It
is widely accepted that there are too many of us (see e.g. these
images, this
article, and this website).
There aren't enough resources for us all to have a decent quality of life even
if we could manage the resources we have optimally, and we are a long way from
knowing how to do that. And it’s getting worse. There are of course people who
deny this for various reasons, but I'm interested in why even those who do
believe it continue to have babies. Many, many babies. They’re everywhere; just
log in to any social media site and scroll. Most days they even outnumber cats,
and cats own the internet.
I
think the reason is that people like stories. We like being part of stories, and
we tell ourselves that our story is taking a particular form we know and love,
even if that requires a little self-deception. Everyone’s favourite story is a
fairy tale with a happy ending. You might not think it, but just because you
aren't a princess-in-a-tower-prince-charming-on-his-white-horse kind of person,
it doesn't mean you don’t like fairy tales.
The
thing about fairy tales is that they are folk stories, and thus pretty
formulaic. The basic formula for a life story goes: grow up, overcome
adversity, be an amazingly popular and charismatic party animal, find A Steady Job
and settle down with The Right Person, marry them, have 2.4 children, invest in
a cottage with roses round the door (or a semi with space for a BBQ in the
garden), raise children to live the same life as you with certain minor
improvements (a bit more money, etc.) Most people would add a hatchback in the
drive, a family dog, annual holidays in the sun, and a flat screen TV. Anyone
who doesn't add those things is clearly An Individual, a bit of a maverick, but
basically still ok because they have the main chapters of the story intact;
they have only changed the details.
In
many respects we all delude ourselves into thinking we are following the script
better than we are. We pretend some waster is The Right Person, we pretend our
jobs are steadier than they are; we've all done these things to advance to the
next chapter as soon as we can. We’re chasing the happy ending.
The
trouble is, the world doesn't fit. We haven’t the space or the resources left
in this world for fairy tales. We’re heading for something more like dystopian
sci-fi. As resources run out, people will fight over them. As people from
different cultures are forced to share space more and more closely, they will
fight over it. It’s already happening. As the climate warms, the crops fail,
our tribes become more divided and suspicious of outsiders, old diseases run
rampant, and we lose our faith in doctors, politicians, and one another, we
will fight. We’re defending the story. Did you ever snap at a friend for
suggesting that your current partner wasn't The Right Person to be settling
down with? Nothing makes us more edgy and makes us turn on one another quite
like the defensiveness of pretending that the story is unfolding just fine when
it clearly is not.
The
only future our world has space and materials to support, the only future those
endless babies have to look forward to when they grow up, is one where they
have to fight for everything. If you starve rats, then throw them in a
steep-sided barrel from which they can’t escape, with only a few scraps of
food, they will tear each other to shreds for those scraps, then start eating
one another. That seething mass of desperate rats in a barrel is the future if
our current story is allowed to play out.
We
are well-practised in self-deception. We are just too good at defensive denial.
But we do know the truth; we write and read about it in the papers all the
time. We just don’t let the knowledge touch us, so we live according to the
lie, not the truth we know. If we lived according to what we know, rather than
the fantasy, there would be a lot fewer babies.
This
dystopian hell might not happen to this generation. All the babies currently
gracing Instagram might get to live out their parents’ lives again, producing
more babies, and more dreams of marriages and semi-detached houses and family
cars. It might not even happen to the next generation. The world is too complex
a system to predict with any exactness. But unless something changes
dramatically, it will happen relatively soon.
The
biggest ray of hope in all this I think is not carbon storage technologies, or
one-child policies, good as these things may be if handled appropriately. It’s
diversification in the stories we tell ourselves. It is becoming more and more
acceptable to diverge from the standard fairy tale; to not marry, to change
careers as often as you want, and most importantly, to remain child-free. The
more choice people have to mould their own story, the more opportunities there
are to make genuine choices based on what the world can offer you, and what you
really want, rather than slavish adherence to the same old story. This will not
only bring population down by making family life only one option among many, it
will increase the tolerance of difference we need in a crowded world.
It’s
time to ditch the standard fairy tale. All except the ideal of a happy ending,
of course.
