A strange question has been asked: Why is it a bad thing that the human population is in steep decline? Some time ago, I was futzing about on my ‘blog, putting up a video in which the argument was made that the plummeting birth rates around the world (yes, in the non-Western world too) was going to threaten our entire culture, from top to bottom, in all our human endeavours. The threat is that falling birth rates lead, eventually, to falling population and, simply put, with fewer people, life is harder. Economies don’t work as well. Things are harder to accomplish, either as a society or individually. To my surprise, one of the comments in the commbox was to the effect of, “Well, so what?”

“If society can only grow at the expense of the rights of the individual, then as an individual who values my rights above all else, I say let ‘society’ die.” Yeah, this guy really said that. It’s hard to know how to respond to this kind of philosophical brutalism. It is the final outcome of 250, or perhaps even 450 years of eradication of charity, of self-sacrificing love as a guiding cultural principle. It is the end of our culture. “Let it die” whether it is my child, or even my entire society, because its continued existence inconveniences me and threatens my autonomy.

It seems strange to those of us who think that the human race, and human cultures, are generally good things, but there is a large – and leading – segment of the population of western societies, particularly those born between 1940 and 1960, who have taken on board the notion that has been so pronounced a feature of political and social life since the socialist revolution of the 1960s. At some point in the horrible 20^th century, someone coined the expression “genocide” to describe the new crime that was all the rage. I have argued many times that we need another term to describe the titanic mass-suicide of our entire culture that seems to be the order of our day.

I suppose it is something to argue over, whether nihilism led to the Sexual Revolution or the other way ‘round, but the two seem to be inextricably connected.

The attitude, “I’m OK without children, and besides, children are a drain on the world's resources,” is precisely a product of the twentieth century Me culture exemplified by the Hippies and later by the Boomers they became. Something that maybe doesn’t get said enough is that the Death Culture and the Sexual Revolution are two faces of the same object.

Living in Italy you see it in action every day. I live in a beach resort town about 60 miles up the Tyrrhenian coast from Rome where the only industry is Summer. Everyone is very rich; they all own a house in Rome and an apartment out here; they’ve all got two iPhones and a flash car, and when the summer hits the Romans flock out here to lie on the beach for two months and work on turning themselves a peculiar shade of mahogany. About the end of May the town puts up the rows of umbrellas and turns our nice, empty, sandy beach into a kind of vacation industrial park. And every year there are a lot of adults, most of them middle-aged, and very, very few children.

It seems mad to people like us, even to ask the question, “Why is it bad that there aren’t any children?” It’s an indication that the questioner’s entire moral and social outlook has been infected with the post-modern nihilist Me culture. But that is really what they say. I don’t have much personal contact with secular people, as a rule, (it’s too depressing) but when I do I’m often shocked by the casualness of their anti-human assumptions.

One of the deadliest products of the Marxist ‘sexual revolution” has been the alienation it created between children and parents. This was predicted by many of the early 20th century writers who saw that our increasingly atomised and materialistic culture was already eroding family bonds. Orwell particularly pointed to it in his Ingsoc, in which parents and children were, essentially, mortal enemies, spying on each other for the state.

Despite the trend for celebrities to collect children as a kind of fashion accessory, the idea that a child is the adult’s worst enemy has become the cornerstone concept of the sexual revolution. One of its important ideological tenets is that children are a threat to our freedom as sexual and radically independent beings whose principal value is “autonomy”. Of course, what is often overlooked is that the new moral imperative of absolute autonomy, gets kicked into reverse later in life and it becomes the children who reject any idea that they are obliged to care for their parents.

It is this cultural alienation between parents and children that produces this outcome. My commenter said that he was convinced that “a shrinking population is good”. The idea that we should have children to carry on our cultural imperatives and care for their elders was seen as a form of enslavement: this idea, he saw as having “to increase the numbers of our younger generations so we can enslave them to the well-being of the elders. Why don’t the elders look after their own well-being?”

The situation we are in is not a mystery, despite what the pundits would have us believe. This week a set of statistics came out of an EU think tank showing that which we already knew, and there were the usual talking and typing heads wrinkling their brows over it. "Why, oh, why, has the west stopped having children?"

Good grief! Where have you guys been for the last 80 years? The proto-sexual-revolution of the 1920s had been the product of 250 years of materialist rationalism, that was itself a product of the Protestant revolution. Am I the only one to have noticed?

But it was the 20^th century that really got things moving. Starting about 1905, the early contraception advocates and “women’s rights” champions went public and started systematically promoting Malthusian and Marxist ideas about population, family, children and economics. These are based on the notion of a radical separation between human beings, and a denial of any kind of natural connection between family members. It was the small army of Margaret Sangers and Fabians like Beatrice and Sydney Webb who took the message to the people.

