Abortion of defective kids

Originally posted on MPCdot.com

In his book "A Farewell to Alms," Gregory Clark talks a lot about the Malthusian trap: the fact that, historically, when living standards rise, populations inevitably increase to swallow up the surplus wealth, pushing living standards right back down to subsistence level. To escape the Malthusian trap, you need a population that desires a high standard of living, and only has children when they can be raised at that standard.

While an emphasis on living standards is the requirement of Malthusian escape, that requirement is only met through reproductive restraint. On the surface, abortion might seem like a way to obtain that restraint -- have as much sex as you want and abort any excess kids. And humanity has a long history of infanticide, so it's not terribly unreasonable to expect this approach to work.

However, this is not at all what we see in the world, either today or in times past. Cultures which practice infanticide do not tend to escape the Malthusian trap, no matter their emphasis on material wealth. On the other hand, cultures which both emphasize high living standards and traditional Christian sexual morality have fared much better. I think there are two reasons for this.

First, I believe sexual restraint simply works better than abortion at curbing runaway reproduction. Rather than quenching sexual desire, sexual activity actually stimulates it; so if a country is laissez fare about its sexuality, and presents abortion as a kind of "get out of jail free card," there will be lots of sex, and while there will also be lots of abortions, it's simply human nature that childbearing will ultimately outstrip infanticide -- look at China, India, etc. On the other hand, a country which discourages infanticide tells its inhabitants that if they have sex, they will be liable for any resultant children; combine this with a requirement that sex only occur between married people who can afford to support any resultant children at a high standard of living, and you would expect said society to have fewer marriages overall, with those marriages occurring later in life and resulting in fewer children. The sexual passions are thereby kept in check, as is reproduction, and the nation escapes the Malthusian trap. This is exactly the phenomenon that Clark documents in the contrast between Europe and Asia leading up to the industrial revolution (although he did not explain it this way).

Second, I think you are infinitely more likely to have an industrial revolution -- that is, large increases in productivity -- when the sexual passions are restrained. Sexual activity can cost much more than the straightforward costs of child rearing. Single people seeking sex will spend inordinate amounts of time, energy, and money obtaining it. When society doesn't sacralize sex, it rapidly becomes everybody's favorite, all-consuming recreational drug. I think this is just common sense, the proof of which surrounds us. Feral women dressing like call girls and men devoting themselves to booze and "pickup" during their 20's and 30's are the clearest evidence of this cost, as is our increasingly sex-saturated media and popular culture. I think the growing narcissism of the facebook generation is a second order effect and also a huge waste of resources. (Really, who has time to cure cancer when there are skirts to chase and selfies to post?) This is in stark contrast to a culture of sexual sobriety. You can poke fun at Puritans and Victorians all you want, but they are the founding stock of our prosperity increases. A man who sees work simply as a way to fund his fornication will have a very different kind of career than a man who considers his vocation an opportunity to serve God, family, and country.

White people tend to think of abortion as a tradeoff between benefits to parents and society at the expense of murdered infants. Rabid pro-choicers aside (and even they are more talk than walk, I suspect), whites feel that there is something wrong about abortion. Does anybody really expect pro-choicers to make the case for tossing unwanted infants in the dumpster? I doubt it. But leaving unwanted children to die of exposure is historically commonplace. Even the most callous modern whites are far more sensitive about the rights of new members of society than our distant ancestors, they just don't realize it. Instead, they tend to focus on whether or not aversion to abortion is valid, and if so, in which circumstances, and to what extent. But why do whites have that feeling at all? I think that's the more interesting question. Here's my take:

Hunter-gatherer tribes have barbaric sexual morality and are rife with infanticide, but they also don't stockpile wealth and are constantly losing members to tribal warfare, so they never become malthusian. But I think that once a people begin to stockpile wealth through agriculture, they become haunted by the ghost of Malthus. Traditional Christian sexual morality provided a way out of the trap by changing man's relationship with his sexuality in a way that restrained population growth and freed energy to invest in productivity-increasing work. I believe that Christendom selected for an innate revulsion to infanticide by shunning (or stoning) those who didn't submit to its sexual norms. In my opinion, that's why Orientals can abort with abandon while even borderline white people like the Irish are disgusted by the practice -- it's more a result of breeding than it initially appears to be.

That the descendants of Christendom, with their aversion to abortion, have come to lead the world indicates that a disposition against infanticide is a survival benefit to the group. Allowing abortion might therefore be a Faustian bargain: we could be kicking the legs out from underneath the very table which supports prosperity. This may extend to anything that loosens traditional Christian sexual morality to some extent, i.e. contraceptives. At the very least, it seems to me that the three pillars of prosperity are reproductive restraint, preference for high living standards, and investments in technology -- and I think this is all undergirded by sexual restraint.

A commentator on Cochran and Harpending's blog noted that the past few generations in black America -- where thugs have many children by several baby mommas who support their spawn on welfare checks -- has been like a "Pitbull Breeding Experiment." I'm inclined to agree, and I see parallels in the possible unintended consequences of shifting abortion norms. Sexual passion is a powerful beast, we tamper with its yoke at our own peril.

Toyota 52 deaths, Gardasil 49. Toyota recalled.

