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Notes -
A note on motivations.
I often see people making arguments of the type of "we need to get fertility rates (across the board, or maybe just for group X) up otherwise human civilization will collapse".
Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it. If human civilization ends after my generation, I'm fine with it. Of course I want living standards to continue to be good during my generation at least, but that doesn't mean that I have any attachment to the idea of wanting to maintain human civilization 100 or 1000 years from now. And if human civilization continues after me, I'm fine with that too. I don't care much one way or the other.
Humanity has been doing this whole reproduction thing for hundreds of thousands of years now. Repetition and quantity is not the same thing as quality.
I get that it feels different if you have kids, which I don't. I might be interested in having kids, but I'm not sure if I want any or not yet.
In any case, if you have kids, I didn't force you to have kids. I hope your kids do well, but it doesn't change my fundamental calculus.
I enjoy being alive, but I see no fundamental deep importance in keeping the human species existing. I'm not a nihilist in the least bit. I love being alive in a very visceral way. I love the smell of flowers, the look of sunshine in the sky. I just see no clear positive advantage to continuing the species. Or to ending it. Like I said, I'm neutral on the matter. If the species continues, cool. If it ends, cool. I don't want to end, and I don't want any currently alive humans to end, but to me the idea of continuing the species beyond that is very abstract and I really don't care about it.
I do not think that this is true. Amish civilization would probably be sustainable with a few million humans. And even a technological civilization could probably work with less than a billion people (though with higher friction -- tech development would take longer, and there would be less entertainment with very high production costs).
Also, not having kids is something which is very strongly selected against both in biological and cultural evolution. If TikTok caused 90% of societies to stop reproducing, human civilization would still be fine in the long run.
Amish civilization is dependent on trade with their technologically advanced neighbors, though. You can have premodern subsistence farmers at shockingly small scale, that's just not what the Amish are.
Their lifestyle would change, they would face the 50% child mortality that plagued humanity most of its existence, but within a generation they would adjust to the new normal. They wouldn't die out entirely.
Yes, but that’s not ‘thé Amish’. What we think of as ‘the Amish’ depend on antibiotics, solar panels, air compressors, credit card processors that they buy from the secular world. You’re describing little house on the prairie.
There were certainly Amish people around in 1920. Most certainly, they did not have credit card processors or antibiotics or solar panels.
Of course, even in 1920 the Amish likely depended on outside trade for a few crucial supply chains, because their shtick is rejecting technology, not insisting on 100% autonomy. I suppose they did not refine their own iron, for example.
This is why I said a few million of them could exist independently rather than saying they could be autark on the level of a few villages.
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This kind of intellectualised lack of care and concern for the world has the pretension of being a serious opinion with some form of philosophical caché, but can really only be understood as a spiteful lashing out at life itself by someone who feels slighted and betrayed by their own expectations at what human existence should be. It's juvenile, provincial, extremely transparent in its self-loathing origin, and can only stem from a position of weakness and defeat.
The inherent good of human civilisation goes without saying - we are the only species in the entire known world that does not solely operate around cruel instinct, we can peer beyond the vulgar material veil of constant frenzied self-preservation and extract beauty, love, and meaning from the violent chaos of the natural order - only in the world of Man can a living being pass away with a semblance of dignity and comfort. No animal in nature dies peacefully. We can create abstracted systems that bind otherwise distinct people and groups together, pool our labour and knowledge into cohesive willpower, and turn base matter into magic. Modern medicine, high-speed global transportation, satellites crowding the stratosphere, the welfare state, not to speak of the surplus of beauty and meaning we have added to the world by means of artistic endeavours. The pleasure of good food (not raw meat torn straight from the spine of a wailing animal), good company, lovely music, light-hearted conversation, a charming landscape, the sound of cicadas on a summer night, its all there for us to enjoy and cherish and compound our fates upon.
For 4 years, I lived in an apartment in Paris that shared a courtyard with an elementary school. Every day, I would hear children playing during their lunch break - laughing, shouting, exclaiming, crying, giggling and scheming in exactly the same way my childhood friends and I did when we were small, and doubtlessly in exactly the same way the children of the Persian Empire, the Neolithic, or the Early Modern period did in their times. I felt an endless cycle of joy and curiosity and willpower and ecstasy at the world and the gift of live we were given to be in it and a part of it, unchanged since the first day of Creation. To look over this vast and endless sea of human joy and pleasure at being in the world and to claim to see nothing inherently valuable in it one way or another is not an intellectual or philosophical position - on the contrary, it is the spiteful grumble of the slave who considers his own wretched existence to be the Alpha and Omega of all human experience. It is the position of a self-loathing man to cowardly for suicide, so he demands the entire world should commit suicide in his stead.
Remember Goethe - "the world a man sees around him is nothing else than the world he carries in his heart". The world I see around me is a big, flashing YES - YES to beauty, YES to pleasure, YES to friendship, YES to love, YES to the bountiful harvest of our labours, YES to the innocent sincerity of a child at play, YES to drunken dancing on summer nights, YES to music, to painting, to cathedrals and to operas, YES to the gift of life, so precious, so explosive, so free.
My cup runneth over - doth thine?
Cachet.
Caché means hidden, cachet means sceal (hence approval, officiality, prestige)
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The most important motivation for caring about civilization is igniting an individual will to overcome obstacles and shape the world. It's an innate desire, a personality trait that not everybody possesses.
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It requires empathy to care about civilization. Because it means understanding that there are people just like yourself who will be living in the far future, though they do not yet exist, and they matter as if they were your friend or cousin. Humans come equipped with an interest in securing the wellbeing of those who are like themselves, though there have been some mutations which express other inclinations usually deemed antisocial. If civilization, then their happiness is secured. If barbarism, then doom —
Also, interest in civilization is usually a proxy for intergroup competition. The failure for your group to be fruitful simply means that another group will dominate yours. This will probably be the Chinese when they eventually realize how easy it is to increase TFR. All of your descendants will be less happy, just as the celts were less happy when the Anglo-Saxons ruled over them. Many of their descendants will beg and prostitute themselves. A well-tuned empathy makes you feel about future members of your tribe in the same way you feel about your own child. This is why Kings with paternal feelings toward his subjects were beloved in history; it is probably evolution’s favored form of governance, given that the primates the dominant member shares food and protects the lesser members.
If you truly
you would recognize there is a chain of empathy descending from “caring about someone who has kids”, to “caring about their kids”, to “caring about their grandkids”, all the way down. Because if you care about them then you also have some care for their terminal values, which is going to be their children. Our present happiness is related to our future predictions, so it’s reasonable to feel unhappy if your civilization is trending toward doom.
Uhh... Fertility is a coordination problem. Coordination problems are hard.
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Easy ... how?
