Slouching toward extinction

Paul Belien notes a disturbing fact in a post to The Brussels Journal:

Most popular name for newborn boys in Brussels, the “capital of Europe,” in 2005: Mohamed, followed by Adam, Ayoub, Rayan and Mehdi.

Of course this indicates that the majority of babies being born in Brussels are being born to Muslim parents. And we know that the Muslim population in Belgium, as in every other European nation, is unassimilated for the most part. The Muslim population of Europe is, again for the most part, hostile to the nations which have take them in and given them access to a quality of life that they simply could not have dreamed of in their ancestral homelands.

The above bit of data also points up another disturbing fact. That the native populations of Europe are not reproducing at a rate sufficient to replace themselves.

The are several reasons for a society to experience a decline in its birthrate. One is that when a society reaches a certain point of stability and prosperity that doors of possibility are opened up for the citizens. People simply have too much to do, too many things to experience to tie themselves down for years changing diapers and answering an endless series of "why, why why" questions.

Another reason, one on the opposite end of the scale, is that the people have lost hope for a better future. When Robert A Heinlein and his wife visited the Soviet Union in the early sixties Mrs. Heinlein, who had become proficient in Russian in preparation for their trip, made it a point to strike up conversations with as many of the ordinary people they encountered as she could. One of the questions she always made a point of asking people was about their families, children, grandchildren, siblings and so on.

Based on her data sample she calculated (she was a mathematician) that the Russians were not reproducing at the replacement rate. The people had been ground down under totalitarian communism to the point where they simply gave up. More and more of them reached the subconscious conclusion that it was better to end the line here and now rather than give another generation to the State to further grind down.

In the case of Western Europe I would guess that a combination of both factors are at work. On the one hand the comfort of their cradle-to-grave welfare states and their surplus of leisure time (35 hour work weeks and 2 full months of paid vacation every year) along with government subsidized contraception and abortion make having children an easily avoided distraction from all of the interesting and fun things they could otherwise be doing.

On the other hand the "one-two punch" of the loss of their traditional Christian faith, which has been replaced with the "dry wells" of socialism and scientism, and the rise of moral relativism and multiculturalism, which feed on the "White guilt" of their colonial past, have robbed them of any real hope for the future.

These two factors cooperate to produce slow motion cultural suicide. To people in the grip of this mindset the Muslim minority (soon to grow into a majority) within their borders is not a malignancy to be excised, but the elemental force of History which cannot be resisted but only submitted to.