Modernity’s Fertility Problem – Jacobite
MODERNITY’S FERTILITY PROBLEM
Nick Land - June 20, 2017 -
Photograph by Amanda Elledge.
The techno-commercial wing of the neoreactionary blogosphere has an obvious fondness for
Pacific Rim city states. Singapore, along with Hong Kong (a PRC ‘Special Administrative
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Modernity’s Fertility Problem – Jacobite
Region’ which retains significant trappings of autonomy), are regularly invoked as sociopolitical models. The striking difference between the two societies only confirms the merits of
what they share. “If you love minimal democracy capitalist enclaves so much, why not move
to Singapore (or Hong Kong)?” is a notably ineffective challenge to this constituency. Those
who haven’t already fled there – or somewhere else that is in important respects comparable –
can only see the prospect of such an exile as a tempting invitation. It’s not quite “Go to
heaven!” but it’s as close as political polemic gets. The asymmetry is decisive. Unlike any
concrete approximation to a left-utopian social model that has ever been available, these are
societies that incontestably work, with attractions that require no active propaganda operation
to support. The right rises because – unlike its enemies – it can find examples of what it
admires that aren’t agonizingly embarrassing upon close inspection. Seriously, be our guests
and look more attentively. The details are even more impressive than the dazzling general
impression. This would be a great place to stop, but instead…
…in March 2013, dissident right blogger ‘Spandrell’ put up a short post on his abrasive but
consistently brilliant Bloody Shovel site that messed up the narrative in a way that has yet to be
persuasively addressed. Entitled ‘Et tu, Harry?,’ it placed the Singapore miracle in a
disconcerting context. Rather than harmonizing with neoreactionary celebrations of the city
state’s unapologetically selective immigration policy, Spandrell asks:
How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely they
are not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage in the
finance and marketing rat-race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting
valuable genes just so your property prices don’t go down. Singapore is an
IQ shredder.
The accusation is acute, and can be generalized. Modernity has a fertility problem. When
elevated to the zenith of savage irony, the formulation runs: At the demographic level,
modernity selects systematically against modern populations. The people it prefers, it
consumes. Without gross exaggeration, this endogenous tendency can be seen as an existential
risk to the modern world. It threatens to bring the entire global order crashing down around it.
In order to discuss this implicit catastrophe, it’s first necessary to talk about cities, which is a
conversation that has already begun. To state the problem crudely, but with confidence: Cities
are population sinks. Historian William McNeil explains the basics. Urbanization, from its
origins, has tended relentlessly to convert children from productive assets into objects of
luxury consumption. All of the archaic economic incentives related to fertility are inverted.
McNeil summarizes his argument in an online essay considering ‘Cities and their
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Top
Modernity’s Fertility Problem – Jacobite
Consequences’:
Intensified exposure to infectious disease was the traditional reason why
cities did not reproduce themselves. […] But it is the cost of raising
children in all urban environments, not disease, that best explains why
urban populations generally decline without immigrants from rural areas.
Wherever adults go off to work in factories, shops and offices, and small
children are not allowed to accompany them, who looks after the young?
How can they be readied for gainful employment? Public education and
pre-schooling are seldom available in urban slums, particularly outside
Western countries, but occasionally even within them, too. Grandmothers
and elderly neighbors can sometimes do the job, but extended family
coherence is not as prevalent in cities, and often such caregivers are not
available. Professionals of various descriptions must then be found. That
renders the cost of children’s upkeep high, and the nurturing that such
professionals usually offer rarely matches their large fees. […] Even as
children are more expensive in cities, they are less economically useful at
an early age. There are few berries to be picked, no small domesticated
animals to herd. There is a much longer wait until children can begin to
contribute to family income in urban settings.
Education expenses alone explain much of this. School fees are by far the most effective
contraceptive technology ever conceived. To raise a child in an urban environment is like
nothing that rural precedent ever prepared for. Even if responsible parenting were the sole
motivation in play, the compressive effect on family size would be extreme. Under urban
circumstances, it becomes almost an aggression against one’s own children for there to be
many of them. But there is much more than this going on.
Recognition of the modern fertility crisis and the ‘far right’ – whether in its ‘misogynistic’ or
its ‘racist’ strains – are not easily distinguishable. The egalitarian axiom, as applied to gender
or to ethnicity, comes under critical strain as the topic is pursued. A general theory of the postconservative right would be productively initiated here.
Feminism has been the first, inevitable target. It is tightly correlated with the collapse of
fertility, and is something modernity tends (strongly) to promote. The expansion of female
social opportunities beyond obligate child-rearing could scarcely lead anywhere other than to a
drastic contraction of family size. The inexorable modern trend to social decoding – i.e. to the
production of an abstract contractual agency in the place of concretely determined persons –
makes the explosion of such opportunities apparently uncontainable. The individualism
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Modernity’s Fertility Problem – Jacobite
fostered by urban life might, to the counter-factual imagination, have been in some way
restricted to males, but as a matter of actual historical fact the dereliction of traditional social
roles has proceeded without serious limitation, with variation in speed, but no indication of
alternative direction. The radically decoded Internet persona – optionally anonymous,
fabricated, and self-defining – seems no more than an extrapolation from the emergent norms
of urban existence. Feminist assumptions, at least in their ‘first-wave,’ liberal form, are
integral to the modern city.
