Moving the Movers of History

 

With all the fighting and dead bodies on our tv screens, particularly during the past few weeks, it is easy to forget that history's most powerful forces rarely make it into the tv news bulletins or the newspaper headlines. They operate silently and over extremely long periods of time and most people are unaware of their existence. I am not referring to some conspiracy theory but merely to those demographic, economic and social changes that are usually invisible to the naked eye but whose importance in deciding the fate of nations and civilizations cannot be overestimated. To give an example, the rise of the West can be attributed to no single battle or political decision but to a powerful accumulation of human and technological resources, made possible by the continent's economic structures, which in their turn were brought into being by its particular geographical, social and cultural environment.

This, of course, is hardly an original thought. However, it is important to keep in mind that the most important occurrence in our lifetimes may turn out to be not the fall of the Berlin Wall or 9/11 or the Iraq War or any other such earth-shaking event. It may simply be the basic inability of our current socio-economic model to support a constant population. The BBC has been following this in a series of interesting articles, the latest of which was put online last Tuesday and concerns the particular case of Germany. It is at this stage quite clear that there must be basic structural reasons why this is happening, most of which concern the fact that in our societies women get married later than they used to and have to juggle family and career. The obvious result is that populations are beginning to fall and are predicted to do so in a much more dramatic fashion over the coming decades. Of course, this is being partly compensated for by mass immigration, which is, however, likely to have a long-term and possibly irreversible political and cultural impact on the host societies.

Right wing politicians occasionally berate Europeans for their 'selfishness' and 'lack of patriotism' and insist that we need more babies. However, expecting people to do things out of a sense of patriotism is not likely to get us very far. Our society is built around the individual and, as a libertarian, I believe that this should not change. Individuals cannot be expected to make too many sacrifices in order to achieve objectives that do not belong to them alone but to society as a whole (what economists call 'externalities'). The developed societies that have come closest to solving this structural problem (the Scandinavian countries) are those that have a social system that has transferred the economic burdens of child-birth and child-rearing as much as possible from the individuals concerned onto society as a whole. This was achieved not simply through financial contributions for every child, a la Mussolini, but also by making sure that women's careers do not suffer as a result of their helping to raise a family.

The only way in which we can have a true say in what our future will look like is by directing our policies at the real underlying forces that are quietly shaping that future. Those who want Malta to remain Maltese will contribute much more effectively to their goal by calling for a more family-friendly socio-economic system than by any other means, however important these may be.