Eunatalism

Discourse about low fertility tends to be framed in a simplistic way. On one side, there are the pro-natalists, who believe that low fertility is bad. On the other side, there are the anti-natalists or free-natalists. To summarize their positions:

• Pro-natalism: Low fertility is bad. It will cause population decline, which is bad.

• Anti-natalism: Low fertility is good. It will cause population decline, which is good.

• Free-natalism: Fertility is a personal choice. Don’t worry about population growth or decline.

The issue of fertility is not that simple. It involves two different value dimensions: what is good for the individual and what is good for the collective. And there is no simple relationship between fertility and either value dimension.

First, we need to define the value dimensions. I define them as follows:

• Reproduction is the core individual value. The individual purpose of life is to reproduce.

• Civilization is the core collective value. Our collective purpose is to perpetuate, extend and advance our civilization.

The latter value emerges from the former, because civilization is the collective home of our descendants.

These values are the starting point of this essay. You might reject them. I won’t try to explain or justify them here. That would require another essay. Even if you reject them, you might be interested in their implications for individual and social action.

Now, let’s consider the fertility question in the frame defined by these values.

In the conditions of modern civilization, high fertility is good for the individual. It doesn’t matter if she is rich or poor. Her children will not die of starvation. Biologically, the only reason to reduce fertility is to increase the survival rate of offspring. When offspring are guaranteed to survive, the optimal strategy is to maximize fertility.

In the modern world, high fertility is good for the individual, and low fertility is bad. A welfare mom with 10 kids is a biological winner. Taylor Swift is a biological loser.

Most people view it in the opposite way, because our ancestors lived in very different conditions. In the past, most children died young. Having more resources was very important to reproductive success. Also, with limited birth control options, high fertility was the default. We are biologically and culturally adapted to those past conditions, not to modern civilization. Thus, most people are making extremely maladaptive choices (like Taylor Swift).

In the past, it was adaptive to restrict fertility somewhat, to (say) 5 children instead of 10. Most of those children would die young, but (on average) 2 would survive to become parents themselves. Today, there is no individual benefit to restricting fertility, because we live in a period of abundance and low child mortality. It is good for the individual to have as many children as possible.

However, high fertility is not good for the collective, whether we define the collective as humanity or a smaller subset of humanity, such as a country.

Unregulated reproduction is a tragedy of the commons. Population growth leads to competition for scarce resources, making life harder in general. If every woman on the Earth had 10 children, we would soon be starving.

To make our civilization sustainable, we need relatively low fertility. Ideally, the population should be stable, not growing (as it currently is) or shrinking (as it would if everyone had the current US fertility rate of 1.6 children per woman). To have a stable civilization, we need a stable population, not exponential growth or decay.

We also need eugenic fertility.

The word “eugenics” has various interpretations. Some people confuse or conflate “adaptive” (what is good for the individual) with “eugenic” (what is good for the collective). To be clear, I define eugenics as the selection for individual traits that are collectively beneficial.

It can be adaptive for an individual to murder, steal and rape, but those actions harm others. It can be adaptive to be a psychopath, but it is dysgenic, not eugenic. Being handsome/beautiful gives an individual an advantage in the zero-sum competition for mates/sex, but it does not benefit the collective. Being attractive is adaptive, not eugenic. Higher IQ can be eugenic, because higher IQ people are generally more socially productive and responsible. However, higher IQ is not necessarily eugenic.

To be eugenic, fertility should be tied to the parents’ contribution to civilization. Productive and responsible people should have more children than unproductive or irresponsible people. For example, it is eugenic to prevent people on welfare from having children, because they are unproductive. Likewise, it is eugenic to prevent serious criminals from having children, because they are socially destructive.

Essentially, eugenics consists of biological incentives that align individual value (reproduction) with collective value (civilization).

We understand the importance of incentives for shaping behavior. We understand that laws and law enforcement are necessary to prevent socially destructive behavior, such as murder, rape and theft. We understand that economic incentives are necessary to make people productive. Eugenics applies the same principle to biology. It biologically rewards (with higher fertility) prosocial behavior, and punishes (with lower fertility) antisocial behavior. Over time, these incentives will shape human nature, in the same way that legal and economic incentives shape behavior patterns.

Currently, fertility is dysgenic. We subsidize reproduction with the welfare state, foreign aid, and other types of charity. Fertility is inversely correlated with productivity and responsibility, both within countries and globally. The highest fertility rates are found in the least productive countries, and vice versa. The biological incentives are not aligned with the collective good.

