… and Europe’s Destiny Dwindles.
The quotation is borrowed from Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857), the reputed originator of the study of ‘sociology’, after having experienced the French Revolution.
The polities of the defined continent of Europe (excluding Russia, which lies in two continents) contain 7.6% of the world’s population in 2023, as estimated by the World Factbook of the CIA.
And the population in 21 European countries is declining, despite immigration from other countries and continents.
The other notable characteristic of these and other European countries is that of Total Fertility Rate—”the average number of children that would be born per woman if all women lived to the end of their childbearing years and bore children according to a given fertility rate at each age.” (Source). A rate of two children per woman is considered the replacement rate for a given population.
In the above chart, the Total Fertility Rates range from 1.24 in Italy to 1.81 in Montenegro. Even the immigration to some of these countries does not overcome the low birth rates sufficiently to keep the population at a constant level. And in nine of these countries, whatever immigration may be occurring is overcome by more people leaving than arriving.
The world has a population growth rate of slightly more than 1%. Only three of Europe’s nations reach or exceed this rate: Ireland, Luxembourg, and Ukraine (although I am doubtful of the latter’s accuracy—this is all self-reporting). Even so, the fertility rates of these three countries is well below the optimum 2.0. Their immigration rates are high, which accounts for at least some of the higher than expected population growth rate.
Please note, also, that the world’s median age is 31 years. Just look at the last column on the right to see how ‘old’ Europe is.
The conclusion I offer, once again, is that whatever Europe is, is fading away.
The Pavellas Perspective 
Perhaps we will all get to be ruled by radical Islam, whose popular and birth rate is, I understand, growing rapidly
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Using the Pareto Principle, I suggest that no more than 20% of Muslims are ‘radical’. I believe I have seen estimates under 10%. Here in Sweden I see apparently Muslim families where the older women wear head covering and the younger women (not girls) do not. From a radical Muslim point of view, young Muslims (or young people from Muslim families) are being ‘infected’ (let’s you and I say ‘influenced’) by Western culture, just as non-Muslim youth are being infected/influenced by popular culture emanating from Hollywood and other infectious sites. If families of all kinds remain strong and intact, these will resist being infected by any destructive influence.
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Unfortunately 20% is way more than enough to impose it’s will on the silent majority. This is the way the world works I fear. The aggressive doses have always imposed their will on those who simply want to be left alone.
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I wish it could be known what the percentage really is.
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The way Muslims are perceived today in the West is how Jews and Gypsies were perceived in the past. Also, in Protestant countries, Catholics used to be feared similarly (to make it worse, Catholics were often darker-skinned southern Europeans and Palatine Germans). While in Catholic countries, Protestants were feared. If everyone fears everyone else, that should solve all our problems, right?
It’s an old pattern of fear-mongering that repeats. The world is always ending because [fill in the blank]. There were similar moral panics in the early 20th century. And another one further back before the American Civil War: lots of ethnic immigrants, invention of vaginal sponge and vulcanized rubber, 1 in 5 pregnancies aborted, white fertility rate declined, etc.
Yet somehow civilization didn’t collapse nor did WASPs disappear from the world. All those dangerous ethnics, religious minorities, etc assimilated. Now their descendants scapegoat new generations of ethnics, religious minorities, etc. Why waste good rhetoric that riles up hate, bigotry, and fear? This stuff can be recycled over and over. It’s still quite effective for Trump in the US and many neo-fascists in Europe.
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Your comments and the associated/accompanying articles reminded me of this article I wrote 14 years ago: https://pavellas.com/2010/07/15/the-holy-zygote/
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Go forth and multiply particularly was taken seriously by Catholics in the past. That was one of the theo-political divides between them and Protestants. Before the 1960s or so, the main conflict in American society was not between right and left, theocrats and secularists, etc. Rather between WASPs (and those assimilated into WASP culture) on one side and on the other religious minorities (particularly Catholics), unassimilated ethnics, and immigrants (at a time of some of the greatest diversity in American history). It was a totally different world, and the holy zygote very much was at the center of it all. There is an intriguing history behind different views on sex and pregnancy in various religions, particularly in the West since the Protestant Reformation.
Catholics have traditionally been opposed to abortion access, planned parenthood, birth control, etc. Following this belief system, they had massive families in the past; and that was magnified by increased infant and early childhood survival rates from improved healthcare, vaccinations, etc. American WASPs saw this as fearful since they were being outbred. But the response of American WASPs, including Republicans and the religious right at that time, was to promote the complete opposite view. Family planning was considered part of the religious morality of family values and personal responsibility, whereas big families were associated with the filthy poor, cultural degenerates, the genetically inferior, and dangerous foreigners who were breeding out of control like vermin.
