75 Comments

1. johnclubvec:

Re the causes for (worldwide) fertility decline; John D. Mueller has published an apparently little-known but astonishing paper on the subject. For the (complete) pdf version, click on “View as PDF” near the top-right of this page.

Jun 29, 2008 - 6:47 am 2. Lifeofthemind:

Remember that this has happened before. The ancient Khmer adopted a highly pacifist version of Theravedra Buddhism and were defenseless before the predations of the Viet and the Thai. The demographic implosion of Rome between the third and the sixth centuries was also in part a willful flight into the abyss.

Jun 29, 2008 - 6:55 am 3. Oengus Moonbones:

R.F.: “This the way the world ends. Not with a whimper, but with a suffocated scream.”

This is well said, and a nice ironic twist on Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”. I wonder who will be grasping the unattended levers of power in the Wasteland?

…I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon–O swallow swallow
Le prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Da. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

Jun 29, 2008 - 6:59 am 4. Doug:

“Of course things would never reach that point. Long before the nursing home phase old and defenseless societies would be systematically looted and taken over by high birthrate outsiders who will have grasped the unattended levers of power. This the way the world ends. Not with a whimper, but with a suffocated scream.”
Indeed.
—

But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,
Make gallant show and promise of their mettle;
But when they should endure the bloody spur,
They fall their crests, and, like deceitful jades,
Sink in trial.

Julius Caesar VI.ii

Jun 29, 2008 - 7:38 am 5. Insufficiently Sensitive:

And over here in our oh-so-comfortable and PC world, Mark Steyn faces trial in Canada for merely quoting an imam who actually noticed (somehow it’s not incorrect for him to do so, but it is for Steyn) which direction the demographics are running.

Did the effort of winning the two World Wars wrest open the drain plug, through which Western hopes and self-confidence for the prevalence of its civilization are pouring out unstoppably?

Jun 29, 2008 - 8:47 am 6. Starko:

I recall reading that these issues are a major force behind Japanese firms’ research and development efforts around robots (Japan has similar problems with their demographics).

I suppose the theory is that if you don’t want to import immigrants you create artificial ones.

Jun 29, 2008 - 8:53 am 7. Teresita:

It is a perfect storm. The population implosion of Europe is hitting just when the bills are coming due for two generations of a continent-wide Mommy State. Right now the Eurozone and the USA are at rough parity in terms of GDP. But over the next generation the population of Europe will remain static even with immigration from Africa, while America will grow 25%. European industry would need spectacular increases in per-capita productivity to even remain where they are, but that is not likely when you are importing unskilled labor and taxing them to the gills to pay for a 35 hour work week, month-long vacations, and retirement before age 60. Taking a whole continent off-line should go a long way toward mitigating the effects of peak oil.

Jun 29, 2008 - 9:04 am 8. Charles:

Long before the nursing home phase old and defenseless societies would be systematically looted and taken over by high birthrate outsiders who will have grasped the unattended levers of power.
/////////
you see that happening right now in california.

Jun 29, 2008 - 10:47 am 9. Zenster:

It’s also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it’s also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.

I see this as one of the most significant pivot-points in distinguishing between the European and American societal models. In Europe—take Sweden for instance—feminism has become so overweening in its newfound lust for political power that single-motherhood is almost extolled.

While America has its own issues about single mothers, many of them come from a less educated strata of society. Europe’s single mother demographics are far more likely to extend straight across all sorts of class lines. The socialistic state’s comprehensive childcare system has all but made fatherhood obsolete, save in its most basic and fleeting function. Nowhere in Europe do we see the same sort of pervasive condemnation of absentee fathers like we do in America. It is the abandonment of family by Europe’s educated class that is most damaging. Far fewer intelligent and productive children will enter the workstream.

If one thing is going to save American “family values”, it is the encouragement of men to actively participate in the raising of their own children. This is what’s happening and I’d wager a substantial sum that it explains a large portion of why America has a functional replacement birth rate.

… the focus is on selective immigration — opening the door for those who have knowledge and training that will benefit the economy.

As a Politically Incorrect and unspecified American politician noted, “We need less boat people and more yacht people.”

Long before the nursing home phase old and defenseless societies would be systematically looted and taken over by high birthrate outsiders who will have grasped the unattended levers of power.

As ex-Soviet KGB spy, Yuri Bezmenov, notes: Even as liberals, in their hope of grasping those “unattended levers”, render modern America defenseless against communism—or in the modern context, Muslims—those same liberals would be shot-on-sight by communists as willing traitors, just as Muslims will stretch out their homosexual-loving necks on the chopping block. Please watch the linked 15 minute video for a glimpse into just how badly communism has weakened the West’s resolve to survive.

Jun 29, 2008 - 11:01 am 10. Gordon:

So people from high-birthrate countries move en masse to Europe, then what?

**will they continue having lots of kids? After all, the reason for high birthrates in their home country is for social and economic security but that won’t be needed in Europe.

**living in the more-developed economies of Europe, their birthrates will drop; this is fundamental demographics–fewer infant deaths, no need for so many children, birth control, female emancipation.

**if they do continue having lots of kids for a generation or so, will these kids want to pay the high taxes to support hordes of elderly French/Italians/Spaniards?

**or will it end up like the Mongols who invaded China: seduced into the easier, less rigorous way of life, becoming Europeans themselves after a while?

Jun 29, 2008 - 11:12 am 11. Insufficiently Sensitive:

After all, the reason for high birthrates in their home country is for social and economic security but that won’t be needed in Europe.

Are you saying that after the educated folks with their systems of laws and dependable business models have been overwhelmed by the masses of uneducated high-breeders with their tribal systems, there will still be any form of ‘economic security’ lasting until their third generation settles down into low-breeding luxury? What sort of economy would support this model?

Jun 29, 2008 - 11:32 am 12. NahnCee:

Read an article yesterday on the increasing abortion rate in BEirut and the Middle East: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/5862119.html

When will we be able to face that fact that children are very frequently unpleasant little animals, and faced with the idea of being caged with them for 18-plus years is an increasingly terrifying idea to lots and lots of people around the world.

Given, too, that some adults seem to view children as their own toys to abuse, rape and torture, it seems to me that we are really looking at a situation that desperately needs a new approach.

Such as government-sponsored creches where brood mare women are paid for their services in bearing the fetus for the required amount of time, and then the children are raised and educated in nice sterile non-abusive situations until they are mature enough to go forth and assume the mantle of taxation and making a living for themselves.

I suppose this is pie in the sky because the government has never been good at ANYthing, but it seems to me that if individual people are declining the responsiblity of reproducing themselves, then we either have to get used to the idea of doing with fewer bodies (wouldn’t that be a Good Thing for the whole global warming debate?), or producing new and more bodies a different way.

Jun 29, 2008 - 11:36 am 13. Tamquam Leo Rugiens:

Gordon;

China was, and remains, insufferably self assured. They *KNOW* with unshakable certainty that their civilization is vastly superior to any other. When overrun they succeeded in communicating this central tenant to their invaders. The works of their civilization proved the point, so the invaders took on Chinese civilization as their own. With the triumph of multi culturalism Europe has no confidence in her own civilization, rather it is the invader that feels culturally superior. The Mongols et al that invaded China had no particular ideology beyond that of rape and plunder. These new immigrants to Europe are surfeited with a totalistic, intolerant ideology. The evidence seems pretty clear that they are not assimilating, their fertility rates not declining. They batten on Europe’s decaying corpse, and when they are done not even the bones will remain.

Jun 29, 2008 - 11:38 am 14. RWE:

I believe it was the SF writer Cyril Kornbluth who foretold of the rise of the “marching morons.” He reasoned that the most intelligent people would not only seek out their own kind but would be socially responsible to not over-reproduce. The dummies would be left with their own kind and would care nothing for any kind of responsibility, social or otherwise. The result would be a world populated largely by morons and secretly watched by the ever more capable and ever more distant intelligent.

