keskiviikkona, marraskuuta 25, 2020

Syntyvyyden lasku liberalismin ongelmana

Quillettessa on taas kerran loistava artikkeli

Juttu lähtee siitä havainnosta, että yksilön vapaus ja yksilön hyvinvoinnin näkeminen ainoana tavoiteltavana asiana johtaa syntyvyyden laskuun. Yksilön hyvinvoinnin näkemistä ainoana tavoiteltavana asiana voi kutsua ideologisesta taustasta riippumatta klassiseksi liberalismiksi, utilitarismiksi tai hedonismiksi, mutta ilmiön nimi ei muuta muuksi sitä, että ko. ilmiöön liittyy syntyvyyden lasku.

Osa ihmisistä väittää - ja he ovat globaalilla tasolla oikeassakin - että syntyvyyden laskeminen on pelkästään hyvä asia ympäristön näkökulmasta. 

Koska ikärakenteen muuttuminen vanhusvoittoiseksi on kuitenkin käytännössä ongelma paikallisesti esimerkiksi Suomen kaltaiselle pohjoismaiselle sosiaalivaltiolle, vasemmalla ja markkinaoikeistossa vaaditaan maahanmuuton lisäämistä. Äärioikealla vaaditaan joko paluuta konservatiivisiin arvoihin, hyvinvointiyhteiskunnan keventämistä yövartio-valtioksi tai kielletään ongelman merkitsevyys esimerkiksi sillä, että teknologian kehitys ei vaadi niin paljon työntekijöitä kuin ennen.  Uskon itse ikärakenteen muuttumisen vanhusvoittoiseksi olevan ongelma kaikenlaisille valtioille mutta erityisesti pohjoismaiselle sosiaalivaltiolle, mutta minulla ei ole mitään mustavalkoista ratkaisua asiaan. Ongelman ratkaisu vaatii uskoakseni useiden työkalujen yhdistelemistä.

Quilletten artikkeli käsittelee amerikkalaisen liberalismin ns. progressiivisen muunnelman tarjoamaa ratkaisua liberalismin luomaan ongelmaan:

As a project, liberalism is concerned primarily with increasing the freedom of the individual, in the belief that allowing people to live the lives they choose is the best way to form a just society. And it is true that loosening some cultural constraints may well increase the sum total of human wellbeing, giving people the freedom to live and work as they see fit. Loosening all constraints, however, can dismantle the social structures that coordinate behaviour and ensure that a culture survives. Total freedom, freedom from obligation and expectation, can prove corrosive. Hedonism, as the ultimate purpose of a society, does not always motivate the sort of sacrifices necessary to keep that society operating.

Looking at the precipitous decline in Western fertility, in particular, there is a distinct sense that raising children, rather than something expected and enforced by norms, is viewed as the undesirable acquisition of an obligation. While this view may be all well and good from a snapshot utilitarian perspective, caring only about the current generation’s happiness, it is less than ideal for the long-term health of a society. And while liberalism cannot sustain itself through “natural” fertility, it also reacts furiously to natalism. Natalist policies that do not constrain behaviour at the very least put a heavy thumb on the scale, and will always involve parents leaving the workplace for at least some period. The first part constrains human freedom; the second involves sacrifice (career and income for family), which is frowned upon socially when “worth” and “productivity” are conflated. 

Liberalismi eli hedonismi alentaa syntyvyyttä. Ns. progressiivisuus - vaikka ei juurikaan puhu syntyvyydestä - tarjoaa käytännössä yhden ratkaisumallin väestöongelman ratkaisuun, mutta on hyvin ongelmallinen useammasta syystä, joista merkittävin klassisen liberalismin näkökulmasta on se, että progressiivisuus (Wokeness) vastustaa sananvapautta samaan tapaan kuin tympein uskonnollisuus. 

Progressiivisuudelle kelpaa väestöongelman ratkaisuun äärivanhoillisimmat tai radikalisoituneet islamin haarat, mutta ei amerikkalainen konservatiivi uskonnollisuus (uudestisyntyneet kristityt).

The short-term fix for a declining population has been to turn towards immigration in ever greater numbers. But the belief that someone else’s children are the future is not a natural one for a people to hold, making immigration levels a perennially contentious topic. It also neglects the fundamental point that those raised by parents of other cultures may not always turn out to be liberals. Other cultures are perfectly capable of replicating themselves, and an environment which makes minimal demands of the individual can find itself hosting communities with very different values and norms.

In this framework, radical progressivism looks like an adaptation of liberalism primed to deal with these faults. A liberal culture that wishes to survive must be able to assimilate large numbers of arrivals, both in the sense of rendering the current population amenable to the process, and in ensuring that newcomers carry its values onwards. 

Contemporary progressivism resolves this by replacing liberal ideals with a borrowed and bastardised form of evangelical Christianity. It views change as desirable only when it acts as a ratchet towards its preferred social values. It does not tolerate dissent—its adherents impose stringent social penalties on apostates, and wherever possible, attempt to twist the machinery of government into providing legal enforcement. Followers are called upon to proselytize continuously, at home, at work, in the streets, in the sheets. They are strongly in favour of open borders, and highly hedonistic, winning converts by promising them the chance to pursue their heart’s desire in a coalition against the prevailing norms of the day. It is not, in many ways, a particularly liberal philosophy; it is in some senses more traditionally conservative, in displaying aggressive intolerance of those that violate its norms. The difference is that the norms and values it espouses are an unusual set of sexual and social freedoms, while those it opposes tend to be more associated with traditional morality.

In the long-term, a functioning society governed according to this ideology looks something like a religious order replenishing itself with new initiates, a cuckoo culture in which one demographic continuously replaces the previous one, over and over. Whether this model would actually work in the longer term is unclear. It suits many groups to make themselves a part of a rainbow coalition while they seek to lift restrictions on their behaviour, but whether conservative religious communities will be seen as natural adherents to an ideology staunchly in favour of sexual liberation in the longer term remains to be seen. It is possible that progressivism would find that, while it succeeds in population replenishment, it fails to spread itself to new arrivals, finding that the immigrants necessary for societal maintenance in the end remain conservatives of their own tradition.

At present, while extremely prevalent online, liberalism’s would-be successor ideology is held by a considerably smaller section of the general population. The segments of the population that are growing are often traditionalists; religious women give birth to more children than their secular counterparts, as do conservatives more broadly. We can be confident that, while the future of the West may look quite radically different to that envisaged by current elite opinion, it will also look rather different to its current form. A culture which combines high migration alongside low integration and fertility will be replaced in the end, whether by a more conservative form of its own values, or something entirely different.

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