Is The Future Autistic?
The baby deficit, pronatalists, demographic winter, and how the materialistic mythos begets an autistic understanding of the value of children.
Dear Readers,
As you might be able to tell from the title, this post is one of my sassier ones. If you disagree, I just ask that you stay civil and enlighten me.
For those of you who enjoy my writing, I would really appreciate a few more paid subscriptions (I currently have about 12—10% of subscribers). I have a number essays on the backburner that are either too weird or not trendy enough for the magazines (which usually pay peanuts anyway). Your support would mean the world.
But in general, what I’m most interested in right now are your genuine thoughts and reactions to the news about the coming “demographic winter” and what it says about our cultural understanding of the family.
Read on, and sally forth!
Yours,
Amelia
Secular Individualism Leads to Cultural Suicide
Global birthrates are now so low that we’re facing a real possibility of civilizational meltdown.
In our modern secular individualist culture, most young people aren’t in any hurry to reproduce. A close friend told me, breezily, when I asked her after her wedding about her kids timeline, “Oh, eventually, of course, we want to have kids! But first, we want to travel the world, enjoy ourselves a bit.” It seems like this “eventually” is an eternal one for many. As income goes up, birth rates go down. As people adjust to luxuries like Hawaii vacations, large houses, expensive handbags, and car upgrades, they decide that actually, they still aren’t in a good position to afford children. And there has been very little criticism of this trend, with environmentalists even commending it as virtuous.
But now “The Science” has begun to ring alarm bells in the mainstream media. Apparently, over the last 50 years, our civilization has drugged itself with pleasure, slit its wrists, and has been gently and blissfully bleeding out in the bathtub ever since. Global birthrates are now so low that we’re facing a real possibility of civilizational meltdown, and suddenly, the whole world is freaking out.
Bloomberg: Global Population Crash Isn't Sci-Fi Anymore
The Economist: Can the rich world escape its baby crisis?
We thought companies were understaffed post-COVID. Just wait. Soon, the entire world will be understaffed. When 1,000 people—bus drivers, construction workers, diplomats, chefs—grow old and die, leaving only 500 children in their place, those 500 are responsible for maintaining a world previously staffed by double the workers. They will also be tasked with supporting a top-heavy population of sick, old people.
So now, everyone, especially the middle-aged, have stakes in the matter. “What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?” Furthermore, all those things people preferred to parenthood—exotic vacations, fancy cars, leisure time—will vanish with the collapse of the global economy, leaving the elderly lonely, childless, and poor.
Oof.
The Autistic Solution: Utilitarian Pronatalism
Although they are presumably devoted to the family and childrearing, pronatalist families like the Collinses have an eerily machine-like approach to parenting.
This dire situation has given birth to the secular pronatalist movement, which, according to its poster child, Malcolm Collins, is generally “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist.” Elon Musk is the most famous guy in the movement, and he’s had 11 children by a variety of women through highly transactional and utilitarian arrangements. "I can't possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children," said Shivon Zilis, mother of twins, who chose Musk as her “sperm donor.”
Subbing the word “father” with “sperm donor,” and “kids” with “replacement population” is so sci-fi it sounds like satire. But that’s exactly the world that people like Musk are creating. And it’s not that surprising. It took utilitarian, data-driven predictions of economic disaster for mainstream Western culture to begin to reconsider parenthood. Is it small wonder that the pronatalists are now couching parenthood in utilitarian, data-driven terms?
The autistic individual may have difficulty understanding subtle interpersonal vibes, feeling, in the words of autistic animal advocate Temple Grandin, like “an anthropologist on Mars” as they try to navigate social interactions with non-autistic people. The autist has no trouble grasping logical arguments and analyzing data but often finds difficulty interpreting aspects of human life that evade clear explanation.
The family is one of those. For many centuries, having children was assumed to be a good and joyful and pretty much ubiquitous part of a normal human life. Families didn’t need to be argued for or explained because they were bedrock. But the last century ushered in a kind of cultural autism regarding the family.
“What function do large numbers of children serve?” people began to ask. The reduction of family to function led to un-personing answers like, for example, that of the American eugenics movement of the early 20th century: “Well, the strong, smart offspring create tech innovations and contribute to society. That’s why we have kids. So… I guess the disabled ones are useless. (Let’s figure out how to eliminate them.)”
Once the existence of human life requires requires a logical defense, civilization is in big trouble. It’s a sign that the cultural default is to think human life isn’t inherently dignified, that it’s something at the best optional, and at the worst, plain bad. Although most of society now rejects the eugenics of the early 20th century, it doesn’t reject the more fundamental demand that we justify procreation, make logical, data-based arguments in its favor, giving credence only to utilitarian advantages like “supporting an aging population” and “promoting innovation” and “passing down ‘good’ genes.”
To watch this inhuman language creeping back in the common parlance of pronatalists disturbs me.
Although they are presumably devoted to the family and childrearing, pronatalist families like the Collinses have an eerily machine-like approach to parenting. First, they create dozens of embryos for potential son and daughterhood, screening them like job candidates by their health, sex, and genetic predispositions, allowing only the fittest to be implanted into Simone’s womb to be loved and nurtured. Everything they do has a data-driven, scientific rationale, from their disciplinary methods (based on the behavior of wild tigers) to their atheist version of Christmas, Future Day, when “The Future Police come and take their toys, and then they have to write a contract about how they’re going to make the world a better place, and they get their toys back.” The Collin’s’ system is perfectly calculated to save the world and humanity from doom and destruction. Their parenthood is perfectly systematic, leaving no room for that elusive indeterminism we call humanity.
