Two years after having one of the lowest birth rates in the world, Georgia is enjoying something of a baby boom, following an intervention from the country's most senior cleric.Yes, the country's population is 80% Orthodox, but there's much more to it than that. For starters, it's the Georgian Orthodox Church, so the religion and the patriarch both have nationalistic roles. The Patriarch's appeal to have more babies spoke both to the people's religious faith and their patriotism. Check out the flag, which tells you all you need to know about the Georgian nexus of religion and nation:
At the end of 2007, in a move to reverse the Caucasian country's dwindling birth figures, the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia II, came up with an incentive. He promised to personally baptise any baby born to parents of more than two children.
There was only one catch: the baby had to be born after the initiative was launched.
The results are, in the words of the Georgian Orthodox Church, "a miracle".
The country's birth rate increased by nearly 20% during 2008 - a rate four times faster than the previous year.
Many parents say they took the decision to have another child on the basis of the Patriarch's incentive. [...]
Many other parents agree. It is perhaps not surprising in a country where more than 80% of people follow the Orthodox faith.
If a nation's people are convinced that having children is more than a private, self-interested choice, if they feel that they are contributing their children to the nation, they'll have more of them.
I suppose that, among Swipples, the more common feeling would be one of regretfully inflicting their one-and-a-half offspring upon an innocent and long-suffering ecosphere.
ReplyDeleteI've long suspected that ethnocentrism/clannishness to be a heritable trait, it sure seems evolutinary beneficial to me.
ReplyDeleteEthnocentrism could very well lead to some ethno-nationalist movements (I think Rushton wrote about this). For a particular nationalist movement to be succesful, the culture should also approve of it. If not, it's going to be hard, as we see in Western Europe, US and the rest of British/Western settled nations.
Still, I've never seen much studies which confirm this idea. Just three: on Eskimo's, Israeli Jews and the French -- two of which, I couldn't even edit.
At the Audacious Epigone blog, I wrote at length about this (possible heritability of ethnocentrism) in the comments.
http://tinyurl.com/ctgo49
But, hey, what do I know. I'm no geneticist.
'If a nation's people are convinced that having children is more than a private, self-interested choice, if they feel that they are contributing their children to the nation, they'll have more of them.'
ReplyDeleteThis is something that various Mexicali tribes (and their patrons) living in the good ole' Cali/USA figured out long time ago.
Problem is that 'nation' is an extremely elastic word these days, especially in the USA. Feels like United States of Special Interest Groups more than anything else...
Georgia is relatively small and poor country with a very few people interested in immigranting there apart from Israeli Khazars.
BTW, country itself is situated somewhere in Asia Minor close to Turkey and Iran.
No offence but, apples and oranges?
I just happen to be reading the Epilogue of Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiori about his former Georgian pals who dominated the USSR and oversaw a lot of the building and purging [The Great Terror]. His bloodiest henchogres like Beria were Georgian/Azeri half-castes and Orzhonikidze & others had cities far to the north named after themselves. The Georgians were renowned in the old USSR as fervent capitalists even under Brezhnev and now their nationalism is fiercer than ever, it appears, after Putin's thugs made their August 8th invasion last summer. [Hilariously, in the Epilogue above, Montefiori notes that Putin's grandfather was a personal chef to both Rasputin and later on to Lenin and Stalin himself, a pretty fantastic political cuisinier by any standards. Lil Vlad has some accomodationist genes if that's the case, and SSM's scholarship is superb]
ReplyDeleteMy wife is Greek Orthodox and they don't call the Patriarchs of each Orthodox division "ethnarchs" for nothing!!
sj071: I didn't mean to imply that what works in Georgia will work here, if that's what you're getting at. It's a symptom of our problems as a nation that it would not work here.
ReplyDeleteDave: "Ethnarch": quite telling that word.
We should stop immigration, not propagandize for people we identify with to breed more. That's just adding to overpopulation-spawned environmental degradation.
ReplyDeleteGood post, but rather a poor choice for the title, don't you think? ;)
ReplyDeleteThis is fabulous news!
ReplyDelete