“There is a lot of talk about biodiversity, but we never talk about saving civilizations, cultures”, French writer Michel Houellebecq said last month at a gala of the weekly Valeurs Actuelles. He is right. European people are physically dying.
New figures from the Spanish National Institute of Statistics just showed that the number of babies born in the country dropped by an eye-opening 40.7 percent over the last decade. In 2018 there were 369,302 babies born in Spain. In the same year there were 426,053 deaths.
The day after we got the headlines about Italy. My country is set to become one of the few countries in the world to experience a so-called “demographic recession”, “a true numerical decline whose only precedent in Italy's history is the long-ago period of 1917-18, an era marked by the Great War and the dramatic effects of the Spanish flu pandemic”,said the president of the Italian Statystics Institute, Gian Carlo Blangiardo.
Today in Spain divorce is a totem, abortion is a right to procreative freedom, eugenics is an instrument of progress, the contraception pill is for the day before and the day after, gay marriage is a flag. But the country which prided itself on passing from Franco's dictatorship to a pure relativistic democracy has entirely lost the will to reproduce itself.
The American politician Al Gore shook the world years ago with the documentary on global warming, publicizing “an unpleasant truth”. Like global warming, the declining birth rate will produce catastrophic effects. But unlike what happens with global warming, you don't need a Ph.D. in climatology to understand that if fewer children are born each year a society will die and experieince economic impoverishment, electoral gerontocracy, military insecurity and irrelevance in the international sphere due to its decreasing demographic weight.
And yet, in Europe the demographic suicide is a taboo. It is a pure cynical electoral calculation. The potential voter must be pleased. The low birth rate is an uncomfortable topic for the feminist movement which fought for fewer births. Environmentalism – the only religion in today's Europe – is openly anti-humanist. Immigrants will provide us with jobs and children. Who cares about declining demography?
When we talk about Italy or Spain, quality of life today is very good, holidays are coming, war has been abolished, people live longer and we never have a shortage of shows on tv, in theatres, cinemas, sports.
But we have a weak will and a kind of inertia. Existential fatigue, is pulling us down and down. Material prosperity has created a very timid European society avoiding any conflict and trying to ignore all the terrible warnings that we perceive as harmful to our own hedonism.