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.
For the vision of a life worth living: http://goo.gl/C4k2H7
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.”
Israel has well above replacement level TFR. That’s true even of the seculars.
So…”Idiocracy” then.
“(para) Naked in the Wild”, AKA “Ass” is getting to be a more popular show, and the health care system is RIGHT on schedule for the bar code/picture menu model.
The redistribution of previously sequestered protein in Soylent Green meets gub’mint standards of GMO/salt/sugar/”foreign” meat/artificial color and flavor/peanut//petroleum products/ bacon/runny egg/gluten/and MSG -free….right?
Most of us are cattle, milked dry by those in power.
*uck-em. I’d rather not increase their herd.
Kids are expensive. DINKs live really well but add two kids and your housing costs skyrocket. Plus saving for college, retirement, etc. Only the super wealthy can afford more than two kids and the poor dont give a shit about living in a good school district or saving for retirement/college so they pop out the babies.
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Basically, if you feel life is a game you can’t win, that the odds are stacked against you, why would you impose this on a child.
That and the popular culture has made it acceptable to be obsessed with yourself and your personal enjoyment. Narcissism and raising children is not a good mix.
There may be a biological imperative at play here where an overcrowded world (and I am fully aware there are vast tracts of the planet where there is virtually no-one, but the perception of the majority is how many are in the cities and towns of the west) won’t support many more people. Farming for example, having grown dependent on chemicals, is now finding that diseases are resistant to the once powerful sprays and treatments. Yields are falling, and hunger may not be too far away for more and more.
There is also the fact that humans have a tolerance for crowds that soon wears thin: the more one is buffeted and pushed on the streets the less likely you are to want to see more of it. We may like other people, but often at a distance and certainly not all at once.
We have therefore become the best argument for not being more of us, and given that average lifespans are increasing as well we are here longer to keep the crowding up. This is not a plea for politicians to regulate life spans or numbers (which they would do badly, as is their wont) but an observation that we aren’t too sure about so many us being around.
In the west, the immigrants — for a time — love the fact that all the things they want are available for free and that includes medical attention at childbirth and extensive child care (this includes school, because a lot of teachers are simply child-minders now) but maybe the magic is wearing off for them. Plans for muslims to outbreed the host nation may not be going as well as first envisioned.
As for the decline of interest in sex… It may be people are coming to the conclusion that there are too many social penalties these days for shagging. Accusations of rape, for example, when sex was willingly given a few hours beforehand means that it might be best not to do it in the first place. As there are a number of women who think all sex, even in marriage, is rape and they seem to have traction in the media (and therefore in the palaces of our leaders) is another reason to stay away from that business. Anyway, kids are noisy, demanding and increasingly undisciplined. When teachers and responsible adults can’t even say ‘boo’ then we are basically admitting that having any of those things means nothing but potential heartache.
All in all, as I say, we have become the best reason for not wanting to see more of us.
In David Goldman’s book, the startling thing to jump out to me was the correlation between church attendance and fertility. Everywhere fertility rates collapsed, church attendance collapsed. Poland, Quebec and Ireland were three great examples. Ireland just made buggery their national pastime.
Even in the Muslim world this phenomenon appears. Tehran is a young city with a stunningly low fertility rate and a lot of empty mosques, even with morality police forcing young men into the mosques. The Turks have the same problem.
I think Goldman’s research and conclusions are valid, I just think that education level is the leading indicator and religiousity is a lagging indicator.
Undergrads these days have their heads pumped full of all sorts of pseudo-science by instructors. It’s the new civil religion, or the cult to use the term you’ve coined. And the psuedo-sciences were purpose-built to displace religion. Marxism, Freudianism, Gaia-ism all have their own set set of paradoxes, mysteries, and dogma for the supplicant to be initiated into. Look at the private writings of the early totalitarians. They are full of Social Darwinism, Freud, and of course Marx. Man is just a moist machine. We can program him to do what we want.
In the 1920’s it was popular among a certain part (liberally educated for the most part) of the intelligentsia to say that the Theory of Relativity meant that everything was relative, that there were no foundations. That was rubbish of course, but a lot of people used that to justify abandoning faith. As recently as a few months ago, a private professional forum I monitor was full of talk about how quantum physics had overturned the scientific method. The liberal arts types on the forum were completely ignorant of the fact that scientists using the scientific method had discovered quantum effects and were continuing to use it to find more and more of the rules of that domain every day. This is where the pseudo-scientific approach takes us.
I also think that despite the talk of people like Alan Bloom, most (especially the state schools) American colleges and universities were feeding their undergraduate students a very unexceptional, plain vanilla syllabus until the last 20 years or so. Derrida, Focault, and the rest only made their way into the more mainsteam curricula recently. Which is probably why Americans have held onto relatively high levels of religiousity outside of the elites until just recently.
Out of all of the datasets we have that meet certain criteria (independently observable, not easily falsifiable, independent of culture, etc.) education levels correlate best with low fertility. Just before the web started getting widespread penetration into homes, the LA Times did a two page spread on abortion statistics. I wish I had kept it, but what it clearly showed was that in the mid-1990’s, abortion was mostly a tool of college-educated, white, middle and upper-middle class women (if I remember correctly, 68% of women having abortions fell into those categories). Which is what you would expect since they are the ones agitating most loudly for abortion rights. The line about saving poor, teenage girls from back alley abortions was mostly propaganda according to that data.
Getting away from statistics and moving into the much more subjective realm of personal experience, the people who I have known who aren’t having children have stated the following reasons (in no particular order):
1. I am selfish (and they often use that word) and value (travel, cooking, sex, my athletics… fill in the blank with some philosophically hedonistic pursuit) more than having a child.
2. I would be a terrible parent.
3. The world is too awful a place to bring children into.
4. I don’t like (sometimes stated as “I hate”) children.
5. I had a traumatic childhood and don’t want to ever risk visiting the same on children.
My observation is that only reasons three and possibly five have anything to do with outside influences. The other reasons seem to be connected to a self-centered world view.
So getting back to your question of what replaces Christianity? I believe that it is the cult of man. But based on fertility rates and my own observations, it won’t last long.
Is it a form of pessimism? I know a fair number of couples (educated middle class) who explain their lack of progeny with the question “Who would want to bring a child into this world?” These are people for the most part who grew up in the late 1960s where society was arguably hanging by a thread, buffeted by the civil rights movement, drugs, inflation, Vietnam and the threat of Soviet nukes. In general, things are better today than they were back then so I never understood their point. I can only conclude from my own observations that these people are either selfish, a possibility, or lacking faith in a better future.