This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Every week there are several discussions brought up on this roundup about how low birth rates are a problem and people need to be convinced through propoganda and or religious manipulation or in some other way incentivized to make decisions that contribute to higher birth rates. Its rare that the other side gets argued for, either that higher birth rates would be bad, or that there is nothing wrong with current breeding patterns in our society. It seems to me like low birth rates are a result of people having the freedom, in accordance to their right to self ownership, to limit or delay or prevent the birthing of children, and that the resulting low birth rates are a reflection of the revealed preferences of the population. I also dont see any negative externality to people having less kids, its not like they are indirectly supressing the fertility of others who desire more kids. Which is why Im confused why its such a big deal to people on here and related spaces. Ive heard conspiracies about how culture has been altered by influential people with an antinatalist agenda to make childrearing lower in priority to women than having a career or marrying late, but I think its more likely that you are seeing these messages because a large segment of the population agrees with them because these life styles match their innate preferences. I think as long as society does not shame women who want to be fecund mothers, its a lot better than in the past where women were not allowed to pursue an alternative life plan. In general, I think its better if people have kids because they want to, not because they feel pressured to or forced to. I personally am debating whether I even want to bring children to this world, there is too much suffering and worry.
I have yet to see anyone at least on the Motte that we need really high fertility rates, like 6 kids a family or whatever. The concern is mostly that the fertility rate in essentially the entire developed world a significant portion of the developing world is below the replacement rate of 2.1. The fertility rate doesn't need to be high, it just needs to be higher of around 2-3 kids a family.
Any lower than the replacement rate and your population will begin to shrink, and ultimately without any increase future in the fertility rate, your society will go extinct. The future belongs to those who show up. You can try mitigate this with some level of immigration, but this is only a stop-gap measure, and not a solution for two reasons. First, immigration in sufficient numbers will replace the existing society, especially in the context of low fertility rates. This applies regardless of whether you're on the side of nature or nurture. The immigrant population's ethnic makeup will be different to that of the native population if you're on the side of nature, and the immigrant population's culture will supplant or at least substantially alter the native culture if you're on the side of nurture. Contemporary politics is hostile to the idea of true assimilation anyway, and even if it wasn't, it's unlikely to possibly assimilate immigrants fast enough to match the halving of the native population per generation. Immigration has a whole range of problems that I won't get into here, but it's not fairing particularly well for many countries in Europe, and other nations like South Korea and Japan, it's not really a realistic option. Secondly, you can't rely on immigration forever. Because the fertility rates are also dropping in other countries. The other countries that immigrants are coming from will experience or have already experienced a drop in fertility rate below replacement. Virtually the only part of the world that well above the replacement rate is sub-Saharan Africa. But eventually the fertility shredder will come for them too, and soon the whole of humanity will be slowly withering away.
But wait you say! There's too many people on the planet anyway! So what if we shrink our population for a couple generations anyway? Just accepting this argument on its face for now (I don't actually), you're not actually solving the issue, merely delaying it and hoping in a couple of generations it will resolve itself. Why would this trend reverse? The only way this trend "reverses" is that the sub-populations with extremely high fertility rates (Amish, ultra-orthodox Jews, hyper-tradCaths) basically take over the population (and somehow themselves don't get subjected to the same forces of low fertility). Maybe you're an anti-natalist, a nihilist and you don't really care what the future holds for humanity assuming there is even a future. But you must at least understand that some people might actually care.
But putting aside the longer term (though not that long) consequences of a low fertility on a culture's survivability, there are some really practical reasons why you need a higher fertility rate. A stable, productive economy needs young workers to actually do stuff. With a fertility rate of one, that means for every 4 grandparents, they will only have one grandchild to support them. This is no feasible. It doesn't matter how much money the elderly will saved from their lifetime of childlessness, if there's no one to actually pay to care for them, it doesn't matter. A society with is mostly elderly is a decaying and dying society. There WILL be civil unrest when one young person is expected to provide for four elderly people (through the state). To use an extreme example, the fertility rate of South Korea is by some estimates below 0.9 (!). This means there will be almost 5 elderly people for every young worker (2 generations) in South Korea if this trend continues. This is an absolute disaster. Already we're seeing the consequences to Japan and South Korea, and more counties will follow. It's only going to get worse. I should also add in national debt. National debt is taken on with the expectation that the economy will grow and the state will inevitably pay off this debt from the growth. But shrinking population means a shrinking economy, and the debt will only ever grow. Young people will be saddled with an increasingly unpayable debt given to them by the previous generations. Not having children is basically a free rider problem. You're expecting someone else's kid to care for you and pay of the national debt in the future. Suppose if no one chose to have kids anymore, then who would be left to actually do anything? We'd just be a dystopia of elderly people, Children of Men style. Humanity doomed to die off.