In such a world, Phds would be granted in such complex subjects as filing and typing. Cars would go ever faster every year, but only because the speedometers had been modified to read 300 instead of 60.

Eventually, though, the intelligent got tired of the morons and announced that Venus had been found to be a wonderful place, far better than Earth. The morons were told to climb on the rockets and go there immediately.

As Wretchard once pointed out a dissatisfaction with the state of affairs among the scientists of Pakistan and Iran also implies the same thing can happen in Tel Aviv and Tokyo. Or in Bonn and Oxford and Geneva. It takes very few smart people to create immense destruction today. There is no guarantee that all of them will go gently into the night.

Jun 29, 2008 - 11:39 am 15. Tamquam Leo Rugiens:

NahnCee:

The sign of the T to you too.

Jun 29, 2008 - 11:41 am 16. hdgreene:

Sorry, I got carried away here. This is pure speculation so I don’t need no stinking links! They seem to turn up dead, anyways.

In a feudal system the military leaders that conquer a region become the new aristocracy. In Western Europe’s recent wars the conquering Military was not aristocratic or even European. Nor was it interested in holding the reins of power, but did protect those who would pick the reins up. This has allowed a new aristocratic system to evolve.

Because after the last century’s wars it was the clerks of Europe (sometimes confused with intellectuals) who emerged triumphant. Their means of control are not military but material in nature (basically, they divvy up taxes in a system of political “group” patronage). This allows woman to acquire positions of great power without having to work through the males of the family. In this system power grows from an inked rubber stamp, flowery prose, poisoned logic and a purple ribbon. In all this (is it proper to say?), woman are the equal of men.

So Europe develops into a “Clerical aristocracy” with de facto primogeniture at its center. In an emerging static system of hierarchy (National and European), the most prepared child of either sex will inherit a position of similar prestige to that of the parents. The guaranteed inheritance is not (yet) total and not (yet) explicit.

In a martial aristocracy the “militarists” control, with some difficulty, the clerks. It is even more essential that the clerical aristocrats control the military. In both systems the Aristocracy wants to control the “weapons” and keep them out of the hands of the commoners. But not necessarily out of the hands of the “healthy” criminal class (those uninterested in attacking the aristocracy). Aristocrats look on healthy criminals as competitors and, at times, allies in the exploitation of commoners.

The Noble Clerks perpetuate their ruling class by properly designing the education and testing system so that the “class favorites” are from the favored class. Selection from this “merit pool” would be influenced by family connections — with the candidates culled as they are promoted up the ranks.

In such an emergent system having more than two children would be considered suspect. You could argue the third was an accident. But the fourth would constitute a kind of rebellion, since the promotion of your brood will leave fewer choice positions for the “child” of others. This “gang of siblings” could become bandits grabbing control of bureaucratic turf. As a matter of “noble” self defense they would be held back.

A clerical aristocracy would not be wealth creators but wealth administrators. The multiplication of social programs would be accompanied by a multiplication of noble positions (with squires and yeoman attached) and a cohort of dependent clients. The nobles would be highly suspicious of freewheeling capitalism since it provides an independent route to status and prestige. Besides, who knows where those free wheels are going to go a-wheeling? The Noble clerks sell free lunches, and their little hot dog stand might get knocked over. The free lunch is a con, of course, but it is also a living for the proprietor and his Noble patron.

The (ideally unarmed) commoners would be dependent on this system even as they became cynical about it. They see that children, as a class, are an excuse for the multiplication of Noble positions — and a cause of higher taxes. This turns their own immediate decedents into a class enemy. Also, in a static society it makes sense to concentrate your limited influence on preparing and marketing one child to achieve one low level clerical position — a position from which the child can climb the greased pole and establish a clerical line.

But the “Nobles” need a population that the domesticated commoners are not producing. One solution is to import them — but in a manner where they will provide additional Noble positions (meaning additional expenditures to the “department” and tax revenues to the government) while not competing for those positions. The Nobility does not need a second generation of honor students from their immigrant class — quite the opposite. Keeping them separate from the native commoners and engendering mutual hostility between them is “Maintaining an Aristocracy 101.” They need to put that “Marxist dialectic” they all studied to work — in reverse.

This has lead to the economic, demographic and social problems that Richard discussed. What is the way forward?

1. Make the new Aristocracy explicit, along with a new Chivalric Code. Only one, or at most two, noble children continue the clerical line. All the children will need the aid of two “prestige” parents. Their “unfavored” children enter a class of lower clerical gentry. Or they can be married into the class of (properly regulated, constrained, and most of all administered) business people. This will strengthen a system of family alliances and make all dependent on the “new chivalry” and the family values it will promote.

2. Recognize that the system is exploitive of future generations and cut the commoner parents into the deal. This can be done by selling new infants a reverse “savings bond” where the parents keep the money. Right now only the Nobles profit from the immediate entry of a new baby into “the system.” With this bond commoners will get a monthly stipend for each child they have. The children will begin paying the bond back when they reach 22. This will be a clear profit for the first generation of commoner parents. The second generation would have to perpetuate the system for any hope of getting their money back. If they don’t have children they will live in even more dire poverty (we are not designing a system that allows people to thrive — only one that pretends to).

Perhaps the Swedes can lead the way here. US to follow.

Jun 29, 2008 - 11:47 am 17. Jay:

Any ordered system requires work. Chaos is what happens on its own. The lawyer-clerk class expects the minions to obey and do the work to maintain the system just as the people who repaired the Roman water systems did.
But the students in our schools are interested in play or crime for those who profit from it.
The Soviets were able to fool the peasants and the urban lower classes for several generations since they took over a central Asian type society.
In this country even the lawyers are having to compete for high paying positions. The illegals and the H1B visa legals are not going to be able to run the system.
I talk to the folks who do the work for the bosses public and private. The so called intellectuals should not be so confident of their future.

Jun 29, 2008 - 12:25 pm 18. Charles:

In california the process is accelerated by out migration especially of people who are tax base for the state.

Jun 29, 2008 - 12:44 pm 19. hdgreene:

An interesting picture with that article. Two girls with a jump rope with the third girl missing. Or is the third girl a boy? And are the two girls at college?

Jun 29, 2008 - 12:44 pm 20. Narmer:

Hm.

Europe better hope for the Singularity. In that case AI’s can enter their workforce, and Europeans can be forever young.

Seriously, though these statistics are very important and troubling, predicting their future implications is very hard. Who knows what technologies or other events will change the equation.

Jun 29, 2008 - 1:26 pm 21. Bret:

Fertility rates are strongly correlated with population density. Europe is more densely populated than the US. Thus it currently has low fertility. Once the population of Europe drops, their fertility will increase and the population will level off. The United States’ population will increase until it gets more crowded, then it will drop.

I suspect that both religiosity and government footprint is also related to population density.

No gloom and doom. Only simple feedback mechanisms.

More info here:

Jun 29, 2008 - 1:30 pm 22. Bret:

Oops. Meant to write “…strongly NEGATIVELY correlated…” above.

Jun 29, 2008 - 1:35 pm 23. whiskey:

I think HDGREENE and Zenster are partially right, but that the issue goes much deeper and broader. Japan as noted has the same problems with low birthrates, little communism or marxism or pressure to create a clerk class of nobility. Add to that Iran, Algeria, and Tunisia which according to the CIA WORLD FACTBOOK have replacement rates of around 1.7 and even Muslim countries have low birth rates. Of course, Yemen has 8! So the situation is varied.

The low birth rate is due to factors outside what’s been discussed. It’s due to what Roissy in DC (a “Pick Up Artist” or PUA who blogs at roissy.wordpress.com) calls the endless choice of urban living. Anonymous, without social control or disapproval, with plenty of the opposite sex on display. Men and women seek to endlessly choose a “better” partner, as shown on Seinfeld and Friends. Urbanization correlates well with drop in TFR, Algeria, Tunisia, and Iran are conservative Islamic countries like Yemen, but are far more urbanized.

