Are we doomed?
That is the question David Runciman sets out to answer in the latest issue of the London Review of Books.
It is a delightful essay. You should read it. (Select passages quoted below).
The essay comes on the heels of his two-part interview with Henry Gee (author of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire) released on Past Present Future (my favorite podcast).
As it happens, I also just finished James C. Scott’s Against the Grain, which traces how early states were demographic death traps that repeatedly collapsed.
Runciman's essay flips the question: what happens when advanced societies can't maintain their populations at all?
Same civilizational fragility, different mechanism.
Scott argues that 'barbarians' who walked away from states were more adaptable, more resilient.
Information technology and social media have closed that escape route entirely—they enable unprecedented control while actively accelerating the maladaptive traits Gee describes.
Homo not-so-sapiens.
Much to ponder as I reach for the egg nog and Woodford Reserve.
Ageing societies vote differently, consume differently and invest differently from more balanced societies … They are more likely to worry about immigration. They tend to save rather than take risks with their money … A falling birth rate makes thinking about the future harder because it means a greater share of resources being directed towards the needs of people who have already lived most of their lives.
Massive redistribution from old to young – from healthcare for the elderly to universal childcare, from pension funds to child trust funds, from people who own their homes to people who don’t – would be required. This would have to happen in societies in which elderly voters continue to outnumber younger voters, in which the immigration that is needed to counteract the short-to-medium-term effects of falling birth rates most angers those who remember a time before it was necessary, in which global competition for people and resources will put increasing pressure on living standards in those places where birth rates have fallen furthest and fastest. It may be a failure of political imagination, but I can’t see it happening.
How can it be that getting richer also makes people feel they are too poor to reproduce?
But the real enfeeblement began ten thousand years ago with the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. Until then, the growth in human population had been limited by the practice of waiting until a child was weaned before having the next one: transporting too many babies around was a needless burden. As a result, overall human numbers topped out at around ten million until we started staying in place and farming the land. At that point two things happened. First, it became possible to have larger families. Second, it became necessary because our new way of life was a deathtrap … The only way the human project could be kept afloat was by having enough offspring to outrun the grim reaper. It was a miserable business for everyone, but particularly for women and for children. Human progress was a vale of tears.
Only in the last hundred years did we become the first species to construct the means of its own annihilation. Depopulation is starting to happen in a world in which the number of nuclear weapons is once again increasing. The old men who run the show hold the future of a dying species in their trembling hands. I’m not sure we’re going to make it to the spaceships.
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