Past, Future, and Breeding Out of Captivity

The state’s concern for its flock tends ever to expand. Last month, the South Korean government announced the creation of a new “Ministry of Population Strategy,” to coordinate its response to a deep demographic crisis. At 0.9 births per woman, South Korea’s fertility rate is the lowest of any country in the world, with the rest of East Asia and parts of Europe closely following. Globally, the underlying fertility rate has dropped below replacement in most countries, including even India. Africa and much of the Muslim world have not yet caught up with the trend, but no doubt will do so in coming decades. Within the lifetime of FPR’s current readers, something inherent in late modernity seems to be tipping countries one by one past peak population and on to a long downward slope.

Lost to time is whoever many years ago first came up with the recurring quip that humans, like other animals, do not breed well in captivity.

Of course, “captivity” is not how most people would describe our current situation. And it is true that contraception, educational opportunity, the lengthening of early adulthood, and the lifting of many constraints on women’s options all make possible smaller families. But options alone would be unlikely to drive the average so consistently below replacement level. When it comes to the factors driving decisions to have fewer or no children, choice and captivity are two sides of the same coin. Despite all the choices we now have, many perceive their options to have shrunk, amid the pressures that come with higher costs of living, dual-career households, and thinner support networks compared to earlier generations.

Still, for those of us in the FPR-sphere who take a lively interest in the more permanent things, the behaviourist thread connecting individual incentives to demographic aggregates probably misses the point. If animals breed for the present, perhaps modern humans breed for their own lifespan, so to speak, weighing the practical and emotional tradeoffs over a few decades. That time horizon happens to coincide with the outer reaches of governments’ actuarial farsightedness as they ponder data on population, pension sustainability, and the like, not much more than half a century beyond the decisionmakers of the day.

For the ancients through to even the Victorians, such a time horizon would look peculiarly short, at least to anyone with the disposition and circumstances to ponder their prospects beyond the barest subsistence of a season. Notions of lineage, of a chain of ancestors and descendants stretching long into past and future, commonly framed decisions to have children. When such notions evaporate, the cultural mainstream ends up with ever more people who want not smaller or more manageable families, but rather no posterity at all.

The short horizon of the modern professional class has struck me more than once in recent months. Late this spring, it came up on a couple of different occasions in the weekly Philosophy Interest Group that I host at the Hopkins-Nanjing Centre, at which we cover assorted ethical and societal issues in convivial fashion, often over wine on a Sunday evening. Few of these twentysomethings felt much in common with even their recent ancestors, often knew little about them, and had little sense of obligation to them. Having children eventually was sometimes on their agenda in the abstract, but even then they seemed to feel little imperative to transmit anything into the future.

The exceptions rather proved the rule. One fellow from a deeply religious background in the rural American South had a strong sense of his roots and seemed out of another era in how he talked of his grandparents and his future grandchildren. And I prompted some bewildered looks myself, when I commented that I took an abiding interest in my own family history in 1700s England and took it as natural that, intergenerationally, I might pass some self-understandings and worldviews on from the Georgian era to the twenty-second century. I suspect that we were seen as exceptions by others in that conversation, too. In the circles of élite postgraduate education and international affairs, few come from the churchgoing countryside in red states. And as one person noted, I was atypical in having a family background going back into previous centuries with some visibility and records. According to a survey done by the National Trust some years ago, 57% of the British population cannot name even one of their great-grandparents.

Others on FPR in recent years have similarly noted how their own quirks of experience make them outliers in a society of rootless amnesia. Earlier this summer, Tyler Justin Smothers recounted some of the colourful personalities from his own family history in Louisiana and Missouri. “Plenty of people walk around having no idea they come from fugitives or bigamists,” he wrote. “But this is a rich inheritance no one can give or take away. Knowing your family’s past fugitives and pretty boys is the kind of localism anyone can aspire toward and practice.” And two years ago, Seth Higgins contrasted his own multigenerational roots in one small town in Pennsylvania with the more common immigrant experience and professional mobility that takes the whole country as its horizon for living. He suggested that such multigenerational communities were inherently vulnerable when the winds of change blew through, since livelihoods usually depended directly or indirectly on one key industry, with all the contextual knowledge and familiar networks wound around it.

