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.