Pronatalism is inherently groupish

The human race is not in danger of extinction. The purpose of pronatalism is not to save the human race, but to save certain human civilizations

Malcolm and Simone Collins, Wikimedia Commons

After only having known them superficially from their bespectacled media appearances, I recently was sent a book called  The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life (2018) by Simone and Malcolm Collins. It is kind of a Socratic manual for how to make conscious decisions concerning life goals and beliefs. The moral is something like all beliefs are equal, as long as they are the result of conscious thought.

It would be a lie to say that I read the book. I browsed it and read a little here and there. Not because it was badly written or stupid - it definitely wasn't - but because it was so self-evident. Of course every presumed truth should be questioned, always. However, the book taught me something: The Collinses are to be taken seriously. Their weird spectacles and fashion choices are not a signal that they are media clowns, but just a way to market themselves as intellectuals (which I should highly respect, given their success in that venture compared to my own). Also, I think they seem very sympathetic. Somewhat like Anders and me, but successful.

Simple math 

My main reason not to take the Collinses seriously in the first place was mostly not their glasses, but their arguments. Their brand of pronatalism is explicitly anti-racist, anti-groupish and anti-ideological. The human race is an endangered species, they say. Every child, in every group of humans, is a part of the solution to this crisis.

Before reading their book about how to be intellectually genuine, I couldn't believe that they believed that themselves. But since they have written a whole book about doing, talking and looking in accordance with what one genuinely believes, I have to change my mind there: Probably they actually believe their own message.

But it is still a bit difficult, because that message doesn't add up logically and mathematically. Yes, a sustained birth rate below 2 will make the human race smaller and smaller until it goes extinct. But only if the human race is not divided into groups where some groups have a higher birth rate. Then some groups of humans will decrease exponentially and other groups will increase exponentially. The human race will not disappear. Its composition will just be altered in favor of those who know how to make children.

If it turns out that the groups that know how to make children are currently small, there might be a blip where the human population of planet Earth actually does decrease for a time. But the exponential nature of population increase will make sure that such a decrease becomes just a blip. The human race has rebounded from many crises before. It will rebound from the population crisis too.

Preserving civilization 

The failure to recognize this simple mathematical fact makes the birth rate debate stupid. For example, Scott Alexander has, in his usual tone of intelligent naivety, dismissed the whole problem of population decline for that reason among others. When Elon Musk says that population decline is a threat against civilization, mass media gives him the (mathematically correct) answer that the world's population isn't declining at all. Maybe it's a sign of my unusually high score on the autism scale, but I can't really figure out who is playing naive and who is for real. Does Elon Musk just avoid spelling out clearly that he isn't concerned about the future of the human race as a whole, but of Western civilization? Do those who argue against him just pretend that they don't understand that, or do they really believe that he can't do the math? Anyone's guess.

Whoever is stupid for real and whoever is pretending: We can do better than this. Let's discuss the real reasons behind pronatalism. 

It would be fun to claim that pronatalism is inherently racist. But that is not really the case. Although “race” is fluid and not easily defined, the Amish, the most fertile population segment in the United States, must be said to be of the same Germanic stock as much of the white population. Urging the majority white population to procreate is not about preserving whiteness - the Amish are already doing that. Admittedly just a sliver of all white genomes get propagated through the Amish, but still - they are definitely white.

Instead, pronatalism is about preserving civilizations. Something I wrote about here: there are exceptions, but by and large, lifestyle and ideas tend to be inherited from parents to children. For that reason, a shift in demographics means a shift in way of life. 

The current low fertility levels in the developed world is not likely to lead to a much smaller global population. Instead, it will lead to:

1. More religion

2. More Africans

3. Less technology

The future is religious 

Point one is simple. Economist Eric Kauffman has outlined it in Will the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010). Obviously they will, Kauffman writes, because they, or at least some of them, have children. That almost inevitably means that societies will shift towards the norms of religious groups. 

The future is African

Point 2 should be a very serious concern for effective altruists. Africa currently has a total fertility rate of about 4. The parts of the world that send the bulk of the aid to Africa have fertility rates below 2. That means that in the next generation, there will be fewer donors to help twice as many Africans. 

When I have raised this question in the rationalist community, I have mostly gotten negative responses. Africa will be fine, because it is getting off aid, I have been told. No need to worry about the future there. 

The question is: Who says that? What are the signs that Africa is expanding its own production of food and medicine faster than population growth? I strongly suspect those projections are based on wishful thinking and political correctness more than anything else. And although many people assume that being politically correct is ethical, they are dead wrong. Saving people from malaria while refusing to think of who will save those people's children from malaria is not ethical at all. It is the very opposite to effective altruism. And still, effective altruists are doing exactly that. For example, Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten habitually uses malaria treatment as a baseline for effective altruism.

