{"id":679,"date":"2004-04-15T20:14:53","date_gmt":"2004-04-16T00:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=679"},"modified":"2009-01-16T17:26:57","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T21:26:57","slug":"mormons-leading-the-way-to-a-new-dark-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2004\/04\/mormons-leading-the-way-to-a-new-dark-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Mormons Leading the Way to a “New Dark Age”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Darren Roulstone was kind enough to pass along a pointer to an article in the most recent issue of Fortune<\/i><\/a>, which lies unread on my nightstand. The article — entitled “Which Nations Will Go Forth and Multiply?” — is adapted from Phillip Longman’s book The Empty Cradle<\/i>. The main thrust of the article is that declining fertility rates bring lots of benefits, along with some risks for the future. Longman describes the worst-case scenario as follows:<\/p>\n

Even more sobering are the implications for modern civilization’s values. As urbanization and globalization continue to create a human environment in which children become costly impediments to material success, people who are well adapted to this environment will tend not to reproduce…So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world–who either ‘don’t get’ the new rules of the game…or who believe they are (or who in fact are) commanded by a higher power to procreate. Such a higher power might be God speaking through Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed, or some latter-day saint<\/b><\/i>, or it might be a totalitarian state. Either way, such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an antimarket culture dominated by fundamentalism–a new dark ages<\/b><\/i>…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Darren rightly observes in his email, “One has to search hard to find such a bizarre notion. I suppose Longman doesn’t read T&S or he’d know the problem with Mormons is we like capitalism too much, right? Not to mention that we place a great value on education and are no different from the average church-going population in terms of income and non-church associations (proxies for our connection to society). (Longman also seems ignorant of the fact that LDS believe that God speaks through Abraham, Jesus and modern prophets–I guess that like Newsweek, Fortune doesn’t fact check references to Mormons very well.)” I couldn’t have said it better, and I won’t even try. But I hope that doesn’t stop the rest of you from chiming in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Darren Roulstone was kind enough to pass along a pointer to an article in the most recent issue of Fortune, which lies unread on my nightstand. The article — entitled “Which Nations Will Go Forth and Multiply?” — is adapted from Phillip Longman’s book The Empty Cradle. The main thrust of the article is that declining fertility rates bring lots of benefits, along with some risks for the future. Longman describes the worst-case scenario as follows: Even more sobering are the implications for modern civilization’s values. As urbanization and globalization continue to create a human environment in which children become costly impediments to material success, people who are well adapted to this environment will tend not to reproduce…So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world–who either ‘don’t get’ the new rules of the game…or who believe they are (or who in fact are) commanded by a higher power to procreate. Such a higher power might be God speaking through Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed, or some latter-day saint, or it might be a totalitarian state. Either way, such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics","tag-popular-culture-and-media"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5686,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions\/5686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}