I have just learned that my paternal granny was one of at least 11 children, born in England 1860-1880. My mother was one of 13, born 1896-1917. How they did breed!
Learning that fact a couple of hours after reading Richard Hoste’s VDARE piece on Gerhard Meisenberg’s book, I sank into some speculations of a natalist fundamentalist kind. Perhaps it is only when ordinary people (i.e. as opposed to just the underclass) breed like oysters, that you have a vigorous civilization. They don’t come much more vigorous than Victorian England.
Does anything else really matter much, I wonder? I become daily more certain that Western Civ. is on the way out, probably faster than we can easily believe. The fertility numbers are what Wall Streeters call “leading indicators.”
Is there any vigor without demographic vigor? Can anyone think of a civilization with TFR < 3 that lasted more than a couple of decades and accomplished anything of note?
I suppose we can always hope for the Singularity.
You are spot on here. Vigorous civilizations always have high birthrates because of the desire to both keep the civilization going and see it spread. Norway is not vigorous, but the Mormon community in America is. And the reproduction numbers bear that out. (I’m not a Mormon by the way, so I’m no boasting here).
Western civilization has been on a suicide plunge since the end of World War II. Unable to kill itself off by internal strife and ideological frenzy, it simply isn’t reproducing. America has done better than Europe, but not my much…
Of course, one of the signs of vigor in a civilization is religious devotion. Puts secularists, agnostics and atheists who are concerned about Western civilization in a bit of a pickle…
The rest of the world is following right behind. Even that pesky Muslim Middle-east is going to pass through the demographic transition in the next 20 years. Two of the MME “big three”, Turkey and Iran, already have below replacement TFR and the third one, Egypt, is not far behind. Of course Sub-Saharan Africa still has a TFR in the 4.0-4.5 area (India’s TFR is 2.85). The only entire region of the world that is still substantially above 3.
Didn’t someone say something about a black planet sometime ago? Or was that a “fear of a black planet”?
I don’t see why this shouldn’t be the case. I doubt the universe cares whether we prefer strict rules of evidence to supernatural consolations.
On the other hand, I don’t see that the historical evidence bears it out. Republican-era Romans, Golden-age Greeks, early-Tang Chinese and a good big segment of Renaissance Italians (like the one who said “man is the measure of all things”) seem not to have been devout in any way I recognize. Christianity, as Gibbon noted at great length, was a blight on Roman creativity. Buddhist devotion in China only heated up after the mid-8th-century collapse. And what vigor has been on display in the last few centuries of Muslim devotion? Sorry, no sale.
Ah, yes, the Republican-era Romans had a vigorous civilization. That’s why Rome remained a Republic that has survived until this day…Ooops. Republican-era Rome was riddled with corruption, brutality and violence. The idea that is is some golden age of culture is simply absurd. And the Romans had their gods, don’t overlook that. Gods of hearth and home, especially. While the elite may not have believed in them, the populace did.
As for Golden-age Greece, you need to read more Burhkhardt. The Greeks and Greek Civilization particularly. Religion was part of the web and woof of ancient Greek, even in Athens.
I can’t speak to the Chinese at all. But even amidst the Italian renaissance there was strong piety, again perhaps not among the elite, but definitely among the populace as a whole. And even among the elite, there was an unorthodox but vibrant faith among many. Like Mirandola, for example.
Not trying to make a sale, either. Just making a point.
And my point is: religion is necessary but not a sufficient component of a vigorous civilization. That religion may not necessarily be theistic or monotheistic, but there has to be a religious component. Culture flows from cult. Lack of cult = lack of culture. Lack of culture = decadence. Decadence = death of a civilization.
let’s have some historical perspective
1) all civilizations before modern times had a religious/pious component. the quality or quantity may vary, but it was there
2) all pre-modern societies lived in a malthusian world, or a transient to a malthusian world. the rapid population expansion of china between 1400-1800 was a sign of vigor, but that was because of improvements in land reclamation techniques + new crops, which increased per unit productivity and enabled demographic expansion.
the british case in the 19th century, or the american case in the 20th century (baby boom) were of a different quality as these were societies which to some extent had broken out of malthusian parameters (thanks to trade england no longer needed to feed itself)
Mr. Hume,
Good points. And completely consonant with my point, which is that religion is necessary but not sufficient. There are other factors as well, and there is no question that the incredible bounty of the modern world — the non-malthusian bliss we find ourselves in — is due to other very beneficial cultural convictions: a belief in limited government (which arose out of the religious event of the Reformation), the incredible advances of modern science (which grew out of a conviction that we lived in an orderly world), and the entrepeneurial spirit (Protestant work ethic, maybe?).
a belief in limited government (which arose out of the religious event of the Reformation), the incredible advances of modern science (which grew out of a conviction that we lived in an orderly world), and the entrepeneurial spirit (Protestant work ethic, maybe?).
yeah, this is a big area of debate. i would place it on #2, but then i probably have a personal bias toward science & tech.
anyway, my bigger point more clearly is that before 1800 the rate of population growth had nothing to do with “societal vigor” and everything to do with resources and ability to make use of those resources. ergo, china’s population expanded when better rice strains from champa were introduced. the introduction of champa rice didn’t generate anymore vigor, it just allowed for farmers to have more offspring, at least temporarily until the new malthusian limit was achieved. simillarly, the three field system and moldboard plow was important in driving population growth in early medieval northern france and the low countries, not some endogenous factor of inner vigor.
malthus himself would have been right if the british kept having children in the late 19th century. productivity gains would have been swallowed up by gains in population. where he went wrong was the demographic transition, whereby families started to shrinking despite greater wealth.
