Hope for Europe?

A quote from Spiegel Online, 15 March 2007

A new wave of anti-feminism is taking hold of Germany. Former career women-turned-housewives are spreading the word about a "new femininity" which encourages women to stay at home and embrace motherhood.

The anonymous letter makes for heartbreaking reading. "Dragging myself from job to job, I used to feel so useless. I wanted to be special but didn't know how -- I was neither fish nor flesh." For this angst-ridden career woman, salvation finally came in the full-bellied shape of motherhood. "With my husband and daughter at my side, I'm so happy and free now," she proclaims.

What sounds like a scene out of a 1950s TV sitcom is in fact a letter written to Eva Herman, the German author of the controversial bestseller "The Eva Principle" ("Das Eva Prinzip"), sub-titled "Towards a New Femininity." The principle in question rests on a series of tenets so old-fashioned they seem almost revolutionary again: Motherhood instead of emancipation, child-rearing instead of career-climbing, devoted marriage instead of egoistic self-fulfillment.

The 262 pages behind the pink cover of "The Eva Principle" are full of anti-feminist anger. Herman feels that nothing less than the survival of the country is at stake – Germans will "die out" if women don't change their behavior, she says. She sees herself as courageously breaking a "taboo" by criticizing women's liberation.

"Let's just say it loud," Herman writes. "We women have overburdened ourselves - we allowed ourselves to be too easily seduced by career opportunities." She recommends women exchange the cold sphere of work for the "colorful world of children" and discover their "destiny of nurturing the home environment."

Germany's fertility rate, for native German women, is 1.3 children per woman. Replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. This means that in each generation the native German population is halving.

Germany, along with the other nations of "Old Europe", has built itself a comfortable welfare state with cradle to grave health care, loads of paid vacation, generous old age pensions and short work weeks. As the number of young Germans coming into the work force grow fewer in number the number of taxpayers to pay for these generous benefits grow smaller while the no longer productive older generation enjoys longer life spans. This will increase the already massive tax burden on the working members of German society.

And this situation applies all across Western Europe with some nations having even lower birthrates. Italy, for example, has a birthrate of 1.1 children per woman. To put is simply ethnic Europeans are in greater danger of extinction than most of the animals on the official endangered species lists.

What is the cause of this situation? There are many. One is the empty-headed dogma of overpopulation which took root in the consciousness of the developed world during the Seventies. The myth that the world was "over crowded" and running out of resources gained such purchase that having a large family came to be looked upon as something disreputable.

Another cause of the lower birthrate in Western Europe is the continent's abandonment of religious faith. With no sense of any kind of transcendent reality there is no trans-generational sense of responsibility. Is the welfare state unsustainable? It doesn't matter to the average European as long as the final collapse can be put off until after he/she is dead. It is a literal "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die" lifestyle.

Of course Europe will not empty out and lie vacant. Even now millions of new residents are pouring in to the continent and they are reproducing at rates far above replacement. From Turkey, Morocco, Algeria and a host of North African and Near and Middle Eastern nations a gigantic migration of Third World persons into the Old World is occurring. And regular readers of this blog will not need to be told that the thing that all these immigrants will have in common is a religion which starts with "I" and ends with "slam".

Muslims will gladly fill the vacuum created by the Europeans lack of faith in the future. And the society which they will build upon the cultural ruins of Old Europe will not be to the liking of those Europeans who are still left. I doubt that Eva Herman's book lays out the decision facing modern German woman as a stark "babies or burkas" choice, but that is what it will come down to.

I wish Mrs. Herman all the luck in the world, but without a revival of a German (and Italian, and French, and British, and so on) identity strong enough and attractive enough to create faith in the future Germans and other Europeans will not sacrifice the pleasures of the moment for the hard work of child rearing.

I believe that the only hope for Europe is a revival of the continents historic Christian faith. And I do not mean what passes for Christianity in the moribund state churches like the Anglicans of the UK. I mean a self confident evangelical faith which can inspire hope, provide a vision for the future and create a sense of identity which can compete with Islam.

How much of a chance this actually has of happening I cannot say.