By Barbara Hollingsworth of the Washington Examiner, reposted at VacTruth.com, March 31

Cervical cancer accounts for less than 1% of all cancer deaths, so it was somewhat surprising when the US Food and Drug Administration fast-tracked approval of Gardasil, a Merck vaccine targeting the human papilloma virus that causes the disease, in 2006.

As of Jan. 31, 2010, 49 unexplained deaths following Gardasil injections have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. By contrast, 52 deaths are attributed to unintended acceleration in Toyotas, which triggered a $2 billion recall....

No recall for Gardasil, which is required for 6th-grade girls in DC, MD, VA, and many other states. Parents can opt out, but few know the true risks...

My own congressperson, Debbie Halvorson, pushed mandatory Gardasil vaccinations of pre-adolescent girls in 2007 as an IL state senator, prompting me to write the "Debbie does..." series (I and II)

Hollingsworth goes on to describe 2 deaths and a stroke of young women following Gardasil injections. She says pro-abort Sen. Barbara Mikulski has requested an investigation into the death of 21-year-old Emily Tarsell, who lived in Mikulski's home state of MD.

Here is a glaring example of the rush by pro-abort feminists to try to stave off the consequences of illicit sex, in this case a vaccination against the HPV STD, to the detriment of the health and safety of girls and women.

Meanwhile they disparage the obvious, full proof, free, guaranteed to be safe and healthy answer, which is abstinence and monogamy.

Vast Majority of Latin Americans Support Criminal Penalties for Abortion

By Mathew Cullinan Hoffman, Latin America Correspondent

MEXICO CITY, May 28, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The vast majority of Latin Americans are in favor of maintaining criminal penalties for abortion, according to a new study.

The study, which polled residents of several Latin American countries, indicates that 60.4 percent of Mexicans favor criminal penalties for illegal abortions.

Mexico, however, is on the low end of the scale. In Brazil, 67.3 percent favor such penalties, and in Chile, 71.7 percent. In Nicaragua, where abortion is completely illegal, the majority reaches 82.2 percent.

In Mexico, women were even more likely to support the criminalization of abortion than men. Of those who support criminal penalties for killing the unborn, 32 percent are women, and 28.4 percent are men, according to the study.

The poll also reflects the fact that the pro-abortion drumbeat insisting that "women have the right to decide" to kill their unborn child has been heard by the people of Mexico -- and rejected.

While 57 percent said they had heard the slogan, 56 percent were in agreement with the statement that "the life of the fetus is above all things."

Claudia Dides Castillo, director of the Gender and Equity Program for the pro-abortion Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLASCO), which conducted the study, admitted to the press that Latin Americans are "conservative" on the issue of abortion. She added that the study's result reflects the fact that the prevailing image in Latin America is "the woman as the giver of life."

The survey was reportedly conducted through face-to-face interviews with an average of 1,200 respondents in each country. It has a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.

Mexico City, Mexico, Jun 1, 2010 / 02:02 pm (CNA).- Mexican journalist Enrique Sanchez published an article in the magazine, Impacto, this week pointing out that a recent forum in Baja California demonstrates that the pro-life movement in Mexico is growing.

The “Citizens' Forum” was held last weekend in the city of Los Cabos in the Mexican state of Baja California.

In his article, Sanchez noted that during the forum, “Southern Baja California became the center of opposition to abortion, demonstrated by 21,000 notarized signatures” on a petition filed in court calling on the state's Congress to respond to a proposal which would guarantee the right to life.

Speakers at the forum included Mexican actor Eduardo Verastegui; Lianna Rebolledo, a 33-year-old woman whose 13-year-old son was conceived through rape; and representatives from numerous organizations. They all called on the state's Congress to recognize the demand from society for protection for human life.

During her remarks, constitutional lawyer Ingrid Tapia questioned the recent ruling by the Mexican Supreme Court allowing the use of the morning-after pill in cases of rape.

The anti-life norms upheld by the court have led “nearly one thousand hospitals and private clinics to request protection against implementing the directives, as the distribution of the morning-after pill in cases of rape was made obligatory, but the distribution free-of-charge of the drug was not established,” she said.

In addition, “Conscientious objection was not taken in to account, and since the pill is abortifacient when taken 72 hours after sexual relations, there will be medical personnel who will refuse to administer it,” Sanchez said.

“The state says, if you kill it, we’ll support you. If not, you’ll be left alone,” he added.

Romania has 70% abortion rate

A devastating abortion rate of 70% has, during the past 12 years, claimed the lives of the equivalent of one-third of Romania's stagnant population of 24 million people.

In 2002, there were 700,000 abortions accounting for well over two-thirds of the one million pregnancies recorded, both within marriage and extramarital. Canada's abortion casualty rate is closer to one-third.

Even in light of the staggering figures, Glasgow's Sunday-Herald spoke for Western media when the paper commented, "The transition for women from baby-producers to individuals in charge of their own bodies has been difficult. But now that the population fails to renew itself, the self-appointed guardians of the nation have swung into action," a dismissive reference to Romania's tiny pro-life movement.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/feb/03021005.html

In Romania, 75% of the couples don’t want children anymore/ În România, 75% dintre cupluri nu îşi mai doresc copii

The overwhelming majority of Romanians renounced the idea of having children. According to the first survey on generations and gender, over 75% of the questioned couples declared that they don’t want children at all or that they don’t want more children.

