A Thousand Times So Many

When Moses gathered his people together at the edge of the promised land, he was astounded by their numbers.

The Lord your God hath multiplied you, and, behold, ye are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude.

-Deut. 1:10.

His reaction?  More!

(The Lord God of your fathers make you a thousand times so many more as ye are, and bless you, as he hath promised you!)

-Deut. 1:11.

Instapundit links an interesting article on the secular problem of our times, the lack of children  (there are some other great links there on the Parent Trap and Car Seats as Contraception, not to mention Montesquieu!).

the global fertility rate peaked in 1965 at over 5 children per woman. Since then, it has been in relentless decline — now all the way down to 2.3. While the Green Revolution was the product of innovation and thus the resulting productivity spike was legitimately unexpected, the drop in birthrates merely recapitulated at the global level a dynamic that had begun in rich countries a century earlier. Between 1870 and 1920, fertility rates fell by 30 to 50 percent in western Europe and the United States. Along with a corresponding, and generally earlier, drop-off in mortality rates, this phenomenon is known as the “demographic transition” — the sea change from a high birth-rate, high death-rate society to one with low birth and death rates.

–The Global Fertility Collapse, Brink Lindsey

Although death rates have been ticking back up lately while the birth rates continue to go down.  A lot of the bargains of modernity seem poisoned like this.  Prosperity (for a while) and longevity (for a while) in return for childlessness and misery.  Eventually the prosperity and longevity dwindle away but the lonely unhappiness remains.  The sexual revolution seems like another such bargain.  Lots of fun sex in return for divorce and family breakdown–but the sex gets worse and less frequent over time, while the divorce and family breakdown just keeps roaring.  The main feature of these devil’s bargains is probably that their initial success, such as it is, relies on social structures and phenomena that they are drawing down.  Eating the seed corn.

The defusing of the population bomb was a triumph of capitalist wealth creation — but it came with a catch. Birth rates fell enough to avert Malthusian catastrophe, but then they kept right on falling. In the 1970s, sub-replacement fertility rates — that is, rates below the roughly 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population — began cropping up in rich democracies. But low fertility didn’t confine itself to rich countries; it kept spreading. As of now, roughly half the world’s population resides in countries with sub-replacement fertility. Here are the current fertility rates of some representative countries:

United States     1.6

Brazil     1.7

Chile     1.6

Germany     1.5

France     1.8

United Kingdom     1.6

Sweden     1.7

Italy     1.2

Russia     1.5

Ukraine     1.2

Australia     1.6

Japan     1.3

China     1.7

Thailand     1.5

South Korea     0.8

.8 is apocalyptic levels.  All of these are apocalyptic levels.  There is no plague in human history that has done this much damage on a large scale.  There is almost no war that has.

Population decline has already begun in some places. Japan’s population peaked in 2008 at just over 128 million, falling by almost 3 million since then. South Korea’s population peaked in 2020 and has dipped the past two years. If China’s population hasn’t peaked already, it’s likely to happen in the next couple of years. All of these countries have historically experienced limited immigration (although the pace in Japan has picked up recently), and so they enjoy less insulation from the demographic consequences of low fertility.

It is in eastern Europe, though, where population loss has been most widespread and dramatic — due to a combination of low fertility and a wave of emigration since the collapse of communism as people sought greater opportunities to the west. Between 1992 and 2016, the countries of this region lost about 18 million people, or about 6 percent of their total population. Latvia has already lost nearly 30 percent of its people; Lithuania’s and Bulgaria’s populations have fallen by nearly 25 percent. The astonishing emptying of the region is projected to continue apace: Latvia is on track to shed nearly a quarter of its remaining population over the next three decades; Bulgaria, whose population has already fallen from just below 9 million in the 1980s to under 7 million today, is shrinking by 50,000 people a year.

…

Although the U.S. population overall continues to inch upwards, population decline is already a grim reality in much of the country. Between 2007 and 2017, about half of U.S. counties, home to roughly 50 million Americans, saw their populations shrink. In an astonishing 80 percent of U.S. counties, with a combined population of nearly 150 million, the number of prime-age workers (ages 25-45) fell during that same period.

The spiritual problem is just as intense as the material problem.  On a social level, these collapsing birth rates due to prosperity is wickedness (not necessarily so in individual cases though).  Worse, having fewer children limits spirituality.  There are vistas of spiritual progress that remain locked.

Consider these two scriptures together.

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord:

–Amos 8:11.

 And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?

-Matthew 21:16

What scripture says that in the mouth of .8 or 1.6 witnesses shall every word be established?