07/12/2024
[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]
Thursday July 11th was World Population Day. I bet you didn’t know that.
Explanatory quote from a “sustainable development” website:
World Population Day is celebrated annually on 11 July to focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues.
In 1989, the then-Governing Council of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) established the Day as an outgrowth of the interest generated by the Day of Five Billion, which was observed on 11 July 1987.
World Population Day 2024, IISD’s SDG Knowledge Hub
So the Day of Five Billion was 37 years ago. What’s the number now? Our own Census Bureau says eight billion and change. Is that good or bad?
It depends who you ask.
People with opinions about demographics fall into two well-populated groups: Doomsters and Boomsters.
Doomsters have been more prominent: the names Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich come to mind unbidden.
Malthus — the Reverend Thomas Malthus, to give him his proper title — was the English gent who, back in 1798, published a book arguing that the increase in population would always outpace the increase in the food supply.
Biologist Paul Ehrlich, 170 years later, in collaboration with his wife Anne, published a book titled The Population Bomb telling us — this was in 1968 — that we were on the brink of a Malthusian catastrophe caused by overpopulation and resource depletion, and that, famous quote: “in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”
There are the classic Doomsters. The Rev. Malthus is of course long departed. Paul Ehrlich is still with us, last time I looked, at age 92, and still ringing the alarm for an overpopulation disaster any day now.
Boomsters haven’t left such a deep imprint on the general consciousness. Forty years ago economist the late Julian Simon challenged Ehrlich on resource depletion, and won the bet. But nobody much remembers that.
The public sphere has recently acquired an outspoken Boomster, though: Elon Musk. Having himself fathered a number of children variously reported as somewhere between eight and twelve, Musk wants us all to emulate him and prophesies — yes! — disaster if we don’t
Clip of Musk speaking: “People have no idea how fast population’s going to collapse. Y’know, basically civilization will die with a whimper in adult diapers.”
"The birth rate is dropping, which leads to a civilization that dies not with a bang, but with a whimper in adult diapers.
One of the things that is overlooked by most historians is the role of low birth rate in the decline of civilizations. Prosperity destroys the birth rate." pic.twitter.com/cQYxBr8VBc
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) May 7, 2024
Paul Ehrlich, I note by way of contrast, had only one child; Thomas Malthus had three.
Where does Radio Derb stand on this, the world wants to know?
Put me down as a qualified Boomster, on the same side as Elon Musk but willing to voice some reservations that Musk, for the sake of his many business enterprises, is wise to keep silent about.
My sentiments are all for high fertility. I cherish fond memories of my 1950s English childhood, growing up in a street teeming with kids.
John Derbyshire’s Primary School circa 1956
I adore my own family, wish I had more kids myself, and I nod along in approval when someone says or writes that the family is the foundation of civilized life.
Yeah, yeah: the family is also the Mafia, the Borgias, and gangster-despots like the Kims in North Korea. I’ve covered that elsewhere; go to my website, Opinions, Straggler Number 66. I concluded then, and reaffirm now, that
In our civilization, the Anglo-Saxon civilization, we care for our families, but not too much. This works well, much better than any other arrangement, for both the individual and the larger society.
Note that the word “civilization” turned up in my last two quotes there, the one from Elon Musk and the one from myself. I described myself as “a qualified Boomster.” Musk seems to be of the same kidney; and it’s on that word “civilization” that our qualifications turn.
We’re thinking about a world with way more people in it than it currently has. That of course raises issues of resource depletion, which we can argue about dispassionately.
However, it also raises another issue; one that, under what Bill Buckley called “the structure of prevailing taboos,” is hard to argue about dispassionately.
”A world with way more people in it than it currently has”? OK, but what kind of people? Yes, we just climbed over the fence into the minefield. I’ll tread as carefully as I can, but those little suckers are everywhere.
Just to get you oriented, here are some random fertility rates, children per woman, from the CIA World Factbook. These are all 2024 estimates. Remember that for a stable population, neither increasing nor decreasing, you want 2.1 children per woman.
You get the idea, and I’m sure this is nothing new to you. There are some surprises there in the middle of the range: Is Haiti really that low? Is Israel really that high?
The general pattern is plain enough, though. Stable societies under rational government have mostly low fertility; trashcan countries under gangster rule have mostly burgeoning high fertility.
Another way of putting it: countries with high levels of illegal immigration — countries that are a preferred destination for boat people and border-jumpers — are mostly low fertility; countries of origin of the boat people and border-jumpers, mostly high fertility.
Having got this far without stepping on a mine, I’ll get even bolder: race and religion are major issues here.
It’s all very well for us Boomsters to smile fondly thinking about streets full of little children at play; but currently most of those streets are in Afghanistan and the Congo and similar locales. Doesn’t that dim our enthusiasm?
Yes, it sure dims mine.
So what’s my answer? Borders!
Where the world at large is concerned, I have a longstanding belief that there are zones of civilization and zones of barbarism. When I said that to a friend once, he said I’d been reading too much Chinese history.
There might be something in that. Yes: I can relate to Chinese people of the strong, stable dynasties always looking warily across the borders of the Empire to the illiterate nomadic barbarians beyond.
We of the Western world are civilized. Elsewhere there are zones of barbarism. Sub-Saharan Africa is mostly a zone of barbarism [Explosion] … darn it, I stepped on a mine. Never mind, I still have both legs … A fair part of the Islamic world can also be counted as barbaric.
It’s a modern style of barbarism. These people are not illiterate. They don’t eat their meat raw after tenderizing it under their horses’ saddles. I get that. And of course some individuals in those zones could, after proper scrutiny, be admitted for settlement into our civilized societies and become useful, law-abiding members thereof.
Collectively, though, the barbarian zones add nothing to humanity, to the arts and sciences, to advancing the general good. I don’t want them flooding in unrestrained across our borders.
If we in the civilized world have fertility issues, which we surely do, let’s dedicate ourselves to finding solutions. Surely our politics and our technology are up to the task.
Plenty of affordable housing for young people would be a good start. We just need to buy the land and build on it. Why is this difficult?
Meanwhile I want the borders of civilization defended at all points, the barbarians fenced off in their own stinking, corrupt, chaotic countries to sort out their own destinies.
The emperors of old China got it right. And when they relaxed their vigilance, they suffered dire consequences.
J
ohn Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
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