Cassava is a woody shrub native to South America. For people living in drought-prone tropical regions, it is a godsend: delicious, calorie-dense and highly productive. The indigenous peoples of the Americas who first cultivated cassava are reliant on it and have developed an arduous, days-long process of preparation that involves scraping, grating, washing and boiling the plant before it is eaten.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese introduced cassava to the Old World. But they did not import the ancient methods of processing, assuming that indigenous people were wasting their time.
Progress swats away benevolent traditions because the usefulness of traditions can be subtle and hard to understand
We do not always know why we do the things we do. This applies as much to indigenous peoples as to modern westerners. The first cultivators of cassava could not explain why the scraping, grating, washing, and boiling process was necessary, because they did not know — could not know — that every step of the process is essential in order to reduce the cyanide content in the plant. If even one step is skipped, chronic cyanide poisoning is the result. And the really devilish thing about cassava poisoning is that the buildup of cyanide in the body is so gradual that it is almost impossible to identify cassava as the culprit.
That’s the problem with what we all think of as progress: it swats away benevolent traditions because the usefulness of traditions can be subtle and hard to understand. Technology brings many blessings: better medical treatment, better nutrition and better comfort for all of the world’s population, even in the poorest regions. But rapid technological development liquifies well-established traditions and sometimes we don’t realize what we’ve lost until it’s too late.
Progressivism, the dominant ideology of our times, insists that history has a shape — that as time goes by, and new ideas and new technologies arrive in our lives, the world gets better. Those who insist on holding to traditions are the enemies of this process because progress and tradition are understood — correctly — to be in direct and bloody competition with one another.
But what we are now discovering is that, at the population level, modernity selects systematically against itself. The key features of modernity — urbanism, affluence, secularism, the blurring of gender distinctions, more time spent with strangers than with kin — all of these factors in combination shred fertility. Which means that progressivism, the political ideology that urges on the acceleration of modernization, can best be understood as a sterility meme. When people first become modern, they have fewer children; when they adopt progressive ideology, they accelerate the process of modernization and so have even fewer. Britain was the first country to experience an industrial revolution, meaning that Britain started hurtling towards modernity faster than anyone else. Today, only 3 percent of the world’s population lives in a country whose fertility rate is not declining.
Demographic imbalance may well represent the greatest threat to the long-term stability of Britain, and indeed the rest of the world. Put simply, our age pyramid no longer looks like a pyramid. An aging population depends on working-age adults to fund the welfare system. An economic system dependent on high levels of debt also depends on above-replacement birth rates. The whole system is a Ponzi scheme, reliant on continued population growth in order to sustain itself.
Immigration can offset the problem. It cannot solve it. If the birth rate continues to collapse, then so too will the welfare state. A “hard landing” to demographic imbalance looks like economic depression, empty and derelict cities, collapsed public services, and millions of poor and childless elderly people ending their lives in loneliness, squalor and pain. As the economist Nicholas Eberstadt has put it, “we don’t know how to be a country without population growth.” The great well of economic theory that we are familiar with was all written during times of population growth. We are about to enter uncharted territory.
The effects of fertility decline will not become evident until the last above-replacement generation dies. In Britain, that tipping point is likely to come in the 2040s, when most of the baby boomers have passed away. Right now, we are witnessing the process of demographic crisis in its early stages, and most people do not recognize it as such. If modernity is cassava, then this is the cyanide.
We look at stagnant growth and we blame government mismanagement. We look at recruitment problems in the care sector and we blame the work-shy young. We look at lengthening hospital waiting lists and we blame chronic underinvestment. We look at inter-ethnic conflict and we blame a failure of assimilation efforts. Very few people piece all of these political problems together and recognize that they are in fact the same problem. Put bluntly, there are not enough babies being born and the sticking plaster of mass migration is not going to hold for much longer. This is the most urgent political problem of our times and almost no one is talking about it.
In fact, even pointing out that there is a problem is extraordinarily counter-cultural. Most schools of feminism cheer on the dwindling of our species, having observed — correctly — that motherhood is tiring, painful, time-consuming, and restricts women’s career opportunities. If we assume that the goal of feminism is to maximize women’s freedom, then motherhood clearly does not serve that project. As one of my friends observed soon after having her first baby, “the only thing that limits your freedom more than having a newborn is going to prison.” She’s right.
