Two highly-recommended recent blog posts on a critical issue: The demographic calamity of modernity. One by Peter Frost, the other by One Irradiated Watson. (It’s a perennial topic, for obvious reasons.)

Now for the bucket of cold water. NRx has almost nothing to say about it. Of course, it can remark on the problem, insistently, and even diagnose it with some definite precision. What it has yet to do is to cross from urgent policy recommendations to anything remotely approaching a road map for implementation.

The way stations on the hazy track into the future that NRx generally follows — this blog very much included — tend to include a more-or-less comprehensive phase of social collapse, and subsequent restoration of comparatively non-demotist, authoritarian models of governance. (It leads, roughly speaking, through the Jackpot.) Is there any solid basis for the assumption that a regime coming out of this — perhaps Neocameralist / Monarchist in character — would vigorously pursue the pro-natalist policies advocated by contemporary reaction? It is at least questionable, given that the actually-existing states presently closest to this type have proven to be — despite public expressions of concern — entirely incapable of doing so.

The problem of time-horizons at the root of the modern fertility crisis is easily trivialized, as if it were merely a product of adjustable degenerate attitudes. The deep problem — partially tractable to game-theoretical apprehension — is that, under the conditions of the modern state in an environment of intense competition, suppressed natalism is a short-term winning strategy, and if you don’t win in the short-term you’re not around to play in the long term. If the world becomes increasingly Hobbesian in the decades ahead, this dilemma becomes more acute, rather than less so. It presses no less heavily upon a monarch than a democratic leader. Continuing industrial advance means that the (strategic) opportunity cost of subtracting smart females from the work-force becomes ever greater. Any ideal of ‘long-term thinking’ that ignores all of this is incomplete to the point of utter dysfunction.

The condescension really ought to stop. Modernity crushes fertility because it sees ahead better than you do — you just don’t like what it’s seeing.

ADDED: Responses from Hurlock and Athrelon.

ADDED: Alrenous on fertility and purpose.

(Open thread, links …)

In and around the NRx (highlights): Steel anarchism (and response). This opaque but intriguing stuff is also, probably, relevant. An epic delve into global complexity. The Gutenberg shock. A Watsoned world (background), further comment. The propertarian alternative (more, and more). Democracy on display (plus a reminder).

Race war round-up: between two worlds (more tightrope walking). Integration from the left: “It’s impos­si­ble for a white per­son to believe in cap­i­tal­ism and not believe in racism,” Mal­colm said in a 1964 dis­cus­sion. “You can’t have cap­i­tal­ism with­out racism.” — which simplifies things. Cut the riot shaming. Blame the cops, or Obama, or leftist race politics, or black family breakdown, or befuddlement, or idiots. “The real message of Ferguson: we are [seeing multiculturalism itself] go up in flames. A polity where the Chief Executive has to address the people over a local law enforcement matter is fatally unstable.” Let it burn. The unsaid. The anti-MLK.

America’s half-hidden welfare state. Bubbelology.

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The post is pitched like this because it’s Friday night, but it works. A more dutiful post might have been entitled simply ‘Malthus’ and involved a lot of work. That’s going to be needed at some point. (Here‘s the 6th edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, for anyone who wants to get started now.) A more thoroughly technical approach would have been flagged ‘Neo-Malthusianism’. While sympathizing with groans about another ‘neo-‘ prefix, in this case it would have been solidly justified. It’s only through expansion of the Malthusian insight in accordance of a more general conservation law that its full current relevance can be appreciated. Classic Malthus still does far more work than it is credited with, but it contains a principle of far more penetrating application.

