The word “why” is one of the more abused words in the English language. Today, the primary abuse comes via over caffeinated twinks from the millennial generation demanding the rest of us explain reality to them. Over the last half century, the word has been used as an excuse to overturn large chunks of Western Civilization in pursuit of an earthly utopia.

The real pity, it seems to me, of our era is no one seems willing to use the word “why” in the attempt to learn anything about human affairs. What I mean by that is right here in this story on German’s demographic collapse. The article details the drop in fertility and how that is playing out over multiple generations. The writer also covers the problems with regards to a custodial state suddenly overwhelmed with geezers.

What you will not find in that article is why, after a 1,000 generations or more in the middle of Europe, these Germanic tribes decided to stop having kids. It is a conscious decision as there’s no evidence that women are suddenly infertile. Contraception sales are better than ever. Men and women of these tribes have simply decided to not have children. If reports like this one are correct, Germans are not even willing to have sex, despite the mountains of free contraceptives.

It is telling, I think, that no one thinks about this in the same way we look at fertility of other species. Armies of humans are involved in understanding why the giant panda stopped reproducing. If the population of the long-nosed fly gorilla ant drops even by one percent, the full force of the federal state swings into action to find out why. People across Europe have stopped reproducing and no one is the least bit curious.

The closest we get to an answer is the old trope about educated people having fewer children, as if self-extinction was the height of genius. Never mind that the smart fraction used to have loads of kids by custom. Then you have the hooting lunatics claiming that what worked just fine for thousands of years is suddenly killing off the species. Otherwise, no one thinks it is important to know what is causing Europeans to die out.

David Goldman, also known as Spengler, wrote a book called How Civilizations Die in which he tried to answer the question. His main argument is that the West has lost faith in itself by losing faith entirely. People who truly believe that there is a reward in the next life for living well in this life will inevitably be optimistic about the future and willing to bring children into the world.

The West, in Goldman’s formulation, sees nothing but a pointless dance to the grave and therefore sees no purpose to life. Not having children is the same as saying you wish you had never been born. I doubt anyone thinks of it in those terms, but the old Greek saying is true. Societies grow great when old men plants trees in whose shade they will never sit.

At the same time, Islam’s violent response to encroaching modernity is a reaction to the spiritual nullity that is modern Western consumerism and materialism. Muslim leaders talk about this very fact. They see their own sudden downturn in fertility as a consequence of Western materialism destroying their traditional societies.

The book is well worth reading, even though I’m not entirely convinced. The biological imperative is what makes life possible. Men will not suddenly decide to overrule their most basic desires just because their churches have fallen to rubble. Even in the darkest days of humanity, people still got it on and made new people. There’s a reason why September is the most common birth month in the northern hemisphere.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if Goldman is not mostly right about what’s driving this trend. The inspiration has died so the aspiration has died too, replaced with the cold, transactional ethos of the modern technological state. Orwell may have been wrong about the brutal austerity of the future, but the custodial state imagined by Huxley is just as sterile.

There’s also the central tenet of multiculturalism which has infected the West. That’s the argument that no society is better than another and to think so, much less say so, is about the worst thing you can do. Pride in your people is a big part of that biological urge. Men risk their lives for their people because to do so means their essence will carry on through others.

If “your people” are no better or worse than any other people, there’s no reason for you to sacrifice in anyway for “your people.” At the same time, if you cannot count on your people to look after your descendents or even associate with your descendents, why bother having descendents? The egalitarian, multicultural society is one where no one has any regard for anyone, beyond the material transactions of daily existence.

In politics, the electorate always has the option to not vote. Often, it is the next to last resort. Millions of white people have stopped voting in America because no party represents the interests of traditional core Americans. That scales up to people declining to show up for the future when the direction of their cultures is headed to a dead, sterile end. The future belongs to those who show up and the West has decided the future is not for them.