verybody knows we're in a depopulation crisis. The problem is not that
we don't know why it's happening. The problem is we don't want to face
it because there is no good solution, so people convince themselves that
the cause is something else—something they can change.
Demographer Paul Morland in a new book titled No One Left mentions half a dozen reasons: loss of religion, low sperm counts, too much education, high cost of housing. You can imagine a dozen more. Maybe global warming or microplastics. Morland concludes that the problem is that women aren't liberated enough, so the solution is “greater female emancipation.” If only men would do more housework, he says, the depopulation crisis would solve itself.
Morland is an academic. Maybe he's worried that if he mentioned the real reason, feminists might start talking about that dreadful movie where everyone was forced to wear red capes and ridiculously big white bonnets, and maybe hound him out of his job. Or worse: make a sequel.
Here's my theory: depopulation is caused by cell phones.
Having a cell phone is like having a baby. You have to carry it around all the time wrapped up in a special blanket and swipe it a lot to keep it happy. You have to plug something into its special aperture for hours at a time to give it energy. It starts making annoying noises every couple of hours to get your attention, even in the middle of the night, and you have to get up and take care of it. You have to be careful not to let it fall into a swimming pool, or it will drown.
Then when it gets 15 or 16 years old, it starts acting up. It doesn't always answer. It won't always take a charge. It's sometimes hard to get it out of sleep mode, and sometimes it makes loud unexpected banging noises.
This is why young people no longer want to have babies. As far as their subconscious brain is concerned, they already had one.
Convinced? It hits all the right buttons. It's something people already believe is a problem. It doesn't offend any special interest group, and the solution is pretty easy: turn off your cell phone. That's the appeal of fake solutions: nobody gets offended, no problem will ever get fixed, nothing ever changes, and we can go on pretending the problem will solve itself. And it frees academics to propose solutions that won't work but don't get them in trouble.
The hard fact is that our civilization made a bad decision from which there is no escape. Morland's solution won't work: even if we had robots to do all the housework, provided free daycare, and did all the other things people say they want, there's no reason to think that would solve the problem. The probability that volunteering to dust off the wife's cat figurine collection once a month will solve will solve the biggest problem faced by mankind is next to nil. If the husband volunteered to wash the dishes, according to researchers who study these things, she'd likely get “the ick,” which means he'd find her floating upside down in the fish tank with white spots on her fins.
That's because this isn't a economic problem or a political or moral problem. It's a biological one. The basic cause is that sex has been dissociated from reproduction. There is now an enormous disincentive to reproducing. To say it a different way, modern society is in conflict with biology. You don't have to be a biologist to know this is not a tenable situation for a species.
The sex drive transforms the brain, changing our values and inducing us to form attachments that are necessary for the task of raising children. Its purpose is to condition us to associate these difficult tasks with physical happiness. When sex and reproduction are dissociated, that gradually falls apart. Depending on any number of cultural factors, birthrates will decrease; maybe a little, or maybe catastrophically.
There are three possible ways to respond: (1) claim it's beneficial and hope it goes away; (2) find some other way to incentivize people to have children when it's strongly against their individual interest to do so; or (3) use technology to finish the job started by the Pill and separate sex from reproduction entirely.
Take your pick. If there's a better option, we need to hear it. At least we need to be honest about what's happening, why, and what the stakes could be.
aug 10 2024, 4:26 am. updated aug 11 2024, 5:24 am
