Do you like your ideas? Then have children

Pro-natalism is not only about securing the survival of the species. It is also about securing the survival of humanity’s best ideas.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted sometime between 1490 and 1510, Wikimedia Commons

In most countries of the world, fertility is now below replacement level. Rather few people seem to think that is a problem. After all, the world's population is still increasing. If low fertility countries need people in the future they can always import them from Africa, where they still make people, the thinking goes. As Scott Alexander pointed out a few months ago, the world is not running out of people.

But I would say, running out of people is not at all the problem. Humans are probably one of the most flexible and thereby resilient species that has existed on Earth. It is not the human race as such that is threatened by low fertility. It is the ideas of low fertility communities that are in danger.

In his 2010 book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, economist Eric Kauffman explains that the number of religious people increases while the number of secular people are decreasing, for the simple reason that religious people have more children. Religious countries have more children than secular countries. Within countries, the more religious people have more children than the more secular people. 

More people migrate from religious communities to secular communities than the other way round. But conversion doesn't offset the higher population growth of religious groups by far. Most people stick to the ideas of the communities into which they are born. For that reason, religious people are becoming more numerous while secular people are becoming less numerous.

I have found very little criticism of Eric Kaufmann's conclusion. Kauffman says that our children and grandchildren will probably live in a world where a much smaller share of people will believe in things like individualism, gender equality and even science itself. Surprisingly, people don't even get angry at him. There is not even a "controversies" section on his Wikipedia page. People neither protest, nor agree: They don't seem to care much at all.

Attracting people or making one's own? 

Kaufmann's book more or less presents two types of societies: One that is good at attracting converts and one that is good at making people. Currently, the second group is making people at a much greater pace than the first group attracts them.

Secular society has indeed attracted many people from religious groups during the last generation. But those who convert immediately tend to take over the fertility pattern of secular people. So the gains are rather short lived compared to the exponential growth of religious high-fertility societies. 

Kauffman explains that the more extreme a religious group is, the easier it is for it to retain its members. When one's native culture doesn't differ that much from mainstream society, mainstream society might seem much more appealing. By contrast, very conservative groups tend to be more isolationist. 

The Amish, for example, outrightly forbids people to hop in and out. As teenagers, people have some freedom to explore. But as soon as they are considered adults (in general between 17 and 20) they are supposed to become full members of the congregation. If they leave after that, they are no longer welcome in the community. Their relatives are not allowed to eat together with them. The shunning system is a component that makes transition very cumbersome. Either people are in, or they are out. And most Amish prefer to be in. Conservative Amish groups have retention rates of more than 90%, meaning 9 of 10 children to conservative Amish parents will grow up to be Amish themselves.¹

Culture in your genes

It all says something about culture: It is largely inherited according to biological lines. Most people are very dependent on the set of ideas they learned as children. If those ideas are too far away from another culture, converting becomes so cumbersome that it is not really possible. As the world’s most attractive culture, Western values have won converts all around the globe. But uptake has been very varied. While East Asia became thoroughly Westernized during the 20th century, much of Africa and the Middle East is still in a world of its own. 

Globalization has forced the entire world into contact with Western culture and those who saw its attractions have mostly been won over. This has also made the Western strategy of being culturally attractive sort of redundant. The remaining non-Westernized people are simply too far away from Western culture to make it appealing to them. Western society will still win converts, but the returns will be diminishing and will not make up for low birth rates.

Most ideas don't have feet

A few ideas actually spread over cultural boundaries. They are so ingeniously adapted to the human psyche that humans just need to hear about them in order to be convinced. Christianity is the best example I know of such a viral idea. In year 0 there were zero Christians. In the year 400 there were tens of millions. Not because Christians bred better than other groups, but because people simply liked the idea. Somehow, the idea of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is so much in line with the human way of thinking that it can go viral almost everywhere. 

Christianity is, I think, the most viral idea of world history. It is also almost two thousand years old. That says something about the rarity of very successful viral ideas. In spite of the furious production of ideas during the last centuries, nothing has beaten Christianity in terms of appeal to people of different backgrounds.

Christianity seems to be an idea that is not dependent on cultural norms. At least not very much. Most ideas are not like that. They are more of components in a larger system, a culture. As part of that culture, they make sense. Outside that culture they are not really viable. The vast majority of ideas only make sense in conjunction with other ideas.

