The Amish Fertility Miracle (Part 2)
How the Amish are maintaining their impressive birthrates, and what they can teach us about the global demographic collapse
If you haven’t read part 1 of this article, you should start there. This second part will build on the information I presented in part one. I’m going beyond just presenting the facts, to try and break down the broader principles behind what makes the Amish culture exceptional and whether any of those principles can be applied to solve the challenges facing the broader cultural landscape.
In part 1, I walked through the life of a typical Amish person, male or female, and attempted to highlight some specific characteristics of their culture that contribute to their default large family size. I’m of course making some assumptions in doing that, and you might disagree with my opinion on the relative impact of various cultural factors. But in general, I don’t think I made too many unreasonable inferences. I laid out the facts as clearly as possible, and didn’t go too far beyond that.
In this part, I want to go beyond the facts and into the realm of hypothesis and speculation. That means I don’t have scientific studies or hard data to categorically prove my points. So if you disagree, you’re absolutely welcome to do so, but don’t expect me to tenaciously defend my opinions with reams of hard data and irrefutable evidence. My purpose is to expand the conversation, not to present a definite solution to any perceived problem.
Is there a problem to solve?
For starters, not everyone agrees that globally collapsing fertility is, in fact, a problem to be solved. Although that’s definitely the dominate consensus in the alternative media space, and is reaching a wider audience thanks to the attention of figures like Elon Musk, the average normie still believes the debunked Malthusian hypothesis that human population is on an exponential trajectory to disaster. They’re more likely to view a collapsing global population as a good thing than as an unmitigated disaster in the making. If that’s your view, you aren’t likely to find my writing particularly compelling. But if you are interested in challenging that belief, I point out some of the potential implications of population collapse here.
If you’re already convinced that global below-replacement fertility is a problem to solve, then you’re in the right place.
Is there a solution?
The modern mind rarely stops to evaluate this question. As soon as a problem is presented, we immediately jump to searching for the ideal solution. That’s a foolish, and occasionally catastrophic, mistake. Before searching for a solution, it’s worth considering whether the possibility of a solution even exists, and more importantly, whether a potential solution would have unintended consequences less severe than the problem it’s intended to solve.
Often those questions can’t be answered until some attempts to find a solution have been made. But we should keep them at the top of our minds throughout the search. Otherwise we can easily find ourselves genetically modifying generally harmless diseases in the lab to make them deadly to humans as we search for a “solution” to disease, or cutting down and burning trees to produce electricity as we attempt to “solve” the climate.
When it comes to global fertility, I’ll give you my conclusion first. Yes, there are solutions to this problem. No, they almost certainly won’t be adopted on a large scale. And I’m not sure if that should be considered a failure.
That’s because of the nature of the problem. People act according to incentives. When global population was growing exponentially, that was because of the incentive structures influencing the choices of each individual. Now that the fertility rate has dropped dramatically, and global population is set to peak and collapse, that’s also because of the incentive structures influencing the choices of each individual. Globally.
That means something happened over the past few centuries that upset historical incentive structures globally. There’s every reason to believe that whatever happened was largely an emergent phenomenon. If it was, resetting the incentive structures would mean imposing, somehow, an incentive structure diametrically opposed to the naturally emergent structure. That somehow gives me pause. How certain are we that overruling a global emergent phenomenon is even possible, and if it were, less destructive than the alternative?
Because logically, the current trajectory will become unsustainable at some point. Fertility can’t continue to fall indefinitely, that trend ends in total extinction. So that leaves two alternative outcomes, absent the kind of global intervention I alluded to. One, it does continue to fall, and humans go extinct. I write that one off because it doesn’t align with my worldview, so as far as I’m concerned I know it won’t happen. You’re free to disagree. Or two, fertility continues to fall until the negative effects of falling population destroy the new global incentive structure of the past few centuries through the partial or total collapse of the emergent phenomenon underlying that structure. If you identify what you think that emergent phenomenon is, and conclude that it’s “too big to fail”, you should probably use some imagination and reconsider.
To take it one step further for the really esoteric thinkers, maybe the whole thing is less of a new concept and more of a certain phase of a larger cycle humans keep repeating throughout history. I’ll leave that one to your imagination.
What can we learn about potential solutions from the Amish?
Like I mentioned in part 1, looking at a group like the the Amish in this context is particularly useful. They exist as a sub-group within a larger environment, so that allows us to eliminate a lot of incorrect theories based on their similar circumstances. The Amish live on the same planet, breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat similar food, buy homes in the same housing market, work in the same labor market, etc. That casts significant doubt on a number of very popular theories on why people in America aren’t reproducing.
That leaves us to focus on the significant differences between Amish culture and mainstream American culture with full confidence that the real answer lies somewhere in those differences.
The structure of this article will be something of a stream-of-consciousness. I’m not going to attempt to isolate and breakdown every aspect of Amish culture independent of the whole, because that won’t be useful or accurate. I’m convinced that the factors influencing Amish fertility are best understood as parts of a larger structure, and not as cumulative independent variables. So I’m going to start by taking a birds-eye view of that structure, and then zooming in on how the various pieces support the whole.
Throughout the past few months, I’ve read a lot of material on this topic as I researched and refined my conclusions. To give credit where credit is due, I haven’t found anyone who expresses a view as coherent as the one
gives in his articleThis is an excellent and well-thought-out piece, and one that’s rightfully gotten a lot of attention in the alternative media space. It’s only with a great deal of respect and serious hesitation that I disagree with any aspect of his work, and I do so in a spirit of advancing the intellectual discourse rather than any delusions of my superior knowledge or abilities as an author.
The role of status
The primary thesis of Mr. Kurtz’s article is that declining fertility is a consequence of a decline in the status of motherhood compared to the status afforded by various alternative life paths. While it wasn’t the only point I made in part 1 of this article, I did mention the relative status of parenthood within the Amish culture in various contexts. And a few months of research and reflection have convinced me that status is the correct starting point for understanding fertility, both within Amish culture and also more broadly. On that point, Mr. Kurtz and I fully agree. He says,
Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.
That seems to me like a fair assessment of the situation.
And Mr. Kurtz mentions the Amish specifically, so he’s aware of their unusual pattern and has integrated that data into his hypothesis. I believe he’s correct in doing so.
With that said, I want to dive a little deeper into the idea of status and how it relates to the Amish specifically. I think they can give us some insights into the topic that make more sense of the broader cultural landscape.
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