A few days ago, a Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry tweeted a chart showing the plummeting birth rate of Oman. Oman is a hereditary monarchy under sharia law—the last place you would expect the longhouse and the resulting TFR decline to touch. Pascal tweeted: “Something incredibly bizarre is happening, all over the world, and it is completely unstudied.”
And it’s true. We can blame American wokeness all we want, but in fact we’re facing a worldwide problem that seems to permeate everywhere. It’s such a huge change occurring right in front of our eyes that we can barely see it.
One explanation is technology—“the Borg” as thinkers like James Poulos call it. The idea here is that wokeness is actually just the special sauce on top of a all-powerful machine that wants to reduce human beings to easily interchangeable cogs. Immutable characteristics like race and gender get in the way of human fungibility, so there’s a ever-present inertia to get rid of them.
However, the explanation that I keep coming ba…
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