Mark Steyn reflects on the important things, and ends up with "it’s the demography, stupid."
Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions - state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything - has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia’s population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria’s by 36 per cent, Italy’s by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?
And a Scandinavian UN rep called the USA selfish?
That’s absolutely correct...ultimately demography is destiny. If your population becomes too decadent to fight for itself (Rome) or to reproduce itself (the contemporary West), then extinction is inevitable.
So, if all the "self-actualization" and "liberation" that has gone on in the West (i.e., extreme individualism) doesn’t include the necessary sacrifice of having children, then it’s just a form of narcissistic suicide.
There was a remarkable article in the NYT some years ago (it was the first sign that the Gray Lady of 42nd Street was beginning to wake up from its Paul Ehrlich fantasies, sorry I don’t have a web link) about the birth dearth in once-Catholic Italy--which along w/ Japan recently became the first country in recorded history to have more people over 70 than under 20.
An archbishop from one of the north Italian cities, commenting on the embrace of the contraceptive/abortifacient society, was quoted saying something to the effect of "we are the freest, richest, and most secure people the world has ever seen, yet we no longer believe in our own future." The city’s mayor, a communist, quickly agreed with him.
And of course Italy and Spain, along with much of the rest of Europe, are on the cusp of becoming demographic colonies of North Africa and the Middle East.
If Turkey gets full EU membership, it will be the EU’s 2nd-biggest country, and in a few decades its biggest: Only Germany is larger now (83 million to 70 million), and Germany has famous problems w/ Kinderunfreundlichkeit and is shrinking, while Turkey’s population continues to grow, and to grow fastest among the populations of its non-Westernized, still staunchly Muslim recesses.
Are we headed for a future that looks like something out of H.G. Wells’s "Time Machine," where the relatively educated, urbane classes and regions--the kind that function the best in modern, democratic, industrial or postindustrial societies--lose their motive force in history and the will to reproduce themselves, while groups of people who long (or think they long) for more tribal, tradition-bound, and hierarchical modes of social organization launch a successful "jihad of the cradles"?
Europes utopia will only last for a single generation because the funding will runout.