‘Neo-‘ at its most frivolous is merely a mark of fashion. When employed more seriously, it notes an element of innovation. Its most significant sense includes not only novelty, but also abstraction. Something is carried forwards in such a way that its conceptual core is distilled through extraction from a specific context, achieving a higher generality, and more exact formality. Malthus partially anticipates this in a phrase that points beyond any excessively constrictive concreteness:

The qualification “in some shape or other” might have been drawn from abstract horror, and “premature death” only loosely binds it. Even so, this formulation remains too narrow, since it tends to exclude the dysgenic outcome, which we have since learnt is a dimension of Malthusian expression scarcely less imposing than resource crisis. A Neo-Malthusian account of the “X” which in some shape or other makes a grim perversity of all humanity’s efforts to improve its condition grasps it as a mathematically conserved, plastic, or abstract destiny, working as remorselessly through reductions of mortality (Malthusian ‘relaxations’) as through increases (Malthusian ‘pressures’). Both would count equally as “checks on population” — each convertible, through a complex calculus, into the terms of the other. A population dysgenically deteriorated through ‘enlightened’ Malthusian relaxation learns, once again, how to starve.

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(Open thread, random links, spontaneous disorder.)

@antidemblog was the first voice I heard comparing Ferguson to a Rorschach blot. That seems right. Here are some communists (++), tortured left liberals, tortured conservatives (+), establishment libertarians, outer right curmudgeons, white nationalists. This line of approach makes a lot of sense to me. Ferguson (allusively) here, and (more overtly) at UF.

The bottom-line of the recent 4GW explorations being pushed by TNIO is that fertility becomes an unanswerable weapon under conditions of Cathedral dominion. The analysis needs a little more hardening up, but prognosis will remain elusive because it leads into biopolitical darknesses no one is keen to coldly investigate. Instead, there’s just elevated shrieking.

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Back in Shanghai from Dunhuang today. It’s not an easy journey (taxi, overnight sleeper train, taxi, flight, taxi) so multi-dimensional disconnection and raggedness.

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Lanzhou, the major gateway city to the West, didn’t win me over. It’s congested, and — upon superficial contact — almost wholly charmless. Given its extraordinary history and contemporary frontier-hub function, that’s a great disappointment. (Despite the grunge, a modest downtown apartment there still costs US$200,000.)

The taxi-ride from the train station to the airport is unusually long because the broken country made it hard to situate runways conveniently. The route we took on the way back took us past the rapidly-arising New Lanzhou City — which is huge. There’s some prospect of a few glitzy modern buildings, if the promotional posters are to be believed. Serried ranks of comparatively tasteful proletarian residential highrises make up the bulk of the New  City so far.

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The Chinese West is weirdly comparable to the American West, but historically fragmented. It plays a similar role in the local movie industry, as an imaginative space of heroism, violence, and civilizational fragility. It’s vast, arid, and geographically sublime — recalling the (to me) stunning fact that China’s proportion of arable land is only fractionally larger than Australia’s. Arid mountains, deserts, and harsh scrubby plains stretch endlessly. Dangerous tribes with an exotic nobility populate the Western frontier myths. Foreigners tend to understand — perhaps even overestimate — the American fascination with the frontier, but China’s is nowhere near as thoroughly appreciated. (A fake ‘ancient Dunhuang’ has been created near the real one, catering to the huge appetite of the Chinese movie industry for historical ‘Westerns’.)

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Who could have guessed?

(More here.)

The witch-craze seems to be running out of juice, according to some  thought-provoking Ngram data organized by Brad Trun.

The charge of “Racist!” is losing its sting as its overzealous hurlers increasingly render it farcical. “Racist” is, for the first time since the neologism’s inception 80 years ago, starting to fall out of favor. Zooming in on the post–1930 period in Google Ngram Viewer and eliminating smoothing reveals that “racist” references topped out as the calendar switched to the new millennium.

My welcome news receptors are so corroded, that I can’t help wondering: what’s wrong with this story?

(In other news, Peak African is still some way off. Caplan will no doubt be thrilled. Does anybody sensible think that a billion Nigerians by 2100 sounds like a future that might work? It’s probably a racist question, but you have to do what you can for dying traditions.)

ADDED: “We’ve set up a system where the world’s most easily offended people get to decide what’s offensive and what’s not …”