1. Wanting to stop it.
This desire is absent. Policy is therefore irrelevant.
2. So, the question becomes something like - Why are Europeans indifferent to demographic decline?
3. Why don't European's regard having children as a major priority?
4. Why don't European's regard permanent marriage and family as the major priority?
This is getting a bit closer...
Individuals... Why would an individual European person put marriage and family as priority? Clearly it must Not be as a short term reliable route to maximise happiness...
So it's about the long term and the cosmic and supra-individual... We are talking about Religion.
5. The answer to what would stop Europe's demographic decline is Religion; serious and as a priority...
6. The next question is what kind of religion?
But at least we are clearer about the nature of the right answer.
The demographic decline (below-replacement fertility rate) is something that effects all countries around the world as they become more and more urbanised. This decline occurs regardless of race, religion, or economic status; it even effects devout Muslim countries (cf. North Africa), and African ones, both of which are notorious for having high fertility rates. So isn't civilisation, which urbanises people and imposes a hierarchical control system on them, to blame for the decline rather than the lack of religion?
ReplyDeleteUnless you're implying than the lack of religion/loving-god leads to the desire to control, systematising, dehumanising people etc and therefore brings about the rise of civilisation?
@LB - You need to look at the exceptions to understand it. Sub Saharan Africans have Not undergone a full demongraphic transition, and the population continues to grow very rapidly. Traditionally religious Christians, Muslims and Jews sometimes have extremely high fertility even living in developed nations. Up to now, traditionalist monotheism is the only known antidote to sub-fertility leading ultimately to extinction.
ReplyDeleteThe entire point of civilization, the standard by which we (quite rightly) judge a civilized society, is to amortize and ameliorate natural selective pressure on the population, to allow the less fit to survive at the expense (especially genetically) of the fit.
ReplyDeleteIt is, to anyone who has lived subject to selective pressure, a noble and worthy aspiration.
It is not the aspiration of religion. The goal of religion is not to delay the deaths of the unfortunate for a time but to defeat death entirely by some method or other.
The downfall of civilization is that the lack of selective pressure on a population weakens the crucial instincts to survive, including by procreation. As the overall fitness of the population falls below a crucial level, they become unable to maintain civilization, one of the early signs of this is loss of interest in actual procreation and becoming content with immediate and superficial gratifications of the reproductive instincts. Eventually this extends to all activities that contribute to survival or maintenance of civilization. It is here that religion can step in to fill the gap, but it is fundamentally important to understand that filling the gaps left by the inevitable self-defeating of civilization to evade selective pressure is not why religion exists.
Religion doesn't try to negotiate a 'livable' compromise with the grave. It seeks victory.
So religion is the sole antidote to Mouse Utopia?! Sounds rather plausible, actually...
ReplyDelete@pyrrhus - Not quite. Religion is the only known antidote to subfertilty (and only some types of some religions) - but preventing mouse utopia would unfortunately also require harsh culling by natural selection...
ReplyDeleteAll this is ignoring the reality of any positive, integrative, organising biological forces that would tend to act in the opposite direction to natural selection.
There aren't really any of these recognised by modern mainstream biology, but there has alwas been a sub-theme among biologists to this effect, including several prestigious figures - I discussed this possibility (or probability) in a paper a couple of years ago:
https://thewinnower.com/papers/3497-reconceptualizing-the-metaphysical-basis-of-biology-a-new-definition-based-on-deistic-teleology-and-an-hierarchy-of-organizing-entities