Countries have tried in both recent and historic times, but AFAIK the only time a national policy has significantly increased TFR (from sub-replacement to above 3) was in Ceausescu's Romania, via "outlawing abortion and contraception, routine pregnancy tests for women, taxes on childlessness, and legal discrimination against childless people". Lots of countries have tried various "carrots" to little effect; it seems like only such big "sticks" work. You'd think China would be uniquely positioned to be that oppressive today, but even for them it might not be possible soon - they only ended the One-Child Policy a decade ago, and it'll be embarrassing (and hence politically risky) for the old guard when they have to admit that continuing it so long was a mistake big enough to require a similarly hard push in the opposite direction.
Even in Romania, fertility didn't stay above 3 for long, though - it was below 2.5 in a few years, and dipping below replacement again well before the policies ended - though it plummeted to 1.5 after, so it's not like the polices weren't still doing something, they just weren't doing enough.
The strongest correlate to fertility is probably the inverse correlation with years of education for females, but I don't know if China is the type of brutal to try fiddling with that. They're certainly not a gender equality utopia, but in higher education women there now outnumber men, despite solidly outnumbered by men in that age range.
It is trivial to change TFR and eventually China will realize it, and they will be able to solve it via totalitarianism while we are unable to follow suit. You (1) judge the social value of girls and women exclusively by their aptitude and progress in motherhood; (2) inculcate pro-fertile values in adolescent girls (eg media, stories, idols), (3) train girls in the skills for motherhood.
The reason the Haredi female TFR is so high regardless of country or income is because they do this. The reason that you have some fundamentalist Christian families with high TFR is because they do this. The reason the Gypsy TFR is 1.5 to 2x the national average of whichever country they live in, despite being urban-dwelling, is that they do this. The reason I have cousins on one side of family who are going to average 4 kids each is that I know their parents so this. There was a longitudinal study where girls were given a fake baby that they had to mother throughout school; the longterm effect was 1.5x higher TFR. (I think I found this on themotte but forgot the poster).
Women care so much about their social valuation that they will starve themselves to gain more more of it; they will spend two hours a day decorating their face and hair and wardrobe; they will even go through a miserable period of hard work and stress with little monetary reward only because it secures status (we call this “academia”). In more fertile eras, these pressures were toward motherhood; a woman who wanted to be an academic would be laughed at and derided.
Anyway, China will realize this, they will totalitarianly implement changes and likely in such a way that it targets high IQ Chinawomen, and we will be fucked (impotently) because we are ruled by entertainment and corporations, not a centralized communist party.
(also paging Mr @hydroacetylene)
It's not even close to trivial -- you're just flatly using the wrong word here. If it was trivial, then most countries would have done so by now. Changing people's behaviors is already tough enough, but changing them on a wide scale and with something as nebulous as social standing is going to be monumentally difficult. The word you probably want instead is "obvious", that it's "obvious how to change TFR", and I'd agree with you there that this will almost certainly be the most effective method. Perhaps it would be the only effective method, at least assuming societies aren't suddenly willing to plow 50% of their GDP into natal subsidies.
The reason I call it “trivial” is because it is easy to change behaviors and values when you have complete control over education and media. As I mention, China can do this while America will be unable to do it. Education and media are antecedent to social values which are antecedent to behaviors. You can train a woman to crave settling down to have children young through exposing them exclusively to media where women receive respect and esteem and attention for doing so, where the women doing this are shown as beautiful and alluring, where it is depicted as a satisfying and an all-moral purpose, where “maternal moments” are artfully selected in media to only show its positives, and where everything which opposes this is shown as psychologically disastrous / ugly / low-status / shameful / selfish. At a more sophisticated level, you apply all of this to prenatal behaviors beginning at the doll-carrying age, eg the traditionally feminine qualities of being meek, caring, loving, and docile, which makes a woman more likely to have children later on for a variety of reasons. A girl who grows up attached to the idea of loving and caring for a doll becomes a woman who wants to do this to a child; a girl who grows up with a modest sense of worth is a woman who does not fantasize about marrying a werewolf pirate billionaire. This is all easy, it is trivial. Two weeks of cognitive labor by a CCP-appointed team of 140iq social psychologists will be able to fix their fertility eternally.
Or, more likely, they'll declare war on sparrows and lose. This is the CCP approaching a task that's legitimately difficult.
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Again, I'm not disagreeing with you on the efficacy of what you say if it was aggressively and correctly implemented. I'm saying none of this is "trivial" or "easy". Human culture is notoriously fickle, and governments can waste tons of effort trying to change it without having much of an impact. If any large nation would be able to do it I think China would be one of them, but that said it's not like China is run by some ultra-competent entity. The CCP has made tons of buffoonish errors, and it's very plausible that they end up spinning their wheels on this problem.
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As if you can snap your fingers and just do it. As if you can make women incapable of looking around them and seeing every large family poor and miserable. How many instances throughout world history can you find where social status was not tied to material wealth?
Is that the cause? Or is it that they are a welfare class engaged in a holy war?
Is that the cause? Or is it that gypsy children are an economic resource to gypsies?
You can if you’re China or some other centralized totalizing social environment. China can snap their fingers and mandate films, books, adverts, lessons, and class trips. These can successfully change norms so that women are socially judged by their motherhood + pre-motherhood behaviors.
In any with strong religious norms, a childless woman was seen as beneath a woman who had many kids. Religious communities do a good job at redirecting social status, but so can any totalizing social environment. In America you have the enormous problem of capitalism / consumerism which will need to be fixed for any national solution to occur, because you have some of the smartest people continually telling women that their social value is determined by buying and experiences things, with universities (effectively all of them behaving as businesses) telling them they need to be educated. And so lots of smart people actually think it’s higher status to be a poor academic (or even a struggling artist) than having a lot of money. If you’re at a party and there’s a poor artist, a prestigious academic, and then a plumbing company owner who makes $400k yearly, the status is not dictated by the one who makes more money. Heck, someone owning a cute coffee shop that barely turns a profit is going to have more social status in many circles than someone who does slant drilling and turns $500k a year. This is because our culture’s media / stories signal that these things are high status.
Their leaders are engaged in a holy war but the average member is just a normal person doing what their culture says to do, and in this culture the number of children is prized over everything. Both men and women are judged harshly or celebrated strongly based on their fertility. It’s seen as both a commandment and a blessing. The average member isn’t having kids for a nefarious reason, they are just taught through custom that it’s prized.
Unlikely now that Gypsies are forced into schools in Europe. And look at historical figures: Ben Franklin’s father made candles, was his 17 children necessary for the candle business in an era with slaves and indentured servants? Of course not. Albrecht Dürer‘s parents were goldsmiths, did they need to have 18 children? Of course not. “Economic resource theory” never made any sense because you can look at rich non-farmers in history and see high fertility.
In any place with strong religious norms children were also very cheap, nearly free, or possibly even negative cost. The two things correlate that one wonders if it isn't religion that produces high fertility but the reverse: high fertility produces a religion that promotes high fertility. If you look really hard at christianity, for example, there's a lot of antinatalist messaging in there that almost nobody uses: yes be fruitful, yes onan but also "For there are some eunuchs who were so born from their mother’s womb, and there are some eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it".
Are religious communities redirecting social status or getting bent around by what people consider social status anyway? Look at how many churches display pride flags despited that being a far more clearly condemned practice than just not having children.
