Sorry
for the long silence. Alex and I have moved into a new flat in Leipzig, and we
are being kept quite busy by the daily affairs of PhD students. Our new flat is
located in the ‘booming’ quarter of Schleußig. The average age here was 35.2 in
2009, compared with 44 for the rest of Leipzig, or 54.8 in Grünau-Ost. The birth
rate here is about 20 per 1000 people, which is actually slightly higher than
the global average of 19.15, and far outscores Germany’s national birth rate of
8.1. The difference is indeed noticeable, and sometimes we have to fight our
way through the prams stacked in the entrance area to our building. It’s nice
to have lots of children in the neighbourhood. They fill the streets with life
and sometimes I almost forget that I live in a shrinking country, and, indeed,
a shrinking continent. Yes, Germany, and Europe as a whole, tops the sad
ranking of places with the world’s lowest birth rate. I don’t have much
sympathy with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and I think that a low
birth rate is a symptom of there being something profoundly wrong with our
society. I want this blog post to examine some of the reasons behind it, and I
want it to be an appeal to policy-makers to identify this issue as one the
great challenges we are faced with, one that even outweighs the economic
crisis.
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| European fertility rates in 2004, the numbers have not changed a lot since, 2.1 is the natural replacement rate |
In some sense it is obvious what caused
the sudden drop in births between 1966 and 1972 in Europe. Birth control and
the increasing involvement of women in the labour market made an obvious
difference. The role of men and women in the household has gradually shifted,
and while it is seen as positive for women to take on the traditional role of
men, the reverse is not so much looked down upon, but it seems that masculine
pride prevents men from being housemen for a while. For me that is one of the
great paradoxes of the emancipation movement. Instead of lifting up obvious
female virtues, such as motherhood, and striving to make them admirable, the
traditional male ‘qualities’ of competitiveness and emotional coldness were
somehow made even more commendable. Women who possess these virtues can be ‘successful’,
success being incrementally increased by the amount of money a woman earns, of
course. Gender mainstreaming is indeed a misnomer, because while women becoming
more like traditional men is apparently praiseworthy, men becoming more like traditional
women has remained an injury to a man’s self-esteem. The realisation that
emancipation goes both ways, that it ought not to be the masculinisation of
women, but the deconstruction of fixed gender roles, is, in my opinion,
critical to understanding the European demographic crisis. Emancipation also
means for men to emancipate themselves from the limits of misguided notions of
masculinity. If seen in this light, the feminist movement was indeed a
particular capitalist type of feminism. While its leaders would of course
reject this accusation, it is nevertheless the case that ‘emancipated’ women
who ‘want a career’ define their own ‘success’ primarily via their income, an
idea that we were all indoctrinated with by the institutions of the capitalist
system (in fact, I remember quite clearly how this was done to me in primary
school).
While this applies to Europe as a
whole, Germany has problems of its own to deal with. I’m not going to dig up
statistics to prove this, because I believe that anyone who has ever lived in
Germany is familiar with that, and because I know plenty of Germans who are in
their late 20s and still doing their Master’s degrees. While I do not regard
this as intrinsically negative, it nevertheless causes women to spend their
most fertile years in the universities. Birth rates are indeed higher for women
who do not go to uni.
So, let me come to some conclusions.
The most basic function of life is to reproduce itself. If we were studying any
other form of life that insufficiently reproduced itself as European apparently
do, we would see immediately that there has to be something profoundly wrong.
If humans do not fulfil the commandment to ‘go forth and multiply’, we need to
ask ourselves why, and we need to find solutions to the problem, leading to a
globally sustainable demographic development. I believe that there is another,
even more profound reason, which I do not want to analyse, because it is merely
a direct accusation: people who choose their ‘career’ over their family are
selfish individualists. That is the true disease of our society, and
policy-makers need to ask themselves whether egotists are the kind of people they
want to breed in their schools and universities. The worship of youth and money
is ultimately the worship of the self.
While I learned plenty in school about compound interest, no one over taught me
about family-planning. Our education systems must therefore be adapted to the
demographic situation, and studying while raising kids must become affordable
as well as manageable, otherwise it seems to me that in the long run, Europe
and Germany are going the way of the dinosaur.
Harald Köpping
