The Main Barrier To Reproduction Is Ideas

According to Thomas Malthus (in later editions of On Population), the barriers to reproduction in man are three: misery, vice, and prudence. By misery he meant war, famine and pestilence. By vice he meant things like contraception, abortion, and buggery, a form of pestilence (do not look up “bug chasing”). By prudence he meant virtue, pride and what we could call economics.

It is clear enough that reproduction is made difficult by men killing each other, or by the lack of food or various maladies killing or disabling many. It is, or ought to be, but is not, also clear that the more vicious a culture is, the less interested it becomes in reproduction. (Incidentally, this restores to prominence the original meaning of vicious, which was to be filled with vice. That our modern meaning of cruelty evolved from this is now understandable.)

It is less obvious that virtue affects reproduction, but consider occupations like priests or nuns. Ideals are not always met, but they largely are and few religious have offspring. Pride requires some explanation, as does economics, which come in a moment.

There is, I think, a category missed by Malthus, which is education.

David Stove (whom we have not met in a while) reminds us in two remarkable essays in On Enlightenment about the Malthus’s steady-state theory of food and species survival. In all creatures except man the numbers of any species are up to and limited by the available supply of food. Conditions change and vary, setbacks occur, new territories (species-relative) entered and the like, and these cause fluctuations, but the balance is restored or approached. On the whole, all species produce as many conspecifics as they are able.

Malthus’s theory is not, as moderns mistake it, to suppose overpopulation will press on “the environment” and cause famine, etc. It is that life fills its niche to the level of abundance available, all things equals. Simple as that.

Charles Darwin, Stove reminds us, gratefully credited Malthus for this vital clue, which he needed for this theory of biological change:

It was this conjunction, of the Malthusian idea of population-pressure with the fact of variation, which was the fertilized egg of modern biology. And by now, of course, Malthusian ideas are so central to our neo-Darwinism that it is usual to find superior biological fitness actually defined in terms of a superior rate of reproduction.

Darwinism became Neo-Darwinism, a theory which, with its flaws, seems to be a crude approximation for all species save one. There is growing dissatisfaction with Neo-Darwinism, but even if its criticisims are admitted (which I think they will be) they will not solve the problem of man. Neo-Darwinism absolutely does not explain man. Man is not everywhere in numbers up to who can be fed. Man is not reproducing to the best of its ability in the mad race for genetic superiority. Not only are man’s genes not selfish, they are vicious.

Any glance out the window confirms this, especially if your look coincides with any of the many, and increasing, days of acknowledgement or “awareness” of “Pride” in whatever vice is popular at the moment.

We covered vice before, and it’s anyway obvious (to us) how “Pride” in all and every non-reproductive sexual activity, including those performed alone, stunts reproduction. And given there is no dispute about misery doing the same disservice, there is no need to discus it.

And truly there is not much need to hash out economics, pride (not in the vicious sense), or even how education depresses reproduction, because even these are known well enough. A note or two might be in order, though. Economics is not money per se, because the rich have few kids, on average. The rich are not reproducing to anywhere near the numbers they could afford to. The poor also have little concern with money, well aware in most places that they’ll not be forced to pay for reproducing, and often even gain from it.

What I mean is the attitude by those in the middle who convince themselves they cannot afford to reproduce. Because they are anxious they cannot maintain a certain quality of life they prefer, or they aspire to a more comfortable life and fret children will hold them back.

This is a form of education that harms reproduction. Which is an idea. Ideas of all kinds contrary to reproduction grip many, so it is ideas that limit most reproduction.

It should be obvious every vice is an idea, or a set of ideas. And so is virtue. As is war, but not so much famine and pestilence. Though there can be elements of ideas behind them. I need only say “covid panic” to prove that. This suggests we can replace all of Malthus’s categories with just two: disasters and ideas.

This is not in any way a new idea, about ideas. It was first correctly espoused by William Rathbone Greg in his 1868 essay “On the Failure of Natural Selection in the Case of Man” penned as a criticism to nascent Darwinism. I urge you to read it all. Civilization is an accumulation of ideas (with my added paragraphications for ease of internet reading):

The two great instruments and achievements of civilisation, are respect for life and respect for property. In proportion as both are secure, as life is prolonged and as wealth is accumulated, so nations rise–or consider that they have risen. Among wild animals the sick and maimed are slain; among savages they succumb and die; among us they are cared for, kept alive, enabled to marry and multiply.