Yes, but surely we can agree that buying and experiencing things, and that having lots of free time, is something that is pleasurable in itself, that it isn't all just a big psyop.
But do they go to university because they are told to do so or do they go because it's not their money (either it's coming from mom and dad or from a loan) and they get to party for 5 years? Are they doing it for the status or are they doing it because they expect to be fun and they are correct?
Being a rich owner of a plumbing company is not so much a job as it is a wish. It doesn't matter if you think something is beneath you if it's also unavailable to you. What's available to you is being an employee of a plumbing company and that makes little money and is phisically draining on top, hence nobody wants to do it.
I think the Haredi are in a position similar to the lifelong Seaorgers: the community is so closed and dependent upon itself that leaving is not just discouraged socially but it's also economically very difficult. Nevertheless the percentage of people that leave that lifestyle is growing.
You're overestimating the mighty power of europe here.
Some people are just weirdos.
Plumbers make a lot more than the members of the social class they're recruited from typically do.
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I believe the theory that Gypsy kids are an economic resource to their parents is due to their utility for typical Ziganeur activities like welfare exploitation, petty crime(which can combine with schooling pretty well), and charity scams.
And I'm going to talk a bit about ultra-religious communities, because I can tell you don't actually live in one- the highest status thing in an ultra-religious community is to become a member of the structure of the religion. This is why Haredi families gamble on their boys becoming rabbis even though the supply exceeds the demand and yeshivas provide no secular education whatsoever(and ultra-islamic families do the same thing with madrassas). For tradcaths grandmotherhood is higher status than having single adult children, but not as high status as having nun/priest children. The desire to be mothers comes from exposure to babies and small children, not from social status(which pushes young women towards the convent). You could not replicate this effect in a society where people don't already have 5+ children. Now of course there is no option for tradcaths to drop out of education at the age of 7 or 8 and enter full-time preparation for the cloister, so it kinda comes out in the wash(and haredi women seem like an afterthought/ultra-islamic women like property).
I’m familiar with the social ecosystem of the Haredim. It’s super interesting. The women are not involved in religious learning, they are raised to support their husband. Because the Rabbi credential is socially important, the women work to support their husband pursue it. But just as important to this is that the women have children. This is going to be the first question asked to married Haredi women. This is why they have a lot of children. What the men learn in their Yeshiva is that having children is a mitzvah, and so they fulfill their nocturnal obligations. This is an easy ask because all childcare duties fall on the women. The Rabbi credential system is not as competitive as, like, getting into a PhD program, because the big Rabbi positions are handed down via nepotism; my understanding is that it’s often a factor of showing up.
Lol no
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-019-09525-0
Do you really think that a Haredi woman who happens (due to some cosmic accident) to be an only child herself, will not go on to have many children? My intuition tells me she will have a lot; perhaps not as many as her many-sibling peers, but still way more than an American with four siblings
I would consider this a perversion of the religion. The Epistle to Timothy is clear that women “will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control.” These are bad Christians if they are giving a woman status for raising a priest instead of a dozen kids. I actually find Catholicism horrifically anti-natal because the most devout are pressured into producing impotent clerical heirs. It made sense in Malthusian times for the youngest male without property to join the church. It doesn’t make sense now. In more traditional, medieval Catholicism, even these priests had concubines
https://www.medievalists.net/2012/08/clerical-concubines-in-northern-italy-during-the-fourteenth-century/
https://www.medievalists.net/2011/08/priestly-marriage-the-tradition-of-clerical-concubinage-in-the-spanish-church/
I don't claim that my co-religionists are perfect- and it's worth noting our actual religious elders don't either, undue pressure on your children to have a religious vocation is explicitly a sin.
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I know I, for one, referenced it (indirectly) here eight months ago, but other people have probably mentioned it on the Motte as well.
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Centralized communist parties don't have a good track record in increasing TFR. Ceaucescu tried and only managed a blip. Even taking the rest of your thesis as true, it doesn't work because Communism is essentially modern in the ways you're objecting to. Communism (theoretically) values work, not motherhood.
Nazism did value motherhood, and does seem to have increased the birthrate, but unfortunately also massively increased the death rate.
Because humans are not motivated to fundamentally change their life for a trivial amount of extra money. In fact, insofar as this is an extrinsic reward, it will decrease the intrinsic desire to be a parent, as it signals to the would-be parent that the reason to do things is to spend money, reinforcing the salience of being an independent capitalist-consumer slopenjoyer. The very offer of the extrinsic reward is demotivating to its intrinsic pursuit. (In the same way, it is terrible to give students candy for doing math correctly, as it teaches them not to intrinsically value learning and success, but only candy). If humans fundamentally changed their life for a small increase in funds, all retail workers would be flocking to the oil rig, and everyone in Appalachia would have left. Becoming a parent is the oil rig of human activity. It needs to be promoted through social influence.
Totalitarian societies are fantastic at increasing pronatality when they understand how to do it, which Romanians and Hungarians do not. The best to do this through essentially non-theistic measures were the Nazis (as you mention). They increased the birth rate by 40% in 7 years, even though their understanding was also pretty mediocre.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/217103
(Unlocked link) https://sci.bban.top/pdf/10.1086/217103.pdf?download=true
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This prompted me to look at other fascist/military dictator states around then. It looks like Italy crashed hard, Portugal stayed about flat, and Spain was flat with a small increase. I haven't found a good chart for Peronist Argentina specifically. I had seen the Franco chart before, but interesting to see that Italy was so different.
It's interesting to note that Argentina is notable for it's anomalously high fertility rate into very recent times; this was plausibly due to its policy of targeting pro-natal gibs at lower class teenagers(which they had a lot of).
Huh, no kidding (only goes back to 1960). ~3 until the early 90s, then a slow decline to about 2.4 until about 2014, and then a dramatic fall.
Here's a more historical one (by 5-year increments). That late 70s/early 80s bump is intriguing.
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Right, the coordination problem to actually do this is a tough nut to crack, even in a totalitarian society.
TradCaths do this by having enough babies/toddlers that there are generally more of them wanting to be held than there are adults wanting to hold them; thus teenaged girls get lots of baby holding time and decide they like it(because most do). This is likely not an option for a country with a TFR of 1.0. The party might bring this up at meetings, but they probably bring up lots of stuff no one believes. China also strikes me as an… unlikely candidate for the kind of religious revival which boosted fertility in the stans.
It’s hard in a non-totalitarian, non-centralized social ecosystem. Otherwise it’s as easy as top-down educational reform and media promulgation.
It’s not religion qua religion that’s essential here, it’s how women are reared and judged. Gypsies aren’t very theistic. China can implement these changes without touching religion. I think the few pronatal factors which are intrinsically theistic are just: (1) increased sense of social safety and abundance from a God, (2) increased use of exaggerated paternal / filial language (when one speaks of God being a Father and Provider, they don’t realize it but this is implicitly pronatal, inspiring a desire to be a parent as God parents). The other pronatal factors in religion can be divorced from the religious package. You can induce obedience to many behavioral prescriptions without God.
