Summum Bonum

Russel Shorto’s long NYT piece on Europe’s demographic decline seems objective. He mentions early Pope Benedict and the “values” arguments:

“More broadly and significant, social conservatives tie the low birthrate to secularism. After arguing for decades that the West had divorced itself from God and church and embraced a self-interested and ultimately self-destructive lifestyle, abetted above all by modern birth control, they feel statistically vindicated. ‘Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future,’ Pope Benedict proclaimed in 2006. ‘Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present.’ ”

While acknowledging this argument, Shorto then ignores it for the rest of his essay: “The spiritual concerns aside, though, [but why should they be ‘aside’?] the main threats to Europe are economic.” It’s a Thomas Frank “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” type of argument that looks for the “real” economic forces behind couples’ decision. But economic motives alone can’t explain this new phenomenon.

According to Shorto, birth rates are lowest in Italy, Greece, Spain, South Korea and Japan because “their superficial commitment to modernity, to a 21st-century lifestyle, is fatally at odds with a view of the family structure that is rooted in the 19th century.” Women are allowed into the workplace, but still expected to bear most responsibilities at home, too–and with inadequate government support. Result: fewer kids.He claims that daycare policies in Scandinavia, and France’s long-term pro-natalist policies, actually produce a higher fertility rate. But France’s is still only 1.9 average children per family (replacement is 2.1), and Scandinavia’s is only 1.8 or so:  “Then again, for the past several decades France’s fertility rate has been about the same as that in the United Kingdom, which has much more limited pro-natalist policies.” The fact that these southern Mediterranean societies also lost their faith at the same time is not part of his argument, apparently.

The U.S. has a higher fertility rate, according to Shorto’s informants, not because of suportive government policies but because of more flexible labor markets and social attitudes. One of his sources says: “ ‘You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.’ An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.”

There’s a sad, twilight, feel to this whole discussion: “Listening to Karl Gröger, director of [Dessau’s] department of building, is disorienting; where local politicians are supposed to cheer development, he was standing in the midst of his city’s industrial infrastructure and saying, in effect, ‘Someday all of this will be wilderness.’ ”

It’s exactly this situation that P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men (distorted by the movie, IMHO) addressed.