There’s a constant trope on the right that the best way to win is to have more kids because eventually you’ll outnumber your enemies?
Seems like it makes sense. It is part of why Christianity won in the Roman Empire: they forbade anal and oral sex and contraceptives (yes, they had clumsy contraceptives back then) and emphasized that sex was for having kids and out-bred the pagans.
But it wouldn’t have worked if the children had preferred the pagan life. Christianity at the time offered a ton of social support, including very practical support like food and housing. Most Romans were poor, and if you were poor you needed the community that Christianity (and some other mystery religions) offered. Christianity offered a better life and a better after-life, for that matter.
Christians today think “we’ll just out-breed them” but it only works if when your kids grow up they don’t go to the big city and discover that there’s a more enjoyable and dignified way to live. Women may realize they don’t want to have multiple children and would like to have sex without necessarily getting pregnant. Ideas of social justice and equality may appeal to both sides, and arguments for atheism and agnosticism start looking mighty convincing when you see how many different religions there are all claiming that they’re the true religion.
The same is true for political ideology. If you’re poor and have no hope for the future maybe socialism looks a lot better than capitalism or the day’s version of MAGA. Maybe communism or anarchism. Or even just standard liberalism with individual rights.
This is what has been happening for well over a century to religion in advanced countries. Fewer and fewer believers, even when the religious breed like rabbits, because secular society or ideologies offer more hope and self-respect. Same with the decline in belief in capitalism. Capitalism says that people earn what they deserve. If you’re not making it are you going to believe you suck and deserve a shitty life or are you going to find an ideology which says “actually, the game is rigged, you aren’t a loser and we can make the world better for people like us.”
I know which one I’d choose.
Breeding is fine, but it only matters if you can hold onto the kids you spawn. And you can only do that if you are seen to offer a better life. This is at the heart of the right wing hatred of universities: kids go to university and realize that a better life is possible if they don’t buy into right wing arguments. They also meet brown people and discover, “hey, they’re just people.”
For a long time, when each generation was better off than the one before it, liberalism basically took the majority of non-liberals and turned them into liberal capitalists. Why wouldn’t it? It was clear that if they bought in they’d have a better life than if they didn’t.
Now liberalism and capitalism are failing. The right is trying to offer an alternative, and a lot of people have gone for it, but it’s also failing to deliver. Watching Trump basically destroy farming communities is instructive. And when it fails and is seen to fail, well, it’s going to be hard to hold on to those kids.
Breed all you want. It’s irrelevant if what you offer isn’t better that the lives possible to people by changing their ideology and loyalty. True victory isn’t having the most descendants, it’s having people act as you would have them act.
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Failed Scholar
What you are saying might be true in regards to political ideology or religious belief, but it is absolutely not true when it comes to ethnicity, in which case ‘demographics is destiny’ is much closer to the truth.
Ian Welsh
Oh? Is Italian American, German American, Irish American a meaningful distinction any more? It was at one time.
Jan Wiklund
According to Rodney Stark (The rise of Christianity, 1997), the Christians won because they had the duty to mend their sick. And when the two lethal pandemies struck Rome, ca 150s and 250s, the pagans died but the Christians survived, because their sick were cared for while the pagan’s were not.
A kind of non-monetary social security. And it got immensely popular. Not only that the Christians survived, it was also a tremendous advertisement: Join, and you will survive the next scourge.
Of course it also helped that they outlawed abortions, a very dangerous thing at the time that killed lots of women, just because their men didn’t want the heritage to be split up among too many children. That was probably the reason why there were so many upper-class women in the Roman Christian congregations.
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Christians today think “we’ll just out-breed them” but it only works if when your kids grow up they don’t go to the big city and discover that there’s a more enjoyable and dignified way to live.
I don’t know about that. At best, it’s replacing one dystopian reality with another dystopian reality. From one frying pan to another, so to speak. My daughter’s friend recently moved to New York City and she is living with six people in a one bedroom apartment with one bathroom for $1,600/month. I would hardly call that enjoyable but I guess it depends on each person’s perspective. For myself, I have a strong yearning for Lebensraum and no, I am not a Nazi.
Failed Scholar
Really Ian? How about America’s black population? It’s only been, what, 250 years? Why is that do you think?
Maybe 250 more years with some turbocharged DEI oughtta do the trick?
mago
Years ago a friend remarked that the Israelis were bent on eliminating the Palestinians because they were outbreeding them.
