Depopulation and Its Causes: A Thought for Victoria Day

 

I’ve been warning about population decline since the nineties. I remember a piece I wrote for the Western Standard in around 2002. It has taken an astonishing time for the media to notice what the demographic projections have been saying for generations.

Canada is delaying the reckoning through mass immigration; as are most European countries. This brings its own problems; but even so, soon, immigration from where? Numbers will be falling everywhere.

I think the cause i a general loss of meaning. In The Descent of Man, Darwin, writing back in the mid 19th century, observed the curious fact that, whenever Europeans encountered some remote tribe, of the sort we used to refer to as “primitive,” the latter’s numbers entered a steep decline. Not due to contagious diseases brought by the Europeans; die-offs from epidemics are part of a normal cycle in remote tribes. Because of low population density, these tribes cannot harbour natural immunity past a couple of generations. Every new disease decimates them.

Rather, women just stopped having babies. 

The encounter with another culture that was so much more advanced (politically incorrect to say this now, but obviously true) shattered all their notions about life and the universe. Life lost its meaning; “loss of soul,” some African tribesmen called it when speaking with Carl Jung. Compare the English term “dispirited.” On the individual level, this is what we call “depression.” We get a taste of it when our own cherished assumptions about the world, or about a close relationship, are shattered. The cosmic egg cracks. 

The whole world is now dispirited, depressed. Our world view no longer holds up. We do not see a direction to human development, a sense of mission, a point to human life other than, perhaps, gaining transitory pleasures and avoiding pains. We no longer have religious faith. The arts are moribund, and what we have from the past is being pulled down or censored. Making it meaningless to create art, in other ages a place where meaning can be generated and a life justified. Family relationships are breaking down. We are merely living for pleasure from day to day, and trying not to think about our death.

So why have children? It’ll just be the same damned thing all over again. A child’s birth is an expression of hope in the future.

The last time we had a strong shared sense of mission, was the time we now tend to scorn as the Victorian age. The days of the social gospel, prohibition, abolition, and the European civilizing mission: we imagined then our efforts were making the world a better place. Yeats captures it in Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen:

We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;

 

The First World War killed that optimism. It revealed, said Yeats,

 

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

The fight against Nazism, and then the fight against the Soviet Bloc, kept us duck-taped together for a time. It even brought back a wave of religious faith, in the US, in about the 1950s. And we had the baby boom. But things were coming unravelled spiritually and intellectually underneath the fine veneer—Nazism and Communism were themselves unravelling strands, tin idolatries. All the old verities were being replaced by scientism, materialism, existentialism, postmodernism, dadaism, all improvisations on the one theme of meaninglessness. None of them have been able to justify human existence. They were only blind guides wandering into walls.

In past ages, when a civilization became decadent, some new tribe, motivated by some new vision and robust from hardship, would charge out of the desert, sea, or steppes and take command. Ibn Khaldun analysed this grand historical process back in about the 14th century. But now there are no more unexamined seas or steppes or deserts from which they might come.

What is the escape from this collapse? Only God’s intervention. Only some infusion of the Spirit.

Scientism

 

A traditional unsympathetic portrait of the Qin emperor.

Most of the horrors of the modern world can be traced to scientism.

Do not misunderstand me; scientism is not science. But science is rarely heard from in popular culture. Scientism is the pseudo-religion that considers science the source of meaning and reality. It is the dominant faith of our age, and its consequences are profoundly destructive. Not least to science.

When people claim that doubting climate change is “anti-science,” or that “the science is settled” on any given issue, this is scientism, not science.  True science is based on skepticism and taking nothing on authority. Science makes no truth claims; it is a method of inquiry, not a set of dogmas. 

Besides the damage to science, scientism is, for example, the foundation of all racism. If we can agree that racism is a problem, rejecting scientism is the way to solve it. Before science sought to classify humans as if they were animals, the concept of race did not exist. The ancient Romans, or the Medieval Christians, knew nothing of race, and would have considered it as senseless to discriminate against someone due to their skin colour as due to their hair colour or eye colour. This is why both Roman citizenship and Christian baptism was open to all, without discrimination of birth.

