Our lesson today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. No, no, not the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, any of that stuff, but the other birth: “But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.”
That bit of the Christmas story doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s in there — Luke 1:13, part of what he’d have called the backstory, if he’d been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician. Of the four gospels, only two bother with the tale of Christ’s birth, and only Luke begins with the tale of two pregnancies. Zacharias is surprised by his impending paternity — “for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years.” Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle — the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus’s birth is the miracle; Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth — all life — is to a degree miraculous and God-given.
We now live in Elisabeth’s world — not just because technology has caught up with the Deity and enabled women in their 50s and 60s to become mothers, but in a more basic sense. The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency — “America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,” etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social-democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.
Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: One in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear.”
If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: It’s run out of other people, period. Greece is a land of ever fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government. How do you grow your economy in an ever-shrinking market? The developed world, like Elisabeth, is barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add.
Seems a reasonable explanation to me, wonder why it’s so hard for soooooo many to understand.
Mark Steyn has been beating this demographic-death-of-the-West horse for over a decade now.
He is probably correct, too.
The West is now morphing into two distinct and different things:
In Europe it is being replaced by an Islamic society which will fail much as the Islamic societies the immigrants escaped from.
In the USA it is being replaced by an Hispanic society.
This might just succeed.
Hispanics have as many babies as Muslims PLUS they have entreprenureal spirit, and value human life.
They will also serve with loyalty in US armed services.
CURT, that is really putting your finger on the problem, and leaving the BORDERS open is not the SOLUTION, EITHER,
the previous generations had multiply the AMERICANS, NOT BECAUSE THEY WHERE RICH,
the older generation of immigrants, multiply, not because they where rich either,
they loved their children, and provide the best for them as a priority,in front of themselves.
today, the access to the contrary help decisions on leaning to the contrary, because any excuses will work more favorable than to have the children, well even the act of procreation today is called having sex, not having babys, and this NATION IS FACING THE CONSEQUENCES NOW. and the GOVERNMENT MUST BE CHANGE TO A SANE PRESIDENT WHO KNOW TO INSPIRE THE RIGHT BEHAVIOR TO THE YOUNG GENERATION OF TODAY, JUST BY SETTING AN EXEMPEL AND RECTIFYING THE WRONG PUBLICITY SO NEFARIOUS TO THEM. AND
ENCOURAGING LIFE, AS OPPOSE TO ABORTION, which now is a free for all busyness affair that benefit the socialist
GOVERNEMENT GOAL TO DESTROY AMERICA, BY REPLACING IT WITH FOREIGNERS HATER OF THE REAL AMERICAN, AND ARE WORKING TO CHANGE AMERICA INTO A SUBSERVANT NATION TO FOLLOW THEIR DANGEROUS AGENDA,
FOR GOD’SAKE THE MOST INTELLIGENT AMERICANS ARE WARNING US ALL IN AMERICA ABOUT IT’S DANGER,