Plus eugenics was still in the air. Many of those wanting to suppress the birth rate of some populations were extremely right-wing. The idea that uncontrolled breeding was a good thing hadn’t yet occurred to the religious right, in that period before reactionary Evangelicals formed an alliance with reactionary Catholics. The right-wing shadow network, under the control of the Catholic Paul Weyrich, originally tried to organize around racism (e.g., segregation in Bible schools). But they lost important legal cases, and it turned out few Americans at that point wanted to be associated with overt racism. So, they had to hide their racism behind proxy ci;tire war issues. That is where they turned to ‘pro-life’. Besides, if they couldn’t keep the undesirables from overbreeding as eugenics fell out of favor, then they’d have to beat them at the game of uncontrolled breeding.
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I tried to leave this comment at the linked post. But when the comment was in the comment box, the ‘send’ button would get hidden. WordPress seems to changed something. That didn’t used to happen. Anyway, I’ll leave my comment here (as I’m able to post the comment from the notifications that doesn’t have the same problem).
I’d get the point you’re making. It’s generally true as species go. But in nature, when species overbreed, there is a mass die-off through starvation, ecosystem destruction, etc. There are many species with boom and bust cycles. But humans have an additional factor, that of culture. As I mentioned in another comment elsewhere on your blog, the main division between Protestants and Catholics, until quite recently, was different theological takes on breeding.
Protestants have tended to put off marriage and pregnancy to later in adulthood. They’ve used this to allow more early life focus on education, literacy, and career development; often for women as well as men. This has led Protestant countries to become highly advanced, with Catholic countries having tended to lag behind. It’s interesting to note that Catholic countries have started to catch up as more Catholics too have embraced family planning, contraceptive usage, etc; particularly American Catholics who have come to largely ignore the Vatican’s commands.
The Protestant (Anabaptist, and Quaker) way of doing things has been around for centuries. From the colonial period to the American Civil War, abortifacients were easily obtained or made at home, while family planning pamphlets had become popular (e.g., Benjamin Franklin published an abortifacient recipe). Then such things as vaginal sponges and vulcanized rubbers were on the market by the early 1800s. But this is an even older phenomenon.
Around the world, traditional societies have long known about various forms of birth control and abortifacients. Hunter-gatherers tend to closely control their populations, as they can’t survive within their ecosystems with too many children. They use various means to suppress pregnancy. Besides certain herbs, they extend breastfeeding for many years which prevents pregnancy. Putting years between each conception ensures better nutrition for the developing fetus and baby, as the mother can rebuild her nutritional stores.
So, the idea that more babies is better, as some genetically-determined message in our biology, is a bit more complicated. One of the successes of the human species is that we have conscious control over our population levels, with some of this knowledge maybe going back hundreds of millennia. Genetics is important, but so is nurture, especially nurture passed on through culture. Humans are distinct because of our ability to create and maintain culture. If we limited ourselves to mere biological instinct, we wouldn’t have built civilization.
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I agree that a rote “more babies is (are?) better” is not sufficient for survival of a species. The ones that survive are the better adapters to a changing environment.
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To my view, survival is probably more dependent on quality than quantity. First, let’s seek to improve human health: physical, mental, moral, social, and environmental.
That will also help to repair all the epigenetic alterations that, in some research, can linger for generations. By doing this, we will increase the cognitive ability and the expression of human potential.
Then hopefully we will be up to the task of understanding the problems we’ve created and figuring out solutions. That was the fear during some past moral panics, that we no longer had what was needed to survive.
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On a related note, there are real things to fear. The reason I’m visiting again is because I came across a conversation we had a few years ago (in the comment section of the below linked post). It was about the Federalists vs the Anti-Federalists.
Many of the former wanted an imperial presidency, a powerful Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution, far less separation of powers and separation of church from state, unregulated corporatism, etc. Whereas many in the other camp wanted greater suffrage, direct democracy, local self-governance, and such.
With Trump and Project 2025, the Federalism of Hamilton and Adams is still going strong. Two things are amazing. First, this ideological battle never ends. Second, almost all Americans know nothing about the history because public education, corporate media, and plutocratic politics keeps us ignorant.
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“almost all Americans know nothing about the history because public education, corporate media, and plutocratic politics keeps us ignorant.” Yes.
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Right-wingers caricature corporate media as ‘liberal media’. But I have no idea what this ‘liberalism’ is supposed to mean. Are we to believe the media moguls, among the richest and most powerful people in the world, are bleeding heart, pansy liberals? You sure couldn’t tell by what they put out from their media empires.
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