). Ironically, even the USA slipped below replacement fertility (to about 2.0) during Obama’s years of “hope,” and it’s only now recovering, with the new gainful employment in the minority communities.

(BTW, if you’re interested in seeing the real results of the Sexual Revolution, check out the 2008 video, Demographic Winter, free on youtube.)

So now we’ve “hit bottom,” as the AA people say, and we’re crawling out?  Pessimists will say that “one” is extrapolating from a small, select sample. To which “one” responds:  Damn straight. Of course it’s a select sample. Recovery doesn’t come from the middle of the Bell Curve. It comes from the outliers. Demographics is a game of The Last Man Standing.  With a capital “M.” Whatever happens to the “mainstream” population, it’ll be the kids of these unusually brave young men who’ll carry on into the generations to come.

At this point, we need to parse out happened to derail Western civilization from nature’s fertility roadbed. It’s been the founding premise of the musings here that the HUMA – the Homogenous, Universal and Natural Administration – was the inevitable result of global population growth, urbanization and low-cost communications.  Before and after World War II, the “social safety net” was knit to catch anyone “falling through the cracks” – those poor folk without families to provide security and opportunity. However, rather than remaining below us, that net quickly stretched over our heads, defining us all as dependents “under the net.”

But none of that explains why we stopped having families. Over the last fifty years, survey after survey has registered the longing of adolescents and young adults to establish their own families. Ninety-five percent-plus of respondents 16-29 would state the most important source of their future happiness would be finding a life-long mate. Duh. So what happened?

In the 1960s, the universities were dominated by Marxist intellectuals, because Marxist theory promised that intellectuals would run the inevitable Marxist Revolution. (They ignored the Marxist practice of shooting intellectuals as soon as they got power.) Awkwardly, as the West got incredibly wealthy, the worker’s revolution became a hard-sell to well-paid union members. Meanwhile, since the days of Fred-and-Ginger, Hollywood had sold the notion of Sex-As-Fun. Then the Pill took babies out of the equation (1963), and the two streams, Marxism and Entertainment, came together in San Francisco’s Summer of Love, 1968, and Woodstock, 1969.

The very few hippies who actually went to Woodstock either died young or saw their friends dying and cleaned up their acts. Watching the movie, however, radical intellectuals realized that the real oppression wasn’t economic, but sexual. And right on-cue, French “scholar” Herbert Marcuse said this very thing in his Eros and Civilization, followed by his colleagues, Derrida and Foucault. The Woodstock wannabe’s concluded that they didn’t really have to slither around in the mud at Yasgur’s Farm. They only had to teach undergrads that happiness lay in overcoming their “sexual oppression.”   

Now, for all the differences of opinion – philosophic and theological, atheist or theist –   over the last 2,500 years of Western Civilization, nobody before has ever been so idiotic as to teach that the path to happiness lay in stoking the sexual appetite, and no parents would allow their kids to learn it. People sometimes did it, but it was so obviously a down-hill slide into meaningless obsession, that it wasn’t plausible even in an Italian opera. Everyone knew: that life would be as short and pointless as all-you-can-eat fried chicken or vodka-and-orange juice breakfasts.  The image for 2,500 years has always been: Trying to fill a cracked jar with a sieve.

Only coddled, pencil-necked professors and their testosterone-fueled undergrads could have believed it. But they did. The bibles of the day, Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior books and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, are proven either lying science or a bad joke. But the intellectuals wanted to believe it all, and some still do. It validates arrested development. Two generations later, there’s nothing sadder than an emeritus professor, hitting on a grad student.  

Now, the Boomers who first proselytized the Revolution came from intact families, so they believed it, but few really lived dangerously. Still, no-fault divorce and shrinking families meant their kids paid the price in loneliness and insecurity. Meanwhile, cohorts of, militant women, gays and multiple identities – the genuine victims of a lunatic theory of happiness – wonder why they’re frustrated, trying satisfy desires that burn faster than they can feed them.

Finally:  how can our little corner of the world have over a dozen marriages, committed to childbearing, in just eight months?  Nobody believes the Sexual Revolution any more. A few really are trapped in obsessive behavior, miserable in the attempt to live an impossible theory. For them, it’s all everybody else’s fault. They’re like an alcoholics, blaming hangovers on society’s failure to validate Jim Beam as vitamin-packed nutrition. But nobody believes it.

Nobody believes the Theory. Like the Soviet Union in the 1980s:  the Politburo never invaded Poland, because they no longer believed the Theory. East German border guards never fired on their friends, tearing down the Berlin Wall, because they no longer believed the Theory. And now, sadder and wiser Millennials no longer believe the Theory.

Elderly Boomers (like Nancy Pelosi!)  still sit atop the culture and disposable income, habitually, superstitiously celebrating their Glory Days and validating the poor, fringe obsessives in their “liberating” addictions. But the mass of Millennials simply want to get on with life. They face a huge challenge, in the scarcity of good “life models,” but they’re trying to do what comes naturally: “love and marriage, love and marriage, going together like a horse and carriage.”