Something about death

Something To Do With Death:

Mark Steyn warns against the Obama project, and his terms are familiar.

A couple of years back Paul Krugman wrote a column asserting that, while parochial American conservatives drone on about “family values”, the Europeans live it, enacting policies that are more “family friendly”. On the Continent, claims the professor, “government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff - to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family.”

As befits a distinguished economist, Professor Krugman failed to notice, that for a continent of “family friendly” policies, Europe is remarkably short of families. While America’s fertility rate is more or less at replacement level – 2.1 – seventeen European nations are at what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility - 1.3 or less - a rate from which no society in human history has ever recovered....

When the state “gives” you plenty – when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood – it’s not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence – literally so for those Germans who’ve mastered the knack of staying in education till they’re 34 and taking early retirement at 42 (which sounds a lot like where Obama’s college-for-all plans will lead).

What was it that Charles Murray said?

And yet he is right to say [men] are not adequately welcome within the society. In many respects the world of Iraq is as much home as this world; for there one still puts on armor and 'rides out,' and does the kinds of things that make you feel like you are living the kind of life a man should live. This is what Murray was talking about: vital experiences, extraordinary ones, that are the reason that men exist at all.

What if these experiences fade, and given the choice of anything else that they want, men choose not to exist? And women, freed to have only the children they really want, find they really want so few that the land grows empty and the people pass from memory?

What if that is what we really want -- given everything we might want?





We've spoken before of how that movie predicted the end of men, in a world in which only 'businessmen' would be welcome. Yet what all this points to is that something within the West has died. What we may wish to wonder about now is, what comes after?

We must ask, for we are coming to the end of this. Perhaps it is an end to us. Perhaps it is a rebirth.