Anyone in need of a break from the frivolity of so much Western politics should spend time in Poland. The conditions there, I was pleased to find on my first ever visit last month, are highly favourable to thoughtful debate about important matters. The country does not go through the tedious ritual of pretending, for instance, that importing endless numbers of foreigners with no ancestral attachment to Poland is an enriching exercise. This may have something to do with the fact that the Polish elite, whatever their other faults, never subjected their country to such a treacherous demographic experiment in the first place, so there is no need to dream up an ex post facto rationalisation. Nor is Polish conservatism plagued by the predominance, so regrettable in Britain, of free market fundamentalists who obsess over GDP while failing to grasp that all economic activity takes place within a pre-existing culture whose health is paramount.
After all, is more money such a virtue if people are titillated into spending it on mindless pleasures which blunt their capacity for fulfilment? Why store up wealth for the future at all if, family life having been kicked from its honoured plinth and left to rub shoulders with polyamorous perverts and worldly metrosexuals in the marketplace of competing lifestyles, there are no children to grow up and make use of it? The purpose of my visit to Warsaw was to discuss this second problem at an event organised by Ordo Iuris and committed to averting Europe’s quiet crisis of fertility.
Poles have learned the hard way that there are no holidays from history. This breeds an alertness to potential catastrophe, along with a healthy intolerance for those who seek to distract us from the basics of civilisational vigilance by glorifying the sort of sterile hedonism on display at Pride parades. Nevertheless, Poles would be the first to admit that with a fertility rate of 1.38 births per woman (2.1 is the minimum required for a nation to keep itself afloat), they are hardly leading the Western world when it comes to making babies.
Everyone in Warsaw agreed that there is no point in browbeating people steadfastly opposed to having children into breeding like Mormons in the summer of 1868. The key is to craft policy in such a way that those who do want to have children—or, as is more often the case, already have some and wish to have more—are rewarded for doing so, provided the babies in question are born into married families. This has been the Hungarian approach and, while the Magyars (along with every other Western people besides the Israelis) still lag behind the optimal 2.1 figure, they have managed to boost their fertility rate from 1.25 in 2010 to 1.56 today.
The sheer number of themes covered by the presentations at the Ordo Iuris conference was itself striking. Very little is left untouched by Europe’s crisis of fertility, including many of the issues which conservatives like to talk about a lot more than fertility itself, from the enlargement of state power to the dangers of mass immigration.
Indeed, one of the reasons we are currently sliding towards a society of mass control is because families no longer provide as firm a counter-balance as they once did to the expansive tendencies of Leviathan. If the predominant relationship in society is that which exists between the individual and the state, with everything in-between hollowed out, co-operative social existence is made harder. This leaves us with two choices: either to trust in the power of the individual to be good on his own account or in the power of the state to make him good through law. The only third option is indifference to how people behave—a principle upon which, as far as I am aware, no thriving society has ever been built. Confounding factors aside, a nation of sturdily independent families will avoid both the slip into anomie and the grip of the tyrant.
Then we have the attempt by a congruence of different political and financial interests—roughly speaking, an alliance between a cultural Left in need of minority voting blocs and an economic Right on the prowl for cheap labour—to subvert the demographics of Europe through mass immigration. And what is one of the more hoary excuses wheeled out to justify this destructive policy? “Europe is an ageing continent, so we’ll need young immigrants to pay our pensions.” It does not occur to such people that immigrants, particularly those coming from the third world, are not automatic net fiscal contributors. They are also alleged to grow old themselves. But more crucially, there is the fact that Europeans used to have a nifty way around this demographic cliff: they had plenty of children.
Over the course of a century in which, due to high fertility, the population of Nigeria alone is forecast to reach 546 million (the current figure is 213 million), it behoves Europeans to ensure that our elites, corrupted by a mix of oikophobia and chronic short-termism, can find no possible pretext for the further importation of fighting-age males into our countries. This means replenishing the continent with our own babies. It has nothing to do with racial bigotry. The fact is that children born into a national home built by their forefathers will feel an instinctive loyalty to the place that mere civics programmes, in their quest to reduce the nature of a country to idle talk of synthetic ‘values,’ simply cannot replicate in the hearts of foreigners born elsewhere.
People care about the preservation of their culture. They are also concerned by the growing authoritarian habits of modern governments, as the Dutch farmers’ protests and other grassroots movements against technocratic statism demonstrate very well. It is a pity that people are less aware of the problems we are storing up for ourselves through a lack of broodiness. This would not matter so much if our leaders were quietly hammering out solutions to Europe’s crisis of fertility. Alas, evidence of any such determination—outside of Eastern Europe at least—is non-existent. If conservatives wish to make fertility a more urgent concern, we could start by underscoring its close relationship to other issues which already enjoy extreme salience in the public mind.