“IT'S CALLED GOSSIP AND OF COURSE IT'S AN OBSESSION OF MINE -ANDY WARHOL
In Europe a decline in religious faith has contributed to the sterilization of the culture. Fertility rates tell the story: The former citadel of Christianity is no longer replacing its population. A similar trend is apparent in America’s “blue” states: Fertility rates in New England now resemble those of northern Europe.Conventional wisdom ascribes changes in fertility rates to economic conditions. But such conditions are only part of the story. Fertility rates reflect people’s confidence in life. Such confidence reflects not only an economic calculation but also an existential one: it is a measure of people’s faith in the value and purpose of life. Phillip Longman, a New America Foundation demographer who has studied the “divide between who is having children and who isn’t,” notes that “religiously minded Americans are putting far more of their genes into the future than their liberal, secular counterparts. . . . Fertility correlates strongly with religious conviction. In the United States, fully 47 percent of people who attend church weekly say that their ideal family is three or more children. By contrast, only 27 percent of those who seldom attend church want that many kids.” What liberalism needs is a leader who recognizes that liberals have been too long suckled in an outworn secularism, and who offers instead a program of creative re-engagement with a spiritual culture that inspired the painting of Giotto and the poetry of Dante, the Moses of Michelangelo and his Sistine frescoes, the cantatas of Bach and the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven.
-CBS News
April 22 2008
posted by IVAN @ 5:56 PM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
The issue of declining fertility rates if one that I have studied intensely since Longman - a man whom I greatly respect despite the criticism he gets from both Left and Right - first wrote the article two and a half full years ago.
The issue is quite clear, but many professional demographers have pointed out it is not so simple as emancipation of women, because of the fact that in Red states of America more women work that in the lowest-fertility states of Southen Europe and East Asia.
What it may reflect, actually, is that the culture of secular Europe, Blue America, Canada and New Zealand is so thoroughly defeminised that anything remotely non-masculine and competititve has no role. With or without the welfare systems so hated by the Right, the industrial economy in these regions is essentially little more than competition for industrial labour, which explains things like their militant unions and high living costs (which, I really must firmly emphasise, also reflect their generally mountainous topography and consequent lack of land.
Only in rural-like suburbs and exurbs of Australia and Red America has labour been retained in a form which allows for some retention of nurturing femininity. With this retention comes a culture that has more confidence in not being robbed by government or nature of opportunity, and thus higehr religiosity and fertility.
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