China's fertility rate is low enough, and has been for a long time, that it's pretty much stuck. Exposing teenagers to childcare causes higher fertility desires but China does not have enough children to do this; China is also aging rapidly and will be running out of impressionable young people sharpish. And orientals have low rates of coupling, too.
There are many ways to promote pronatal attitudes & behaviors that do not rely on exposure to childcare. It is easy to imitate this with imitation like the “infant simulator programme” study I linked, and with media.
China does not have universal high school.
No doubt the Chinese are capable of psyopping the crème de la crème of their society into three kids is better than none. But effective government propaganda is hard, and it has to hit the middle and lower classes in these cases. Does China have an equivalent of country music pushing the idea that having kids is the obvious culmination of a romantic relationship? Is the ministry of culture able to pivot to producing this, or is it stuck with the usual East Asian model of gay virgins who might think you in particular are appealing but really, focus on your studies? Is there a critical development window for exposure to childcare(afaik we really, actually DON’T know this, but it’s plausible)? And I mean obviously, is China just old enough that the damage is done, a 2.5 ish tfr among current twenty year olds won’t change much? Are the economic incentives too hard against women having kids(in practice female coded jobs in America expect resume gaps and maternity leave even if they don’t like them)?
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I wonder if this is really true. Let's say you're on your deathbed, everyone you personally care about is dead, you have the option to give yourself a bit of morphine on the way out but it will make everyone currently alive not want to have children and as such humanity will die out in a few generations . Do you press that button? I consider myself rather nihilistic but I wouldn't press the button, so I have to assume I have some preference somewhere for humanity to continue on. This means it's not actually a categorical preference but one based on trade offs.
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My ancestors (please forgive the cliché term) expended a lot of effort to get me where I am, and I won't be the one to chuck it all overboard because "lol who gives a shit about anything so long as I go to the grave on a road of dopamine". I only have it as good as I do because others worked hard and contributed to the edifice of the commons to the best of their abilities. To look to myself and only myself instead of paying it forward strikes me as the very peak of ingratitude.
And I guess that's where the exchange ends. You just put your view out there, here's mine, I don't think there's much to be done either way. Enjoy continuing to extract benefits from those who care more than you.
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Ay, there's the rub, isn't it?
I understand your thought process, despite being ideologically opposed as someone who is very much attached to civilization and its fruits. But what makes you think that your living standards might continue to be good during your generation? There is a lot of decline to go, and you can always be one of the rats clinging to the planks, but the effort required to do so will only increase in future.
My interest in cratering TFR is not because I find it an interesting hobbyhorse in the abstract, or because I am attached to the idea of human civilization, even though I wholly admit that is where my biases lie. I am extremely worried about what the governments of the world will enact on me and mine in the pursuit of keeping the flywheel spinning just a bit longer. Maybe you have some idea or experience dealing with others when you threaten their rice bowls. If you do, you should have at least some inkling of what it is like or what things they will do.
I believe, in the name of restoring
TFRthe tax base to pay forbenefitstheir own salaries, there will be a huge attempted clampdown on sexual freedom with predictable results. Governments will first offer tax breaks for families and then increase taxes significantly on the single. I also see this having predictable results: imagine, if you will, the nothing-to-lose incel hordes stitched to financial incentives. And who knows, maybe there will be more countries led by the lizard-brained enough to go back to pillaging other countries to take their stuff, or willing to feed large numbers of their population into the meat grinder of drones, artillery and shrapnel so they can make a dent in those depending on the government for long-term palliative care.The year is 2100. The US, China, even Brazil- all, faced with declining populations, they drain their hinterlands- not exactly demographically healthy themselves in lots of cases- for workers to maintain their economies. Vast swaths of Latin America are empty; the world's largest hippo population is now in lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, having expanded from their range in Columbia since the human population left the place empty, having walked to the US or Mexico or Brazil for better economic opportunity cleaning bedpans and pouring concrete and sewing jeans. Venezuela itself has not a single soul under fifty; they export all of them to be hired by Exxon and Pemex and then expat in their home country extracting oil. In China, Tajik and Kazakh workers earn a good wage in the factories, they fly back to their home countries on the holidays to build better hovels they'll retire in. The taliban still holds on in Afghanistan, having deported their entire Hazara population to Iran, desperate for young shiites to prop up the country.
India can no longer fill its sweatshops; Pakistan has attained conventional military superiority due to having more young people and retaken Kashmir. US backing is sufficient to keep Pakistan from expanding further south. In the middle east, Israel regularly conquers territory from its neighbors with declining population, and partners with Ethiopia to occupy Yemen and keep Egypt occupied. Further south in Africa, the megastates launch grinding trench warfare over resources they can trade for Russian or American or Canadian or Argentine grain. A small handful of western mercenaries can turn the tide for million man armies; the Afrikaner breakaway state in South Africa secured international recognition by acting as backer in several cases.
Senator Armstrong's babble makes more sense every day. Sad pepe.
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Future world contains Outer Heaven?
wtf, I love low TFR now?!
I admit to having enjoyed coming up with this.
Maybe 'oddball future history' will be a feature I start on in the friday fun thread.
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I get joy at the idea that some small part of me will help someone down the line. I don't claim any deep philosophical justification for it; it's the same part of my brain that picks up a piece of litter to throw it away in a place I'll never revisit. Meaningless in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but it still makes me happy.
Do you pick up litter? If so, why?
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Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Burgess shale and an eon's worth of mud?
Are we supposed to just totally fail the final and most blatant Marshmallow test? If we extend your logic to the next step, it follows that nobody should accept any sacrifices to sustain civilization (at least after you/we die). This is the ultimate Baby Boomerism, extractive selfishness taken to its ultimate conclusion.
Walk the stars or die trying
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At least we have some flags on the moon to show for it I guess.
Ha, can you imagine if civilization collapses and doesn't rise for another 100,000 years. Then that civilization thinks we were cavemen and finally gets to the moon only to have their heads spin over abandoned flags and moon rovers. Or in another unlikely scenario, we get to Ganymede and find some weird cro magnon trash and porno mags in a pre-fab.
From "The Next Ten Billion Years" by John Michael Greer (The Archdruid Report):
Awfully bold of you to assume the Dinosaurs didn't build a civilization.
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At the Mountains of Madness truly deserves a remake in Spess
Thats another horrifying masterpiece.
But if we know of one place where the capitalists can't go... its SPACE!
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I mean there are philosophical arguments that can be made, and I'm sure people will make them. But there is also the cold hard economic argument to be made that a population collapse means a whole lot of old people in your cohort are going to die slowly alone in pools of their own waste.
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You find life "viscerally" valuable, you find the fruits of your society enjoyable enough that you want to be alive for them. You clearly value your civilization and its continued existence. You just don't care if someone younger gets to or at least gets out before it all goes to hell.
I don't see why this would change anything about the pro-natalist/pro-civilization argument. Is it providing new information? This all seems like the prosecution's case being made for it.
