One of the weird things about a population with a fertility rate below replacement – which is to say 2.1 – is that there is no natural point at which the decline in population stops. Although it will of course take a long time, a population with a fertility rate below 2.1 will eventually cease to exist. At the moment, the world fertility rate is estimated to be roughly 2.4 with all 10 of the countries with the highest fertility rate being in sub-Saharan Africa, but the fertility rate has halved in the past three quarters of a century and it continues to go down. At some point, several centuries in the future, the people of the world will be faced with the question whether they want the human race simply to go out of style. Even for the youngest reader of this blog, several centuries is very far in the future, but it is not long in historical time.
Perhaps two maxims are apt:
ReplyDelete"Trees don't grow to the sky" and "life isn't linear."
For most of human history annual population growth was a small fraction of one percent (i.e. Malthus ruled). Beginning in the seventeenth century that went wacky and by the early-mid twentieth century hit ~2% annually which, of course, is unsustainable (rule of seventy two). Africa is still unsustainable.
I assume the soon to be experienced effects of climate change and nuclear war will create yet another population bottleneck. Won't be the first and likely not the last. This is why New Zealand had to put restrictions on tech bro foreigners buying their way into the country.
Curious if anyone, including Professor Wolff, has looked into any of the current strains of antinatalism. In my more nihilistic days I came across folks such as David Benatar and Ray Brassier (yes, I'm a fan of True Detective). Never got too deep into any of it, but I certainly thought of it as an interesting area for study that doesn't seem to attract too many academic folk.
ReplyDeleteI like Jurassic park (Michael Crichton) "live is analog". I have tried to think of a good example of digital vs analog. Would like to hear from the others here of some good example that they have. I want to think of PI (3.1415927...) as one but not sure if that makes sense.
ReplyDeleteJason, there’s a little bit of that in the comments here, if you didn’t already see -
ReplyDeletehttps://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2021/12/this-and-that.html
I haven’t paid attention to any developments in antinatalism since Benatar’s one book. My interest in all that stemmed from my interest in pessimism, which I haven’t looked at lately either. But I did just add Hud Hudson’s Fallenness and Flourishing to my reading list. It seems to look at pessimism from more of a philosophy-of-religion perspective.
There’s a good interview with Hudson here:
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/from-the-glasshouse-analytic-theology-and-metaphysics?c=end-times-series
BTW, some interesting, somewhat overlooked “classical” writers in pessimistic thought include Eduard von Hartmann and Giacomo Leopardi. The former (IIRC) combines aspects of Hegel’s and Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and contends that universal suicide is the final, rationally necessary outcome of existence. And the latter I think had developed (exacerbated?) a spinal disorder from excessive studying. Gotta love this stuff, haha. :)