Gândul, July 8, 2008

Sexual Liberation & Racial Suicide

By F. Roger Devlin

What is “sexual liberation”? It is usually spoken of by way of contrast with the constraints of marriage and family life. It would seem to be a condition under which people have more choice than under the traditional system of monogamy. Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy philosophy” seemed to offer men more choices than just sleeping with the same woman every night for fifty years. Feminism promised women it would liberate them from “domestic drudgery” and turn marriage and motherhood into just one among many lifestyle choices.

On the other hand, there was always an element of free choice even regarding marriage: one may choose whether, and to a certain extent whom, one will marry. Indeed, marriage is perhaps the most important example of a momentous life choice. But on the traditional view you cannot make your choice and still have it. Once one takes the vow and enters into the covenant, ipso facto one no longer has a choice. In other words, marriage is a one-way nonrefundable ticket. Your wife is your choice even if she eventually displeases you in certain ways, as all mortal wives necessarily must. Keeping your choice of mate open forever is called “celibacy.”

Ultimately, the ideal of sexual liberation rests upon a philosophical confusion which I call the absolutizing of choice. The illusion is that society could somehow be ordered to allow us to choose without thereby diminishing our future options. Birth control, abortion, the destigmatizing of fornication and homosexuality, arbitrary and unilateral divorce—all these have been pitched to us as ways of expanding our choices.

Now, I am in favor of giving people all the choice they can stand. But I would like to be careful about what this means: analysis will reveal that the term “choice” has distinct and partly contradictory senses which may not be equally applicable in all contexts. In other words, choice is not a single thing which can be expanded indefinitely at no cost; the appearance of greater choice in one area can be shown to entail reducing one’s possibilities in another.

One perfectly legitimate sense of choosing is doing as one desires. When we are asked to choose a flavor of ice cream, e.g., all that is meant is deciding which flavor would be the most pleasing to us at the moment. That is because the alternative of chocolate or strawberry involves no deep, long-term consequences. But not all choices can be like this.

Consider, for example, a young man’s choice of vocation. One of the charms of youth is that it is a time when possibility overshadows actuality. One might become a brain surgeon, or a mountain climber, or a poet, or a statesman, or a monk. It is natural and good for boys to dream about all the various things they might become, but such daydreams can breed a dangerous illusion: that, where anything is still possible, everything will be possible. This is only true in the case of trivial and inconsequential matters. It is possible to sample all of Baskin-Robbins’ thirty-one flavors on thirty-one successive days. But it is not possible to become a brain-surgeon and a mountain climber and a poet and a statesman and a monk. A man who tries to do so will only fail in all his endeavors.

The reason for this, of course, is that important enterprises demand large amounts of time and dedication, but the men who undertake them are mortal. For every possibility we realize, there will be a hundred we must leave forever unrealized; for every path we choose to take, there will be a hundred we must forever renounce. The need for choice in this sense is what gives human life much of its seriousness. Those who drift from one thing to another, unable to make up their minds or finish anything they have begun, reveal thereby that they do not grasp an essential truth about the human condition. They are like children who do not wish to grow up.

Now, sexual choices, especially for women, are analogous to a man’s in regard to his calling. Inherently, they cannot be made as easy and reversible as choosing flavors of ice cream. But this is what sexual liberation attempts to do. The underlying motive seems to be precisely a fear of difficult choices and a desire to eliminate the need for them. For example, a woman does not have to think about a man’s qualifications to be a father to her children if a pill or a routine medical procedure can remove that possibility. There is no reason to consider carefully the alternative between career and marriage if motherhood can be safely postponed until the age of forty (as large numbers of women now apparently believe). What we have here is not a clear gain in the amount of choice, but a shift from one sense of the word to another—from serious, reflective commitment to merely doing as one desires at any given time. Like the dilettante who dabbles in five professions without finally pursuing any, the liberated woman and the playboy want to keep all their options open forever: they want eternal youth.

The attempt to realize a utopia of limitless choice in the real world has certain predictable consequences: notably, it makes the experience of love one of repeated failure. Those who reject both committed marriage and committed celibacy drift into and out of a series of what are called “relationships,” either abandoning or being abandoned. The lesson inevitably taught by such experiences is that love does not last, that people are not reliable, that in the end one has only oneself to fall back on, that prudence dictates always looking out for number one. And this in turn destroys the generosity, loyalty, and trust which are indispensable for family life and the perpetuation of our kind.

Most of those who have obeyed the new commandment to follow all of their hearts’ desire do not appear to me to be reveling in a garden of earthly delights. Instead I am reminded of the sad characters from the pages of Chekhov: sleepwalking through life, forever hoping that tomorrow things will somehow be changed for the better as they blindly allow opportunities for lasting happiness to slip through their fingers. But this is merely the natural outcome of conceiving of a human life as a series of revocable and inconsequential choices. We are, indeed, protected from certain risks, but have correspondingly little to gain; we have fewer worries but no great aspirations. The price we pay for eliminating the dangers of intimacy is the elimination of its seriousness.

