by Micah E. Weiss
The image above is of the village Kiryas Joel in upstate New York. While it is technically part of the town of Palm Tree, in Orange County, I was happy to learn that the village and town are coterminous (happy because I had never learned that word before), which is to say, they share all relevant boundaries, a peculiarity that will make sense in just a few sentences.
Kiryas Joel was started in the 1970s on 1.49 square miles of forest purchased by 14 families of the Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism. Its population at last count was 32,954 residents, but that’s census data from 2020. The current estimate is over 37K residents. It’s a fascinating place to drive past at night on US-6, as I recently did, because it’s pretty rural out there, and consequently, somewhat dark at night. All of a sudden, a small city appears and multi-story buildings are lit up along the road, almost out of nowhere.
There are several factoids about Kiryas Joel that are notable. One is that, as its founding families might suggest, 100% of its residents are Hasidic Jews. Another is that it has a 40% poverty rate, making it the poorest village in America, by far. A plurality of residents are apparently on food stamps. Yet another factoid more relevant to this essay is that the average age of its residents is 13.8 years, the lowest average age for any place in America with more than 5,000 residents. It is difficult to pin-point family size in this community because the census only shows Kiryas Joel having an average household of 5.6 members as a data point. There is some serious Jewish minutiae here when considering other data, as Hasids fall under the Orthodox umbrella but as a sect have larger families than other Orthodox Jews, so national data on Hasidic family size is hard to come by. But that 13.8 average age tells us a lot. By comparison, New York City’s average age was 36.9 years in 2020. Chicago, D.C., LA, are all in the 35 range. “Young” cities like Austin, Huston, and Atlanta are in the 33 range. Kiryas Joel is young, and growing. Extrapolated over a modest timeline, it’s not hard to imagine the next century dawning on an almost exclusively Jewish Orange County.
I have a question for progressives: How do you think they voted in 2020?
We’ll come back to that.
Birth rates in the industrialized world have been low and dropping for a long time. Even the United States, often an exception to the developed world’s rules (guns, infant mortality, being awesome!), has seen a fertility rate fall below the previous historic nadir from 1976 of 1.74 births per woman to 1.73 in 2018. Caveat: some of these numbers are tricky to research. Different scales are used. If you ask google, a lovely interactive graph pops up and gives you the above number, but then links here to slightly different numbers. However, the trends match and are clear. After the baby boom of the 40s-60s, our birth rate plummeted to a low in the 70s, bottoming out the year I was born, the heart of Generation X, and then rebounded for a time, creating the Millennials. Now, fertility rates have inched down again and the US is no longer having children above replacement. I’ve seen different numbers on what “replacement” means, but 2.1 births per woman seems the most logical definitional line to me. Based on that, our nation reached close to replacement in the 90s and stayed there till about 2009, which has led to a demographic reality that is relatively healthy in the developed world. I really like these graphs:
They do take up a lot of room, though, so bear with me. Back on that second link is a chart titled “Similar Countries Ranked by Fertility Rate,” and I expect they mean similar in terms of wealth or GDP per capita or something, but let’s just assume Israel and New Caledonia are actually similar to the US and take in the breadth of the reality the developed world is facing. Almost none of those “Similar” countries have birth rates above replacement. The numbers aren’t that dissimilar in developing countries. India is currently at 2.05, and has been going down steadily for decades. China is at 1.24 (!), having already dropped like a stone.
Side note: Some of this topic was easier to think and write about in the old first world, second world, third world framework I grew up with. But I have to admit that that framework has lost its utility. China is at least a half-fully developed country, having left the so-called third world some time ago. India seems to be in a similar situation. I will stay with developed/developing for now until the global intelligentsia comes up with something better.