How would your theory explain the Roman population collapse in the West prior to the Germanic invasions? I am not aware that there was a food shortage in the West at that time.
(And, contra Bradlaugh’s assertion that Christianity was the bane of the Empire, the West was the least Christianized part of the Empire.)
How would your theory explain the Roman population collapse in the West prior to the Germanic invasions? I am not aware that there was a food shortage in the West at that time.
from what i can gather it had to do with enforcement of political order. in an unordered political environment individuals and communities obviously can’t plan well for the future, and so they don’t invest in a manner which would increase their future returns vis-a-vis present gains. there was for example an emphasis on defensible villages, which likely had a trade off in terms of where the best arable lands were (in italy settled areas started refocusing around elevated strong points). the same pattern is much more evident in china because the records are better and we have several cycles of unity and disunity. when political order collapses there is a diminution of collective action, the peasants scatter, and populations drop.
also, plagues started breaking out regularly around ~160 in the roman empire. it seems that a lot of diseases entered into common circulation between this date, and the black death, in europe (e.g., malaria was unknown in the early roman world, showing up in late antiquity and the early medieval period, and forced the evacuation of much of lowland italy). i suspect that it was probably just a tipping point as common trade networks started to become robust enough to create a genuine eurasian pathogen environment.
How would your theory explain the Roman population collapse in the West prior to the Germanic invasions?
also, do you have data on the magnitude of collapse? from what i have seen through demographic and economic sources the real collapse occurred after the early 5th century, when the barbarians broke through the limes permanently. prior to the early 400s the decline was either gradual, or it didn’t occur. two sources which hold to these positions:
The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, Perkins
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, Heather
also, note that there were major disruptive breakthroughs of barbarians regularly in the 3rd century, before a revival of order in the 4th.
…100% of Western European states from 1980 onward…?
I don’t think you can look at history to forecast the effects of the current demographic shifts. Barring some unknown event halting technological advance, current trends have little in common with historical trends. It seems to me that in the not to distant future, the vigorous growth will be in artificial intelligence, robots and automated military hardware. The areas where vigorous population growth historically was a plus, manufacturing and defense, will compete for resources with large human populations. In a world where workers can be manufactured instead of bred, the only place where vigorous human population growth is a plus would be as constituencies in democratically governed states.
Mark, as some form of religious belief is and has long been a very widespread human characteristic, I think you will be pushed to find any society, successful or unsuccessful, without it. Looking at your later conversation with Mr. Hume, I’m not sure you would disagree.
In trying to identify why civilizations succeed or fail, it may be more useful to look not at the absence or presence of religious faith, but at how different faiths have varied in beliefs, intensity, observance and enforcement.
Bradlaugh,
Have you read Spengler’s Decline of the West? I found his arguments pretty convincing, though some will suggest that his models are overly deterministic.
My late father was a somewhat eccentric, conservative English professor at a university in Virginia who was profoundly influenced by Spengler; I was introduced to Spengler’s work in my quest over recent years to learn more about my dad, so my opinion of his work is hardly unbiased. And I don’t know that I’d take Spengler’s historical philosophy literally, but I would suggest that the preeminent modernist writers–Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Yeats–all shared Spengler’s sense of “spiritual exhaustion and imminent catastrophe.” Pound, in the aftermath of WWI described Western Civilization as “an old bitch gone bad in the teeth.”
I would suggest that rather than seeing birth rates as “leading indicators”, they’re a symptom of the natural death that all civilizations must face. Having been exposed to Spengler I sometimes feel like Odin having drunk from the well of the fates and knowing what was to come, resigned to knowing what lay ahead…
Global fertility rate is now 2.5.
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=global+fertility+rate
Given that Sub-Saharan Africa’s TFR is around 4.5 (population 800 million) and South Asian’s (india, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) TFR is 2.85 (population 1.3 billion) and the total world population is 6.7 billion, one can easily calculate the the TFR for the rest of the world is already below replacement at 2.06.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fertility_rate_world_map.PNG
@David Hume
Hume,
See William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976).
@David Hume
Mr. Hume,
See William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976).
mark, ok, good citation. i read that book, but i will trust more recent estimates of population which have more robust data sets (in particular, ward perkins book which is cliometric in orientation). the nation of late roman demographics though is necessarily guesswork, so i have only moderate confidence.
And one more book for Bradlaugh on the roots of the Italian Renaissance in religious devotion: Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125-1325 by Augustine Thompson, OP.
@kurt9
Becoming less poor has pretty much the same effect on blacks as on everyone else.
Barbados’s total fertility rate is below replacement :
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&idim=country:BRB&dl=en&hl=en&q=fertility+rate+barbados
Botswana’s is pretty low for africa :
http://www.google.com/search?q=botswana+fertility+rate&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1
Even gabon’s is getting low :
http://www.google.com/search?q=gabon+fertility+rate&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1
For gabon, i have seen numbers that were higher by about 1.0 but that 3.35 figure looks like something i read about the fertility rate among the highly educated in that country.
Ironically, for those particular countries it’s not such a good thing imho for the educated classed to be the ones restricting their reproductive output. One would have liked the presumably smarter people outbreeding the not so smart. Oh well,such is modernity.
Even in haiti the rate is in the 3.5 vicinity and I fully expect it to go down. Large 4 or 5 kid families are becoming anachronistic . The other caribbean islands all seem to be below 2.5.
@ogunsiron
Yes, and Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced a 6% annual growth rate in GDP during much of this decade, up until the recent crash. There is lots of Chinese investment flowing into Africa these days. It is not inconceivable that Africa will be at the same standard of living as China is today in 2040.
Haiti was actually on the verge of sustained economic growth when the earthquake hit.