In place of family formation, we find a “dating scene” without any clear goal, in which men and women are both consumed with the effort to get the other party to close options while keeping their own open. There is a hectic and never-ending jockeying for position: fighting off the competition while keeping an eye out for a better deal elsewhere. The latest “singles” fad, I am told, is something called speed dating, where men and women interact for three minutes, then go on to someone else at the sound of a bell.

Sex belongs to early adulthood: one transient phase of human life. It is futile to attempt to abstract it from its natural and limited place in the life-cycle and make it an end in itself. Sustainable civilization requires that more important long term desires like procreation be given preference over short term wishes which conflict with them, such as the impulse to fornicate.

The purpose of marriage is not to place shackles upon people or reduce their options, but to enable them to achieve something which most are simply too weak to achieve without the aid of a social institution. Certain valuable things require time to ripen, and you cannot discover them unless you are faithful to your task and patient. Marriage is what tells people to stick to it long enough to find out what happens. Struggling with such difficulties—and even periods of outright discouragement—is part of what allows the desires of men and women to mature and come into focus. Older couples who have successfully raised children together, and are rewarded by seeing them marry and produce children of their own, are unlikely to view their honeymoon as the most important event of their marriage.

People cannot know what they want when they are young. A young man may imagine happiness to consist in living on Calypso’s Island, giving himself over to sexual pleasure without ever incurring family obligations; but all serious men eventually find such a life unsatisfying. The term “playboy” was originally derogatory, implying that the male who makes pursuing women his highest end is not to be taken seriously. The type of man who thinks he’s hot stuff because he’s able to have one night stands will never raise sons capable of carrying on the fight for our embattled civilization.

Confusion about one’s desires is probably greater in young women, however. For this reason, it is misleading to speak of women “wanting marriage.” A young woman leafing through the pages of Modern Bride does not yet know what marriage is; all she wants is to have her wedding day and live happily ever after. She may well not have the slightest notion of the duties she will be taking on.

Parenthood is what really forces young men and women to grow up. Young men whose idea of the good life was getting drunk, getting laid, and passing out suddenly start focusing on career planning and building capital. They find it bracing to have a genuinely important task to perform, and are perhaps surprised to find themselves equal to it.

But without the understanding that marriage is an inherently irreversible covenant, both men and women succumb to the illusion that divorce will solve the “problem” of dissatisfaction in marriage. They behave like the farmer who clears, plows, and plants a field only to throw up his hands on the first really hot and sweaty day of work, exclaiming: “Farming is no fun! I’m going to do something else!” And like that farmer, they have no one to blame but themselves when they fail to harvest any crops.

Understanding the marriage bond as an irreversible covenant similarly influences the way economic activity and property are understood. Rather than being a series of short-term responses to circumstance, labor and investment become an aspect of family life transcending the natural life span of any individual. From a mere means to consumption, wealth becomes a family inheritance. In Burke’s fine words: “The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself.” By contrast, the characteristically modern view of property finds its clearest expression in the title of a bestselling 1998 financial planning guide: Die Broke. This amounts to a scorched earth policy for our own civilization. Perhaps someday the author will favor us with a sequel entitled Die Alone or Die Childless.

But not everyone is equally receptive to this kind of message. Women in parts of West Africa are averaging over eight children apiece. The revolt against marriage and childrearing is an overwhelmingly white phenomenon. It is primarily in white countries that the birthrate has fallen below replacement level. It would behoove racially conscious whites, therefore, not to ignore the sexual side of the revolt against our civilization, nor shortsightedly to limit our attention to the single issue of miscegenation. The homosexual bathhouse view of sex as merely a means to personal pleasure attacks our race from within and at its source. As much as with inimical races and racial ideologies, our survival will depend upon our ability to organize effective resistance.

When we look around at all the forces arrayed against our race, it can be daunting. How can we fight them all? Are circumstances right? Would we be ready even if they were? And what to do in the meantime? The situation becomes a lot less daunting when we realize that the first battle, and the first victory, must take place within ourselves.

Losing the Ties that Bind

By Paul Craig Roberts

Whatever became of marriage? Cultural conservatives blame the decline of marriage on the sexual revolution, which destroyed the chastity of women. Men don’t marry, say the conservatives, because sex is available outside marriage.

There is, of course, something to this view, but it is hardly the whole story. Sex has always been available outside marriage. Call girls are cheaper than wives, and a prostitute costs no more than a date.

Men married for love, children and family. They would still do so, only the culture—and women—have changed.

When I inquire of men in their thirties why they remain unmarried, a few give the hedonistic answer, but most deny that they are unable to make commitments and assume responsibility. Marriage, men say, has been undermined by a lack of female and societal commitment.

The fickleness of women, men argue, is no longer constrained by concerns with reputation and by laws that require real grounds for breaking up a marriage and a family.

A wife can walk out at any time—with another man if she wishes—and take your children, your house, half of your pension and half of your income. If you make a fuss over child custody, she can gun you down with accusations of child molestation.

Even if a father is awarded joint legal custody, the mother usually has actual custody. It is up to her whether the father’s visitation rights are honored.

Professor Stephen Baskerville at Howard University in Washington, D.C., is an expert on family courts. For most men, divorce and its aftermath are a Gestapo experience. There’s not a man alive who doesn’t know someone who has been through the experience. Indeed, the experience never finishes with a man.

