EXCEPT THAT THE CYLONS ARE AMERICAN:

Navigating Battlestar America: Sci-Fi Show Asks Real-World Questions (Alex Wainer, 6/14/2006, BreakPoint)

[G]alactica has quite deliberately shaped itself as a metaphoric exploration of America in the post-9/11 era, with the democratic Colonials as the U.S. and the Cylons as radical Islamists determined to destroy the West and its values. But one episode from this spring, “The Captain’s Hand,” was particularly relevant for one of the big questions facing us: Can a civilization increasingly downsizing itself confront a growing Muslim population that is increasingly “over here” in Western nations?

Like most contemporary dramatic television episodes, “The Captain’s Hand” has at least two plots. In the episode’s main story, the Colonialists’ abortion policy is brought into question. The subplot involves a young woman who has smuggled herself aboard the Galactica seeking an abortion, which is legal, though she comes from a colony that frowns on the procedure—sort of like their version of the Bible Belt. When President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), who has always supported abortion rights, expresses her support for the young woman’s decision, Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos) urges her to reconsider. President Roslin is sitting under the whiteboard where she keeps a running count of the usually declining human population which now numbers 49,584.

Adama: I hate to say this. Because I know that this is a political issue. The fact is that that number doesn't go up very often.

Roslin: I fought for a woman's right to control her body my entire career. No. No.

Adama: I'm just remembering what you said. Right after the Cylon attack. That if we really want to save the human race, we'd better start having babies.

Adama’s words found real-world echoes in a column written by Mark Steyn that points out at length that the West—that is, Europe, England, and the United States, as well as other modern and developed nations—face their disappearance this century not because we will be outfought on the battlefield, but because of the crisis of childlessness. Western nations, as well as Japan, China and other countries, are, simply put, not replacing their current populations by having at least two children per couple. In the West, populations are dropping—at least white populations are—but in Europe, Muslim populations continue to grow. Steyn and others argue that it’s a simple mathematical progression that in two generations or more, Islam will have triumphed without a battle simply because the self-imposed depopulation of the West will cause it to lose cultural weight, creating a vacuum to be filled by Islam.

Steyn asserts that, in the real world, we are at war with radical Islam, which finds its foot soldiers from growing masses who are confident of an eternal reward for their deaths in the battle with the West and face an enemy with no clear reason to fight them:

That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"—as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda—lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism—is collectively the real suicide bomb.

Modernity provides the conditions for diminishing procreation. Speaking in purely economic terms, when an agrarian society changes to an industrialized, urbanized society, the need for children to help with the family farm’s crops decreases and the outgo of family wealth in the cost of raising and educating them receives very little in return. That’s the case Glenn Harlan Reynolds makes in an article about declining birthrates. He also discusses how parenting has simply become more difficult as overprotectiveness and the need to cart kids to endless activities drains the joy out of raising children. And this increases the pressure to have fewer or no children.

Add to that the assumptions of autonomous individualism—the ease of birth control, consumerism, the rise of the welfare state and other factors, all contributing to rationales for abortion—and you have a formula for a birthrate under the replacement level.

It requires an astonishing level of self-absorption to think that raising children has become more difficult because you need to drive the little rug rats to little league than it was when you lived in fear of not being able to feed them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 22, 2006 10:21 AM