The Decline and Fall of Everyone

Not the way it usually works.

Contrary to what you commonly hear, social Darwinism, the idea that survival of the fittest applies to human nations and cultures, was no perversion of Darwin's original theory. Darwin himself was the first social Darwinist. It was the subject of his later book The Descent of Man. Leading pretty directly to the First and Second World Wars.

In Descent, Darwin makes the interesting observation that, when cultures are no longer, for one reason or another, competitive in the evolutionary struggle, they are not necessarily defeated militarily by some neighbouring tribe. They often seem instead to simply lay down and die. Darwin cites a Mr. Sproat, who observed the Native Indians of Vancouver Island, over time, become “bewildered and dull by the new life around them; they lose the motives for exertion, and get no new ones in their place.” (Darwin, p. 542). That sounds, indeed, like what has happened to native cultures in North America generally.

Soon, fertility declines. Darwin tracks the rapid fall in the number of Tasmanian aboriginals. Far from being exterminated by the Europeans, according to Darwin, the Tasmanian government took every effort to keep them going. Nevertheless, the native islanders seem to have simply stopped reproducing. “At the time when only nine women were left at Oyster Cove, … only two had ever borne children: and these two had together produced only three children” (p. 548). Among the Maoris of New Zealand, similarly, Darwin quotes figures that, in 1844, there was one child for every 2.57 adults; in 1858, only 14 years later, there was one child for every 3.27 adults. In Hawaii, after contact with the Europeans, fertility fell to “half a child for every married couple in the whole island” (p. 552).

Last four Tasmanian aborigines, 1860.

I don't think these examples bear out Darwin's theories; they suggest a spiritual instead of a material cause for the rise and fall of nations. Do animal species die out from ennui? But they are of interest in showing how depression works, and that it is primarily a loss of meaning. A culture or an individual, coming into contact with a new culture, is automatically challenged in their prior assumptions. If that new culture is different enough, and seems to offer plainly superior results in some fields, this is necessarily powerfully so. Everything seems, to the individual in the less developed culture, to become pointless, as all the old signposts and destinations seem disproven. This, I suspect, is what African cultures refer to as “loss of soul.”

Hence the shock and depression in these cases almost entirely hits the aboriginal, not the European, culture.

The same effect, not incidentally, can be achieved by surrounding an individual with consistent lies, which challenge his own common sense and experience, as happens in a dysfunctional family. It can happen on a broader, social level when a culture for whatever reason departs generally from common sense and common experience, with or without any outside pressures upon it.

The culture or the individual is then caught between a spiritual Scylla and Charybdis. He dares not leap nor stay behind. There is the same sense of purposelessness as with the “lazy Indians,” or for that matter, the “lazy negroes,” like a car that cannot get into any gear. Hence the lack of interest in sex, which is really a lack of interest in procreation and childrearing. To have a child is a vote that the future will be better, not worse, than the present.

First point: the reality that these things happen disproves the idea of cultural relativism. All cultures are not equal, or culture shock would be more evenly distributed. Second point: such things are not the superior culture's fault. Time to get rid of notions of “cultural imperialism” and “cultural genocide.” Third point: there is a cure to depression, and it is to make the leap.

In other words, broadly, the residential schools were the right idea, and our current drive to resegregate and revive aboriginal cultures will only prolong the problem.

It is also interesting to see that the clearest symptom of this problem on a cultural level is a decline in fertility rates.

We have such a decline, of course, currently across the West. Our culture generally has strayed too far from common sense and common experience. If it does not correct itself, it will die, as did these others.

But who will replace it? Fertility rates have fallen even more disastrously in East Asia. And they are falling in South Asia (i.e., India). And in the Middle East. In Russia, they have long been alarmingly low. So much for possible competing civilizations. In fact, fertility rates seem to be falling just about everywhere.

All of this is actually prompted by an article from David P. Goldman, “Spengler,” on the demographics of modern Iran. Fertility there has fallen from 7 children per woman in 1979 to 1.6 in 2012. This is a bigger decline than has ever been seen before in a large, developed country.

Clearly, there is something very wrong with the spiritual climate, and there are as yet no solutions in sight.