Men say that women’s lack of commitment is evident in the fact that the vast majority of divorces, family quarrels and acts of domestic violence are initiated by women. Yet, from start to finish, men are regarded as the villain. Society’s image of divorce is the successful executive who dumps his dowdy wife for a young blonde bombshell. The propaganda is ubiquitous that domestic violence means men beating women.

Men maintain that the position of a husband in a marriage is untenable. Formerly, there was a division of labor and authority among the spouses. Today, working wives have financial independence, and divorce laws and family courts give them the upper hand in any dissolution of the relationship. Husbands know this and, consequently, have lost their share of authority. The wife cracks the whip, and when she is no longer pleased, she leaves with your assets.

I have listened to men debate what can be done. They doubt Baskerville will succeed in reforming family courts and don’t believe that heterosexual men will organize politically like feminists and homosexuals.

Recently, I heard the view expressed that multiculturalism would provide a solution. Men will return to marriage, a young man said, when the bride brings a large dowry that remains the husband’s property regardless of what happens to the relationship. The dowry would offset the risks that make it foolish for men to marry.

Heads nodded in agreement, but one spoke out, saying that more would need to be imported from India’s customs. He had in mind child betrothals and child brides. It was the only way in this day and time, he said, to acquire a wife who didn’t have the sexual experience of a prostitute by the time she reaches marriage age.

Conservatives are right—but for the wrong reason—that the sexual revolution has undermined marriage. Men see women as damaged goods and feel funny about marrying a woman who might have shared a bed with a number of the wedding guests.

It is called the double-standard, but many men believe that promiscuity does not suit women. They believe that a woman who has had many partners cannot bind emotionally with a husband. She is never his. The emotive ties that bind a woman to a man are lost to professionalism or to indifference.

None of this is to deny that individual men can be jerks, neglectful and abusive, but the decline of marriage is not caused by personalities.

Women think men don’t care, but men are far more aware of the problem than women. I was a young professor when it all started and watched a campus turn into a brothel. The male students were perplexed, even the left-wing ones who had been taught to regard female chastity as oppression. I still remember the resident Marxist who, high on peyote, came to me to complain that “nice girls are ruining themselves.”

Twilight of the Godless

Feminism is a Darwinian blind alley. In biological terms, there is nothing that identifies a maladaptive pattern so quickly as a below-replacement level of reproduction; an immediate consequence of feminism is what appears to be an irreversible decline in the birth rate. Nations pursue feminist policies at their peril.

~Katarina Runske

It’s no secret that Western man has given up breeding. A society needs to have 2.1 births per women in a lifetime if it’s going to maintain a steady population. Besides the U.S. and Iceland, no western nation is even close.

Putting the problem in chart form may help to illustrate its enormity. Here are some of the fertility rates for western countries and their projected white populations by 2050, not counting migration. I estimated 4.9 million nonwhites for the UK and knocked that out of the population, 6.4 in France, 1.7 in the Netherlands, 2.5 in Germany, and 10 million for all other EU countries. The total EU white population is 491.5 million- 25.5 million nonwhites = 466 million. Also, the TFR was adjusted from the official number of 1.51 to 1.45 due to the higher nonwhite birth rate. Canada has around 2.7 million nonwhites. Their overall TFR is 1.58; I estimated the white number at 1.5. Russia is about 20 percent nonwhite.

^EU member
*ex Soviet state, non EU member

It can be projected that the total number of white people lost from the EU, Canada, Switzerland, the Balkans, Norway and the ex-Soviet states including Russia will be around 279,000,000. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the losses due to World War I, World War II, the Nazi regime and all communist governments in history combined. Of course, deciding against having children is not equivalent to starving people in gulags. Still, whatever the causes of the birth slump, the result is hundreds of millions of lives not existing that otherwise would have.

Perhaps low birth rates are not a cultural phenomenon and the number of children people have is based more on economic considerations. Looking at birth rates for the world as a whole casts doubt on that possibility. The top five countries are Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger and Afghanistan. Not exactly places known for their prosperous middle-classes. Even within first-world countries, if there’s a correlation between wealth and fertility, it’s negative. In the U.S., black and Hispanic households are worth about one tenth of what white household are. But according to estimates, Hispanic women have 3.0 children each, blacks 2.2, and whites 2.0. Ukraine’s nominal GDP per capita is less than $4,000 a year while its TFR is indistinguishable from that of Italy ($39,000), Spain ($35,000) or the Czech Republic ($21,000).

We must conclude that there is something besides economics that is going on here. If you find a white population somewhere, it’s almost certain that it’s not going to be reproducing itself enough to survive.

There is one major exception.

After the 2004 presidential election, Steve Sailer famously analyzed Caucasian fertility rates in Red (those that voted for the Republican candidate) and Blue (those that voted Democratic) states. He found that the top 19 states in fertility (and 25 out of the top 26) voted for George W. Bush. Amongst the 50 states and Washington, DC, the correlation between white fertility rate and the Republican share of the white vote was 0.86 (0.84 in 2000).

Sailer hypothesizes that the lower cost of living in Red States makes child bearing more feasible.

In a tempting contrast, the cost-of-living calculator provided by Realtor.com says that a $100,000 salary in liberal Manhattan buys only as much as a $38,000 salary in conservative Pinehurst, North Carolina. Likewise, a San Francisco couple earning $100,000 between them can afford just as much in Cedar City, Utah, if the husband can find a $44,000-a-year job—and then the wife can stay home with their children. Moreover, the culture of Cedar City is more conducive to child rearing than San Francisco.

