Why so Many People on Earth? The Ideology of Natalism

(Above: a 19th century English family). 

A few years ago I was invited at a reunion of citizens concerned about social issues. When I was there, I was startled to discover that only concern of the group was the evils of abortion. It was a fascinating experience: one of the persons speaking reported a calculation of how many “babies” had been killed by abortions over the past 15 years and concluded with “do you realize that, were it not for abortions, we could have today one million more people in Italy?” (I may remember the numbers incorrectly). But don’t make me say that they were bad people, not at all. It is just that if you start – as they did – from the assumption that the more people there are, the better the world is, then the consequence is that you want as many children born as possible: it is the position called “natalism.” I wonder how the people I met at that reunion would judge the kind of discussion that we are normally having at the “Cassandra’s Legacy” blog.

In the following post, Natan Feltrin and Eleonora Vecchi examine natalism as an ideology. About the proposition, “the more we are, the better it is,”  see also my post titled “If Switzerland had a Sahara Desert, it Would be a Small Africa” (U.B.)

Brief manifest of ethical-political anti-natalism 

Guest post by Natan Feltrin & Eleonora Vecchi

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to point out the problematic relationship between demographic trends and the ideology called “natalism”. With a point by point analysis, the authors highlight how, worldwide, there has always been a biopolitical approach to control the human biomass. This political “numbers game” builds on three main socio-cultural imperatives: to accomplish a holy order, to meet military needs and to enhance economic growth. In this dominant perspective, men, women and their sexuality become an effective tool to carry out a capitalistic and imperialistic goal.  Starting from this assumption and taking into account the biogeochemical limits of Gaia, “anti-natalism” turns out to be a heretical proposal against the dominant political mindset. From the child-free individual choice to family planning based on gender equality this brief manifest tries to encourage a new perspective on demography particularly with regard to its implications for the other species. Finally, the paper suggests the necessity of a more-than-human demography based on a bio-proportionality criterion far beyond the reductive idea of biodiversity.

Premise: Thursday, July 19th, 2018 10.13pm, we’re in a small pub in the Finnish town of Savitaipale in Southern Karelia. The World Population Clock reports that the human population has already reached 7,637,012,840 (billion) individuals. We sit down with two cups of coffee, ready to explain as briefly and effectively as possible why the dramatic growth of sapiens biomass is an ethical, ecological and political concern.

We live in a finite system: The Earth is a not a closed, nor an isolated, but a finite system. Thereby it is meant that from a biogeochemical perspective there are limited chances of expansion and proliferation on the planet. In other words, the growth of both consumption and consumers, engine par excellence of GWP (Gross World Product), has physical constraints that are flexible but not breakable. There’s no possibility to throw our hearts over thermodynamic rules! To state it even more clearly, the ideology of growth inherent in the contemporary capitalistic economy is heading towards a crash against the hard cliff of reality.

Violation of ecological boundaries: In the last two hundred years, Homo sapiens not only turned fossil fuel into human biomass but also our species increased its unequal prosperity to the detriment of natural systems. This phenomenon, known as The Great Acceleration, has resulted in an abnormal anthropic effect on a geologic scale: the Anthropocene is not only the Epoch of Man because sapiens has become a hyperobject – an all-pervasive entity in the lives of present and future beings- sed etiam because of the “human quantity”. In the Epoch of Man – “Man” and not “Human” due to the anthropocentric perspective of geo-history – loss of biodiversity, global warming, ocean acidification, desertification, plastic pollution, land consumption, water pollution, alteration of many biogeochemical cycles and much more, are consequences of the product between consumption and consumers. An unprecedented impact in history…

Optimist only if realist. Against an ideology of progress: Technology isn’t a deus ex machina and won’t necessarily intervene providentially when humankind needs it. In history, “great inventions” “saved” only behindhand: vaccines hadn’t a retroactive effect on generations that died in the agony of diseases. Endeavouring to create a more resilient world through a tenacious and avant-gardist scientific research doesn’t mean to let utopian or dystopian geo-engineering scenarios seduce us. In order to avoid phantasmic policies we need a realistic approach towards science, which often doesn’t ensure cures, but clearly identifies symptoms and aetiology.

Humans deal with knowledge in a schizoid way: when we achieve easy solutions through science we praise it, on the contrary when it warns us, we overthrow it. We let mermaids seduce us as much as we don’t want to listen to Cassandra! Regardless, technology is only a portion of a solution that must take place in a conscious political evolution. The human flock has to find new routes and new ways to coordinate and not to lose itself in some Neverland!

What to do? A systemic answer: if you’re lost in the heart of a Finnish forest the best thing to do is to ration resources, walk and not to consume everything, blindly trusting in prompt rescuers. Thus, so as not to be overwhelmed by the chaos of Anthropocene, politics and ethics can’t only hope but have to take responsibility for their own time through an unprecedented pragmatic rationality. Understanding the necessity of acting and not waiting, we must intervene in the whole IPAT equation: the massive impact of the present and future anthropo-mass combined with the erosion of the “natural capital” must be resized with the descent of consumption, the inversion of demographic trend and the development of more ecological technologies. Repetita iuvant: the demographic growth is not the only area for action, nevertheless without giving a limit to this human multiplication every sickness of the world, at least of Gaia, won’t be solved.