Unless “The Science” tells us something’s helpful, it’s clearly expendable. Ultimate truth is found only in controlled, peer-reviewed studies, and ultimate good is found only in the optimization of mechanized systems. This autistic worldview has room only for autistic solutions, where everything is excluded but the strictly logical, the exhaustively explainable.1
It’s great the world’s found a reason to have children. But it’s horrifying that people think the need can be met by designing artificial wombs, manufacturing human eggs from stem cells, and replacing human caregivers with A.I bots. (Google this issue, and you’ll find all those suggestions being made.)
Where’s the love?
Is The Future Autistic?
I don’t think the future’s autistic. I think we’re already there.
When I asked ChatGPT how the world would be different if the entire world’s population were autistic, it told me:
Jobs might be highly specialized, with a focus on detail-oriented and repetitive tasks.
Remote work might be more common, accommodating different working styles and sensory needs.
A culture of deep specialization and expertise in specific areas would develop.
Texting and other forms of written communication would become more prevalent.
This doesn’t sound like a hypothetical world. It sounds like Western society today. We’re living in an increasingly autistic world. Is that a bad thing? In many ways, no. Temple Grandin wrote in The Way I See It, a book on the experience of autism: "What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done." At that point in time, her perspective was vital in spreading increased understanding and acceptance of neurodivergent people.
But times have changed. Consider the corollary of her statement. In an autistic world, everyone would be alone in their apartments, getting things done. They would be living closed-off, socially anxious lives, and there would be no more room for relationships. Or having kids.
I don’t think the future’s autistic. I think we’re already there.
An Alternative Solution: Belief in Human Dignity
The heart of Christianity isn’t a scientific stat. It’s a person.
Realistically, if there is to be any future, it will probably going to be more Christian than autistic. The secular pronatalists are an interesting, new fringe movement, but the people consistently having the most kids are the religious. It makes sense. Religious people of all sects already have leapt the hurdle of seeing themselves as a small part of a larger ecosystem, a perspective hard to find in modern individualism, which centers on the self.
What gives Christianity a particular edge in repopulating the world is its affirmation of universal human dignity. This worked out historically in two fruitful ways.
Christians spread the good news of the Gospel to all people, producing spiritual offspring, regardless of nationality, gender, and social class. In churches, for the first time in history, slaves brushed shoulders with aristocrats, and Jews ate with Gentiles.
Christians saved the lives of unwanted children, producing physical offspring through adoption and childbirth. Early Christians would walk the hills, picking up Roman babies whose parents had exposed them to die from starvation and wild animals. In a letter from the time, we see how callous Roman men were about murdering infants. A man named Hilarion wrote to his wife Alis in the century before Christ’s coming: “If you happen to be pregnant again, if it is a boy, leave it; if it is a girl, throw it out.” Christians also forbade abortion and most forms of birth control, founded hospitals, and opened orphanages to raise unwanted children.
In a utilitarian analysis of the current population crisis, Keith Woods writes that the Christian belief in human dignity may have preserved Christianity through population shocks like plague:
“Christians eschewing this practice [of infant exposure] would have meant that, aside from the obvious advantage of not killing many of their children, they would also avoid the same kind of gender ratio imbalance Romans had due to mostly removing girls, which could provide a big comparative advantage in birthrates — removing potential mothers from society drags down the birthrate far more than removing men. Some research has suggested this could have been compounded by the population shock caused by plague in the 2nd Century, when Christians would have been far more capable of replenishing their pre-plague numbers due to the sex ratio imbalance. Looking at the rise of early Christianity shows that seemingly minor advantages in breeding patterns can create massive change over the course of centuries, and that even these comparative advantages can be massively exacerbated by population shocks.”
- Keith Woods “Where Do The Children Play?”
Christians, in contrast to the autistic pronatalists, are not engaged in a task of blind optimization, extending lifespans merely for the purpose of increasing our stats and saving capital-H “Humanity.” The heart of Christianity isn’t a scientific stat. It’s a person.
We are attempting to enter into a deeper relationship with our Creator, to seek sustenance and love and peace from Him alone. And in the process of loving our God and the people he has created—who knows?—we may end up saving the world.
Further Reading/Watching/Listening:
Birthgap (documentary by Stephen J Shaw)
The Epidemic That Dare Not Speak Its Name | Stephen J Shaw (Jordan B. Peterson podcast)
Note, when I use “autistic” in this way, I’m using it in a metaphorical sense to refer to a worldview that misses out on some of the same things that many autistic people miss out on. I am not using it as some kind of slur that just means “weird and bad,” like how kids use it on the playground. Autism is beautiful in many ways, and we need people like Elon Musk and Temple Grandin to enrich and improve the world. But there is a certain extremeness to the autistic mind, a tendency towards reductionism, that I think is a reflection of our culture’s materialist reductionism. That is what I am pointing out here.
This reminds me of Matthew B. Crawford’s book “The World Beyond Your Head” , specifically a chapter entitled “Autism as Design Principle”.
Basically, what you’ve recognized about the future (or, rather, the present) being autistic is the result of 1) the human world lacking basically intelligibility, controlled as it is by impersonal forces (“globalization”, bureaucracy, etc.), 2) my inability to directly affect the world around me because of my inability to understand it, and 3) experiences filled with perfectly controllable, repeatable, stimulus-response pseudo-actions with predictable outcomes that gratify the need to exercise the will, where I can do something and actually see an inteligible effect.
You’re right on the money, imo.
Certified Autist here. I mostly agree. One thing: It's an autist trait to care much about stability in one's immediate surroundings, like family. Another thing: Autism with low intelligence is a trainwreck; there's evolutionary pressure linking autistic traits to intelligence. Sometimes you get Hitler, sometimes you get a helpful genius.