Next, the condom and the pill (I’m shocked no one has mentioned it) mean that women can delay pregnancy endlessly. Both are cheap, effective, and available. Women unconstrained by social mores in the big cities can pursue and sleep with the most “Alpha” or socially/physically dominant men without any real penalty (unwanted pregnancies). This leads to the pattern of young women delaying marriage until mid thirties or later, and a catastrophic decline in fertility. You’re looking at one child at best, with fertility treatments. That’s the cost of pursuing Mr. Big.

Next, there seems to be a link between intelligence and testosterone levels. You can see here a discussion at Gene Expression. Testosterone declining as one moves left or right from Average IQ. Bill Gates certainly would appear to have less testosterone than say, Hulk Hogan. Most societies seem to have a problem with intelligent men, they don’t use them very well. Women unless constrained seem to chase after high-testosterone “Alpha Males” of whom there are very few, and have either few kids marrying late, or have kids by the Alpha without marriage.

Britain’s illegitimacy rate is 50%. Most of Northern Europe has the same rates OR HIGHER, including the Scandinavian nations, the Benelux nations, Germany, France, and Switzerland. No one should be shocked by this, women if given their choices would rather have a kid or two by the Alpha Male and remain unmarried than marry some “Beta” male.

Lest anyone be sanguine, Blacks in the US have 70% nationwide illegitimacy, and 90% in the urban core. Whites have 34% illegitimacy rates. Compared to 4% in 1965, and 24% for blacks in 1965. Huge changes in 40 years. Indicative of a pattern of chasing after the Alpha males who do most/all of the reproduction, leave a generation of fatherless kids with boys especially running wild and engaging in thuggery to be the most macho and thus the most favored by women.

I’ve blogged about this here. Short version: “beta” males or the tool-makers, focused on abstract tasks, tools, how things work and can be improved, form the basis for a society’s improvement. Since better tools equal more resources extracted from the environment and better ability to fend off covetous neighbors. HOWEVER, women do not like tool-makers because they are lower in testosterone, the evolutionary price for abstract mental focus on things rather than people and social positioning. THUS societies that constrain and channel male-female reproduction, like Europe around 1000 AD with freeholding tribes converted to monogamous Christianity, have great comparative advantages over others. European women until recently had the choice of prostitute, disposable mistress of an Aristocrat, marriage to an impoverished soldier, or wife of a tradesman or merchant. Eliminating the reproductive bottleneck of the Alpha male, and mobilizing great gobs of beta male tool-makers and improvers.

America is just later jumping into the Abyss than Europe. We also have anonymous urbanization with the illusion of endless choice with no consequences. We also have increasing illegitimacy rates showing the choice of women for Alpha men and no desire for the nerdy beta male. We also have loss of social organizations and constructs that channeled male-female reproduction and marriage. We also have disposable fathers, valued only for testosterone/sexuality, and a fairly feminized society reflecting the demographic reality of slightly more women than men. But urbanized and wealthier Muslim countries are not any different, either.

It’s a tragedy of the commons — the wealth and safety of the fruits of the tool-makers cause women unconstrained to choose the Alpha, which undermines the very wealth and safety in the first place. [This assumes, of course, that one agrees that interest and talent in making tools of one sort or another is inherited, and not just some aspect of personhood "magically" appearing through the Ether, and that while women occasionally are outstanding tool makers, the vast majority have little to no interest in tools and abstract thinking about tools and systems of tools. Thus they are not a replacement for the "beta male" tool-maker.]

Jun 29, 2008 - 2:00 pm 24. Zenster:

hdgreene: In such an emergent system having more than two children would be considered suspect. You could argue the third was an accident. But the fourth would constitute a kind of rebellion, since the promotion of your brood will leave fewer choice positions for the “child” of others. This “gang of siblings” could become bandits grabbing control of bureaucratic turf. As a matter of “noble” self defense they would be held back.

Which is an exact description of the “Zero Sum Game” that European socialists—and communists in general—are so fond of bashing America with. Perish the thought that someone actually creates any wealth rather than just continuing to divide up a fixed pie of taxes and already existing resources. That sort of intellect-straining, heavy lifting is left to us brutish, greedy and imperialistic Americans—all the better so that we can then be trashed for our over consumption of resources—even as we bring the world cars, computers and the Internet.

The nobles would be highly suspicious of freewheeling capitalism since it provides an independent route to status and prestige. Besides, who knows where those free wheels are going to go a-wheeling?

Precisely! Such untrammeled creation of wealth might lead to [gasp!] UPWARD MOBILITY!

Recognize that the system is exploitive of future generations and cut the commoner parents into the deal.

If by “exploitive” you actually mean “parasitic”, I couldn’t agree with you more. Nice description of Social Security, by the way.

Jun 29, 2008 - 2:08 pm 25. Steynian 183 « Free Mark Steyn!:

[...] New York Times does a gargantuan thumb-sucker on Steynian predictions of demographic doom. “O Brave New World: Russell Shorto of the New York Times looks at the demographic collapse of Europe and examines the [...]

Jun 29, 2008 - 2:23 pm 26. trangbang68:

Europe’s demographics are probably much the work of pessimism generated by two ruinous wars which showed Nietsche and Marx et al to be frauds pimping murderous ideologies. Combined with the end of vital Christianity you’re left with soul dead populations happy to fritter away their lives and heritage with no thought to posterity.
Here there is hope because of the large segment of our population who still believe in faith, family and patriotism despite the taunts of the Euro wannabes on the left. Psalm 127 states children are “arrows in the
hands of mighty men and happy is the man whose quiver is full”. If you believe that your land is still a special place with hope and a future you delight to launch children into it. Pity the barren womb of the cynic and the ideologue.

Jun 29, 2008 - 2:34 pm 27. Doug:

Gordon,
Experience so far in this country, since the rise of the welfare state, is that the birthrate for Mexicans in this country is far higher than in Mexico.

Jun 29, 2008 - 2:43 pm 28. Doug:

Iraq: Death Comes for the Archbishop

Christians are being systematically run out of Iraq.
Those who are left are being forced to pay ransom on their own lives.

Open your throat and submit to the Jizya, Christians.

From Andrew Bostom

Jun 29, 2008 - 3:42 pm 29. Gordon:

Doug–I’d be interested to know where you got that information (re Mexican birthrates in the US). I am a volunteer physician in a clinic that serves working immigrants, overwhelmingly Mexican, and we have a large obstetrical practice. In talking with the young mothers who come there they virtually all mention that they plan to have a smaller family than their mothers had in Mexico. Among several things, children are more expensive here and their moms often didn’t have access to, or knowledge of, contraception.

It may be that the most recent arrivals continue for a while to have big families but it’s a universal tenet of demographics that the desire for large families disappears after moving to a more-developed economy. As Stengel said, “You could look it up.”

Jun 29, 2008 - 3:50 pm 30. whiskey:

Gordon, that is most decidedly NOT the case in Yemen. Or Pakistan (3.58). Or Bangladesh 3.08. Or Chad (5.43). All these countries have experienced GAINS in both wealth and urbanization. Yet all have rates ABOVE steady-state replacement.

Besides, even if your assumption is true, as Steyn points the demographic “winner” is last man standing. If Muslim birth rates decline less faster than Europeans, they REPLACE Europeans, making Europe merely Yemen with a colder climate. Which has profound implications for the US and the world, not least in trade and economic growth.

Other than oil and gas, Muslim nations produce nothing of interest to the US or other developed countries, other than terrorism and jihad. Replacing a wealthy, consuming Europe with a cold and rainy Yemen exporting jihad around the globe means a huge chunk of wealth in the world just disappears. A strangling effect on world trade, including China and Japan which export considerable amounts of goods and services to Europe as well as ourselves. Not to mention the headache of constant, European-based jihad.

