Rudolph Binion Repies (response article)

First fact, Lloyd, then theory. Europe’s large-scale marital birth control did not begin with “the most evolved parents.” No measurable variables whatever consistently distinguished the early starters. The monographic literature on this point is abundant and conclusive. Paul, if the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply “made far better sense on the farm than in the city,” how come the peasantry took the contraceptive lead as often as not? As for the rubber condom, Norman, its causality has been written off long since. Ancient Rome depopulated without it. So did the Americans and the French take the fertility plunge without it following their two great political revolutions. When birth control, extramarital since antiquity, went domestic across Europe beginning in the 1870s, mechanical devices and abortion only brought up the rear behind withdrawal and especially abstinence, imposed by wives as a rule and abetted by prostitution: one less intercourse in ten and the transition was irreversibly on.

My question, though, was not how fertility plunged, but why. As that plunge was collective, I answered in kind. Or rather, to exemplify large-scale adaptive group process I drew on some arithmetic I once did with Patrick Festy at the French demographic institute (INED). I put my findings more graphically at that time:

By the 1870s Europe faced an unprecedented, potentially devastating internal invasion. At the peak rate of increase it was then running, its population of some 330,000,000 in the 1870s was headed toward a couple of billion over the next century—a truly forbidding prospect. To have stemmed this human tidal wave in the traditional way, by juggling marriage rates and ages, to the extent that it actually did so by conjugal birth control would have called for condemning nearly two out of every three women to celibacy without issue or else forbidding women to marry before their middle thirties—both options impracticable from the word go. That is why Europeans adopted marital birth control instead, on top of their continuing large-scale emigration. And that radical emergency measure was too little too late at that: they topped it off with the positive check of massive self-slaughter beginning in 1914 (Journal of Social History, 27 [4], 1994, p. 691).

Other animals retrench by the group when food or space is running short, so why doubt that humans do too? Of course, Lloyd, the individuals involved don’t retrench for the sake of the group: you dismissed my point so fast that you missed it. Individual motives aren’t group motives any more than particles move like the bodies they compose. As for group memory, if hunter-gatherers reverse direction along a tribal corridor after several generations, what guides their steps back? Not likely oral tradition, since speechless creatures migrate that way too. If we “cannot assume the method of transmission between generations,” neither can we ignore the fact of transmission. Or to analogize with “hard” science again, should the law of inverse squares have been repealed over the couple of centuries before quantum field theory finally established how gravitation is transmitted? (By the by, Lloyd, in which individual Germans have you documented that enema behind the “stab-in-the-back,” or shaming little children behind the “shame of Versailles”?)

The group in my demographic example is clearcut geographically: all Europeans and only Europeans. But did it pre-exist psychologically? It did at the gut level, Howard, in such basics as the distinctive European marriage pattern, though only now is it gaining self-conscious identity. True, John, Europeans did not mentalize their baby budgeting the way the Germans defeated in 1918 and Pirandello’s six Characters mentalized their traumatic reliving. The reason as I see it was not that Europe’s aggregate demographic business was “mega” (so was World War II), but that it was adaptive. Both traumatized groups—Hitler’s Germans and Pirandello’s six Characters—literalized their reliving as far as circumstances allowed. While reliving, both were unconsciously back in the original trauma and consciously even thinking Here we go again. It remains that only mentally, in the unconscious, is a refought war the same war or a restaged dramma the same dramma, whereas a reproductive cutback is just that for a population defending collectively against overgrowth. Still in

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all, inborn unconscious material is no less mental than repressed material. The two group imperatives of retrench and relive are both alike mental, with retrench even the more clearly defensive of the two. And isn’t everything mental the psychohistorian’s business?

What a rich harvest I inadvertently reaped by citing Langer’s example of symbolic reliving in the aftermath of the Black Death. Langer’s is still our next assignment, but one requiring, as Sam shows, a comparative approach to sort out a “multiplicity of reactions” polarized to extremes of abandon and control. May Sam’s book and Norman’s bring that macabre megatrauma into focus at last through all the convulsion and disarray that went with it. Meanwhile, back with Norman to Germany’s simpler, smoother traumatic reliving: for once joker A. J. P. Taylor was nearly right, the German public went to war in 1939 in a spirit not of jubilation as in 1914 but of gloomy resignation. Such was precisely the mood that heralds a traumatic reliving.

Paul, you prefer sniffing around to looking around, but does that make the big picture illusory? If you mistrust demography because of its false prophets, why not psychohistory too? And is ethology at higher risk than psychohistory for researchers’ projections? Ignore facts that can be misread and learning is at an end. Demography and ethology are privileged peepholes into our animal basics in the bulk. That bulk is a fact of life even if, alas, it does leave individualizers such as Lloyd, you, and—to quote Peter—Peter himself “adrift.”

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