In keeping with the spirit of FPR, these personal histories bind intergenerational horizons to localities. As I traced in my early contributions to FPR many years ago, I have much sympathy for rooted localism. Leaving home does often go along with a diminished interest in one’s forebears and, by analogy, one’s presumably equally mobile descendants—assuming they will even exist.

This helps to make sense of why students in our Philosophy Interest Group—mostly, though not entirely, American and Chinese—find it hard to relate across more than a generation or so. Cause and effect are clear on the surface. Americans have long experience of setting out across a vast country to seek their fortunes. And most do not have to go back far to find immigrant ancestors whose international move not only put then-unbridgeable distance between their children and any ancestral village, but also typically cut them off linguistically as well in short order. China, despite a long history, belies its own pretensions as well as outsiders’ stereotypes about continuity. In effect, most educated young Chinese are also immigrants of a sort. After the Cultural Revolution’s extirpation of “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits,” they were born into a period of frenzied urbanisation and development, which have laid waste to most concrete markers of the past. Many of their linguistic roots have also been severed by Mandarin standardisation. I still remember the aspiring investment banker fifteen years ago who remarked in class that he felt more in common with his roommate from New York than with his grandparents in a Chinese village. I hear that he has since moved back and forth across the Pacific over the course of a successful career.

Still, the shrinkage of intergenerational horizons has more going on beneath the surface. While rapid social change and moving around can sever certain roots, it has also become a lot easier to maintain cultural and personal ties across long distances than it used to be. Many of us in expat circles do just that, even though we also divide our time in ways that look hypermobile. Places loosen as time contracts, but the deeper issue has to do with how we see our own lives and aspirations and what is worth transmitting. Whatever the variety of personal circumstances and histories that may exacerbate or ameliorate the trend, the diminished importance of intergenerational continuity seems bound to something more fundamental in the advance of late modernity—something more than mobility per se.

My seven year old daughter goes to the British School of Nanjing during the academic years when I am at HNC. The father of one of her classmates once told me that it was a low priority for his daughter to master his native tongue—a major European language—because English and Chinese will be far more useful to her in future. For many expat families in this layer of global society today, it is merely a more extreme version of what already happened to the middle classes of most countries during the last century. The past and the provincial are something mainly to be escaped, a foil for where one has already arrived and where one is going next. The future and the cosmopolitan are together an object of ambition. Utility is the guiding principle. And that utility operates on the time scale of an individual life, not an intergenerational chain. It extends more or less from one’s own adolescent striving through to launching one’s offspring into their own careers. At that point, presumably, all the calculations must begin anew.

The counterweight to utility has historically been a sense that one possesses something intrinsically worth transmitting, beyond immediate interest. Conversely, utility on a short time scale will tend to swell in importance if other goods have already shrunk to leave a vacuum.

This past spring, a discussion of global challenges in social policy in one of my classes generated a few of the usual observations about hypercompetitive secondary education in China as a burden on parents. One foreign student then added that the sort of traditionalists and religious believers who aspire to “be fruitful and multiply” believe that they have experienced and absorbed something worthwhile, which they in turn want their children and grandchildren to preserve and transmit. The student in question applied the point with an observation that very few Chinese today who have gone through the pressure-cooker of Chinese secondary education look forward to inflicting it on anyone else going forward. Likewise, in a viral video from the Shanghai lockdowns of 2022, one young couple, threatened by police with three generations of consequences for failing to comply, replied, “Sorry, we’re the last generation.” The comment came out of a clash in time of crisis, but the sentiment seems to abound: Shanghai has an even lower fertility rate than South Korea.

To be sure, trapped frustration may be more extreme amid the tightly wound competition and dystopian hierarchies of places like China, compared to places like Italy and Spain, where fertility is also very low. But the common self-understanding of late modernity is akin to what the late Christopher Lasch described as the “culture of narcissism.” Individuality has been uprooted from moral contexts, leaving unstable relationships between people living entirely in the present and seeking a kind of “hilarious anæsthesia.” Whether in any particular society either the hilarity of comfort or the numbness of the exhausted hamster on the wheel wins out, the atomistic outlook is at its core the same.

