Why Some Cultures Don't Die

What with the decline of the west—particularly the demographic collapse in western Europe—it is appropriate to ask: Why?

Or perhaps, as the Asia Times Spengler asks, why not?  For the normal thing is extinction, not flourishing.

[A] majority of the world’s cultures simply will themselves out of existence, largely through the individual decision of their members not to rear offspring.

Just like today’s welfare state Europe.

The situation in Europe is all the more puzzling because the old threat of extinction, continuous warfare, appears to have been removed.

The modern world, with few exceptions, removes the violent threat to the national existence of small peoples, yet the rate of their extinction by strictly voluntary means is faster than ever before in history.

So why do people “cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves[?]”  Spengler says we should understand it as “a symptom of a culture’s mortal illness.”

We see cultural illness everywhere in the world and nowhere more than in the global south.

Yet it is there that Christianity is making its strongest growth.  Why is that?

[I]ndividuals embrace Christianity when their pre-Christian culture no longer can transmit their memory as well as their genes to future generations.

They become Christians, children of God, when their culture of “clan and kindred” is collapsing all around them, as it is across the world today.

Christianity provides an abstract family, replacing the love of the kindred with the love of the church family, the memory of the clan with the memory of Christ’s suffering, and the hope for the children with the hope for salvation.

Of course, in the western welfare state, there is no need for any family because the family is replaced by the paternal/maternal state.  People can live their entire lives as selfish children.  They do not think of the future; they do not have to think at all.

They find that such a life is not worth living, or not worth sacrificing for the sake of the children. 

But life must be lived, as Burke wrote, by treating it as a covenant between the ancestors, the living, and the generations yet unborn.  That is how you create meaning in your life in the modern world where the kindred embraces the whole human race.