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The Human Disappearing Act: Why Are We Not Reproducing?
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
—Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”
Ivan Pavlov’s salivating dogs, Burrhus Frederic Skinner’s ping pong-playing pigeons, Harry Harlow’s love-starved rhesus monkeys — these laboratory animals have entered into the pantheon of behavioral science, aiding us in our understanding of conditioning responses, non-contingent reinforcement, and the importance of contact comfort, among other phenomena. Yet these renowned experimental subjects, through no fault of their own, cannot shed much light on those existential questions concerning the fate of our own species. Enter John Bumpass Calhoun and his self-destructive colonies of rats and mice.
The story of Calhoun’s investigations into rodent overpopulation is well enough known. It was in the spring of 1947 that the American ethologist, then living in Towson, Maryland, approached his neighbor with a rather unusual request. He was seeking permission to establish a colony of Norwegian brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) in the extensive and unused woodlands located behind his neighbor’s suburban home. The neighbor assented, and Calhoun promptly set about constructing not a simple hutch or two, but a sprawling 10,000 square-foot rat pen, before spending the next twenty-eight months carefully monitoring the progress of the newly-founded “Rat City,” as part of the Johns Hopkins University Rodent Ecology Project. What the obliging neighbor made of the experiment is anyone’s guess, but his cooperation had helped set in motion one of the most influential animal behavioral studies of the twentieth century.
Calhoun initially seeded his Towson rat colony with five pregnant dams. Given that a female rat has around six litters annually, with as many as twelve pups per litter, and can manage the trick of nursing one litter while pregnant with another, and given that rats reach sexual maturity at around four months of age while breeding year-round, it is possible for two rats to become 1,250 rats in the span of a year. According to Calhoun’s calculations, the quarter-acre rat-pen could accommodate around 5,000 rats. The post-war Baby Boom was just beginning, and Calhoun was looking forward to a rodential Baby Boom of his own, so it came as a surprise when the pen’s population leveled off at around 150 rats, and never exceeded 200 — an astonishingly low number for that famously concupiscent species, and far below the environmental carrying capacity. It was as if some innate sensibility was preventing the rats from over-running their idyllic woodland domain.
As frightened as we were of Universe 25, we now face the equally frightening prospect of demographic collapse.
In the years to come, Calhoun would move his base of operations to a barn outside Rockville, and then to Poolesville, both in Montgomery County, Maryland, pursuing research that would result in his 1962 Scientific American paper “Population Density and Social Pathology.” Working for the National Institute of Mental Health, he constructed so-called “mouse-universes” designed to override his subjects’ instinct to avoid overpopulation, the most famous of which, Universe 25, was established in July 1968. There eight albino mice — inbred to ensure genetic homogeneity — were introduced into a nine square-foot pen lined with vertical mesh tunnels, and then provided with unlimited supplies of food, water, and bedding material. The population doubled every 55 days in the early stages, reaching 2200 by day 600. Unfathomably cramped conditions in Universe 25 took a terrible toll on the murine inhabitants, however, with the females abandoning their young or refusing to reproduce, and males engaging in obsessive grooming, and hyper-sexual or homosexual behavior. Infant mortality reached 96 percent, reproduction ceased, and the remaining mice fell into a “behavioral sink,” huddling in the center of the pen, unable to function on even the most basic level.
Calhoun’s “Population Density and Social Pathology” would be go on to be included in Roger Hock’s psychology textbook Forty Studies That Changed Psychology: Explorations Into the History of Psychological Research, and Universe 25 would attain positively iconic status in popular culture. (Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, for example, was based on Calhoun’s lab rats.) Calhoun would be described as “the researcher who loved rats and fueled our doomsday fears,” whose research “led to grim predictions for the future of humanity.”
It just so happened that Universe 25 was founded the very same year the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb — the cover of which claimed that ,“While you are reading these words four people will have died from starvation. Most of them children” — was first published. Ehrlich, for his part, had not counted on the twentieth century’s Third Agricultural Revolution, which massively enhanced the planet’s carrying capacity through the use of high-yielding cereals, chemical fertilizers, and improved irrigation, thereby preventing his dire predictions of mass starvation from being realized. Calhoun’s equally alarming warnings, however, were not predicated on the scarcity of resources, but rather on the opposite, and for this reason Calhoun’s rats have retained their purchase on the popular imagination. Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams, in their 2009 article in The Journal of Social History, “Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence,” noted that
the macabre spectacle of crowded psychopathological rats and the available comparisons with human life in the densely-packed inner cities ensured the experiments were quickly adopted as “scientific evidence” of social decay. Referenced far outside of the fields of ecology and mental health, Calhoun’s rats have – or certainly had – come to seem part of the common cultural stock, shorthand for the problems of urban crowding just as Pavlov’s dogs were for respondent conditioning.
