If Jim Rob tells me to excerpt it I will.....
A BIOLOGICAL DEAD END
Four years ago, I caught Alan Keyes, the magnificently conservative African-American speechifier and perennial Presidential candidate, at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. “My friends,” he began, “we stand at the brink of the abyss.”
Wow! What a great opening, I thought. But perhaps not the best campaign slogan. Not exactly “It’s morning in America” or “A thousand points of light”, is it? Democratic politics requires the candidate on the stump, even when on the brink of the abyss, to keep his sunny side up and whistle a happy tune. And that goes double for conservatives.
But those of us in the media are under no obligation to ac-cen-tchu-ate the positive. And so I confess I was a little surprised when The Globe And Mail rounded up the latest grim statistics on Canada’s birth rate – it’s the lowest since records began, it’s fallen 25.4 per cent since 1992, the current fertility rate of 1.5 births per couple is well below “replacement rate” – and then concluded with a singalong chorus of “Happy Talk”:
Luckily for our future economic and fiscal well-being, Canada is well-positioned to counter the declining population trend by continuing to encourage the immigration of talented people to this country from overcrowded parts of the world.
Phew! So there’s nothing to worry about, eh? We stand at the brink of the abyss but we can fill it up with immigrants and continue on our path to the sunlit uplands. Thank goodness for that. Lucky, aren’t we?
Most 20-year projections – on economic growth, global warming, etc – are almost laughably speculative, and thus most doomsday scenarios are, too. The eco-doom-mongers get it wrong because they fail to take into account human inventiveness: “We can’t feed the world!” they shriek. But we develop more efficient farming methods with nary a thought. “The oil will run out by the year 2000!” But we develop new extraction methods and find we’ve got enough oil for as long as we’ll need it.
But human inventiveness depends on humans – and that’s the one thing we really are running out of. When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2005, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2025 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). We’re at that moment in the movie where the countdown’s begun and we have a choice of trying to defuse the bomb or accepting our fate.
The chaps at the Globe seem to have plumped for the latter. The design flaw of the radically secularist welfare state is that it depends on a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. The tax revenues that support its ever growing numbers of the elderly and retired have to be paid by equally growing numbers of the young and working. So, if Canadians can no longer be bothered having children, where’s that workforce going to come from?
Easy, say the complaceniks. “Talented people” from “overcrowded parts of the world”.
Okay, name one. In the ne plus ultra of doomsday tracts, The Population Bomb (1968), Paul Ehrlich begins with a blithely snobbish account of trying to reach his hotel in Delhi through the teeming hordes of humanity:
People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, people arguing and screaming. People thrust their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.
But 35 years on, even Delhi’s running out of people. Even Paul Ehrlich’s hell-hole of choice doesn’t have a high enough birth rate to maintain its population in the long term.
Yet the complaceniks cling to the long-held Canadian policy of using the Third World as a farm team and denuding developing societies of their best and brightest. Even if one accepts this as enlightened and progressive, rather than lazy and selfish, it’s unlikely to be much comfort for much longer. Birth rates in the so-called “overcrowded” parts of the world are already falling. India has a fast-growing middle-class and declining fertility. In 2010 or 2020 “talented people” will be much sought after by all countries within the developed-but-depopulating world: how confident should we be that an educated Indian will prefer our high-tax, low-temperature jurisdiction to Britain, Australia, the Continent? Or, come to that, his own country.
Even if the complacenik thesis were reliable, an acceleration of immigration to compensate for fertility decline would present huge problems for Canada, exacerbating geographical imbalances to the point where the present confederal arrangements would become even more indefensible. Young immigrant suburbs of Toronto would be working round the clock to maintain the Potemkin structures of empty, elderly Maritime provinces.
But, of course, even this isn’t reliable. Canada’s immigration policy is based on “family reunification”, which means that the hot, young “talented people” get to bring in not just less talented siblings and cousins but also elderly parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Which means that, in terms of increasing your worker-to-retiree ratio, it’s all but useless.
In Montreal a year or so back, I went to see a very good friend become a Canadian citizen. Two things struck me: One was that, when our newest Canadians stood up to take their oath of allegiance to Her Majesty, they were a markedly elderly crowd. The other occurred before the formal ceremony began. The lady judge, beautifully dolled up and looking far more vice-regal than Adrienne Clarkson, did the usual multiculti thing and boasted about all the countries these new citizens had come from. She began listing them in alphabetical order, in French: “Afghanistan, Algerie, Arabie Saudi…” At the end, she asked if anybody’s native land had been omitted. A hand shot up: “Iran.”
“No, no, I said that. ‘Iraq.’”
“Not Iraq. Iran.”
One English girl, one French man, nobody else from the developed world at all, no Latin Americans, none from the democratic Caribbean, a couple of Indians, couple of Chinese, and lots of Muslims. For Canada and western Europe, Islam is now the only remaining source of large-scale immigration.
Birth rates are declining all over the world – eventually every couple on the planet may decide to go for the western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. So light-fingered Svend should enjoy his deft heist of Canadian free speech (Bill C-250) while he can. A decade or three down the line, and an increasingly Islamified Canada is unlikely to be as easily cowed into silence as the Dominion’s beleagured Christian communities.
Svend’s sterner critics disapprove of gay liberation because homosexuality is a “biological dead end”. But the whole of post-Christian radical individualist western society is a biological dead end – a failure of conception, in the most literal sense. That leaves us with the fallback position, articulated by Booker Prize-winning novelist Yann Martel, in his much-quoted acceptance speech: Multiculti Canada, he declared approvingly, was “the greatest hotel on earth”. And when the occupancy rates go down and bookings dry up, what’s left?
There’s nothing new about this. The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. If Alan Keyes’ “We stand on the brink of the abyss” is too gloomy, the cuddlier slogans - like Bill Clinton’s “It’s about the future of all our children” – are redundant. A society that has no children has no future. And if the radical secularists have any proof to the contrary I’d love to hear it. In civilizational terms, people who need people are the unluckiest people in the world.
