OPINION:
There has been a bit of a boomlet in concern from the usual suspects in academia, think tanks and the intelligentsia about the pending global depopulation.
They are rightly concerned that population is eroding pretty much everywhere, that fewer people will mean less economic growth, fewer inventions and less innovation, and that a future with far fewer people will generally be just a bad thing.
They note with some alarm that this lack of children — which will lead to a dearth of grandchildren and so on — seems to be affecting all sorts of societies. That includes the religious and irreligious, Muslim and Catholic nations, West and East and the developed and developing world. We will come back to that in a second.
They should be concerned. Just to replace those who already live here on Earth, we need to average about 2.1 births per woman. The global average at the moment is probably around 2.2, and it has been heading downward for more than 200 years.
South Korea’s rate is 0.75. Italy, Japan, Argentina and a bunch of other nations have rates lower than 1.2. China’s average is less than 1.0. The average in the United States is about 1.6.
Generational math makes the problem worse. As each generation shrinks, the next one is even smaller and on and on. Nations with replacement rates hovering around 1.0 should expect to have a population that is about one-third of their current one within two generations.
Despite all this, no one seems to have a solid theory about why pretty much everyone stopped having children around the same time. As a consequence, there are not many good ideas about how to reverse the decline.
Let me propose a simple idea that might explain why people around the globe have stopped having children.
The fundamental problem is that the philosophy of utilitarianism and strict adherence to rationality have contaminated pretty much everyone on the planet, mostly as a direct consequence of colonialism and, more recently, of the media.
The lens through which most of us — irrespective of stated religious preferences — look at the world is whether an action being considered is economically prudent. Does that maximize our very minimal time here on the planet?
In an agrarian society, children made lots of economic sense, so people had many of them. In our current societal structure, children are a cost center, so most of us have few and an increasing number have none.
Let us try a thought experiment. How much would a prospective mother who was neither inclined nor disinclined to have an additional child need to be compensated to have that child? Think about the cost of foregone wages and opportunities over the course of that woman’s lifetime. Or think about how one might value the cost of letting another human throw up on you.
There is no economic argument to be made for children in the modern world. That is why those who study depopulation cannot and will not be able to offer solutions; any solution would require society to turn its back on the metes and bounds of its current arrangements.
The modern world is all about optimization, maximization, costs and numbers. There is no room for emotions, for sentimentality, for the beautiful and the true, for humanity.
That is why we do not build gorgeous cathedrals, schools, office buildings or even post offices anymore. Beauty, truth and transcendence cannot be reduced to spreadsheets.
It is not accidental that the cohorts still having children either live far away from things of modern Western “civilization” — Niger and about a half dozen nations in sub-Saharan Africa have the most children per woman on the planet — or view them as gifts from God, not economic burdens.
In the United States, Christians, on average, have a fertility rate of 2.2, while nonbelievers have rates as low as 1.3. When was the last time you ran across a big family that did not go to church?
The irreducible minimum is this: The hyperrational approach of utilitarianism, which has dominated Western (and therefore, worldwide) thought for three centuries now and in which everything, even human life, is reduced to its “usefulness,” has led us into a demographic dead end.
The good news is that we will have lots of things to distract us as humanity dwindles toward irrelevance.
Utilitarianism was always bound to fail. Any intellectual construct flexible enough to comfortably hold both communism and capitalism eventually had to do so.
It is our misfortune that the system failure has first appeared in our unwillingness to do the most elemental thing humans can possibly do: procreate.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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