In uncivilised tribes, the ineffective and incapable, the weak in body or in mind, are unable to provide themselves food; they fall behind in the chase or in the march, they fall out, therefore, in the race of life. With us, sustenance and shelter are provided for them, and they survive.

We pride ourselves-and justly-on the increased length of life which has been effected by our science and our humanity.

But we forget that this higher average of life may be compatible with, and may in a measure result from, a lower average of health.

We have kept alive those who, in a more natural and less advanced state, would have died-and who, looking at the physical perfection of the race alone, had better have been left to die.

Among savages, the vigorous and sound alone survive ; among us, the diseased and enfeebled survive as well; -but is either the physique or the intelligence of cultivated man the gainer by the change? In a wild state, by the law of natural selection, only, or chiefly, the sounder and stronger specimens were allowed to continue their species ; with us, thousands with tainted constitutions, with frames weakened by malady or waste, with brains bearing subtle and hereditary mischief in their recesses, are suffered to transmit their terrible inheritance of evil to other generations, and to spread it through a whole community.

His next phase of his argument is summed up aptly in this (perhaps cryptic) question: Have you seen (one of the richest men) Jeff Bezos’s bride? God bless him, I’m sure. But I do not think we shall be seeing issue from this pairing. Mr Musk, richer still but from humbler origins, is however prolific. Given his interest in depopulation he ought to recall this rule: wealth “inherited without effort and in absolute security, tend to produce enervated and unintelligent offspring…to be surrounded from the cradle with all temptations and facilities to self-indulgence, is not the best safeguard against those indulgences which weaken the intellect and exhaust the frame.”

The poor are weak in mind and body, the rich are soft and enervated. “It is the middle classes, those who form the energetic, reliable, improving element of the population, those who wish to rise and do not choose to sink, those in a word who are the true strength and wealth and dignity of nations, -it is these who abstain from marriage or postpone it.”

Greg: “Surely the ‘selection’ is no longer ‘natural.'” That is, animal like. But instead governed by ideas. I ask you to remind yourself, before this next quotation, of the essay’s date (with my paragraphication):

We are growing daily more foolishly and criminally lenient to every natural propensity, less and less inclined to resent, or control, or punish its indulgence. We absolutely refuse to let the poor, the incapable, or the diseased die; we enable or allow them, if we do not actually encourage them, to propagate their incapacity, poverty, and constitutional disorders.

And, lastly, democracy is every year advancing in power, and claiming the supreme right to govern and to guide:-and democracy means the management and control of social arrangements by the least educated classes, -by those least trained to foresee or measure consequences,-least acquainted with the fearfully rigid laws of hereditary transmission,-least habituated to repress desires, or to forego immediate enjoyment for future and remote good.

The word education in his time is not what we now mean: the egalitarianism of democracy has turned education into something like its opposite. I believe our education, not his, and the ideas it brings, has done the greatest work in depressing reproduction. But his meaning, too, has done its own work. Recalling the drug PrEP (introduced yesterday), medicine “controls and sometimes half cures the maladies that spring from profligacy and excess, but in so doing it encourages both, by stepping in between the cause and its consequence, and saving them from their natural and deterring penalties.”

Of course, Greg omits how barbarians breed themselves into civilizations. But it’s obviously just the inverse of his enervation theory.

Now the big twist.

Ideas, including the ideas behind civilization, are held in our intellects, our rational intellects, acted on by our wills. Famine and pandemics being rare, man can encourage and limit his reproduction by will alone. Man is thus unlike any other animal. Man is alone in possessing this rational essence, or nature. Because man is rational, individuals can talk themselves into both good and bad ideas, and can will anything within his means.

If you are like me, and many others, and hold that that intellect and will are not material (as we have discussed before), then it follows that any biological change in man cannot directly manipulate intellect and will. But intellect and will can influence the change in the materia of man indirectly. Which means, for us, that biological change in man will not be explained by a simple mechanistic theory like Neo-Darwinism. The machine metaphor is false in man.

And really in all species, though that is a story for another day.

Addendum: This would have been better in the previous post on orientations, but I offer it as yet another idea against reproduction. This is not so much the desire some have to mate with first cousins, but the desire in Experts to say it is healthy, and fits some scheme of evolution because DIE. “The NHS says first-cousin marriage is linked to ‘stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages'”. The ‘H’, I’m told, but refuse to believe, stands for Health.

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