Fatal losses
by Campbell Campbell-Jack, A Grain of Sand:
Throughout the West and beyond we are witnessing a steep decline in marriage and birth rates. Greece’s birth rate fell by 30 per cent from 2011 to 2021 to under 84,000 per year, slipping below the death rate. Prime Minister Mitsotakis said that in effect the country recorded just one birth per two deaths in 2022. Greece is now facing the possibility of becoming the first contemporary country to experience ‘population collapse’, a sudden and irreversible decline in population..
The depopulation crisis facing the West is not confined geographically but touches those nations heavily influenced by the West. We are all familiar with Japan’s population crisis but it expands beyond rapidly ageing Japan. South Korea, the Western-influenced industrial powerhouse of the Far East, is on track to produce between four and seven great-grandchildren for every 100 Koreans alive today. This equates to a 93-96 per cent reduction in population over the course of a century. No plague or war has ever achieved as much.
Why? The most common reason given for population decline is the debt crisis: people cannot afford children. However, a temporary economic disturbance cannot explain the long-term trend. There are a number of other reasons but the underlying one is that increasingly marriage and family formation is discincentivised in our society and culture.
We are used to the term ‘Go woke, go broke’; perhaps we should replace it with ‘Go woke, go vanish’. Our governments see us primarily as units of production and have no discernible interest in helping straight married couples produce children, while our media promote an increasingly divergent array of relationships and forms of co-habitation.
The decline in marriage and fertility rates in the West should concern us all, and not just because fewer indigenous people having babies means that more non-native people have to be imported to service our economies. The decline in marriage rates is of concern because generally speaking what we term Western civilisation emerged from a culture built on what we now term ‘traditional marriage’, though not so long ago it was simply ‘marriage’. One man and one woman making a lifelong commitment to each other to the exclusion of all others was our standard foundational social model for centuries. It was not perfect in every instance, but generally it worked and produced stability and continuity within society with values being passed from generation to generation.
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