Human procreation is fuelled by the spirit of war

Group selection weakened nepotism. Thereby it weakened the instinct to raise a family for the sake of it.

In the fertility debate, Camp Culture is growing. More voices are raised in support of the idea that in fact, the most important thing a society can do in order to make people have children is to say that having children is good. For example, Aria Babu and Johann Kurtz have written convincing essays on that theme.

I wholeheartedly agree. I believe that culture is strongly underestimated in the fertility question. And I believe that nature is strongly overestimated. Humans are commonly assumed to have a natural instinct to procreate. The welfare state treats children as consumption goods that people need help to afford. The underlying assumption is that people naturally want children. Give people resources to raise children and they will do so, the thinking goes. 

This species is different

But by and large, people don't. And that is quite astonishing. Every animal on the planet - maybe except for the infamously incompetent pandas - have more children when they get more resources. Whichever species is supplemented with food and a reasonably secure habitat will use these resources to raise more young. Only humans will not. 

How could humans be an exception from this principle? I would say, because of group selection. Evolutionary biologists dispute the existence and importance of group-level selection in nature. But whatever the other species are doing, one thing is clear: Group selection is a very strong force among humans. Wars have been fought by groups. Sometimes very big groups. And the reproductive prospects have been vastly better for the winners than for the losers of those wars, in particular on the male side.

Partially, group selection stands in direct opposition to individual selection and kin selection. Group selection favors behaviors that strengthen the group, at the expense of individuals and kin groups. Individual selection favors selfishness. Kin selection favors nepotism. Group selection favors selflessness and team spirit. In other words, group selection can actually cancel out the effects of individual selection and kin selection. That way, humans are a very particular species of animals.

The stand-off between individual selection, kin selection and group selection is in no way over and will probably never be. For that reason, human affairs are much messier than the affairs of ants and bees, who have more or less settled for kin selection. Still, among humans there has been a very slow but steady social evolution in favor of group mentality. States and empires are vastly superior to bands and clans on a military plan. Still, it took humans a very long time to reach that level of cooperation, because individual selection and kin selection work against it - reproductive greed and nepotism makes it very difficult for humans to cooperate. Thereby, there was a selection process in favor of societies that could overcome those forces to some degree. Societies that could make their citizens prioritize society at large over themselves and their own nuclear families formed the mightiest armies. That way, over time, societies consisting of a majority of highly socially sensitive individuals were selected for. 

On a superficial level it looks as if the animal-like, genetically selfish instincts to reproduce were overcome during the last century or so. I think that instead, the animal-like instincts were overcome very gradually during a very long time. As I wrote in my post Society has defeated the family, a battle between individual selection, kin selection and group selection is constantly going on. Very slowly, group selection has overcome kin selection. Kin selection works in favor of what society calls corruption - the tendency to direct resources that are supposed to go to society to one's own family. Only after very long and hard struggles, current corruption-fighting societies have gotten the upper hand in the game of cultural evolution. 

In other words: Societies where people had children mainly for selfish reasons were selected against. If people have children because they love those children above everything else, they become nepotists that strive at achieving the best for those children at any cost. When everyone is doing that, no efficient, unified society can be built. A modern, complex society needs citizens who at least sometimes can be made to prioritize the best interests of society over the best interests of their children. Every parent strives for the best for their child is a modern idiom. It is false. When people are caught really acting that way, like in the Varsity Blues scandal, a public outcry will follow. 

In accordance with this principle, people are not supposed to have children when they feel like it, but when society considers them ideally suited to bring up a child. Everything else is considered mildly to severely antisocial - instincts be damned. 

So I think that it wasn't mostly industrial society that muted people's instincts to have as many children as possible with regard to material circumstances. The muting of those instincts had been going on for millennia already. Societies consisting of citizens who each adored their own children above everything else couldn't hold themselves together. It is not that people didn't love their children. It is just that the love had to be constantly negotiated with people's love for and fear of society at large.

As long as people had rational, socially approved reasons to have children, this process was invisible. People had children roughly when society told them to and raised those children the way society asked them to. Since most of the people who were meant to have children also profited economically from having children, convincing them was not very difficult. The lack of instinct to reproduce only became visible when society stopped saying that having children is a virtue and children stopped making sense on a rational, economic plan.

Mother heroine

If humans lack strong instincts to reproduce, why did they still do that on a large scale until recently? I think it was for the same reason that they went to war: A spirit of sacrifice for the group.

While men make a disproportionate share of self-sacrifice in war, women make a disproportionate sacrifice in gestating and giving birth to and caring for children. And my feeling is that those women are, at least in part, driven by the same spirit of elated self-sacrifice as the men who willingly and knowingly enter front lines in wars. In pre-modern time, rates of death and physical injury were not completely unsimilar in childbirth and in wars. And hardship was almost a certainty in both situations. 

