Why I Am Not A Pronatalist

We live in a time for Natalist Philosophy, not Technocracy

Pronatalists are not remotely moralistic enough.

Society and its norms used to produce children. It pushed people beyond traditional habits and constraints. By the numbers, mankind grew faster in the mid-20th century than ever in human history.

Now, society and its norms destroy children before they exist – literally and metaphorically. The power centers of the world economy — San Francisco, London, Singapore, Shanghai, and its ilk – are zones of exceptional childlessness. Somewhere along the line, the machine of civilization didn’t just break; it started doing exactly the opposite of what it had done before.

If you were the manager of a car factory where the machines stop moving, you’d try to patch things up. If those machines also began hunting down any workers who were still doing your job, there’s something fundamentally wrong about your understanding of the factory, if not the world.

It’s not just that your story is missing something — it’s that your story has fundamentally inverted what is true and false.

This graph is known as a population pyramid:

Source

If you flip your screen upside down, you can just about see the pyramid shape. The reason it’s called a population pyramid is that a healthy society looks like this:

Source

South Korea has more 84-year olds than newborns. Most western societies come short of that regime, but still have some form of the inverted pyramid. We have inverted the structure of society at every level. The balance between adults and children has been inverted. So has the balance between the elderly and adults. They have been inverted economically, politically, and morally. These relationships have not just broken — they have become actively harmful to their original purpose.

I’ve interviewed many of the top pronatalists: Malcolm and

Simone Collins

,

Bennett's Phylactery

,

Lyman Stone

,

Robin Hanson

, and

Richard Hanania

. I consider them all friends. Some, I assure you, are good people.

Right now, pronatalism is a science, not a philosophy. Pronatalists adopt the policy-relevant trust in social science interventions. They suggest baby bonuses, parental leave schemes, tax credits, subsidized childcare. Each of these might be good for their own sake, but none will not solve the fertility problem. Hanson is closer: a subsidy will work as long as it's big enough. But that only defers the problem. Why don’t Western societies have the political will to pass subsidies that are big enough? And if they did, would there even be a need for pronatalism?

I’ve been adjacent to the pronatalist movement for long enough to see people go deeper and deeper into this rabbit hole, finding time and time again that more and more of the norms, conventions, and assumptions of modernity arrayed against them.

Asking the questions at the bottom of the rabbit hole is the purpose of philosophy. Every conversation I have about fertility drops through all of these levels — from technocratic solutions, to incentives, to politics, to the bare fundamentals. And to question the bare fundamentals is to do philosophy. Here’s my problem with them: Pronatalists are autists who get so fixated on the first layer or two that the body of pronatalist thought and discussion remains so far from the fundamental questions of virtue, legitimacy, family, and civilization.

But before we do any philosophy, let’s steelman the autists. What statistics actually say about the inversion of fertility?

1. Fertility fell in the West gradually with the onset of modernity

2. Fertility collapse spread rapidly in the modern developing world as they grew

3. Fertility had temporary increases at times of national crisis like World War 2.

   

So we’re on the hunt for a suspect that matches these three traits. We can add more details to our suspect. It helps to be religious, married, conservative, or at war.

Unlike a factory, civilizations contain competing interests. Different factions and sentiments gain prominence as circumstances change. So it’s possible that behind a gradual change in fertility is a slow migration of people between two distant worldviews.

Let’s return to our fundamental question: why has civilization inverted? Why has it gone from fostering fertility to eroding fertility of those who assimilate to Western culture?

Virtue

The tricky thing about a moral inversion is that it can strike so deep that “dissidents” to modern antinatalism are simply those who repeat 9 in 10 of its premises.

We’re stuck in a mystery that can only be viewed from the outside. Not too long ago, at least one modern philosophy out of many would advocate for higher virtue. Far into the past, this was the prevalent definition of virtue. For example, virtue and education are inseparable for the Athenian Stranger, Plato’s proxy in the Laws:

Because what we mean by education is not yet defined! When

we at present blame or praise the upbringing of different per-

sons, we say that one of us is "educated" and another is "un-

educated," sometimes applying the latter characterization to

human beings who are very well educated in trade or mer-

chant shipping or some other such things. So it's appropriate

that in our present discussion we do not consider these sorts

of training to be education; we mean rather the education

from childhood in virtue, that makes one desire and love to

become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled

with justice.

The connection to fertility is obvious. Fertility is the culmination of a human journey. From an idealistic perspective, it is the pot of gold under the rainbow after adulthood, romance, and marriage.