Then there is the argument that Africa's population will eventually stabilize because the continent’s rate of population growth is currently in decline. That argument is wrong for the same reason that the global population collapse projections are wrong. Just as there are cultural pockets of above-replacement fertility in the developed world, there will be such cultural pockets in Africa, also if much of the population gets Westernized. And just as in the developed world, those cultural pockets will take over the game. With current demographic trends, development and Westernization of Africa will just be a blip, if it happens much at all. If Westernized Africans have much fewer children than traditional Africans, the traditionally-minded people will soon take over the continent. 

The future is low-tech

There are high-fertility populations all over the world. They are of different races and of different religions. The number one thing they have in common is that they are less technologically advanced than surrounding populations. 

I outlined an explanation here: Technology development is being done best in child-unfriendly factories and offices. People who forsake children in order to focus on work become more successful. That raises their standards of living, inspiring others to copy their low-fertility culture, until almost everyone becomes part of it. 

But only almost everyone: Those who belong to cultures that have methods to make their members resist the appeal of a high standard of living do not become part of mainstream low-fertility culture. The Amish, who are outrightly banned from competing for advantageous positions in the modern economy are the prime examples of that kind of resistance to the appeal of the majority culture. But there are many other groups too that have mechanisms to prevent their members from fleeing to the lifestyle of majority culture.

People who prioritize high-tech, efficient production are busy producing high-tech goods and services and assisting those who do. They have little time to have children, so they become fewer and fewer. That way, human cultures that are upholding cutting-edge technologies are becoming smaller and smaller, while some cultures that don't deal much with advanced technologies are getting bigger. 

The eternal return

One obvious result of this contraction of high-tech cultures and expansion of low-tech cultures is that technology is developing less than it could have done. But there is a much more serious problem: The Malthusian nature of expansionist low-tech societies. As we have seen during the last two centuries, population expansion combined with ever-advancing technology is going fine. As the human race has seen during all the rest of history, population expansion on a fixed level of technology leads to a Malthusian situation, which leads to wars between groups of humans.

Then we will be back into the same situation that led to the dominance of high-tech societies in the first place: Cultural evolution through war. When low-tech populations grow, they will sooner or later encounter subsistence constraints. Then they will inevitably find an excuse to expand onto the territory of their neighbors. Since this is what has happened during human history as a whole, there is no reason to assume that it wouldn't happen again. 

War is the great engine of human group evolution. And human group evolution is the great engine of development. War was what once made high-tech societies expand and vanquish low-tech societies. It happened for a reason: High-tech societies were better at producing arms and soldiers. 

For that reason, it will happen again. If low-tech societies take over the world, they will go to war with each other. That will slowly and painfully restart the evolutionary process that leads to technology development. The societies that are capable of digging up the know-how to make tanks and drones will win those wars. Those that aren't will lose them. In the struggle against each other, low-tech cultures will be forced to become high-tech or perish.

Up to the Second World War, this process was going on in the world as a whole. High-tech society only recently put it on pause and largely replaced competition through war with competition through market forces. As soon as society reverts to lower levels of technology, the struggle will be picked up again.

The real reason to multiply 

The process of group evolution that led to high-tech society was both painful and inevitable. It also led to something valuable: In spite of all its flaws, technology serves humanity. Both in itself and through the incentives it gives to avoid war. 

If those of us who uphold the spirit of high-tech groups fail to reproduce, we are wasting that progress. If we allow the world to slide back into low-tech mode, the very painful and costly process of social evolution toward higher levels of technology development will have to be repeated. That is both wasteful and will cost immense human suffering, just as it did last time it was done. 

The very reason for people in high-tech groups to have more children is to avoid such a rerun of history. What was achieved by our societies during the last couple of hundred years is immensely valuable and was immensely costly to achieve. Wasting that progress through not defending our civilization is, I dare to say, deeply unethical. 

I have previously discovered that I have eerie similarities with the Unabomber in terms of personality and life history. But my moral conclusions are the total opposite from his: I'm convinced that defending high-tech society is the right thing to do. High-tech society is not an accident of history. It is the result of cultural evolution. That cultural evolution was tremendously costly, but led the human race to less violence and less suffering. In our time, it is becoming obvious that high-tech society has an important weakness: While we have finally learned how to trigger technology development without deliberately killing each other, we haven't learned how to uphold this progress across generations. That is the job for us living now. Compared to many of the horrors of the 20th century, it is a rather pleasant task.