Fertility and the end of history
I recently read this piece from February’s New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus about plummeting fertility rates worldwide and what that might mean about humanity’s collective future.
I thought it was overall a fairly good sketch of our impending collective childlessness which was ultimately unwilling to take a side in that particular battle of the culture wars. Rather than harp on about the statistics that everyone has surely heard by now (South Korea’s total fertility rate is 0.7; every single Western country is below replacement; fertility is falling even in developing countries; world population will probably peak in the next fifty years or so), the article paints a picture of life in South Korea, where childlessness is the norm, mixes it with a few parallels to the dystopian film Children of Men, and then tries to wrap up the whole thing without passing a judgement either way, other to seemingly say that both groups of people (those who decide to have children and those who don’t) seem to enjoy frowning on the others’ choices more than just living with the consequences of their own.
I have three children so clearly I have fallen on the “having children is a good thing” side of the argument, but I often have trouble articulating why when thinking on the humanity-wide scale of thinkpieces like this. The thing that closest approximates my feeling, I suppose, is a sort of natural skepticism towards a sort of end of history fallacy. I am scared of the times we live in, desperately afraid of the future, but I don’t think I’ve seen enough evidence to conclude that this is in any way exceptional on an evolutionary timescale. The future has always been scary. Unprecendented things have always been happening. But the one thing that has always, unfailingly continued, by definition since the first cell rose from the primordial sludge, is reproduction. So it feels a little disingenuous to me to use “the state of the modern world” as a reason not to have children. In the same sense, are our modern psyches so much more advanced and fragile and important than they have been for the rest of our collective history, that their caprices should trump our biological raison d’être? Could it be that having children is a highly disruptive event for the individual’s ego, which is given more and more prominence in our culture?
My kids seem pretty good at adapting to whatever we have thrown at them so far. I’m pretty confident that they and their generation will be as adequate keepers of the human torch as we have been: indeed, it’s a pretty low bar we’ve set really, isn’t it.
Photograph: Deer on the hills near Brasted, England.