In one piece
AND THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS
Demographic decline: is humanity at the end of its life cycle? A natural life cycle common to all cosmic civilizations?
I. The natural end ahead?
If everything has a beginning and an end, can humanity be the exception? If all stars and galaxies emerge and disappear obeying the same laws of physics, does every cosmic people, human and ET alike, follow the same cycle of social evolution?
All civilizations in space face the same reality: the universe, our shared habitat, is heading for demise. At the end of its expansion, started 13.7 billion years ago at the Big Bang, the universe will die out, either in absolute coldness (the Big Chill) or in complete disintegration (the Big Rip). While the inquiring humans may gain awareness of the course of the world, there’s not much they can do to change it. Humans are to the expanding universe what bugs are to the circling Earth. Even if, by moving elsewhere, humanity can survive the Milky Way’s scheduled collision with the Andromeda galaxy in 3 billion years or the Sun’s programmed death in 6 billion years, it can’t escape the end of everything.
With the ultimate fate of all life forms already written in the laws of nature, the remaining question is how exactly the smart and conscious peoples of the universe, humanity among them, will go? Willing or unwilling? In fun or in pain? For the end of humankind, different hypotheses, serious or wild, have been advanced. Most are catastrophic prophecies where nuclear war, environmental collapse, ET attack… force us into extinction. Few envisage a natural, calm and consensual fading away, similar to that of the human individual.
Such scenario, however, may be unfolding at this very moment: increasing number of human societies are not reproducing enough to maintain their populations. World population, according to UN projections, will begin to drop from mid-21st century, after an all-time peak of 9 billions. Is this downhill future the last stage in the natural life cycle of an intelligent species? Are we facing here the immutable law of nature that, so far, deprives us of (or saves us from) an ET visitor? Let’s think about this on the way to the peak, which will be reached within the lifetime of many of us.
II. A problem of whites and non-whites.
In order to fully replace a generation, technically, every female must have two of her newborns survive into adulthood. Throughout history, given the high frequency of death, meeting this target often required from four to eight deliveries per lifetime. Thanks to medical and nutritional advances, two grown-up children demand as few as 2.1 births per woman today. As of 2005, however, birthrates in more than 90 countries are below this replacement threshold of 2.1. In the most developed regions of the world, sub-replacement fertility has been the rule for decades.
The baby drought doesn’t stop there. It is spreading across the globe, touching societies as far apart as Confucian Korea, Catholic Brazil, Orthodox Russia, Muslim Turkey… The phenomenon may be rooted in humanity, that common ground below national cultures, religious traditions and skin tones. Modernity appears to be at play: the higher a country ranks in development tables, the lower its fertility. If having few kids is what people everywhere - black, white, yellow, red, green, purple… - do when raised in a modern setting, the prospect of a global demographic decline is not a joke. Counting in centuries, as westerners were still enjoying third-world living standard not long ago, even today’s poorest will be living in modern consumer paradises.
By making every succeeding generation slightly smaller than the last, sustained low fertility can bring radical long-term consequences. While the species’ quantitative rise has been extremely slow, as high mortality offset high fertility, the fall could be brutal. At a global birthrate of 1.85 per female, the level of America’s non-Hispanic whites, France or Ireland (two best European performances), humanity would drop to 2.3 billion by 2300. If low fertility is indeed an active choice driven by human nature, there may be no limit as to how low world population can fall.
III. A weaker case for kids.
Reproduction was serious matter in pre-industrial days, as it still is in today’s poor South. By helping around the house or working outside for wage, children contributed since an early age to the family. Nobody in the West complained about child labor before the 19th century. More importantly, as many modern-day Americans still know when they wire money to the old country, children were also—- the only pension scheme available to their parents. With babies being such a necessity, people sought to maximize their chance of having enough of them. When life expectancy at birth struggled to reach 30, the rational way to do it was to have as many as you could so that one or two would hopefully make it through.
