Legislative restoration: you cannot restore a nation through legislation—this is evident if you examine the attempts by Augustus to fight Rome’s declining birth rate through legislation, through financial penalties for unmarried men without children and for adultery. These measures all failed. Indeed, William Godwin, the first modern socialist and anarchist, specifically denied the proposition that nations cannot be restored through legislation—associating it with the “myth of the Golden Age”. So we can be sure that the proposition is true.
Hence you cannot just imagine a “very right-wing government” that sweeps in and bans abortion, bans pornography, bans no-fault divorce, and so on—it wouldn’t work. Indeed, modern conservatives, hardly versed in history, suggest the very same measures Augustus did, more or less, with the proposition mothers should receive financial bonuses from the state to breed. This is less likely to work than Augustus’s “negative” inducements to breed—and it is suggested because it is a soft option that avoids any criticism of feminism and also the racial issue (the biggest beneficiaries in the West would be the most enthusiastic breeders—the Muslims, for the most part).
In fact, the idea that you can “legislate reality” comes from the left—it is the left that thinks that you can pass a law that says “everyone is equal” and then everyone is. Yet, of course, you can no more pass a law that says gravity no longer applies than you can pass a law to make everyone equal. You can’t just pass “reactionary laws”—the nation’s strength didn’t originate in any legislation in the first place. It originated, as noted, in rural wisdom—found in the aristocrat and the peasant—and that wisdom can’t be legislated into existence. In a sense, it is the opposite to legislation.
It’s not rational, like legislation, though it does use reason. Hence, for example, peasant wisdom would distrust old age pensions “Where’s my money now? How do I know these here government offices will give me my money when I’m 73? Might not even exist.” Credulous city folk laugh at these statements, because of course there will still be a government when you’re 73, granpaw. Actually, old age pensions in Britain were introduced just before WWI, where the state experienced major stress, and then persisted through the Great Depression, along with other state welfare measures, when the state was more precarious than ever before.
The peasant is pleased to have two sons and a daughter. He’s pleased because the eldest son will take over the small-holding, the second-oldest will either be apprenticed or find his own plot, and the daughter will be married and will look after the peasant (or his wife) in their old age—with the older son to do the actual work on the farm, the younger son in reserve for emergencies. That is his “retirement plan”—his retirement plan is entirely concrete, it’s three children that he can see and touch and trust. It also so happens to represent the continuation of the nation.
The clever city-dweller relies on various bureaucratic institutions, state and private, to provide a stipend in their old age—if they have no children at all, children being more drain than benefit in those circumstances, they will, in the last resort, rely on a retirement home. Again, this is all more precarious than you might think—with these institutions arising late in a civilisation, and being subject to crashes and bailings out. The presumed stability is quite fictional.
You cannot legislate wisdom—people are not going to adopt that viewpoint because you provide them with inducements or punishments, they’ll just react to it like any other law the late legislature passes (i.e. they’ll try to get round it through loopholes and will be cynical about it). You cannot “think yourself” back to the man who only deals in practicalities and realities—who only deals with what he can see. Legislation of this sort will be regarded as a “nag”, just as Augustus’s attempts were regarded as “nags” (and he was among the wiser emperors, one of the “golden” emperors).
The entire presumption is ameliorative and itself smacks of “social engineering”—of changing incentives, of “nudging”, so that people become fertile again. The same could be said about religious lectures and hectoring—the Victorians were overtly religious even as their birth rate fell; again, you cannot lecture or moralise wisdom into people. Wisdom definitely has a spiritual aspect, but it is not the same as religious moralism or overt piety—both of which can be quite unrealistic and sentimental (after all, many religions praise non-reproductive religious devotion).
I don’t see any prospect that the contemporary West will even attempt “Augustinian” laws to revive birth rates. So far as I can see, the Western states have decided the population will be replaced by Africans and this is considered a morally good thing because Europeans (“whites”) are morally evil—so nothing will be done, other than to encourage miscegenation to destroy the European peoples as far as possible along the way.
Since that policy is basically the path of least resistance, an acceptance that the situation is non-recoverable, it will probably work in its own terms—in the sense that lying in your own mess if you soiled yourself would “work” if it allowed you to carry on playing your video games.
The ameliorative measures suggested by conservatives aren’t even sticks (more likely to work) but rather carrots—carrots for women to breed that would be offered to all, and so, even if implemented, would not help Europeans as such.
It’s easy to be sentimental about this issue, but, per the peasant, people reproduce for quite practical reasons—and when it seems impractical, as when they live in a large city supported by bureaucratic organisations, they stop. They stop because it doesn’t make sense to them—because they come to trust what is abstract and notional. The more concrete people become, the more it makes sense to breed.