[BRIEF NOTE] A Fisking Aborted

I suppose it's true that I pick up the National Post--free, if possible and legal--in order to be outraged. In last Friday's issue, on the Comments page (A16, if you're curious), I came across Susan Martinuk's "Promoting homosexuality in schools is wrong," complaining that British Columbian gay activists are trying to change that province's school curriculum to be GLBT-friendly.

At first, I was going to fisk the article. Fiskings are fun, and I haven't done one in a while. As I read Martinuk's essay, though, I discovered--somewhat to my disappointment--that she didn't sustain a single strong coherent argument meriting a fisking. Do curriculums, by not including any GLBT-relevant content, neglect students affiliated with this group? Did she not actually examine the content of the books that the Surrey School Board tried to ban (hint: Heather Has Two Mommies isn't a sex book)? Does she claim surprise at the idea that a Christian college with a doctrine which holds homosexuality to be wrong might manage to produce homophobic teachers? Does she deny that homosexuality has any relevance to the dignity of the individual person and then, go on in the next paragraphs to argue that gay activists must be prevented from damaging the sancity of the individual? Does she, bizarrely, throw into this discourse on education arguments against same-sex parenting which work just as well against adoption generally (this might be a trend, incidentally)? Does she make facetious distinctions between respecting individuals not fortunate enough to be born heterosexual and saying that it's okay to not be heterosexual? The answer to all of these questions, of course, is yes.

You know that your side is winning a debate when your opponents provide poorly-organized grab bags of ideas like the above.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Amorality of 21st Century Fame

At Indigo, books on true crime are organized alongside the fiction. I shouldn't have been too surprised that Amber Frey's new book, recounting the history of her affair with Scott Peterson, her discovery that something was terribly wrong, and her eventual decision to collaborate with the police, occupied a central position in the mystery display table. I skimmed the book during morning break, and yes, it manages to replicate the tropes of mystery fiction. Only! This! Is! Real! Doubtless we've a best-seller.

In the New Year's Day edition of The Globe and Mail, Leah McLaren had a wonderfully snarky column which begun by examining the numerous stupidities of Paris Hilton and segued into a straightforward condemnation of a culture of celebrity which made no distinction between fame and infamy. Lacie Peterson, after all, got on the cover of the year-end edition of People alongside images of the best-dressed and the brightest of the American star system. Surely, McLaren observed, that made her rest easier in the afterlife. The current media culture doesn't care how people get famous so long as they remain famous. Thomas Wolfe observed, in a recent interview, that he could have imagined a situation where an heiress would be blackmailed with a sex tape, and that he could have imagined a situation where someone talentless got a hit television show, but that he couldn't have conceived of a talentless heiress getting a hit television show thanks to her sex tape. (And don't worry, those of you guys who aren't a Kinsey 6: You can buy 1 Night in Paris at any dirty-windowed porn shop in the GTA, and likely worldwide.)

It won't be long until McLaren's prediction of the imminent celebrity of Richard Speck's sexy illegitimate granddaughter will be fulfilled, I fear.

One begins to comprehend what radical Islamic clerics mean by Western decadence.

[BRIEF NOTE] Random Encounters

At 9:30, as I was leaving work, I ran into S. and her friend R. unexpectedly at the Pizza Pizza on Yonge just north of Bloor. This is the fifth unexpected meeting that I've had with people I've known in Toronto, by my count, in the six months that I've been a permanent resident here.

I used to think that this was uncanny luck. Then, in the three days that I spent on the Island, I met as many acquaintances and friends at random on the street again. Really, considering that I like walking around Toronto, that I spend time in the same districts of Toronto as many of my acquaintances and friends, and that I have many interests in common with many of the people I know, it would be surprising if I didn't meet people unexpectedly on the streets of Toronto. As the number of people I know grows, I can expect the frequency of the encounters to rise. So far, this seems to be the rule.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] More on Fewer; Or, Why Skills Matter

In the comments area to my review of Ben Wattenberg's Fewer, Pearsall Helms asked whether Canadian demographics were more similar to the United States' or to Europe's. The latter, I believe, as Statistics Canada has noted.

Canada's total fertility rate has been declining, but the American rate has been rising. In 1999, Canadian fertility hit a record low of 1.52 children per woman, compared with the American rate of 2.08, a difference of more than half a child per woman. Only 20 years ago, this gap was less than one-third of that size.

Québec before the Quiet Revolution had a relatively high birth rate. The Quiet Revolution saw Québec pass rapidly through the demographic transition to one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, provoking policy responses and inspiring serious nationalist concern about the future of Québécois culture. These pundits can now at least take comfort in the fact that, as Statistics Canada demonstrated in 2004, Québec's fertility rate is merely average for Canada, with Atlantic Canada and British Columbia lying significantly below the Canadian average and with the Prairie Provinces resting significantly above the Canadian average. National fertility rates are somewhat higher than Germany's, significantly lower than the United Kingdom's, and, again, well below the United States'. Immigration now dominates Canadian population growth, just as it dominates population growth almost everywhere else in the First and Second Worlds. If, for whatever reason, further immigration halted, the Canadian population would start to shrink in a generation's time.

And you know what? That state of affairs is quite fine.

What is that? Danny raised a lot of good points in his reply. These points merit individual responses, and so, here they are in thematic order.

