On the most recent episode of The Good Fight podcast, host Yascha Mounk interviews author Dean Spears on the subject of population. Or more specifically, the subject of his new book (After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People), the problem of depopulation.
A few times throughout the interview the word “math” was evoked to define their particular approach to the subject. I’m always fascinated by such conversations. Reducing the laws that govern our existence to a math equation certainly fits for the physicist in the room. Somehow though, once we get into the complex workings of existence itself, or our experience of it, reducing such an experience to a math equation feels like it betrays the emptiness of such an approach.
What makes this more problematic is that, in this case the numbers apply to the authors desire to uphold a kind of unspoken and undefined value statement, something you can hear him subtly slipping in and out of as he moves to justify certain concerns using reductionist terms.
The concerns can essentailly be summarized as fleshing out the relationship between population growth and progress. As the analysis goes, the spike that we saw in human population, which has brought us to 8 billiion people in a relatively short amount of time, is masking what is most likely an inevitable shift towards depopulation. Here its a simple numbers game- the trend of any progressive society is decreased childbirth. We can note this in the most progressed societies in which child birth is below the magic number of 2 children per 2 adults. We can also see it in less progressed societies which are still above that number and presently sustaining our global population, as even a shift from 5 to 4, or 4 to 3 reflects the same inevitable trend moving at a striking speed. It’s a quick moving trend precisely because any decrease in numbers has an immediate and direct impact on the next generation. Less people in a given generation means less ability to increase the population.
There are numerous observations and questions that go along with this, all of which eventually lead to that bigger concern: what is the relationship between this and progress, and how do the two impact one another. For example, progress is often seen to correlate with education, and it would appear that one of the biggest things that fuels a generation that has less kids is education, especially for women. Why? This can be debated, but one liklihood is that education prioritizes numerous other things above systems that encourage and support birthrates. In Western culture, it also tends to correlate with the rise of individualism and the decline of things that grow and develop family systems. Without even making a value statement, the rational observation suggests that any culture which is predominated by declines in marriage, long term relationships, non-nuclear family structures, results in a drastic decline in population growth. It simply is what it is.
Here is where things get really interesting though. The author is very clear about seeing the decline of progress as a bad thing. He also sees depopuluation as a bad thing. What becomes clear the more he speaks to both of these things is that they are far more interconnected than first appearances might allow. To the point where, what starts to emerge is a kind of cyclical pattern, Progress leads to depopulation. But population is needed for progress. At this point I kept wondering whether the real crisis point here is an incoherent value system.
To underscore this point he pushes back on anyone who thinks over-population is the cause of our worlds problems. It is not over-population, rather it is people living wrongly that is the problem. Here again though he kind of muddles his way through an incoherent point of perspective and smuggles in undefined value statements. He wants to state that the problems emerge from populations living wrongly (defined as living in ways that do harm to the environment), but he also wants to state that the growth in population is what creates the pockets that have come up with solutions to the problems, something he sees progress as enabling. You can see how this starts to trip over itself on logical grounds, trying to get from one to the other and back again every time it runs into an apparent contradiction. Kind of like trying to make a case that the advancements progress handed us which allow for unrestricted sex without concern for pregnancy have played a significant role in the seemingly inevitable depopulation problem, but that overpopulation is what handed us the necessary progress to have those advancements in the first place.
Welcome to a world reduced to a math equation.
Welcome to a world that has bound itself to the myth of progress.
It’s the same problem he attaches to the rising rates of life expectancy around the world, a key factor in disguising the trend of depopulation from numbers that might suggest the opposite. The reason for the illusion of an increase in population trend is the simple fact that more kids are being had that not only survive past infancy and into childhood, but that adults are also sticking around at the same time. When you add 30/40/50 years to a lifespan, the numbers will go up expanentially in the short term even as birthrates decline. But there again, you come back to progress as the thing that enables something that then brings its own set of problems that progress has to solve (aging). Which of course is the number one thing that impedes progress in other areas (inherent concern for all persons of all ages).
So here’s my thought process on this. And as I was thinking about it, I was thinking back to that period of our life where we found out we could not have kids (we being my wife and I). It’s odd for me to think that this had such an impact on our lives. When you think about the socieity that we actually live in this shouldn’t be the case. Finding out that we couldn’t have kids should have been the thing that handed us the world progress promised us. The liberated individual who can make the world whatever we want it to be. That’s not at all what it felt like though. It felt like we lost our place in the world. The liberated individual that the myth of progress hands us is a lonely life to inhabit. Which might be why its so effective in pushing people to instead sink their lives into the aims of progress.
There’s another outcome of this that might be even worse though. That’s the notion that the world this myth of progress hands us is one in which overpopulation is necessary precisely because it hands you that necessary pool of potential exceptional persons and collaborations that bring progress about. That simply means that while all of these people are required for those pockets and persons to emerge, the vast majority are in a way sacrificial lambs. We are only needed as part of a numbers game. Which is what makes the fact that progress is similtaneously inhibited by those numbers and its supposed moral and ethical obligation to extend energy and attention in attending to them so ironic. This is precisely what we find though in such a view. The push and pull that the disparity between forms of affluence and forms of poverty cause (or the strong and the weak, the exceptional minority and the greater majority).
This is precisely why I see the role of the cynic as so necessary. Sure, on some level we can locate functional societies in which all of these realities are equally necessary, and then satisfy our point of persepctive by looking at the world progress has handed us and convincing ourselves that this is an end and an aim in and of itself. After all, we would never want to revert that way things were, right. We wouldn’t want to be like those lesser backwards people and societies. So we reinforce our convictions by creating those necessary scapegoats. All while we see history hurtling forwards towards who knows where and who knows why. Every advancement creating its whole new set of pains and problems, all while selling us on the idea that we could not live or thrive without it.
And then we get confronted by this data. Progress has created a problem of depopulation. We in the progressive West cannot sustain it because future generations won’t have the numbers. And all those other countries that we insisted needed to become like us, well the more they become like us the less childeren they have. Raise the alarm bells. Except lets be clear about what those alarms are for: a fear of losing hold of the privileged position western exceptionalism hands us.
To return to my own observations regarding our experience of not being able to have kids. There is something that happens when you lose your sense of place in this world. Something else happens though when you become aware of the fact that this is both because of the way the cultural conssruct (marriage, family) judges you, AND because of the way the myth of progress judges you. That’s what the proper cynic is analyziing. Except, a proper cynic is also not embracing defeatism and nihilism. Rather, it is a seeking after what it is that actually matters, what is actually true. A true value. What is it precisely that all of these cultural constructs are responding to, and do our social constructs reflect that or not. Perhaps thats the real crisis at hand. And here’s the most revealing thing. When we are looking at less progressive socities and saying both that they have something we value (higher birth rates, which is essential to progress) and that we have something they value (progress, which leads to our depopulized societies), perhaps the obvious muddledness of that whole equation should be the first thing leading us to question our foundations.
The Stories of my Life 