Young Men are the Problem (Part II)

In part one, I quoted Martin Kramer as saying a surplus of young men is the central problem of Middle Eastern Muslim societies. The 9/11 attack and everything since in the War on Terror is a byproduct of their astonishing birthrate. Bad as this is, an historical perspective says Darwinian selection is also threatened, and with it, us.

Young Men are the Problem (Part II)
By Frank Hilliard

Why did Greece fail? Why did Rome crumble? Why did Northern European societies sprint ahead of the rest of the world and develop industry, commerce, science, inventions and armaments? And is the progress of the West, as we call ourselves, threatened by current developments?

There is a theory that answers these questions developed by Gerhard Meisenberg, a professor at Ross University in Dominica, from work done by Oswald Spengler and quoted at VDare by Richard Hoste. Here's the first part of the argument, presented by Hoste:

At the most primitive level of development, people have only magical explanations of the workings of the universe. Manliness and patriarchy are in style. Intelligence is selected for, as the very weakest die out.

The intelligent tribe’s population grows. More people means more inventions. The population then grows further, because people still have their old habits and haven’t yet realized that more children means a lower standard of living. The “Flynn Effect”, an absolute rise in IQ likely caused by improved nutrition, takes hold and people become even smarter.

Thus although high intelligence is no longer selected for, improvements in environment mask any decline in the gene pool. The society’s higher IQ leads to even greater progress.

But this doesn’t go on forever. There is only so much that nurture can do to improve cognitive functioning. So, although IQ improved by about thirty points in the twentieth century, with most of the gains coming at the middle and left of the bell curve, the Flynn Effect has now hit its limits in the modern West.

OK, so we top out on smarts; what's the problem with that you ask? We stop having babies because, being smart, we realize there's no benefit to us as individuals and since we no longer believe in God, no benefit to society either.

Meisenberg quotes Spengler:

“Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence...When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard ‘having children’ as a question of pro’s and con’s, the great turning point has come. For nature knows nothing of pro and con.”

Oh, oh. Let's go back and look at Greece:

When Ancient Greece was at its peak in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., writers considered the city-states overpopulated. But by the second century B.C., Polybius would write:

“In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth-rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them.”

Next up, Rome:

The emperor Augustus passed laws to increase fertility, but they were a failure. The rulers of the Antonine dynasty remained childless. They were able to maintain good governance that way because there were no incompetent or evil sons to take power. Unfortunately, there would soon be nobody to govern.

Actually, not everybody stopped breeding. There was one small cult the encouraged its flock to “be fruitful and multiply”. That cult was, of course, Christianity.

Christians took over not because, as I used to think as late as last week, of their creed, but their breeding. Indeed, one reason the American birth rate is at the replacement rate today is because the United States is more Christian than either Canada or Europe.

Which brings me to the final point, which was Mark Steyn's point. We are not replacing ourselves; we are being replaced by the fertile and fecund populations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; Muslim every one.

Just like the Christians replaced the Roman polytheists.

When I said young men are the problem I could have said young women are the problem because they have so many young men. Either way; a tidal wave of swarthy Islamists is on the way to replace your selfish, secular, statist, athiest, 'Progressive', hedonistic, self-centred, and self-satisfied selves.

A society that is more interested in sports than war will shortly lose at both to a society more interested in war than sports. Sports, after all, are merely—and especially the Olympics—playing at war.