People don’t just breed and breed
It’s a blessing to have seed
This transmission started off as a steader heap but turned into a uniform argument.
In this transmission we propose that the assumption that humans are Malthusian is ill-formed; point out that based on results our current culture is not nourishing for human reproduction; and provide a number of analytical jumping off points and practical suggestions for founding and sustaining a nourishing family culture.
Found and sustain. In certain niches and milieus there is a great deal of support for being a founder. In others, for sustainability. Hardly ever are the two synthesized. Isn’t it obvious that the two go hand in hand, that each one is sterile without the other?
You will also find a paradigm shift on artificial wombs.
Humans are not Default Malthusian Animals.
This transmission proposes a paradigm shift. Humans are not Malthusian animals. Our numbers are a hard-won achievement.
ScifFi author Devon Eriksen makes the case (nitter).
The major weakness of the human species is infertility.
What do I mean by that? I mean that the human reproductive cycle is extremely fragile and easy to disrupt.
In evolution, as in engineering, there are always tradeoffs. Humans are very, very smart, and this has done wonderful things for us, but we pay a price, and most of that price is the extreme difficulty of our reproductive cycle.
This is easiest to understand in physical terms. To be born, a human infant must pass through the pelvic girdle of his mother, and emerge from the vagina... which stretches quite a bit for this process, but there are limits, and bone, of course, does not stretch at all. The head is the widest part of the human infant, and the least squishy (a technical term which I just made up). Yes, an infant head can and does compress and deform somewhat during birth, but there are limits to this, too.
What this all means is that humans must be born before their heads get too big to allow them to be born at all.
And what that means is that, from the perspective of some other mammal, like, say, a horse, human births are all premature. Not enough development has happened. A horse's gestation period is 11-12 months, which allows the colt plenty of time to develop, and it shows, because they can typically walk a few minutes after being born, and can run within a day. If a human baby were to come so late, both mother and baby would die. Dead end, edited out of the gene pool.
So what we have instead is a sort of emergent design compromise, where you get childbirth which is extremely painful and high-risk (compared to other species), but still results in an underdeveloped infant which is too weak to lift its head and will be totally dependent on 24/7 care for years.
Bearing and then caring for, an infant like this is a LOT of risk and work for mother, and while civilization does some transfer of some of that to the father, this just means it's a lot of work and expense for the father, too. Simply put, having babies is much more of a pain in the ass for humans than for any other species. So it requires a lot of resources, and really strong motivation.
When you view it at that abstract level, it becomes pretty easy to understand why it's so easy to make humans stop breeding, especially when they are sophisticated enough to be able to satisfy their sex urges without accidentally making babies.
Unhappy childhood? -> Don't wanna have kids.
Delayed age of marriage? -> Fertility problems.
Economic stress? Both parents gotta work? -> Can't afford time off to have kids. Disrupted sex roles? -> Women don't want kids.
Loss of respect for fatherhood? -> Men don't want kids.
Disruption of mating rituals? -> No stable family, no kids.
I'm sure we all can think of more. Yes, those who successfully have children report tremendous payoffs in happiness and life satisfaction, but unless this is culturally communicated and reinforced, it doesn't actually motivate breeding. Saying "I'm glad I had kids" simply isn't enough.
Malthusians, with their delusions that human overpopulation is a serious risk, try to influence culture in ways that discourage child-bearing. As such, they are literally attacking the human race at its weakest point. Our economic and technological lives are tremendously robust, but our reproductive cycle is not.
Our default isn’t to breed to the level of our carrying capacity. Human reproduction is hard, humans are agents and have large social-cultural elements in their courtship and mating and raising of progeny, and social cultural elements are big, complicated, and fragile.
Human reproduction is a complex biological system hybridized with a complex social system.
Yes, humans are a wonderfully unique animals, so it shouldn’t be shocking to say that Malthus is not the default for humans. Yet the claim that humans are not default Malthusian animals is a non-Copernican claim. Lots of other animals also seem to suffer from constraints on breeding when outside the right type of experienced environment. How many critters require D-day levels of coordinated attack just to breed in zoos?
On the spectrum of K-selected v. r-selected breeding animals, K-selected animals like humans are more likely to have disruptable reproduction and rearing, in addition to being more likely to be picky about the circumstances for even breeding in the first place since breeding is more of an investment. Humans are not the only species where mothers’ bodies will trigger miscarriage if the body receives signals that conditions are just too rough. But even r-selected animals will sometimes fail to reach the carrying capacity of their environment even without predation, disease, or chemical disruptors. In the famous Mouse Utopia experiment eventually the mice just … stopped.