Naturally a poorer globe means naked resource grabs rather than trade.

Jun 29, 2008 - 4:27 pm 31. Alexis:

Perhaps a sizable chunk of Europe could be turned into a series of sanctuaries for gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, baboons, et cetera. Considering how the tree habitats of Borneo and Central Africa are getting logged out of existence, these primates may need a new place to live. And given how politically correct it would be for European states to set aside large reserves for primates overseen by a bureaucracy in Brussels, I see this as a feasible possibility.

Given how the Spanish Parliament has conferred human rights to apes, I could easily see how Spain would insist on importing apes instead of Muslims on the basis of promoting (and celebrating) diversity. (So far, Moroccans in Spain vastly outnumber bonobos.) One question in my mind is whether any gorilla, orangutan, bonobo, or chimpanzee would be interested in voting in human elections, and who they would vote for if they were interested. It appears to me that nobody has ever asked the opinion of non-human primates about what they think of human politics.

Jun 29, 2008 - 5:07 pm 32. Cardozo Bozo:

The laws of evolution: not rescinded. Social or biological.

Jun 29, 2008 - 5:39 pm 33. Gordon:

Whiskey–

Yemen, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Chad were not exactly the ‘more-developed’ economies I had in mind.

Jun 29, 2008 - 6:05 pm 34. Wadeusaf:

Until very recently, child mortality rates were incredibly high in all country’s. Mortality in child birth was likewise very high. Large families are the result of the stark realities of a low expectation of children living beyond twelve years of age and the relatively high rate at which fertile females would die in childbirth, often along with the child. Throughout history the success of certain human lines in certain climates has been dependent on adjusting to virus, flu and other pox upon our collective human house. Medical science itself possibly has more to do with the rise and subsequent fall in fertility rates than a good economy itself, but economic health and the health care available due to successful economic systems should result in fewer fetus among us. The lag between the gains made and the adjustment of social systems to benefit or incorporate those gains can I would hazard to guess take varying amounts of time to be incorporated into different societies.

So the question remains are Fertility and birth rates as used reliable measures of robust libidos? If so can they be used as a reliable statistic, indicative of a trend or is it a symptom of an abnormal or unhealthy adjustment?

I should I suppose next offer assist in further study. However, my wife thinks it would not be a wise or prudent thing to do, and thus, sigh, I will pass.

Jun 29, 2008 - 7:12 pm 35. bobal:

It appears to me that nobody has ever asked the opinion of non-human primates about what they think of human politics.

I recall reading a study about that, though I can’t recall where. It seems the humans couldn’t quite understand the reply, though it was reported to have a sort of mocking tone, as if to say, why all the hypocrisy about it? When getting straight to the dirty work serves as well.

Jun 29, 2008 - 7:24 pm 36. whiskey:

Gordon, they may not be urbanized to the extent that Iran and Algeria and Tunisia are, but they nevertheless have considerable migration into cities from rural areas, growth in GDP and per capita income, falling rates of infant mortality, and so on. Yet still remain higher to significantly higher than their peers in the Muslim world (to control for character).

Therefore, the assertion that somehow, magically, birth rates AND culture will automatically adjust to European norms is well, magical thinking.

Stanley Kurz has done some original research on how cousin-marriage from the old country has produced MORE cultural stasis in Pakistani immigrants, not less. Essentially rural Pakistan is colonizing England. Not English making Pakistani immigrants into “colorful Englishmen.” The incidence of female genital mutilation, honor killing, burqua, forced/arranged teen marriages, etc. shows this process.

Jun 29, 2008 - 7:41 pm 37. Doug:

CIA – The World Factbook — Mexico

MEXICO:
Birth rate: 20.04 births/1,000 population (2008 est.)

U.S. fertility rate for Mexican-American women was
105 per 1,000

Net migration rate: -3.84 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2008 est.)

- Hispanic Birth Rate Soars.
Hispanic births are skyrocketing in the Southeast, where an increase of at least 40 percent was recorded in five states between 2000 and 2003, according to a new government report.

In North Carolina, there were 181 births per 1,000 Mexican women ages 15 to 44 in 2000. In Georgia, the fertility rate was 180 per 1,000 Mexican women.

In contrast, the U.S. fertility rate for Mexican-American women was 105 per 1,000. California’s was 112, and Texas’ was 124.
—
Heather Mac Donald: Hispanics Have Highest Single Mother Fertility

We are going to get large numbers of illegitimate Hispanics. That means higher rates of school drop-outs, higher rates of criminality, higher usage of taxpayer-funded welfare services, and all the rest of a decaying society.

While a higher percentage of black births occur outside of marriage the fertility rate of Hispanics is much higher and so the Hispanics produce a much larger number of illegitimate babies with all the social pathology that we can expect from children growing up in mother-only families.

But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.

As if the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, it is increasing faster than among other groups. It jumped 5 percent from 2002 to 2003, whereas the rate for other unmarried women remained flat. Couple the high and increasing illegitimacy rate of Hispanics with their higher overall fertility rate, and you have a recipe for unstoppable family breakdown.

The disastrous President Jorge Bush is now going to turn his attention once again to the passage of a massive amnesty and guest worker program. Bush is a pox on the nation. His Iraq debacle has ushered in Democratic Party rule in both houses of Congress and the House Democrats are far more supportive of Open Borders than the House Republicans. While a minority of old style Democrats see Hispanics as cheap labor that drives down the living standards of the lower classes most elected Democrats see Hispanics as reliably left-leaning voters and also as cheap labor for maid, nanny, gardening, and home upgrade services.

America’s elites are rotten to the core. The Republic can not survive without virtue but virtue is in shrinking supply in Washington DC.

Steven Malanga points out that the benefits of low skilled immigration are outweighed by the costs.

Jun 29, 2008 - 7:47 pm 38. Zenster:

whiskey_199: Add to that Iran, Algeria, and Tunisia which according to the CIA WORLD FACTBOOK have replacement rates of around 1.7 and even Muslim countries have low birth rates. Of course, Yemen has 8! So the situation is varied.

There is a frequently overlooked offset with respect to Muslim reproduction rates and one that I’d dearly love to see explored in depth: Namely, the extraneous impacts of consanguineous marriage. It is a well-known fact that the MME (Muslim Middle East) has both some of the highest rates of consanguineous unions and the dubious distinction of how: “Seven of the 10 countries with the highest birth defect rates are Muslim nations.

Given this disastrous convergence of cause and effect so common to Islamic cultures, it is easy to imagine that much of the legendary Muslim over-breeding produces sub-prime genetic stock. What’s more, the defect rate automatically implies massively disproportionate outlays—be they private or governmental—for post-natal and lifelong health care.

In fact the British government has already rebuked MP Paul Woolas for noting, along with fellow Labour MP, Ann Cryer, how “research showed British Pakistanis were 13 times more likely to have children with recessive disorders than the general population.”

Called the “elephant in the room”, this stark reminder of yet one more drawback to unrestricted Muslim immigration was clearly ill-received by political leadership already in denial about “no-go zones”, soaring crime rates and a spate of recent unsuccessful terrorist attacks in Great Britain.

Given this markedly negative outcome in a land far distant from the MME, it only stands to reason that the impact of elevated birth defect rates is far more severe in Islamic countries. It is equally safe to say that such humiliating admissions are not likely to be forthcoming from Muslim governments regarding this glaring defiance of natural law.

As with how much of Islam treats its young, this voluntary participation in risky genetic comingling—knowing full well of its potential impact upon newborns—demonstrates the usual callous disregard that Muslims have for the welfare of their children. Once again, Islamic culture betrays itself as one that has a thoroughly diminished respect for the sanctity of human life. No surprise, and even less shocking in how—as usual—Islam hobbles itself through prideful insistence upon entrenched practices that are clearly against its own best interest.