The only continent where the fertility rate remains high is Africa. Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana. Outside Africa, several “stans” have higher numbers, including Pakistan, but all of those countries have one thing in common with the rest of the world: the 30 year trends are all down. As those countries have continued to develop and grow richer, the fertility rates dropped. There is a chance, according to some analysts, that the population globally will actually never reach 10 billion people—though the UN currently disagrees. Other folks, particularly Elon Musk, think we’re headed for global population collapse, although I, like everyone else, have suddenly decided Elon is a big fat meanie head—ah, the capricious American public!—so I find his worries easy to dismiss, the jerk. One thing from all this data gobbledygook can be gleaned: one way or another, the global population is probably not going to get out of control. Humanity will not find itself layered and shelved in dystopian mega-cities being served Soylent Green through their feeding tubes (probably).
Considering the Malthusian hand-wringing usually associated with world wide population trends, one is tempted to think that this new data signals a good thing. Organizations like Zero Population Growth have even changed their name to Population Connection, proving two things: that someone over there at ZPG was paying attention to data, and that NGOs are rather absurd organizations that are bad at naming things.
And yet, in Portland, Oregon in the last few months, a peculiar billboard appeared that caused as much of a stir as you might expect in these stirring times. It said: “A Lot of Humans Wish They Were Never Born.” This billboard was paid for by Stop Having Kids, a new NGO trying to put a less apocalyptic spin on the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. (I won’t be linking to these organizations. Google at your own leisure, but I felt a little guilty giving their website traffic just writing this essay.) The set of ideas that make up today’s anti-natalism are relatively new, but now they have financial backing, slick websites, slogans, protests (really?), and a new and insidious spin, couching the movement in the language of the morality of care. Other slogans include “Why Does Someone Have to Share Your Genes For You to Care About Them,” and “Why Play Russian Roulette With Someone Else’s Life,” and “Help the Houseless.” They also take full aim at present parents: “Let’s Stop Dumping Our Problems On Future Generations,” and “Think Beyond Yourself,” and “What Is an Unselfish Reason to Have Kids?” Another tack is to impose a pseudo-environmentalism on the issue: “Humans Are the Most Invasive & Overpopulated Species.” And, naturally, in our self-obsessed age, they valorize childlessness as maximizing one’s personal liberty: “Normalize Childfreedom.” And, naturally, they also play the victim. From their website: “We want a future where those who choose to live a childfree lifestyle are able to do so and are not stigmatized, attacked, or questioned for their morally neutral choice to not create new humans.”
It isn’t hard to see from these slogans where on the political spectrum this organization comes from. First, there is the obsession with consent—babies can’t consent to exist, of course, which is a clear violation of their right to not exist, I guess. Second, a simplistic zero-sum attitude towards resource distribution by invoking the homeless. Third, as mentioned, the invocation of self-centered self-expression as the ultimate human value. Fourth, the catastrophizing of environmental degradation through overpopulation. And fifth, the positioning of childfree existence as a lifestyle choice that’s under attack (Really? It can’t even be questioned? Well, I have some questions. . .). These folks are progressives through and through, and as is the way in politics today, left or right, they can’t build anything without trying to tear something else down, hence the implied attack against “normal people,” or what was until very recently, normalized human behavior. We normies (I have three children, and teach them that having children is the joy of life) who have followed the basic instincts of the evolutionary imperative to procreate need to be marginalized for these arguments to gain traction.
And this isn’t just one marginal NGO. According to the BBC, the Childfree “lifestyle,” far from being attacked, is being celebrated. According to that article:
On Instagram, the hashtag #childfree has garnered more than 311,000 posts to date. And on TikTok. . . the hashtags #child-free and #childfreebychoice have rocketed in popularity during the past couple years, with 570 million views and 391 million views of each tag, respectively.
That was February. By now, most likely, the number of views has passed a billion.
The intellectual background of anti-natalism is frightfully undergraduate. Dr. David Benatar is what passes for a philosopher these days in some circles, and is the tadpole to the movements of Godzilla. In his essay Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, he posits the following logic: Pain is bad, you can’t feel pain if you don’t exist, and so, bringing someone into existence is bad, because they will inevitably feel pain. This construction has all the blunt-forced logic of Positivism, committing that paradigm's usual sin of forgetting or ignoring our basic spiritual humanity, but lacking any of Positivism's virtues of complexity and nuance. Poor Benatar did manage to express a new(ish) idea, however, which got him attention, and peculiarly, he continues to exist, despite the pain of existence, and a variety of easily accessible alternatives, which begs certain questions of sincerity. When Greta Thunberg took a sailboat across the North Atlantic to the US, and Peter Singer became a vegetarian, at least they demonstrated authenticity.