Another cause of fear and hatred.
Dan Lynch
It’s primarily the right wing males, not females, who want large families. Most women, if given a choice, choose education, a career, and financial independence. Maybe one or two kids, but not a “quiver full.” It takes a lot of brainwashing to convince women to stay home, change diapers, and be financially dependent on an authoritarian husband.
Russia is pushing hard to get their women to have more kids. I think that is a misguided policy, but at least Russia goes about it in a nice way, offering generous paid maternity leave and giving stay-at-home parents pensions. To their credit, Russian women are not going along with it for all the reasons I have described, and their birth rate remains low.
I did not want children, but one came along. I will say that being a parent made me a better person, and I learned a lot by being a parent. But it was harmful for my career and my hobbies and my social life. I still have mixed feelings about it.
ibaien
this is why our century’s looming polycrisis has been so damaging to the left globally – the overwhelming narratives on offer are “things are bad and getting worse” with no stories about how we get to a better future. who would want to join that team?
bruce wilder
I was born in the mid-1950s and grew up subscribing to an idealistic version of secular, socially progressive liberalism. Most of my adult life has been witness to the strange combination of continuing “technological” material progress and accelerating political entropy. I know enough history to realize that contradictions and cross-currents are perennial, but no constellation manifests a structure let alone a constant. My experience is not a universal.
Ian Welsh
So I have 3 examples where ethnicities effectively disappeared due to the effects of ideology (integration) and you have one where they didn’t, the most extreme case which started from slavery and which has a strong external marker.
America was founded on slavery for blacks, it’s part of the founding ideology. That ideology has proved too strong to fully overcome, so far. In a long enough timespan, it will be or there’ll just be so much interbreeding that no one can tell and it’ll all seem silly.
Stuff can last a long time, thousands of years. Doesn’t mean the processes for change don’t exist.
GlassHammer
Ian,
For fun you should take a look at the number of Americans born abroad (a pretty sizeable number, more than I thought) and compare it to the number born within the country.
Point being that withouy anything resembling a Western culture in the surrounding environment plenty of American births happen regardless.
WatchesForFun
That’s the thing, innit? The right’s vision of paradise is hellish for any sane person, even those on the right. It’s an ideology completely based on hatred for human beings.
KT Chong
Relevant:
The Colosseum: Rome’s Mind Control Machine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJj58txYaTU
So 25 to 40 percent of Roman citizens did not have steady jobs and were poor and on food stamps.
Eric Anderson
Interesting timing of this article Ian. I was having a morning shower thought today that our problems today in the West don’t per se stem from any real ideology. But, the lack thereof. It feels more to me that a kind of narcissistic nihilism rules the day.
It’s not the ‘isms or the ‘ologies. It’s the lack thereof.
Christianity isn’t christianity. It’s the “prosperity gospel.” Or, Christianization.
Capitalism isn’t capitalism. It’s enshitifinancialization as Ed Zitron recently put it. It’s, all for one, and one for none! Atomization by automization.
Everything is ‘ized.
There is no center where everyone is the center. To what do we hold?
Things, fall apart.
The masses brainwashed by the incessant propaganda of their own singular importance, and flailing at the “other” with singular impotence.
And singular, atomized, we’re fed into the maw of the corptocrasy to be spit out in a wad of corptocrisized AI slop.
Surely, we’re treading new water.
Surely some revelation is at hand.
j
For a case of outbreeding, check out how Kosovo became a separate country.
Stormcrow
KT Chong wrote:
Yeah. Old news by the time Christianity got started. Several centuries old. Italian smallholders could not economically compete with latifundias operated entirely by slaves, when slaves became dirt cheap. Which they did when Rome ate up every other polity from the Mediterranean Basin all the way to the Rhine-Danube frontier.
But that was Second Century BC through First Century BC. It was one of the major stressors that collapsed the Republic.
That was the fracture plane that Gaius Marius followed to power. If you have roughly one third of your entire citizenry out of work, that’s a windfall for army recruitment. Of course, if Gaius Marius could see that, so could others, starting with Publius Cornelius Sulla. These new formations weren’t the conscripts of old, loyal to their city. Marius’ design of New Model Army was loyal to its paymasters. And there was nothing in the mos maiorum that specifically prohibited resorting to military force to resolve political rivalries, because prior to Marius’ design of New Model Army, it was practically impossible.