I can only anticipate that this consistent pattern of ill-thought-out decisions will persist right up and until the first Islamic nuclear weapons launch triggers a total annihilation of the MME.

Jun 29, 2008 - 8:16 pm 39. Zeno:

The thing is, against all odds, Europeans (and particularly the French) think that all immigrants will eventually convert to their wonderful culture (and cuisine), which is the Best in the world. They don’t really stop to think that for some reason Muslim immigrants will not become Europeans simply because of the geographical change, and instead will maintain their own culture and religion with honor killings, female mutilation, burkas and kebabs (actually, I don’t really understand that, too. Having a choice…)

Jun 29, 2008 - 8:17 pm 40. Alexis:

If more Spanish and Italian pubescent girls make pacts to get pregnant in imitation of the girls of Gloucester, Massachusetts, would that be a good thing or a bad thing? There was a time when “girls in trouble” were not allowed to get abortions and would instead give up their babies to church-run orphanages. If merely replacing the population with younger generations were the principal problem, the solution conceived of by seventeen teenaged girls in Gloucester would appear to be just what the doctor ordered.

For girls and young women, peer pressure and fashion are utterly important. The birth rate for any nation correlates to the BATNA for a woman’s pregnancy. When there is a high level of status for a woman who becomes a mother as opposed to a woman who does not become a mother, women will gravitate toward childbearing. When there is a high level of status for a professional woman who “has it all” as opposed to a woman who is sneered at for being “barefoot and pregnant”, it is a no-brainer that the birth rate will plummet. Fashion, fashion, fashion. If a woman is more celebrated when she is barefoot and pregnant than when she gets an abortion, it affects the birth rate.

Conventional wisdom from both the Left and the Right castigates the Gloucester Girls, by the Right for not getting married first and by the Left for not killing the fetuses. But if such a trend of pregnancy were to become fashionable in Europe, would this necessarily be an improvement over the status quo? Can the western world dare celebrate the Gloucester Girls as heroines given the sour legacy of Lebensborn? Nazi eugenicists promoted pregnancies among unwed teenaged mothers as a means of promoting a “master race”. The emotional trauma for the actual children of that program was horrific.

If increasing the birth rate of a nation were the only problem, that could be solved very easily. Yet, the social problems leading to the plummeting birth rate go much further. Does accommodating the needs of unwed mothers lead to a celebration of unmarried motherhood? Is a nation of bastards what a society wants? I think the reason why the birth rate is so low in Europe is because every other alternative is considered to be worse.

Jun 29, 2008 - 8:30 pm 41. Gary Rosen:

Zeno, I like kebabs. The rest, not so much.

Jun 29, 2008 - 8:30 pm 42. Richard Fernandez:

Back in 1963, when if as I recall, the postwar German birthrate was at an all time high, almost no one would have believed this demographic collapse would happen. But that turnabout also illustrates the danger of projecting trends indefinitely.

A lot of things could change. Unfortunately they depend on largely unforseeable developments. Just as 2003 would have shocked the Germans, so too will 2048 be a wild an unfamiliar place. Several possibilities may occur. A revolution in robotics, energy sources and biotechnology may obviate, practically overnight, all the trends we decry today. Or a new era in nuclear terrorism and state control may usher in a new dark age. But at all events fortune favors the bold. Whether the 21st century becomes the brightest or the bloodiest century in history depends in large part on our willingness to act freely, humanely and decisively. In the coming decades charlatans, dictators and self-proclaimed prophets will arise. They always do. And each will tempt us with some sort of paradise in exchange for freedom.

But demagogues are really ignorant but brilliant marketers. We’ll always do better by applying common sense and reason than subscribing to fads and cults. The one is the response of the free individual. The other of the madding crowd.

Jun 29, 2008 - 8:45 pm 43. mark:

Religion results in larger families, but the new patriarch is not the 1950’s patriarch.

see Charlotte Allen, in “First Things”

“. . . when the Southern Baptists issued a statement in 1998 affirming the father’s headship of the family as defined in the New Testament letters of Paul of Tarsus, we heard journalists Cokie Roberts and Steve Roberts warning the nation that this sort of thing could “lead to abuse, both physical and emotional.”

“‘Soft Patriarchs, New Men by W. Bradford Wilcox, a young sociologist of religion at the University of Virginia, is a study of the actual surveyed attitudes and practices of the married men of the so-called “religious right” that turns this stereotype on its head. Wilcox reports that Christian conservative fathers, at least the ones who attend church frequently, are actually far more affectionate with and emotionally invested in their wives and children than are their counterparts among either mainline Protestants or the unchurched. They are patriarchs, says Wilcox, with a “traditional, authority-minded approach to parenting,” but they are soft patriarchs (more akin, shall we say, to Ned Flanders in “The Simpsons” than to the Commander in Atwood’s novel). Wilcox concludes—and this is richly ironic—that Christian conservative fathers display many of the qualities of the sensitive, thoroughly domesticated “iconic new man” whom the feminists lionize.

Jun 29, 2008 - 8:54 pm 44. whiskey:

Wretchard, it’s a lot easier to simply stop having children and decline into nothingness, than have children and rebuild one’s population.

Europe’s birthrate is so low, for many nations there will be no recovery. Spanish will vanish from Spain, and Portuguese from Portugal, along with their culture. The same holds true for the Italians and Greeks. Perhaps even the French and British.

Jun 29, 2008 - 9:00 pm 45. Doug:

The New Patriarch is the Welfare State:

Comparing Fertility in the U.S. and Home Countries

Analysis of data collected by Census Bureau in 2002 shows that women from the top-10 immigrant- sending countries living in the United States collectively tend to have higher fertility than women in their home countries. As a group, immigrants from these countries have 23 percent more children than women in their home countries, adding to world population growth. Among the findings:

Among Mexican immigrants in the United States, for example, fertility averages 3.5 children per woman compared to 2.4 children per women in Mexico.

Jun 29, 2008 - 9:57 pm 46. wretchard:

Europe’s birthrate is so low, for many nations there will be no recovery. Spanish will vanish from Spain, and Portuguese from Portugal, along with their culture. The same holds true for the Italians and Greeks. Perhaps even the French and British.

This will stop happening when the expectation of social security evaporates. Once the safety net begins to look shaky then the childless will look with envious eyes upon the families with two or more kids.

Unless robotics or biotechnology comes to the rescue what will happen is a) pensions in crisis; and b) a revision in behavior.

Jun 29, 2008 - 10:59 pm 47. whiskey:

Wretchard, perhaps, but by then it will be too late. A tiny segment of Europeans just won’t be able to match the much larger Muslim population which will simply expel or absorb them. It’s last man standing and Europe has already fallen.

It’s easy to fall, nearly impossible to rise from the pit.

Alexis — the problem is two fold, one a decline in birth rate absolute, and second Diana West’s “Fatherless Civilization.” Families without fathers generally don’t end up so good on average. No matter the few exceptions.

Jun 29, 2008 - 11:05 pm 48. gdude:

Gary Rosen, you took the words right out of my mouth!

Richard, the point about the unknowns of the future is the important one. The Future rarely moves in a straight line, as it is the sum of all the vectors of humans interacting with one another in all of their various groupings. Ironically, it is modern Cartesian technological man that thinks he can control nature (and Man himself)and create, for the first time in history, a static existence. How odd that we should understand science so well, (and make a veritable religion out of evolution), and yet largely reject its basic premise of change.

whiskey (at 4:27) — but if Europe becomes Muslim, and Muslim countries don’t produce anything, then we don’t have to worry about Europe, since it will become more irrelevant than the Middle East and South Asia since it little oil or gas to bother us with. At least, that’s what a straight-line reading of many of the posts here would suggest.

