How long do you think before the topic of child limits is being discussed in the mainstream media? 1-5 years, 5-10 years, or is this something that pushes so strongly against our intrinsic drive to reproduce that it can never be discussed other than on the fringes?
I was thinking about that over the weekend, what the time frame could be. The reality is that if we don't ever have the conversation, we will most likely grow ourselves into an early death.
How long? Never.
It's never going to be discussed openly. The trend has actually been downwards on this one - the peak of visibility of the issue was in the 1960s and 1970s, and since then denial has been winning more and more convincingly.
It's a useful exercise to check whatever texts have survived from the 5th century in Western Europe and see how people perceived the collapse that was unfolding around them. Not one author whose writings have survived understood what was going on. Which means that either nobody understood it, period, or that those that understood it were such a marginalized minority that none of their writings were preserved.
Also, the 4th and 5th century were the time of maybe the biggest theological controversy in the history of Christianity. Possibly not in terms of the magnitude of divisions from a modern perspective, the depth of diversity in the first three centuries was much greater, with Marcion, various gnosticists, and countless other "heresies", many of which don't look anything like the Christianity we know. But in terms of the bitterness of the disputes and the amount of man and brain power that went into them, that period wasn't matched until the Reformation. That's when the trinity was hammered out, the churches split for the first time, etc. So basically what was happening was that the top minds of the empire were engaged in completely useless arguments over non-issues while the empire was falling apart. And nobody noticed. Sure, you will find many reports from that time lamenting the state of the infrastructure and the loss of security, but everyone thought this was going to be temporary and the greatness of Rome will resume in due order. Well, yes, it was temporary, a 1000 years....
BTW, the same thing happened with the Eastern empire in the 14th and 15th century -- there was a civil war, which coincided with a major theological dispute (over hesychasm), meanwhile whatever was left of the empire was being swallowed piece by piece by the Ottomans. And nobody was paying attention while they were arguing over obscure theological issues...
Expect more of the same this time around -- there will be a lot of increasingly shrill back and forth between economists (market economy is the current religion) on why things aren't working and which ideology should be adopted to bring back the good times, and plenty of insistence the reversal of fortunes is just around the corner. You can in fact already see it. What is highly unlikely is that at any point society will face up to the reality of the situation.
