How to increase white Western birth rates
A reader raises good questions about comparative birthrates, demographics, and the Islamic threat to the West. I reply that the problem of the low native Western birthrate cannot be separated from the National Question.
The reader writes:
In posting the material from the reader who suggested banning contraception as a way of reviving population growth, I can only hope that you posted that for amusement purposes, as an example of extreme idiocy. Hopefully, you’re not endorsing that as representative of “civilizationist” views, for it strikes me as downright anti-civilization. The ability to regulate birthrates is the kind of thing that makes the difference between life in an affluent first-world society and life in a piss-in-the-street third-world society. Civilizationism, if it means anything, means that we do not allow ourselves to slide into the latter category.
As a general matter, I OPPOSE further population growth; I think there are already far too many people on the planet, creating too much pollution and consuming too many resources. From the civilizationist standpoint, the problem is that all the wrong kinds of people are reproducing—in particular, Muslims and Chinese. You’ve been strangely silent about the demographic dimensions of Islam, yet it’s exactly what’s causing France to buckle: at the end of the day, democracy isn’t about ideas, reason, argumentation, and persuasion; it boils down to numbers and birthrates.
My reply:
First, the primary problem with the Muslims in France is not their birthrate but the fact that they are there. While it would of course be beneficial, I’m not primarily interested in helping the French find ways to cut the Muslim birthrate, a type of social engineering the outcome of which is very uncertain. Rather, I’m interested in the French finding ways to remove the Muslims from France. Once they’re out of France, the French won’t have to worry about their birthrate; or, at least, their birthrate will no longer represent an immediate internal threat to the state, as it now does.
I know that the idea of removing Muslims from France sounds absurd and inconceivable. But in 1900 or 1945 the idea that France and Europe would admit a mass influx of their historic mortal enemies was inconceivable. Yet the inconceivable happened, didn’t it? If the inconceivably bad can happen, the inconceivably beneficial can happen too.
Also, the supposed impossibility of removing Muslims from Europe, including native born Muslims, is seen in a different light when we realize that this is not a policy question, but a question of civilizational survival. As more and more Europeans wake up to the nature of Islam and the threat it poses in Europe, what once seemed inconceivable to them will slowly become conceivable.
While you are not concerned about increasing the Western birthrate, I think it is a serious problem that cannot be ignored. For one thing, it affects the relative strength and confidence of the Western and Muslim populations within the West. For another thing, it is intimately connected with our other civilizational problems. High birthrates are a function of two other factors, namely traditional family morality (high birthrates may occur among pathological groups such as the Palestinians, but we are speaking here in a normative, Western context) and confidence or faith in the future. The West has destroyed traditional morality in the name of excessive individualism, and, with the aliens being among us and still coming in, Westerners experience an unspoken despair about the future. So it is not surprising that the birthrate among native whites is low. The way to increase the white birthrate is to restore traditional family morality, and to do all the other things needed to recreate confidence in the future. Among these are stopping non-Western immigration; banning the culture of sleaze which is a culture of despair; and banning the anti-white and anti-Western propaganda in our schools and entertainment and politics, which has a profoundly demoralizing effect on whites, and white men in particular.
I disagree with Buchanan-style, gloom-and-doom breast beating about the low birthrate. The low birth rate is the result of other factors, just as abortion is, and can be reversed by reversing those factors.
Let’s put it another way. We have embraced an ideology of collective death. The Catholics call it a culture of death. But the Catholic way of looking at this culture of death, by actually ignoring culture as well as race, is no solution. People don’t have children in isolation from their social surroundings. They have children as an act of affirmation of life and society, of the goodness and shared sense of purpose and identity of their society and people. Yet the Catholics by embracing open borders, diversity, and anti-whiteness undermine the very confidence—the sense of individual and collective worth and identity and purpose—that Westerners need to overcome the culture of death.
To put it another way, contemporary Catholics are neoconservatives, meaning that they have abstracted morality from the particularist cultural settings that are the indispensable background for a shared moral life. A merely universalist culture of life can no more save the West than a merely universalist belief in democracy.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 06, 2005 08:27 PM | Send