The ideology of modernity is pulling us over a demographic abyss

I just saw an essay in First Things that blew me away. “Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button” is a penetratingly profound article that deserves wide circulation. I would be remiss not to mention it.

“[M]odernity seems hellbent on destroying itself.” So says the inimitable Louise Perry, journalist extraordinaire and ceaseless campaigner for common sense. She trembles not in the face of political correctness. I have mentioned her before. With a huge following, she is an avatar of pro-family feminism.

Modernity is characterised by “individual subjectivity, scientific explanation and rationalisation, a decline in emphasis on religious worldviews,” etc. Sounds like secularism on steroids.

Ms Perry is right. Modernity is going to heck in a handbasket as we speak. Its demise is unavoidable, irreversible and slowly picking up speed. Rome didn’t die in a day. Maybe modernity peaked in the US in the late 1960s with the explosive proliferation of graduate schools to avoid military service. The academy became the higher education industry, manufacturing hordes of government-subsidised academics “producing” ream upon ream of “research” servicing the Frankfurt School agenda. This is how we educated the common sense out of the chattering class.

Today the chatterers reign, relentlessly pushing utopian schemes that just don’t work for ordinary people. Understanding that is beyond the ken of “well-educated” secularist fanatics. You cannot change fundamental human nature. The recent US elections were a sign of popular pushback against taking on God and Mother Nature. Say what you will about either presidential candidate, but DEI, pronoun dictates, and biological men competing as females are a bridge too far for most folks.

Modernity’s hubris says we can have it all. Freedom! Freedom from children, freedom from cumbersome familial obligations, honest labour and repressive social conventions. So many rights, so few responsibilities. Modernity says we are more sagacious, enlightened and advanced that anyone who ever came before us. The Age of Reason has morphed into the Age of Omniscience; those tried-and-true notions of marriage, family, social convention and personal dignity that sustained us through the millennia are now old hat. But there is a catch, says Ms Perry:

The people on whom modernity depends are failing to reproduce themselves, which means that modernity itself is failing to reproduce itself. Most voters have no idea that this is happening. Nor do most politicians. But it is happening nonetheless, and we are experiencing its early ­stages in the form of diverse political crises across the modern world.

The coming demographic crisis

Is the dying out of Homo sapiens a political crisis? Is it a spiritual crisis? Consider this. People with little money have been having children all along. But modernity says that today’s affluent cannot afford them. Antiquated notions of personal sacrifice and family lineage are alien concepts that cannot be monetised. That’s terminal thinking. As Ms Perry comments:

As a civilisation, we are running on the fumes of the accomplishments of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Why are we “running on the fumes?” And why were people from the British Isles so instrumental in shaping today’s world? Without mentioning Henry VIII, Enlightenment empiricism or John Stuart Mill, Ms Perry posits:

An important part of the answer is demographics… The nineteenth-century British TFR peaked in 1820 at 5.56, much higher than the replacement figure of 2.1, which modern governments regard as economically necessary, and much much higher than the 2022 British figure of 1.49.  

Europe and her colonies attained military and cultural power only because they had a large supply of warm young bodies to send to war, and many eager young minds capable of innovation.

In South Korea — the country with the world’s lowest TFR, at 0.7 — the number of babies born in 2100 is on track to be 93 to 98 percent lower than the number of babies born this year. No disease or invading army has ever managed to destroy a country so thoroughly, and the word that springs to my mind, when contemplating such an event, is “biblical.” The question that preoccupies me is this one: Is it possible that there is indeed a God, and that he does not want us to be modern?

Modernity… eventually trips a self-destruct trigger. If modern people will not reproduce themselves, then modernity cannot last. One way or another, we’re going to return to a much older way of living.

Wow. Ms Perry gets it. The world is going back to the future “one way or another”.

Predictions

In 1900, Westerners were about a third of the world’s population. We’re now around 13 percent. Africans were 8 percent in 1900, now almost 40 percent. Squabbles over immigration are just getting started. With fewer Westerners coupled with uncontrolled non-Western immigration to the West, today’s vaunted diversity could descend into a multicultural miasma.

Decline of a different sort awaits northeast Asians, Asian Indians, Latin Americans and everyone else. With fewer people to support existing infrastructure and pension plans, societies will change in ways unforeseen. Things we take for granted could well  disappear altogether. The vast majority of the world’s people live in below-replacement fertility societies. Even sub-Saharan African TFRs are falling like a stone. Prolonged global fertility decline has never happened before.

Technological progress will stall:

Such breakthroughs depend on the rich world’s producing a sufficient number of young, hyper-intelligent people and putting them to those tasks… [those] who are now children are unlikely to be given the resources and freedom necessary to innovate in adulthood, since their talents will be put in service of keeping an enormous elderly population as comfortable as possible for as long as possible.

Old-age pensions will fold:

The Ponzi scheme of the old age pension is already collapsing… I wouldn’t be surprised if the British government abolished universal education before it abolished the state pension.

Revival of family life?

In the end, we will have to revert to the system that prevailed for all of human history, up until a century ago. The elderly will be cared for privately, mostly within the extended family, and mostly by women. Healthcare for the old will be mostly palliative, and the only safety net for the poor and lonely will be provided by charities. Lifespans will shorten.

Sounds like pre-modernity. As demographic winter sets in, extra-natural living arrangements such as polycules and other fads will not hold up. Less affluent societies will have fewer counsellors and social workers to enable them. A shrunken academia will churn out less woke garbage as gender/critical race studies go the way of the dinosaurs. Many will rediscover self-sufficiency and spirituality. Mankind could make a virtue of necessity.

Here is a dystopian but entirely plausible bombshell:

Until we get there, the only policy solution that is permissible within the dominant ideological framework [emphasis added] is legalized euthanasia.

And a sound projection:

[I]t is hyper-fertile groups like the Amish who will define the future of humanity. The world they create… will look neither post-apocalyptic nor techno-utopian. Rather, it will probably look much the way human societies have always looked: static, parochial, low-tech, clannish, religious, and dependent on sunlight and muscle.

“[D]ependent on [unmonetizable] sunlight and muscle.” Amen.

Ms Perry is saying that things will get worse before they get better. When you’re going through heck, keep going. This will take time. Modernity has humanity addicted to Economic Man’s produce-and-consume treadmill, where if you dispense with family, you can have a great career, upscale home and image-boosting threads and wheels. Beating an addiction is one of the hardest things in the world to do. But if my reading of Ms Perry is correct, the consequences of today’s birth dearth will inevitably wean us off what ails us.

There really won’t be any choice – survival of the species depends on it.

[…]

Postscript: Ms Perry is the author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. From the Amazon.com description: “This counter-cultural polemic from one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary feminism should be read by all men and women uneasy about the mindless orthodoxies of our ultra-liberal era.” A profamily polemic? It’s on my list.

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AUTHOR

Louis T. March

Louis T. March has a background in government, business, and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author, and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.