Presented without comment (by me at least):
Demographic collapse is the good news.
Falling in love and having babies is among the most natural and powerful impulses a human being can have. If billions of people are just vaguely saying they “don’t feel like it”, something has gone profoundly wrong, and the appropriate response is not a symptomatic policy band-aid.
If you find yourself trying to justify or sell this basic human imperative, as one lifestyle choice among many, or as a vehicle for delivering some other good — or, God forbid, as a means of wringing a few more years out of a decrepit and exhausted system — you’ve already lost.
People aren’t having babies because the system they live within is profoundly unnatural and anti-human, and it needs to fail.
Trying to make people breed in order to save that system is precisely backwards. The only good reason to care about the economy, or the budget deficit, or house prices, or the state of the military, is because those factors either support, or suppress — or, worst of all, derange — healthy family formation.
Demographic collapse tells us that human society can’t just infinitely circle the drain: the people capable of running the machinery may be willing to liveas psychically gelded interchangeable productivity units, but they aren’t willing to breed that way.
This means that the processes that generate our present predicament really are self-terminating — which is very good news.
This, says Mary Harrington, is “Either more or very much less pessimistic than the Kingsnorth take on modernity, depending on your priors.”
Okay, fine, I’ll comment. I don’t hate “liberalism” enough, nor do I have enough knowledge or wisdom, to cheer along here. But I certainly nod, because I do hate the anti-human nature of the system being referred to. And not enough defenders — today’s poor-weather defenders or, if you can find them, real defenders — of “liberalism” take this seriously.
In any case, it’s not simply good news, as the post goes on to explain, if that wasn’t obvious enough. This collapse — or transformation, or whatever — will not go gently into that good night. Brace for rage, rage against the dying of the light and all that.
Oh, and there’s specifically good news, too. There will be Opportunities!… for the courageous, the energetic, and the excellent.
Whoever Mr. Kevin Dolan, the apparent writer of the Substack above, is, I do not endorse him, at least not based on a 5-minute perusal of his writing. And I’m guessing his ilk will mostly succeed in adding to that rage — calmly, with unwitting cleverness and composure, of course, to go along with all the excellence.
I don’t get the impression that the excellence he has in mind is the right kind, though I get the impression that he thinks it is exactly that.
But I think there are going to be some weird overlaps to navigate in the now and near future. For example, the only one who has put a finger on my own hesitation with Paul Kingsnorth, and only for a brief moment (most of his thoughts were as Blaaah as others’), was David Bentley Hart, when he pointed to some odd overlapping “comfort” Kingsnorth seemed to have, “sitting down with Wendell Berry one night and with Eric Metaxas the next and seeming equally at home with both.” I don’t think that’s entirely a fair statement, but I get it. I know what my gut reaction was when I saw he’d done a Metaxas interview. (I have not listened to it.) But, I also have to admit that I don’t know that I’m entirely justified. I might be right about my discomfort with the interview; or I might be wrong about my purity-test revulsion to it. (I’m much encouraged by Jennifer Herdt’s recent piece on James Pennington: “Today, when purity-seeking and critique so often stymie our capacity for commitment, Pennington embodies a generative alternative.”)
I anticipate more such headache as the wave of 2026 crashes over us.
No way out but through, I suppose.
‘I do not know which to hope,’ said Boromir grimly: ‘that Gandalf will find what he seeks, or that coming to the cliff we shall find the gates lost for ever. All choices seem ill, and to be caught between wolves and the wall the likeliest chance. Lead on!’
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Don’t worry (I say to myself but also to anyone reading), my next post will be from Winnie-the-Pooh, who speaks to me more clearly and luflyly.