Religious traditionalist lamentations in this regard are, of course, nothing new. Christianity –
especially under Catholic inspiration – has connected modernity to sterility for as long as
modernity has been noticed. A number of crucial factors have nevertheless changed. Since the
early years of the new millennium, secular liberals have begun to notice the connection
between religiosity and fertility, and to express gathering concern about its partisan political
consequences. In a 2009 paper, Sarah R. Hayford and S. Philip Morgan discuss the transition
from a traditional discussion of the topic, focused upon differential Catholic and Protestant
fertility, to its contemporary mode, subsequent to the convergence of denominational
differences, and now mapping more closely onto red / blue state partisan affiliations. Their
abstract is worth citing (almost) in full:
Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), we
show that women who report that religion is “very important” in their
everyday life have both higher fertility and higher intended fertility than
those saying religion is “somewhat important” or “not important.”
Factors such as unwanted fertility, age at childbearing, or degree of
fertility postponement seem not to contribute to religiosity differentials in
fertility. This answer prompts more fundamental questions: what is the
nature of this greater “religiosity”? And why do the more religious want
more children? We show that those saying religion is more important have
more traditional gender and family attitudes and that these attitudinal
differences account for a substantial part of the fertility differential.
“Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?” asked Eric Kaufmann in a 2010 book with that name.
A peculiar twist in the Darwinian inheritance had begun to bring the heritability of religious
attitudes into prominence, and linking it (positively) to the question of reproductive fitness.
Those groups previously seen as having been unambiguously vanquished by a triumphant
evolutionary science were now subject to an ironic – and from the progressive perspective
deeply sinister – evolutionary vindication. This is a story that has still scarcely begun to
unfold.
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Modernity’s Fertility Problem – Jacobite
A parallel development, compounding the commitment of cultural modernity to imperative
sterility, has been the efflorescence of LGBTQXYZ sexual identity politics. Following the
decisive progressive victory in the cause of gay marriage, something like a Cambrian
Explosion in non-traditional sexual and gender orientations has occurred, turbo-charging the
pre-existing feminist critique of normative reproductive sexuality. Here, too, the affinity with
profound modernistic inclinations is unmistakable, in a process of introjected brand and niche
specialization. The tendency – often supported as an explicit political strategy – is to invert the
terms of marginalization, by drowning the reproductive family unit within a hyper-inflated
menu of socio-libidinal positions. Fertility is increasingly identified as a conservative
eccentricity, legitimately targeted by partisan political warfare. Intense backlash has been
among the results (providing fertile ground for the post-conciliatory ‘far right’).
Oh, but there’s more. The truly great transition, implicit in the process of modernity from the
start, is marked by the threshold between domestic and global urbanization. Major cities have
always been distinctively cosmopolitan, but for the initial phase of their histories the bulk of
their demographic absorption has been limited to their own ethnic hinterlands. Urbanization
meant, first of all, the conversion of rural populations into city dwellers. In the developing
world, it still means this. In the most advanced modern societies, however, domestic rural
populations were almost fully consumed, reduced to some negligible fraction of the national
total. After this point, the process of population replacement intrinsic to the urban phenomenon
from its beginning became inextricably bound to globalization, and trans-national migration
flows. Now – which really is now – things get interesting.
Politics, by prophetic etymology, is about cities. The inevitability of an emergent ‘Alt-Right’
in the mass politics of advanced modern societies is already fully predictable from a minimal
understanding of how cities work. It is simple delusion to imagine that mere contingency rules
here, perhaps under the guidance of particular political personalities. Rather, the urban
metabolism – essentially – at a certain phase of its development, generates circumstances
overwhelmingly conducive to the eruption of popular ethno-politics. Cities are demographic
parasites. They trend intrinsically to a dynamic that – beyond a comparatively definite
threshold – cannot fail to be perceived as a systematic policy of ethnic replacement.
There is still much hope of coaxing toothpaste back into its tubes. In other words, there is a
massive failure to appreciate the profundity and magnitude of the processes underlying the
current global crisis. For instance, the incendiary language of migration-driven ‘genocide’ is
not going away. It is bound, on the contrary, to spread, and intensify. The re-emergence of the
race topic, and all of its associates, is deeply baked into the modernist cake. Comparative
modernity is automatically racialized once global metabolism lends differential (urban/rural)
fertility its ethnic specificity. What is unfolding, among other things, is the racial
disaggregation of the ‘population bomb,’ with drastic inevitability. This is not a product of
intellectuals, but of the modern process inherently, and all attempts by intellectuals to obstruct
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Modernity’s Fertility Problem – Jacobite
its cultural condensation are hubristically misconceived. “Who, actually, is having kids?” It is
a species of insanity to think this question can be strangled in the crib.
So, what’s the answer? Does the Alt-Right have one? If so, there’s been no sign of it yet.
“Burn the cities to the ground” has been floated on Twitter, and no doubt elsewhere, but it
doesn’t seem obviously practical. That solution has a rich – and especially East Asian –
communist pedigree, which the Alt-Right will probably rediscover at some point. It didn’t
work out in the 1970s, and would be unlikely to perform any more convincingly today.
As the crisis escalates, it can be expected to generate a thread of novel political theory oriented
to the question: How do we make practical and technical sense of social solution searches in
general? Such thinking is going to be necessary. Our great cities pose an ultimate political
problem. Eventually, something will be grateful for that.
Nick Land is an independent writer living in Shanghai.
***
Notes:
William McNeil, ‘Cities and their Consequences’
Sarah R. Hayford and S. Philip Morgan, ‘Religiosity and Fertility in the United States: The
Role of Fertility Intentions’
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