Jun 29, 2008 - 11:29 pm 49. heather:

This brave new world is not brave and it is not new.

Missing out on grandchildren is possibly the saddest way to spend your old age. And shuffling your feeble parents off to ‘care centres’ is an act of weakness.

Jun 30, 2008 - 12:47 am 50. Doug:

Doubt–Curse or Blessing?

gdide:
The great Victor Hugo, suffering in exile, was seeking answers to spiritual questions when a spirit identifying himself as Martin Luther reportedly communicated with him (via medium).
Hugo asked Luther why God does not better reveal himself, to which Luther responded:
“Because doubt is the instrument which forges the human spirit.
If the day were to come when the human spirit no longer doubted, the human soul would fly off and leave the plough behind, for it would have acquired wings.
The earth would lie fallow.
Now, God is the sower and man is the harvester.
The celestial seed demands that the human ploughshare shall remain in the furrow of life.”

from Vital Signs

-Sheik al-Bob

Jun 30, 2008 - 1:27 am 51. Doug:

“gdude”

Jun 30, 2008 - 1:29 am 52. Charles:

Because doubt is the instrument which forges the human spirit.
/////////////
The great triumph of Christianity is that it founded on faith. In fact, faith in God the unseen maker of all things is the foundation of biblical righteousness.

“And he believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness.”—Genesis 15:6.

Jun 30, 2008 - 2:20 am 53. Bob Murphy:

Tamquam Leo Rugiens-Germany and Japan were as self assured as China and just as xenophobic in 1939…

Lovely comments on Europe’s “Clerical Aristocracy”. I fear the new Australian Prime Minister is of the same “progressive” socialist ilk.

Jun 30, 2008 - 3:44 am 54. Bob Murphy:

Wretchard, some people expressed fears that your move to the new site and greater accessibility would inhibit or dissipate the intelligent conversation so frequent on the old site.
Nope.
Look at this thread.
Nice stuff. There is intelligent life on earth, and some of it is here.

Jun 30, 2008 - 3:47 am 55. bobal:

He who mocks the infant’s faith
Shall be mocked in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne’er get out.
He who respects the infant’s faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.
The questioner who sits so sly
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.
The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar’s laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour’s iron brace.
When gold and gems adorn the plough
To peaceful arts shall Envy bow.
A riddle or the cricket’s cry
Is to doubt a fit reply.
The emmet’s inch and eagle’s mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.

William Blake

Blake wasn’t a man of faith, but of vision. St. Paul didn’t start preaching until he had a vision. Then he preached his experience in terms of faith to the inexperienced. Blake Elk had a vision. Jacob Boehme had a vision. One can have faith in Mohammad. I’ve had faith in my lawyer. The Catholics who introduced genocide into Christian Europe during the Albigensian crusade had faith. Moses saw a burning bush and had a vision. Luther had faith, threw an ink bottle at the devil, gave up on the Jews, and late in life persecuted them. Best be careful of what we have faith in, and be able to distinguish a vision from a phantasy.

Jun 30, 2008 - 4:38 am 56. Joshua:

There is one more factor to consider, though it’s not easy to know how great it is: Today, young men have diversions available to them that their fathers and grandfathers didn’t. The Internet, high-definition TV, Playstation 3… the list goes on and on. Having gotten a taste of this fascinating new technological world, how many would give it up, or even cut back on it, to raise children?

Between this and the contraception angle already discussed, it seems to me that it’s not enough by a longshot for Western civilization to encourage biological fathers to play a greater role in raising the kids that they helped create. We must also find some way to discourage men from actively avoiding becoming biological fathers in the first place.

Jun 30, 2008 - 5:36 am 57. Doug:

I would so much like for you to be wrong, Joshua, but my experience hearing about some of our son’s former roommates informs me that you are not.
One extreme case spent almost all his time away from his job as a network admin playing computer games.
Never understood why his attractive girlfriend chose to stick around.
Her story must be as sad as his.
What a web we weave.

Jun 30, 2008 - 6:32 am 58. Mark:

Joshua wrote:

“Today, young men have diversions available to them that their fathers and grandfathers didn’t. The Internet, high-definition TV, Playstation 3… the list goes on and on.”

There was an article in the ‘Atlantic,’ I believe, recently about this phenomenon of late adolescence, and not just regarding the poor adolescents. Virutal life is quite amusing and secure. And there’s no shortage of smart, looking-for-relationships women drifting in and out of the scene.

Doug’s a quotation from Luther, who is always provocative, brilliant, and fundamentally wrongheaded. (How’s that for a sweeping generalization?) Bobal’s comments suggests how doubt cuts two ways, or shreds many ways. In general, Christians are to make choices that follow the law of charity (according to Augustine), but there have been more than a few instances of killing heretics in the name of charity (’it’s for their own good’).

Wrichard wrote: “. . . what will happen is a) pensions in crisis; and b) a revision in behavior.”

History repeating itself would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Hdgreen’s analysis has its analogue in 14th century England, especially as represented in the great ‘vision’ poem “Piers the Plowman.” After chronicling the debauchments and clerical abuses of the time, the narrator witnesses Piers calling in Hunger to punish the lazy beggar folk:

“. . . thousands of blind and bed-ridden folk suddenly recovered, and men who used to sit begging for silver were miraculously cured! And the starving people appeased their hunger with bran-mash, and beggars and poor men worked gladly with peas for wages, pouncing like sparrowhawks on any work that Piers gave them (86). Then Piers feels pity for the people, and requests that Hunger leave the land. Hunger does, but not before advising Piers on how to handle these people. He quotes Genesis:”‘In the sweat of thy brow . . . shalt thou eat bread” – that is God’s command”” (87).

We’ll see what the next economic correction brings.

Jun 30, 2008 - 6:51 am 59. Cascajun » Where have all Europe’s babies gone?:

[...] Hat tip: Richard Fernandez [...]

Jun 30, 2008 - 7:26 am 60. Gordon:

Doug @ 7:47 & 9:57–

Thanks for the info, very interesting. The item about ‘Mexican-American’ women would have had me saying they are the daughters of the immigrant women I referred to but your later post makes that a distinction without a difference.

Proves that when women are more confident about the future, they’re willing to have children (eg, Russia where the birthrates have been falling for some time).

Jun 30, 2008 - 7:33 am 61. abu al-fin:

Gordon is right that eventually, muslim immigrants to Europe will relax their procreative drive. That will happen when the backs of the welfare states have been broken by the high numbers of uneducated, unskilled, untrainable, unassimilable, low IQ sub-populations of third world peoples who are not able to maintain a first world infrastructure.

Then, Gordon will be shown to have been right. A Pyrrhic victory, certainly, for which Gordon will be congratulated no doubt.

Jun 30, 2008 - 7:34 am 62. Eggplant:

Bob Murphy wrote:

“some people expressed fears that your move to the new site and greater accessibility would inhibit or dissipate the intelligent conversation so frequent on the old site.”

The old site was dissolving into entropy. Belmont Club’s commentary was almost dominated by shrieking moonbats being flamed by regulars (an effective way to end coherent discussion).

Wretchard’s action was timely and appropriate.

Jun 30, 2008 - 8:41 am 63. cedarford:

Gordon appears to have embraced the magical thinking that all cultures will eventually, with prosperity, act like the West and Northern Asia did…
3rd and 4th African, Muslim, and Latin residents in Europe and America belie that claim.
History also shows that not only does demography lessen the power of the slower reproducers, it can move them off their native land (Serbs, NAs, Ainu, Greek Islands) – but

Even exterminate them entirely over time (neanderthals, Arawak Indians from several Caribbean islands, various protoraces and ethnicities we only know from bones or DNA markers in the engulfing successor humans of Bantu, Javanese, Han ethnicity.)