Modernization changed all that. First, a drop in child mortality gave parents the confidence to cut births. A few contraceptive techniques that had always existed, mainly the biblical coitus interruptus, sufficed to halt population explosions in 19thcentury Europe, betraying therefore a lack of interest, not technical know-how, earlier. Next, the mass exodus from the countryside brought birth numbers further down. In a farmer’s world, parents could use the importance of inheriting farmland to secure their children’s support. With that leverage gone in the cities, the higher risk of child default shifted parental focus from babies to savings. Following the introduction of pension schemes that took direct responsibilities away from the family, the link between one’s children and one’s cushioned retirement became less obvious for new generations. Babies are now seen more as a choice than a necessity.
Why have kids at all when you no longer bank on them for economic security? The answer today may have more to do with life enjoyment. Besides economic reasons, babies have always, since forever perhaps, been born for emotional rewards. According to evolutionary psychologists, humans may be biologically hard-wired to enjoy nurturing. Genetic fine-tuning may explain why we find babbling toddlers irresistibly cute and thus continue to have them when their economic value seems to have disappeared. This said, there is also more than one way to satisfy the genes. Many couples, through adoption, are happily caring for tiny strangers born continents away. Others still prefer to direct their nurturing urges toward a dog or cat. It seems therefore that while Mother Nature may have made us love children, and so likely to have them, she neither imposes the decision nor dictates a minimum to have.
Besides nurturing, nature may have also predisposed the weak humans to countless other temptations. To make things worse, most of these are now within reach in our prosperity-brought leisure society. Not long ago, life was all about work. Our austere ancestors toiled for food from early childhood until near death. And to secure food when they could no longer work, they had to have, in what amounted to monumental work, as many kids as possible. Fun - anything people do to enjoy themselves, not for a living – was minimal. Thanks to our record free time and unprecedented wealth, that’s not the case anymore. From shopping (rocketing credit card debt), eating (rising obesity), video games (the average gamer is 33) to playing with the kids (who no longer leave at ten to become servants), community service, intellectual pursuits (the after-hour hobby of a patent clerk named Einstein changed the world)…, fun is now omnipresent and accessible.
Babies, born for fun value these days, obviously don’t hold the monopoly of fun the way they once were the only pension scheme around. Competing against them are many positive things afforded by modernity: freedom, personal fulfillment, career, consumption, knowledge… Having kids is a great way to learn about life, young people may favor the school of traveling the world. Children being certainly great fun, potential parents may prefer the joy of casual sex… No matter how rich we become, life will always be full of trade-offs. It is one thing to tell a pollster from your couch that you want more kids (as well as your salary doubled, your vacations tripled…), it’s quite another to get up and face the sacrifices that will get you there. People may love the idea of a big family, they could still cut down on kids in favor of their other loves, be it African elephants, competing with the Joneses, politics (Lenin, Ralph Nader), gods (the Pope, Mother Teresa), contemplation (the Buddha, Thoreau)… With so many good options available and only one life to spend, a compromise - dirty word, no doubt, but inevitable - has to be found on how much of each to have. Away from Stalin and Kim Jong-Il, different people have different picks for best cocktail.
Bombarded with options, fewer are choosing the classic roadmap for big family, which requires early settling down, efforts to avoid break-up and a serious time and money reallocation toward child-raising. First of all, given much of the same window of fecundity, now the young are settling down much later. Why commit yourself when you are having so much fun, pursuing exciting projects, and the next date, who knows, may be even better? After a partying 20s, the boomer George W.Bush got married at 31, at which age his father, married at 21, had found time to fight a war, go to college, get married and father four babies.
When people finally settle down, they now do it for love and passion. Yet love-based unions are notoriously unstable. The whole thing ends the moment your soul mate walks out the door, having found excitement and intimacy - or just peace - elsewhere. Such was not the case of the old survival-based marriage. It’s human to stick together in tough times: in the face of uncertainty, the divorce rate of East Germans, traditionally higher than their western brothers’, plummeted during the first three years of unification. Over the last 100 years, as survival pressure goes down, dissolving unsatisfactory unions has become much more affordable in the rich world, so much so that nowadays almost half of all marriages there end in divorce. Late-formed and short-lived couples, for sure, are less conducive to babies, most of whom are still being born into coupled parents, married or not.
