Look at any futuristic movie – say Star Trek or Blade Runner – and you find one reliable consistency: massive cities, packed with Frank Lloyd Wright-esque mile-high skyscrapers. Why? Why would we need such density of building? Ironically, the neon-lit, congested, sky-less street scenes in Blade Runner are straight from Tokyo. Or. at least, Tokyo as it was.
[From Star Trek Into Darkness & Blade Runner]
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To maintain a steady population, on average each woman must have 2.1 children. The Irish are barely hovering over the 2.0 mark. But that’s positively fecund when compared with Germany, Italy and Austria (1.42-1.43) and the Japanese (1.4). So, in Japan, over the next 50 years, the population is set to fall by a third. Keep up the good work inventing robots, lads, because there’ll be nobody to look after you in your old age…
So, again, while it’s cool to depict these colossal cityscapes for sci-fi nerds like me, if current trends continue there will be no need for them.
On that subject, here’s an interesting piece from France [1]. It’s just the latest in a line of iceberg warnings – Russia’s Vladimir Putin [2] is already failing to raise Russia’s birthrate with all sorts of sweeteners. The article lists oodles of entitlements to encourage couples to reproduce that are now being cut due to the state of the French economy. I challenge the author, however, in the assertion that cutting such entitlements is causally connected with any real drop in fertility. This is a decades-long trend.
As a US commentator wrote the other day:
“It’s a perverse consequence of the times in which we live: Cultural and economic pressures see to it that many young women spend their most fertile years trying desperately to avoid motherhood and then spend their least fertile years trying, with the same desperation, to conceive. It’s cruel.”
Which leads to some questions: Why have kids? Why bother? Why go-forth-and-multiply? And, if you’re a woman: from stretch marks to your career prospects, they’re just too much trouble. We have the pill, and the activity for which it’s sold is a heck of a lot of fun. Mary Eberstadt brilliantly described this Faustian bargain in Adam and Eve After the Pill. As Catholic Exchange [3] wrote, reviewing that book:
“If it was so liberating, she asks, why are its supposed beneficiaries, especially women, unhappier than before? Why did the very effects that Pope Paul VI predicted in his much despised but (in her eyes, prophetic) 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, come to pass – an increase in infidelity and divorce, the objectification and degradation of women, abandonment of women and children, cohabitation, sexual promiscuity and increased abortion rates?”
Isn’t it odd? Not only would I be a kill-joy to argue that Pope Paul VI was indeed prophetic in his predictions; I would be a supporter of the very Catholic Church that Ireland’s nouveau chic are trying to discredit and destroy. I mean, what right do a bunch of celibate retrogrades have in telling the young, free and single what to do with their bodies?
With all the knee-jerk vilification of the Catholic Church in Ireland over the last few years, I doubt many have stopped to reconsider Pope Paul VI’s warnings. You don’t have to like a person, or what they are saying, to accept they have a point.
Pope Francis [4] had to recently spell out that perhaps having kids, rather than buying a cat, is more fulfilling and enriching in the long run. For a Pope to have to say this is some indictment on today’s child-bearing generation. Sadly, Pope Paul VI saw it coming, and Pope Francis is here to confirm it.
Until the West reconsiders its attitude towards procreation, there really won’t be any need for those futuristic cityscapes. At this rate, in a few decades you could buy a nice bungalow in Manhattan and see out old age with your cat. Enjoy.