Virtue had to be attained — it was something that required deliberate effort, cultivation and transformation. Civilization created paths to higher virtue — the point of its institutions was to better its people. We are at the bottom of a millenia-long slippery slope. ‘Democracy’ in social science has resulted in a relativist, egalitarian anti-morality. Leo Strauss diagnoses this problem in his 1957 essay “What is Political Philosophy?”:

It goes without saying that while our social scientist may be confused, he is very far from being disloyal and from lacking integrity. His assertion that integrity and quest for truth are values which one can with equal right choose or reject is a mere movement of his lips and his tongue, to which nothing corresponds in his heart or mind. I have never met any scientific social scientist who, apart from being dedicated to truth and integrity, was not also whole-heartedly devoted to democracy. When he says that democracy is a value which is not evidently superior to the opposite value, he does not mean that he is impressed by the alternative which he rejects, or that his heart or his mind are torn between alternatives which in themselves are equally attractive. His "ethical neutrality" is so far from being nihilism or a road to nihilism that it is not more than an alibi for thoughtlessness and vulgarity: by saying that democracy and truth are values, he says in effect that one does not have to think about the reasons why these things are good, and that he may bow as well as anyone else to the values that are adopted and respected by his society. Social science positivism fosters not so much nihilism as conformism and philistinism.

The reason I emphasize virtue is that it is one crucial way in which social morality — and with it politics, journalism, academia, and commerce — has not just declined, but inverted. Let’s return to the metaphor of the factory. A once-functioning factory with a slowing machine can almost certainly be repaired. But once the machines begin going out of their way to destroy the very thing they were designed to create, you have to ask yourself whether you have anything remotely resembling a factory at all. There is a time and place for technocracy, but it is not now. You can’t use a spreadsheet to fix a factory which has inverted its fundamental functions.

We live in a West where all institutions promoting higher morality have eroded. Egalitarians and relativists have succeeded in denying reality — aided by economic comfort. Ironically, the few bubbles of competence retreat from morality, becoming amoral and apolitical business titans or scientists. Public morality has become hostile to those it depends on most.

It is higher morality that motivates people to transform their lives. When people to get married, have children, or fight in wars, they are paying a personal cost to become something different than they were. They are becoming better people. But if they do not believe they are becoming better people, if even the concept of better people is denied entirely, then civilization must become antagonistic to parents, soldiers, and married couples.

Meanwhile, it is higher morality that inspires someone to create something new. The endless childhood of the modern West demands nothing and gets nothing. Egalitarian morality only knows how to destroy, obstruct, and enslave. It is not capable of making people better because it does not believe in better people. Egalitarian morality is miserable, even on its own terms.

source

Of course, not all men are philosophers. But this morality is present in law, economics, and media. It is present in all human interaction. Fundamental beliefs in good and evil continue to motivate decisions — whether protonalists, who are on the losing side of public morality, admit it or not. The failure of the pronatalists is the failure of the social scientists. Morality is truly all or nothing. Either you believe in higher virtue or you do not. A society which does not believe in higher virtue will spread egalitarian degradation into every element of law, education, commerce, journalism, entertainment, and even the military. Sound familiar?

Likewise, a solution will become baseline morality, or it won’t. It will diffuse itself across all of society, or it won’t. It will survive, or it won’t. That is why the war for natalism is fundamentally a war for philosophy.

Instead, I see the pronatalists as a fundamentally marginal people. They retreat to pluralism and technocracy not as a plan to transform public morality, but as an excuse not to. The smarter ones choose to isolate themselves and hope to escape public morality. That’s a better plan, but still far from ambitious enough.

Regime Change

In Washington DC, I recently came across a famous Catholic Postliberal. I asked him about the possibility of a philosophical regime change — a regime change not just in government or law, but in the way people legitimize moral and factual claims. He told me that after Trump took office, he had hope for that for the first time.

In my ideal pronatalist scenario, the Trump administration could be the scream that sets off an avalanche. I believe America is ready for virtue-glasnost, for a wave of fervor, mimicry, and spiritual ritual in which the pursuit of virtue goes from hidden and unthinkable to omnipresent. Ultimately, I believe that is how philosophical revolutions occur. If I were dictator of pronatalism, I would direct full attention towards pursuing the scream that sets off an avalanche.

In my opinion, the Trump administration remains short of that. They may be a political regime change. Trump’s victory might have set off an avalanche in how tech thinks of itself or how conservatives think of the administrative state. We are certainly closer to a philosophical regime change than they were before. But I believe the egalitarian regime — the regime against transformation — will outlast Trump.