(And for the record, NO! I am not encouraging Dr. Benatar to do a great outrage unto himself just to prove he really means what he says. The world is richer for his presence, something I think he might want to appreciate and add to his childish existential equation of value).
Reduction has always been the great siren of philosophy and spirituality. If you can find one aspect of human existence and cram all the square pegs that make up the complexity and diversity of the human heart and soul into a single formula, then you can justify all manner of bad ideas. Augustine led Western Christianity down the garden path of original sin. The Buddha determined that all life was suffering. Marx’s condescending view of class, Foucault’s power matrix, Ayn Rand’s so-called ethical egoism, Libertarianism’s monochromatic freedom; reductive philosophy can be very powerful and compelling. And it is always, always, at best, incomplete, and sometimes much, much worse, regardless of how compelling and constructive (except in Foucault’s case) consideration of the idea might be.
But deep philosophy (or in poor Dr. Benatar’s case, shallow philosophy), isn’t what moves the general public. Of late, comedienne Chelsea Handler has gone to war with several pro-natal (re: normal human) conservatives. She declares her position is childless, and loving it! She has posted TikToks from mountain tops, bragged about her wealth and success, and enjoined others to admire and follow her example as she pursues the joys of freedom. When a conservative commentator on the interwebs somewhere expressed concern that 45% of working women ages 25-45 will be unmarried and childless by 2030, Chelsea, unprovoked, set up her phone to record, poured a giant glass of vodka, and made a TikTok, claiming that when “men” talk that way, “I have no choice but to sedate myself with drugs and alcohol,” going on to brag about herself as an unapologetic “wild woman.” Good for you, I guess?
This is the latest anti-natalist position coming, again, mainly from progressives like Chelsea. That if you don’t have children, life is one nonstop party! And aren’t you jealous, you breeder homebodies! No, Chelsea, I’m not. Watching a grown woman who is pushing fifty drink like a frat boy and brag about her money like a 90’s rapper is not something that makes me look at my children and question my choices. There is an entire essay here on how our culture has been glorifying a lifestyle-for-all that 20 years ago was only sold to meat-head, douche-bag, teenage boys of the type that used to beat me up in the locker room, but for now I will only observe that the most common form of anti-natalist argument isn’t on behalf of the homeless, or the environment, or even some simplistic pain-matrix of existence; it’s to promise the joys of the endless party, the hedonic pursuit of HAPPINESS, NOW!
Never mind that every wisdom tradition in every culture tells us this is a terrible way to reach happiness. Social science, too, supports the ancient wisdom—and while there is pushback, clearly a life of contentment and satisfaction and meaning is based on long-term goals and work, not comically large belts of vodka (it should go without saying that there’s nothing wrong with the occasional comically large belt of vodka, but sadly, I still felt compelled to say it). Constant direct hedonic pursuit of happiness is one of the quickest paths to deep unhappiness.
There aren’t many arguments for anti-natalism that don’t break down under scrutiny, and I could pick them apart all day (perhaps I will in a future essay), but the thought I had when I sat down to write this piece was not about philosophy or the environment or victimhood. It was the simple realization that the anti-natalist movement was a progressive movement, and that begs the following question: What’s your long game? Allow me to illustrate with the following diagram that explains alleles to grade-school students:
Now, instead of those little circles representing alleles, pretend they represent human couples. The blue one’s are progressives, and the green ones are conservative. How do I know the breeders are conservative? Excellent question!
How did Kiryas Joel vote in the 2020 election? You guessed it. But that’s not my only data point.