France didn't fall because it had a particularly low birth rate compared to Germany, or because its population was barely more than half Greater Germany's. France had numerous powerful allies, to say nothing of the second-largest colonial empire in the world to fall back on; France had a military more mechanized than the German. The reasons for French collapse were fundamentally political, lying in the weaknesses of the Third Republic in the context of the depression and in the disaffection of many on the right with the secular and democratic republic of métèques. The most important reason rests in how military doctrine was shaped by the terrible casualties of the First World War, with that war's costly and unproductive offensives seemingly demonstrating that a defensive strategy would be the best use of the French military. Concerns over a low birth rate and relatively small population influenced French policymaking and French public opinion, but they didn't radically alter either process. Failings in French military doctrine led to the fall of France; a France of eighty million could have fallen just as readily.

Interesting that you bring up a Serbian doctor, after all, Serbs used to be a majority in Kosovo; though the primary reason why the Serbs lost their majority was ethnic cleansing they suffered, another reason was a lower birthrate than the Albanians. As a result, Kosovo is no longer theirs.

I think I'm safe in saying that although the details of the ethnographic and demographic histories of Kosova/o continue to be disputed, there is a broad consensus that there was always a proportionally large ethnic Albanian population in the region, perhaps a majority of the region's population by the time that the region was incorporated into the Serbian state in 1912. Certainly, there were enough ethnic Albanians to survive state-sponsored emigration to Kosovo/a and the various Serbian campaigns of brutality, of which the very earliest were described by Trotsky. Although mixed, the interlude of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia gave Kosova/o the best deal, with some concessions to local issues and concerns and the removal of the region from Belgrade's direct rule. The reimposition of direct rule from Belgrade--with an ethnically discriminatory pro-Serb tinge, no less--managed to thoroughly wreck affairs, with the known results. If Serbia has lost Kosova/o, it can blame no one but itself.

I asked on alt.history.future, in a related discussion, for people to name a reguion of the world where there has been, through immigration and fertility differentials, a radical cultural transformation. Four provisos apply.

• This candidate state or region must not include two distinct populations with widely different demographic behaviours (Serbia in Kosova/o, Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, a hypothetical greater France retaining the Maghreb).


• This candidate state or region must not be a sparsely-populated frontier region in the process of rapid and extensive colonization (the Argentine pampas from the 1870s on, the Eastern Townships of Québec from the 1840s on).


• This candidate state or region cannot experience the ethnic cleansing of established populations (formerly German territories of western Poland, formerly Arab territories in Israel, formerly Estonian areas in the northeast of Estonia proper).


• This candidate state or region cannot be conquered by another state and subjected to a program of intensive colonization (as described recently at The Head Heeb).

We haven't gotten an Albanian-majority Serbia. We won't get a Muslim-majority France, and in all likelihood we won't get a Chinese-majority Siberia either. We will get an Arab majority west of the Jordan River in Israel-Palestine, but unless the Israeli government continues the self-destructive policies of the past generation and a half that Arab majority will not exist within the effective frontiers of the State of Israel (admittedly, the odds against this aren't as great as I'd like).

I'd like people to name an example of a given territory that meets my four criteria but yet has seen a radical shift in its ethnic demography. I can't think of any offhand.

Nations that have low productivity are not going to reproduce themselves, will become weaker, and will then be dominated by others.

It isn't obvious that is the case, actually. Consider West Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. West Germany was one of the first major nation-state to see a transition to below-replacement fertility rates; in the early 1980s, judging by TFRs of the period, less than two-thirds of the number of children needed to sustain the levels of current population of some 60 million were being born. In contrast to this, the Soviet Union had a population that was still growing quite vigourously on the whole, despite worryingly high mortality rates. The demographics seemed to suggest West Germany's eventual domination by the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, though, West Germany absorbed the Soviets' German satellite state, increasing its territory and population greatly, while the enlarged German state played a pivotal role at the heart of a confederal Europe; the Soviet Union, in contrast, experienced first disintegration then continued sharp decline.

Why did this happen? Demographics played only a minor role in the Soviet-West German competition. West Germany, for starters, was much more economically productive than the Soviet Union, and had a higher overall level of technology. If West Germans had wanted, they could easily have become a major military power, including a nuclear power. They didn't want to do that, though, in large part becase the West German government--and more importantly, the West German people--were far more interested in balanced and egalitarian cooperation with their neighbours, in Europe and the wider world, than the Second Reich or even Weimar Germany. West Germany proved--in NATO, in the EEC, in the UN--that it was a trustworthy partner in all manner of bilateral and multilateral relations, that there was no reason to fear it. So what if West Germany's population was a quarter the size of the Soviet and aging far more rapidly? In every other field--economic, political, technological, cultural--West Germany was far superior to the Soviet Union, hence the eventual outcome.

In the world of 2050, absent radical changes at every level of society, will Ethiopia really be more powerful than Germany just because the former country has four times the population of the latter? Hardly. Iran has almost as many people as Germany already, and Iran is a sizable factor in world politics only because of the size of its oil/natural gas reserves and because almost every other country within a radius of a thousand kilometers is weaker and less developed still. A large population is not a sufficient qualification for a country to be a world power; arguably, it isn't even a necessary qualification. Think of the Dutch Republic in 17th century Europe if you don't believe me.

At CFTAG several Sundays ago, pauldrye suggested, rightly, that a technologically advanced economy with continued population growth would be stronger than a technologically advanced economy with a stagnant or declining population. The problem, though, is that even minimal investments in human development--in education, in medical care, in women's rights--seems guaranteed to produce fertility rates plunging far below replacement levels. Some tweaking is possible, certainly, but only tweaking. It seems that it is impossible for a country that's even halfways to modernity to avoid the spectre of a declining population. A developed country with a growing population, I concluded with pauldrye, was a statistical chimera, an artifact of spreadsheets and calculators without any chance of manifesting in reality. After all, even the United States--that most fecund of developed countries--has a fertility rate below replacement levels, fluctuations aside.

Or, at least that's what I thought.

Watch this space for the next installment in this series.