Instead of anti-natalism, pro-natalism or free-natalism, I propose eunatalism: the social regulation of individual fertility for the collective good. This would consist of eugenic reproduction control.

We need eusocial fertility, not high, low or free fertility.

The system that I propose is very simple. Reproduction would require a permit. Both parents would have to agree to have a child and accept responsibility for it. Only people with sufficient income to support a child and meet their social obligations (pay some tax) would qualify for a reproduction permit. Serious criminals would not qualify for a permit.

Eunatalism would replace “nature’s boot”. In the past, the population and genome were regulated by high levels of premature death. Most children died young from war, disease or famine. To maintain the condition in which most children live to adulthood, we must regulate the population and genome ourselves.

Modern civilization has lifted nature’s boot from humanity’s neck, but only temporarily, by increasing the resources available. It depends on nonrenewable resources, such as fossil fuels, and it has no regulatory mechanisms. In its current form, our civilization is not stable. It is a runaway growth process, which will likely terminate in collapse.

See Modern Civilization is Irrational and Bootnecking Modern Civilization.

Eunatalism would stabilize modern civilization. It would regulate the population, preventing it from growing out of control. It would also maintain and improve the order of the genome, which will otherwise decay.

Unlike the other X-natalisms, eunatalism recognizes the distinction between individual and collective value, and the potential for conflict between individual and collective interests. It resolves that conflict by regulating individual behavior.

This is nothing new. It is how society works. For example, we prevent individuals from killing, raping and stealing, because those actions are harmful to the collective. Society regulates individual behavior for the good of the collective.

Now, you might be thinking “But the big problem now is LOW fertility! You are proposing limiting fertility, not raising it.”.

First of all, low fertility is not a big problem for the human collective. We have plenty of people. Low fertility is a big problem for the individual, but not for the collective. In the long run, it could become a problem for the collective, but now it is primarily an individual problem.

By itself, eunatalism would not solve the individual problem of voluntary low fertility, which is that people are choosing to have few children. As I have explained in other essays, the modern fertility decline is mainly due to biological mismatch: the mismatch between human instincts and the modern environment. The best way of solving this problem is with an explicit value of reproduction. Now that people have the ability to control reproduction, they must consciously want to reproduce, to be adapted to modern civilization.

Although eugenic reproduction control would not directly make individuals want to reproduce, it would raise the social status of high fertility. Today, high fertility is associated with low social status. The welfare mom has low social status, while Taylor Swift has high social status. This is partly because of outdated values, and partly because we subsidize reproduction. By associating reproduction with productivity and responsibility, eunatalism would raise the status of high fertility. It would be a sign of a person’s social worth.

The corollary is that trying to raise fertility with economic incentives, such as lower taxes or tax credits for large families, has the opposite effect. It lowers the status of high fertility. It also tends to be dysgenic.

It is important to understand that low fertility is not the result of hardship or scarce resources. Our ancestors had children while living in mud huts or caves, with predators at the doorstep, struggling to feed themselves, etc.

The existence of welfare moms proves that it is possible to have many children in this environment. The typical welfare mom has a material standard of living far better than our premodern ancestors had. In fact, with modern plumbing, heating, air conditioning, refrigeration, etc, her material conditions are superior in many ways to that of a king or queen in the past.

I’m not saying that the modern individual has no economic problems. Yes, it is hard to afford a home. Yes, there are greater expectations placed on parents these days. You might feel that you need a house in the suburbs and two cars before you can have a child. But you don’t. That’s just a preference, which was created by outdated values and modern marketing.

Today, the main obstacle to reproduction is individual choice. Modern low fertility is voluntary.

This is especially true for women, who control reproduction. A man might be unable to reproduce because he can’t find a mate. The breakdown of pair-bonding is another aspect of the problem. But both men and women are choosing low fertility.

To make civilization work, we need individuals striving to reproduce, and being limited by society. The social regulation of reproduction is a much kinder and gentler substitute for nature’s boot. It replaces mortality with fertility as the means of selection. It would allow us to maintain an advanced civilization with low child mortality. We would have moderate fertility, not low or high fertility, and the fertility would be eugenic, not dysgenic.

In the long run, voluntary low fertility will be eliminated by natural selection. (See Fertility and Destiny.) However, that will take a while, and it might involve the collapse of modern civilization. Rather than waiting for that to happen, I propose that we change our cultural values. We need to replace outdated values about sexuality and reproduction with values that are adapted to modern civilization. This can be done, because values are somewhat cultural, although they are rooted in the emotions.

