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4 hours ago
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I know what “civilisational erasure” looks like: I’ve seen the graph. The European Commission published it in March. It’s a chart of total fertility rate: the average number of children born per woman. After a minor bump over the past 20 years, the EU rate appears to be declining once more, and now stands at 1.38. The UK’s is 1.44. A population’s replacement rate is 2.1. You may or may not see this as a disaster, but the maths doesn’t care what you think. We are gliding, as if by gravitational force, towards the ground.
Civilisational erasure is the term the Trump administration used in its new national security strategy, published last week. It claimed that immigration, among other factors, will result in the destruction of European civilisation. In reality, without immigration there will be no Europe, no civilisation and no one left to argue about it.
Of course, we’re talking about different things. The Trump administration appears to see “civilisation” as a white and western property, threatened by Black and Brown people, regardless of whether they were born here or have recently arrived. This week, Donald Trump claimed that, with the exception of Poland and Hungary, European nations “will not be viable countries any longer”, as a result of immigration. Well, Poland has a total fertility rate of 1.2, which means a rapid slide to inviability unless it allows more immigration. “Civilisation”, as it has often been over the past two centuries, is in Trump’s case a racist and white supremacist concept. The erasure the Trump government appears to fear is of “white” culture.
There is and was no such thing. Our language, science, mathematics, music, cuisine, literature, art and – thanks to the legacy of colonial and post-colonial looting – much of our wealth, originated elsewhere. Italian cooking might be unimaginable without tomatoes but, originating in South America, they were not widely used until the 19th century. The balti might have a greater claim to be the UK’s national dish than fish and chips (a Portuguese import), as it originated here. The roast beef of Old England, from an animal domesticated in the Middle East, was enjoyed by the elite: the rest derived much of their protein from dal (pease pottage, pease pudding, pea soup). This changed only when the means were found of preserving and shipping meat from animals raised in the colonies. Widespread beef consumption in Britain required the civilisational erasure of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, and the eradication of their ecosystems.
Some rulers once understood the power of pluralism. King Stephen I of Hungary, who reigned from 1001 to 1038, noted that the cultures and knowledge of foreigners enriched the realm, while “a country unified in language and customs is fragile and weak”. A thousand years later, Trump appears to have forgotten this obvious truth.
What I’m talking about, by contrast, is actual erasure: the literal disappearance of society. Once the fertility rate falls below 2.1, it keeps falling, and the slide towards zero looks inexorable. This doesn’t mean I’ve become a “pronatalist” (wanting to see rising birthrates). I’m neither pronatalist nor antinatalist, as both positions are equally futile. As David Runciman points out in his excellent summary of the science in the London Review of Books, the opportunity costs of having children rise with prosperity, leading inexorably to falling birthrates. In some parts of the world, this process began in the 16th and 17th centuries. No government constraint or incentive, it seems, can significantly alter the trajectory.
For years I’ve been arguing with people who want to reduce the human population for environmental reasons. I’ve pointed out that the growth rate today was established before most of us were born: as a UN report explains, “Considerable population growth continues today because of the high numbers of births in the 1950s and 1960s, which have resulted in larger base populations with millions of young people reaching their reproductive years over succeeding generations.” In other words, those who obsess about too many people are fighting a mathematical function. Global (and, in the UK, national) population will continue to rise for a while, before sweeping dramatically downwards, largely as a matter of demographic momentum.
The only thing the obsessives could do to change the peaking point by more than a couple of years would be mass murder on an unprecedented scale: slaughtering hundreds of millions of people. This is because the issue is not rising birthrates (the global rate has been in decline since the year of my birth, 1963), but a rising child survival rate and greatly increased longevity. Ironically, the person who might have caused the greatest depopulation is the self-professed pronatalist Elon Musk, whose dismantling of USAID could, according to an estimate in the Lancet, cause 14 million deaths. He wants to see more children born, but appears to care little about whether they survive.
Otherwise, if the “population control” advocates have any significant impact, it will – because of the long and compounding time lags involved – be to hasten the plunge on the other side of the curve. People have devoted their lives to this fatuity.
Why do they cling to the idea long after the evidence has departed? Partly, I believe, because population growth is a highly convenient scapegoat for, and distraction from, the impacts of consumption: wealthy people in the global north can blame much poorer Black and Brown people in the global south for the environmental crises they themselves have caused. Switching to a plant-based diet or from fossil fuels to renewables, by contrast to altering the size of the human population, are things we can do immediately, humanely and effectively. But blaming other people requires no change, and no confrontation with power.
Without immigration, there will, within a number of generations, be no Europe and no United Kingdom. Today’s racist obsessions will look incomprehensible to our ageing descendants, desperate for young people to look after them and keep their countries running. Before long, we’ll be fighting to attract people from overseas. But, as Runciman remarks, “There soon won’t be enough immigrants to go around.”
Perhaps this is why, in the new novel by the always prescient Ian McEwan, What We Can Know, set 100 years hence, the dominant global power is Nigeria, one of the few countries that today still has a fertility rate well above replacement, though it’s also falling fast.
Trump’s security strategy, like all far-right politics, is simultaneously preposterous and sinister. But above all, it is wrong.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
