Our lesson today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. No, no, not the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, any of that stuff, but the other birth: “But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.”
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That bit of the Christmas story doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s in there — Luke 1:13, part of what he’d have called the backstory, if he’d been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician. Of the four gospels, only two bother with the tale of Christ’s birth, and only Luke begins with the tale of two pregnancies. Zacharias is surprised by his impending paternity — “for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years.” Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle — the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus’s birth is the miracle; Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth — all life — is to a degree miraculous and God-given.
We now live in Elisabeth’s world — not just because technology has caught up with the Deity and enabled women in their 50s and 60s to become mothers, but in a more basic sense. The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency — “America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,” etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social-democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.
Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: One in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear.”
If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: It’s run out of other people, period. Greece is a land of ever fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government. How do you grow your economy in an ever-shrinking market? The developed world, like Elisabeth, is barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it’s made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate’s somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple — or about half “replacement rate.” Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year-old women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered “None.” We are living in Zacharias and Elisabeth’s world — by choice.
Especially at this time of the year, parents of large families know we're the richest people in the world, regardless of the numbers on our bank statements. Those couples who choose not to have children or have only one "designer" child are really missing out.
This should scare the pants off of us. While developed nations are declining in population, the overall world population continues to increase. Western civilization is being replaced by peoples from the most violent and impoverished parts of the world. I always assumed society and technology were an ever evolving prospect but if we can't be bothered to raise a family and pass on the western way of life, we are already doomed. Time to make another baby for the good of society!
I think it's more than selfishness. From my point of view the government and corporations control ever more aspects of your life until it is no longer your life, if it is life at all. At some point you say, don't have kids because Lord knows what things will be like when they grow up. The TSA will probably be putting up x-ray checkpoints in our driveways while the Goldman Sachs of the world steal your savings. The only way to beat the unmanned aerial drones flying over your head is to not have any children for them to spy on. The conservatives are every bit to blame as the liberals in this.
"The educated and productive are not. The uneducated and skilless are."
This type of thought has also been used to justify eugenics in the past. Dividing the country like this is a false distinction. In the past educated and skillful societies have arisen from largely unskilled, uneducated predecessors. This division makes no account for the mobility that exists in a healthy society. The country as a whole is the proper focus for the demographic / replacement rate argument, not class subsections. To do otherwise plays into the Liberal Fascist mindset.
Directly out of the Barack Obama School of Strawman Creation and Rhetorical Flourishes (teleprompter-free campus). Nobody suggested, mentioned or even hinted at eugenics. Can nobody lament a condition without folks like you instantly applying Godwin's law to them?
I've seen it, amusing enough though crude. I'm just arguing that in fact history suggests things can work out otherwise. In a healthy culture (I'm not suggesting ours is) the mobility is in the positive direction, and the Idiocracy-style decay is only possible in an unhealthy culture. I'm only arguing for less pre-determination of the circumstances of birth, in the spirit Steyn has suggested here of the universal nature of the miracle of birth.
The past is different from the present into significant ways: (1) literacy (never mind education) used to be the preserve of the rich - the poor got to till the land and little more and (2) advancement used to be based entirely on being born into the aristocracy or exploits in wartime. Point being that the intelligent are now given the opportunity to spread their wings instead of being consigned to menial work. The problem we have isn't eugenics in favor of the intelligent - it's eugenics in favor of the unintelligent, thanks to the inexorable spread of the welfare state.
Amen, Mark! And what of the millions and millions of babies who have been aborted since 1973? Many of them would now be productive members of all of these societies. What of them, indeed??
In addition to the good point made by "Carolina Jimbo", with which I agree, there is another factor in this matter which is not easy to evaluate: technological progress.
Despite appearances to the contrary, our country is not just populated by lawyers, professional bloggers, and stock manipulators. In spite of the fervent hopes and lamentations of the Greens, in American we still manufacture things, dig useful stuff out of the ground, and grow things other than marijuana plants. In all of these endeavors, not so many unskilled and semi-skilled workers are required to produce a given number of widgets as has been the case in the past..
A great many of the illegal immigrants mow our lawns, wash our clothes, mind our decreasing number of offspring, and sell us our illegal mind-altering substances of choice. All of these chores have not yet been greatly affected by the well-known effects of the revolutionary and accelerating capabilities in electronics and cybernetics cap of the modern age and the lesser-known, at least by the chattering classes, but equally revolutionary and increasingly deployed revolutions in robotics, automated manufacturing and the like. Industrial activities today require far fewer human workers per unit of output than has been the case in the past. This compensates to some degree, or perhaps puts off further into future, the effects of fewer children per adult.
There is another interesting aspect to this technologically-based increase in manufacturing productivity: the effects of and the need for the immigration, mostly from Asia and Eastern Europe, of people skilled in engineering and applied science. because our children don't go for such unglamorous professions as much as in the past. I have been involved in education and research, in universities and national laboratories, in the "non-bio" side of engineering and applied science (specifically metallurgy and materials science, areas vital to innovation and progress in manufacturing) for over 50 years, and the change in demographics of the student and young working professional population in mechanical engineering, civil engineering, electrical and computer engineering,, as well as in my own area, has been astonishing.
The majority of my students and co-workers now are mostly from East Asia (China, India, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) This has saved American from the propensity of the offspring of the Baby Boomers to seek careers in the law, finance, and ambitions to become film stars. Thank heavens for these immigrants.
However, this also bodes ill in one respect for the future stability of society, since the overwhelming majority of these technologically skilled and capable immigrants go through the arduous business of becoming permanent residents and citizens, and they are not likely to be tolerant of the wave of illegal immigrants in the future, i.e. they will most likely have no guilt about racism, etc. in decrying the flood of unskilled illegal immigrants from the "Third World".
Nobody ever said that maintaining a democratic and open society is easy, but we should try not to assist in our own societal suicide, so to speak.
Anecdotal I know, but most of the conservative people I know have 3+ kids, while most of the liberal couples have 2 or less. I am not quite as sanguine about the direction of the country, with the caveat that we need to get the immigration problem in order. The doomsday scenario for Europe is that they are importing millions of illiterate, intolerant and violent Muslims to do the menial work, not caring as to whether or not those immigrants detest their adopted country.
And we're allowing the importation of millions of illiterate, indifferent Mexicans who couldn't care less about the USA, and whose only motivation is to extract what they can without regard to what they destroy in the process. Read about Hanson's California for starters. The only real difference between our parasites and those of Europe is that ours are not generally as actively motivated to rapidly destroy the host.
I invite you to examine the difference between the Mexican immigrant population of Texas, where the government has had high expectations of it's population with low interference, and that of states such as California and Massachusetts where the illegal south of the border immigrant population is being degraded by the same liberal welfare policies that have almost entirely destroyed the integrity of the African American family and of blacks in general in this country. Expectation is everything. Set the bar high and people rise to meet it. Set the bar low and you get what you ask for.
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