can we avoid demographic collapse?

I’ve just been reading yet another article about how we’re all doomed because of demographic collapse. Unlike most of the things that people worry about demographic collapse really is happening. Fertility rates have plummeted globally. Most of the world faces the prospect not just of declining populations, but fairly rapidly declining populations. It’s not that people are unaware that this is happening but the exact nature of the problem is widely misunderstood. Several things need to be understood.

Firstly, this is happening absolutely everywhere outside of sub-Saharan Africa and it will almost certainly happen there as well in another generation or two. Throughout Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and Asia birth rates are in free fall. This is not a problem confined to the West (although the problem may have originated with us and been spread by us throughout the rest of the world).

Secondly, immigration isn’t going to make any difference. If birth rates fall catastrophically everywhere there just isn’t going to be a supply of new people to make up the shortfalls. Also, cutting immigration isn’t going to help. In countries with high immigration rates birth rates are disastrously low. In countries with very low immigration rates, birth rates are disastrously low.

Thirdly, the problem isn’t going to be fixed by a Christian revival. However desirable a a Christian revival might be there is absolutely no sign of such a thing happening. It might happen in the long term in the wake of complete economic and social collapse but that’s not much consolation for anybody who’d like to see civilisation survive. And other religions are unlikely to help either – fertility rates are plummeting in the Islamic world as well.

Fourthly, economic incentives are not going to work. They might be part of a solution but on their own they have very little effect.

The only workable solution, in my view, must also include a restoration of a sense of of national purpose, or at least a sense of communal purpose. People have to believe in something outside their own lives or even their own families. The problem is that the entire globe is now dominated by two ideologies, capitalism and liberalism, that have the opposite effect. Capitalism and liberalism can be very good at giving people a sense of individual purpose, but that sense of individual purpose had led us to disaster. These are ideologies that just cannot provide a sense of communal purpose. We need to find ideologies that can provide that sense of communal purpose.

Of course given the nature of western civilisation it’s unrealistic to expect an abandonment of individualism. What is needed is more of a balance between individualism and communalism.