This is a column we still get a lot of requests for this time of year - written sixteen Christmases ago and riffing off an often overlooked corner of the Gospels. It represents one of my first forays into what would become the demographic thesis of America Alone. I'm happy to report that Israel's fertility looks a little healthier than Mr Netanyahu gave it credit for. Europe, alas, remains largely blind to what lies ahead:
But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.
If you're one of the increasing numbers of Britons who have "some problems with conventional organised religion" (as JK Rowling puts it), you've probably forgotten that bit from the Christmas story. It's Luke 1:13, part of what he'd have called the backstory, if he'd been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician.
Only two of the gospels tell the story of Christ's birth. Mark plunges straight into the Son of God's grown-up life: he was writing for a Roman audience and, from their perspective, what's important is not where Jesus came from but what He did once He got going. But Matthew was writing for the Jews, and so he dwells on Jesus and His parents mainly to connect the King of the Jews with all that had gone before: he starts with a long family tree tracing Joseph's ancestry back to Abraham.
Like Mark, Luke was writing for a gentile crowd. But, like Matthew, he also dwelt on Jesus's birth and family. And he begins with the tale of two pregnancies: before Mary's virgin birth, he tells the story of her cousin Elisabeth: Zacharias is surprised to discover his impending fatherhood - "for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years." Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth's pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle - the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus's birth is the miracle. Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth - all life - is to a degree miraculous and God-given.
There's a lot of that in the Old Testament, too, of course - going right back to Adam and Eve, and God's injunction to go forth and multiply. Or as Yip Harburg explained in his Biblical precis in Finian's Rainbow:
Then she looked at him
And he looked at her
And they knew immediately
What the world was fer
He said 'Give me my cane'
He said 'Give me my hat'
The time has come
To begin the Begat.
Confronted with all the begetting in the Old Testament, the modern mind says, "Well, naturally, these primitive societies were concerned with children. They needed someone to provide for them in their old age." In our advanced society, we don't have to worry about that; we automatically have someone to provide for us in our old age: the state. But the state - at least in its modern European welfare incarnation - needs children as least as much as those old-time Jews did. And the problem with the European state is that, like Elisabeth, it's barren.
Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it's made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate's down to 1.2 children per couple - or about half "replacement rate". You can't buck that kind of arithmetic.
In the Holy Land, where all the begetting got going, they're doing the numbers, too. The rationale for Israel unloading the "occupied territories" is that, if they don't, Palestinians will do their sums, quit asking for their own state, and instead demand a one-man-one-vote arrangement for the state they're already in. Last week, in a speech on the country's demographic difficulties, Binyamin Netanyahu conceded: "We do have a demographic problem, but it is with the Arab Israelis."
"The day is not far off," replied Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset, "when Netanyahu and his cohorts will put up roadblocks at the entrances to Arab villages to tie Arab women's tubes and spray us with spermicide."
I would doubt it. Developed nations are far too busy tying their own tubes to tie anybody else's.
Demography is not necessarily destiny. Today's high Muslim birthrates will fall, and probably fall dramatically, as the Roman Catholic birthrates in Italy, Ireland and Quebec have. But demographics is a game of last man standing. It's no consolation that Muslim birthrates will start falling in 2050 if yours are off the cliff right now. The last people around in any numbers will determine the kind of society we live in.
You can sort of feel that happening already. "Multiculturalism" implicitly accepts that, for a person of broadly Christian heritage, Christianity is an accessory, an option; whereas, for a person of Muslim background, Islam is a given.
That's why, as practised by Buckinghamshire County Council, multiculturalism means All Saints Church can't put up one sheet of A4 paper announcing tomorrow night's carol service on the High Wycombe library notice board, but, inside the library, Rehana Nazir, the "multicultural services librarian", can host a party to celebrate Eid.
To those of us watching from afar the ructions over the European constitution - a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem - it seems amazing that no Continental politician is willing to get to grips with the real crisis facing Europe in the 21st century: the lack of Europeans. If America believes in the separation of church and state, in radically secularist Europe the state is the church, as Jacques Chirac's edict on headscarves, crucifixes and skull caps made plain. Alas, it's an insufficient faith.
By contrast, if Christianity is merely a "myth", it's a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ's divinity in the miracle of His birth. The obligation to have children may be a lot of repressive Catholic mumbo-jumbo, but it's also highly rational. What's irrational is modern EUtopia's indifference to new life.
I recently had a conversation with an EU official who, apropos a controversial proposal to tout the Continent's religious heritage in the new constitution, kept using the phrase "Europe's post-Christian future". The evidence suggests that, once you reach the post-Christian stage, you don't have much of a future. Luke, a man of faith and a man of science, could have told them that.
