BOOK REVIEW Faith, fertility and
American dominance The Empty
Cradle by Phillip Longman
Reviewed
by Spengler
Rapid aging followed by depopulation
on a scale not seen since the collapse of the Roman
Empire threatens the modern world, writes Phillip
Longman, an American journalist. Buried inside his book
is the startling forecast that America's evangelical
Christians will breed themselves into a position of
global dominance. That idea horrifies Longman, who
spends most of his pages hatching schemes to prevent
this from happening.
In Longman's view,
modernity itself is to blame for the population debacle.
"Those who reject modernity," he argues, "seem to have
an evolutionary advantage,
whether they are clean-living Mormons, or Muslims who
remain committed to large families."
Having
looked into the abyss, Longman proposes to save
modernity from itself through tax incentives favoring
larger families, an unconvincing approach. But he at
least has taken the trouble to notice that modernity is
consuming itself. A few sound bites give the gist:
Germany could easily lose the equivalent
of the current population of East Germany over the
next half-century. Russia's population is already
decreasing by three-quarters of a million a year.
Japan's population meanwhile is expected to fall by as
much as one-third.
By mid-[21st]-century,
China could easily be losing 20-30% of its population
per generation.
Fertility rates are falling
faster in the Middle East than anywhere else on Earth,
and as a result the region's population is aging at an
unprecedented rate. It took 50 years for the United
States to go from a median age of 30 to today's 35. By
contrast, during the first 50 years of the 21st
century, Algeria will increase its median age from
21.7 to 40.
With deaths exceeding births by
well over half, current projections show Russian
population will fall by 29% by 2050.
Longman
cannot make up his mind as to whether economic
disincentives or existential despair account for
collapsing birthrates. He offers an economic explanation
as follows: In traditional society children were an
asset, a source of cheap farm labor in the present and
the equivalent of a pension later on. In the modern
world, children are a cost. Because parents and
non-parents both will receive pensions paid by the next
generation, no individual has an incentive to make
sacrifices to bring the next generation into the world.
In the absence of economic incentives to reproduce,
"Faith is increasingly necessary as a motive to have
children."
Longman contemplates the future with
trepidation:
... Where will the children of the future
come from? They will come disproportionately from
people who are at odds with the modern environment ...
or who, out of fundamentalist or chauvinistic
conviction, reject the game altogether.
And
again:
This much is sure: The uneducated have far
more children than the educated, and the religiously
minded generally have bigger families than do
secularists. In the United States, for example, fully
47% of people who attend church weekly say that the
ideal family size is three or more children, as
opposed to only 27% of those who seldom attend
church.
Longman is right about the
correlation between faith and fertility, but wrong about
the cause. Mortal existence is intolerable without the
promise of immortality. Animals breed and foster their
young out of instinct; humankind does so in the hope
that something of our mortal existence will survive us
in the continuation of our culture and the remembrance
of our children. Longman believes that the religious
continue to reproduce because the Bible or Koran so
instructs them. Religion in the broad sense means hope
of immortality. By reducing culture to a hedonist's
shopping basket of amusements, modernity destroys the
individual's hope for immortality, and with it his
incentive to create a new generation of humans.
Suicidal behavior is common among (for
example) stone-age tribes who have encountered the
modern world. One can extend this example to Tamil or
Arab suicide bombers (see Live and let die, Asia Times
Online, April 13, 2002). But the Europeans are the
modern world. Have the Europeans taken to heart
existentialism's complaint that man is alone in a
chaotic universe in which life has no ultimate
meaning, and that man responds to the anxiety about
death by embracing death ... it bears on a parallel
development, that is, the death of European
Christianity. Fifty-three percent of Americans say
that religion is very important in their lives,
compared with 16%, 14% and 13% respectively of the
British, French and Germans, according to a 1997
University of Michigan survey.
The
implications of this trend appall Longman, who warns,
"Such a trend, if sustained, would drive human culture
off its current market-driven, individualistic,
modernist course, and gradually create an anti-market
culture dominated by fundamentalist values." This
conclusion appears driven by prejudice. One may deplore
or admire US evangelicals, but it is hard to argue that
they will create an "anti-market culture". No one
admires free enterprise more than American Christians,
and one might conjecture that the growing proliferation
of their denominations in Asia, Africa and Latin America
will lend impetus to capitalist development.
The
United States will adjust painfully to its aging
population, argues Longman, and the concomitant aging of
the countries whence the US now recruits immigrants will
make it harder to compensate for declining native
fertility. What worries him most, however, is that
rising fertility among US evangelicals will shift the
balance of power towards the religious.
Seem far-fetched? Not since the fall of
the Roman Empire has the world ever experienced
anything on the scale of today's loss of fertility. As
sociologist [and Christian apologist] Rodney Stark
demonstrates ... at that time Christians had
marginally higher birthrates than pagans ... They also
had better life expectancy ...The resulting
demographic advantage, Stark argues, slowly
transformed a marginal Jesus movement into the
dominant cultural force of the Western world, as
Christian communities gradually outbred and outlived
their pagan counterparts. Demographic conditions today
suggest that a culture transformation of similar
proportions may be in store if secularists
increasingly avoid the growing economic cost of
raising children, while fundamentalists of all stripes
do not.
It costs today's US middle-class
family more than US$1 million to raise a
university-educated child, including more than $800,000
in lost wages, according to a study cited by Longman. He
proposes tax incentives to families with children, but
these seem tiny next to the costs. The reader must fall
back on his argument that faith, not pecuniary
calculation, will motivate today's prospective parents.
The reproductive power of an increasingly Christian
United States will enhance the strategic position of the
US over the next two generations, leaving infertile
Western Europe to sink slowly into insignificance.
The Empty Cradle by Phillip Longman
(Basic Books; New York, 2004). ISBN: 0465050506; 240
pages, US$26.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact [email protected] for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
an evolutionary advantage,
whether they are clean-living Mormons, or Muslims who
remain committed to large families." 
