Our children, the poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote, “are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself”. Yet, even in an entire world fast greying and ageing, Europe in particular is dying on its feet.
The numbers are stark and undeniable. Almost everywhere, the natural population is shrinking. Since 2012, the EU has recorded more deaths than births annually, and that decline is being offset only by immigration, with 2.3 million migrants being added in 2024 alone. Crashing fertility rates are matched with soaring abortion rates: no European country is even close to replacement level.
It seems the continent has lost, not just its longing for itself, but also its desire to cherish the norms that bound us and secured our way of life across the ages. Globalisation hasn’t helped, or family breakdown, or the infantilisation of a whole generation raised with the belief that responsibilities are a burden and children a barrier to success.
How else to explain the extraordinary birth collapse in Europe, which is now well documented but is mostly met with a shrug or the wringing of policy-makers’ hands? There is a sense of inevitability, as immigration surges in to fill the gap.
Old Europe is gone, or is fading fast: the future, it seems, belongs to rootless, transient workforces, and corporations ever shifting in pursuit of tax arbitrage, and to a shrinking market for plastic, shiny, empty experiences and lifestyles that most will rapidly no longer be able to afford. Churches are emptying as mosques are built. Farming is being abandoned, our ageing population increasingly – and deliberately – dependent on foreign production of food.
The culture shift is exacerbated by the housing crisis, the gig economy, hook-up culture, the relentless doom about the future of the planet, the anxiety caused by uncertainty as to the stability of the European economy: but most of all the birth crash seems to have happened because so many Europeans gave up on marriage and family.
We know the numbers, or at least are vaguely aware of them, but we may not have fully understood the impact of what population bust will bring: the economic shrinkage since growth is so heavily reliant on population growth; the devastation for pensions; the calamitous effects on healthcare especially for the burgeoning elderly demographic; the decline on innovation coming on the heels of already declining average IQ levels.
We’ve been here before, within Empires that once seemed mighty and invincible and set to endure until the end of time. The cause of the fall of perhaps the most renowned of the ancient superpowers – the Roman Empire – is still debated, with corruption, plagues, economic turbulence and more being proffered as important aspects, but it is increasingly accepted that the catastrophically low birth rate was a hugely significant factor.
Octavian Augustus recognised the danger of a rapidly declining rate and sought to strengthen attitudes towards marriage and bolster family values, seeing himself as a restorer of morals that had helped the Empire to flourish. Augustus sought to penalise adultery, and offered unprecedented incentives in his Lex Papia et Poppaea (9 AD) to Roman women by granting rights previously restricted to men to mothers of three children or more.
Historians believe the measures had only limited effect, partly because well-off Romans found way to circumvent them – and also perhaps, as we are now experiencing, cultural change even when it takes hold at speed can be extraordinarily difficult to reverse.
Some of the parallels pointed to by historian and social theorist Dr Jim Penman are interesting. He posits a theory he describes as ‘biohistory’, where behavioural change across a population is driven by epigenetics – how gene function is switched on and off. The decay identified by Augustus was driven by prosperity that not only widened the gap between rich and poor but made native Romans less “vigorous”, weaker, self-indulgent, hedonistic, more selfish and desirous of endless gratification.
It sounds familiar. Everyone is too busy – and broke – seeking a Kardashian lifestyle on Tesco wages to even consider the responsibility of child rearing. It seems you can’t have your avocado toast and eat it.
Penman says: “The character of the Roman people changed during the late Republic and early Empire, becoming less disciplined and hard-working, less innovative and forward-thinking, increasingly averse to military service, and less attached to the institutions of the Republic. These changes were epigenetic in origin and were influenced by greater prosperity, declining respect for authority and religion, and less strict childrearing.
“From a biological and psychological perspective, the Romans became weak. And though an influx of people from the provinces shored up the Empire for many centuries, they too were affected epigenetically. It was this that led eventually led to the fall of their civilisation and the rise of a Dark Age.”
He believes that we are now seeing the same decline now play out in the Western world, but at a “far more accelerated rate”. It’s an interesting theory: that the established reality of epigenetics – changes to gene expression brought about by environment – might have such a powerful effect on character across populations as to cause biological and psychological effects that are extraordinarily difficult to reverse, as the Emperor Augustus found.
But we don’t need to look back two thousand years to see the impact of a shift in mindset which favours a life focused on self and disinclined to prioritise family and children. That attitude is all around us, and has been driven by popular culture and the trend towards self-interest for decades.
Contrary to such pessimism, perhaps, is the dogged efforts in countries such as Hungary to support marriage and families, and this tale of from the credit-card processing company Gravity Payments, where CEO Dan Price made headlines when he announced that he would raise the minimum salary for all 120 employees to $70,000 – slashing his own €1 million salary to meet the cost of the gesture.
He told Business Insider that “staff had many more babies and bought more homes”. The revenue of the company also soared, he said.
“It’s been over six years and we’ve had really fantastic results. We’ve had a 10 times increase in the number of first-time homeowners every year and 70% of our employees were able to pay down debt,” Price said. About a third of his staff reported they were debt-free.
“Our employees had a 10x boom in terms of the number of babies they were having. We went from having between 0-2 babies born per year among the entire team, to over 65 born or announced over the last six years,” he added.
Working from home might also help: some initial findings during and post the Covid lockdowns suggest that facilitating remote work might encourage or assist women in having babies.
Perhaps all is not lost – though what is most likely to happen is the natural outcome in terms of political change and policy upheaval when the only people having children in any significant numbers are traditional families with traditional views. Perhaps that is where life’s longing for itself has most meaningfully been retained.
Time will tell whether that number can form a critical mass in Europe before the fate that befell the Roman Empire becomes an inevitable conclusion.