In the short run, a society could do various things to eugenically boost fertility, such as requiring people to get married and have at least one child by a certain age, if they can afford to. Such policies are not necessary in the long run, but they could make a big difference in the next 50 years or so. Social policies that eugenically boost fertility could give a country a big advantage over other countries, within a single generation.

In general, eunatalism will make a society stronger. If China, for example, adopts eunatalism, and other large countries don’t, then China will dominate the world.

Eunatalism is the only way to make modern civilization sustainable. Unless we regulate the human population and genome ourselves, nature’s boot will eventually return, probably in the form of a civilizational collapse.

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Now, I will address some potential criticisms (in block quotes).

Eugenics is evil!!

Really? Why is it evil? How is it evil? What does “evil” mean?

People who say things like that are thinking with words, not ideas. They don’t even know what “eugenics” means or what “evil” means, but they know that the two words go together.

If we define “evil” as “bad for the collective”, then eugenics is the opposite of evil. It is regulating reproduction for the collective good.

It sounds like the NWO!!

If you are judging things by superficial pattern recognition, you’re not thinking. If you are judging them by comparison to online memes, you’re an idiot.

That is fascism!!

“Fascism” is just a word that is used to dismiss ideas. What I am proposing is not a political ideology. It is a social solution to a social problem: the problem of making modern civilization sustainable.

But that is authoritarian!!

It’s no more authoritarian than any other social regulation of individual behavior, such as traffic regulations or the law against murder. Society is necessarily “authoritarian”. The function of society is to impose a social order on individuals, to solve problems of cooperation that would otherwise exist.

See Game Theory and Society.

We just need to restore traditional religion and morality. We don’t need your atheistic, materialistic, technocratic solution.

Traditional religion and morality are cultural adaptations to past problems, not modern problems. They worked reasonably well in the past, but they don’t work now. That’s why they have gone into decline.

Traditional religion and morality do not provide a moral justification for either eugenics or population control. Traditional religion and morality evolved (culturally) during a time when most children died young, so there was no need to control the population, and reliable birth control did not exist, so there was no effective way to control reproduction, other than prohibiting sex.

Traditional religion and morality focus on preventing extramarital sex (and thus, children born out of wedlock). This was the main problem in the past, but it is not a big problem now. Preventing extramarital sex is much more invasive than simply controlling reproduction, and it would not be sufficient to regulate the population and genome.

Overpopulation isn’t a problem. Malthusianism has been refuted. Haven’t you heard about the Simon-Erlich wager?

Malthus was essentially right that populations are regulated by scarcity. Recent history doesn’t disprove that. A forest fire burns out when the fuel is exhausted. Before that happens, it can grow a lot. Growth does not disprove limits. We are in a period of growth due to new technology and fossil fuels. It does not follow that we can grow the population and economy forever. The Earth is finite, regardless of whether Simon won a bet with Erlich about commodity prices.

You’re worrying about nothing. The global population is projected to stop growing on its own, due to voluntary low fertility.

We can infer, by logical reasoning from evolutionary theory, that the population won’t stop growing due to voluntary low fertility. Voluntary low fertility is a biological error that will be corrected (and is being corrected) by evolution. In the long run, only involuntary low fertility or high premature mortality can regulate the population.

Life, by its nature, fills ecological niches.

See Fertility and Destiny.

Dysgenics can be prevented by individuals using new technologies, such as embryo selection and genetic engineering, to select their children’s genes.

Again, there is a difference between the individual good and the collective good. If parents select their children’s genes, they will probably base their selection on what would benefit the child, not what would benefit society. (They might also have incorrect notions about what would benefit the child.)

For example, most parents would want their male children to be tall and strong, and their female children to be beautiful. This is not eusocial. Attractiveness is a zero-sum competition between individuals. Having a more attractive population is not socially beneficial.

I’m not opposed to parents making such decisions, within the framework that I have proposed. But artificial selection by parents would not necessarily be eusocial.

Social problems require social solutions. To be eusocial, selection must be imposed on people, not voluntary. It must be based on eusocial criteria, such as social productivity and responsibility.

Why not use socially mandated genetic engineering to fix problems with the genome, rather than policing who has children?

A feedback loop is better for regulating a complex system than ad-hoc fiddling. For example, a thermostat is much better for regulating the temperature in a house than manually turning the heater on and off. What I have proposed is a simple feedback loop. It does not require technocrats to make decisions about what genes are required in what percentages, etc. It simply creates a causal dependence between the desired outcome (social productivity and responsibility) and reproduction.

