Argentina is dying. According to Austral University’s human resources department, the birth rate has fallen to 1.4 per woman. This means that, unless far more take heed of the biblical exhortation to be fruitful and multiply, in the not too distant future the country will once again be the uninhabited wilderness it was before we humans arrived.
If it is any consolation, much the same is happening in the rest of the world. After having looked away for many years, politicians and others in Japan, South Korea, Russia, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Greece, Spain and most other countries have finally realised that before the century is out, their peoples could be well on the way to extinction. Apart from Israel, where what Henri Bergson called “élan vital” remains a powerful force, about the only countries that so far have managed to buck this trend are in Africa, but there are signs that they too are beginning to adopt modern ways. What is seen as development may have many merits, but it would appear that “empowering” women by educating them and encouraging them to pursue a career is tantamount to agreeing to a collective death pact.
As happens everywhere else, those worried by the sudden decline in the Argentine birth rate, which at the start of this century hovered around replacement level, are prone to attribute it to local conditions, such as the huge increase in poverty, changes in marriage customs and so on. All this is true enough, as are many other factors such as the high cost of housing and the assumption that in order to maintain a decent standard of living most families need at least two wage-earners. However, while such explanations would be convincing if low birth rates were being recorded only in societies going through severe economic crises, this is far from being the case, with the wealthiest countries, some of which boast excellent social-welfare systems, being among the hardest-hit.
Pessimistic demographers warn that, after the fall in birth rates reaches a certain stage, recovery becomes well-nigh impossible. If they are right, the Japanese, South Koreans, almost all Europeans and, soon after, Americans both North and South, will vanish from the face of the earth towards the end of this century or, if they cling to life tenaciously enough, in the 22nd. This doleful prospect, which came into view many years ago, does not seem to disturb that many people. On the contrary, most blithely hope that nothing untoward happens before they themselves depart after living for decades on the pensions they have been promised.
Their nonchalant attitude towards what is fast approaching would surely have come as a surprise to those who came before them and willingly sacrificed themselves on behalf of future generations they knew they would never see. Once upon a time, the long-term fate of one’s own people, culture and language was a matter of great concern to most intelligent human beings, but it would seem that such outdated and, needless to say, reactionary sentiments have no place in today’s world. Most live for the moment and are uninterested in what tomorrow now seems certain to bring.
Has what some dismiss as “the Enlightenment project” run its course and, instead of leading to a democratic, fairly egalitarian and phenomenally prosperous world, ended up by opening the door to one that, at best, could resemble an enormous geriatric care home and, at worst, a brutal charnel house? People on both extremes of the ideological spectrum have long enjoyed blaming the free-thinkers who dreamt it up for what they most dislike. Leftists and progressives say it was responsible for unleashing dog-eat-dog capitalism and, by spawning the industrial revolution that would spew out vast quantities of greenhouse gases, helped turn the planet into what could be an inferno. Conservatives stress that Communism and Nazism owed much to Enlightenment thinkers, especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and by doing so put the world on the path to the Gulag Archipelago and Auschwitz. Such charges may be unjust, but there can be little doubt that much is terribly wrong with a way of life whose beneficiaries refuse to do anything much to ensure its survival.
Would driving up the birth rate to a replacement level require authoritarian measures? If it did, dictatorial regimes – like the ones in China, Russia and Iran – would surely be applying them, but it would appear that even they suspect that they would not work. Despite the many differences between them and the democratic governments of Western countries, they share with them the belief that economic performance has to take precedence over all else, either because military strength and national prestige depend on it or because it decides elections, and so women need to do their bit to keep production going.
One reason why few politicians and cultural eminences like to think much about the inevitable consequences that a low birth rate will have on human societies is their awareness that it has to do with the role of women. Until “hatcheries”, like those imagined by Aldous Huxley in his prophetic novel Brave New World, take care of the problem, they will continue to be the only people who are able to provide a solution, but unless motherhood comes back into fashion very soon, Argentina and most other countries will simply wither away, leaving behind nothing but scattered artefacts to bemuse the animals that bump into them.
It may be repugnant to suggest that the future of our species would look less alarming if women were to forgo much of what has come their way since the feminist liberation movement got into full swing. Among other things, it would entail admitting that the viciously misogynistic and ultra-patriarchal Taliban have it right and that they all should, once again, be confined to the kitchen and the bedroom, but the sad truth is that unless cultural norms do change drastically in the next few years, humanity’s spell as the lord of creation will turned out to be far briefer than that of the dinosaurs. Their reign lasted for about 165 million years, while ours could be over after having been around for barely 300,000, with the end coming not as the result of a nuclear holocaust, a catastrophic climate change or an asteroid strike like the one that did for our reptilian predecessors, but because we as a species lost the will to live.
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