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The Battle of the Sexes and Population Pressure

by the Revd. John Lovejoy - who writes from Newcastle upon Tyne

Not long ago I contacted Tony Linsell, co-founder of Steadfast and our main publisher on English affairs, via Athelney, and he remarked that he was concerned about the low birthrate of the English ethnic population. We agreed that this was a factor which was found widely in Northern Europe, though I have also heard similar reports about Italy. Some while ago I heard that this was also a problem for Russia. 

But very recently the Newcastle Evening Chronicle featured an article about one Cheik Tiote, a Newcastle United player from the Ivory Coast (very successful, but he does collect yellow cards!) He was worried about his family because of the civil war there, and it transpires that he has five sisters and three brothers. Yet this size of family is not unusual in the African continent, and is the average in some countries there.

African population growth

Now there have been generations of people from Britain who have wanted, quite rightly, to go and help the Africans, but it has always been a sensitive issue to deal with the stabilisation of the population since it would look as if we Europeans wanted there to be as few Africans as possible. Fortunately, according to the magazine of my own college, there is now a drive to enable the building up of an indigenous intellectual leadership in African countries so that there may be a social, political and economic stabilisation in those African states where, only too often, there has been a dictatorial 'Big Daddy' figure assisted by a syncophantic and self-serving State apparatus. Let's hope it works.

My own belief is that population stability is dependent on there being a stable culture, in the full anthropological sense, since a rich and full culture ensures that people should be encouraged to marry and raise children, while at the same time mindless sleeping around and getting girls pregnant in a casual way is simply not allowed, according to the prevailing social customs.  

Malthus and moral restraint  

Thomas Malthus

One Thomas Malthus, in 1798, published an essay arguing that population increases faster than the means of subsistence. We can suppose that population increases rather like compound interest on a long-term bond, but it is clear that the means of subsistence cannot behave like that. Malthus, a clergyman, was anxious that moral restraints should check population growth, but he may have had a rather simplistic notion of the connection between religion and morality. Cultural integrity and stability, I would argue, are the more immediate issue.   Nor does war reduce population, except in the very short term. War - and not least civil war - loosens the bonds and restraints in society, and is often followed by a population explosion. Well, there was a 'baby boom' after the last war in England!

England's decline

I am also convinced that a very low birthrate is due to cultural breakdown and impoverishment. I note that in our post-industrial society there is immense confusion about the respective roles of men and women, and about exactly what we mean by the family and the raising of children. In England, now, we seem to experience immense difficulty in maintaining a stable marriage and in raising even one child.

Men have lost most of the industries which used to give them stability and self-respect: meanwhile women have seemingly been presented with a range of paths for self-fulfilment which turn out to be incompatible. How many women can simultaneously lead a life of adventure, pursue a career, enter into a loving relationship with a man, raise a family, and write books, while at the same time maintaining excellent health and exceptional good looks? Oh, and she has to be a good driver and use the computer regularly!

I end with a quotation from John Seymour, father of the 1970s self-sufficiency movement:

" I'm only a housewife, I'm afraid.' How often do we hear this shocking admission? I'm afraid when I hear it I feel very angry indeed. Only a housewife: only a practicioner of one of the two most noble professions (the other one is that of a farmer); only the mistress of a huge battery of high and varied skills and custodian of civilisation itself. Only a typist, perhaps! Only a company director, or a nuclear physicist; only a barrister; only Prime Minister! When a women says she is a housewife she should say it is with the utmost pride, for there is nothing higher on the this planet to which she could aspire."

This may seem like a blast from the past, an extreme statement even. It may strike some as a sort of secular blasphemy, or to others as ice-cold water dashed in one's face. This quotation from the seventies should, however, make us stop and think just what is happening to our English society at the present time, when all the foundations of our common society have either been removed or have been rejected.

I would suggest that 'Self-Realisation', as the ultimate human goal, may prove to be both illusory and ultimately self-destructive. At the very least, a society that has great difficulty in conceiving and raising children - except in casual teenage pregnancies - and has a very low birth rate, has somehow lost the way.

The challenge for the English is to find the way, to recover a true sense of direction instead of blindly following the highly questionable Western concept of 'Progress'.