Recently in Population Category

Quoting from an e-mail from an English reader:

Even I, an ardent believer in secularism in its original form, and a sceptical, watery Christian, find the hatred, bigotry and all-round ignorance of people my age towards Christianity trying and depressing. I avoid the subject of religion at dinner parties unless the people are old fashioned upper-class, rural gentry types, the only people who don't despise Christianity. Among the metropolitan middle-class, who rule England, Christianity is viewed like vegetarianism in Spain -- a mental illness.

Still, if they want their grand-daughters to wear a burka, assuming any child they do have manages to avoid being aborted, then they're going about it the right way.

That came to mind when reading Mark Steyn's post about Muslim demographics in Europe and the UK, based on research showing ... well, here's the story from the Daily Telegraph:

Last year, five per cent of the total population of the 27 EU countries was Muslim. But rising levels of immigration from Muslim countries and low birth rates among Europe's indigenous population mean that, by 2050, the figure will be 20 per cent, according to forecasts.

Data gathered from various sources indicate that Britain, Spain and Holland will have an even higher proportion of Muslims in a shorter amount of time.

Steyn comments, in part:

For what it's worth, I'll bet the EU will be a lot more than one-fifth Muslim by 2050. As for those countries the Telegraph puts in the fast lane, a Netherlands or a United Kingdom that becomes 30 percent Muslim will not just be more "diverse" but in ways both profound and trivial no longer Dutch or British.

It's happening. You can argue about the speed, but not about the destination.

I don't think it's possible to argue credibly that it's not happening. What you can argue about is a) what's it's likely effect to be, and b) what, if anything, can be done to stop it? To say that it's not going to have any real effect on the law and public character of European nations is simply absurd. How could it not? The question is, are the likely effects something that Europeans are prepared to live with? And if not, what are they prepared to do about it? That is the far more difficult question, because what are those governments going to do, start expelling Muslim citizens on the basis of their religion? Is that really where they want to go? I cannot believe that it is, or should be. But what, then?

I'm beginning to understand why a senior and well-respected British journalist once told me that he believed he would see a religious war in his native land before he dies. This is a politically moderate, even-tempered fellow; he was simply saying that he did not see how British society was going to go easily down this inevitable path. As my English correspondent quoted above indicates, the alienation of European intellectuals, cultural elites and educated middle-class persons from their ancestral religion and its traditions is only greasing the skids. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, if you will not have the faith of your fathers, prepare to pay your respects to Islam or the British National Party.

David P. Goldman on marriage, reproduction and the survival of civilizations:

Marriage as an institution that fulfills our nature: It is a holy estate that permits the mating pair of humans to embed their reproductive activity in the eschatological hope of their faith community. The propagation of the species in its animal characteristics is united with the continuity of the people of God. If, as observation seems to confirm, the willingness of humans to form mating pairs and to bear offspring depends in the first instance on eschatological hope, then it is marriage as a sacred institution that makes possible the perpetuation of human life.

[snip

This may be the first time in Western history in which the sacred foundation of society, whose irreducible fundamental unit is the family, faces explicit opposition. If militant secularism succeeds in banishing the sacred from social life, we will lose heart and perish, as the tragic victims of communism are perishing. There is nothing to be done for the infertile, aging peoples of the former Soviet empire. The best thing one can do for them is not to be like them. Secular Western Europe already has one foot in the demographic grave. If we lose the sacred in the United States, we will follow them into Sheol. We might as well make a stand now over the sacred character of marriage, because there is nowhere to fall back from here.

You might be thinking: What about Islamic Iran? If religious fervor is associated with fertility, wouldn't we expect the Iranian birth rate to be high? Actually, as Goldman has written often, it's cratering -- and that's but one sign of the country's spiritual decadence, despite official proclamations of pietistic vigor. Nevertheless, fertility rates are collapsing globally, even in societies that are more overtly religious. Why? You could say that this invalidates, or at least undermines, the idea that religious faith is meaningfully connected to childbearing. Or you might say that it tells us something about the degree or quality of religious faith within societies. Philip Longman, the progressive thinker who writes with concern about population decline from a left-wing point of view, suggests in his Christianity Today interview (read the whole thing here) that that might be in the offing. Excerpt:

The high incidence of childless and single-child families in the West has one big implication many overlook. It means a very large proportion of the children that are being born are being produced by a small subset of the current population. And who are the people who are still having large families today?

