Demographics

An article I read today has been causing some comment among the blogs I read… The article talks about the population decline in Europe, and what it comes from, and what it might mean.

I thought this section was interesting, talking about how cities could plan for shrinkage over time:

According to some, a declining population presents certain opportunities: to increase efficiency and livability, to change lifestyle and environment for the better. The plan that Akbar’s team came up with was for 18 cities in the region (two cities now share one government) to submit to an exhaustive process of review and soul-searching under the direction of Bauhaus planners and, by the year 2010, to come up with long-term redevelopment strategies appropriate to each – to find a way for each city to shrink constructively.

Dessau itself, Akbar said, had two distinctive features. One, as Karl Gröger indicated from the sausage-factory lookout, is that it is surrounded by protected national forest. The other is that it has no historic town center (80 percent of the city was destroyed in World War II) and thus no core. The plan, therefore, calls for demolishing underused sections of the city and weaving the nature on the periphery into the center: to create “urban islands set in a landscaped zone,” as Sonja Beeck, a Bauhaus planner, told me. “That will make the remaining urban areas denser and more alive.” The city has lost 25 percent of its population in recent years. “That means it is 25 percent too big,” Gröger said. “So far we have erased 2,500 flats from the map, and we have 8,000 more to go.” Beeck and Gröger walked with me through an area where a whole street had been turned into a grassy sward. Many residents were dubious at first, they told me, but as we walked, a woman recognized the government official and marched up to chat about when promised trees and flowers would be planted in front of her building.

Eisleben, another of the cities in the consortium, has a picture-perfect 16th-century downtown but is losing people fast, and many of its historic buildings have been long unused and uninhabitable. Eisleben’s shrinkage strategy centers on history: it happens to be the birthplace of Martin Luther. The city is laying out a tourist route – from the house in which Luther was born to his first church to the church in which he gave the last sermon before he died – that shows off its old center and turns its many derelict buildings and empty lots into art installations related to the father of Protestantism. The idea is to attract more tourists and money and build up the locals’ pride in their history. There is a certain paradox here: thanks to its Communist heritage, this part of Germany has the distinction of being one of the least religious places on earth. Eisleben gets 100,000 religious pilgrims a year, but only 14 percent of its population are churchgoers, and hardly anybody expects a turnaround.

Interestingly, I think that the declining birthrate is linked to the falling societal status of parents and parenting, which, in turn, can be linked to the free-falling status of teachers and the teaching profession. (No; not so much professors at the university level, but teachers, associated with mandated K-12 education in the U.S.) I keep reading editorials about the sad decline of the teaching profession, the need for more and better teachers, the need for math and science teachers… Attempts have been made to pay teachers more, to reward them in various other ways, but I think at its heart is the fact that teaching is not considered a status job. Teachers are providers of a service, and, consequently, part of the “service tier” in our cultural status hierarchy. We may or may not be polite and kind to them, depending on the day and our mood, but we don’t revere them. At times I suspect we don’t even respect them. (And yes, I spent a short while as a high school teacher–some of this comes from first-hand experience.)

I think something similar is happening to the status of parents, culturally. Having children has lost its cachet as a milestone–one’s real entry into the adult world. As this article points out, a culture hypervigilant and paranoid about child rearing has made the costs of parenting skyrocket–both in terms of money and also less quantifiable ways–and childlessness has moved from being a regrettable state to one that we expect from some of the highest-status members of our society. Exceptionally large families are viewed with derision, contempt, and sometimes outright hostility. (Check out some of the message boards about the Duggars, a family with 17 children that has filmed a series of TV programs for TLC. Granted, much of the hostility seems to be toward their rather off-the-norm version of Christianity, but then, that’s why they’ve had so many kids in the first place.)

We’ve moved to being a nation full of nosy neighbors and nanny-staters. Charges of neglect and/or abuse for quite normal behaviors seem ever-more prevalent. I remember from teaching the dictate that one was not allowed to touch a student… it could be construed as either inappropriate touching or as an assault. When you hamstring people into operating by a set of legalistic, abstract rules such as we’ve developed over the past few decades, it’s hard to get the practical work of dealing with children actually accomplished–be it teaching or parenting. Despite the Rousseaunian ideals of the elites who champion the nanny-state (or is it we, the children who want Mama Government to take away all our problems, who’ve created this Frankenstein?), kids don’t mold like plastic into model citizens, and they’re not always going to like the process of being shaped into adults. We’ve created an unsustainable societal model.

Wow. Listen to me ramble on! Me, who as a single childless person really has an outsider’s perspective. I do know that, after watching my friends and family with children, and watching them deal with some of these very issues, I am more hesitant about having children myself some day. It’s hard enough without the government and every other interested party breathing down your neck, waiting for you to make just one false move. No one’s perfect… so why are we acting as though only perfection is acceptable? I just don’t get it.

As far as the wider issue, that of declining population… I wonder what this means for the world as a whole, that global growth rates are slowing so much? It spelled doom for the Roman Empire… Like a tree rotten at the core, they eventually fell to outside forces. What happens if that happens on a global scale? Do we descend into a global Dark Ages? Interesting questions.