Yet even stable couples are having fewer. Given their limited resources and the labor-intensive nature of child-raising, instead of more babies, many modern-day couples deliberately opt for more work and life enjoyment. Why on Earth are the world’s richest peoples also the least fertile? They can’t have more because life is too tough? Then what about the poor billions in the South who still reproduce strongly for a caring hand in their last days, exactly what the rich’s ancestors did a few generations back? How to explain the fact that, despite big increases in public subsidies, the Scandinavian nations still remain where they were three decades ago, fertility-wise? Why don’t the Nordic, for all those benefits, have more babies than do white Americans who live in the capitalist jungle? Why are third-world immigrants always more fertile than their native-born neighbors, Swedes, Danes or Americans? The answer may lie in a fun-loving culture that white America shares with the Nordics but not with the oh-so-1950s immigrants. We are having fewer kids but our houses, cars and TVs are getting bigger, we eat out and travel more often, find ample time for political activism or partying… Our love of children, though strong, may not be strong enough to save the world.
IV. Who will feed us then?
Are low-fertility societies sustainable? Can we get away economically with fewer children? Do we still need at least 2.1 for psychological well-being? If a smaller youth population can not feed and care adequately for the masses of oldies that outnumber them, sooner or later the pendulum will swing back.
On the economic side of the equation, can we really afford this new way of life? Some economists predict long-term stagnation for low-birthrate societies. Yet, at closer inspection, this so-called catastrophe looks more like milder GDP expansion, not a falling back to Sub-Saharan economic levels. Projections from OECD, IMF and others still show living standards in the rich world, pending the necessary adjustments, rising in absolute terms, albeit slower than without population aging. Besides, certain quality-of-life gains can be achieved in a less-crowded society: more housing space, less pollution, less crime… These are exactly what the western governments had in mind three decades ago, before the current baby-bust, when they officially welcomed the prospect of an end to population growth.
While the worst-case scenario is unlikely, population aging still presents difficult economic problems. Troubles are looming for most pension systems in the rich world, where they were set up to tax the working population to pay for retiree benefits. When the huge boomer generation retires in a few years’ time, due to insufficient breeding in their prime, there will be too many retirees for too few workers to support. A wide variety of solutions exist, however, to avert a systemic collapse: tax raises (Europeans suffer high tax, yet they still do well in happiness polls,) later retirement (healthy life is much longer now than when Social Security was designed,) benefit cuts (pandering politicians promised impossible benefits, knowing they would be dead long before payment day,) immigration (postponing the problem for a while, until immigrants’ children become locals, with local reproductive behaviors,) private savings account (started in those people’s republics of Germany and Sweden)… or a combination of all these.
Whatever the reform mixture adopted, an even more important determinant of our economic outlook is the future of productivity growth. Smaller workforces won’t be a problem as long as the remaining workers are more productive. If recent productivity growth continues, the average worker’s output, having more than doubled in the last 50 years, will double again by mid-21st century. Continued productivity growth will also improve quality of life through high-standard retirement communities for all or cheap videophone that allows the virtual presence of loved ones… Economically, humanity cannot go away until it has built the ultimate machinery that can feed, house, clothe, amuse… people all by itself, removing then the need of further children being born to take care of those born before them.
Productivity growth happens mainly through technological innovation. Can older and shrinking societies innovate? There are reasons to think so. The record human capital invested in our fewer, ‘’quality'’ children will certainly help. We don’t need billions of scientists to innovate. A small youth population of brainy knowledge workers can be way more innovative than masses of illiterate hammer-and-sickle toilers. Time is on our side, too. Even if it takes, say, 10.000 years to figure out the technologies that reconcile population decline and economic boom, eventually we will find out, the searching period being meaningless on the grander timescale of the species.