Also, eusocial selection is not just the removal of mutations; it is also positive selection for traits that benefit society, and negative selection for traits that harm society. To do this with ad-hoc genetic engineering would be very difficult, because it would require calculating the effects of individual genes on complex social outcomes. By contrast, it is very easy to do with a simple feedback loop.

Eusocial selection would allow for beneficial mutations to be positively selected. For a new mutation, there is no way to know its effects in advance. Each life is an experiment, which provides data for the induction process of evolution. If we eliminate all new mutations, the genome will not improve over time.

Why not just target IQ, rather than social outcomes? We know that IQ is correlated with social outcomes.

That would run into the problem of Goodhart’s Law. Currently, IQ might be correlated with social productivity and responsibility. Thus, selecting for higher IQ would improve those outcomes, for a while. However, it would also decorrelate IQ from those outcomes, for various reasons.

Again, a feedback loop is better for regulating a complex system than ad-hoc fiddling.

Your system is based on income, and I don’t think income reflects social productivity. High-income people are often parasites, while low-income people do all the important labor.

In general, I think income does roughly reflect social productivity. However, that is not guaranteed. It depends on the economic system. Some people acquire wealth by nepotism, luck, trickery, etc. I would not say that the current economic system always rewards productive labor more than unproductive or even destructive labor.

However, that is a problem with the current economic system, not with eunatalism. Ideally, we want both biological and economic incentives to be eusocial.

Eunatalism, by itself, is not a blanket solution to all problems with modern civilization. It just deals with the biggest biological problems. There are other problems, such as that the financial system is a giant pyramid scheme. To make our civilization sustainable, we need other reforms.

Eunatalism requires a functional society. For example, if law enforcement is highly corrupt or dysfunctional in other ways, legal enforcement of reproduction licensing would be unreliable. However, that is not an argument against eunatalism, any more than “law enforcement can be corrupt” is an argument against having laws.

The problem of creating a functional society is outside the scope of this essay.

AI will make human labor obsolete, and thus make individual productivity meaningless. UBI will replace labor-income.

Even if human labor became completely unnecessary, civilization would still need population control, and the potential for people to be destructive would still exist. So, there would still be a need for eunatalism.

Currently, we are nowhere near a labor-free utopia/dystopia. But it is worth considering, because we might end up there someday. It would create many new philosophical and social problems, most of which are beyond the scope of this essay. We would have to think about the purpose of civilization, the role of the individual within society, and what to do with our lives.

Your proposal could never get political support, so it is useless.

The counterpoint is that political power is useless if it doesn’t solve real problems. We might be able to get political support for communism, but communism is socially destructive. If we want to actually solve social problems, not just attain power for personal use, we need to understand social problems and their solutions before we engage in politics.

Eunatalism certainly isn’t in the political Overton window now. But things change. The Overton window today is very different from the Overton window 50 or 100 years ago. We are seeing an increased awareness of the problems of modernity. Ten years ago, nobody was talking about “the fertility crisis”, even though the West has had low fertility (at or below replacement) since the 1970s. People are suddenly noticing a deep problem with modern civilization that has existed for a long time. Dysgenics and population growth are being ignored now, but they can’t be ignored forever.

There are moral obstacles to eunatalism, such as the association of eugenics with evil. But it can be justified on standard ethical grounds. It follows from the general ethical principle that people should not inflict harm on others.

Most behaviors that could cause harm to others are regulated by society. For example, society regulates driving to prevent bad drivers from inflicting harm on others. The same should apply to reproduction. Children can be a burden on society if they are not supported by their parents. Children who grow up to be criminals are a burden on society. Uncontrolled reproduction is a tragedy of the commons. Thus, there is a clear ethical basis for socially controlling reproduction.

The social control of reproduction is not a new idea. It is a very old and almost universal practice. In the past, reproduction was controlled by the institution of marriage. Almost every society had some form of marriage that regulated sex, and thus reproduction. Extramarital sex was not allowed.

We abandoned the traditional control of reproduction without understanding its function or the consequences of abandoning it. We are now seeing the consequences (and paying the costs) of abandoning marriage. It is time to replace marriage with a modern form of reproduction control.

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Eunatalism would transform modern civilization into a stable, sustainable system. It would allow us to control our destiny by regulating ourselves. It is essential for a rational civilization.