People who benefit from a thing but refuse or are unable to care for its continued existence for whatever reason have always existed - usually people assume they're talking to people prosocial enough to not bite that bullet, invested enough in the common good to not benefit from doing so (what if you were twenty years younger and can't count on croaking before it gets really bad?) and agentic enough that they can impact the outcome if they're convinced. And it is also debatable if you can enjoy that standard of living without a concern for fertility.
The standard of living is good across the developed world, by definition, but there are also clear signs of strain due to the aging population. What if you're the one fucking up the math? Live a little too long, run out of money too soon before you croak? Assuming a safety net that isn't there? Your own logic should drive you to care.
Most people really don't think in thousand or even hundred year timescales. They think about what would stop them and their children from losing out on the sorts of fruits you enjoy and that's enough. Their grandchildren can run the same logic, ad infinitum.
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There's a saying about this..."so open-minded his brain fell out."
Okay, so you're a solipsist, not a nihilist [edit: fixing a brain-fart]. This is not an improvement.
An egoist. A solipsist would argue the world outside themselves doesn't exist, not merely that it doesn't matter.
OP quite confidently has the Stirnerite position here.
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I understand you cannot be brought around to prosocial motivations.
Who do you expect to pay your social security and wipe your ass when you’re old? Is it a work until MAID plan?
I don't think it would be prosocial to bring humans into the world just to pay my social security and wipe my ass.
Of course I would love for people to take care of me when I'm old, but to me that just doesn't seem like a good enough reason to bring new people into existence. It's very selfish. If I'm going to help bring new people into existence, I would probably like to do it for less selfish reasons than that.
I never said it was pro-social.
Ultimately fertility is a coordination problem and coordination problems are hard. But you have selfish reasons for wanting it to be solved even if you don’t care about the prosocial ones or the intangibles.
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If you're an anti-natalist who believes that life is inherently suffering this makes sense.
I'm not really sure why you'd be that bothered about it given your own experience. By your own account life can be very good. Seems like you got a good deal here.
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What can I say, I live here.
I'd like to see what else is out there in this gigantic universe.
If Civilization recedes in my lifetime, there's a serious chance it won't come back to the tech level necessary to get off the planet. At which point, we are STUCK here until a rogue asteroid smashes us, solar flare fries us, an alien Civ shows up, or some other cataclysm. Eventually the sun dies out too.
Then its game over for reals.
If there is any real purpose, any endgame, any way to discover the answer to the last question, it's probably only accessible to Kardashev II and above civilizations.
But really, I just think its more fun for everyone if civilization continues. One thing I think that is fair to say about most of human history: MOST of humanity was not having fun MOST of the time. Quite the opposite. Wars suck. Famine Sucks. Manual labor for sheer basic survival sucks. So civilization receding will suck.
We should be trying to have more fun.
But since we're bootstrapped sentient primates running on ancient murder monkey software and have access to nuclear weapons and we're bad at large-scale coordination, maybe this was always our fate. But I prefer to believe not.
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Seeing this written out explicitly, it makes me wish that more people would be open and honest about their view on this like here. Because this comment reminded me of 3 different things.
One was during the aftermath of 9/11 when the PATRIOT ACT and War on Terror were pushed through, with one of the arguments from the Republican/conservative side in favor of these things being that "the US Constitution is not a suicide pact," which was completely ineffective as an argument against most Democrats/liberals/progressives by my observation. The reasoning being that, if adhering to the Constitution would result in the destruction of the country that follows it, then that justifies not adhering to it, so that the country that actually makes the Constitution meaningful beyond some scribbles on paper, can keep on keeping it meaningful. And the most common counterargument was some variant of, "If this means the USA is destroyed, then so be it, at least we followed principles of civil liberty and privacy and etc. along the way."
Another was part of an interview in a documentary called The Red Pill, which was made by a feminist named Cassie Jaye as a way to explore the red pill community/movement/whatever and related man-o-sphere groups like men's rights activists and men going their own way. She interviewed a lot of people, but one of them was a feminist academic, and one of the questions had to do with the idea that, what if the Patriarchy, as feminist academics like herself, understood it, was something that was needed in some form in order to keep human civilization going, since women freed from its shackles empirically keep choosing to have too few children to keep above replacement. Her answer was pretty much "that's a depressing thought," followed by a non-answer in a way that gave the impression that she clearly had thought very little about this possibility, i.e. that this possibility just wasn't something she particularly cared about.
The third is more general throughout the interminable arguments about US immigration, where a common conservative argument against open borders is that allowing anyone in who wants to come in would cause US society to worsen, including, at the limits, just destroying the country altogether. And one common sentiment, though rarely stated explicitly, among progressives who reject this argument, has been something along the lines of, "If open borders would destroy the USA, then so be it; at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way." This happened to explicitly be my own position for a while, before I decided I was selfish enough to want to keep some of the benefits of USA society for myself in the future.
In each of these, one can make some argument based on facts for why the bad thing won't happen: even without the PATRIOT ACT, USA would remain a safe and powerful country; even with maximal female emancipation and sex equality for whatever those mean for any given feminist academic/activist, human society could keep surviving and even thriving; even with open borders, it's possible that USA will be just as prosperous and safe a nation to live in as before, just servicing more and poorer people. There are good and bad arguments for and against all of these positions. But looking from the inside, it seemed to me that these arguments weren't made based on good faith belief in them, but rather based on motivated reasoning, in order to avoid having to make the argument that the benefits are worth the harms, in favor of just denying that harms exist (this is a common pattern you've probably seen in every aspect of life, from the most minute decisions one might make in everyday life all the way to the biggest, most world-altering policies or military actions).
Now, I have little idea if this is a left/progressive thing; I've just observed it in that group because I am part of that group and have spent most of my life surrounded by people in that group. I suspect that conservatives, by their nature of preferring tradition - such as the tradition of keeping civilization going for the next generation - have a greater tendency to want to keep humanity and human civilization going than progressives, who tend to be skeptical of tradition. But either way, I'm quite sure this attitude of "why care about humanity's survival when we have my favorite principles to worry about" is extremely common among progressives. Usually, it's not explicitly spoken or even thought, it gets laundered in, as alluded to above, by motivating oneself to believe that the evidence indicates that one's principles don't actually conflict with other goals such as survival of humanity/human civilization (in fact, I see such motivated reasoning often leading people to believe that their principles are actually synergistic to good goal, such as game devs genuinely believing that putting in characters that conform with their ideology would also lead to more sales due to expanding the market).
Which, to me, is interesting to think about with respect to the concept of a "progressive," which indicates someone who wants to "progress" - but what's the point of progress if there's no one around to enjoy its fruits? One way to think about it might be that we've "progressed" beyond ideologies for the benefit of the comfort and life satisfaction of mere animals such as ourselves and to pure principles that are Good or Bad due to arguments that I found convincing, rather than due to empirical consequences of following them. Which looks a lot like inventing a god or a religion.