The stereotypical answer is poor people, or dumb people, or members of minority groups. But birth rates among American racial and ethnic minority groups are plummeting. The more accurate answer is deeply religious people.

To be sure, religious fundamentalists of all varieties are themselves having fewer children than in the past. But whether they be Mormons, Orthodox Jews, or Islamic or Christian fundamentalists, devout member of these Abrahamic religions have on average far larger families than do the secular elements within their society.

In Europe, for example, the fertility differential between believers and nonbelievers has recently been estimated at 15-20 percent. Though children born into religious families often do not become religious themselves, many do, especially if they themselves go on to have children. Meanwhile, of course, the childless stand no chance of passing along their values to their progeny.

The faithful thus begin to inherit society by default. The West's total population may fall or stagnate, perhaps for quite awhile; but those who remain will be disproportionately committed to God and family, whether they be Christians, Muslims, Jews, or members of new pro-natal faiths. Let us just hope that this new age of faith will also be an age of peace.

Maybe. I'm sure Longman knows a lot more about the facts and figures than I do, but I know a number of families who are serious about their faith, and who do more than just talk about it. Yet they don't seem to be having any more kids than anybody else. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that the future will belong to members of religious groups who explicitly connect fertility to fidelity.

David's point about marriages needing to take place before a congregation is a point that deserves dwelling on. It has a Benedict Option connotation, as Sally Thomas, who used to comment often on this blog (I miss her), observes in the combox under David's essay. Excerpt:

I'm not sure that you can very successfully argue a fundamentally religious position to a secular society. One more reason to have children: to create at least a small-scale culture to which these understandings will make some sense. One more reason to be a part of a congregation: to increase the chances of your children's finding someone to marry who will share these understandings and want to have children to perpetuate them.

And "congregation" is important, even above "community" (or "village," a term I think I'm coming to loathe). In a congregation you have the figure of a marriage: a conjoining of God with His people. When people marry before a congregation, they have that figure before them, with the expectation that the marriage will reflect and embody it. Community, on the other hand, is grounded in human relationship and on expediency of one kind or another, and has largely supplanted the congregation as the default figure for marriage, which is kind of the problem.

Cleaning out my in-box, I found this link that a reader and friend had sent me earlier this month: it seems that earlier gloom-and-doom demographic projections are going to have to be revised The news is better than we thought, according to Martin Walker. I don't have time to analyze the piece, but I'm hope some of you will.

Economist David Goldman at First Things says our failure to reproduce enough children to sustain our society will make us poorer. Excerpts:

Life is sacred for its own sake. It is not an instrument to provide us with fatter IRAs or better real-estate values. But it is fair to point out that wealth depends ultimately on the natural order of human life. Failing to rear a new generation in sufficient numbers to replace the present one violates that order, and it has consequences for wealth, among many other things. Americans who rejected the mild yoke of family responsibility in pursuit of atavistic enjoyment will find at last that this is not to be theirs, either.

It will be painful for conservatives to admit that things were not well with America under the Republican watch, at least not at the family level. From 1954 to 1970, for example, half or more of households contained two parents and one or more children under the age of eighteen. In fact as well as in popular culture, the two-parent nuclear family formed the normative American household. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, two-parent households had fallen to just over two-fifths of the total. Today, less than a third of American households constitute a two-parent nuclear family with children.

What could we do to promote natalism at the policy level? Goldman suggests:

Numerous proposals for family-friendly tax policy are in circulation, including recent suggestions by Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, and Reihan Salam. The core of a family-oriented economic program might include the following measures:

• Cut taxes on families. The personal exemption introduced with the Second World War's Victory Tax was $624, reflecting the cost of "food and a little more." In today's dollars that would be about $7,600, while the current personal exemption stands at only $3,650. The personal exemption should be raised to $8,000 simply to restore the real value of the deduction, and the full personal exemption should apply to children.

• Shift part of the burden of social insurance to the childless. For most taxpayers, social-insurance deductions are almost as great a burden as income tax. Families that bring up children contribute to the future tax base; families that do not get a free ride. The base rate for social security and Medicare deductions should rise, with a significant exemption for families with children, so that a disproportionate share of the burden falls on the childless.

