Is modernity killing itself?
Why are birth rates falling?
Falling birth rates
In half of the countries in the world, the average women give birth to less than 2.1 child, the rate considered to give a stable population. The populations of Italy, Japan and South Korea risk being halved up to 2100. This points to that the world will reach ”peak population” earlier than previously assumed.
This is probably good news for the environment, the climate and the rest of nature, while it spells bad news for the economy (aka capitalism). Working people is the most important factor for economic activity and growth. There is really no indication that AI will change this equation for the economy at large, as little as industrialization and automation of farming did. It is almost equally important, that the number of consumers also grow to keep the wheels spinning. A non-growing economy will spell the end of capitalism as profits and rents will evaporate or only be obtained by increasing the gaps between capital owners and the poor. In turn this will lead to popular uprising or revolutions.
Be that as it may, that is not the topic for today, which is the question why birth rates are falling. The arguments often heard are: 1) women want to make career rather than babies; 2) many are anxious for the future, the climate or their own economic prospects; 3) many are not feeling very well and have a number of mental conditions and they don’t think they can take care of a child, or are afraid of being bad parents; 4) the costs of raising a child is very high and it is hard for children to find a place to live: and 5) women are afraid of pain or that their body will be ruined by child bearing.
I believe all of them have some validity but that they to some extent are superficial noise which are not sufficient to explain the fall in birth rate in countries with huge variations of conditions. For example, in Sweden we have excellent paternal leave, child support, and subsidized day care available for all and free education, still birth rate in Sweden just hit an all-time low.
The long view
A long view might help. A stable or very slowly growing population has been normal in most human societies all through history, interrupted by sudden falls in population caused by disease, war, natural disasters or climate change. The Black Death killed 30 to 50 percent of the entire population of Europe, and it took several hundred years for some areas to regain a population as big as it were before the plague hit.
In a historical perspective, it is the growth of population the last two hundred years that stands out as exceptional. One can explain this growth with a number of factors. On the material side we have increased availability of food, external energy in the shape of fossil fuels, improvement in hygiene, health and other conditions. But even more important is the spread of the (capitalist) market economy and its bundles of societal changes.
Engels and Marx didn’t describe population growth when they, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, wrote that: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations” and “The bourgeoisie* has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”. They did, however, implicitly describe how the introduction of capitalism made old customs wither and how children became resources as labourers, instead of being part of the natural regenerative cycles.
Capitalism made children into market resources instead of being part of the regenerative cycles.
The narrative of population explosion often has a condescending attitude, where high population growth rates are seen as a result of uncontrolled child births of poor people and of patriarchal control of women as child bearing machines.** But that is a far too simplistic view. Before the transformation of societies into market economies, the richer often had more children than the poor as an expression of wealth and as a means to strengthen the standing of the clan. And, there were many poor men and women who never got any children at all. With capitalism, children was no longer needed for the rich, while having many children becomes a way for the poor households to get more income. Households in the country-side exported huge numbers of labourers to the cities (which could not uphold their populations) where they got involved in industries and commerce.
As mechanization, industrialization and automation progressed in the capitalist cycle, there was less need for more people and those working needed better education. This changed the logic of the families and households so that less children were favoured. This was the main reason for why birth rates fell in the richer countries while it is still high in countries which have not yet fully industrialized. Notably, there is now a trend in the richer countries that the rich, again, get more children than the poor. Elon Musk has 12 children and again there are many poor that never have children, in particular men.
The bigger picture
In my view, there are huge societal changes underlying the falling birth rate. The world is increasingly “full”. There is less space for people (and in particular where people aggregate the most, in the big cities), we are running out of resources (or it becomes more and more difficult to access them), we are undermining the ecosystems that we need to thrive and the capacity of the biosphere to take care of all our emissions has reached several limits (global warming is but one such). Perhaps, people feel that in some subconscious way, and that feeling ultimately also affect the desire to procreate?
There are also important cultural factors at play.
Having to take care of a child collides with the focus on the individual and her desires that is central in “modernity”. Interestingly, it has an almost contradictory expression in people who want children but (for many different reasons) can’t get children through their own bodies. Many see it more or less as their “right” to get children in many different ways from IVF to surrogate mothers. In addition, the modern project is all about making our life independent of the biological relationships we all come from (this is of course an illusion as we can’t get away from our biological dependencies, just put more layers of technology between them and us). Another such example is all the efforts made to prolong our life, or to freeze bodies in the anticipation of future medical advances. Transhumanism is the ultimate expression of this, with eternal life and no biological functions. There is no room or need for children in this future (unless you believe in a transgalactic civilization which I assume is the rationale for Elon’s twelve).