*****
It is the very nature of the social, behavioral, and psychological sciences that research in those fields tends to produce results that are either so obscure as to be of limited utility, or so obvious as to represent a mere recapitulation of common sense. Calhoun’s findings, while clearly compelling to a wide audience, largely belong in the latter category. Indeed it would have been surprising if inhumane levels of overcrowding, filth, and inbreeding had not produce drastic results in the mouse-universes. Even the most inexperienced of backyard chicken-hobbyists is aware that poultry overcrowding soon results in elevated corticosterone levels, growth retardation, compromised immunocompetence, aggressive pecking, feather-pulling, and eventually cannibalism. Mice and rats are no different. No organism could function properly, let alone thrive, when subjected to such insalubrious conditions. (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The Strange Life and Ironic Death of Putin-Loving Russell ‘Texas’ Bentley)
Decades spent torturing animals likely took a psychological toll on Calhoun as well, and his writing took on a quite literally apocalyptic quality. His 1973 think-piece “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population” began thusly:
I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution. Threatening life and evolution are the two deaths, death of the spirit and death of the body. Evolution, in terms of ancient wisdom, is the acquisition of access to the tree of life. This takes us back to the white first horse of the Apocalypse which with its rider set out to conquer the forces that threaten the spirit with death. Further in Revelation (ii.7) we note: “To him who conquers I will grant to eat the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God” and further on (Rev. xxii.2): “The leaves of the tree were for the healing of nations.” This takes us to the fourth horse of the Apocalypse (Rev. vi.7): “I saw… a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him…”
He goes on like this for some time. Here we are getting dangerously close to the sort of thing that might be found scrawled on the wall of a public toilet or a madhouse, or sent to a police station in the form of a cut-paper note. Calhoun was clearly not immune to the temptation to anthropomorphize his test subjects. Writing in 1972 about the collapse of Universe 25, he referenced the concept of a “second death,” or spiritual death, as described in Revelation 2:11 (“He, that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches: He that shall overcome, shall not be hurt by the second death”). His pseudo-scientific formula, which studiously ignored neuroendocrine responses to unfathomable stress levels, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, corticosterone and other glucocorticoids involved in stress regulation in rodents, was as follows:
Mortality, bodily death = the second death
Drastic reduction of mortality
= death of the second death
= death squared
= (death)2
(Death)2 leads to dissolution of social organization
= death of the establishment
Death of the establishment leads to spiritual death
= loss of capacity to engage in behaviors essential to species survival
= the first death
Therefore:
(Death)2 = the first death
While demographic alarmists latched on to Calhoun’s experiments, eager to continue sounding the alarm about the harmful social, instead of dietary, effects of overpopulation, skeptics of modernity had also been given potent ammunition. The Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, writing in the October 13, 1908 edition of his magazine Die Fackel, despaired of a world “deprived of oxygen by progress” — which was to say the “feverish progress of human stupidity” — and warned that “the real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit [die Vernichtung des Geistes]; the other depends on an indifferent attempt to see whether, after the destruction of the spirit, there can still be a world.” According to Kraus, the spiritual death of a society would come first, after which there would be nothing left to salvage, a potential fate seemingly foreshadowed by Calhoun’s teeming mouse colonies as they floundered in their behavioral sink, and then ceased to propagate themselves altogether.
It hardly matters at this point that Jonathan Freedman, Stanley Heshka, and Alan Levy, in their 1975 study “Population density and pathology: Is there a relationship?,” published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that population density, people per acre or per room, had little or no direct independent effect on pathologies. (Though surely there exist limits in this regard, as the survivors of the Black Hole of Calcutta might have testified.) Nor does it matter that, at a Royal Society of Medicine symposium on “Man in His Place,” Calhoun was strongly cautioned that “he had been discussing mice, and the Chairman agreed with Professor Mellanby that there were some very strong contra-indications. Hong Kong, for example, was a most marvellous population of people living under much higher densities than in east London. He thought the inhabitants to be impressively happy as far as one could see,” to which Calhoun could only respond, rather feebly, that “he did not know what happened in Hong Kong. He had been in Calcutta and was frightened by it. His interpretation of what was happening there might be happening in Amsterdam and other places now.” (Amsterdam?)