There was no great final battle between humans and neanderthal. Just a small differential in birthrate and survival to breeding age that led Neanderthals to be pushed off the paleolithic versions of The Levant, California…to remoter, less productive lands where the birthrate edge widened slightly until Cro Magnon man was ready to take over those lands with the power of greater numbers.

****************
Bret:
Fertility rates are strongly correlated with population density. Europe is more densely populated than the US. Thus it currently has low fertility. Once the population of Europe drops, their fertility will increase and the population will level off. The United States’ population will increase until it gets more crowded, then it will drop.
I suspect that both religiosity and government footprint is also related to population density.
No gloom and doom. Only simple feedback mechanisms.

Bret’s theory would be comfortable and reassuring if it was true. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

In 4 generations of breeding in densely-packed refugee camps, Palestinian birthrates exploded. The rates or rural Mexicans hitting high population density US and Mexican cities has gone up 2 to 5-fold. And held for 2nd and 3rd gen descendents. A pattern also seen in urbanized Arab and African populations moving to high density urban environments. While some anthrpologists argue they give birth at no significantly different rates and some ethnicities do go down…the effective birthrate – thanks in no small part to the feverish effort of well-intentioned white people to lower 3rd world infant mortality and provide free care to poor mothers with a pregnancy every year – has gone up massively in births surviving to reproductive age.

********************
Where this ends I don’t know. Many think the neaderthals were intelligent beings, capable of grasping the portending doom of their kind but passively experiencing it – condemned by flaws in their culture and lifestyle – agreeing with the verdict..

It may be the West, even the European part of the white race, and slow-breeding other ethnicities like the San People and Yamoto may passively accept extinguishment after a long period of being chased out of verdant fields they once ruled, farmed, and played in to desert and mountain redoubts that are but the next phase where demography will confront and defeat them and in the end, hold out hope that the people now in power thanks to “democracy and majority rule” will at least let a remnant live on in reservations and in theme parks where the conquering masses can bring their clutches of children and watch the colorful whites and Japanese, and other surpassed people perform. Watch whites re-enacting Roman events, strange Greek dialogue absent ANY credit to Allah, cowboy shows, the strange foods of long-gone French and Italian cooking. Whites can be studied from some of their long-ago media shows like Leave it to Beaver and Monty Python and Casablanca…back when whites thought they were a race worth surviving…before they agreed they were an evil oppressor race that had to embrace MultiCulti and post communist rule of them by lawyers….
But a lot of the offensive stuff, like the cathedrals of Europe, signs of white opulence, all the textbooks about things dead white people did would be agreed by all to be best destroyed and eradicated from the record.
The Japanese would be fun, with Samurai flicks, a theme park set to lure Africans, Muslims to the long since destroyed Emperor’s palace reproduction. And the San could have a little desert village set aside in Mexican Arizona after the Bantu wiped out their last stand in the Kalihari.

It could be the last whites of Europe may be so blindly devoted to “majority rule” “female power”, tolerance, “multiculti as faith”, and complete grovelling to the rule of Jewish and Leftist lawyer’s arbitrary, made-up laws that they will be silently full of pride that they suicidally stuck with those values as they watch their last days.
Watch the last unclean pig killed and buried, the last wine bottle smashed, the last fertile European white women (self-righteously screaming in outraged feminist protest) being veiled and swaddled and carried off to a house to have her unused womb soon productively filled with the progeny of a proper Nigerian Muslim man. A house she will never leave unless by male permission. As the few Euroweenie males nod as she is dragged off that it is proper under Sharia, Sharia is law, and that everything is being done completely legally under Dhimmitude. And of course – they have been barred for 1500 years from any contact, friendship, intimacy with a Muslim woman as unclean and a death sentence for any Muslim female disgracing her family, tribe, and Allah so.

The solution might be in a West counter-revolution that of necessity would have to destroy Constitutions, end democracy, and kill Jewish and Gentile agents pushing Multi-culti.

That may sound ugly to people conditioned all their lives it is better to end up like white Rhodesians, Serbs than defy sacred tenants the Jewish and Gentile progressive intelligensia say matter even more than survival.

The Sacred Parchment of the Constitution scrapped, even burned to get a better Operating Manual for America????…(which in the end is but a scrap of paper that codified what the People wanted a nation to do for them…not Holy writ right from God, the Talmud..)Burned? The very words of the Holy Founding Fathers and the interpretation skills of Mighty Lawyers Dressed in Robes of what those words really meant about green-lighting abortion and buggery and gay marriage – no longer blindly worshipped??? Monstrous!!
Just as democracy is supposed to be about the supreme wisdom of the collective thoughts of the masses – as if they were immune to rampant manipulation by clever Ruling Elites that convince them a vote for more Gov’t goodies all for free, a vote for great leader Hitler, kind Comrade and father Stalin is the right vote.
Democracy has failed catastrophically in the past, it will do so again in the future.
Nor are media owned by a few in the Ruling Elite a check on selling a people, a race, a civilization out.
The Western media, instead of being a defender of Western peoples and their civilization – are run by the sorts like the Sulzberger-Ochs Family of the NY Times that thought the Jewish Bolsheviks got it right and spent two decades covering up democides in favor of convincing fellow Jews and the masses that Jewish progressivism was on a roll in the Soviet Union and social justice for all was being achieved.
In modern times, the same sort of actors, not majority Jewish when you count Europe or even the non-Jewish influential Left in America – is out to say white history is evil, multi-culti and transnational progressive human rights law that only targets whites – is the only valid narrative. And all cultures are equal in merit except for all the evil done by whites.

And outside meta-issues, the same media extolls Western women that sacrifice kids to make partner in a law firm and who die eventually and only leave behind an adopted Somali girl or 2-3 highly pampered cats. Or say that no one should be more admired than the indulgent, always looking for a man that will be “good enough” Carrie on the chick pleaser “Sex in the City” as her fertility runs out after 500 dates, 4 promotions, and hundreds of swank nights out with 15 buck a glass cocktails…

I have my doubts that the West will let itself be demographically snuffed by post-communist Jewish progressives and the Gentile Left by high foreigner bithrates and Open Borders immigration and acceptance of right of mass refugee settlement – as atonement for all their “great crimes” of racism, sexism, colonialism, anti-semitism, homophobism. incorrect cultural and class sumpremacy beliefs..

My belief is the masses of Europe are already beginning to seethe under edicts of Eurocrats and “International Lawyers/UN apparachniks” that they no longer have any say in the most basic of issues that will be resolved by the New Sanhedrin of Elites.

I suspect when it comes crunch time when the surviving Euros understand they have no place to go to retreat to and it is fight or live as a persecuted minority in nations cities that resemble Karachi or Rwanda, they will fight.
It will be the military, along with tremendous popular support of the beseiged and disenfranchised white masses. And it must be deady.
The transnationalists and other elites out to destroy the West cannot be allowed to retreat to become a potent opposition – protected by immense personal wealth, civil service immunity, academic and think tank sanctuaries. To shatter those elites, they either have to die, do a Trotsky and go into exile and keep quiet to remain safe, or they don’t keep quiet and go out with an ice-pick, figuratively speaking.

True revolutions – like the coming one to prevent extinction of the West and all its good things and liberties, must kill off or imprison without recourse – the entrenched agents of causes that are collapsing the West and the self-determination of white people on their native lands.
At the same time, unlike Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin or Mao such an effort cannot be collective, even genocidal in aim – but a scalpel to permanently cut out the insitutions, leaders and main backers that give the malignancies attacking the West such potency.
At the same time, just as the world said the Euros lacked the moral authority to raise a peep about being run out of countries they colonized, the world may have to accept a Revolutionary Europe, even America – running out unacceptable cultures and demographic threats to them from foreign lands to avoid going the way of the Neanderthals, Ainu, many Latin American, Caribbean indigenous & Native American tribes.

