mandarine

An announcement

#2 will celebrate its zeroeth birthday sometime around end October.

This is an opportunity to recycle an old post that probably not everybody has read. If you have, you are welcome to read it again.

Introduction

A couple of years ago, I heard a heated argument between my brother-in-law and his cousin. The young mother of three had hinted something about my in-law still being single at age 35+ and having no active plans to found a ‘real family’. The accused righteously retorted that the cultural model of the normal family with kids is slowly drowning our planet in overpopulation, and that his choice was the reasonable one. He was this close to saying something like ‘as far as sustainable development is concerned, having kids amounts to owning a SUV’.

Is there such a thing as a desire to have children ?

When birth-control pills were invented then marketed in the 70’s, many right-minded people were really worried that couples might stop having children altogether. Beyond the really creepy question of how women would spend their free time if they could choose not to be mothers anymore, the future of mankind itself was at stake. Because honestly, people do not want children, do they ? They used to suffer them as an unexpected consequence of sexual activity, but would anyone is his right mind choose such a calamity deliberately ?

In France, after a birth rate low point in the late twentieth century, figures are on the rise again, with people referring to the years since 2000 as a new ‘baby boom’. Today’s parents have not known the not-so-old times when children could just ‘happen’. And yet they are choosing to have children. Let us understand what has got into them.

There is no other biological urge

I believe that there is no biological urge to have children independently from sexual desire. I cannot prove it — I just rely on evolution theory. I observe that sexual desire is all that our species needs to guarantee that children will be conceived. A separate desire to have children would provide no evolutionary advantage, therefore its existence is very improbable. It would be an entirely different story if we were all homosexuals: only a very strong impulse to have children could save the species. However, it is not the case.

It is undeniable that once children are born, they need a lot of care to survive until they can fend for themselves. Therefore evolution has made sure that we would love our children once we have them. But I really doubt that this love for the children we have can turn into a wish to have children so we could enjoy loving them afterwards. Rational thought can follow this path but it looks too convolute for a biological urge.

If sexual desire is the only mechanism through which our species ensures its propagation, then birth control should have been the doom of mankind. And yet we continue to have children. Proof enough that such a separate desire exists: if it is not biological, then it is either cultural or rational.

The weight of cultural references

Cultural references play a fundamental role in this respect. They are very trickily disguised as universal patterns, when they are merely the ways it has been done for the last few million years. When you are nearing the 30-winters deadline (and times ten when you’re past it), parents, grandparents, friends, colleagues, all behave as if they were dying to ask you when (not ‘if’) you intend to have children — if they do not ask it outright. As if there were no other important questions: ‘When are you planning to visit Venice ?’, ‘When will you be carrying on with your PhD ?’, ‘When will you do that delicious plum chutney again ?’. No. The only decent thing everybody expects from a young couple is children. Later is OK, but children nonetheless. The environmental pressure is barely bearable when a majority of your friends and colleagues are parents and all discussions rapidly boil down to diarrheas, sleep deprivation, and first words.

It takes considerable lucidity not to be lured into believing that having children is the only important achievement in life, all the rest being bent towards this noble quest: love (a mate to have children with), work (for money to buy food for your children), home (to provide shelter for your children). Why are there so many couples breaking apart at age 50, when the kids are big ? Why, the main project is finished — no need for the project team to be maintained, right ?

Rational reasons (I know it is a pleonasm)

You can also invoke rational arguments to have babies, although some of these can hardly be extracted from their cultural ore. For instance, you might choose to be the ones to contribute to the survival of the species. Or you might say that a balanced age pyramid is a necessary harm to maintain economic wealth (and your future pensions). You might want to have children because stirring, hosting and nursing a new life is a mystical initiation experience you think your fulfilment could not feel whole without. Or a woman might cherish the superior status pregnancy brings about. My personal reason was that having children is a neat way to (culturally) justify selfishness. My conscience would keep banging at the door if we lived as dinkies: we should be out there, wearing our soles off and growing blisters trying to relieve some of the world’s misery and pain. But if we have children, it’s OK if we just focus on our family, build a really cool house to keep them warm, and grow a really nice vegetable garden to feed them home-made ketchup.

Yet we have to have fewer children

To all of us eco-friendly westerners, it appears obvious that we have to accept giving up on our little comfort so that the planet has a chance in the near future. Well, chinese people might disagree. They might say that any level of comfort is acceptable to our planet if we reduce demography in accordance. They have done just that, so that they might claim a right to a better share in the comfort-reduction transition. The more we are, the more comfort we will have to give up, and the harder it is to reform. Therefore I believe that we not only need to change our way of life (riding a bike, heating fewer rooms, eating less meat), but we also need to change our cultural references as regards children, so we can stall and even reverse demographic growth. Just know that if we keep our current growth rate of 1% a year for 1170 years, there will five people standing up on each square meter of emerged land, like a flock of penguins filling up Antarctica.

Alternative cultural models

If we want to reverse demographic growth, we have to favor a new cultural model in which we have fewer children. Should we do like China and impose the one-child rule ? I think this is bad policy. It is enough having one billion people with the mentality of an only child; what would it be with six billion?

Can we find a stable cultural model where people are split in two categories: some have two children or more, while most others have none ? We could do this in many ways: random lottery at weddings: ‘Congratulations ! You have just won the right to have …(drum roll)… seven children !’ Or through market regulation: every adult over 18 gets a voucher for half a baby, but no couple is allowed to actually make one before it has bought at least two other half-baby vouchers from less motivated or poorer people. Or through some kind of ‘law salic’: only the elder child in each family gets to have children in turn.

This is all very funny, but can we find a morally acceptable cultural model? Could we not tell everyone that they really do not have to have children, so that the icon of the nuclear family with two kids exits our cultural background for good? Then only men and women with a real passion for kids would choose to dedicate their lives to raise six to ten of them, against the cultural mainstream. Ah, but there is a problem. All kids, as per design, would be raised in such a large family — all kids would consider it ‘normal’ for adults to have many children: their personal reference would actually not mirror the vast cultural majority, but only their personal marginal history. How is that for a tricky cultural bias effect ?

This proves that there is no stable and acceptable cultural frame in which some people have kids (more than one) and some people do not. So, it seems we must choose the chinese way after all.

Or must we ?

There is one implicit premise in the above logic that we can still challenge. The model of the nuclear family, with or without kids, is a quite recent cultural reference that we should not take for granted. How about widening the family to the grandparents ? The good-old clan-like structure of the extended family, for all its internal tyranny and difficulties, would be a nice model. A handful of cousins would live together among their numerous parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, each being an only child, but all growing in a ‘large family’, so that they can learn to share. And with the troubled times ahead, larger family structures with extended solidarity and reconfiguration capabilities could well be a more robust and stable environment in which to raise children.

Read on

An apologia of the scientific mind

Read away

China’s one-child policy

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