Gender equality, an idea Westerners in general hold in very high esteem, is such an idea that only makes sense within a certain cultural system. Without the ideas of individualism and sexual self control, gender equality doesn't seem to be a very good idea at all. Without individualism, no one will understand why women should have the right to do the same thing as men. If serfs can't do the same things as lords, if merchants can't do the same things as warriors, why should women then be allowed to do the same things as men? Also, without the idea of sexual self control, talking about gender equality means talking about sexual mayhem. If there is a preconception that men and women can't behave chastely when in the same room dressed in normal clothes, someone suggesting gender equality just seems to be proposing sexual anarchy and the lethal conflicts that tend to ensue.

Ineffective altruism

I think that in general, people overestimate the power of ideas. Ideas look like robust creatures because we mainly know about the successful ones. Since people mostly see the successful ideas, they get the impression that good ideas are rather good at spreading and maintaining themselves. 

One group I think is very much overestimating their ideas is effective altruists. I have heard about most colors of effective altruists: There are those who try to save as many lives as possible here and now. There are those who try to ward off existential threats to humanity as a whole. But I have never heard of any effective altruist who is working on preserving effective altruism as such for the next generation.

I think they should. There is no reason at all to believe that effective altruism is one of those few ideas that can traverse cultural limits. On the contrary, the idea that one should be as solidaric with unknown people on the other side of the world as with one’s own community is individualism taken to its extreme. In fact, I believe the idea of effective altruism can only ever work in a very small subset of Western culture where individualism, rationalism and scientific study are placed at the fore. Diminish this subset of Western culture, or take it away entirely, and the idea of effective altruism will disappear. 

Maybe effective altruists really think that their idea is robust enough to spread in all cultural settings. If so, I believe they will be gravely disappointed. When effective altruists save lives all over the world and fail to breed rational Westerners at home, all in the name of effective altruism, they are working for a world that contains much fewer effective altruists in the next generation. And who will do the good deeds then? It sounds neither effective nor very altruistic.

Creating a world with fewer effective altruists can't be the goal of effective altruism. And still, that is what fundamental effective altruism does. As far as I have heard, effective altruists don't talk about the problem. Like if they don't know that it exists. Or like they don’t want it to exist. 

Changing evolution of ideas

Maybe people are unprepared for the importance of demographics because it has been around for such short times. Before the 19th century in Europe and the US and the 20th century elsewhere, high birth rates were not what mattered. Birth rates were high enough to hit the Malthusian ceiling more or less everywhere. 

Instead, cultures were, to a certain degree, actually competing with their ideas. There was a selection pressure in which good ideas won out. Cultures that created materially and militarily successful societies survived. Cultures that created materially and militarily weak societies disappeared. 

In the Malthusian world there was no real distinction between being an attractive society and being a high-fertility society. The things that make a society attractive are the things that make its citizens feel good. And these things are usually the same that make its citizens productive and hence able to support a larger population, which was what counted as high-fertility back in Malthusian times. 

Today things are very different. Birth rates are down and we don’t have a Malthusian condition anymore. This has changed everything. The high-fertility societies are no longer societies that can keep up production but rather societies that can keep up birth rates. Individualism might be good for production, giving Western societies a demographic edge in Malthusian times, but it’s not very good for birth rates, giving non-Western societies an edge today. 

For a culture to win in a post-Malthusian world, it doesn't need to be the most productive, most cooperative, nicest society. Its children don't need to be the healthiest, happiest or best-educated. If a few percent of them die of childhood diseases, the culture in question is still doing great if people get seven children instead of two. As long as people have many children and those children keep the ideas of their parents, then the culture is doing great. 

Current Westerners are in no sense prepared for this development. We believe our culture to be superior and for that reason expect it to win out. Which it did for a long time. First by allowing us to out-produce other cultures and then by out-attracting other cultures. But this winning streak is now over. Successful cultures of today need neither be very productive nor very attractive. They only need high fertility and some cohesion, neither of which needs to be very pleasant. 

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow

The human race is not in danger of extinction from low birth rates. The danger is not against humans as organisms, but against human ideas. Conditions can change rapidly, but right now, mainstream Western ideas are losing and the ideas of religious high fertility cultures are winning.

People who believe in ideas supported by Western culture have two reasons to have more children. First, there is the direct cause. More children means more people in which the ideas of the Western world can live on. 

But there is also an indirect route. If Western societies can find out ways to be more accommodating to larger families the cultural distance to other cultures will decrease. This will make it less of a hurdle to become westernized for people from cultures where large families are the norm. This way Western culture can increase its attractiveness to other cultures. 

Ideas are culture-dependent. If you like your ideas, you should also like the culture that makes those ideas viable. And if you like your culture you want it to live on. The best way, maybe the only possible way, to make sure your culture and your ideas live on, is to support childbearing by its members.

1. Eric Kauffman, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, 2010, page 67-68