Jun 30, 2008 - 9:34 am 64. Charles:

Because doubt is the instrument which forges the human spirit.
/////////////
the other annoying thing about this is that there is no way Luther would have said this.

But it would have been just like Decartes to say this.

Jun 30, 2008 - 10:21 am 65. abu al-fin:

Cedarford: True revolutions – like the coming one to prevent extinction of the West and all its good things and liberties, must kill off or imprison without recourse – the entrenched agents of causes that are collapsing the West and the self-determination of white people on their native lands.
At the same time, unlike Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin or Mao such an effort cannot be collective, even genocidal in aim – but a scalpel to permanently cut out the insitutions, leaders and main backers that give the malignancies attacking the West such potency.

History tells us that there are no “native lands.” Every population is derived from another population who came from somewhere else, or from several “somewhere elses.”

There is no scalpel capable of doing what you describe. There are no “final solutions” to destructive and dysfunctional social memes that have recurred in so many societies over so many hundreds of generations. They simply have to be dealt with time and again, by those aware enough and in a position to do so.

Is it only coincidental that Europe and a relatively enlightened western civilisation evolved together? Perhaps. It is the philosophical openness and dedication to free intellectual inquiry, and free economic exchange of European derived societies that makes them worth saving. Not any particular bloodlines or pieces of real estate.

Jun 30, 2008 - 12:40 pm 66. whiskey:

Joshua — what you are describing is substitution. Most young men don’t fit the ideal of the perfect man, so find substitution in games, the internet, etc. for their biological urges. Which remain stronger, but forbidden mostly by the lack of accomplishment relative to men. Equality for women has many good points, but one consequence is that most men are merely equal, not superior in status and power and prestige to women and therefore not that appealing. Even in Iran, women mostly choose. Since the tribal society was fractured by urbanization. [Ahmadinejad plans to move most of the remaining, impoverished rural population to urban centers.]

Cedarford does indeed have a point: ethnic and racial groups have a right to exist within historic lands. This btw is one of the Wilsonian Fourteen Points: Self Determination. That applies to Mexicans (who do not wish to be over-run by Guatemalans) and Italians who do not wish to be over-run by North Africans and Roma and Albanians.

However, I can state that Cedarford is conclusively wrong in his laughable assertion of “Jewish and Marxist lawyers” since Iran has a TFR of 1.71 and faces demographic annihilation by it’s neighbors with higher rates: Pakistan, Afhanistan, and Iraq. Last time I checked, no “Jewish and Marxist lawyers” in Iran.

It’s not JUST the West. Algeria, Tunisia, and Iran are in the same boat. If anything they may be worse since the governments there tend to obfuscate bad statistical data.

All evidence (plummeting birth rates in every industrializing/urbanizing nations) suggests this is a global phenomena NOT LINKED to culture, ideology, “lack of faith,” marxism, feminism, “Jewish lawyers” and the like.

I have seen here at Common Dreams the assertion that peak female fertility is from 17-23. I have no idea if this is true. It might very well be false. BUT if it is, it would explain how all these disparate cultures with only one thing in common — delays of women into the marriage market by urbanization and opportunity cost of early childbirth along with available and reliable birth control — have caused plummeting birth rates.

Jun 30, 2008 - 2:21 pm 67. Al_Batross:

“But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2″.

I don’t think that is actually part of the plan for many native Europeans, but for over two decades economic and social conditions have worked heavily against early marriage and parenthood.
As a relatively unskilled white male, who started working in the UK during the early 1970s, my experience has been of ever-rising costs, especially of housing, heavier taxes, increasing competition for jobs, and downward pressure on wages.
Like many of my generation, I was raised to believe that marriage and children were not to be undertaken lightly, to be responsible for my actions, to save wisely, and avoid debt.
However, that was perhaps not an advantageous pattern of behaviour for a long period of financial incontinence and state-dependency culture, in which the quickest way to get a nice flat (appartment) and regular income was to be an unmarried teenage mother, or an asylum-seeker, or even a terrorist.
There may now be a “lost generation” of the childless in the UK, who waited until they could afford a home in which to start a family, only to find that that they could never afford it, or who woke up one day and found that they were just too old, but I think the good news is that the financial incontinence seems to have been dealt a fatal blow, in which case the state dependency culture cannot long survive it.
We may soon, I hope, see a swing back to economic and social reality, and a greater need for the support of family life. I doubt that the native birthrate will actually soar as a result, but I think that replacement level will not be a problem (and replacement level is all
the UK needs, it was already too crowded a long time ago).

Jun 30, 2008 - 2:22 pm 68. Doug:

Not sure what fatal blow you might be refering to, Al.
Could you please expand upon that?

Jun 30, 2008 - 6:36 pm 69. Gary Rosen:

C-fudd, once again you open your piehole only to prove you are a compulsive liar. The Sulzbergers are not Jewish, they are Episcopalians who loudly reject their Jewish heritage. They also covered up the Holocaust during WWII, making you an ingrate on top of everything else.

C’mon, Fudd, tell us about the “heart and courage” of your boy Kuntar. That’s your idea of heart and courage, some Islamic savage smashing the head of a 4-year-old Jewish girl against a rock. You must get a big smile every time you think about it. Own up, dude, don’t weasel out like you usually do.

A serious question, Fudd – do you *really* think that your “Jewish and Gentile” formulation actually conceals your Jew-baiting rather than calling even more attention to it? My money says, yes, you are fucking dumb enough to really believe it.

Jun 30, 2008 - 9:01 pm 70. Zenster:

Gary Rosen: C-fudd, once again you open your piehole only to prove you are a compulsive liar. The Sulzbergers are not Jewish, they are Episcopalians who loudly reject their Jewish heritage. They also covered up the Holocaust during WWII, making you an ingrate on top of everything else.

C’mon, Fudd, tell us about the “heart and courage” of your boy Kuntar. That’s your idea of heart and courage, some Islamic savage smashing the head of a 4-year-old Jewish girl against a rock.

Never mention Samir Kuntar (whose last name really should begin with a “C”), without a link. This one terrorist $h!t has been the center of more hostage taking, wars and extortionate prisoner exchanges than any other Islamic turd.

While digging up the link for this comment, I just discovered that Kuntar will be released in exchange for Hamas held hostages Goldwasser and Regev.

Olmert deserves to be executed for this bit of treason.

Jun 30, 2008 - 10:05 pm 71. Doug:

Israel Swaps Prisoners for Soldiers’ Bodies

Jul 1, 2008 - 3:49 am 72. miki:

Want to see what a declining population rate looks like?

Just look at the Serbs in Kosovo. From majority to minority in less than a century. Imprisoned by Muslim Albanians in little ghettos, not allowed to attend schools, partake in economic activity, governance, free movement or anything resembling normal existence.

Mind you all of this paid for and sponsored by our liberal, socialist overlords.

Jul 1, 2008 - 4:19 am 73. Mira:

I was struck by the point about the immigrant changing the character of the countries to which they immigrate. I cannot imagine the real character of an entire country changing unless there were a complete exodus of natives and influx of immigrant (US circa 1600). Rather, the influx of immigrants colors the character of a country, I argue, for the better.

Mira Flomin
Correspondent – http://www.AustraliaLiveWorkPlay.com

Jul 1, 2008 - 9:38 am 74. Peterike:

“Rather, the influx of immigrants colors the character of a country, I argue, for the better.”

Yeah, if you like the color of crime and gangs. And spending billions of dollars in social services. And putting tremendous downward pressure on wages. And heck, if you like the color of millions of illegitimate children, then immigration’s for you!

Jul 2, 2008 - 7:22 am 75. Morgentalerism 2.0 « UnAborted:

[...] The New York Times does a gargantuan thumb-sucker on Steynian predictions of demographic doom. “O Brave New World: Russell Shorto of the New York Times looks at the demographic collapse of Europe and examines the [...]

Jul 2, 2008 - 3:02 pm

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