On to the things that are harder to quantify or definitely prove - I think the drop in fertility rate and the rise of childless and single child families is not social healthy, and is generally bring misery. The direction causality between between the atomisation of society and low fertility rates is uncertain, it's probably a feedback loop with many other related factors at play. We are facing a crisis of meaning and community in the West, and I think this has been driven in large part by the destruction of the family. Young adults may be happy to leave a hedonistic life free of familial responsibility in their youth, but when the reach their 40s and 50s, loneliness will and has hit them hard. It's incredibly short sighted and yes, based on instant gratification. They're the farmer who has eaten their seed corn and has nothing to harvest for the future. It's hard for me to take your suggestion that childlessness is just the result of innate preferences when this is an incredibly recent phenomenon, it hasn't been this way for the entirety of human history up into this point. It also make no sense evolutionarily that our innate biological preferences is to not have children (some people are argued that we are wired to have sex, not raise children, but this still makes little sense to me, because we are a K reproductive strategy species, not an r). Additionally, we live in an age of unprecedented information, ideology and propaganda. I don't believe or one second that say, feminist ideology hasn't had an impact on fertility rates.
I'll just leave by linking to some older comments of mine discussing various elements of this issue in more detail.
On Feminist Ideology
On the Value of Having Kids
On the Hostility of Modernity to Childrearing and its Consequences
There's also discussion from this same CW thread which I won't bother linking, as you seem to have read it already.
As it was in my village when I was growing up. More than 3 kids was very rare - the only case I recall was of a family which had triplets and an older sibling. Being an Only Child was a thing of note, and the stereotype was that only children would be socially awkward and probably spoilt by their parents. About 10% of child-bearing families have just one child. It was very typical to share a room with your siblings, at least until one of you was a teenager, but once your parents had a little money, it was easy to have a house with plenty of room for 2 or 3 children.
Almost all of the houses on my street had families with 2-3 children of school-age or younger. There was one mini-house with an unfriendly old couple (I assume they had grown-up children, but they kept very much to themselves and nobody knew much about them) and another little cottage with a sweet old granny. If I walked down the street on a summer's day, I would almost always hear other children playing in gardens and I only had to climb over a wall to spend time with one of my best friends. The children also formed interconnections between parents, and so almost everyone knew everyone else on the street, even if people didn't go to church or other social events. Child-centred holidays like Halloween also meant that e.g. the sweet old granny were brought into the community. Babysitting, Scouting etc. meant that even families with teenagers were brought into the network of social relations.
Now the demographics are reversed: there are only about two families with young children and most of the houses are occupied by older couples/single people. On a summer's day, one hears no children, and the youngest people one generally sees are the gardeners who commute in from the city to do manual labour in the old people's gardens. This is not due to depopulation: the problem is that young couples can't compete with older people's wealth when it comes to buying houses, and older people can comfortably retire without selling their big family-sized homes. In contrast, my grandparents generation generally either moved into care homes or into places in the city soon after they retired. They reasoned: why live in a five room house with a big garden? Pensions were much less generous back then and poverty among the old was widespread, so selling a house was a good way to have liquid assets in your retirement.
This is an extreme case, but the demographic transition is really visible in some places. I hate it, and as it happens, the older people in the street with whom I've talked about it also hate it. I do know people my age who have a child and sometimes two, but they generally live in cities in cramped apartments that are unsuitable for having 2-3 children. Ironically, their homes remind me of the type of places that my grandparents' generation would live in, if they lived independently.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link