Meanwhile, young people alarmed by climate change tell pollsters that they are rejecting parenthood for the sake of the planet. Some have even opted for surgical sterilization. But the problem for those who advocate fertility decline for the sake of the planet is that the plan isn’t going to work, and not only because it will take too long.
The larger problem is that birth rates are not falling evenly across the whole world, nor are they falling gently. What we are seeing, instead, is precipitous falls in the rich countries that are best placed to develop the technology needed to get us out of the mess created (ironically enough) by earlier and more destructive forms of technology. Countries with shrinking populations and shrinking economies are not in a position to invest in green technology.
Nor are they in a position to resist encroachment from cultures that are better able to resist the sterility meme, likely because they don’t care about environmentalism, feminism or any other facet of progressivism. Anyone with any sympathy for even the most basic liberal ideas — legal equality between the sexes, gay and lesbian rights, religious pluralism — ought to be appalled by this prospect. I may have my reservations about progressivism as a quasi-religion, but that does not mean that I welcome the prospect of sliding back towards the poverty, parochialism and authoritarianism that characterized most of our species’ history — which is exactly what will happen, if we cannot find some way of marrying modernity with a culture that promotes and supports parenthood.
A feminism that prioritizes freedom above all other values will never be able to achieve this goal, which is why we need to be fashioning a feminism orientated towards care and interdependency. And if we are going to attempt this, then we will need to look at people of other times and places with new eyes and, rather than assuming that they were all bad and stupid — as the progress narrative does — instead thinking carefully about which norms and institutions actually serve the interests of women.
In pre-modern Europe, women would remain in their homes for the first forty days after giving birth, in a period known in English as “lying-in.” Initially, they would stay in their beds, and then their bedrooms, with female relatives, neighbors and (for the wealthy) servants temporarily moving into the home and tending to their needs and the new baby’s.
Ritualized postpartum confinement has long been abandoned in western countries, although a few minorities have imported the practice from their own countries — a vestigial trace of a pre-modern tradition that makes complete sense in an environment in which postpartum infection claimed the lives of so many women and babies, making social distancing a wise choice. The anthropological record reveals lying-in to be an almost universal practice, lasting somewhere in the region of thirty to forty days. It is a traditional solution to the problem of postpartum vulnerability that enormous numbers of human beings have adopted throughout our species’ history.
But not us. Twenty-first century Britons no longer suffer from high rates of infant and maternal mortality, thanks to modern medical technology, which is a great blessing. I was kicked out of hospital within twenty-four hours of my C-section, as is now typical, and when my husband returned to work after just five days of paid paternity leave, I was left largely alone with our newborn during what could have been my lying-in period. And we survived, of course, in part thanks to the course of antibiotics that I was prescribed for a nasty infection. But is it any wonder that rates of postnatal depression are so high among women suddenly cut off from an ancient tradition that serves both a physical and a psychological function? Is it any wonder that women look at modern motherhood — safe, yes, but also dreadfully lonely — and say “no thanks?”
We could respond in two ways to the status quo. Either we could say — as many feminists have done — that modern motherhood is inimical to women’s interests and ought to be rejected. In doing so, we would be embracing the sterility meme, and accepting the end of our way of life — a prospect that is much more immediate than most people realize.
There are not enough babies being born and the sticking plaster of mass migration is not going to hold for much longer
Or we could try and resurrect and refashion some of the age-old practices that actually served the interests of parents — and particularly mothers — but were wrongfully abandoned during modernization. In other words, we should have antibiotics and lying-in. It ought to be possible to consciously choose both.
My contention — my hope — is that examples like this could be scaled, with the principle extended far beyond the first forty days of a baby’s life. If we are going to reinvent a fertile culture, then we will have to look to other fertile cultures and learn from them, taking the ideas best suited to our own values and material conditions. Government policy can affect some kinds of change. Individuals and families will have to do the rest.
The challenge ahead of us is to work out how to have all of the good things in modern life — not just female education, gay rights and political freedom, but also affluence, safety and comfort — without eventually succumbing to the sterility meme. The first group of people that can crack this problem will have the world before them. Let it be us.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
