Turn The Ship Or Leave on Lifeboats
To those who see just how much better is a civilized life, one of the most terrifying things one can learn from history is that pretty much all past civilizations fell. Yes, often the most immediate cause was foreign attacks, or weather changes. But internal decay contributed a lot to most of those falls. And often internal decay was the main direct cause. Often population declined, often due cultural decay.
In fact, it’s hard to find a story of internal civ decay that doesn’t have a big place for cultural decay. Usually something bad happened to common norms, expectation, or strategies. And often many people in the civ saw the decay, and tried to reverse it, but failed.
Of course the bigger and richer a civilization became, the further was its fall afterward, and on average that fall took longer. All of which seems a clear warning to our civilization, which has unprecedented scope (worldwide), wealth, and accomplishment: thought it might take centuries, we too might fall.
While things are going well, this all remains an abstract concern. And as our civ is so different in so many ways from past civs, one might discount history as no longer relevant. But once you start to see some plausibly bad cultural trends, you start to wonder if our culture might be decaying. Yes, one is put off by fact that every era has had such worriers, even in periods of great cultural success. But still the worry remains.
For me, the big trigger was seeing how big, wide, and long lasting has been our world fertility decline. Low fertility in a rich world at peace is clearly biologically maladaptive, showing that our culture is maladaptive in key ways. Suggesting that cultural evolution, which is supposed keep culture adaptive, has gone wrong.
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Tomorrow I leave to speak (and moderate a debate) at NatalCon, a conference on fertility. While I wish this pro-fertility community great success, I fear many treat this like lobbying city hall to fill a pothole, or congress to raise the retirement age, instead of the multigenerational long-shot religious-level conversion project that it is. Our dominant world culture has many deeply-loved components that are pushing fertility down, and it will take an unusually-huge cultural revolution to reverse that.
Yes, you can try to teach your kids and friends to respect fertility, but over generations they will spread out and mix with the world. The ship of world culture is approaching an iceberg, and you either need to get us to turn the whole ship, or exit into subculture lifeboats insular enough to let their differences last for centuries.
Yes, there is a simple win-win financial fix for fertility, but alas I fear we’ll need a cultural revolution to be willing to adopt it.
Added 31Mar: A few comments on the Natalism event.
First, while most speakers connected fertility to conservatism, more had their first allegiance to politics, hoping fertility could help with that, than had their first allegiance to fertility, hoping politics might help with that.
Second, a very wide range of framings were offered, with little consensus on which are most compelling. Shows the early days of such a community. By now, for example, folks concerned about global warming have pretty strong consensus on the framings that are expected and wanted on the topic.
Third, the right does in fact think less abstractly than the left. And my talk on cultural drift was alas pretty abstract.
Fourth, I moderated a debate using a chess clock, which worked well.
Yes, our culture and civilisation is biologically maladaptive. I first started telling my students this story nearly 20 years ago with a comparison to animal keeping in zoos. See, the practical proof that you are keeping your animals in species-correct conditions is when they reproduce in captivity. It can be surprisingly difficult to make it so, and food and shelter are not enough. Turns out that humans too have a hard time reproducing when you put them in high rise cages and the reasons are similarly varied and hard to pin down as they are for zoo animals. But yes we can conclude that the human zoo clearly does not meet the living conditions humans expect. The puzzle for me is, why world wide so? Cultures, beliefs and ways of life vary widely. Not everyone lives in high rises and mere density alone does not seem to be so harmful. Whatever it may be though, the modern world does not meet what we as humans biologically expect.
It's funny, for me the fertility decline is less a sign of cultural decay and more like a miracle. We are so lucky that it turns out that when humans are exposed to modernity we just naturally scale back our fertility to sustainable levels. We have freed ourselves from the Malthusian trap! Thank god the world population isn't 20 billion going on 40 billion.