Over on the continent from which, or from nearby which, so many of our ancestors fled or left in chains, there's a good deal of concern about the falling birth rate. If things go on as they are going, the population of Europe and its near outriders, such as the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and England and Ireland will have significantly smaller populations 20 or 30 years hence, or, perhaps far worse from the point of view of some worrying most loudly, a significant proportion of the population will be black, or Muslim, or Slavic. The problem, of course, is that women (by which we mean fine white Christian women) are on strike and not having babies.
Apparently one does not have to worry about this only in frankly racist terms. One can transmute any such instinct into a concern about culture, perhaps even international culture. The France that we know, or believe we know, is a complex product of a history of, say, 1500 years, its language, culture, outlook and intrinsic philosophies a natural reaction to that stew of ideas. Will all of this be changed if the average mademoiselle is of Algerian background and goes to the mosque? Will the great cultural heritage and outlook of a Britain, not to mention a supposedly innate love of liberty, be not fundamentally changed when three of every five new babies being born have more genes originating in the Indian subcontinent than in Mercia or northern Europe? Can the land of Leonardo and Michaelangelo - and the cultural centre of Christiandom retain its character and its personality after a non-violent invasion by people (even Christians) from Byzantium or further parts east.
Personally, I think that Europe is up to it, if only because it has been up to it before. The nature, character and history of France, for example, was more fundamentally shaped by wave after wave of invasion by Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks (who gave the country its name) and Normans than ever was by Celts, Bretons and Gauls. At the time of the invasions of these outsiders, from about 1600 years ago, columnists, thumbsuckers and beard-strokers on the then equivalent of Le Monde at Lutetia (as we used to call it then) worried deeply about how these barbarians would ruin the local culture and food, dilute the wine and mangle the purity of various lingua franca that passed, then, for the French language. There were Celts and Mercians who felt much the same about the waves of Picts, Jutes, Angles and Saxons who abandoned their lands in western Europe to colonise England, and, later, the Norsemen who came to rape, ravage and ultimately settle alongside. Or, in Germany, from the groups whose invasions had caused these refugees - say the Slavs, the Huns, and the Tartars, or, further to the south east, the Turks.
A good many people of south-east Europe, particularly the noble modern Greeks would shoot me for saying this, but the chances are that the gene pool of most north-east Mediterraneans owes more to the central steppes of Asia than, say, to Demosthenes or Phillip of Macedonia.
All of these invasions, and many which succeeded them, had deep impacts, locally and globally, on civilisation as we knew it, but the remarkable thing, in retrospect is how much more the invaders settled into existing cultures (and languages, lifestyles, religions and affectations) than they fundamentally changed the existing (surviving) locals. More often than not, indeed, they became more French than the French, more German than the German and more British than the British. It is not generally recognised, for example, that the demand of the (Norman) nobles on the (Norman) king, John, in 1215, which gave us Magna Carta, was the restoration of what were said to be traditional English liberties. The biggest upset these liberties had had, of course, was the invasion of these (French-speaking) North Men (ie Scandinavians) under William the Conqueror in 1066 and the displacement of the old landholders. In due course, however, the new landholders wanted protection from arbitrary government by the king. Likewise Arian Goths and their fellow invaders became in due course Catholics, and stronger defenders of the Pope and the church system of government, than those who had stood alongside Popes when the invaders were thought the harbingers of the collapse of the West and western civilisation. And those who came to live alongside (and, horrors, even learn from) the Moors and other Muslim invaders, many of whom, the Mongols, Seljuks, Iranians and Turkmen had themselves invaded, conquered and become integrated with the original Arab messengers of Mohammed, and other Muslims invaders, were the ones whose reintegration of ancient learning sparked the cultural renaissance of Europe.
Over in the United States, people are worried that the fine pure strains of American blood are being diluted by Latinos. The US is not, strictly, suffering from the population crisis of Europe, but that is thanks only to the youth and fecundity (in first and second generation at least) of immigrants, legal and illegal, from Central and South America, and the fact that Southern Babtists (stet), of any racial background, continue to heed Genesis 1.22. Elsewhere, the fertility of American women resembles that of Australia, Italy, France and other parts of eastern and western Europe, the occasional bumps owing more to demographic humps than any renewed intention to have one for the country, or to maintain Judeo-Christian civilisation.
The panic this is inducing in Europe has thrown up some interesting points. In countries where there is good public child care and relative actual equity (in pay, aspirations and willingness to contribute to looking after children), the birthrate is higher than elsewhere. Italy, where practical equality is a myth, where a high proportion of married women do not work, and public support for children slight, women are effectively on a baby strike, having many fewer children, on average, than in, say, Sweden.
It goes without saying that the social influence on fertility of the Catholic Church, which is particularly opposed to contraception, is minimal anywhere in Europe, or North America or in Australia. It is simply impossible to identify Catholics as less likely to use contraception (or resort to abortion) than any other religious group. Likewise, policies to help stay-at-home mothers do not work, at least in encouraging people to have more children. In Europe, indeed, the average stay-at-home mother (whether or not supported by tax subsidies or other measures) has fewer children on average than a working woman of the same age and station. Barefoot and pregnant just does not cut it anymore. At least if neither the state, the family or the husband help out.