Enter the first set of civil wars, stage left. By Caesar’s time, the Republic was a dead man walking.
IMHO, Christianity really went from a marginal cult to a reasonable contender for state religion about 400 years later, during the Third Century Crisis. Romans didn’t think of their relationship to their gods in the unlimited way Jews did. Romans thought in terms of contracts they made with their deities. Offer your god prayers and sacrifices and honor, and your god pays off with luck and victory and worldly goods. Unsurprisingly, a fair number of Romans felt their gods had welshed on their contracts by the mid 250s AD. Time to find gods who actually honored deals. Paul Pearson argued this contention in “The Roman Empire in Crisis, 248–260: When the Gods Abandoned Rome“.
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I say, let’s kill all the lawyers for they are the enemy of all humanity, domestic or otherwise. Shakespeare was right about that, but for the wrong reason(s).
elkern
A few years ago, I attended a one-woman play performed by a friend of mine, then titled just ‘Picking Up Stones’; it is now titled “Picking Up Stones: An American Jew Wakes to a Nightmare”. The difference: I saw it before the Oct 7 Hamas raid and Israel’s massive retaliation.
The show I saw was performed at the ‘Palestinian Museum US’, near Hartford, CT, and there was a long discussion after the play, which included the founder of the Museum, Faisal Seleh (a Palestinian-American).
The part of the discussion which is relevant here started with a small aside during the play, where Sandy noted that the liberal, non-religious Jews in Israel that she knew mostly had 3 children, while the more religious Jews had large families. Saleh asserted that Palestinians were having even more children. Whether true or not, it highlighted the /fact/ that both Jews and Palestinians view the conflict as a multi-generational fight for ethnic survival.
I think that’s when I lost all hope for any ‘Two-State Solution.
https://sites.google.com/view/sandralaub/home
Joan
I briefly lived in an orthodox Jewish neighborhood and our downstairs neighbor was a turbo-mom. She had a daughter old enough to be married and having kids of her own but was still having babies herself.
But the city surrounded this neighborhood and the kids could grow up and downgrade out of orthodox Judaism and become conservative or secular Jews, or just go secular completely despite growing up Jewish. You could have 15+ kids but you might not end up with even one turbo-mom among your daughters.
It really helps to see educated women thriving without kids and maybe without even a romantic partner, just enjoying their friends and pursuing their dreams.
Carborundum
High rates of reproduction are much more effective as a strategy for in-group leadership than out-group competition. Folks who spork out half a dozen kids are busy, comparatively resource strapped, and much more dependent on the group (and, by extension, its leadership) for support.* When the leader says lots of kids is divine, what they’re really saying is job security for me is divine.
*By extension, making kids too expensive for a large component of the populace is not exactly a strategic masterstroke on the part of the current pseudo-capitalist class.
StewartM
It’s a truism of anthropology (Marvin Harris) that people (the majority, at least) optimize the number of children they have to maximize personal comfort. In agrarian societies, children are useful for labor, they start making a “profit” for their parents around the age of 7 and by the age of 12 or so have “paid back” fully their parents’ “investment” in them. Absent old-age pensions both private and public, children are one’s means of support on old age. Finally, due to high mortality rates among children, one has to “overshoot” in actual babies born to achieve the optimal number.
In modern societies, children are just economic liabilities. This more than anything else is why people are choosing fewer and fewer children. Women’s rights have something to do with this too, but women’s power also is correlated to modern economies as unlike most agricultural work, women can do just about any job men do equally well, and that gives them more power just the way that needing commoners as soldiers also meant that the elites had to care for their cannon fodder better. As an aside, the trend towards smaller families was well underway in the late 19th century, and the elites fought it by passing all those laws criminalizing abortion, contraception, and all forms of non-procreative sexuality. It didn’t work.
The Right cannot get this right, as they are essentially “idealists” by nature—when I say “Idealists” I mean philosophical idealists, who believe that behaviors are largely or entirely the result of beliefs, and by changing the beliefs you change behaviors. Materialists, who say that material conditions drive behaviors which in turn influence beliefs, know better. People don’t just choose the number of the children they have from a belief system, but it is highly dependent on the material conditions in which they find themselves. If the Right really wanted Americans to have more babies, they would need to:
a) Have universal, free healthcare
b) Have free education K-12 and university;
c) have free or low-cost childcare;
d) require free family leave away from work, and require vacation minimums;
e) increase tax credits/tax deductions for children;
f) crush housing and transportation costs
Obviously, the Right doesn’t want to do this, but the opposite. So I predict that no matter how much pro-family verbiage the Right spouts, it will fail because they will do the opposite in every way possible in regards to actually achieving their goals of higher birthrates. They will actually accelerate each of these costs and then complain about women getting abortions or getting contraceptives (which they will continue to do, even if made illegal).
