Human society is very old. The continents as they exist were in place for millions of years before any creature approximating humans set foot upon them. One doesn’t need to be an atheist to know and understand that humans change and evolve from one stage to the next. The Bible is written in a primarily agricultural society, and its stories are built around empires as well as estates where value was demarcated in land, grains, wives, and children. Humans had passed through the hunter/gatherer stages before the era covered in the Bible was written and humans have passed through many more stages since.
The biblical era covers a period of human complexity such that there was the need for rules. Also, societies became dependent on natural events, such as the weather, to survive, and humans began at this point to think about what forces might be behind the weather. Gods fulfilled that longing for there to be order. The idea of humans rising and falling according to random chance was never a satisfactory answer, not then or now. In this period, people prayed to God for children, as recorded in the story of Abraham and Sarah.
Over the many centuries of agricultural dominance, the lives of most people were very much like those of their parents. They worked, scraped by, and hoped for the best. Kids were a blessing in more ways than one. Kids provided protection, community, and they were valuable agricultural helpers when labor was needed. When there was no money or labor markets, help came from the community, and none were so reliable as mutually dependent family members.
Human ingenuity grew, and excesses in food, along with the development of languages, then written languages, allowed for learning. The great Polis, or City, grew in this environment. Cities appeared in the places where the geography was favorable.
Finally, advances in technology allowed for more food production with less labor, and industry began to mass produce things formerly handmade, like clothes. The family farm shrank, and shrank, and shrank, and shrank, and people moved to the cities.
The industrial and post-industrial cities changed the relationship of parents to their children. The revolutions in hygiene changed this relationship further, since far few children died before the age of five. Doctors delivered babies in hospitals, further reducing child deaths. Vaccines changed this further, and then came contraception and abortion.
Now, humanity stands at an unprecedented crossroads at least as critical as the agricultural revolution thousands of years ago and covered in the Bible. We are reevaluating our relationship with our children, and considering, really for the first time, if we even want them in our lives. And if we don’t, then the last generations have arrived.
It seems crazy, but it isn’t: populations are starting to fall everywhere in the world where industrialization has taken hold, which now, is everywhere. There was a huge bump in population as the early industrial revolution played out, but that bump was never at the front; it was at the end, made manifest because people were living longer. Think that through for a moment: longer lives made the population grow, not more children. That trend has played itself out, and now, the number of children has fallen below the demographic replacement rate.
If women could have children later in life, this problem might not be so threatening. Older adults are wealthier and more circumspect; they would have children because they want them. But the industrial society that gave us the very idea of a teenage, and an adolescence phase in life, have made the incentives to have children fall at the lowest point when women are most physical able to have them. Telling a 17-year-old girl that she needs to get pregnant is frowned upon, and the act of getting her pregnant is illegal. And yet, from 15 to 30 is when women are most likely to get pregnant and carry a baby to term. This was how nature, or evolution, or God, set it up. This design is hopelessly at odds with the patterns and incentives of the industrial society, and we are now at the end of the grace period.
And so, we get to the critical question; was industrial society ALWAYS destined to reach this moment? Was the Polis, the Great City, where there was learning and art and entertainment and restaurants and night life, was it always a brief, shining moment in the sun that could not last more than a few, like three, generations? If the answer is yes, we’ll be living in a long, slow descent of humankind as the lack of children sends everything that was built up over the past 150 years, back down. You can’t keep the lights on, literally, if there aren’t enough people to run an electrical system. You can’t keep hospitals staffed or even maintain a police force, and thus maintain the precious rule of law, in an environment where there are no young men to spare for jobs not directly linked to food. Already, around the world, there are formerly inhabited towns that are abandoned. Japan has many of them as does Spain, and Italy. Humanity is retreating to the cities, and this makes the problem worse, not better.
Lots could happen on the way to the grave. There could be a technological breakthrough that will allow older adults, those that WANT kids, to have them. There could be a sort of baby market, where the wealthy pay the poor to have their babies. There could be baby slavery, aka like The Handmaiden’s Tale, or plain old baby theft. All of this is happening now to one degree or another, and these trends could accelerate as the lack of children around the world becomes felt.
If industrial society was always fated to meet this moment, then what comes next was also fated. Humans will level out, I predict, and find a new equilibrium, but that balance will be in a smaller, shrunken world well before any new expansion will start again.
Two decades ago, I began to read about societies that were shrinking. The oddball stories out of Japan had to do with old people pretending baby dolls were their actual children. At first, it was funny: ah, those wacky Japanese people! But then I started reading about how Europeans were not having kids. The question was why, and if anything could be done about it. Most explanations had to do with the changing role of women in society, and those explanations aren’t wrong, but it is a whole other dilemma if the lack of children around the world, even in very traditional societies, is simply a natural artifact of leaving the agrarian world, and moving into the industrial, and then post-industrial one. If that is so, there is no social movement that will recapture the love of children and family. If the City, and all it offers, is a death trap, then human decline is baked into the cake already.
TomRoushOnline 