And nor does it matter that the deplorable conditions in which Calhoun’s subjects were kept differed completely from even the most soul-crushing Pruitt–Igoe-style brutalist tenements or the most densely-packed Japanese coffin-apartments, or that being subjected to traffic jams or the crush of sweaty bodies in a subway system is still not the same as residing in the dystopian hellscape of Universe 25.
Despite all these criticisms, Calhoun’s pathetic little rats and mice, wallowing in feces and urine and surrounded by the corpses of their expired relatives, are nevertheless still widely, and perhaps even increasingly, viewed as portending a bleak future for humanity. With polls showing that nearly half of teenagers agree with phrases like “I can’t do anything right,” “I do not enjoy life” and “My life is not useful,” and with 57 percent of single Americans reporting that they are “not currently looking for a relationship or casual dates,” it is hard not to be reminded of Calhoun’s listless, spiritless test subjects.
*****
The Population Question has dominated modern thought ever since the appearance of Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in which the English clergyman-turned-economist posited that the geometric increase of the population would inevitably outstrip the arithmetic progression of food production. As we have seen, the global famine Malthus prophesied was avoided, but Malthusianism did successfully introduce the notion of a “surplus population,” which Charles Dickens memorably pilloried in A Christmas Carol:
“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
Concerns about overpopulation persist, viz. Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 comments regarding sub-Saharan Africa’s need for “a successful demographic transition when countries today have seven or eight children per woman.” At the same time, the developed world’s declining total fertility rate (TFR) has led people to revisit the supposed lessons of Universe 25. Consider South Korea, which famously maintains the world’s lowest TFR at 0.78, and in particular the Seoul region, which can only manage a TFR of 0.55. The South Korean government has spent some $280 billion over the last 18 years on various public policy measures designed to reverse its plummeting birth rate, to no avail whatsoever. South Korea is only the most extreme example, as the entirety of the developed world enters into a veritable Baby Bust.
Acolytes of John Calhoun suspect that this unprecedented “demographic transition” is the result of high social density and vertiginous “social velocity” (the volume and frequency of unavoidable social contact), leading to a “loss of capacity to engage in behaviors essential to species survival.” It is an explanation appealing in its simplicity, although it should be noted that TFR decreases are occurring across the board. Between 2007 and 2017, American TFRs fell 12 percent in rural, 16 percent in small or medium metro, and 18 percent in large metro counties, suggesting that social density may play a role, but not a dispositive one. “It is almost universally acknowledged,” observed researchers with the International Institute for Environment and Development in the 2013 study “Urbanization and Fertility Decline,” “that urban fertility is lower than rural fertility,” with the notable exception of “the very poorest urban slum areas,” where, incidentally, social velocity is doubtless at its highest. There are cities where the excess crude birthrate exceeds that of the surrounding countryside (Stockholm, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Bratislava), and cities where it is far, far lower (Paris, Dublin, Helsinki, Boston). The relatively high fertility of immigrant communities, and other relevant cultural or socio-economic factors, must also be taken into account when grappling with these numbers, since we are dealing with phenomena far more complicated than inbred albino mice stuffed into a tiny pen.
If the population of the developed world is indeed descending into demographic oblivion, then we are dealing with something akin to a systems collapse. Elon Musk, not without reason, has described falling birth rates as “the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” while contributors to The Lancet have warned that “national governments must plan for emerging threats to economies, food security, health, the environment, and geopolitical security brought on by these demographic changes that are set to transform the way we live.”
Advocates for negative population growth grasped the demographic monkey’s paw … and their wish has now come true.
Systems collapses, as any archaeologist can tell you, are complex by their very nature, produced by a cascading series of events that cannot be viewed in isolation. The Late Bronze Age collapse was not just the consequence of environmental changes, or the invasion of the Sea Peoples. The Roman Empire did not decline and fall because of the barbarian invasions, the debasement of imperial coinage, or the effects of the Antonine plague, but because of all of these factors and more besides. In the case of our present-day demographic crisis, we are obliged to venture beyond the effects of high social density.
