April 5, 2004
PERHAPS THE DODO CHOSE EXTINCTION?:
Eurabia? (NIALL FERGUSON, 4/04/04, NY Times Magazine)
[C]onsider the extraordinary prospect of European demographic decline. A hundred years ago -- when Europe's surplus population was still crossing the oceans to populate America and Australasia -- the countries that make up today's European Union accounted for around 14 percent of the world's population. Today that figure is down to around 6 percent, and by 2050, according to a United Nations forecast, it will be just over 4 percent. The decline is absolute as well as relative. Even allowing for immigration, the United Nations projects that the population of the current European Union members will fall by around 7.5 million over the next 45 years. There has not been such a sustained reduction in the European population since the Black Death of the 14th century. (By contrast, the United States population is projected to grow by 44 percent between 2000 and 2050.)With the median age of Greeks, Italians and Spaniards projected to exceed 50 by 2050 -- roughly 1 in 3 people will be 65 or over -- the welfare states created in the wake of World War II plainly require drastic reform. Either today's newborn Europeans will spend their working lives paying 75 percent tax rates or retirement and ''free'' health care will simply have to be abolished. Alternatively (or additionally), Europeans will have to tolerate more legal immigration.
But where will the new immigrants come from? It seems very likely that a high proportion will come from neighboring countries, and Europe's fastest-growing neighbors today are predominantly if not wholly Muslim. A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize -- the term is not too strong -- a senescent Europe.
This prospect is all the more significant when considered alongside the decline of European Christianity. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark today, fewer than 1 in 10 people now attend church once a month or more. Some 52 percent of Norwegians and 55 percent of Swedes say that God did not matter to them at all. While the social and sexual freedoms that matter to such societies are antithetical to Muslim fundamentalism, their religious tolerance leaves these societies weak in the face of fanaticism.
If one believed in Darwinism, one would be forced to say that secularism is an evolutionary dead-end. No, strike that, if one believes in Darwinism one is likely blind to such truth. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2004 8:17 AM
Or if one believed in Darwinism one might say: "Who cares! Let's party."
Posted by: Peter B at April 5, 2004 8:52 AMOn the other hand, I've seen this posited as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. To wit, technological societies inevitably become less religously oriented which in turns leads to their senescence and collapse. This happens on time scales short enough that the technological societies never make it across the interstellar gaps (which will probably take us another 100 - 200 years). So it's not clear that being a Darwinist blinds one to this possibility.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at April 5, 2004 9:47 AMAOG:
That's somewhat of a generalisation.
Rome for example didn't really need a technological society in order to collapse.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at April 5, 2004 10:05 AMAOG -
Einstein says "You can't get here from there".
The Fermi Paradox makes sense only if Fermi believed that Einstein was wrong.
Posted by: Uncle Bill at April 5, 2004 10:11 AMIf I may be so bold….
I have for some time been considering religion from a purely Darwinist standpoint… that is, what I would term (I’ve never heard it elsewhere) “anthropological Darwinism”, that is, that certain cultural mores sustain themselves because, over the multi-century or even millenia term, the cultures that adopt them are more likely to survive.
Thus even an atheist must acknowledge that religion must play some integral role, or it would have died out itself long ago.
Setting aside my own personal beliefs or lack thereof, it would seem Europe seems to be pointing this out in spades. (Not to mention Russia, which turned against the church visciously, and will now likely be a hundred years recovering, if at all.) The churches are emptying, and Europe is dying.
Maybe they have nothing to do with each other.
Maybe.
Andrew:
Very well said.
It is also true that as societies become more modern, the birth rate declines precipitously.
I don't know of any modern society where the native borns of 3 generations or more have a fertility rate of 2.1 or greater.
Secularism could very well be a dead end. But so could modernity, as AOG notes above, and I have mentioned before.
M. Choudhury;
You're making a logical error. A→B that doesn't mean that ~A→~B. I.e., if all technological civilations (A) are doomed to senescese (B) that says nothing about what happens to non-technological societies (~A) such as Rome.
Uncle Bill;
I'm sure OJ doesn't want us to rehash the Fermi Paradox here, but even if we could go only 1% of the speed of light, we could colonize the entire galaxy in about 10 megayears. Based on current knowledge, nuclear powered spacecraft should be able to get up to about 3% of the speed of light. Could you be more specific about what Einstein said that invalidates the Fermi Paradox?
The Europeans' problem isn't their low fertility rates, it's their welfare programmes.
Halving the population in fifty years isn't intrinsically bad, unless the oldest generations consume today's surplus, and depend upon the youngest generations for survival.
Unless the median number of children per family matches the average number per family, this is really just a weeding-out of the socially/psychologically/emotionally infertile.
Given enough time, the developed world will be populated by those who like children, and their descendants.
At that point, populations will grow again.
Due to their high fiscal maintenance requirements, Europe's native populations might be enveloped by a competing society/religion, but that won't be America's fate, nor, (probably), Japan's.
I would also bet against that being Russia's fate, but at the rate their population's shrinking, Russia itself may shrink, calving more nations.
Also, technology might play a role...
If women want to have kids in their late 40s and 50s, artificial external wombs, or cloned teenage replacement reproductive systems, might make parents out of people who might otherwise remain childless.