With renewable and sustainable methods, food, water, clean air, and a standard of living higher than world’s current average can be maintained for a population far exceeding current levels.
A new awareness has arisen that humanity may, in fact, be facing an underpopulation problem. Declining birthrates in developed “first-world” countries threaten our ability to sustain civilization.
A birthrate of somewhere between 2.3 and 2.5 children per couple is required to maintain a population. Shrinking populations wreak economic havoc. Populations which are growing at a slow but steady pace optimize economic growth. Reiner Klingholz, a researcher at Berlin’s Institute for Population and Development, Das Berlin-Institut für Bevölkerung und Entwicklung, writes:
Working longer is one option to counter a shrinking workforce. But extending the retirement age can only partly solve the problem of an aging population, because it is the very old who are aging the fastest. Today, 20 percent of Germany’s population is older than 65, and 5 percent are older than 80. In 2050, the 65-plus age group will make up 32 percent and the 80-plus group 14 percent. In other words: By mid-century one out of seven Germans will be older than 80. The figures are similar in Spain and Italy. The Old World will then truly be the oldest.
Aside from the economic and environmental damage - shrinking populations produce more pollution - done by Germany’s stagnating population growth, there is global fallout, especially because other advanced nations are facing similar phenomena.
The ‘first-world’ nations are stewards of a type of human civilization; will they be able to continue to fill that role if they have ever older and ever fewer citizens?
A loose set of worldviews coalesce around these countries: beliefs that war is better than peace, that women have certain legal and social equalities with men, that every human being has dignity, that such human dignity is worthy of respect, that every human life is valuable, that human life should not be ended capriciously, that the individual is significant, that liberty is a central human value, etc.
If the nations of the developed world are in a population decline, will they still be able to represent these, their peculiar and characteristic notions, to the rest of the world? Or will this cultural heritage be endangered?
Ironically, some sociologists hypothesize that it was Western Civilization’s occasional departures from its own worldview which have triggered a pattern of low birthrate, a pattern which can be interpreted as a collective self-hatred or a collective suicide: the carnage of the two world wars may have left the cultures deflated and cynical - sometimes obviously so, as in postmodern art, sometimes in a hidden manner behind an optimistic facade.
Statistical population counts have hidden the fact that Germany has suffered from a low birthrate for a number of years. But the graying of civilization can no longer be camouflaged, as Patrick Buchanan writes:
What Klingholz is saying bears repeating: Germans have been dying out for forty years and this has been covered up by counting Turks, East Europeans, and Arabs as Germans. Now, not even immigrants from the Muslim lands, Eastern Europe, and the Third World can mask the reality.
Astonishing. Not long after World War II, West Germany boasted the world’s second largest economy. Now a united Germany is on schedule to become a retirement center, nursing home, and cemetery for the Germanic peoples, whose origins date back to before the birth of Christ.
If the first-world nations are weakened by low birthrate and stagnating, or even shrinking, populations, then the rest of the world will suffer the absence of this rich cultural heritage.
The problem of a handful of developed nations will become a global problem. The worldview which informed both technological progress and humanitarian compassion will leave a devastating void throughout the world.
It is in the interests of the entire global community to sustain the civilization which alone articulated the principles of individualism and liberty, while at the same time replacing both ethical and aesthetic barbarism with a cultural tradition which inspires both scientific exploration and philosophical reflection.