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When you referenced "The Begat" from Finian's Rainbow, I looked it up in Apple Music, and couldn't find it in the 1968 movie soundtrack.
Now that I listen to it (as sung by Susannah McCorkle) I can see it doesn't quite fit the Disney theme, and I wouldn't have understood it when I saw the movie in 1968. (I was 10.) The book "Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg, Lyricist" calls it a "curious" song to put in the mouth of Gospel singers, and you can see what they mean.
Mark replies:
With all due respect to the late Miss McCorkle, James, the killer version is by the McGuire Sisters.
"'Multiculturalism' implicitly accepts that, for a person of broadly Christian heritage, Christianity is an accessory, an option; whereas, for a person of Muslim background, Islam is a given."
Still crazy-relevant, after all these years.
One of the saddest things I recall is being in Bosnia in the very late 1990s and reading an article in Stars and Stripes about how a lot of guys -- reservists -- were using their time there, away from wives, to get vasectomies on Uncle Sam's dime. I mean, here were men who were, almost by definition, above average in IQ (low scorers on AFQT aren't eligible for enlistment) and in work ethic. They had stable jobs plus extra income, and here they were sterilizing themselves and the US government was practically encouraging it.
Would be interested in Mark's commentary on T. S. Eliot's "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees."
Maybe next year...
Thanks for providing this. I remember reading articles like this and realizing there was at least one person on earth with clear eyes to see and nimble fingers to type.
"'Well, naturally, these primitive societies were concerned with children. They needed someone to provide for them in their old age.' In our advanced society, we don't have to worry about that; we automatically have someone to provide for us in our old age: the state."
Which makes as much sense as saying we don't need farms anymore because we can get food at the grocery store. Where do "we" think the state is getting the wealth it's redistributing to "us?"
Good questions for Bernie Sanders voters. If you want to have some tears of laughter and despair, go down to a college campus and see what answers the students give you.
So well put, Tom. Especially the line about grocery stores.
Nor will we need pipelines and drilling rigs because we have gas pumps, and solar panels and landscape-destroying, bird-mashing wind turbines. Really we don't need anything anymore because we'll have everything we need, except the birds and children. There will come a day where we won't even need hormones to get the reproductive organs in gear to create children because of the surplus of sperm banks and egg-filled test tubes. We won't need to even touch each other to make the conception happen, just a mad scientist who wants fame and a Nobel Peace Prize for improving the genetic make-up of our kids. We won't even need the moms and dads to raise the children because they will have robots designed by then to do that. Isn't this what CS Lewis was onto with "The Abolition of Man"? Luke was crazy ahead of his time. We're moving towards the obsolete model of life forms here on earth.
Way back in 1957, PhD biologist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a novel, The Naked Sun, about a human colony world that had exactly the kind of society you describe. With an abundance of intelligent robots, each person lived in isolation from other humans, including their own biological parents and offspring. It was the polar opposite to the society on earth, described in his prior novel The Caves of Steel, in which humanity lived in huge underground hives, having abandoned the surface of the earth after a nuclear war, with essential farming conducted by robots, who were not allowed into the vast, thousand layer warrens below. Asimov's protagonist, a homicide detective, realizes that both societies are unnatural and are dead ends that are not sustainable in the long term for humanity. He leads a movement to return humankind to the surface of the earth, and launch a new wave of colonization of the galaxy based on human families rather than robots.
Over time, Asimov tied his novels and stories together into a vast Future History that described the rise and fall of a civilization spanning the Milky Way galaxy, centered on a capital planet, Trantor, completely covered by a single city. It is clearly the model for George Lucas' Coruscant, in a galaxy far, far away, with its intelligent robots. The one huge difference is that Asimov's future empire has no non-human species.
The trilogy of books at the fulcrum of Asimov's future history are reportedly being produced as a Game of Thrones-style series, now that CGI has caught up to the depiction of Asimov's vision. Watch for Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation.
I just watched the biopic about Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady, in which her own fellow Conservatives ridicule her for being the daughter of a green grocer, someone who knows the current price of butter, and knows how it is produced and distributed to consumers.
The movie is useless as an explanation of why Thatcher's policies were successful in reviving Britain's economy, in growing the pie of wealth rather than focussing on the redistribution of a shrinking pie. There is no recognition in the film of the similar transformation that Reagan worked in America, nor any understanding of how the socialist dream state in the USSR finally collapsed through its inability to transition into the 21st Century technological world of unlimited information sharing.
Thanks, Raymond. I wrote that comment after reading "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I think my last sentence meant to say: ..moving towards humans becoming the obsolete model...
I can't see what other motivation is behind much of what The Left promotes.
"...post-Christian future" - an oxymoron indeed. Would that more people would realize it.
Hear, hear, Paul.