Redbrickbear said:
whiterock said:
Redbrickbear said:
interesting account. Not sure there is a major body of thought that declining religiousity is a major factor in declining birthrates.
hell, climate change alarmism and Queer Theory are religions (and not very good ones). The latter surgically preempts fertility, and the latter explicitly advocates reducing birth rate.
Yea,
I think the big question is that if secular post-Christian counties in the West are back having collapsing fertility…but so are religious Islamic countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Then who can prevent fertility collapse?
cycles. Fertility will rebound somewhere, sometime. Always has.
Today, we tour Ankor Wat, Chichen Itza, the Pyramids, etc.... Somewhere out in the future, people will be touring the ruins of NY, Paris, Beijing, etc.... Today, we marvel at the red haired peoples buried in kurgans in Central Asia. Where did that red hair come from? Western Europe? Densovians? 2 thousand years from now, people will marvel at all the mummified bodies buried in meal boxes encased in concrete throughout North America and Europe. What will they call our culture? Celtic 2.0?
Something changes. Maybe the weather. Maybe a new tool, or a new resource, and life gets easier. The population expands. Room becomes an issue. So you invade adjacent lands. Consolidate. Invade some more. You realize this is a good business model. Eventually, you are not in a hut on the slopes of the Altai. You've cut smoldering swathes thru most of the known world, dominate a very big piece of it and intimidate much of the rest of it. You settle into the lush river basin and start acculturing into an easier life in a land of plenty. A thousand years later, you find yourself engaging in a few centuries of immense struggle against maurading Ottomans, emerging as the center of an aging, fading empire controlling much of Eastern Europe. Then, an ambitious neighbor gets out over the skis on foreign policy and.....boom....just a few decades later, you are a small nation in a small country fighting to retain Magyar identity and language. Things rise and fall. A few amid legend, like the Huns. Most without notice. Those Ottomans started out somewhere not too far from the Altai, too. As I type this, Erdogan dreams of returning his peoples to lost glory. Cycles.
So many microcosm examples around us. We think we are at the end of history. But we are just little pieces sliding around in response to forces we cannot control. History tells us our doom is only a question of when. Civilization waxes and wanes. But mankind goes on forever.
Today, we call it wokeness. But every successful civilization has at some point devolved in to narcissistic nonsense that stifles productivity, wastes wealth on things that do not matter, ultimately making that civilization vulnerable to the very forces which it once embodied. America isn't over. Haven't even crested quite yet. Have a few centuries to go. We are blessed in ways no others have been. We may go on longer than any before us.
