It’s the best thing that could happen to reduce our destruction of the environment, and the pyramid scheme of ‘endless growth on a finite planet’ had to end at some point.
This means generally tolerance and science literacy could decline. That worries me.
Poor, non and under developed nations with poor living standards are the only ones that still have persistently neutral to positive replacement birth rates. And, yes, this has many consequences, which his why I hope S. America, Africa and South E. Asia are the benefactors of a weaker China and they too begin to modernize as the whole Species stands to benefit from that and we decouple from the CCP's violent and belligerent stance against the World.
I agree that in the immediate sense a lower population is net boon to allow the Planet to heal itself from myopic Human action/pollution/over consumption, but as we're getting closer to becoming a multi-planetary species we will have to increase this population size significantly to meet the demand of those efforts and I think their is a significant lag time if the culture of having 2 kids per married couple and has been reduced to 2 dogs per married family for my generation and likely those to come and has become the norm in order to remain relevant in the ever shrinking labour market.
There are plenty of belligerent countries in those regions, it's just that they're not considered important enough for their saber-rattling to be noticed internationally, and their enemies tend to be sub-national groups formed around shared ethnicity, control of resources (drugs, oil, mines) or religion who are even less likely to attract attention.
By now, lots of people have heard about Mexican drug cartels, Kurdistan or Joseph Kony's "Lord's Resistance Army", but who cared about the Houthis in Yemen before their civil war turned into an international proxy war? Who could've predicted the civil war in Ethiopia? And who knows whether the Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylie, the Naga nationalist movement, the Wa state or the Free Papua Movement will be next to make international news?
Modernization doesn't guarantee peace and democracy; it also means higher availability of more powerful or more, cheaper weapons. Combined with population growth, even small areas are able to raise substantial armies, while declining resources (relative to population) incentivize wars to secure a larger slice of the pie.
I expect that we'll continue to see large countries only held together by shared colonial history disintegrate violently into smaller regions with more complex borders.
I don’t know where politics is going in the short term, but I suspect it goes in cycles. Conservatism might be winning at the moment, but it will reach its limits, mistakes will be made and there will be a resurgence of liberalism.
Also, just because you believe your set of looney beliefs is not a religion does not mean that it's any different from any other religion.
I completely agree that magical thinking and conspiracy theory delusions seem to be growing and that's a real problem. I won't quibble about you equating it to religion, it's a valid point.
No. There is a lot of conversion from religious/conservative backgrounds to liberal/secular affiliations. Religious/conservative demographics having birthrates several times higher than the mainstream is a phenomenon that's been going on for centuries.
Not necessarily. It depends on the environment too and can shift with new generations. For example Poland was nearly 100% catholic a few decades ago and there's still lots of that influence, but even the official number is trending down. (Which means the real one of people who actually care is likely below 90%)
Very democratic governments are susceptible to be overthrown by this tactic again.
That's why they do it!
If it turns out it is the modern way of life/thinking, then that modern way of life/thinking is doomed, isn't it?
If the world population ends up stabilizing around one billion, for example, or half a billion or whatever, we would be far from "doomed", only a lot more sustainable than we currently are. Absent a whole lot of global catastrophes, it might take a couple of centuries for us to get there. Meanwhile everybody cries bloody murder because they have no idea how to extrapolate current trends into the far future.
We already have the capability to decouple sex and procreation.
Environmentalism is a luxury good that people think about when basic needs are met and requires capacity above that. It's going to be hard to care about coral reefs when we need to devote more of our scarce young people to the practical needs of a gerontocracy.