Idiots.
different clue
Here’s something interesting and vaguely tangentially related to this post. It shows Sherpas conversating without oxygen masks at a very high altitude.
” Sherpa brothers at Mt. Ama Dablam without oxygen cylinder chatting about which brand of noodles to eat at that altitude, one of them says it says spicy WaiWai. ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1pzia8c/sherpa_brothers_at_mt_ama_dablam_without_oxygen/
I don’t know how long they could go without oxygen masks at that altitude. But they are clearly one of the peoples who have adapted over time to lower oxygen levels at higher altitudes.
So if organized lowland mankind burns so much fossil and biological carbon and compromises so much photosynthesis as to lower the oxygen level of the atmosphere, these people might be able to survive on the remaining oxygen at low altitudes when us lowlanders no longer can. Which means they would be able to come down out of the mountains and inherit an otherwise-depopulated earth all for themselves. Them, and the Andeandigeneous nations and the Tibetans and other such.
The future of humanity may be in their strong hands.
Purple Library Guy
@StewartM Great post. I hadn’t thought about the right being “idealists” in that sense, but they definitely are and it does explain a lot about why everything they want to do is so stupid.
@different clue That’s amusing, but I don’t think it’s a thing. Various forms of feedback destroy human civilization LONG before oxygen levels could get low enough to kill people. And once civilization is gone, it isn’t wiping out vegetation any more. As to burning fossil fuels, CO2 levels are measured in parts per million, while oxygen is around 20% of the atmosphere. For burning stuff to have a noticeable impact on oxygen levels, CO2 would have to get up into the actual percentages range, which would, first, have us headed towards Venus style global warming, not the piddly couple of degrees we normally talk about, and second, do really weird things to our breathing in and of itself, since our breathing reflex is triggered by CO2 levels in the lungs. Everyone would be hyperventilating all the time, including Sherpas.
On the ethnicity thing . . . I will agree that there is a serious distinction in terms of people just up and leaving between on one hand ideologies and religions, and on the other ethnicities–at least visible ones. Nearly all blacks simply don’t have the option to just decide not to be black any more. Second generation ethnic Irish people can forget about Irishness and become part of the general, say, Canadian population, but blacks can’t. So the mechanism Mr. Welsh describes does not apply to them. And indeed, racism depends on this. To have the social effects that the instigators of racism want, the victims have to be stuck in the role. If they can just swap out and no longer be in the group discriminated against, lots of them will.
However, I’ve never heard of any victimized group holding an actual ideology of outbreeding the oppressor. It sometimes sort of happens, because they’re poor and that can lead to faster growth rates. But that implies that if in-groups don’t want to be outgrown by the victims they’re prejudiced against, they should make them not disadvantaged so their birth rates become the same as the society average. But they won’t, which brings us back to StewartM’s “Those bastards are idealists rather than materialists” thesis.
elkern
PLG –
The ongoing conflict in Israel is a perfect example of “victimized group[s] holding an actual ideology of outbreeding the oppressor”. European Jews *started* modern Israel for exactly this reason, and the Nakba set the Palestinians on the same path. BOTH sides are reproducing way beyond the carrying capacity of the land; both sides view themselves as ‘victims’.
In my story above, I neglected to mention something important: I’m not sure Faisal Saleh was correct when he said that Palestinians are breeding even faster than Israeli Jews, but I /am/ sure that he was proud of the idea.
Conversely, my Jewish friend was dismayed at the large families she saw among Orthodox Jews (but not bothered by the mild increase implied by the three kid average she saw among her secular friends there).
Murxi
The idea that the pagans didn’t tend to their sick is ahistorical nonsense, christian propaganda of the most embarrassingly stupid kind.
Not that it would change much, tending to the sick under the conditions of a pandemic in antiquity meant mostly more infections and death.
Christianity succeeded by outpoliticking, not by outbreeding others.
There is also no real indication that the plagues of the time made any lasting dent in any section of the population, just as the Black Death didn’t.
No matter how many people died, unlike perhaps today numbers would bounce back very quickly.