• Make child-related expenses tax deductible. Tuition and health care are the key expenses here with which parents need help.

• Change the immigration laws. The United States needs highly skilled, productive individuals in their prime years for earning and family formation.

We delude ourselves when we imagine that a few hundred dollars of tax incentives will persuade individuals to form families or keep them together. A generation of Americans has grown up with the belief that the traditional family is merely one lifestyle choice among many.

[snip]

Without life, there is no wealth; without families, there is no economic future. The value of future income streams traded in capital markets will fall in accordance with our impoverished demography. We cannot pursue the acquisition of wealth and the provision of upward mobility except through the reconquest of the American polity on behalf of the American family.

Philip Longman has covered this ground before, from a secular liberal point of view. Last November, Longman and his New America Foundation colleague David Gray proposed a new pro-family "social contract" (PDF form here) to address the same problems David Goldman identifies. Excerpt:

More from the amazing Ms. Astyk, who has been thinking about the way we collectively imagine children determines the direction of our society. Excerpt:

The totalizing world view that accompanies industrial modernism says that children are fundamentally one thing, and one alone - they are an economic commodity, something that you have if you can afford them, something that small nuclear families are responsible for alone. They display your status in how they dress, what school you send them to, what activities they do, what college they get into, what sports they play, and they are increasingly, aware of their status a commodity and invested in it - that is, our children increasingly see themselves as here to shop.

One thing I think is always true about the nature of demographic imagination, that multiple perceptions can be simultaneously true. Thus, when I had my first child he was simultaneously my parents' first, blessed grandchild, another child added to the consumptive west's absorption of resources, revenge upon the Nazis who tried to exterminate my husband's family, a disabled child probably destined to consume more resources than he produces, a candidate for the 6 billionth person born on the planet (we crossed that threshold shortly before his birth - a little girl from India won the dubious prize), our adored and deeply desired son, a gift from G-d...and a host of other things. There is no point in trying to filter out which of these things is "true" - they are, for good or ill, all true in some ways, and through some lenses. And none of them is all the truth - but that doesn't mean we can full extricate these simultaneous perceptions. Industrial society, however, tells us constantly that there is only one meaning - that children exist in only one valence, as expressions of status, or at best, costs to us.

Nations, peoples, regions after all, have demographic imaginations as well, and they tend to try, with varying degrees of success, to superimpose them over the imaginings of smaller groups. The stories we tell ourselves personally and collectively shape our policies. The world we get if we see ourselves as a beleagured outpost of justice in a world surrounded by rapidly breeding barbarians is very different than the one we get if we see ourselves as integrated with the surrounding populations, able easily to sustain ourselves by opening our borders. A small indigenous people, or religious faith, losing its children to assimilation may be told that the world is overpopulated, and simultaneously and accurately experience themselves as dramatically underpopulated. Our military, economic and social priorities depend on population - both literally, and in our perceptions. Ultimately, our worldview about reproduction, population, biology matters in a whole host of ways. And on this subject, I think we have managed to get ourselves into a particularly troubling way of thinking about children - troubling no matter how you look at it. That is, we've transformed children from economic assets to burdens, from beings who are fundamentally productive to beings who are fundamentally consumptive of resources.

What do I mean by this? Historically, children have certainly had economic value - you could make the case that for most of human history, the one continuous reality was that families had a strong economic incentive to reproduce. It is worth noting that in most societies, the economic value of children was not the only or even primary rationale - that is, generally speaking, children were held to be a blessing and pleasure in their own right. Most religious cultures considered them a sacred blessing. You could make a case that the sacredness of reproduction was a later add-on to what was fundamentally an exploitative relationship, or you could argue that the perception of sacredness and blessedness preceeds and supplements the economic relationship - at least for today, I'll stay out of that one. But while children were always an economic asset, hope for the future, security in one's own age, someone to preserve assets for, they were rarely only that. [Emphasis mine -- RD]

Now my claim is not that most of us have ceased to view our children as a blessing - how could we, because we experience them that way (most days ;-)). But while we experience our children as blessings, industrial society is very clear that some children are, shall we say, more blessed than others.

Read the whole thing.