The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution (Societas)

Since the 1960s, the West has moved ever-leftwards. 'Equality' and ‘feelings’ are central to the New Religion that rejects all traditional values. Yet beneath the institutionally dominant ‘Left’ stews a growing and restless ‘Right’. How has this fractured situation come about? What will the future hold?

In The Past is a Future Country, the authors trace it back to the Industrial Revolution. Darwinian selection massively weakened, meaning that, for the first time in history, the selfish, sick and stupid could survive and reproduce, undermining our religious, group-oriented culture. Now the West is scourged by an epidemic of narcissists, competing to signal their individuality and moral superiority. But their ‘fight for equality’ is really a fight for self-promotion. Reflecting this runaway individualism, Westerners increasingly don’t have children, save for those who are genetically resistant to this onslaught ― the staunchly conservative and religious: the eventual inheritors of the earth.

But there is a dark storm brewing in the demographic data that the authors have analysed. There is a burgeoning growth in the population of exceptionally unintelligent and antisocial people that social welfare systems cannot sustain for much longer. The developed world will pass away, and the global population that depends on it will crash, in the greatest Malthusian Collapse of all time. Yet all is not lost. The authors show how a resistant class of intelligent, religious conservatives will band together to preserve enclaves of civilization that may survive most of the coming apocalypse, and from its ashes rebuild a new world: A Neo-Byzantium.

Edward Dutton is a researcher based in Oulu in northern Finland. Born in London in 1980, Dutton read Theology at Durham University before completing a PhD in Religious Studies at Aberdeen University in 2006. This was developed into his first book: Meeting Jesus at University: Rites of Passage and Student Evangelicals (2008). He was made 'Docent' (Adjunct Reader) of the Anthropology of Religion and Finnish Culture at Oulu University in 2011. In 2012, however, Dutton made the move to evolutionary psychology. Since then, Dutton has published in leading psychology journals including Intelligence, and Personality and Individual Differences. He has been a guest researcher in the Psychology Department at Umeå University in Sweden and is academic consultant to a research group in the Special Education Department at King Saud University in Riyadh. In 2020, he was appointed Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Asbiro University, a business-focused university of applied sciences in Łódź, Poland. Dutton's research has been reported worldwide. He runs a popular internet channel, The Jolly Heretic, in which he explores daring scientific research. Dutton is the author of many books, most recently, Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West (2021), Islam: An Evolutionary Perspective (2020) and Churchill’s Headmaster: The 'Sadist’ Who Nearly Saved the British Empire (2019).