The assumption that we have the same default reproductive strategy as rats or deer is just an assumption. Yes, there have been Malthusian periods in human history where the engine of human reproduction was ticking over and the populations pushed up against the carrying capacity until enough of us got sick or we had some wars. Even famines. Late medieval France and periods in Chinese history are examples.
There are also plenty of examples of periods when human populations have failed to reach Malthusian limits without wars or disease to explain it. The most obvious examples are nearly every modern society. Although we can blame chemicals or something else unique about industrialization or technology, those by themselves cannot fully explain it. The drop in birth rates started in France, Britain, and America before industrialization had become significant.
It is also clear centuries before industrialization first Hellenistic Greece and then Rome suffered a serious, ongoing, and never quite repaired failure to reproduce. Indeed, although careful work in historical demography has not been done to the degree needed and may not be possible to do, there is some evidence that in the Byzantine period the Greeks continued to underpopulate. Slavs, Armenians, and other ethnicities continued to inflow even into rural areas often without violence and sometimes by invitation. Eastern European rulers in the late middle and early modern periods also eagerly sought for settlers, though it is difficult to sort out why the populations there were not reaching carrying capacity, assuming they were not, or to what extent the immigrants were increasing the carrying capacity with more sophisticated techniques.
In reading Herodotus, one is struck by the number of times Herodotus mentions the expanding Greek populations of his day establishing a new city colony somewhere where the local population were indifferent or even supportive. It was so unusual for a new colony to be opposed that Herodotus remarks on it extensively when it did happen. Though the reasons are murky, it seems unlikely that the Mediterranean world was at the Malthusian limits.
It seems evident that human reproduction is not a given, even in the absence of disease or war. A burgeoning population or even a stable one is an achievement, that needs explained just as much as a shrinking one does. Flourishing human reproduction requires extensive social technology.
So let us propose a second paradigm shift. Artificial wombs already exist. They are called families, communities, and societies. Human biological wombs don’t work well without them.
Our task is not the impossible one of inventing a new kind of artificial womb. Our task is the much simpler one of reconstructing the kind that we already have.
Artificial wombs already exist
Though you live in what at least by its effects seems to be a ruined social environment, the good news is that you and your children and eventually your grandchildren can still live a fully rewarding, reproductive life. You can form your own social environment aka your own family culture. You can construct your own customized artificial womb.
It’s easy!
What you cannot do is just drift. The most important target of your teaching is you, to remind you what you are doing, that it is worth doing, and that you are doing it well. To this end we prescribe frequent self-reinforcement.
The Family Culture Series
Such as, for instance, reading M. Perrone’s new series on building family culture. He applies a start-up, entrepeneurial framework to the task of flourishing a family.
Charting a New Course : Getting to the Next Generation
Weathering the Initial Hiccups : Catching The Vision... From The Comfort Of The Ruins
Staying out of the Ruts : Conservative No More
Real Rites of Passage and Transformative Growth for your Children : Passage & Commitment
If frameworks and big pictures work for you, read those. If you like something more specific, then see below, or how about his latest? Boo smartphones. Living With Radioactive Waste - by Michael Perrone (substack.com)
WhiteBoardTopia
Here’s another practical, hands-on suggestion for forming family identity through family culture. Produce some family culture yourself. You want it to be home-made and involves everyone’s participation.
A family whiteboard meets the bill.
We discovered this technique by accident when we installed a whiteboard on a utility door for homeschool and chore list purposes. We started adding inspirational quotes, the kids asked if they could doodle, and it went from there. Now we use it for games where one child will reproduce a Calvin and Hobbes panel and the rest have to guess the strip, for poetry, for impromptu art, for whatever comes to mind. Its public mural and public forum in one, for a very select public.
We also have had good experience with homemade stickers. Kids love stickers. They especially love one’s they’ve made themselves. You can buy sticker paper they can draw on themselves, or buy sheets of sticker backing for existing work, or a product designed to act as a laminate over an existing object but with a peel-off backing so the sticker does not have to be used right away.
If adults and older teenagers participate from time to time, it lends prestige and sets a higher aspiration for quality.
The end result is household cultural production. Rewarding, identity-forming, and unifying.