Okay, I’m sure Mark Steyn has an answer for this, but I must confess I don’t know what it is because I still haven’t read his by-all-accounts-and-then-some wonderful book yet. I’ve read bits and pieces, but it came out when I was killing myself getting my own tome done and I just haven’t had a chance to revisit it. Anyway, I do know that Mark has written that the West’s low fertility to is to be blamed on a “lack of civilizational confidence” and that the “design flaw of the secular social-democratic state,” Steyn writes, “is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it.”

Okay, I’m on board with this, to a point. However, is the converse also true? Is having lots of kids an indicator of high civilizational confidence? I’m not so sure. Every time I read a story about life in the West Bank or Gaza, there’s at least one man-on-the-street interview with an angry fellow, bemoaning the failure of his government to provide basic services and his inability to find enough work to support his 9 or 10 or even 22 kids. Meanwhile, all of these stateless Hieronymus Bosch hellscapes in Africa seem to be peopled with poor souls living hand to mouth with piles of kids. I understand that in poorer societies, children are an economic asset and religious imperatives for reproduction are a mighty incentive when you have nothing to fall back on but faith in God’s wisdom. But I don’t think these high fertility rates can be chalked up to “civilizational confidence.” And it seems worth keeping in mind that while the West may not be making enough babies, the reasons other countries are making so many are not necessarily reasons we would want to emulate nor be envious of (particularly when it comes to the plight of women).