Are we "progressing" toward extinction?

Abortion, of course, is the most direct assault on life of all. Since Roe v. Wade was judicially conjured into law in 1973, the total death toll has been at least 46 million according to CDC statistics. That’s more than 14% of the current US population. Even this number leaves out states like California, who refuse to keep statistics. Abortion has gone from what even liberals saw as an unhappy practice, to the left’s loudest and most militant rallying cry. What can one say about a culture whose most sacred institution is the right to murder its own children?

The West is dying. Our culture has become enchanted with its own self-satisfied and self-sterilizing disease. You cannot argue with the numbers. Any fertility rate below the replacement rate just factually means a dwindling of our kind. The replacement rate is 2.1. The fertility rate in the US is 1.9. In Europe and parts of Asia the rates are even lower. If some individual were responsible for such a decline, we would call it genocide. It would be a war crime.

There can only be one rational objection to the argument that we are marching steadily toward our own extinction. That argument is that the numbers will change. Maybe once we have saved the planet and gotten our population down to some conveniently sustainable level, the fertility rate will naturally rebound on its own. Unfortunately, we’ve become quite accustomed to having our way with nature, then discarding her as soon as we are done with her. Unless our culture fundamentally changes, a rebound of the fertility rate is out of the question. We didn’t decide on a low birth rate because we were running out of resources. Most of the world’s people are materially better off than their grandparents were in the 1950’s – and yet in every continent but Africa fertility rates continue to decline. People didn’t stop procreating as the result of a well-informed collective decision – some national, or international “conversation” we had in the 1960’s. People have stopped having children chiefly for two reasons. First, more and more effective contraception has become available. Second, the family as an institution has lost much, and in some cases all, of its cultural value. People can howl about personal choice, sexual freedom, and female empowerment all they want to – but we can see plainly both the cultural disruption and the hard statistical consequences of the road we’ve chosen. Facts, no matter how inconvenient – are facts.

Most Americans have become accustomed to their laissez-faire morality, their self-interested use of money, and their illusion of personal freedom. They love these things much more than they love posterity. In every generation from the beginning of the world, many people have loved themselves more than anyone else at heart. In the past, however, few whole cultures have wedded themselves so fervently to the god of the insatiable “me”. None that have done so have survived. Societies survive only because the people who constitute them are willing to believe in, and sacrifice for, things greater than their own passing interests. Real things. Things that patter around on tiny unshod feet. They’ve been willing to sacrifice. To make commitments. They’ve been able, somehow, to believe in something grander than veganism, and to look for wisdom from more plausible sources than Greta Thunberg. If our parents or grandparents fell short of our ideals – at least they had them. If they gave birth to less than perfect families, at least they had some solid notion of what a family was.

It would be a mistake to believe that conservatives can somehow coexist with what our enemies have become. We shouldn’t be complacent about out-breeding them. While traditional Christian families do have more children than demographically similar progressives, they still have fewer than they used to. Moreover, as the left propagates by conversion rather than by procreation, it effectively sterilizes a substantial fraction of conservative children sooner or later. I know many older Christians who lament the loss of an adult child to the general pathology of leftwing self-loathing and navel-gazing malaise. Children would interfere with their yoga, their social life, and their competitive consumption. Progressives not only murder their own children, they functionally sterilize as many other peoples’ children as they can. The culture war is, in the end, a fight to the death.

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