Is liberalism digging its own demographic grave?

The Office for National Statistics has suggested that the UK will very soon be at the point where annual deaths outstrip births. Our fertility rate — births per woman — have been below long-term “replacement level” for a half a century. Eventually the long-term catches up with the present, and that is what it is about to do in Britain, sooner than previously expected, thanks to a recent further tumble in the number of births.

This is not a recent Covid effect but the effect of choices and lifestyles since the end of the baby boom in the 1960s. And it is certainly not unique to this country. Across Europe, North America and East Asia, countries are facing the prospect of falling populations which can be countered only by immigration. It’s true for countries as different as Germany and Greece, Spain and Korea. And it’s true not yet for the United States as a whole, but for a growing number of US states, starting with those in New England. Where mass immigration continues, as in Germany, the population continues to grow, just. Where there is net emigration, like in Bulgaria, or little movement in or out, like Japan, there is absolute population decline.

Some may celebrate this human retreat. It is invariably accompanied by ageing, and older populations are more peaceful and less criminal. The abandonment of villages leaves more space for nature. One fewer person is one fewer home-heater, car-driver and carbon-emitter. But there is a flip side. “Shortages of labour” sound a bit academic, but reality hits home when you can’t find a dentist for your aching tooth or a carer for your parent with dementia or a tanker driver to ensure there is any fuel when you turn up at the petrol station. Technology — the rise of the labour-substituting robots — will no doubt solve some of these problems. One day.

Meanwhile, you will have to manage without. And ultimately there is a sense of a civilisation literally dying. There are no longer any Visigoths or Wends. On the current trajectory, there will at some point in the coming centuries be no Italians or Japanese. Today disappearing languages and cultures are still of marginal and peripheral groups we have barely heard of. Tomorrow, it will be major cultures who have contributed inestimable riches to the human tapestry.

This is all to do with the choices people are making. True, there are biological reasons why some people can’t have children, and we hear worrying tales of falling sperm counts, but on the whole the baby shortage is about deciding not to have children, or not to have more than one, or not to try until the biological constraints start to bite. But these are not universal choices. Humanity itself will not die out. It’s just that some societies and communities are pro-natal and some are not.

At the national level, as we have seen, vast swathes of humanity are not prepared to reproduce themselves. Wherever urbanisation, education and wealth arrive, so fertility tends to plummet. No surprise then that the last redoubts of high fertility are in the poorest and least-educated parts of the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Within nations, there are sometimes sharp contrasts in fertility rates. In the US it is no coincidence that the most liberal states are those with the lowest fertility rates; women in the Dakotas have more than half a child more than those in Washington DC or Vermont. Taking a more microscopic view, the contrast is even starker; the fertility rate for women in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish townlet of Kiryas Joel is about five times the level for the surrounding State of New York as a whole.

In the West, immigration has tended to come from places where families are still large. But once arrived in Birmingham or Berlin, one of two things happens. Either immigrants tend to assimilate — to take on the cultural attitudes and outlook of the surrounding people, or they stick to their lifestyles. In the former case, their fertility rate drops. The highly-assimilated Hindus of the UK, for example, now have fewer children per woman than whites. Muslim fertility rates, although higher, are falling, but more so for the more assimilated, less so for the more religious. Among Jews in the US, Israel and the UK, there is a close correlation between religiosity and fertility.

A clear pattern is emerging; liberal societies are not reproducing themselves. This can be attributed to a range of associated attitudes — a preference for self-realisation over parenthood, of careers over childcare, a concern about the environment, a proclivity for alternative lifestyles which do not rule out offspring but make them less likely. The hyper-liberalism of “wokeness”, while not explicitly anti-natal, does not fit with a large or even a medium-sized family. To make up numbers, liberal societies import people from cultures with more child-friendly attitudes, but along with the liberalism of their neighbours, they tend to adopt the low fertility practices too. US Latinas have fewer than two children. And besides, fertility has now plunged in the homelands of many immigrants, from Mexico to India.

In most of the developed world, we are fast moving to a situation in which only those committed to ways of life quite different from those most of us have adopted are prepared to reproduce themselves. Their offspring may in turn assimilate and adopt lower fertility, or remain within the group and have large families. Either way, the nature of our societies is going to change. Either they will be de-populated altogether or they will become populated with people who do not share the latest shibboleths of liberalism. The very discussion of such matters is seen as impolite precisely among the liberally-inclined. But those who care about everything from gender equality to gay rights must ask themselves how these things are to be preserved and upheld in the face of the demographic reality.

Paul Morland’s new book, Tomorrow’s People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers (Pan Macmillan) will be published in March

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