There's a splendid car crash of pieties in this wibble from the Chief Rabbi:
"Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy. Where today, in European culture with its consumerism and its instant gratification because you're worth it."He has a point in his first paragraph. One of my oldest friends and his partner have been through a harrowing few years of miscarriages and disappointments because they left it too late. That follows a history of abortions-of-convenience in younger years. They are very typical of recent generations. The time to have kids is young adulthood, this does involve sacrifices. People who try to have it all simply transfer the costs of their ambition to their children, who have to bear them or forgo existence entirely.
There was no room for sacrifice for "the sake of generations not yet born" in such a culture.
"Europe is dying," he concluded and compared the situation in the continent today to ancient Greece with its "sceptics, epicureans and cynics".
He said: "That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it."
Religion was the safeguard of morality and the decline of religion would lead to fragile families and communities in atrophy.
The glib and complacent description of the source of so much human misery and burnt human flesh for so many centuries as the "safeguard of morality" is just par for the course.
It's the comparison with Climate Change that provides the car crash. Human population growth is one of the factors in climate change, if the alarmists are to be believed. The Rabbi's statement can be re-rendered as follows:
[population should rise] is the moral equivalent of [population should fall]
Europe isn't dying. If the massive expansion of population of the past couple of centuries were to be followed by a levelling off and even a slight contraction, so what? That would be a very good thing in all kinds of ways - especially economic and ecological.
Via Laban, who draws rather different conclusions.
7 comments:
You're right that fewer people would be better for the environment - I'm with the Optimum Population Trust on that one.
I think the good doctor was drawing the analogy with 'something big and important that will produce enormous change and that maybe we ought to do something about' rather than implying that the two things were in any way linked.
The great British 60s cultural disaster (which I enjoyed so much) might not have been all bad had it led to a population drop. But alas the economics of an expanding Welfare State founded on the baby boom of the 50s and 60s (basically a giant Ponzi scheme where current income is used to pay past liabilities) meant that more and more taxpayers were needed. Once women were fully involved in the labour force (which led to another drop in fertility) where else were they to go ? We've outsourced childbearing like everything else. That has great dangers - which you only have to pick up a history book to see. Racial, cultural and/or religious division = trouble.
I forget which wit coined 'Globalisation in one country' as Labour's mantra, but it's not inaccurate. I'm also quite fond of Steve Sailer's 'Invade the World, Invite the World, In Hock to the World'.
Hi
As to dying Europe, thought you'd like
The Brandenburggate Scandal
http://www.notbornyesterday.org/index.htm
"Morla" ?
So Peter, having kids 'does involve some sacrifices'. I don't recall you making too many 'sacrifices' when you buggered off and abandoned your own daughter in Scotland.
Morla, yes. Typo but since it took so long for me to notice I think I'll let it stand.
David, you're a lying piece of shit, too cowardly even to identify yourself.
It's the truth and you know it.
The truth is that after a ten year battle with a mentally ill woman, I finally gained access to the child. I repeat, you are a lying piece of shit, too cowardly even to identify yourself.
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