The best thing to promote fertility is to promote marriage. This means discouraging ideologies hostile to marriage and promoting healthy religious belief. Ideologies are lullabies, entrancing people to embrace the bright side of cultural decay. James Burnham called liberalism the ideology of western suicide. Among modern Western peoples, feminism and sexual liberation ideologies are our lullabies. Opposing compulsory feminism is crucial in this regard. 

To Bet on the Future, You Must Believe in the Greatness of Your Civilization

Editor’s note: This is a modified version of a talk given at the Trad Dad conference in Battleground, Washington October 25, 2024.

I first thought about the problem of birth rates while writing my dissertation on David Hume. 

Hume’s essay “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations” showed that ancient nations were more sparsely populated than modern ones. Modern freedom had caused the population growth underway during his lifetime, Hume argued. “In the flourishing age of the world,” Hume writes, “it may be expected, that the human species should possess greater vigour both of mind and body, more prosperous health, higher spirits, longer life, and a stronger inclination and power of generation.” Simply removing impediments like economic scarcity to the “desire and power of generation” will lead to an increase in population. As Hume predicted, Europe’s population grew with advances in industry and commerce, from about 120 million in 1700, to 210 million in 1800, and about 425 million in 1900 and about 750 million in 2000. 

Yet something was missing in Hume’s analysis as I tested his thesis against current trends. Ben Wattenberg was the authority on population trends during the 1990s. At the time, more people like Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome worried about overpopulation. Wattenberg’s 1987 book The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don’t Have Children sounded the alarm about a population implosion. He even debated Ehrlich on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show!  

Time vindicated Wattenberg. Books like Phillip Longman’s The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (2004) revealed a riddle. Ours was a period of industry and commerce and of declining birth rates. What did Hume get wrong?  

I gave my first talk on the riddle in Hume’s observation at Brigham Young University in 2003 to a mostly skeptical faculty still bewitched by Ehrlich’s overpopulation thesis. Hume’s linkage of commerce to increasing birth rates was, I argued, an incomplete theory of hope. Having kids is a bet on the future. People who do not believe in a good human future and a deep sense of purpose for the future will not have children. Christianity speaks highly of hope (1 Cor 13:13). Men who have forgotten God do not have children. In addition, Christianity supports a sexual constitution favorable to having children, both teaching sexual continence and making fecundity a duty.  

My original position of more faith; more babies was not stupid. The United States, among the most religious countries in the world, had near replacement birth rates in the early aughts. Religious Americans had higher birth rates than lefties and atheists. Lefty books like Longman’s bemoaned the religious inheriting the world. (Eric Kaufmann agreed about the outcome in his Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-first Century in 2010.) 

I am less convinced today. The focus on faith and hope fails to account for many population explosions. It is ambiguous on why people should hope. Today’s Christians have higher birth rates, but they are low compared to Christian birth rates from earlier eras. Hope can be theological and political, which I learned through a confrontation with Montesquieu, a great French thinker from a generation before Hume. 

Hume was debating Montesquieu on population. In Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that ancient nations were more populous than modern nations—a notion Hume refuted through clever sleuthing. Montesquieu was on to something, however. Compared to what came before them, Greek cities like Athens and Corinth unleashed animal spirits that sent population and birth rates soaring. The Greek polis was a giant leap forward for mankind.

Before the Greeks, most peoples were governed either according to the way of the tribe or the empire. Tribes were extended families, selecting fathers as leaders and submitting to them as masters. Empires were governed by fear and force, with each person owing his position to kingly favor. Greece was a “great nation made up of towns, each having its government and its laws,” according to Montesquieu. The people of each territory combined with established families to cultivate a common way of life, with civic gods and common laws. The Athenians, Corinthians, and Spartans—as well as Syracuse, Carthage, and Rome—discovered a new moral continent. 

This discovery unleashed animal spirits. Having lots of children helped achieve fantastic possibilities. Political eros fueled eros. Political energy coincided with sexual energy. “With a small territory and a great felicity,” Montesquieu writes, “it was easy for the number of citizens to increase.” Cities “were full of small people and glutted with inhabitants.” Greek cities, along with republican Rome, were what Montesquieu called “nascent peoples.” Such peoples, as Montesquieu writes, “multiply and increase greatly.” Among nascent peoples, it is “a great discomfort to live in celibacy,” and “it is not a discomfort to have many children.”

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