An excellent point by Luttwak (h/t Instapundit).
Today, however, with the average fertility of women across Europe less than two and still falling — the EU average was 1.46 in 2022 — there are no spare children.
The extreme case here is China, with its fertility rate of 1.1. President Xi is, by all accounts, a bellicose man who enjoys threatening war against Taiwan. And yet, curiously, in 2020 he took eight months to reveal that one PLA officer and three soldiers had died during the fighting on India’s Ladakh frontier. During that period of official silence, the families of the four were re-housed and provided with welfare payments or better jobs; the officer’s wife who taught piano in a village school was elevated to the Xi’an Conservatory of Music, with a new house to go with it. Each of the four also became the subject of dedicated media campaigns, which portrayed the youngest as cinematically good-looking and the officer as so conscientious that, up in cold Tibet, he would wake up before his soldiers to prepare hot-water bottles for them. Later, the names of the four were added to many highway bridges to remind all of their sacrifice.
Why the grand acts of remembrance? The answer is demographic. Thanks to China’s one-child policy, imposed in 1980 with the abundant use of forced abortions, the four deaths extinguished eight family lines.
Emphasis added. I only have one child, by fate rather than policy; if he were drafted and killed at war, it would end my family line. I only have one cousin in my father's line; he has one son as well. We're only two sons away from my grandfather's line being extinguished.
Under those circumstances, how important is Taiwan? Quite a bit, really, and more important yet is control of the sea lanes nearby; but those are the concerns of nations, not families. Not our family's, and not Chinese families'.
Aristotle held that the polis is an outgrowth of the decisions of families, not (as modern political theory has it) of individuals. When the interests of the families as a whole comes apart from the interest of the polis, the political project is in grave danger of being fundamentally illegitimate. It seems this new demographic reality has changed us, but the archaic political systems at work here and in Europe and in China all date to the era in which National Glory was something for which children could be sacrificed.
2 comments:
I don't think people ever stop thinking about things like this, even in times past- but as you point out, they typically had 'spares', and we no longer do. You and I have much in common- married only about a year apart, only one son (though I also have a daughter), and he is the Prince Pu Yi of our line, my father being an only son, and though he had three sons, only one grandson. Even on my Mother's side, My grandparents had seven children, but only two sons, and of them only one male offspring.
On the other hand, I think many in the younger generations don't think much of name legacy and lineage. My niece is having no children, by choice so far as I know, and I don't think she's so rare, and certainly more than two kids has become vanishingly rare around where I am.
We can only hope Gen Z and forward start to see the problem and start having more kids. I'm making it a habit to tell my kids I would love lots of grandchildren, and that children are the greatest thing you will ever do, your greatest legacy. I hope and pray that's enough.
"On the other hand, I think many in the younger generations don't think much of name legacy and lineage"...Hypothesis: when lifespans were shorter and daily life more dangerous, people tended to be more focused on family because of its persistence over time.
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