That could be one reason why painkillers during childbirth have been such a hard thing to accept for society: There is a long tradition of heroism around childbirth. Although I'm an avid proponent of anesthetized, medicalized birth, I can sense a tinge of that feeling in myself. My last two pregnancies were rather hard on a physical level. And both times, when the child was born, I felt the same rush of victory. I did it, I survived, I’m going to do it again! It was, I guess, like exiting a battle triumphantly.

I wasn't always like that. When I was young, I approached childbirth with the same fear and disgust as many voluntarily childless women express. It took me several births to arrive at that mindset. My guess is that such a mindset is much more accessible to women who live in high-fertility cultures and inspire each other at young ages.

No one wants to be a parasite

If real-life people tend to have children in the spirit of war, that explains why the fertility-raising efforts of the economists tend to be useless at best. Economists deal with self-interested individuals aimed at pleasure and comfort. So they suggest that people should be bribed so childbearing gets more comfortable. And the more economists try to bribe people to have children, the more those economists send the message to parents that they are parasites on society. And that is exactly what cultural evolution has made sure that people don't want to be. 

What about instead of bribing people into having children, try to offer them “nothing else than blood, sweat and tears”? Tell them that raising kids is a true act of heroism? Now and then, some political leader or pundit makes a half-hearted attempt at doing exactly that. Public outcry always follows, if anyone cares at all. Just as it does when a political leader half-heartedly suggests that young men should go to war and die for this-or-that cause. It almost always fails. Almost.

As the tragedies of the world wars showed, and the tragedy of the Russia-Ukraine war is showing now, sometimes it actually succeeds. Sometimes people actually volunteer to take great risks and do what they would never have done for personal gain. But they will only do that for a cause they believe in. Young men will only volunteer to go to war if they, and people around them firmly believe in the good cause behind the war. And young women will only accept the sacrifices of childbearing as long as they, and people around them, firmly believe in the good cause behind those sacrifices.

Homo Economicus goes extinct

In mainstream high-tech societies, few people genuinely believe that having children in itself is a good thing to do. People are actually very suspicious of other people's children. “Social problems” is more or less a euphemism for the wrong people having the wrong children and raising them the wrong way under the wrong circumstances.

That is nothing strange. Our society is mainly of a transactional nature. People pay their taxes and get services and payments in return. Such a transactional scheme will break down if people who take out more than they pay are born and raised in large numbers. Naturally, people are vigilant against below-average citizens taking over the system and dragging it down. 

This is one of the high prices we are paying for individualism. Conformism has its obvious disadvantages. But there is a good thing with conformism: Conformists tend to actually like each other. They dislike non-conformists - they can even be very hostile to them. But people who conform to the same norms can be extremely generous toward each other. If people actually believe that their community serves God, they will be happy to see it grow. Every little child born will be a potential servant of God.

I don't know it for sure, because I have never seen a high-fertility, traditional society from the inside. But I imagine that if a society is conformist enough, most people will actually appreciate their neighbors. They will genuinely appreciate other people's children. Not only those children who are likely to make society richer and more prosperous, but all children who are likely to become conformists themselves. 

If society in itself is something good, children are something good. If society is merely a neutral meeting place for individuals, children aren't good in themselves. They complicate things and they are hugely expensive. As Chinese leaders saw when they instituted the one-child-policy, and the Chinese public saw when they agreed to it: Children are both expensive and difficult to control. Bullying people for having them looks like the safer option in the short term.

Outsourcing the purpose 

The most successful societies of today became successful because their citizens found it even more important to be citizens than to be family members. Societies where people were most of all loyal with their families couldn't withstand the armies of societies that could cooperate efficiently above the family level. 

The price for this development is that the instinct to form families for the sake of it has been weakened. If people don't get to hear that having numerous children makes you a good citizen, most of them will not want to do that. As long as they don't get a clear signal from society, most of them will be very anxious that forming a family is in fact an antisocial decision that will rightfully lower their social position. Appreciation from the community at large is the prize we have been shaped to crave, even more than raising our own families. Our species has evolved into an impasse where most people wait for social approval before having children. And if that social approval doesn't show up, they don't have any children.

If people are asked the right way they are willing to make many sacrifices and even delight in them. Also bringing up families. The problem is not that society is outsourcing the financial cost of having children to parents. Most societies throughout history have more or less done that. The problem is that society is outsourcing the purpose of having children to parents. That is what we truly need society to provide for us. 

No one has to tell chimpanzees why they should raise and protect their young. But they also don't form armies. Wikimedia Commons.