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A World Without Babies Martin Gurri

Published

9 months ago

October 27, 2023

Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

This piece has been republished with permission from Discourse:

When future historians look back on the last half century, I suspect they will pass over war, terror, and populism to settle on infertility as the decisive event of the age. For the first time since the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, the world’s human population is about to shrink—a process that has already begun in many countries. The correlates to the decline are well known: affluence, urbanization, women’s education, abortion, and easy access to contraceptives. But identifying hard causes is difficult. Gigantic trends touching on the survival of ancient cultures—and even of our species—get entangled with social pressures and moral ideals. At the same time, one must reckon with the secret dreams and expectations of solitary individuals of every class. The result is uncertainty.

People stopped having children when life has gotten good. Switzerland is possibly the wealthiest nation on Earth, with a high-trust, homogeneous population ranked near the top of the happiness index. There are no obvious material or psychological barriers to reproduction, but the Swiss birth rate, at 1.5 children per woman, falls short of the 2.1 needed to replenish the country’s human stock. Italy has the third-largest economy in the European Union as well as a sunny climate and delightful lifeways. Yet Italy is a leader in the global depopulation race—by 2050, 6 million fewer Italians will be enjoying that magnificent weather. Japan, another rich, tightly knit society, may lose 20 million inhabitants by 2050—that’s 45 times the lives lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out in one generation.

But this isn’t only a question of rich societies going off on a hedonistic binge. People have also stopped having children when life is terrible. Cuba is a political and economic basket case; the birth rate there has plummeted. The same holds true for Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova and Ukraine, poor nations all. The Covid-19 pandemic, despite the cozy lockdowns, led to a “baby bust.” It may seem intuitive that hard times should reduce the birth rate, but now we are also saying that the causes of infertility are too much wealth and too much poverty—which, though not really a contradiction, feels a little like having it both ways. Historically, poverty never stopped the human race from making babies. South Korea ranked among the poorest countries in 1950, when the birth rate per woman was over 5; today, with a powerhouse economy, the South Koreans are virtually going extinct.

Here in the U.S., we tended to place the burden of reproduction on God and faith. When we came upon a large family two generations ago, we would remark, “They must be Catholics.” A generation later the same was said of Mormons. Today, however, both Catholics and Mormons have slipped below the critical 2.1 threshold. In a narcissistic age, we have refashioned deity after our own image and likeness: his/her/their commandments sound suspiciously like the pleasures we hope—with any luck—to indulge in. We have come to worship a shimmering spirit called “happiness,” defined as equal parts sensuality and smugness. And since studies tell us that “spouses who raise children appear less happy than childless spouses,” we have no choice but to sacrifice our offspring on the altar of this jealous god.

Consequences of a Barren World

Sporadic attempts have been made to understand what life will look like under the conditions of a population crash: see, for example, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, or alternately, Decline and Prosper!: Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children. These are futile exercises. We have never been there before. While we can guess where most of the pieces will be positioned at the start, we have no clue how the game will play out. All that follows, therefore, is speculation—and from where I stand, speculatively, things look grim.

For instance, the welfare state requires an endless supply of young people to produce more, consume more, and generate ever more taxes for bureaucrats to distribute. A prolonged shortage of young bodies will stress the social safety net to the breaking point. Expensive retirement and health insurance schemes are likely to collapse. The marginal will slip into poverty—the poor will grow desperate—but government will lack the funds to do much about it. The political consequences are unfathomable. My guess is that crime and turbulence will be a constant background noise but not revolution, since the minimum levels of testosterone needed for that kind of venture will be lacking.

Economically, a world dominated by the old will be less innovative, less dynamic, and more risk averse. The only way to compensate for a shriveled workforce will be through technology—but that’s just what you won’t get from the geezers in charge. Ingenious walkers and hospital beds may be devised, but productivity will at best stay flat. Given fewer workers and stagnant productivity rates, living standards will inevitably decline, and wealth will be distributed unevenly between age cohorts. This may suit the puritanical killjoys who advocate a less consumerist lifestyle, but even a gentle decline in consumption will throw a vast number of manufacturers, stores, and restaurants out of business. Recession, a temporary evil, will at some point become a permanent condition—and a traumatic economic convulsion will by no means be unthinkable.

But the most wrenching aspect of the transition will be social and psychological. Absent the binding power of children, the extended family will disappear, and the nuclear family will disintegrate. There will be few mothers and fathers, no siblings, no cousins, no aunts or uncles; whole lineages will flicker out. If family is the audience to the drama of life, each individual will perform in the chill of an empty theater. Isolation will leave the young, as a class, powerless and dependent. Loneliness will fill them with psychotic dread. There can be no exit, no escape to a better future. Repopulating the world will be a tough mathematical proposition. For generations, the old will smother the young the way one does with a precious possession, like a rare breed of dog.

