VI. Breeding for Us?
‘’What is to be done?'’ pundits would ask, in good Leninist fashion. If people don’t reproduce for themselves and suffer little for that, can they be persuaded to do it for a cause larger than their own private lives? Is humankind important enough to motivate humans where God (not enough prolific evangelicals to lift white fertility to replacement) and nationalism (Buchanan and Le Pen appeal to the no longer fecund) have failed? Will people care enough about the species to have more babies?
The answer to these questions won’t be known until someone has engaged real humans in the real world, telling them of the unintended consequences of their lifestyle for humanity. That may turn out to be easy, people do care and all they need is a gentle wake-up call. Reminded of what is important in life, they would flock to the bedroom and some 38 weeks later the world’s biggest problem would be fixed. If history is any guide, however, the species is going to be a tough sale.
The odds are against the salesmen: of all the previous doctrines urging people to live their life for an abstraction, none has passed the test of time. The scripts are the same. According to the founding messiah, life is empty without working, breeding, killing, dying… for a dubious community: the people, the class, the race, the sect… Yet apart from a few lunatics, most people never believe in these. The worldly cravings of life are just more real. All radical revolutions end up co-opted by a nomenklatura of petty opportunists, not exactly the kind of new, transformed, better human being who should emerge, in the vision of the first-hours idealists, as the ultimate achievement of the whole enterprise.
Given these precedents, a failure to save the species would more likely signal people’s chronic apathy, not a lack of saving efforts. Changing people is a thankless business. While advocates of most causes are free to speak these days, their targets are equally free not to listen. If you look less interesting than, say, that hot chick on the next channel, you’re at the mercy of the remote. The species, so real and meaningful to some, may mean nothing to most. And even if public interest could be raised, there would always be the test of time. To maintain this 200.000-year-old species around forever, you will have to find ways to keep people enthusiastic in, say, four million years. The first step to that, of course, is to make sure that your sweetheart won’t dump you in four years. Suppose that she agrees to give you four beautiful babies, how can you two guarantee that these tiny creatures will, in their days, have that many too? And what about the children of the children of their children, if some will still be born at all? To paraphrase the cynical Mrs. Thatcher, there may be no humanity, only humans. If humankind is to disappear, you have only the humans to blame.
If people don’t care, nobody can stop their species (it’s theirs too, pal!) from vanishing. Even in a futuristic scenario of parentless babies conceived for society in artificial wombs, the final decision on how many to have collectively would still rest with the tax-paying public. Political leaders can’t decide these matters; they are just our employees. Democratic government is a purchasing cooperative through which we pool resources to buy public goods: clean streets, safe neighborhoods, well-lighted cities, peaceful borders… Politicians are then hired, on a competitive basis, to run the institution. Despite their often-abused operational discretion, elected officials know that they are replaceable: Churchill and Bush 41 were fired right after war triumphs. As the faceless masses, not our pretentious leaders, decide ultimately what ‘’We'’ want, you have right-wingers building the nanny state and leftists scaling it down. Smart leaders have consistently proved themselves to be good followers.
The politicians, therefore, can’t be counted on to fight the baby drought. In reproductive matters, most democratic governments are resisting the temptation to intervene, invoking people’s right to decide for themselves. Efforts are concentrated instead on healthcare and pension reforms that accommodate, not combat, the citizenry’s new lifestyle. Things look centuries away from the natalist consensus that prevailed until World War II, with its funny vocabulary of ‘’selfish women'’, ‘’superior interests of the nation'’, ‘’foreign hordes'’… Fortunately, politicians of such sensibilities are now outcasts. The comrades who make policy, for their part, prefer to go with, not against, the flow of the people.