DoktorGlas
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User ID: 1338
I've previously posted on the Motte about the Swedish state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and suggest solutions to the problem. The fourth report dropped a few weeks back, this time focusing on involuntary childlessness and infertility: “Involuntary childlessness: prevalence, causes, treatment and consequences” As before, here's a link in case you know Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-4-ofrivillig-barnloshet-forekomst-orsaker-behandling-och-konsekvenser/
In contrast to the other three reports previously released, this one actually got some major government attention, and shorly after it was made public an extra investment into fertility treatments was announced. That's all well and good, and I'm sure it will help suffering couples – but I am also increasingly worried that the committee is losing the thread. These last two reports (the previous of which focused on economic differences between different family formations) have deftly dodged all the bigger questions at play in this crisis. Biologically-related infertility is obviously an exceedingly small cause of declining fertility, and in any serious discussion it must be pretty far down the list of priorities. I get the feeling this particular issue is getting a whole report's worth of attention not because it's key to a solution, but because it's conveninent and doesn't involve questioning anyone's life choices by wrestling with difficult and dangerous questions.
One of the difficult and dangerous questions I've wrestled with recently is a particular form of dissonance. It might surprise a few of you, but Sweden actually has an extensive Total Defense Duty (yes, literal translation) technically applicable to all Swedish citizens between the age of 16 and 70. Everyone and their grandma really is expected to make significant sacrifices, perhaps even give their lives, in the event of war. In the information pamphlet the government regularly sends out to facilitate crisis-preparation there's a classic mantra (in the more literal Sanskrit meaning of that noun, man-tra, i.e. support or instrument for the mind) that I think has been included since centuries back – alla uppgifter om att motståndet ska upphöra är falska – all reports that resistance is to cease are false. Liberty or death. Noble stuff!
Yet the most central part of ensuring the continued existence of a sovereign Swedish state, i.e. the creation of a new generation of Swedes, is apparently not even a moral, let alone a legal, duty on the part of the citizen? Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo? That old Goldfinger-line pops into my head. "You expect me to have children?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" Really, what is the point of this gung-ho never-surrender sentiment, and for that matter all the increases in defence spending in Europe, if we're just going to allow death to conquer us all from within? There are ideas here which should be connected, yet they seem to lie strewn all about in disorder in a way that's both frustrating and disheartening to see.
Apart from that, I'm also not entirely sure unreservedly making it even easier to postpone getting children is truly the right way to approach this problem. Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.
In short, the material focus in the debate is starting to worry me. I hope that the next reports will be a bit meatier and tackle the larger cultural and ideological questions at play.
DoktorGlas
27d ago
This touches on one of good ol' Spengler's most esoteric distinctions: the difference between truths ("Wahrheiten") and facts ("Tatsachen").
I think the answer to your question – the only real answer – is that knowing a bunch of truths about what makes human faces attractive, about genetic fitness, about fertility and about how an attractive man acts et cetera do not actually help you with the fact that you are unattractive. To quote Oppenheimer from the Nolan-movie: theory will only take you so far.
It's fun for us cerebral minds to figure out what makes the machine tick, and some of the best and most entertaining Youtube-videos I've seen are actually about lookstheory. But it has not helped me with women in the slightest; and since most people are practically rather than cerebrally inclined, they mostly believe that thinking a bunch about theory is the sign of the low-status weirdo.
I've heard this sentiment before, and the central problem with it is that the time frame is ludicrous. Evolution can work quickly, but it needs at least a few generations in order to spread reproduction-conductive-genes throughout the population. Before our reproductive behaviour is done sorting itself out we'll already have a demographic collapse on our hands destabilizing enough to rock the foundations of every modern Western and Far Eastern state (not Africa, mind, which is rapidly making even the worst fears of overpopulation seem optimistic).
Now I can only speak for myself, but I quite like those states – I think they're the best, actually, and it'd be a shame to see them go.
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