The rationalistic humanism of the 18th century, that had led to so much wealth being created, at least in Europe and N. America, was devastated. In 1919, the idea that human beings were capable of creating a moral and social and material earthly paradise without recourse to superstitious religion, was dead. Bayonetted, machine gunned, and gassed to death and buried in the French mud and its sorry little grave mocked by the intelligentsia.

After the First World War, I think the ground was well tilled. The war had radically demoralised western culture. Gone was the wild optimism of the previous generation who had seen their material wealth enormously increased throughout the latter period of the Industrial Revolution. After the devastation of Europe, those with eyes saw that the old order was completely gone. Christendom was a vague and distant memory, its philosophical proposals entirely forgotten or rejected by the governing classes.

What replaced it was, in all the essentials, what we have now: 20th century nihilism, the "postmodern" idea that since all human philosophies had failed, that our new philosophical guiding light must be that there are no philosophical guiding lights. Philosophy and religion had failed us. And they continued to fail us throughout the 20th century while we set about killing off the next generations.

Finally, we have the answer to the question I like to put to self-styled progressives, “Where are we progressing?” Cosmologists used to propose that the universe was winding down, that after uncounted billions of years, all particles of matter in it are going to be equidistant, and will reach a final, steady-state in which there will be no movement and no heat, held motionless for all eternity. To the Revolutionaries, the ultimate goal of life seems to be something like this total autonomy, which is pictured as a kind of steady-state cultural universe in which we are all separate, independent beings in a steady state of non-interaction, motionless and utterly cold.

(Or perhaps not. Maybe they’ve just never asked themselves that question: what is the ultimate goal of “progressivism”? Maybe they’ve never been trained to follow a trend of thought to its logical, final conclusion. I don’t know, since I’ve never thought like one even when I lived in their camp.)

At the other end of life, of course, as our commbox correspondent pointed out, it becomes the parents in old age who are the threat to the radical freedom and autonomy of their (few) children. The parents who, at least morally, abandoned their children while they were young, are in turn abandoned by those children who learned the lesson of radical autonomy only too well. The Great Triumvirate of social goods proposed by the post-sexual revolutionary west: divorce, contraception and abortion, are specifically geared towards dissolving the natural bonds of responsibility and love between family members. Indeed, it is easy to see this outcome in practice.

My own parents were early victims/proponents of the S. Revolution. My father's parents, while unconsciously retaining much of their late Victorian cultural and social assumptions, had, by the 1920s, adopted a set of values that were later to evolve into our current acultural state. They were Bloomsbury atheists for whom the throwing off of Victorian moral restrictions was regarded as a radical act of personal emancipation. What it meant in practice, was the throwing off of the last vestigial remains of the old Christian moral values...though by this time, few would have remembered the Church whence these archaic ideas had come.

My grandparents stayed married for the rest of their lives, but my parents took the logic to its next step and divorced when I was four. (In our time, of course, they would never have bothered getting married in the first place.) I was born just in time. Had it been only three years later, the abortion law would have been abolished and I am left in no doubt that I would not be here to write this. I was an inconvenience that my father, and ultimately my mother, found too real and burdensome to be borne.

My father hovered around the edges of my life until I was ten or eleven, then went off to Mexico to find himself (or another girlfriend). My mother decided that she didn’t really need anything from me after I was fifteen, so I went and found other arrangements.

I’ve come to think of my immediate family, in which there simply does not exist any concept that any person has a responsibility towards anyone else, as a tiny microcosm of the Culture of Abandonment that was the great cultural trend of the 20^th century. Three generations, starting at the birth of my grandfather in 1897 and ending with me, childless and unmarried, with no parents or siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles or cousins, in 2013. The 20^th century has blasted our society into individual, atomized units, steadily progressing away from each other on our way to total, steady-state autonomy.

There is a whole generation of us who have come directly out of this philosophical end-game. Nearly all my school chums, almost all the people I knew after I left home in my teens and early twenties, came from the same hyper-secularised cultural milieu. We simply took it for granted that human relationships were entirely voluntary, ephemeral, and above all transitory. We had known nothing else. Only a few of us married, and there are very few children. To every one of us, the idea of a moral obligation to care for another, particularly when it was inconvenient or unwanted, was repugnant, even a source of moral outrage. It was a moral absolute that no one should be tied down in a responsible relationship to another. Marriage, parenthood, the relationship of honour between parents and children, familial duty, were regarded as outrageous infringements of our highest value: autonomy.

That we were all, to a man, chronically depressed and alienated, was something that we were constitutionally incapable of connecting to our attitudes. Quite a lot of Prozac gets consumed, but rarely does anyone ask why it’s needed.

Society no longer concerns itself with the moral ordering of man. Each radically individualised, atomised person is left to his own devices to try to come up with a purpose for his life that makes sense, and needs to make sense, only to him. But this, only after he has been thoroughly indoctrinated in the post-modern Me-ism. The one place he is never allowed to look, is back.