While this kind of thinking is on the right track, it doesn’t address why some women choose carriers and others families as much as it does why those with particular characteristics end up in one place rather than another. After all, those from New York are free to move to Idaho and vice versa. But it does show that we’re dealing with a cultural issue—one of the soul, not the pocketbook. Utah, the only majority Mormon state in the Union, has a 2.45 TFR. That’s pretty impressive, especially considering Utahans watch the same TV and listen to the same music (both of which encourage libertinism and nihilism) as the rest of America. While cost of living considerations may explain some of the difference in TFR between New York and Utah, they do less to shed light on the disparity between Utah and the rest on the socially conservative and sparsely populated heartland.

Taking an international perspective, there seems to be two ways to have a replacement fertility rate in the modern world.

A) Be really religious.

B) Be really r-selected.

Since Europeans aren’t Africans, that leaves option (A) as the only proven method for replacement Caucasian fertility. The potential success in this area of any secular philosophical system is speculative. Remember that next time you see Bill Maher on TV foaming at the mouth about those stupid Christians who won’t bow before the god of evolution. The ultimate irony is that championing Darwinism has, as Katarina Runske wrote of feminism, been a Darwinian dead end.

Put bluntly, liberal secular humanists are on the verge of extinction.

To get an idea of the cluelessness of the evangelical Darwinians, look not further than Richard Dawkins’s recent article “What Use is Religion?” The author begins by distinguishing between proximate and ultimate causes. To get an idea of what he’s talking about, think of a moth that flies into a lamp and kills itself. The proximate cause is that the physiology of the insect and physical properties of light cause the moth to behave in a suicidal way. An ultimate cause is evolutionary: in the conditions in which the insect evolved, the only light in the night sky was the moon, which the moth was able to use as a compass without ever running into it.

Saying we believe in religion because it feels good is a proximate explanation, the same way that saying we eat sugary foods because they taste good is. The evolutionary “why” just isn’t there.

Dawkins’ answer to “what use is religion?” has something to do with children, but nothing to do with the likelihood of having them.

My specific hypothesis of the necessity of religion is all about children.

More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations. Theoretically, children might learn from experience not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But to say the least, the child whose brain includes this rule of thumb will be at a selective advantage: Believe whatever the grown-ups tell you. Natural selection builds child brains just this way.

In addition, this very quality automatically makes them vulnerable to infection by mind viruses. For excellent survival reasons, child brains trusts parents and elders whom their parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the “truster” has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot tell that “If you swim in the river, you’ll be eaten by crocodiles” is good advice but “If you don’t sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, the crops will fail” is bad (or at least, unnecessary) advice.

Dawkins compares religion to an Internet virus in this way. A good computer does what you tell it. That makes it a wonderful machine capable of doing spreadsheets, but also likely to follow harmful instructions. To Dawkins, religion is a late arriver like the artificial light which kills the moth that is behaving in ways that in other conditions were evolutionarily adaptive.

The problem with using that explanation for religion is that spirituality has been around for too long. There has been plenty of time for evolution to preserve the positive results of blind obedience and do away with what’s harmful and wasteful. For similar reasons, Harpending and Cochran theorize in The 10,000 Year Explosion that Jewish intelligence was a recent adaptation. The Jews have unusually high intelligence and a susceptibility to a group of similar diseases. The genes for disease may have not had time to be selected against. They are around because they are part of the package that includes traits which are adaptive and make up for the fact that the carrier is more likely to die from a particular group of illnesses. Had Jewish intelligence been around for much longer—Harpending and Cochran say it reached its abnormal level in the Middle Ages—then evolution would’ve had time to create a healthier high-IQ race. If man’s spiritual side goes back tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years, it’s unlikely that he couldn’t have evolved to both obey elders as a child and as an adult only believe things that he has empirical evidence for, if such a thing was adaptive. After all, evolution does produce secular, empirical-minded men (Dawkins and I among them). We simply haven’t been able to outbreed believers.

Since man’s been talking a lot longer than he’s been writing, it’s hard to date the birth spirituality or belief in life after death. As good a guess as any for the start of religion is when humans started taking the trouble to ceremoniously bury their dead. That’s been happening for at least 100,000 years. We may trace spirituality even further. OriginsNet.org has put together the evidence for religiosity in the great apes in their “Appendices for Chimp Spirituality.” As the article recounts, after a 10-year old female bonobo was killed by a leopard, the tribal elders encircled the body almost immediately, some making loud displays and calls, others sitting in solemn silence. The body was eventually groomed and cared for, and the high-status apes wouldn’t allow any other apes access to the body. Surely if these alpha apes could talk, they would’ve declared themselves a priesthood and said they were praying for the poor child’s soul!

There’s also evidence that animism and a certain reverence for nature has a very long lineage. Jane Goodall observered that at the onset of thunderstorms, chimpanzee males would often perform spectacular aggression displays, charging, swaying back and forth, and brandishing and shaking branches. Goodall sensed that the Chimpanzees were expressing something like the emotion of awe.

