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Add to NewsvineThis story from the new issue of the left-liberal magazine The Nation is a choice example of the left's emotion-based denial of demographic winter. It's a lengthy catalogue of Christian and cultural conservative individuals and groups who are trying to reverse Europe's demographic decline. What's fascinating about the essay is never does the writer actually examine the case these conservatives make about fertility decline and demographic winter; much like the right's prima facie dismissal of the case for global warming, the thrust of this piece is that demographic winter can't true because it would validate so many troglodytic teachings that modernity has vanquished. In other words, the case for demographic winter can't be correct, because all the wrong people believe in it.
It really is striking how the essayist operates from the premise that all she needs to do to discredit their argument is to point out that they're patriarchalists, or somesuch other icky right-wing bogeymen. For this writer, it would appear that the fact that the Nazis turned their attentions to babymaking for civilizational reasons is sufficient to taint the bona fides of anyone who dares to suggest that a civilization cannot survive if it doesn't have enough children to carry out its purposes, the most basic of which is ... survival. Notice this neat elision:
Indeed, when Pope John Paul II raised his demographic concerns to the Italian Parliament, it was unprecedented since Fascist years, evoking a painful social memory of Mussolini's fertility project, which attacked bachelors, rewarded mothers of many children, criminalized abortion and banned contraception.
You see? Anybody who cares about this stuff must be a Brownshirt. And there's this:
As for cultural identity, Krause delivers a salient reminder that some multicultural liberal truisms hold and that what unifies a population is often a deliberate decision to welcome and integrate new elements into society rather than clinging to ever-shifting notions of "true" European heritage and race. To wit, the very insults hurled at today's Muslim immigrants in Italy are themselves repurposed echoes of old slurs that Northern Italians made against their Southern countrymen up to a short decade ago, deriding them as too dark and too foreign to qualify as "authentically" Italian. The population that is being banded together against a new outsider was, until very recently, fractured within itself, still struggling after more than 150 years to forge a common identity out of the many regional groups that make up the state. "One of the famous quotes from [newly unified] Italy in the 1860s," Krause recalls, "was, 'Now that we've made Italy, we need to make Italians.' Making Italians, Russians, Americans is a constant project."
Because see, there are no meaningful differences, none whatsover, between southern Italians, who share the same culture and civilization as northern Italians, and Muslims, who do not. How on earth does The Nation figure secular leftists would fare better in an Islamified Europe than in whatever European Christians and their American counterparts propose?
Good grief. This Nation cover story is a perfect example of what the secular progressive Philip Longman identified as his side's refusal to deal with politically unpleasant realities in the demographics debate.
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Comments
Larry, consider this: "Imagine there no heaven", "no hell", "no countries", "Nothing to kill or die for", "no religion", "no possessions", "no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man"... Those, as you've probably figured out, are lyrics from Lennon's (awful) "Imagine", an anthem for a certain part of humanity.
Liberalism, multiculturalism, Socialism - those, to me, are nihilism. The struggle of life is a good thing, I wasn't condemning it. If a bear ate me, it wouldn't mean that life is bad, and I wouldn't wish it indigestion.
No clue what kind of ism that is, but it's not nihilism.
Posted by: Ian | February 20, 2008 12:21 PM
For the record, I think "Imagine" is horrible, even nightmarish.
And I'm a bleeding heart liberal.
Posted by: Larry Parker | February 20, 2008 2:04 PM
Liberals are the people who've been civilization's lonely and embattled champions throughout history
You can tell yourself that, but the word "liberal" has no meaning prior to the Western Enlightenment. And even within the West, its meaning is slippery. The most conservative Republican today is in most respects more "liberal" than the most liberal 19th-century English MP. Your statement, then, is of limited utility.
Yet ours is called "liberal civilization" for some reason. And if the most recent cases- Nazi Germany and Communist Russia- are any measure, it was the liberals that stood up for the value of the ability to lead lives according to personal spiritual calling. You may persistently misconstrue the liberal core belief as being about individual material freedom, but the value of individual spiritual freedom- if only confined to what is called private life- is the deep root that has long historical tradition.
Anyway, if a civilization cannot mount an army to defend it from aggressors, or serve its economic needs (most especially farming), it runs the risk of collapse. Those are the two most basic ways, it seems to me.
Well, you have here shifted your argument to one about dominance or competitive parity rather existence. They may be linked notions to you, but not to me. You seem to work off the model of pagan Rome and the Mayas, for example, but those rules don't work for early Christianity (if you count that as a distinct civilization), the Jews while in Exile, probably Greece under Turkish rule, etc.
Posted by: Jillian | February 20, 2008 7:29 PM
"There virtually are no Christian conservatives in Europe."
I don't think that's really true. There's some in Ireland (North and South), Malta, and parts of the Netherlands.
However to worry about demographic decline and dislike immigrants strikes me as foolish. Even on the religion issue there's no reason that immigrants to Europe have to be Muslim or that all Muslims have to be radicals. I recall reading that there's a growing amount of "black churches" in the Netherlands and Britain. I imagine there's plenty of Oriental Orthodox Christians in the Mideast that wouldn't mind fleeing Iraq or wherever. Maybe Europe could offer asylum to persecuted Saudi Christians. As for Muslims the Ahmadis of Pakistan are highly persecuted and generally peaceful. There are many Sufi orders in West Africa that are adaptable and moderate.
Maybe I'm thinking that way as I hadn't heard of this racial aspect until recently. I was thinking the issue was more how they'll deal with an aging population. In fact one of the main things I've heard on this concerns the Japanese not Christian Europe.
BTW: Sorry if this is late.
Posted by: Thomas R | February 23, 2008 2:53 AM
Sure, let's all see the documentary "Demographic Winter". And then we can all watch "Soylent Green". We'll make it a double feature.
Having looked through their websits I have to ask: are these people nuts? Is their ideal family really one with 10 or 12 kids? Well let's do the math shall we? If everyone had 12 kids (given that 2.1 kids per couple represents steady state demograpics with a growth multiplier of 1.00), this results in a growth multiplier of almost 6.00. Assuming that each succeeding generation achieves this ideal familiy size we can then apply the magic of compound interest.
Currently, the earth's population is about 6,600,000,000. Its land surface is about 57,500,000 sq mi (or nearly 1,600,000,000,000,000 sq ft, equal to almost 245,000 sq ft per person). Perform a compond interest formula, and determine how many generations before there is at least person for every square foot of ground. At the above stated growth rate, I get 7 generations, about 150 years. YMMV. But it shows what hapens when we take the pro-natal logic to its logical conclusions.
But that is silly and won't ever happen since war, famine and disease will keep the human population in check. But why is that a good thing? Why is it it holier to poison the planet and turn the world into a giant third world slum than to use sinful birth control. Are people in abject poverty living in slums somehow more saintly than those living comfotable lives in American suburbs? Why is turning the world into a giant version of Calcutta more Godly than wearing a condom? Why is the unavoidable complete extermination of entire species and collapse of nature's biodiviersity a good thing? What exacatly will we eat when every acre is built on and every species wiped out?
Oh yeah, we'll have Soylent Green.
Bon appetit.
Posted by: atlatl | February 29, 2008 10:00 PM
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