It is said that the seventeen-year-old Alexander the Great broke into tears for fear that there would be but one world for him to conquer. This is undoubtedly apocryphal but nevertheless, by age thirty-two Alexander had conquered the enormous Achaemenid empire built by Cyrus the Great and imposed on it the Greek language and culture. By age twenty, William Wilberforce was the Member of Parliament for Hull. His good friend William Pitt the Younger was Prime Minister of England at age twenty-four during the Napoleonic wars. I could go on. Today many twenty-four-year-old men can scarcely get out of bed before ten in the morning. And what is worse, there are too few reasons for them to do so.
In 1798, an English cleric published his thoughts on the consequences of recent success in food production. Rather than seeing this success as a barometer of optimism, he defined the success as a trap. People were not using the over production to improve their standard of living but were having more kids and causing those kids to live longer. His argument became known as the Malthusian trap. How can a society prosper if people increase the population faster than the economy can absorb them?
There is a hubris that saturates modern Western discourse that is based, I think, on a terror of the future. In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, God ends his daily work with an observation, “And God saw that it was good.” But today’s generation, in its hubris, looks around and concludes that God is wrong. It is not good and being not good, it is terrifying. Mr. Malthus saw life that way and so did Dr. Paul Ehrlich. He wrote a book in 1968 that was premised on the Malthusian trap as identified in its title, “The Population Bomb”. Dr. Ehrlich was terrified about climate issues and the exponentially growing population which he feared would lead, within ten years, to shortages of energy, minerals, and food resulting in mass starvation.
The solutions proposed by Malthus and Ehrlich are similar. Malthus suggested to David Ricardo that, “to give full effect to the natural resources of the country (Ireland) a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” Nice. This argument gave rise to Jonathan Swift’s famous essay “A Modest Proposal” suggesting that Irish children become foodstuffs for the population. Dr. Ehrlich, similarly, suggests that only massive de-population can save humanity although he is bit less graphic in formulating how that is to happen. Perhaps Bill Gates can fill in the details.
Just as the ideas of Malthus were debated by David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, so are the ideas of Dr. Ehrlich contested today. Jordan Peterson calls the concept of overpopulation an “anti-truth”. That is, it is an idea that is completely opposite to the truth. In his podcast with Lex Fridman, Peterson phrased his objection as follows (my paraphrase):
“You are telling me that I must accept the limits that you will impose on me because you are frightened of the future. Plus, you want to use coercion to resolve the issue of overpopulation. That makes you a terrified tyrant. Do I want to trust you for a solution?”
I think the ideas of Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich and all those who see life as a zero-sum game in which my survival is dependent upon your death have been soundly and repeatedly defeated by events and philosophical arguments. But if that is so, then why are countries around the world, almost without exception, allowing themselves to die off by not having children? It is a level of pessimism that has never been seen in recorded history. Why? Why are societies, lemming-like, marching into the extinction of a demographic winter? Last week I referenced the fact that Japanese society is shrinking, and its potential parents are giving up on marriage, childrearing and even sex itself. What in the world is going on?
Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt took up the question of modern demographics in a National Review Article and described in an interview with Peter Robinson1. He describes the problem from the US perspective and examines some of the economic repercussions including fewer new enterprise start-ups, decreasing economic freedom indices, lower life expectancy, poorer test scores and lower average academic achievement, and surprisingly, lower labour participation by non-immigrant workers.
The economic and social dangers of demographic pessimism are obvious. When social welfare systems are designed on a pyramidal population scheme rather than an insurance algorithm, there need to be more active workers funding the scheme than retired workers drawing from the scheme, or it quickly goes bankrupt. The unfunded liabilities of American Social Security and Medicare are $65 trillion. Who will pay that bill when the source of cash is drying up?
Immigration is the cure to this problem according to the current government. But the question of assimilation must be asked. What happens when the rate of immigration overwhelms the ability of the new arrivals to assimilate to the customs, laws, and mores of their new country? Does the country become so changed that no one wants to come to it anymore? And what happens then?
The various attempts to bribe people to have larger families have not met with lasting success. Russia and Sweden have made bold attempts to encourage larger family formation through financial incentives, but both have found that, when the cash spigot is turned off, the family size immediately reduces again. So there does not seem to be any way to sustainably increase family size by government fiat or funding.