Observe this map:
And now, compare it to this map:
Interesting, isn’t it? And that’s not all. It’s not just conservative versus progressives when it comes to having larger families, it is also a product of religious observance. One last map for you:
In other religious community news, the average Amish family has 7 children. The average Morman family has 3.4 children. The evangelical Quiverfull Movement in the Midwest may only have had an estimated 10,000 families when this story aired on NPR in 2009, but think of how many they have now? These may appear to be fringe movements, outlier examples closer to cults than real mainstream religions, except that this chart tells a more accurate story:
Yes, the chart comes from this study from a somewhat conservative organization; however, doom and gloom is usually in their wheelhouse, and this data would indicate the right is winning at something they value. You may notice that yellow line, “Weekly or more,” is above that magic 2.1 replacement number. As sad as this makes me to write, it’s clear that religious observance and the left-right divide in our politics are becoming ever more linked. As has the fertility rate. There is plenty of data to suggest that Nonreligious is the fastest growing religious demographic, and I’ve seen atheists in public and private do adorable little victory laps about that. But looking deeper into the future, it may only boomerang back, as Nonreligious people just aren’t having enough kids to even compete in the long game.
It would be tempting, of course, to flatter oneself with a joke about the film Idiocracy. I would simply ask that joker, if you’re so damn smart, why can’t you do math well enough to see you’re going extinct? But, the pretense of assumed intellectual superiority among the left, the now somewhat tired adage that “reality has a left-wing bias,” is honestly the height of ignorance and arrogance that I would expect from a demographic raised on Richard Dawkins-like screeds against the religious. My response to such talk is that a surefire way to lose ground to an adversary is to underestimate him, and the left has been underestimating the right for my entire life.
Furthermore, I first heard the left-wing demographic inevitability argument—the idea that Democrats were going to start winning forever as the country became more diverse—over twenty years ago. The cracks in that theory get wider every year, but smug progressive intellectuals who count their demographics before they’ve voted, continue to flog the idea in public, even as various Hispanic demographics and black men continue drifting to the right. And now a portion of the left has stopped breeding altogether.
I am a father of three who attends church more regularly than I have in years, but I am not yet a conservative. It would be nice for some smart person to articulate what that even means in a reality where the blond-dye-job-real-estate monster still roams jelly-roll filled middle-American plains, however, I am certainly no longer a progressive. I do deeply appreciate the strides that have been made by progressives in our history. America would be a sad country indeed were it not for our history of progress, allowing the Constitution to grow and adapt, to free slaves, empower women, free children from work, and the poor from workhouses and poor farms. The Civil Rights movement continues to inspire me in those brave men and women’s dedication and courage. The Gay Rights movement has also come a long way, allowing for civil marriage rights and equal protection under the law, as it should be in a country as large and diverse as ours is. The environment, too, needs protection, though I would like to see a lot less shrill shrieking fear mongering about it. But the free market has failed time and again to preserve nature when a profit can be made by exploitation—so the preservation must be the work of those with a progressive mindset. I would ask the anti-natalist crowd, who exactly are you preserving the environment for, if you aren’t having kids?
One might propose that adoption could be coupled with a concerted effort to convince and convert conservatives to become progressive to mitigate this demographic collapse. It’s the exact plan the Shakers came up with—go ask one how that worked out. If all the data above holds true, then there won’t be progressives left in our culture much sooner than we think. I thought that this was going to be a problem for the future. Then I read this, and changed my mind. From just the abstract:
Over the 2004 to 2018 period, opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion was 3 to 4 percentage points more prevalent than it would have been were traditional-family conservatism independent of family size in the current generation. For same-sex marriage, evolutionary forces have grown in relative importance as society as a whole has liberalized. As of 2018, differential fertility raised the number of US adults opposed to same-sex marriage by 17%, from 46.9 million to 54.8 million.
No longer a progressive, I find that data concerning, but a progressive should be deeply worried. All of this is to say that we need progressives, as much as we need conservatives. They are not enemies, they are symbiotes, adversarial, perhaps, but symbiotic nonetheless. A conservative culture is like Tsarist Russia, oppressive, stagnant, self-satisfied, and often jingoistic; a progressive culture is like the French Revolution: bloody, misguided, short-lived, and with a backlash thereafter. There may even be a genetic connection between our born predilections and tendencies and whether or not we end up conservative or progressive. But even if there aren’t, there is culture, and culture starts with family, and family starts with children.