It looks like we won’t have to wait 10.000 years. The process of modernization that brought us here will get us there pretty soon. The same technological revolution that is making children a choice in its early hours will go on to render them completely unnecessary. Modernization is about more machines and less human work. A society no longer dominated by physical work must be hard to imagine just a century ago. Fulltime workweek of 40 hours would look suspiciously part-time beside a Gilded Age sweatshop job of 70 hours. Will modernization, still going strong, continue to surprise in the next 100 years? The great transformations of the 20th century - which started in horse-drawn carriage and ended on the Internet - are probably just the beginning. A self-functioning life-support system for humanity, the necessary condition of human exit, is emerging through advances in computing, artificial intelligence, robotics…
The sufficient condition, however, will always remain human choice. Technology is neutral; it doesn’t dictate a direction. If people choose procreation, technology can help with, for example, an artificial uterus. Combined with previous breakthroughs like sperm and egg bank…, this invention will smash the so-called biological clock. Future generations will be able to reproduce as many as they want whenever they want, even after having partied - or worked - away their entire youth. Technology, if need be, will also provide new living space elsewhere in the universe - the way aviation made intercontinental migration possible - for all the babies their parents may want. For all these promises, however, technology could as well drive fertility even lower: if another chance to have kids always exists, folks, full of confidence, may be tempted to postpone indefinitely. At the end of the day, when human ingenuity have removed technical obstacles in all directions, only human desire matters. Its affordability aside, how desirable is this brave new world?
V. What about my little happiness?
Can life be happy without many children? For sure, there will always be children. The issue is not voluntary childlessness; it’s whether a world of 1.3 or 1.8 babies per mum such a good deal, psychologically, when we age? Aren’t young people trading their future happiness, which means more babies now, for the immediate gratifications of the present?
Happiness requires food and TV, but also love and companionship. Few want to be sick, frail and alone. Throughout history, economically and emotionally, the old were neatly integrated into their big family, surrounded by spouses, children, grandchildren and other relatives. Being among one’s kith and kin, sharing their joys and hardships gave one the desire to go on. Those days are long gone. Today’s old, the best fed ever, don’t have much company: a spouse if there still is one, a pet in other cases. Children and grandchildren often live faraway. As for nieces and nephews, well, maybe you will see them again in your next incarnation. At the very end, the elderly are often cared for by nursing professionals who, while good feeders and curers, won’t stay longer than their shift. Modern old age, unless you trust the commercials, can be the hard season of loneliness and isolation.
These problems, however, are not caused by a lack of children. The current generation of seniors has had more than enough babies to replace themselves: these are the parents of babyboomers, the big belly of the population pyramid. What causes problems is the modern society itself. These days, your kids, boomers or generation X/Y/Z…, are unlikely to live next door, work in your profession or ask you whom to marry… Life must go on the moment they move out, having been the center of your life for so many years now. Family is no longer that tight-knit combat unit fighting for common survival. Being fruitful is not sure guarantee against loneliness anymore. Something else, certainly not children, is lacking in this generation’s recipe for a fulfilled old age.
The missing ingredient may be an aptitude for fun, whatever that is. Those who chose funs other than kids in their youth may soon pioneer a new, different old age. In the coming years, retired boomers will be testing time-tested notions about being old. How many of these stem from the hardships of life in the past? Do people just grow old that way, naturally, or were they forced to?
The age frontier of fun has been steadily advancing for several generations. Childhood as we know it appears very recently, when child labor was outlawed at the end of the 19th century. Next comes, in the 1950s, the teenager. Ever since, the age at which people grow up and settle down hasn’t stopped to rise. Today’s twenty-somethings are in a state of prolonged adolescence while 30s are increasingly the new 20s, when people used to get serious. Those in their 40s and 50s, the babyboomers, also look (Botox?) and act young compared to their parents at the same age. Will they carry on enjoying themselves in their 60s and 70s? Having fun is best learnt young. This generation, the first ever brought up in affluence, has proved all along that they weren’t cast in the puritan mold of their ancestors. Hedonism, the true legacy of the 1960s, is the new faith. How well this group - also the first unwilling to replace themselves - is going to fare in their last decades will tell whether happiness in old age is possible without multiple children. Will the Clintons regret someday of having only one daughter? And Oprah for having none? Life’s last season may never be the same again after them.