What is natalism? Brief explanation: natalism is not the same as an increasing demographic trend, instead it is the ideology that advocates the positivity, necessity, and eco-compatibility of such an increment. This ideology leads to political or individual ideas and actions that have the aim of sponsoring, encouraging or forcing the population of an area to heighten their natality according to a bio-political agenda. There are three common form of natalism that intertwine together: theocratic, militarist-ethnocentric and capitalistic. In those viewpoints, demography is never neutral but, from a woman’s womb to male sperm, all the anthropic matter serves as cannon fodder for achieving the aims of a few. The will to fertility becomes the will to power, not merely reproductive but cancerous.

• Theocratic: there’s only one population, the one of God, and it has to follow the imperative to multiply itself at the expense of every other community, human or not human. This mind-set, even if archaic and reclaimed by few, contains all the monotheistic culture, affecting us from the depth of our unconscious.
• Militarist-ethnocentric: from Mussolini’s speech to the fight of cradles between Palestine and Israel all geopolitics is drenched in geo-demography. The number of humans is turned into a tool which different Leviathans use to compete and to divide an ecumene increasingly tight and mortified. In this vision, the others are always “too many”.
• the human biomass is gasoline for the wheels of stagnant economies: more consumers, most families with small children tend to spend more, means growing GDP. Furthermore, like Malthus and Ricardo had guessed, more people are synonymous with cheap workers. The demographic imperative, namely natalism, is an unequivocal breaking point between two different ways to administer the Oikos: ecology and capitalistic economy are irreconcilably in opposition.

Ethics anti-natalism, child-free and bio-protest: being child-free means to freely decide not to have offspring. The ones that contest this position often describe the decision as Eurocentric. In this critical statement, there’s a concealed truth: choosing to have or not have a child is not possible throughout the world. Above all, under either the reason why individuals choose to use their right of not procreating, often related with the rupture of the taboo of the traditional family as the only social accepted relation, the child-free choice doesn’t turn those subjects anti-natalistic. Anti-natalism in individuals is the awareness of the criminal implication that natalistic ideology has, both from a biocentric and an anthropocentric perspective. Anti-natalism, therefore, is an ethical disposition in a natural and cultural world with the aim of disarming all the theocratic and capitalistic attempts at increasing human quantity. This results, in supporting a policy of family planning and moreover embracing, with a symbolic and material parrhesia, in life seeing the descent of consumers and consumption. For this reason, an anti-natalist couple can decide to have zero, one, two children, or to adopt. All these reflections have to start from the consideration that to whom in this world is not and wouldn’t have the desire to be, we don’t have to give them a mere existence tout court, but the possibility of material and social condition to be happy. In this ethical horizon, the child-free choice can be a bump key and breaks the chains that nail human life on a reproductive telos. Frequently referred as a child-less choice in a deprivation sense and painted like the symbol of a bourgeois and egocentric existence poor in affection, the decision to not reproduce can rather assume a proactive value in political environmentalism. As a reply to a natalist bio-policy, being child-free matures into a bio-protest, boycotting in its small way the rush towards collapse.

Anti-natalism beyond Eurocentrism. To act is needed: policy has to make cast-iron and trans-national decisions: a steady stream of investment for family planning where the birth rate is higher is fundamental. Family planning, it is always good to emphasize, doesn’t mean to control birth rate with a coercive and totalitarian approach, conversely, it means to allow individuals to decide with conscious freedom about their reproduction. Effective and accessible provision to contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and the reconnection of social realities with their environment are goals to reach alongside illness and hunger prevention and political instability.

This approach, far from being a paternalistic Eurocentrism, is a moral duty towards the other dictated by awareness: the ones who prefer non-intervention in foreign reality are like an AIDS sufferer that refuses to contemplate the use of prophylactics. As regards the so-called “developed countries”, the natalist and limitless ideology must be eradicated through ethical-ecological education and liberation of sexuality, still enslaved by the pornography-reproduction dichotomy. Culturally, a decreasing demographic trend, like the Italian or the Japanese, has to be turned from demerit to collective virtue. A descent will bring countless advantages of resilience, although from a social perspective will be distressing. Thus, a declining birth rate has to be handled by policies focused on effective generational replacement and specific investment in public services: what a nation invests in under 18’s would be endowed gradually towards protection against senility. This can sound drastic but assuming there will be more young people to take care of elderly will only procrastinate and escalate the issue of a radical change in the demographic pyramid, enslaving us in a Ponzi scheme. Obviously, anti-natalist policies need to go beyond, in quantity and complexity, the few points that we have mentioned here. Further consideration would be a fertile ground for broader research.

A world among worlds. More-than-human demography in the Eremocene: There are several talks on Anthropocene, nevertheless the more correct word to describe the Epoch we are creating could be Eremocene. This is because we are annihilating bio-cultural diversities mainly by subtraction of “living space” creating a repetitive and monochrome world. In the current reality, where globalization, free market, and heritage flattening are making humankind greyer and more fragile, others life forms are incurring a dramatic extinction, aka the Sixth Extinction. Contemporary philosophy needs to become aware not only of the demographic challenge but embrace the concept of a more-than-human demography. With this definition, we want to underline the necessity of going beyond the division between anthropocentric demography and ecology of non-human populations.

This effort is required because thinking of the human quantity only in the economical-political-cultural outlook blind us from seeing the reality: our species is a world among worlds and not a self-referential isolated monad. The base principle of this ethic is that every life form and every bio-cultural heritage, have the right to a space for expression. This space cannot be a merely symbolic reductionism of species and population to an individual label.

Cassandra’s legacy by Ugo Bardi