The premodern sensibility involved a way of life and the truths of tradition cascading down over one’s head as one stood on a ledge halfway up a long waterfall, so to speak. The late modern self swims through the flat surface of a lake, experiencing and reacting subjectively to whatever rewards or amusements may float by in proximity. Virtue and an orientation to the permanent things have yielded, correspondingly, to human capital and therapeutic reassurance. The former inherently favour a longer time horizon, and a common reference point capable of spanning multiple generations, compared to the latter.

Despite the alleged freedom of modernity, this stripped-down and present-minded self bears eerie resemblances to what the ancients most feared about enslavement. As historian Orlando Patterson ably detailed, the slave was alienated from the obligations and honour of social ties, and disconnected from past and future. Providing only physical labour, he or she was free to cross boundaries of social space and caste. Much like the eunuch, the slave lacked posterity and thus had no interest beyond personal lifespan and making the best of the incentives and comforts immediately available. The ancient slave’s outlook followed from having to live in the moment. Perhaps today the causal link goes the other way, from the outlook to a diminished interest in what happens more than a generation before or after oneself.

For those of us in the FPR landscape concerned with more stable bases for human flourishing, how are we to assess this peculiar turning point in world history, when present-mindedness coincides with the prospect of steady population decline? Some precision in what matters and why is crucial, lest we get overly impressed with prevailing would-be solutions, which mostly leave the vacuum of modernity intact.

Culture-war gestures that narrowly affirm the nuclear family are more about lashing out than about genuinely restoring a moral ecology that would extend intergenerational horizons again. As many of us have no doubt seen in headlines, a 2021 video recently resurfaced of Republican vice presidential nominee J D Vance opining that childless Democratic “cat ladies” had no link to the future. Apart from the understandable backlash against an uncharitable insult, the focus on what amounted to a celebration of masculine fecundity effectively ignored the many dimensions and callings through which genuinely traditional societies connected people to one another and to the future. There are few monks or crusaders on the manicured lawns of picket-fenced McMansions. Having four children in the back of a minivan does not necessarily mean thinking of four generations. As James Matthew Wilson observed on this website over a decade ago, “vague consumer conservatism” on the American right tends to see “the nuclear family as a source of stability, while it is in fact a decimated tribe, subsisting after upheaval and sojourning in exile,” given the abandonment of natural law, interdependence of extended kin, and the like.

A second selective response is the dumb nationalism that revolves around an imagined collective bloodline. Elderly cadres in Beijing who would reduce Confucianism to deference and patriarchy, while razing anything else that gets in the way of modernity, find their hegemonic dreams of a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese race” thwarted by millions of young Chinese women reluctant to people that future. Ineffectual policies to raise the birthrate aim merely at collective demographics, and studiously ignore the micro-level anomie of “the last generation.” And lest the hard-edged racialism of the CCP seem alien, remember the anti-immigrant sentiment voiced back in 2017 by Iowa Representative Steve King: “We can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies.”

The suburban nuclear family of the postwar era caricatured a lost world of kin and community, just as emergent nationalisms caricatured a lost world of civilisation and textured tradition. Today, these intensifying demographic preoccupations on the right miss the point. It is far easier to change nothing while brandishing markers of identity, than it would be to address the experiences that have shaped the modern soul and turned it in on itself. On the left, orthodoxies extend the time horizon not in any personal affection or calling in society, but in ostentatious enlightenment about longue durée global harms and preferred urgent remedies. And somewhere between them, techno-optimists hold out hope for artificial immortality and transhumanism, effectively promising to extend the present rather than making one’s relationship to past or future more meaningful.