European studies have diagnosed the problem as a radical transformation from citizen support of broad cultural values to a more individual focused quest for self actualization and personal autonomy. American studies have tied this phenomenon to a drop in faith expression as fewer people attend church. Eberstadt reports that pessimism, hesitance, dependence, self-indulgence, resentment, and division accompany decreasing birth rates. Could it be that these emotional traits are the cause rather than the result of plunging populations? Could it be that we have so lost touch with the transcendent that we can no longer rejoice with God that “it is good!”
I can only offer questions because the issue of decreasing populations is multifaceted and likely each country has unique inputs to the problem. The rising cost of living is certainly a deterrent to large families and particularly so if the family wants to enjoy the general fruits of the society in which they live. The fatigue of mothers who work outside the home and then bear the largest share of child rearing is an issue. Distrust of a once malignant government will give pause to the notion of a large family. I argue that these issues are enough to reduce family size but not enough to eliminate marriage and family altogether. For this to happen, something else must be going on.
Eberstadt asserts that the single best predictor for national fertility rates is wanted family size as reported by women. If women see the value in larger families, then there will be larger families. Combine that with his reporting that one of the few nations to report increasing fertility is Israel and the increase is spread across all Jewish subgroups, religious as well as secular. The increase in family size is not reflected in the Arab populations of Israel. He concludes that perhaps Jewish Israelis want the country to have a future that includes their children. In the American context he offers the following thought,
“Spontaneous, intellectually and spiritually disruptive ferment from within civil society might offer a homegrown American answer to the culture of ‘second demographic transition’.”
Perhaps this disruptive ferment is another way of saying “optimistic about the future”. I started writing this article a month ago while preparing a presentation to a sustainability conference of high school students. In researching the issues faced by today’s 14- to 17-year-old kids, I was struck by the sense of gloom and depressing pessimism that characterized most of what I was reading. Rates of drug use, anxiety, and suicide are on the rise and the ascent started long before covid shuttered their world.
In my presentation, I pointed out to them that the world has never been great, but it has always been good with each generation making technological advances. Why be pessimistic about that? I told them that I grew up believing that the atom bomb could drop on me at any moment, but I never felt any anxiety about life. What changed? Why do we feel such civilizational fatigue and why is it so widespread?
I can only conjecture.
Among many other possibilities, is it possible that, like Alexander, we don’t see the modern dragons that need to be slain? Has X-Box, Youtube and other technology so blunted our imaginations that we settle for the ersatz rather than the real adventure? Has the ready availability of zero cost sex so corrupted the culture that the ennui and lassitude it generates will destroy that culture? Are we confronted with more and stranger aspects of human sexuality because we become easily bored with each new depraved experiment? Are we so fearful of the monsters that inhabit our lives that we will smother our children rather than push them outside to fight those monsters? Isn’t fighting dragons the reason for getting out of bed?
Some years ago, my wife and I were handing out Hallowe’en candy in Peru. Because we had brought candy with us from Canada, we became a light bulb to all the hobgoblin moths. We noticed an uncostumed and obviously impoverished little girl sitting on the curb across the street and whenever a crowd of Star Wars characters came shouting “dulce o trato”, the little girl would attach herself to the back of the crowd and push her dirty little hand in for a dulce. Our subsequent conversation about what to do about her ranged from getting her a costume or at least a bag to doing nothing. These are the events in life which pull at heart strings but have only ambiguous answers. We concluded that she wanted our candy and not our charity, so we did nothing. But candy she got! I have long forgotten about all the pretty costumes of that night, but I will never forget the fortitude and determination of that little girl. What a champion she was and would that the world be filled with billions of such wonders.
When I was fourteen years old my older brother did me a favour that influenced the rest of my life. He sat me down and made me write out ten things that I wanted to accomplish by the time I was twenty-five years old.
When I finished my comments to the high school students a couple of weeks ago, I left them with “Murray’s Ten Things to Live an Optimistic Life”. Included in that list was the challenge to write out their ten goals because that is the first step towards slaying dragons. And the opportunity to stand atop a slain dragon will get all but the most ancient and jaded of us out of bed. That is optimism. Maybe we should focus more on dragon slaying than fear of the future to prevent our culture from dying of indifference.
Revitalization won’t come from government, National Review, September 30, 2021