Regular readers have heard it all before, but here's a good general overview from the Independent of the problems and paradoxes of the world population situation. Excerpt:
But the United Nations has had to revise downwards its prediction that the world population would reach 11.5 billion by 2050. The human race is now expected to peak, according to one of the world's top experts, Dr David Coleman, Professor of Demography at Oxford University, at 9.5 billion people. Then, around 2070, it will begin to decline. We have reached a demographic crossroads which will have dramatic consequences for large sections of the world - including us.
More:
The implications of all this are enormous. Low-birth Europe is faced with an ageing population, a pensions crisis, later retirement, changes in work patterns, shrinking cities and a massive looming healthcare cost. Nations of children with no siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles - only parents, grandparents, and perhaps great-grandparents - will face the burden of paying for the care of a massive older generation. The same prospect of an older, more conservative, less vigorous or inventive culture looms in China, Japan and much of the Far East.Meanwhile high-birth Africa will remain stuck in a vicious circle unless it gets economic growth, agricultural reform, improved world trade terms, infrastructure investment, better health and education systems, more girls into school and a wider availability of family planning. A tall order, though the example of Bangladesh shows change can come.
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Oh heck no.
I'm poor. Having one or a dozen, I'd still be poor. And I even suck at math and science. It was luck of the genetic draw that my son didn't get my 'suck at math and science' genes.
Not directly "on topic" but related to the Netherlands tangent on the later thread re: college: take note of this candid article written by a young European man facing the narcissism of his controlling mother as she schedules her own euthanasia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/23/euthanasia.cancer
and manages her domestic affairs with the energy of a 40-yr old not a terminally-ill 65 year old, and choreographs the funeral arrangements as if she were a seasoned wedding planner, with narry a thought for the impact on the others in her 'sphere of influence.' IMHO = a metaphor for today's global malaise.
When women think their sphere of influence is "gatekeepers" of creation (the Wicca-Gaia fallacy of "mother earth") what we get is the grim reaper in drag: the evil one is full of empty promises, and feminism is surely one of his most hollow illusions, Eve was the first to succumb -- her salutory family history being the stuff of Holy Writ -- but why are so many men not willing or able to step up to the plate and do the heavy lifting of defending human dignity and the welfare of those God entrusts to them? Those born at the close of the 20th century will soon come to see so much of the shambles we are passing on to them was set in motion by the 'exhuberant irrationalism' of their grandparents in the 60s who jettisoned millenia's worth of virtues formed by traditionally held values for the fata morgana of a "Brave New World" ...
And kudos to the young author for publishing such a brutally honest account of the rot at the heart of families in the West and elsewhere.
Wow. Clare, I read the article and it seemed completely different to me from your take on it. I agree on how sad it is. But what I saw was a grown man who can't say one kind thing about his dead mother because he's still so angry and resentful at her. Not only that, but he doesn't record himself as having said one kind thing to her during her terminal illness. He does record screaming at her over nothing, really. Who can say what the real dynamics of this sad family were, or what were the original causes of their lack of compassion for each other. I think it's a bit of a stretch to blame "feminism" for all their ills, however. There's only one woman in the family, and three men. If the three of them weren't able to come up with a way of life that made them all happy, why blame her?
It sounds as if his mother may have had a difficult personality--but he doesn't say much about his own. Perhaps if the author had been less concerned with fighting for control and more eager to show some compassion for a frightened, suffering woman, this story would have had a different end. I wonder what would have happened if he'd said gently, "I can see that you're afraid. Perhaps you are afraid that we don't love you enough to care for you when you are dying. Please sit down with me for a minute and let me tell you how much I've always loved you, and how sorry I am that I haven't always shown you that."
It sounds as if this angry son would have been happier if his mother had died screaming in agony, after losing all control over her own life. That seems a bit twisted to me. God forbid you or anyone you love should one day be dying of a brain tumor, in confusion and unmanageable pain, and be condemned by others as a narcissist and an example of how women are the source of all evil. Peace be with you.
Meanwhile high-birth Africa will remain stuck in a vicious circle unless it gets economic growth, agricultural reform, improved world trade terms, infrastructure investment, better health and education systems, more girls into school and a wider availability of family planning.
It's real simple: if Africa becomes "modern" with girls in school and family planning, they will just become like everyone else and start declining in population as well. It's the fact they don't have these lethal cultural traits that they are doing so well population-wise and spreading their seed far and wide, eating into the worldwide gene pool.
Writers should be ashamed to pick up a pen and write the word "demographic" without knowing even the basics about biology and Darwinian science. Fact: humans are animals, and breed as such, so there must always be more fit tribes demographically eroding the less fit ones. This erosion can be measured: the West is decreasing relative to other cultures every year (and has been for a long time now). There is no "steady state" in demographics like so many wish to believe; one race or culture always pushes against another, and superior human capital will eventually dominate (by superior, I mean those breeding the highest sustainable populations). But hey, it's very funny to watch the liberal West deny basic Darwinian science just because it doesn't fit our ideology. We simply can't accept that nature doesn't ask us to be happy, merely to survive. African culture gets this truth, and the blunt fact is that the world future is written by those who show up for it.
Oh the joy--you gotta love mdavid. He provides a standing reductio ad absurdum for almost all of the wackiest ideas that propagate around here. And he volunteers for this job of his own free will.
Yes, he is absolutely correct. For the right-wing religious agenda--any right-wing religious agenda, whether Christian, Muslim, Shintoist or whatever--to succeed, women must abandon all pretensions to individual identity or independent volition. They must give up all attempts to participate in a larger world or to achieve anything beyond the production of as many children as their bodies can bear before their capacity is exhausted. They must resign all control over their own fertility. Above all, don't let them go to school.
So, if this is the future you want for your daughters, you've come to the right place. If mdavid didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Following which, Rod would stoutly maintain that he was a myth and did not represent any legitimate viewpoint in conservative thought.
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