More darkly, easy responses threaten sometimes to tighten dystopian controls further and, whatever their impact on behaviour in the aggregate, worsen the anomie. No doubt the warnings about a Handmaid’s Tale future say more about their purveyors than any likely outcome. Still, states concerned about relative demographic weight will probably keep “nudging” their subjects with ever more force. Having two children rather than one because of tax incentives, or to get crushing student debt forgiven, would not in itself alter the tendency to think within one’s lifespan rather than genuinely across the generations. Historically, societies with a labour shortage have also offered somewhat better terms to common folk, as when wages rose after the Black Death. Yet, still more darkly, the prevalence of slavery in precolonial Africa stemmed on some accounts from abundant land and the need to control fewer people directly rather than through access to scarce resources. Future states with shrinking populations might try to attract immigrants by making their societies more congenial. Or they might tighten the fetters, East German fashion, to make it easier to extract value from a smaller labour force.

While perhaps less obvious, all these attempts to treat demographic decline and present-mindedness as a collective problem, or as an opportunity to signal ideological allegiances, have a common blind spot. They pay little attention to the vacuum through which the modern self moves, the context in which that self finds so little on which to peg a greater regard for past and future. Such solutions might swell the state, or technology, or some racial identification, but they would do little to enrich the texture of human life.

Traditional societies were good at pulling people out of themselves to connect with places, pursuits, and institutions that not only had a permanence about them but also mattered in lived experience day to day. A strong and pluralist civil society that fragments power and ambition and enables people to pursue intrinsic human goods is about more than just mediating between state and individual, though it does that too. It is also about what the Dutch Calvinist philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd—a founder of the sphere sovereignty tradition—dubbed “personal enkapsis,” or the individual’s simultaneous membership in institutions of all the various spheres: family, religion, politics, commerce, education, clubs, and the like. As modernity has thinned out traditional society, leaving the atomised relationship between state and individual citizen-consumer as primary, it is small wonder that fewer points of engagement with the permanent things leave people with less attachment to continuity itself, even when it is something as personal and concrete as one’s own lineage.

If the present-mindedness of this generation comes from the social and spiritual vacuum in which it moves, then the vacuum itself is more the problem than any individual choice about how many children one has or how one imagines one’s ancestors and descendants. Restoring localism that matters, one way or another, may tilt the landscape again for many of us. But perhaps the greater challenge after modernity is how to reconcile permanence and texture and tradition with mobility and the mixing of heritages in an increasingly open future, which are ultimately not going to go away in this cosmopolitan century.

I am mindful of how far I fall short in reconciling them myself, but some fragments come together even in what I try to do with my own daughter. She has not spent most of her life in any one country, and takes moving around for granted. But she goes back again and again to the same places and keeps up her childhood friendships. I imagine she sees no tension between her Dartmoor walks in English summers and her daily Chinese character memorisation, or between the global horizon of her international school and the questions of faith that she asks daily in the car while I drive. And I hope that, in due course, she will make her way through the family bookshelf and read with equal personal interest both the history of my mother’s forebears among England’s minor gentry and her Chinese grandfather’s writings about his childhood in a village wracked by revolution, even as she looks forward to a global space where all these elements come together for her.

Whatever the specifics of what any of us pass on from past to future—indeed, if our circumstances even allow us to do so—what matters most at the present civilisational moment is whether the aspiration itself is there for a critical mass of people. Perhaps in the coming decades we shall have, so to speak, not a straightforward demographic slope downward, but more of a dip and a levelling off in the next century. That undoubtedly smaller global population will look and think very differently from those whose worldview briefly dominates today. As these cultural and psychological tendencies work their way through billions of people, they also operate as a filter of sorts. Late modernity creates a demographic and cultural bottleneck. Anything purely present-minded will most likely not survive it—a reality that goes far beyond breeding, into the cultural transmission of the permanent things in all callings. Whatever is sufficiently disposed to survive by definition will displace a way of life that has abandoned even the desire for continuity between past and future.

In the long run, the late modern spirit is taking itself out of the running. Against the odds, the twenty-second century may have bred itself out of captivity and restored the circuits of hope, albeit on new scales.

Image Credit: John Trumbull, “The Vernet Family” (1806) via Collections – GetArchive