This rosy picture could be just a dream of aging and denying boomers, a kind of mirage they want to believe in to escape the desert ahead. If the new lifestyle is economically unaffordable or emotionally disappointing, nothing can stop humanity from shifting back. Though not foolproof, children will always be the best insurance against loneliness, as blood may really be thicker than water after all. Scared by the depressing image of the well-fed but lonely old, the future’s youth may strike a different balance and bring kids back. For humanity as a group, it’s never too late for a U-turn: even a few hundreds lukewarm generations would not be enough for the uterus to atrophy. A few millenniums in the wrong direction would mean nothing beside the millions and millions years of life afterward.
Nevertheless, if people keep going down this road in 50, 100, 200, 3000… years, it will mean that they are doing fine. And humankind will be in big trouble. The fate of the species belongs to our descendants, not us.
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.
VII. Of ETs and cats
How could a species of conscious, intelligent individuals run its own course toward extinction? What happened to the much-touted human greatness? And that special destiny in space? Isn’t survival the primary purpose of life itself?
You can’t help feeling absurd? Such feelings won’t go away until you stop to see so much meaning in humanity’s existence in the universe. What is going on will make perfect sense if the human society is just taken for what it is: a natural phenomenon. Nature’s species rise and fall all the time around us. Human society is natural because it is not the realization of a premeditated plan - nobody conducted the premeditation if you don’t believe in God. It’s produced and reproduced constantly and spontaneously through the interactions of human animals following their drives. The evolution of life may have made us the most powerful creatures in natural history, the truth remains that we still belong to the kingdom Animalia (class Mammalia, order Primates, family Hominidae), being made of blood, flesh and desire. The call of the wild may be subconscious, it is irresistible. It’s staying alive and enjoying oneself, whether by watching Web porn (monkeys, too, are willing to pay for pictures of female monkey rears, according to scientists), playing astute baboon politicians or, as it all boils down to the same brain chemicals responsible for bliss, writing unreadable philosophical treaties. The highbrow, theoretically the most conscious subgroup of the species, are in the grip of nature too. Our learned brothers and sisters are as active as anyone else in ruining humanity’s future, having traded that extra baby for the ecstasies of understanding. Even when humans become aware of what they are doing to their species, will they choose otherwise, turning against themselves? Their individual urges seem much more genuine than that abstract aggregate called humankind.
If all living things strive to satisfy their innate urges, none ever forgets to go forth and multiply. They can’t: wild creatures are programmed to breed for nothing, certainly not for old-age care. Homo sapiens, exceptional by its brain, broke this rule. Though sex remains one of the most powerful human instincts, intelligence, or the contraceptives it invents, allows people the fun without the function. Evolution has made us the thinking beings who know how to trade blind multiplication for the good life. This unique intelligence could also, however, make us the only species to vanish on its own, smoothly, without any ecological disruption typical of all previous extinctions. This most-evolved animal constitutes, in many ways, evolution’s end of the road. The moment a wave hits its shore, it swiftly disappears.
Is this the inescapable destiny of all human-like species in the universe? Are we facing here the immutable law of nature that, so far, deprives us of (or saves us from) an ET visitor? The path humanity is taking may be common to all intelligent peoples in the cosmos, past, present and future. Look around: as soon as they can crawl to the moon, humans, now fat and happy, quickly become bored with both multiplying and space. Space budgets have gone down everywhere except in China, which is not yet rich and free. Further down the road, civilizations that have reached the advanced stage of, say, intergalactic travel may have lost interest in conquering the infinity beyond their skies. Perhaps they are too busy enjoying their remaining moments. How could anyone conquer the boundless anyway? That’s the stuff of kids. The old boys, for their part, prefer the good old funs of home. Why bothers going out if all you can see is the same cycle everywhere? Going to the stars to ensure the species’ survival sounds great, but what about the aftermath? Resettling in a faraway world to do what? To resume once there what’s happening right here and now: the moment people begin to take survival for granted, they can’t be bothered to breed even the minimum to maintain their species? Guaranteed survival for individuals may simply be the death knell of the group.
Human extinction won’t be the end of life on Earth. Life goes on with or without us. Other animals, the cats perhaps, will evolve to fill our place, develop technology, beat survival, love fun, have fewer offspring… You heard the story. A story of nature.