By: George Monbiot / The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com

I know what “the demise of civilization” looks like: I’ve seen the graph. The European Commission published it in March. It’s a graph of the total fertility rate: the average number of children born per woman. After a slight increase over the past 20 years, the EU rate seems to be falling again, and now stands at 1.38. The UK rate is 1.44. The replacement rate is 2.1. You may or may not see this as a catastrophe, but mathematics doesn’t care what you think. We are sliding, as if by a gravitational pull, towards a collision.

“The disappearance of civilization” is the term the Trump administration used in its new national security strategy, released last week. It claimed that immigration, among other factors, would lead to the destruction of European civilization. In reality, without immigration there would be no Europe, no civilization, and no one would be left to debate it.

Of course, we are talking about different things. The Trump administration seems to see “civilization” as a white, Western property, threatened by people of color—whether they were born here or have recently arrived. This week, Donald Trump claimed that, with the exception of Poland and Hungary, European nations “will not be healthier as countries” as a result of immigration. Well, Poland has a total fertility rate of 1.2, which means a rapid slide into dysfunction unless it allows more immigration. “Civilization,” as it has often been over the past two centuries, in Trump’s case is a racist, white supremacist concept. The extinction of which the Trump administration seems to fear is that of “white” culture.

There is no such thing, and there never was. Our language, science, mathematics, music, cuisine, literature, art and – thanks to the legacy of colonial and postcolonial plunder – much of our wealth, originates elsewhere. Italian cuisine may be unthinkable without tomatoes, but, having originated in South America, they were not widely used until the 19th century. Balti may have more of a claim to be the UK’s national dish than fish and chips (a Portuguese import), since it originated here. Old England’s roast beef, from an animal domesticated in the Middle East, was consumed by the elite: the rest of the population got most of their protein from lentils (pea porridge, pea pudding, pea soup). This changed only when ways were found to preserve and transport meat from animals raised in the colonies. The widespread consumption of beef in Britain required the civilizing extinction of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, and the destruction of their ecosystems.

Some rulers once understood the power of pluralism. King Stephen I of Hungary, who ruled from 1001 to 1038, observed that the cultures and knowledge of foreigners enriched the kingdom, while “a country unified in language and customs is fragile and weak.” A thousand years later, Trump seems to have forgotten this obvious truth.

What I am talking about, by contrast, is real extinction: the outright extinction of society. Once the fertility rate falls below 2.1, it continues to fall, and a slide towards zero seems inevitable. This does not mean that I have become “pronatalist” (who wants increased fertility). I am neither pronatalist nor antinatalist, for both positions are equally futile. As David Runciman notes in his excellent summary in London Review of Books, the opportunity cost of having children increases with wealth, leading inevitably to a decline in birth rates. In some parts of the world, this process began in the 16th and 17th centuries. It seems that no amount of government restrictions or incentives can significantly change this trajectory.

For years I have argued with people who want to reduce population for environmental reasons. I have pointed out that today’s growth rate was set before most of us were born: as a UN report explains, “The substantial population growth continues today because of the large number of births in the 1950s and 60s, which have resulted in a larger population base with millions of young people reaching reproductive age in subsequent generations.” In other words, those obsessed with large numbers of people are fighting against a mathematical function. The global (and, in the UK, national) population will continue to grow for some time before falling dramatically, largely as a matter of demographic momentum.

The only thing these nutcases could do to change the tipping point for more than a few years would be mass murder on an unprecedented scale: slaughtering hundreds of millions of people. That’s because the problem isn’t high birth rates (the global rate has been falling since the year I was born, 1963), but increased child survival and a much longer life expectancy. Ironically, the person who may have caused the biggest depopulation is Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed pro-natalist who, by dismantling USAID, could cause, according to an estimate in The Lancet, 14 million deaths. He wants to see more children born, but seems to care little whether they survive.

Otherwise, if the proponents of “population control” have any significant influence, it will – because of the long and complicated delays involved – accelerate the decline on the other side of the curve. People have dedicated their lives to this folly.

Why do they cling to this idea long after the evidence has disappeared? In part, I believe, because population growth is an extremely convenient scapegoat and distraction from the impacts of consumption: rich people in the Global North can blame much poorer black and brown people in the Global South for the environmental crises they themselves have caused. Switching to a plant-based diet or from fossil fuels to renewables, as opposed to changing the size of the human population, are things we can do immediately, humanely and effectively. But blaming other people requires no change and no confrontation with power.

Without immigration, within a few generations there will be no Europe, and no United Kingdom. Today’s racist obsessions will seem incomprehensible to our elderly descendants, desperate for young people to look after them and keep their countries running. Soon, we will be struggling to attract people from abroad. But, as Runciman notes, “Soon there will not be enough immigrants for everyone.”

Perhaps that is why, in Ian McEwan's new novel, always visionary, What can we know? [What We Can Know] - set 100 years later - the dominant global power is Nigeria, one of the few countries that still today has a fertility rate significantly above replacement level, although that too is falling rapidly.

Trump's security strategy, like all far-right politics, is both senseless and ominous. But, above all, it is wrong. /Telegraph/

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