Religion may have evolved to protect us from slipping into hedonism, or to instill a sense of duty in order to go bear the difficulties of childbearing. It may simply be that those who thought God was on their side exterminated the prissy atheist cavemen (who probably also believed their women should be “liberated” and hunt for themselves.) The issues of the evolution of religion and exactly why it’s good for the fertility rate in the modern world are outside the scope of the article. There isn’t even an established theory on the evolution of the brain yet. (I’m partial to Geoffrey Miller’s belief that it has something to do with sexual selection, but I wouldn’t bet a week’s salary on it.)

What we can say with certainty is that Dawkins’s idea that religion brings nothing to man, or, indeed, harms him, is patently false, whether we see things from the perspective of how long faith has been around or what’s happening today to people without it. A quick look at the CIA Factbook proves that Dawkins is very wrong when he claims, “religion has no survival value for individual human beings, or for the benefit of their genes.” If, in the end, all evolution cares about is survival, it’s liberalism that must be considered the virus. Our ancestors who had religion survived while those of us without it might not.

The two most evolutionarily successful men in written history were probably Genghis Khan and the Prophet Muhammad. But only the latter invented a religious justification for his conquests. Now his ethny (loosely defined) continues to claim land while the Mongolians are a measly five million and dwindling. Among whites, the two most fertile groups are by far the mentioned Mormons and the Anabaptists. Though the Old Testament ignores the afterlife, the Hebrews’ great reward for pleasing God was that the they could spread their genes. Millennia later, God’s chosen are still around, while the Canaanites exist only in word.

There may be nothing we can do to stop the current trends. Whites may simply not be fit for the world they created. Perhaps the few that are have already become religious fanatics and simply need time to expand their numbers. We won’t know until there’s a white elite that doesn’t declare war on the traditional beliefs of their people. Russia may be providing a test case (albeit not a perfect one. The government may have started to encourage nationalism and religion, but there’s still the poisonous effects of the Western-American media).

Even if it was granted that the modern world, with its feminism and secularism, produced all the happiness one can imagine, it cannot last. A baby born today may live to see the extinction of the Lithuanians (projected to be a population of 760,000 by 2100, possibly all assimilated into other ethnicities). Any philosophy that guarantees that those that adopt it will be gone within a few generations can only be embraced by nihilists. The patriarchal and god-fearing will inherit the earth, one way or another.

by Richard Hoste on November 03, 2009

America is not a Christian country

Thomas Fleming:

President Bush’s remark the other day that the theory of ‘intelligent design’ should be taught alongside the theory of evolution brought howls of derision from his detractors in Europe and the United States. It was, they said, one more piece of evidence that America is populated by fundamentalist zombies who are potentially as dangerous as bin Laden’s boys. Intelligent design, it goes without saying, is a boneheaded piece of pseudo-science, almost as simplistic as the naive materialism that Darwinists teach. But neither side of the argument cares about logic, much less truth. The important thing is to declare which side you are on: religious fanaticism or cosmopolitan anti-religious fanaticism.

Both sides agree on one thing: that America really is the promised Land of true-believing Christians. In ‘Old Europe’, the United States is seen as a land of extreme piety and fanatical Puritanism. In the United States, at least among those who support the Bush administration, Europe — France, in particular — is regarded as impious, socialist and immoral, but then France has always been America’s favourite whipping boy.

‘Man,’ declared Mark Twain, ‘is a creature who stands somewhere between the angels and the French,’ and French husbands, according to American legend, are flagrantly disloyal, while American men are the very models of marital fidelity. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the French are more likely to cheat on their wives than the Americans; and in most areas of traditional morality, the French are better behaved than the Americans. According to a worldwide survey of abortion rates in the 1990s, for example, a statistically average American woman could be expected to have .69 abortions, while her French counterpart would have .39 (and a German woman only .23). In America, furthermore, the divorce rate is more than twice as high as it is in France, and the rate of teenage pregnancies more than five times as high. In so far as these things can be measured scientifically, Americans are more sexually permissive — though also more puritanical — than Europeans.

So is there anything to American piety, or is it one of those useful myths that make it easier for BBC presenters to pretend to understand complex issues?

America has always been a strange place, even to Americans. While most countries are content merely to exist, America is supposed to have a project, a destiny, a divine mission. New England Puritans suffered from the delusion that their little settlement was a ‘city on a hill’, and Cotton Mather, who played a key role in the Salem witch trials, thought New England was plagued by witches because, before the arrival of white European Calvinists, the continent had been a playground for devil-worshipping Indians and idolatrous Catholics. President Lincoln went so far as to describe the United States as ‘dedicated’ to a proposition, and secular Americans speak glibly of America as ‘an experiment’ — a grisly idea, if ever there was one. Even today patriotic conservatives believe that ‘God’ has blessed our nation as a reward for our virtue and our piety. As H.L. Mencken observed in a more candid age, ‘No one ever went broke underestimating ...the American people.’

Small wonder that so many Europeans are afraid of the United States and its messianic approach to foreign policy. The good news is that all our exceptional virtue and piety is so much buncombe, as Mencken would have said. Despite the many myths of American ‘exceptionalism’, most Americans have always been just as content to muddle through as if they had been born among the unredeemed heathens of London and Paris.

