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Male self-love: a key hidden determinant in the high fertility of the conservative religious?
I came across this interesting study (PDF archive link here) that measured the correlation between “dark triad” traits and lifetime offspring. The authors claim that this is one of just a handful of studies on the subject. Among the dark triad traits, only narcissism was significantly associated with lifetime offspring, and only in men. There’s something insightful here, because men and women differ in their level of selection for sex, so a narcissistic woman may be overly-selective and end up with a lower number of offspring. A narcissistic man, on the other hand, is predisposed to be less picky, so his narcissism turns into maximizing offspring earlier with less selection. The study is flawed because it uses a basic question as a proxy for “narcissism”, but I think the preliminary finding and the hypothesis are still worthy of discussion.
A common belief for why religiosity impacts fertility is that having children is socially sanctioned and esteemed among these communities. But on closer inspection this falls apart. Consider that the Japanese and Korean, with their disastrous fertility rates, are chided by their mothers and grandmothers to have children. Their governments and media push family formation which is also a metric for a successful life. All of this is amplified by their culture of conformity. Yet the fertility rate trends downward. Regarding the study’s finding on the difference of male and female narcissism, we can note conservative religion privileges men uniquely with honor and respect. In traditional religions, women usually cover their head and stay quiet in sacred spaces as symbolic gestures of obedience. Women are told to be subservient to their husbands and that their role is to support him, which works to reduce female self-esteem and increase male self-esteem. Men are told that they are privileged by God for certain duties.
There’s a more significant dimension to this that I want to discuss. Having a child fundamentally changes a person’s life, and people do not voluntarily change their whole lifestyle unless the pleasure of the change outweighs all the discomfort. You need to sincerely desire the change to make the change. Humans are terrible at making changes that are merely “good for them” in the abstract without any concomitant overriding pleasure, which obesity and addiction and low exercise rates clearly prove. So when we’re talking about having children, we really ought to ask, “why would anyone want to be around a child every day instead of having fun?” Because adults don’t usually make this decision — they don’t skip the bar to go read a book to children at the library. So what’s the reason that the conservative religious actually desire to be around their children, these versions of themself in miniature?
Reproduction in all of its sense
I think that what the fertile religious cultures are good at is inculcating sincere and deep-rooted male self-love. As a consequence of this self-love, they naturally desire to have children as extensions of themselves, to be around and expand themselves. This desire is intrinsic and compelling on its own, and they are not compelled to have children because of a social prescription. Their self-love means that simply being around their child is fun and positive regardless of any criteria of parenting or external criticism. If you love yourself, and know yourself to be loved and to enjoy living, then reproducing yourself is intrinsically desirable. There’s more of you! It’s like a self-friendship, where one wants to increase their friends and time spent with friends.
Now, I mean self-love in a particular way. I don’t think these words — esteem, narcissism, pride — capture the type of positive self-assessment of the devoutly religious. I’m not talking about clinical narcissism here. What I mean is all follows: (1) there is a complete devaluation of capitalist or hierarchical notions of success, as well as concerns for beauty, meaning that a man is buffered against attacks on his worth which overwhelm so many today, eg balding or income, not to mention there’s an equality among believers; (2) there is intensive gratitude for the primary aspects of a man’s identity: merely the state of being alive, having a healthy body, being a man, and being personally selected and personally cherished by the maker of the universe itself regardless of one’s acumen or skillset; (3) lust for one’s wife, contrary perhaps to popular notion, is invested with divine purpose, and each moment of intimacy fulfills a chief command of God Himself; (4) in a counterintuitive way, one’s own life and local community become the center of the universe, because it’s through here that God works, and nothing else has relevance to one’s ultimate purpose, so no such comparisons to self are made.
An immediate (and anticipated) criticism of this would be: what about sin? What about original sin? But sin is just one item within whole religious package, and the package needs to be understood as whole. Whether one believes he sins daily doesn’t actually tell you about his self-regard unless you know whether he is forgiven daily. The emphasis in traditional religion is on the state of being forgiven and favored by God, and the emotions of guilt and shame are fleeting and quickly washed away with more positive emotions. (This holds true for the Abrahamic religions). And so, while sin is a big aspect of religion, it needs to be understood that (in practice) sin is merely a way to increase thankfulness and forgiveness and so forth, which increase one’s own positive valence. (Consider the emotional life of a child who is bad at chess yet is being lovingly tutored by Magnus Carlsen. His self-esteem as a whole is increased, and yet his skill has never been self-judged lower. The calculus on positive/negative valence vs self-judgment can be pretty nuanced).
So maybe this is key variable for understanding religious fertility. Maybe this is why the hyper-competitive, hyper-capitalist East Asian countries are dealing so badly with fertility right now. Maybe the esteem-crushing competition of a consumer nation can never be more fertility-promoting than simply loving the act of being alive. And maybe the direction that society is going with its condemnation of male pride and (seeming) reduction of joie de vivre will prove to be disastrous in the future.
I don't remember whether it was on LessWrong or SSC (the incident in question having happened over a decade ago now) but I do remember that the first time I got slapped by a mod in a Rat-Adjacent space, it was for describing an anti-natlist user's life as a "self-correcting problem". The old Avatar Col. Quaritch/40k Meme may have also made an appearance.
It's been at least a few years at since I last beat this particular dead horse, but my position is the same now as it was then. Secular liberalism is not a philosophy that is particularly conducive to family-formation or child-rearing. Just the opposite in fact. Getting married and/or having kids means jettisoning your own personal feelings and freedoms. And one you internalize the bit about how "my life is not my own" it becomes difficult to take the rest of the secular liberal memeplex seriously.
To go off on a tangent, as much as I am a human-supremacist who goes fuck yeah everytime we get one over the aliens, photogenic or not (Avatar 2's opening sequence almost made up for the ham-fisted morality tale that followed), Quaritch is wrong.
Pandora, to put it bluntly, doesn't work as anything but an intentionally crafted artifact of an immensely superior technological civilization.
A Hive Mind of that scale simply doesn't evolve according to natural selection, and remind me what incentives prey animals have for letting predators plug in to their US ports? That is simply not something that happens in isolation. Leaving aside the fact that they have a form of immortality when they upload their minds to join their ancestors (!!!).
The Na'vi are also morphologically distinct from the overwhelming majority of Pandoran fauna, they're bipedal with 4 limbs, while the majority are hexapedal.
And why exactly are there room-temperature superconductors just hanging around everywhere and forming floating rocks? Apparently they're not found in the rest of the universe.
By far the most sensible answer is that the modern Na'vi are the Amish analogs of an advanced K2 or K3 civilization, that chose to consciously hew to a naturalistic aesthetic while keeping plenty of their creature comforts, all while designing the ecology and their AI to keep that status quo indefinitely.
Where did the rest of them go? Who knows, but the idea of the Na'vi being naturally evolved eco-hippies makes no goddamn sense. Glass the planet and take their resources, but you better go up the tech-tree fast if you have the sense to worry about a counter-attack from their distant kin.
Ironically your comment proves him right. Quaritch himself may lack the scientific background to ask the question you just have, but assuming your user ID is accurate, other humans are curious enough to ask just such a question and ponder the consequences.
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