I just saw an essay in First Things that blew me away. “Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button” is a penetratingly profound article that deserves wide circulation. I would be remiss not to mention it.

“[M]odernity seems hellbent on destroying itself.” So says the inimitable Louise Perry, journalist extraordinaire and ceaseless campaigner for common sense. She trembles not in the face of political correctness. I have mentioned her before. With a huge following, she is an avatar of pro-family feminism.

Modernity is characterised by “individual subjectivity, scientific explanation and rationalisation, a decline in emphasis on religious worldviews,” etc. Sounds like secularism on steroids.

Ms Perry is right. Modernity is going to heck in a handbasket as we speak. Its demise is unavoidable, irreversible and slowly picking up speed. Rome didn’t die in a day. Maybe modernity peaked in the US in the late 1960s with the explosive proliferation of graduate schools to avoid military service. The academy became the higher education industry, manufacturing hordes of government-subsidised academics “producing” ream upon ream of “research” servicing the Frankfurt School agenda. This is how we educated the common sense out of the chattering class.  

Today the chatterers reign, relentlessly pushing utopian schemes that just don’t work for ordinary people. Understanding that is beyond the ken of “well-educated” secularist fanatics. You cannot change fundamental human nature. The recent US elections were a sign of popular pushback against taking on God and Mother Nature. Say what you will about either presidential candidate, but DEI, pronoun dictates, and biological men competing as females are a bridge too far for most folks.

Modernity’s hubris says we can have it all. Freedom! Freedom from children, freedom from cumbersome familial obligations, honest labour and repressive social conventions. So many rights, so few responsibilities. Modernity says we are more sagacious, enlightened and advanced that anyone who ever came before us. The Age of Reason has morphed into the Age of Omniscience; those tried-and-true notions of marriage, family, social convention and personal dignity that sustained us through the millennia are now old hat. But there is a catch, says Ms Perry:

The people on whom modernity depends are failing to reproduce themselves, which means that modernity itself is failing to reproduce itself. Most voters have no idea that this is happening. Nor do most politicians. But it is happening nonetheless, and we are experiencing its early ­stages in the form of diverse political crises across the modern world.

The coming demographic crisis

Is the dying out of Homo sapiens a political crisis? Is it a spiritual crisis? Consider this. People with little money have been having children all along. But modernity says that today’s affluent cannot afford them. Antiquated notions of personal sacrifice and family lineage are alien concepts that cannot be monetised. That’s terminal thinking. As Ms Perry comments:     

As a civilisation, we are running on the fumes of the accomplishments of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Why are we “running on the fumes?” And why were people from the British Isles so instrumental in shaping today’s world? Without mentioning Henry VIII, Enlightenment empiricism or John Stuart Mill, Ms Perry posits:

An important part of the answer is demographics… The nineteenth-century British TFR peaked in 1820 at 5.56, much higher than the replacement figure of 2.1, which modern governments regard as economically necessary, and much much higher than the 2022 British figure of 1.49.  

Europe and her colonies attained military and cultural power only because they had a large supply of warm young bodies to send to war, and many eager young minds capable of innovation.

In South Korea — the country with the world’s lowest TFR, at 0.7 — the number of babies born in 2100 is on track to be 93 to 98 percent lower than the number of babies born this year. No disease or invading army has ever managed to destroy a country so thoroughly, and the word that springs to my mind, when contemplating such an event, is “biblical.” The question that preoccupies me is this one: Is it possible that there is indeed a God, and that he does not want us to be modern?

Modernity… eventually trips a self-destruct trigger. If modern people will not reproduce themselves, then modernity cannot last. One way or another, we’re going to return to a much older way of living.

Wow. Ms Perry gets it. The world is going back to the future “one way or another”.