Humanity Against Itself

These processes are already at work. The decline of the birth rate parallels the crisis of all institutions—from government to marriage—that once provided the handrails and signposts needed to successfully navigate social life. A society abandoned to its own devices has fractured into sectarian warbands, leaving the public increasingly divorced from ancestral culture.

The causes of institutional ruin, about which I have written at length, need not concern us here. What’s strange and unprecedented is the mood behind the wreckage. There are many legitimate reasons not to have children. And there are many who wish to have children and can’t. But as a form of cultural negation, in the aggregate, the spirit of the age that inspires childlessness feels antihuman in a very literal sense: fewer humans are being produced, suggesting a slump in the value of new human life. Those leading the parade, curiously, tend to share a humanist education and profess humanitarian values. They love humanity as an abstraction but despise it in the flesh. Members of this tribe stand, as it were, on a geometric point, above the world of mere objects, and from that privileged space look on their kind with unaccountable loathing and contempt.

The youngest generation to reach breeding age, the Zoomers, has been infected with this grudge against humanity. From every corner of a broken culture, with monotonous repetition, the Zoomers hear their species characterized as sadistically cruel, “senseless and suicidal,” locked in “a spiral of self-destruction.” If they somehow survive school shooting massacres, viral pandemics, and Donald Trump, they’ll be annihilated, along with the planet, by climate change.

Not surprisingly, the Zoomers are a psychological mess. With regards to sexuality, they are stuck at the threshold of adulthood, too terrified to move forward. Compared to previous generations, they have less sex, fewer marriages, lower levels of testosterone, and, since “science proves kids are bad for Earth,” a greater unwillingness to reproduce. Potential mothers have no wish “to birth children into a dying world.” That’s the antihuman temper at its purest. According to the ethics of a future apocalypse, but amid actual tranquility and abundance, we must condemn the entire race, with all its unrealized dreams and adventures, to a death sentence.

In defiance of the studies, childlessness hasn’t made the Zoomers happier. In fact, they may be the most wretched generation ever raised under conditions of peace and plenty: robbed of the usual youthful excitement in exploration, their lives are darkened by spiking rates of anxiety, clinical depression, eating disorders, feelings of guilt and shame, and suicide. The Zoomer indictment of humanity translates easily into self-loathing. Accordingly, they often engage in fantastic attempts to escape their own skins, for example, by denying the iron dictates of biological sex in favor of invented genders. Such revolts against reality may entail self-mutilation—digital or real—but leave little room for parenting and family life.

A Matter of Choice, Not Destiny

None of this is fated. Childlessness hasn’t been ordained by obscure impersonal forces. It’s a choice. I can say this with total confidence because a counterfactual exists: consider the case of Israel, a hypermodern country that teems with children. Israeli women “of all educational classes and levels of religiosity” embrace “strong pronatalist norms,” delivering (so to speak) a birth rate of 3-plus—highest by far among wealthy nations.

So what makes Israel special? Parents there receive generous benefits, but the same holds true for many countries in decline. Some suggest that Israelis multiply because they face an existential threat—but the Zoomers have reacted to feelings of threat by abdicating their sexuality. Israel is different, let me suggest, because at the micro scale, one individual and one couple at a time, Israelis have chosen to bring another generation into the world. We should be thankful they did so, if only to demonstrate it can be done. But the reasons behind the choice are private and subjective, and probably as varied as the number of Israelis who are capable of procreating.

Precisely because the choice is personal, it would be presumptuous of me to pass some cosmic analytical judgment on the question of childlessness. I can only fall back on my own experience. Indulge me, good reader, as I reflect on a life that may bear little resemblance to yours.

My wife and I came from three-sibling families. We thought that was the perfect number of children to have; in the fullness of time, overcoming trials and troubles, that’s exactly what we got. The birth of my kids clarified a great mystery. The human race is unique in that every individual craves to live for something bigger and more important than himself. Many fulfill this sense of mission in religion, others in careers or in service. I knew from the first I had been put in the world to protect those three helpless creatures. Was I happy? The question doesn’t even make sense in this context. Parents are hostages to their kids. They can make you miserable in a million ways. But you’re not paying much attention to yourself; you’re looking after them. And watching my children strive and struggle, succeed and fail, love and bicker, what I felt made the word happiness seem shallow and lame.

I am now a grandfather and that feeling has only intensified. The persons involved are largely responsible: I have been fortunate in the character of my kids. But I also know myself to be a link in a chain winding back to the beginning of all things. I walk arm in arm with a host of ancestors and descendants as fellow travelers in the extraordinary progression of organic life: of the human story. The feeling isn’t mystical in the least. It’s as solid and real as the family room of my home—and for all I know, it’s biochemically induced by selfish genes eager to replicate.

Who cares? I belong to the most boring and least exclusive club on earth, and every day it feels like an amazing privilege.

Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst, author of The Revolt of the Public, and a columnist at Discourse, where this article first appeared. Read his Free Press piece “The Problem of Abundance” and follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @mgurri.

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Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

10 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

17 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

21 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641