Great Article: Global Warming and Fecundity in the West

Questioning the birth dearth in industrialized nations as the controversial thing that it is.  Very cutting edge.  Just when I get to the point where I’m about to start hating the Brits again, they show me how wrong that would be.  They do it every time.

The demographic dysfunction of the “developed” nations is an unspoken component of our social and economic maladies, from the looming monetary chaos to the way men and women relate to one another.

“Fecundity”.  Great word, and remember you heard it here first:  that’s a word you’re going to see a lot more of over the next decade or so.

And I’ve hinted at this before, but this is one of the directions film director Martin Scorsese is going in, in ways so subtle that I’m not even sure he’s aware of it.

There’s a scene in one of the last Boardwalk Empire episodes where the main character, Enoch Thompson, chastises his faux-wife for using a contraceptive.  In “The Departed”, there is a strong implication that the one virtuous character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, impregnated the Matt Damon character’s girlfriend, something the Damon character was apparently not capable of.

In other words, in his recent work Scorsese is hinting – just barely hinting, but it’s there – that barren-ness, a lack of fecundity, is a marker of moral dysfunction which has gone too far.  Scorsese has always been culturally cutting edge, and maybe he still is.

The developed western nations have been reproductively barren for more than a generation.  You could say there are a lot of reasons for it.  But maybe the reasons don’t matter.  Maybe it’s a problem that is sufficient unto itself.

There are few people I’ve ever heard of that I would characterize as out and out evil, but Crispin Tickell contends for the honor.  He hates human beings, considering them “…a malignant maladaptation in the corpus of living organisms.”

Of course he means the rest of us, not him.