I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I haven’t written much here. I spent the past couple of weeks visiting family in Spain, reading Brothers Karamazov1 on the beach and trying to forget about the state of the world. I was staying on a smaller location, about 20 minutes by train from downtown Barcelona, in a coastal region called El Maresme.
And yet, how can you completely escape from the world? Even if you escape from it, it follows you. The local newspaper that I picked up at the nearby cafe, La Vanguardia, informed me that the Spanish birthrate has collapsed and that it is not going to come up again any time soon. Spanish people are just not having children or even marrying and, according to a recent study, in a decade or so a third of the households in Spain will be single-person.
Meanwhile, migrants keep coming and while right now 21% of the residents of Catalonia are foreign-born — and that’s not counting those of migrant background but already born in Spain. This is likely to grow. More migrants will be coming, mostly from Morocco and Subsaharan Africa, but there are many coming from Latin America too. In fact, I was surprised at how many Latin Americans are there in Barcelona compared to 20 or even just 10 years ago.
And yet, in a building just across from one of Gaudi’s masterpieces, I watched a conference by a famous Spanish journalist. At one point he said that “in the next decades, migrants from Africa and North Africa will comprise most of our population”, or something to that effect, but in a matter-of-factly tone. No one blinked. Everyone seemed to accept it as a given.
And yet, when I looked at the audience, it was all white Spanish people — and mostly older folks too.
Isn’t there a contradiction here?
People expect that Spain will have a completely different population in fifty years, and things will work exactly the same way, but the audience seemed to show otherwise. Migrants don’t tend to go to Spanish journalists’ conferences. In the future, Spain — and large parts of Europe — will resemble more and more Latin America or perhaps North Africa in its dysfunction.
And yet… Many right-wingers talk about such things as if society was on the verge of collapse, but I think that’s just exaggeration, or perhaps wishful thinking. Most countries in Latin America or North Africa haven’t collapsed yet. European countries seem still pretty chill, regardless of the occasional random “terrorist” attack (and some of those are probably staged by CIA/Mossad).
It’s true that the current world order is mostly based on strange lies or utopian ideas — that all people are equal and replaceable, that sex differences don’t exist, that we need to wear masks to avoid viruses and suck carbon from the atmosphere and cut trees to “solve climate change” etc etc — and, as such, it cannot really go on forever. Nevertheless, it can still last for quite a while. After all, it took hundreds of years for the Roman Empire to fall. The Fall of the American Global Empire may take an even longer time.
I don’t even think migration is the main problem in Spain. That would probably be feminism, which is the main reason of the current birth rate collapse in the country, as well as liberalism in general. In recent years, Spain has become very left-wing on social issues, and in particular in what is today called “gender” stuff. They really are one of the most radical countries in Europe in that aspect. And what hope can there be for a country that doesn’t understand the basic things about Nature and doesn’t even care to propagate itself, outsourcing its own reproduction to foreigners?
On the other hand, life is still good. The beach is not going anywhere, never mind the screams of the apocalyptical climate cultists. You can eat well for very reasonable prices. Economically, people complain about jobs but they don’t seem to be struggling. Catalonia appears to be doing pretty well compared to other regions of Spain. There’s little sign of social unrest, most migrants are slowly integrating or rather merging, and even the Catalan separatists quieted down a bit.
There is no sign of a visible collapse anytime soon.
Of course, sooner or later something is bound to happen. Liberalism is like a castle made of cards, it is just not sustainable in the long run.
But we may all be dead before it happens.
Paraphrasing T. S. Eliot, this is how the West will end, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
*I am trying to read or re-read a few classic books I missed in my youth, and this seemed an obvious choice. The insufferably pompous Nabokov once said something to the effect that he wouldn’t include a page of Dostoevsky in a compilation of Russian literature, but I could never finish any of his books except “Lolita”, and while certainly well-written, what is it but a story of pretty disgusting Epstein-style characters? Dostoevsky has many more memorable novels.