I am currently reading Mark Steyn’s “America Alone”, and boy, is it depressing. Often funny in places, because of his way with words, but the message is stone-cold sobering. On their current trajectory (which in some countries may already be past the point-of-no-return) low birthrates in the European cradle of Western civilization raise the prospect of complete societal collapse and cultural extinction… or if not extinction, at least complete subordination to societies with more self-assurance and robust birthrates (all of which, as he puts it, currently start with an “I” and end with “slam”).
I began to search online for a critique or refutation of his argument, hoping to lift my spirits. Instead, I discovered a supporting work from a liberal scholar. So, if you were inclined to dismiss the message because of the messenger (i.e., he’s one of those right-wing extremist fear-mongering Islamophobes), you’re out of luck.
ChristianityToday.com, in the “Books & Culture” section of their current (May/June) issue, has an interview with Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “The Empty Cradle”(Basic Books, 2004). There are some telling differences in seeing the issue from a liberal perspective- I’ll mention a few that caught my attention, as well as what I see as some hopeful and heartening observations of his. Read the whole article here, it isn’t long.
Some quotes:
For nations, as for people, there are many benefits to not having children… As the relative number of children declined, so did the burden of their dependency, leaving more resources available for adults to invest and enjoy. Absolutely… I can spend all that money on me, me , wonderful me, without the dreary “burden” of dependent children.
… at least until you grow old.
Oops, there’s the problem that Steyn analyzes. Who’s going to pay for the taxes to support your ballooning health care needs? Dang! But wait- We’re Baby Boomers- we’ll never grow old, right? At least not the icky way people used to grow old. We’ll always be hip and active and doing triathalons and stuff- we’ll never be dependent on anyone else, right? Right? And even if I did have kids I wouldn’t want to be a burden on the little darlings- the government will take care of me! Right?
Ultimately, low fertility means population aging and population decline. This is not all bad. A population dominated by middle-aged and elderly people, for example, is probably less inclined to send its few children off to war.
That’s right. Having been lulled into terminal indolence by “cradle-to-grave” social welfare programs, such a population is much more inclined to promptly sue for terms of surrender to populations dominated by robust, rowdy, and vigorously militant 15- to 25- year olds. Then we can live in peace, right? A peace called “dhimmitude“. After all, hundreds of cars torched on a nightly basis is just property damage, they can be replaced… and having the occasional politician, or filmmaker, or average citizen murdered is unfortunate but sustainable, and so morally superior to going to war… and the young women raped are at least still alive, and anyways ought to have been more sensitive to living in a multicultural society.
He alludes to this almost in passing a few paragraphs later, when he says:
They (so-called “progressives”) also forget that if progressives themselves “forget to have children” then the future belongs to people who have opposing values.
Now here is the heartening observation. Which demographic groups have the highest birthrate? Poor, rural, uneducated, and ethnic minorities? Nope. Religious folk… and specifically, devout traditionalist religious folk. And so:
The faithful thus begin to inherit society by default. The West’s total population may fall or stagnate, perhaps for quite awhile; but those who remain will be disproportionately committed to God and family…
The silver lining on this otherwise very dark cloud looming over us.
He ends with a pathetically lame call to “just hope that this new age of faith will also be an age of peace”. Well, professor, let’s just be sure we’ve all defined our terms as to what kind of peace we mean.
