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Comment by 4gotunameagain | Hacker News Reader

  So, the demographic transition took place exceptionally early in France, but why? In my research, I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline.

It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate. If they are beneficial to the individuals comprising them, this is a matter of heated debate though. But regardless of that, does the apparent higher fitness of conservative societies (in a global point of view) mean that more "open minded" and "liberated" societies will always be overtaken by the conservative ones ?

Are we cursed to an eternal dance between perceived personal liberty and societal success ?

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I'm not sure how you're getting to this enormous generalization. Seems to me that for the past century or so, liberal societies have been the dominant societies on the world stage. Which conservative, traditionalist societies are you thinking of that are more successful or have "higher fitness" than liberal societies?

When I think of an archetypal "conservative, traditional" society, the first countries that spring to mind are Afghanistan and Iran, which I wouldn't call particularly successful countries.

Some like Saudi-Arabia do better by virtue of sitting on an infinite source of money, but even these oil nations have something dysfunctional to them. They tend to be so corrupt and anti-meritocratic that they need foreign companies to perform any non-trivial task, as they can't get anything done themselves and do nothing to foster homegrown talent. They don't produce value beyond what they (or rather, a mix of hired and pseudo-enslaved foreigners) dig up from the ground.

The United States was a conservative country at least until the 1960s

Not by the global standards of the 1960s.

I think we need an objective rather than a relative definition if we're going to do anything other than move goalposts.

Your statement makes no sense.

To begin with, the terms "objective" and "relative" are not antonyms. A definition can be both, neither, or either one of the two.

And the terms "progressive" and "conservative" in particular describe attitudes towards the status quo and traditional institutions, which means that whatever exact position a progressive or conservative person takes on an issue will depend on context. By their very definition, the meaning of these words is bound to a particular point in time.

As an example: anyone not on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum will agree with at least the broad strokes of the universal declaration of human rights today, but the adoption of a similar document [1] in revolutionary France was a highly contentious act that directly attacked millennia of institutional power (that is, the divine right of kings).

Conservatives at the time fought this tooth and nail and sought to restore the old institutional power. But most conservatives today would for the most part support this text. In the short term, the Revolution didn't succeed, but on the long term they "won", their ideology largely got adopted and supplanted the old feudal ideology: the Revolutionary ideals are now the status quo in many countries, which many conservatives will defend (support for absolute monarchy is thinly spread even among conservatives today). Nevertheless, it would be deeply absurd to call the French revolutionaries conservatives. In fact, the usage of the terms "left" (supporters of the revolution) and "right" (loyalists to the monarchy) to denote political positions originates from this time.

So yes, at the time, the positions of the French Revolution were progressive, even though the Revolutionaries weren't progressive by today's standards (in particular with regards to women). These terms are fundamentally relative, to try to give them an absolute meaning is simply to not understand them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M...

So you're arguing that the conservatives at the time failed to conserve their traditional values resulting in their spiritual successors being more liberal. Which in the case of the traditional value of having large families resulted in the demographic decline that is the topic of the article. This seems to clearly support OPs argument that conservative societies will be more successful as long as the values they are conserving are beneficial to the individuals comprising those societies and they succeed in conserving them.

That's not at all what I'm arguing. My comment was purely a response to

> I think we need an objective rather than a relative definition if we're going to do anything other than move goalposts.

I claimed that this is a nonsensical statement for two reasons:

1. You imply that relativity and objectivity are at odds (they aren't -- "I'm taller than my mom" is both a relative and an objective statement).

2. You claim that in order to have a meaningful conversation about conservatism and progressivism, these terms must be defined in an absolute sense. But they are by definition relative. Most of my comment illustrates this point.

I think they are talking about segregation… After the US, the last large segregated state was South Africa.

When did the US stop being a conservative country?

From my European point of view you have a two parties system allowing you to chose between conservative and more conservative.

Around 2000. There are two parties now, neither is conservative.

> Which conservative, traditionalist societies are you thinking of..

Legitimacy laws were still prevalent across the western world until the 1970's. Furthermore, abortion was basically illegal in Britain until 1967.

In the year that Legitimacy ceased to have legal meaning in Britain, the fertility rate dropped below 2, where it remains today.

I'm not saying that traditional values don't affect fertility rate. My comment was responding to the claim

> It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate.

Which is a much more general statement.

I see no evidence for that claim. Evidence that traditional values affect fertility rate does not provide evidence for this claim; for that you need at least some examples of traditional conservative societies outcompeting their more liberal contemporaries in some meaningful way.