In fact, America’s lack of genuine piety has aroused the ire of some excitable Catholic intellectuals who regard the United States as a masonic conspiracy. After pointing out the masonic symbols on the dollar bill (to say nothing of the masonic design of the national capital), they will go on to cite the fact that the constitution (drafted by leading freemasons) never mentions Christianity. This omission is aggravated by the doctrine of ‘the separation of church and state’ — a notion unacceptable to some traditional Catholics. This historical interpretation (apart from the bit about the masonic conspiracy) is utter nonsense. Christianity is not mentioned in the constitution because it is a treaty of union, not an ideological declaration. In a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional union, the best way to avoid religious conflict was for the national and state governments to be neutral towards competing Christian sects.

Conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, insist that the founders of the republic were all pious Christians. In fact, few of the men who led the revolution or drafted the constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox. Washington was an ordinary Anglican, which even in the 18th century meant very little, while John Adams was a Unitarian, Jefferson a mildly anti-Christian deist, and Ben Franklin a sceptical freemason as well as a rake. America —alas, it is all too true — has been swept periodically by revivals and cult crazes. Many of the cultists went west and ended up in California, the last stop of the rootless and disaffected before falling into the Pacific.

I have lived 60 years in the United States, the first 25 of them as an atheist, the last 35 as an increasingly reactionary Christian. I have never witnessed the great piety and deep spirituality which I have heard described in 4 July addresses and in semi-scholarly tomes on American religion. We are a practical people, above all else, and, as I have heard repeatedly from business and political leaders, religion makes good sense: the man who goes to church also goes to work, takes care of his family, pays his taxes. This is religiosity, not Christianity.

For American Christians, what they say they believe does not always translate into concrete actions or even into support for Christian moral positions. They complain, occasionally, about the prohibition of prayer in school and resent media attacks on religion, but they seem unaffected by the pervasive blasphemy of television commercials and by the barbaric post-Christian morality of everyday life in these United States. This is a country, remember, where Britney Spears was a spokesbimbo for the Episcopal Church. Many evangelical and Catholic Christians actively supported the philandering, lying Bill Clinton, and many traditional Catholics, in defiance of both the Vatican and the Church’s teachings on just war, support George Bush’s war in Iraq. In March 2003 Pope John Paul II, who described his opposition to the war as ‘unequivocal’, sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to dissuade President Bush from attacking Iraq. The President told Cardinal Laghi, ‘We’ll be quick and do well in Iraq.’ As Cardinal Laghi, who calls the invasion ‘tragic and unacceptable’, points out, ‘Bush was wrong.’

But warmongering Catholics are no match for the Revd Pat Robertson. Mr Robertson has gone beyond deflecting hurricanes and denouncing Ariel Sharon for turning Jewish settlers out of land that God gave them. Now he has called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the troublesome president of Venezuela. In defiance of both logic and Christian ethics, Robertson recently said: ‘If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.’

When foreigners speak of American piety, they usually have in mind some form of evangelical Protestantism. But that is a very broad category, which includes austere and disciplined Calvinists in the South as well as clownish TV preachers and the megachurches fitted out with rock bands and wall-sized video screens. Imagine a luxurious sports complex with Elvis, in his sequinned powder-blue Vegas jumpsuit, crooning ‘How Great Thou Art’ to a mob of hysterical middle-aged women writhing in the aisles. This is not ‘that old-time religion’, unless the ‘old time’ in question is the heyday of the Münster anabaptists. Perhaps I am biased: as a pure-minded young atheist I was arrested for mocking a travelling evangelist who healed the sick and raised the dead with wirework that anticipated Hong Kong martial arts movies.

The United States was never a ‘Christian country’ in a confessional sense, though it was once a nation of mostly Christians. Today, it is a nation with a weak-kneed Christian majority that elects, year after year, an actively anti-Christian political class that encourages divorce, protects abortion and pornography, and banishes prayer and Christian symbols from public places. Republican leaders, it is true, pander to their Christian constituents, but they have never and will never lift a finger to advance the cause of Christian morality, much less Christian faith.

Most Americans say they ‘believe in God’, and Americans do attend religious services more frequently than Europeans, or at least they tell pollsters they do, though when the numbers of an ABC poll are broken down, weekly churchgoers tend to be women, Southern, Republican, and old. In western Europe, far fewer people go to church or profess any religious faith, but, from what I have seen, observant Catholics in Italy and France are a good deal more serious than their counterparts here in the land of ‘In God We Trust’.

To compare apples with apples, the most prominent conservative Catholics in the United States are the so-called neoconservatives. They are indifferent or hostile to the traditional liturgy, defend the discovery of democratic capitalism as an event of ‘incarnational significance’ (Michael Novak), and have routinely defended US foreign policy against explicit statements of John Paul II. Catholic neoconservatives represent the triumph of ‘Americanism’ in the Church. They are more Republican than Catholic, more loyal to George Bush than to any Pope. In secular, anti-Catholic France, a Catholic has to be resolute, even courageous; in America, he just goes with the flow.

European leftists can breathe a sigh of relief. A typical American may go to church too often to be respectable, but when he walks out on the street he is either a little liberal or else a little conservative. If there really were a ‘Christian America’, Hollywood would be broke, and the ashes of both political parties would be reposing quietly in the dustbin of history.