RL asks some interesting questions:
Allow me to turn that question around. If you also believe that Western Civilization is the best and brightest, then why are you so quick predict its demise?
Are there any actual historic examples of an entire civilization, any civilization (not a kingdom, empire, or country), completely disappearing from the face of the earth because they stopped reproducing enough?
I think I’ll address the first question tomorrow, because I’d prefer to do so in more detail than I feel like ripping off right now. But as to the latter, that’s a bit of a difficult question.
First, because any civilization which has become defunct is, by definition, not around now, so we don’t necessarily know what happened to it. For example, historians have a few theories about why the Etruscans were wiped out by the Romans, but we don’t actually know.
Second, a civilization which becomes demographically vulnerable is seldom left in peace to vanish in silence. Indeed, among the various aspects of a decadent culture is an declining inclination to reproduce. But humans, like nature, appear to abhor a vaccuum, especially if there’s perfectly good land and other resources available for the taking.
If one examines the case of Italy, the immigrant population has grown from 156,179 of 54.1 million in 1971 to an estimated 3.8 million of 58.5 million in 2004. So the population appears stable, even if the percentage of Italians is falling. But the real problem is that in 1971, the birth rate was above the replacement rate of 2.1, now it is well below it, at 1.17. So, the trend is going to increase rapidly and the declining number of children is already readily apparent to anyone visiting an Italian city.
Lest anyone think that pointing out these obvious trends is only a concern of the right wing seeking a return to the Dark Ages of the 1950s, I note the following:
“the anthropologist and writer Ida Magli has a more controversial view of why Italy’s fertility rate is falling. She says: “No one wants to say the truth–that Italian women don’t want to be mothers. In this country, there is no help for a mother with a child. So maternity destroys her chances of working and realising herself.”