Traditional religions make this kind of argument all the time, of course, under the justification of God, who is said to be intrinsically good and beyond understanding and judgment by mere mortals such as ourselves. And He might also punish/reward us in the afterlife, which means even from a completely selfish cynical perspective, following His principles is in my interest. Convincing if you already believe in Him, not so much if you don't. But progressive ideology largely rejects religion and associated supernatural beliefs, and so there is no Heaven or Hell to reward the souls of extinct humans; we just stop existing. And there's no God or faith in God to use as a compass for figuring out what principles are good, we just have academics at our local Critical Theory-related college departments to instruct us what's good. I'm reminded of the criticism often thrown at "wokes," that they copied the original sin of Christianity without copying the forgiveness and redemption.
There's also the reality of a group like "Extinction Rebellion," which is explicitly against the extinction of humanity and what most people would agree is a "progressive" group. However, the fact that the group's mission has to do with stopping global warming, something I don't think I've seen anyone seriously argue has a meaningful chance at making humanity go extinct or even destroying human civilization to enough of an extent to be close enough, makes me think it's more motivated reasoning with an intentionally eyebrow-raising name than genuine motivation.
In any case, I doubt that more than a handful of particularly honest and self-aware progressives explicitly believe this notion, but I commonly see this attitude of "human civilization is a small price to pay for achieving our principles" at virtually every level of analysis and rhetoric put forth by people belonging to this cluster of ideologies. I just wish everyone was more honest and open about this. A progressive who thinks like this and a conservative who wants human society both to stay alive and stay just as good, if not become better, are actually, fundamentally, at odds with each other in terms of goals, not just the methods. If people actually have honest, true, correct beliefs about the goals and principles of others, a lot less time and effort can be wasted in making arguments that falsely presume a common ground.
I'm also reminded of the commonly known "thrive/survive" dichotomy, where progressives are characterized as focusing on how we can thrive, which is only possible in times of plenty, and conservatives are characterized as focusing on how we can survive, which is most relevant in times of not plenty. Sacrificing thriving too much for the sake of survival seems like a likely failure mode of the latter, while sacrificing surviving too much for the sake of thriving seems like a likely failure mode of the former.
Speaking briefly on ultimata.
The primary purpose of an ultimatum is to force the listener to accept the form of the argument: A or B. The argument then splits out along lines of A-support, B-support, A-opposition, B-opposition... etc. It begs the question on whether A and B are in fact linked.
Take your PATRIOT example. The post-9/11 question is: how can we protect ourselves from future attacks? Supporters of the PATRIOT Act alleged that the only effective method was curtailing the rights of Americans. But this is not obviously the only way to protect ourselves from these kinds of attacks. Suicide terror attacks are, and were, overwhelmingly favored by a certain type of extreme Muslim on the world stage. Governments and mafia (i.e. small governments) don't really like them, as they expend valuable trained human resources on frankly trivial strategic goals. (Unless they can convince a third-party stooge to do it, like Iran.) The only time people favor suicide terror attacks is when they kinda want to die (or have their people killed) as a side effect. Consider Japan's suicide bombers. They were very clearly a statement more than a strategy. So, taking this all into account, you could theoretically solve the problem by tightening the visas you give to foreign Arabs substantially, or some other form of discrimination against the highest-risk group. In practice, I think this is what we did. There were lots of racism complaints during the Bush admin. But as far as the PATRIOT debate went, it was about the ability to spy. It's not obvious that this had any bearing on the real problem, and was instead about the ability to spy itself. Call me cynical, but I think that if there were more guys in the White House with strong prejudices against Islam, we'd have been having a different Constitutional debate, one about outlawing a certain religion.
OK. Taking a look at the feminism/fertility debate, or the environmentalism/survival debate, and so on, I believe the not-so-subtle move is that the two are necessarily linked and we must "choose." I call bullshit. Around the world, patriarchal societies still have cratering birthrates. This is easy to find information. Similarly, a ruined environment has explicit costs to human survival, as we undermine our own productive capacity through poisoning ourselves, wrecking good farmland, denuding the seas, etc etc. The existence of those binaries can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to link these unrelated topics for the purpose of controlling the debate, steering it towards one's desired outcomes.
For feminism/fertility, I think the real move is getting attention off of fertility itself. Lots and lots of women want to have kids, and yet they don't, or put it off until the numbers just go down. Why? The feminist (or anti-feminist) answer is to hide it behind the "right to choose," but it's pretty obvious in context that it's only a (colloquially) feminist choice in one direction. (Not all feminists believe this, but it's what dominates the conversation.) I suspect the real reason is a confluence of factors, mostly cultural (lower respect or understanding for the importance of reproduction) and partially material (increased life expectancy screwing with wealth movement and life stages relative to fertile windows). But as long as it's about feminism, which everyone has already made up their minds on as a matter of principle, we don't have to think about maybe changing our individual values and cultural practices to reflect this new reality. Almost the same description can be applied to environmentalism with some mad-libs substitutions.
That's why I'm so skeptical of simply accepting the frame on these things. OP, for his part, didn't actually frame any of this as an ultimatum. He was actually just negating the antecedent, showing that (for him) the presented argument was insufficient. Sure, I happen to disagree with his stance quite fervently, but reading him closely - he doesn't say that he values certain things above the survival of the species, he says he does not value the survival of the species at all, one way or another. There's no ultimatum there, Therefore, one had to be provided for him.
(As far as the OP is concerned, all I can make is a value statement: that it is ugly and sad to have nothing to recommend one's time on Earth to posterity, be one's contributions ever so humble. We are all destined to die, and pleasures are fleeting, and the march of old age makes the immediate world increasingly bitter, it behooves one to seek value in something a little more distant and external. Say, the future in which one is invested. People who do this seem in my experience to die more comfortably.)
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I tend to perceive progressive strains of liberalism as making the assumption that civilization as they know it is tge default state of humanity and you can’t really destroy it. It’s not “sacrifice survival for thriving” it’s “survival is a given, so let’s thrive.” On tge conservative side it’s understood that civilization is not the default state, decorum, high trust, low crime, safe environments etc. do not just happen, nor will they just continue without some efforts put toward maintaining those things or preventing their destruction. Now I think you can have thriving as well as civilization if you bother to do so correctly. If you make sure that the support structures aren’t destroyed or that public morality, health, and welfare are preserved, then you can do things to allow people to thrive. It’s not a zero sum game.
This is difficult to square with the constant neuroticism around reactionary enemies who seek to destroy this state or return everyone to a much worse status quo. There's always someone about to put y'all back in chains.
I recognize the quoted section describes a psychological tendency amongst some very sheltered leftists especially, but "you can't destroy what we have" doesn't really fit the hysteria shown by the references to The Handmaid's Tale or - of course - Weimar Germany and the Nazis.
Without opining on the object-level question, I will point out that there is a difference between tyranny on the one hand, and civilisational collapse on the other. One can believe in one without believing in the other, and certainly the latter is pretty far from experience in the West (I mean, when was the last time a Western country had state failure? The Wild West kinda counts - although it wasn't a case of state failure so much as a state not previously existing there - but I can't think of anything more recent).