"It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate."

Weren't pretty much all societies on the planet in the 1700s and 1800s "traditional and conservative"?

Yet most of them weren't particularly successful against the British, who, on aggregate, weren't that much traditional (superficially, yes, but behind the visible old-school clergy and nobility, ruthless modernization continued apace).

Well Germany with it's much more conservative population and petty kings and nobles were able to outgrew liberal Britain and republican France between 1870-1918, and so did Archconservative Russia post-1900 or so.

Of course both fell in WW1 but the period just before it was quite interesting to ponder about.

I don’t want to rain on your parade but Germany had just been unified and was quickly liberalising and Russia was so conservative the communist party would successfully take control of the state in 1917.

I am not so sure about your claim that Germany in the indicated period was "much more conservative" than Britain.

The heart of German economic development was in industrial Prussia, resulting in enormous growth of left-wing politics. Bismarck's anti-socialist laws were repealed in 1890 and the SPD since then got the plurality of votes cast in every election to the Reichstag.

Rural Bavaria was much more conservative, yes, but back then it was an economic backwater. Bavaria only started industrializing after 1950.

I'd love to see some citation for that since most of the ultra conservative countries around the world are failing states both economically and societally.

Everything from Iran, Iraq to European Hungaries to US bible belt states, you can pretty much directly map failure to fringe conservatism.

I am not talking about fringe, weird, or internationally blockaded societies, but ones like the comparison of Provence and Brittany of the article.

Can you quickly specify what you mean by successful. And which "conservative" societies you were thinking of as successful

Well, by the metric of Conservative and high birth rate Afghanistan is currently the most successful country on Earth, as I believe it has the leading population growth rate...

Lol. I was hoping the OP had some definition of success that wasn't literally population growth.

I thought we were discussing the article, sorry, my bad.

You literally kicked off this thread with the statement

> It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate.

Which is a much broader claim than just stating that traditional values increase fertility rate.

After being pressed to provide examples by multiple commenters, and failing to produce even one, you can't just sarcastically pretend that we were talking only about fertility rate all along.

I'll bite. I have extensive first-hand culture experience (travel, friends, dating) with people from Indonesia, India, and China (PRC). I would broadly categorise all three as very socially conservative -- relative to other G7-level developed, liberal countries.

Economics:

China: Life in a mid- to mega-size city is already pretty good. Yes, it isn't 50K EUR per year, but 10K EUR per year is solid middle class.

India & Indonesia: Life in a mid- to mega-size city is meh-to-OK. In the next decade, urban incomes will very likely double. After, it will be close to China today.

Socially:

All three: Family structures are incredibly deep and supportive -- way deeper than most highly-advanced countries. Part of that comes from strong religious traditions from Taoism/Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, etc. The lack of social safety net is mostly handled by wider family.

I have much less personal experience with Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, but I guess their story is similar to the above three, but higher income.

> Family structures are incredibly deep and supportive -- way deeper than most highly-advanced countries.

As long as you bend the knee to all of your family's beliefs. God forbid you're gay, irreligious or different religion, date someone of another caste/religion, etc...

and unfortunately that does not matter for the things the post mentions, ie. population and geopolitical dominance. :/

From my equally unfounded gut feel, it's actually balanced societies that are the most successful.

When that balance strongly tilts one way, tension occurs and requires rebalancing for that society to continue to prosper. On society lifetime scale, this usually takes decades which is annoying to a single generation, but a speck in the scheme of things.

In the middle of the 20th century, an extremely conservative, traditionalist society that was technologically modernizing at an extremely high rate but still a feudal empire that was one generation away from pastoralism decided they would attack the most self-declared "liberated" society in the world. The situation proceeded not necessarily to their advantage.

(Despite what the fascists want to think, there's substantial evidence that open societies being more adaptable and innovative is an overwhelming advantage)

This is contradicted by all available evidence: “traditional” societies succeed when they industrialize and liberalize. France was 20% of Europe’s population in 1700, but there is no meaningful sense in which the average French subject was “succeeding” in 1700.

The comparison of the article is pretty clear. Secularism and liberalisation led to plummeting birth rates. This is to what I am referring.

That’s not a great metric of success, as pointed out in TFA: most places with high birth rates have them because environmental pressures demand it. Remove the pressure (excess child mortality), and the social factors that justify high birthrates disappear.

We’re presumably in agreement that imposing excess infant mortality is not a good idea.

If you define success as "maintains high birth rates that suppress standards of living", sure.

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