Marxism, and all the mass murders it has produced, is also based on scientism. Marxism wanted to reduce all human life to material, and scientific, terms. It defined itself as “scientific socialism,” and was and is, of course, aggressively atheist. People were merely objects, means rather than ends.

Nazism is also directly based on scientism—it is Darwinism applied to the human species.

Everything we today experience as “mental illness” can, I think, also be attributed to scientism, which strips the world of its meaning. It is a striking fact that, before Freud, “mental illness,” melancholy, was generally considered transitory and curable. Now it is multiplying like an epidemic, and is incurable in all its forms. It is still highly curable in non-Western societies.

A Chinese student of mine, without anything being assigned, chose to write and submit an essay arguing for the need for society to support the Humanities. This looks to me like an appeal: Chinese schools and universities, like those in the old Soviet Bloc, do not teach the Humanities. There are no Humanities departments. There are only the STEM fields, and Marxist ideology.

She contends in her essay that this is why the Soviet Bloc fell—history shows, she writes, that any society that neglects the Humanities must fall in time. She cites, along with Eastern Europe, an earlier example from Chinese history, the Qin Dynasty. The Qin unified China in 221 BC under the banner of “legalism,” which emphasized social order as the only value. Books were collected and burned. 

The dynasty lasted only 15 years. It collapsed as the leaders, guided by no principle but power, began executing one another.

A point we are coming to, I fear, in our current societies. Humanities give us morals and meaning. Without the Humanities, there is no “why.” 

My student is not alone in her perception that scientism is a fatal flaw. When the Berlin Wall fell, the new democratic regimes of Eastern Europe thought the same, and sent their academics to the West to bring back knowledge of the Humanities.

Sadly, they discovered that the West, too, had largely abandoned them, in everything but name. Instead they had themselves been concocting and distilling the poisoned Kool-Ade of scientism. 

It has only gotten worse since.

Now the West seems to be falling apart, just as China is falling apart; from the same poison.

The difference is perhaps that there are more people in China who realize the problem. Chinese culture may recover first.

The Wasteland

Eliot: "Man can only take so much truth."

We are, collectively, passing through a desert of meaninglessness.

We have been since the early 20th century; but it has recently been getting worse.

There used to be prominent voices, at least, who spoke truth: T.S. Eliot, Winston Churchill; in my youth, Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The hallmark of truth is its simplicity. Once said, it seems obvious. It is lies that are complicated, ambiguous, “ironic,” “nuanced.” Liars need the cover of deniability.

So, it is true, do some truth tellers at some times; Jesus himself spoke in parables. This is so of artists generally. But when truth is covert in this way, it can be easily missed or misunderstood.

The Vatican, especially under John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger, then Benedict XVI, was the great redoubt of plain truth; perhaps the last redoubt. But under Pope Francis, it too has gone all ambiguity and nuance, barely distinguishable from the rest of the culture.

This leaves a terrible lack of meaning emerging from any commanding voices in high places.

And even the artists seem to have fallen silent.

Under this regime of political correctness, speaking truth seems only dangerously naive.

Rebuilding Notre Dame Upside Down

Rolling Stone magazine has run an article on rebuilding Notre Dame de Paris that has generated a lot of comment on the right. Their main point is that the cathedral should be rebuilt not as it was, but to express the “new France,” as it is today. Which, so far as we can tell from the article, represents nothing uniting or edifying. Just “joie de vivre and change.” Hedonism and relativism.

Specifically, the bit everyone is quoting is:

“The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University.

That about says it. There is a significant portion of the modern intellectual class that actually wants to burn civilization down, because they are against meaning itself. They WANT chaos and meaninglessness.

Everything else follows.

John 3: 19-21:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.