In the past week, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres, warned that humanity will die in a planetary conflagration unless it joins forces, under his leadership, to curb global warming. Others are more concerned by the specter of a nuclear winter brought on by the bellicose Russian Vladimir Putin. And there are those who, like the astrophysicist Didier Queloz, he would not regret the foreseen hecatomb since, as he has just said to Jorge Fontevecchia, “we are a very dangerous species and we are destroying the planet”.
The Swiss who in 2019 received the Nobel Prize Because of his work as a researcher, he is far from the only misanthrope who seems convinced that we human beings are so hopelessly evil that we deserve to be wiped off the face of the Earth. In developed countries, supporters of other forms of life abound, from endearing animals to harmless plants, implying that they had better replace us as kings of creation, perhaps because it would take millions of years before, thanks to evolution, one acquired the ability to cause so much damage to the environment.
The extreme pessimism manifested in this way, which is motivating violent street protests and vandal attacks on works of art, makes a phenomenon more understandable that, if the circumstances were different, would top the list of challenges faced by our species but which, for reasons it is to be assumed ideological or, perhaps, personal, it is not among the most debated topics. It is about the demographic implosion that, unless it is reversed, can only culminate in the definitive end of the human adventure.
Half a century ago, the American scholar Paul Ehrlich became a very influential guru thanks to a book, “The Demographic Bomb”, in which he warned that the world population was increasing at such a frightening rate that there would soon be famines and wars everywhere, but it happened that, almost immediately, the birth rate began to drop precipitously in the most prosperous societies and, a few years later, in others, such as Iran. According to UN, before the current century comes to an end, the world’s population will be shrinking despite medical advances that will continue to allow more people to prolong their lives and thereby delay the numerical collapse. It goes without saying that a world in which there are many old people and few young people will be more like a dilapidated nursing home than what is envisioned by those who imagine that the future is an improved version of the present.
For a country to maintain its population without relying on immigration, it needs the birth rate to be 2.1 children per woman. Well in South Korea approaches 1.1, Japan 1.3, Italy, Spain and Germany 1.5, Russia and China 1.6, the US 1.8 and the UK 1.9. As for Argentina, the Ministry of Health informed us that, in the year of Covid, the rate dropped to 1.55 per woman. All these countries are committing suicide, some faster than others; If current trends continue, over time they will be depopulated. In certain cases, immigration may help for a while, but since it is almost always a massive arrival of people from a culture very different from the native one, there is no guarantee that the results will be as positive as those who are in favor of immigration claim. removal of all national borders.
Why the equanimity, not to say indifference, with which entire peoples are heading toward extinction? After all, unless there are drastic changes very soon, before those who are about to leave high school retire, the Greeks, Spanish, Italians and Germans and many others will belong to ethnic minorities in the countries they believe to be their own. In the past, such a prospect would have caused anguish but, perhaps because fewer and fewer have children, it seems significant to few that the days of the national culture in which they were raised may be numbered.
A few years ago, those concerned about what was happening realized that, with few exceptions, the most notable European leaders, people like Angela Merkel and Emmanuel MacronThey had no direct descendants. Will the decision not to start a family have influenced your political decisions? It is probable; For childless men and women, the long term is often a more theoretical concept than it is for those who want their own lineage to perpetuate itself over time.
A characteristic of these times is the propensity to privilege subjective impressions and treat them as if they were more authentic than information from other sources. In such a way, immediacy is privileged; it is fashionable to despise the past and feeling so alien to the future that few dare to think about it without treating it as something related to science fiction. The old-fashioned idea that each generation should respect the previous ones and think about those that will come after it is despised by those who have convinced themselves that their predecessors were criminals who did nothing worthwhile and that it would be worse than useless to waste time thinking in what might come when they themselves are gone.
For some who are interested in the demographic implosion that began fifty years ago and that in many places is undermining pension schemes that were launched when there was no lack of contributions to the system, the refusal to have children is a consequence of economic pressures. They can point out that in the cities where economic activities are concentrated, housing prices have increased so much that many young people prefer to continue occupying a room in their parents’ house than go into debt in order to find a place of their own.
Also, whereas in the not too distant past it was normal for the husband to work and his wife to take care of the home and family, today it is often necessary for both of them to contribute to the family budget. Those who emphasize economic factors will be right, but in the world of yesterday, when there was much more poverty in rich countries than today, “the problem” was the general propensity of married couples to have “too many” children, as is still the case. in many impoverished parts of Africa.
Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the precipitous fall in the birth rate in all advanced countries with the striking exception of Israel, where both those who cling to traditional religious beliefs and agnostics or atheists have refused to emulate to their European or North American contemporaries despite – or because of – being surrounded by enemies who claim to be determined to exterminate them, is linked to the changed role of women in modern societies.
This reality raises some questions that are extremely unsympathetic. Is feminism, however moderate it may be, compatible with the survival of the human species? Are the Taliban and other Islamists who rage against gender equality right when they say it has dire consequences? It would be nice to be able to believe not, that it would be a perverse mistake to try to attribute the resistance to reproduction of current generations to the eclipse of “patriarchy” in the West and the Far East, but it is clear that a civilization that is reluctant to perpetuate itself is ill.
Although in some countries, such as Hungary, there are governments that strive to stimulate the birth rate, which makes them targets of furious criticism from those who describe them as reactionaries and ultra-conservatives, the truth is that they have not been very successful. The influence of the world’s dominant culture is so strong that it is not entirely easy to change people’s behavior by offering them material benefits that always seem modest. Yet unless more women decide – as nearly all their predecessors did for millennia – that motherhood is a more dignified option than any alternative, dozens of peoples who have played prominent roles in history will share the tragic fate of Amazonian tribes. who live on the fringes of societies that are radically alien to them.
From the point of view of the political and media elites, it is a priority to reduce carbon emissions, whatever the cost, to save the planet and -in the opinion of the most charitable- mankind from the climatic cataclysm they see approaching. Secretary-General Guterres and others of similarly dire views may be right, but as things stand, if they escalate the war they are waging on fossil fuels, there won’t be many victims of the catastrophe they envision; by then, the bulk of humanity will have gone to a better place, as the enormous costs of dismantling the industrial and agricultural sectors they have in mind would make the economic pressures that those wishing to raise a family will have to face even more brutal. family like before.
