Chief Rabbi: Europe is Dying of Selfishness and Secularism

There will be more voices joining Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks soon, decrying the suicidal exchange of Europe's fertility for the sterility of secularism and hedonism.   He happens to be one of the earlier voices but he won't be the last.  I predict the chorus will swell based on my informal conversations with otherwise liberal-minded European colleagues who are starting to wake up and smell the espresso of a continent burgeoning with the children of fundamentalist Muslims.  "How did we get here?" they are asking.  The time is ripe for evangelism.

What surprises me is that nobody is really all that worried about the state of things here in the U.S.of A.  Our birthrates are kept just slightly positive (2.1 per female) by the influx of Hispanic and African immigration, so we sit comfortably in a sustainable population range.  Your white western female here in the States, however, is reproducing at unsustainable levels (1.6 or so), largely for the same reasons the Rabbi outlines below. 

This isn't about whether the future of the western world should be white, black, or brown.  It's about why the white cultures are killing themselves off.

Read the whole thing in the Times Online (bold emphases mine).  H/T Ruth Gledhill.

In his address he said that civil society needed religion because it sanctified the family and parenthood, safeguarded against relativism and protected the moral principles on which western freedom was based.

The emphasis on consumerism and instant gratification had left little room for the sacrifice involved in parenthood, he said.

Like the people of ancient Greece, Europeans were unwilling to marry or to bring up children.

“That is where Europe is today. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.”

He argued that neo-Darwinian attacks on religion – typified by Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion – were leading to a population crisis in Europe.

He said: “Wherever you turn today – Jewish, Christian or Muslim – the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.

The Chief Rabbi said being a parent involved a massive sacrifice of money, attention, time and emotional energy.

He questioned where this selflessness could be found in modern Europe.

“In that culture, where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not yet born? Europe is dying, exactly as Polybius said about ancient Greece in the third pre-Christian century.”

Lord Sacks added: “Albert Camus once said, ’The only serious philosophical question is why should I not commit suicide?’.

“I think he was wrong. The only serious philosophical question is, why should I have a child? Our culture is not giving an easy answer to that question.”