Wednesday's post on First Things is about a very strange controversy: Europe and the Demographic Winter. A reporter named Kathryn Joyce wrote an article for The Nation about the right-wing groups behind the pro-family movement. Her first interview subject was Steven Mosher, the author of the First Things post. He's upset about how her article turned out.
What is demographic winter, anyway? The basic idea is that when people in Europe don't have enough babies, there will be fewer and fewer Europeans, and that this is bad news for European civilization, particularly since new people are moving in, and some of these new people don't hold liberal democratic values in high regard. Or so the argument goes.
To Joyce, this is in essence racist, nativist, anti-feminist, and fascist:
“Europe is failing to produce enough babies--the right babies--to replace its old and dying. It's ‘the baby bust,’ ‘the birth dearth,’ ‘the graying of the continent’: modern euphemisms for old-fashioned race panic as low fertility among white ‘Western’ couples coincides with an increasingly visible immigrant population across Europe.”
…
“And this, of course, is the (largely unacknowledged) rub with the profamily movement's focus on procreation: it requires a world of women to dedicate their lives and wombs to demographic battle. ‘The shadow of Fascism still hovers over demographic science,’ Krause tells me, and lends a chilling factor to ‘moralizing’ language that pathologizes the childless as sick or, in Italy, as anorexics refusing to eat. Indeed, when Pope John Paul II raised his demographic concerns to the Italian Parliament, it was unprecedented since Fascist years, evoking a painful social memory of Mussolini's fertility project, which attacked bachelors, rewarded mothers of many children, criminalized abortion and banned contraception.”
To which Mosher says, basically, that it's all about the numbers, and NOT ABOUT RACE:
“Discussions of the demographic winter start with Europe not because of race (is it really necessary to say?) but because the barren world of tomorrow is already evident in the Europe of today. As nearly everyone knows by now, all of Europe, from Ireland in the West to Russia in the East, is aging and dying.”
He rehearses the evidence again in his article, and convincingly argues that he's worried about everyone, not just Europeans, so he's certainly not racist. Of course, he is anti-feminist, if we mean feminists in the modern sense. Mosher doesn't really care what The Nation and its readers do, because his people are going to out-breed them anyway.
The mathematician in me finds the statistical argument convincing, but who am I to tell people that they ought to have more kids? I hate to say it, but Joyce does have one very good point. If these childless progressives can find a way to turn the children of their enemies to their own causes, then they can get huge amounts of work done and not have to worry about replacing themselves. For example, she says that “what unifies a population is often a deliberate decision to welcome and integrate new elements into society rather than clinging to ever-shifting notions of ‘true’ European heritage and race.” If you can convince enough people to make this deliberate decision, to take on a multicultural liberalism, then you've got yourself an open society.
What is more fundamental than the raw number of children, I think, is the will to pass on one's own culture, whether it is inherited or chosen.
2 comments:
You don't have to be a racist to make it about race (or at least culture). Why does Mosher care that the European birth rate is lower than the Muslim rate? Because he doesn't want Europe taken over by minorities. That's the only possible reason a low birth rate can be of any importance.
"All of Europe, from Ireland in the West to Russia in the East, is aging and dying."
All of WHITE Europe is dying. There 's no way you can try to cloak your concern for the death of white Europe into a false sympathy for "the barren world of tomorrow."
It's about culture and it eventually its about a racial culture. Let's at least have the honesty to say that and not look like idiots who think that "Children of Men" is in our immediate future. This isn't a humanitarian concern.
(source for European birthrates: http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2003/03middleeast_taspinar.aspx)
If we're going to reduce this thing properly, it's more about religious culture than racial culture, at least from the Catholic perspective in the United States. It's more the case that he doesn't want Europe taken over by Muslims. If the problem was immigration of, say, Ugandan Christians, the Europeans would still struggle through the mechanics of assimilation, but I doubt that as many folks here in the USA would get up in arms.
This is not to say that it's not a nice cause for secret racists, but I don't think it's fair to attribute that motive to everyone when there are more visible motives in view.
I didn't mean to endorse either position in this post. Demographic changes happen for deeper reasons, and I'd prefer to talk about those. Numbers, for me, are a surface issue.
Also, we should distinguish between nativism and racism. Racism involves the belief that races can be ranked from inferior to superior; nativism can contain this element, but it can also be about particularity (i.e. one's own). Both are opposed to multiculturalism, for which I suppose I have a preference.
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