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I don’t see it that way simply because none of the actions they take are consistent with the idea that “reactionary enemies” are about to end civilization as they have known it. The same people refer to ICE as the Gestapo and to Alligator Auswitz and Palentir reading their social media posts also are mostly bitching on the Internet, and occasionally attending a weekend protest that doesn’t interfere with normal life at all. I think most of the “reactionary Nazi” stuff reads more like a psychological need for significance in their own times than the thought that these are actually threats to civilization. Even in Congress, the minority leader is Jewish and he’s not doing anything more than sending angry letters around. If they really believed in Trump’s Nazi party, it seems like you’d be doing a bit more than leaving tge equivalent of 1-star reviews on the internet.
There's a lot of inconsistencies among Democrats'/popular progressivism's stated beliefs. Plenty of courses of action available but untaken that aren't even the least bit risky or illegal.
Suppose it's 2024, and you believe Trump is neo-Hitler and also that America is a fundamentally racist and sexist society. Doesn't that then call for nominating a relatively milquetoast white man who takes no unpopular stances? You might have to put off your more out-of-the-mainstream policies for awhile (or at least implement them surreptitiously), but that is still far superior to having a Fourth Reich.
All you've got to do is vote in a primary as if winning the election is important as opposed to moral posturing. Instead, identity issues dominate.
I mean exactly. It’s not a serious thing, at least not in the sense that they literally believe in theNeo-Hitler theory. If they did, and they wanted to stop it, they’d be doing that. I find it rather fascinating just from the psychological aspect as it almost seems like a rape fetish, but political. They want to be brutally repressed. They want the camps. They want the mass arrests. It’s exciting to them. That’s why they’re always speculating about canceling elections, martial law, and camps. Not because they believe it’s going to happen (in fact Trump would be stupid to cancel elections or declare martial law because it would create a huge backlash from the general public), but because they want to play out their vision of themselves as plucky rebels defying their Hitler. But because it’s a fantasy and they at least unconsciously understand that, they aren’t willing to accept loses of their lifestyle. They aren’t willing to be arrested, risk their job, make their kid miss practice, break the law, etc. they want to appear to have resisted without the messy stuff.
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I mean, if they really believed that Trump was going to institute an authoritarian regime and they couldn’t stop it… well none of these people strike me as true believer martyrs(republicans usually don’t either). They’d be loudly cheering on Trump so they don’t get purged.
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Isn’t that what we’re doing here? To my mind, this explained better by @kky’s theory of traction.
The average person has no idea how to get from “I am upset about this” to “I am taking effective (paramilitary?) action against it”. If I remember correctly, both the CIA handbook for building an internal insurgency and the famous “Rules for Radicals” both hypothesise that showing supporters intermediate steps along this path is the primary purpose of an effective resistance movement.
I’m not demanding they form a militias or something to be taken seriously. But the complete lack of any action beyond standing outside with signs doesn’t really do much to convince me that these guys are serious. It’s like someone screaming that tge house is on fire from the bedroom while queuing up a Netflix movie. The actions don’t match including the actions including by people who have power and should know what to do and could do things to either slow it down or impeach or launch investigations or hold hearings. Yet… they don’t.
Now if this were 1935 Berlin, and these people believed that the crazy Austrian was about to destroy democracy, the actions don’t remotely fit. They can’t be made to fit unless they don’t actually believe what they’re saying, or they’re actually okay with it, but playing tge part. Psychologically, I think the LARP angle makes a lot of sense. It explains the sort of slacktivist protests, the lack of fear of saying something that the reactionaries don’t like (a good way to get arrested in actual authoritarian regimes), the lack of action by anyone in congress, and on it goes. Now there’s always been a certain romanticism of “plucky resistance movements.” The genre of resisters bringing down or stymies an authoritarian regime is a staple in Hollywood. Star Wars, Red Dawn, Lawrence of Arabia, pretty much every WWII movie ever made, Handmaid’s Tale, Hunger Games. It’s a trope buried pretty deep in American mythology. And so people who are disappointed in losing the culture war might well project that movie trope onto American politics, especially because it allows them to cast themselves as the heroes of the psychodrama. It’s easy to cover up a life you aren’t happy with by pretending to be on some kind of great crusade for Justice. It’s also great for a party that barely has a real agenda because if you are fighting Palpatine, it doesn’t matter that your big idea is shovel-ready projects or something — you’re fighting evil.
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A leftist might also argue that shooting first and helping the descent into lawlessness without public buy-in benefits fascists, who already believe in violence and want to discredit the status quo. It's especially bad if Trump already controls the government.
A much less extreme form of trying to play the man (all of the prosecutions, which Democrats do not see as unprovoked) has arguably already backfired.
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I perceive the same, but I disagree with that last sentence. One is the other. If you care so little about survival that you haven't done the research to learn just how unusual and precarious modern society is, then you're deciding that sacrificing survival for the sake of thriving is worth it.
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This is just as often reversed on immigration, though.
Lib: We need immigrants for economic growth, to bring in young productive people to support social security programs, to do jobs that are otherwise difficult to fill. Immigration makes America stronger!
Con: What does American economic growth matter if it doesn't benefit Americans? I'd rather see the American economy grow or collapse on the strength of Americans, than sell out my country to foreigners to get stronger.
Purity is typically a conservative basis for morality in Moral Foundations Theory. Refusal to compromise on one's beliefs is the essence of having beliefs, of having principles. Life for the sake of life is the philosophy of bacteria, the life has to mean something, be something.
Speaking as an anti immigrant person, I’m concerned we let in people who are ill suited for our culture and who aren’t the brightest. I don’t think the brazilificarion of our nation will lead to economic growth per capita even if it might increase overall gdp; I think it will per capita make it worse.
I'm not addressing every single person who holds a position. People think things for many reasons!
Surely you can recognize that there exist some anti-immigration individuals who would not care if the GDP went up if it meant the Great Replacement occurred.
Of course. But you made a claim about the mass of conservatives. I think a big piece is that there will be a net decrease in utility. Some of that is eco ionic and some of that is cultural.
At some level though what OP is positing is equally mixed: libs believed that torture was bad, that it wasn't useful (delivered no usable Intel), and that even if it did it would still not be worth the compromise in morals. The degree to which the middle term is driven by motivated reasoning is the battleground.
Similarly, anti immigration folks claim immigration is net negative in every way, pro immigration folks tell me it's positive in every way. The degree to which motivated reasoning, or per op simple dishonesty, is present is the battleground.
I don't think the broad mass of conservatives are motivated purely by economic concerns. That isn't contradicted by somebody popping up and saying well actually me personally... And even you yourself admit that some of it is cultural for you, so once again we're in the battleground.
To me, there is a difference between pecuniary and the common good. I can imagine some communities that are slightly poorer compared to other communities but better places to live due to non pecuniary reasons. Of course, the larger the pecuniary gap the more difficult it is for the non pecuniary benefits to outweigh the pecuniary ones.
There's a reductio ad in either direction right?