Many people don’t see their life as part of the bigger biological and social context. Reproduction is seen as an individual choice and not an essential part of being a biological organism. One could argue that one of the main aspects of sustainability is to ensure the continued existence of the human species***. Not caring for the future of humanity can in this way be seen as the ultimate victory for modernism and as such it can also be the seed of its death.
Not caring for the future of humanity can in this way be seen as the ultimate victory for modernism and as such it can also be the seed of its death.
This statement can perhaps be interpreted as an argument that reduces women to child bearing automata. That is not really my intention. On the level of the personal, I am all in favour of a “free choice” to have no children or ten children. Meanwhile, I believe that “free choice” to a large extent is determined by external (biological, material and cultural) factors and that we are less free than most want to believe. As a species we are certainly bound by the same evolutionary “laws” as other species. I just try to make sense of the developments and understand the mechanisms behind.
There is contradiction between the “earth is full” perspective and the “leave biologics behind” perspective as elaborated above, even if both can lead to reduced child birth. I can’t judge which one is more important or if they can play at the same time. In the end, we can’t know how the future will play out anyway, even if it is amusing to speculate and calculate.
* In the words of Engels and Marx bourgeoisie is just another word for the capitalist class. Marx did also use the word capitalist and capitalism occasionally.
** The observation of that population growth tend to fall when countries get wealthier is often interpreted in a way that there is a causation between increasing wealth and less children, but there is little empirical evidence for that causation. The other commonly heard explanation that the number of children falls when women get education also has very little scientific support.
*** Some would argue that a world without humans is more sustainable, but I would argue that such an opinion is nonsensical as there would be no-one there to observe the alleged sustainability in a human-void world. Of course, this is something that could be discussed much deeper, another time perhaps...
Interesting to see your thoughts on this, Gunnar. It feels like one of those conversations that has been brewing for a long time – the first book that put it on my radar was Jeremy Seabrook's A World Growing Old in 2003 – but has only finally spilled over into wider debate this year. If you didn't see it already, then Louise Perry's latest essay for First Things has a rather similar title to your own:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/12/modernitys-self-destruct-button
I was struck by a comment from Mary Harrington earlier this year, when she said she suspects the underlying cause is the gap between the state of being that is required to participate in contemporary society (both as a worker and a consumer) and the state of being that is required to show up to the needs of a baby or small child. This gap has grown so wide that it is increasingly difficult to move backwards and forwards across it.
The other point which is underlined in Louise Perry's article is that it is not only capitalism that is vulnerable to the end of population growth, but also the social welfare systems which are often represented politically as if they were the opposite pole to capital. This is where Illich's critiques of those systems need to be brought back to the table, I think, along with the work of agrarian thinkers like Wendell Berry, to help us catch sight of the possibility of good ways of living in the ruins. But as I reflected on in a talk at Steneby Skolan last week, it takes a particularly long stretch of the imagination to catch sight of such possibilities when we're starting from Världens modernaste land (or, as I sometimes think of it, the world's *last* modern country...).
I would suggest a world with 2 billion people would be far preferable to a world with 10 billion people, especially as we have gone from 2.4 billion to the current 8.2 billion IN MY LIFETIME! Exponential and runaway growth simply cannot continue, so it won't.
Secondly I would suggest pollution in water and food, and now microplastics, are having a serious effect. In the 1980's I worked as a consultant in London, including for Thames Water. At that time, some research calculated that the entire volume of the River Thames was abstracted, filtered, used by the consumers, 'cleaned' and disposed of back into the Thames SIX TIMES between Oxford and East London. The research pointed out that the water treatment processes did mot remove chemicals and drugs from the water, notably oestrogen from the birth control pill that was accumulated in detectable levels in drinking water. Bearing in mind that water was consumed by babies and children, boys as well as girls, one cannot be surprised it has long term effects.
Lastly, and on a completely different tack, may I recommend Dr James Lovelock's Gaia Theory as a 'big picture' context for human reproductive decline. This Theory, some 5 decades ago, was that the Earth's chemistry is created and stabilised by life on Earth, but more, is a self regulating ans self correcting mechanism that can also act to protect itself, much like an animal's immune system. On that basis, runaway human populations releasing long-trapped carbon and disrupting the environment would be a,in to a virus or cancer, and the Gaian system would respond to try the 'heal' the planet by whatever means.
Whether that is reproductive failures, wars, climate crises, economic crashes, pandemics...... who knows. But I do expect an economic and societal collapse in fragile Western economies now fossil fuels have reached peak EROEI, so perhaps a Gaian-generated collapse to 2 billion people who are not part of Western technological societies would be enough to allow the non-human fabric of nature thrive again?
We shall see (though probably not in my lifetime).