The people it prefers, it consumes

Wednesday, August 9th, 2017

The techno-commercial wing of the neoreactionary blogosphere, as Nick Land like to call it, has an obvious fondness for Pacific Rim city-states. like Singapore and Hong Kong, but these right-wing utopias have a problem. As Spandrell pointed out, Singapore is an IQ shredder:

How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely they are not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage in the finance and marketing rat-race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable genes just so your property prices don’t go down. Singapore is an IQ shredder.

The accusation is acute, Land says, and can be generalized:

Modernity has a fertility problem. When elevated to the zenith of savage irony, the formulation runs: At the demographic level, modernity selects systematically against modern populations. The people it prefers, it consumes. Without gross exaggeration, this endogenous tendency can be seen as an existential risk to the modern world. It threatens to bring the entire global order crashing down around it.

In order to discuss this implicit catastrophe, it’s first necessary to talk about cities, which is a conversation that has already begun. To state the problem crudely, but with confidence: Cities are population sinks. Historian William McNeil explains the basics. Urbanization, from its origins, has tended relentlessly to convert children from productive assets into objects of luxury consumption. All of the archaic economic incentives related to fertility are inverted.

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Education expenses alone explain much of this. School fees are by far the most effective contraceptive technology ever conceived. To raise a child in an urban environment is like nothing that rural precedent ever prepared for. Even if responsible parenting were the sole motivation in play, the compressive effect on family size would be extreme. Under urban circumstances, it becomes almost an aggression against one’s own children for there to be many of them.

Comments

  1. Abelard Lindsey says:

    Curing aging (SENS, whole body regeneration) will render the whole fertility issue moot.

  2. Bomag says:

    Curing aging will render the whole fertility issue moot

    Yikes! We are a long way from improving nature’s plan of vigorous growth; flowering; wilting.

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