On the one hand, replacing every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person might raise the GDP by 15%, but it's weird to say to say it would be good for "America."
On the other, admitting Jensen Huang to the country obviously benefits America, even if it dilutes the pool of Americans. 1/333000000 dilution, versus a roughly $500 estimated increase in GDP per capita.
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It's religious conservatives who believe every life has intrinsic value, though
Every life has intrinsic value.
Yet, Christianity honors the martyrs who refused to renounce God even in the face of death.
There is a value above life in this view. There are forms of continuing human civilization that would not be worth it.
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Human extinction is 100% inevitable. Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.
Btw I think extinction rebellion is named that because of mass wildlife extinctions rather than human extinction.
I don't think anyone knows this with any meaningful level of confidence. The heat death of the universe through entropy is the only thing that I can think of that could guarantee this, but I don't believe we have a complete-enough understanding of physics and cosmology to state with 100% confidence that that's inescapable.
This is perfectly cromulent, but also, I think most people would prefer to live a beautiful long life over a beautiful but pointlessly short one. And the thing about prolonging versus ending life is that it's asymmetrical; if you prolong life when human civilization is barely lumbering along in a state of senility, there's always the chance in the future that that civilization becomes beautiful and prolonged. If it ends in a blaze of beauty, then no one ever gets to discover if there was a way to have a prolonged beautiful civilization. Believing that the end of civilization/humanity is worth it as long as my own principles and values got met by the last generation requires a God-like level of confidence in the correctness of one's own values. Which points to faith.
Which is also perfectly cromulent! I just wish people would talk about this honestly and openly.
What can I say, I just want to starve on a dying planet in the arms of my loved ones, instead of having to eat or be eaten by them.
(In reality most of the time I am personally extremely unconfident about whether AI, low fertility or climate change will in the long-run hasten or put off the demise of our species, so actual existential continuity tends to fade into the background of my thinking on most issues.)
Also, yes, you are right, heat death is not actually certain.
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If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the fruits of progress. If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
I mean, okay, let's run with this hypothetical.
You do progress. This undermines the basis of civilisation (this being your "if"). Civilisation "ends", by which we mean there's no stable law, the modern economy (including agriculture) disintegrates because you can't have trade without functioning laws against theft, half the population eats the other half, infrastructure disintegrates.
But that's not extinction. Humans still exist, a lot of knowledge will be retained, agriculture will persist in some less-efficient form. You'll get governments, sooner or later, as warlords put together enough force to cow people. I don't think their policies are going to be very progressive, particularly since they'll (correctly, in this hypothetical) blame your progress for the apocalypse and warlords are not known for wanting to be eaten.
Sure, maybe they'll come back to where we are now in a hundred years or so. But this doesn't seem to maximise the average amount of progress over time. Unless you think that very-recent and near-future progress is far more important than that from, oh, 1770 to 1970?
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Progress doesn't exist. There is only degrees of survival and almost everything is a tradeoff.
Things that don't sustain themselves die. In the long run no other phenomenon really matters.
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Not dying. Maintaining the level of success, arete, and prosperity that has already been obtained. These are not only good insofar as we get more of them - they are good in and of themselves, and forgetting and taking for granted the successes of the past is one of the chief flaws of modernist thinking.
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It's certainly perfectly cromulent to judge that as good and even better than the alternative of a civilization that keeps chugging along in a way that improves people's lives compared to not having civilization - and even improving the amount by which this is an improvement - without enjoying the fruits of progress, where progress here refers to the types of societal changes pushed for by people identifying as "progressives," rather than something more generic like "improving over time" or "moving forward." I don't think this is a common sentiment, though; what I see by and large is motivated reasoning that circumvents the issue altogether, by adopting a genuine, good faith belief that progress - again, referring to the specific meaning alluded above, not the general term - not only won't result in civilization ending within a generation, but that progress will help make civilization more robust against ending.
As a progressive, I would say that the odds that I'm mistaken about the goodness of my ideology - and more generally that people who agree with me are mistaken about the goodness of our ideology - is sufficiently high that I have a general preference to hedge my bets by having humanity keep moving forward long after my death. It's possible that we'll create literal heaven on Earth that you and I can enjoy until we die as the last humans to have ever lived, but it's also possible that, when good, intelligent, well-meaning people do their best, in good faith, to implement ideas that I consider to be good, this actually creates a hell on Earth that we all have to suffer through before we die as the last humans to have ever lived. I would prefer to avoid that.
The way I see it, the point of civilization is to organize humans in a way that helps make both surviving and thriving easier or more likely for them. Not uniformly or monotonically, but in some vague general sense. Which some/many people see as a good thing worth sacrificing for, even if no one ever enjoys the fruits of progress, again, by that specific meaning referenced above.
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The problem with the end of civilization is that the alternatives suck.
Furthermore, I think we have a serious problem in humanity civilization or not if basic biological necessities like perpetuating the species or not eating ourselves to death, or those kinds of things. I’m hypothesizing that we’re creating a very hyper stimulating environment that hijacks our normal biological systems in ways that are more stimulating than the normal activities that our hyper stimulating environment creates. I’m looking into a minimalistic sort of entertainment tech detox that im suspecting will prove this out. But if people are hyper stimulated by media, technology and so on to the point that they don’t end up socializing as much as they should, or if porn (which I don’t do) is hyper stimulating to the point that real life humans and dating them cannot compete, I think we may be engineering our own species out of existence much like we created beer bottles for Australian beetles to prefer to hump over real female beetles. If this is the case, it needs to be dealt with unless the royal we are perfectly okay with killing off the most intelligent species we know of in the entire universe to make the money printer go brrrrr.
I always imagined the Great Filter might be something exciting like a war or a plague. Turns out that it might be us creating systems that stimulate our brains too much.
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Annoying nitpick. Civilization ending and the human species existing are not necessarily equivalent.
I personalty would prefer for any future descendants to live in a high functioning civilization, but presumably the anarcho-primitivists might still have preference for human species existing but also for civilization ending. Return to Monke, and all that.
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I think this kind of thing actually does affect life right now. There’s a qualitative difference in what life is like in a civilization that is alive, growing, and still believes in itself and what we have now.
That's a good point. Yeah, abstractly I don't care whether humanity survives in the long term or not, but in practice it would probably be very unpleasant to live in a society that is convinced that humanity is about to go extinct.
Aren’t their pockets they believe this right now, due to climate dooming? They don’t seem like the happiest people.
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Have you read Children of Men or watched the movie? That’s the kind of society I think we would have this attitude was widespread.
Is the book good?
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Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.
The idea that your views on this stem from whether you've got kids or not is dubious. My father had a bunch of kids, who've now got kids who have their own kids, and his opinion is still the boomer holdover of there being too many people on earth. Like that 80s song by Genesis, "...too many people making too many problems."
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I already covered that.
Responding before reading the whole thing is indeed my weakness.
Your first impulse was the right one. A person without kids musing about why legacy doesn't matter is the same as a person without sex organs musing about why sex doesn't matter.
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