We do not lack for alternative explanations. As Ms. Gulick discussed in these pages, Pope Francis has blamed “selfishness, consumerism, and individualism, which make people satiated, lonely, and unhappy.” While these are aspects of modern life that tend to inhibit family formation and promote anti-natalism, collectivist societies do not invariably fare better.
Is a general decline in religiosity responsible? In the United States, birthrates among Roman Catholics have dropped below replacement levels, and even Mormons are seeing a considerable decline, while a comparison between the relatively pious Poland (TFR of 1.33 in 2021) and the relatively non-believing Czechia (TFR of 1.83 in 2021) is instructive. Ben Sixsmith, writing in The Critic, addressed still more theories. “Are childcare costs too high? Certainly! But Sweden has some of the lowest child care costs in Europe and is also hitting record fertility lows. Is housing too expensive? Yes! But Germany has far more affordable housing and its birth rate in 2022 was 1.46 — even lower than that of the UK.” (READ MORE: Gustav Klimt’s Last Painting Was Among His Best)
Is it the widespread availability of low-dose oral contraceptives? As Mr. Sixsmith notes, birth control pill usage is incredibly low in Japan (something like 0.9 percent of women), yet Japan still has a TFR of 1.374, and only 1.04 in the Tokyo prefecture. Maybe it has something to do with microplastics, or xenoestrogens, or increasingly fragmented genetic material in spermatozoon. Perhaps it is the effect of rampant social media use, which inflicts its own kind of social velocity. American TFR was relatively stable between 1980 and 2007, and was even on the upswing, before slumping shortly thereafter. Some blamed the deteriorating recession-era economy, but recall that the first iPhone was released on June 29, 2007.
Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s Prime Minister from 1959 to 1990, writing in his memoir One Man’s View Of The World, denied that the “Stop at Two” population campaign of the 1970s was responsible for Singapore’s moribund TFR, which has since dropped to 1.12. “Our low birth rates,” he insisted, “have nothing to do with economic or financial factors, such as high cost of living or lack of government help for parents. They are instead the result of changed lifestyles and mindsets … Once women are educated and have equal job opportunities, they no longer see their primary role as bearing children or taking care of the household. They want to be able to pursue their careers fully just as men have always been able to. They have very different expectations about whether or whom they should marry because they are financially independent. There is no turning back the clock, unless we want to stop educating women.”
All of these explanations tell part of the story, but the fact remains that modernity and urbanization are not conducive to the formation of large family units. For the first two hundred thousands years of human history, our demographic situation was fairly predictable. Hunter-gatherers populations typically maintained a TFR of 5-6, while agriculturists averaged around 6.6, levels of fecundity that were kept in check by high child mortality, disease, starvation, and war. Modern urban populations perforce have very different fertility levels, particularly as infant and child mortality rates have declined. Modernization and urbanization will necessarily produce a shift from a high mortality/high fertility paradigm to a low mortality/low fertility paradigm. Now, as that iron law of demographics is joined by the aforementioned socio-economic circumstances, we are finding out just how low it can go.
Fertility rates have been dropping since the Industrial Revolution, with the post-war Baby Boom representing, if anything, an aberration. Around 1860, nearly two-thirds of couples in Great Britain were producing families of four or more children, but by 1925 that number was closer to one-fifth and dropping. Among hunter-gatherers, horticulturists, and agriculturists, children represent economic assets, while in modern societies children are treated as investments requiring considerable expenditure. As child mortality rates have plummeted, parents have chosen to allocate resources accordingly, a “quantity versus quality trade-off” that some may view as selfish, but others may see as efficient or responsible. Lee Kwan Yew, as he so often did, represented the voice of reason. Falling fertility is not just about “economic or financial factors,” though they undoubtedly play a role, but also about the “changed lifestyles and mindsets” inherent in modern life. But Lee’s facetious suggestion that the only way to turn the demographic tide would be to “stop educating women” is not quite accurate. To return to pre-modern levels of fertility, we would likely have to return to a pre-modern ratio of peasants to city-dwellers. If we truly want to encourage large families, we will need more subsistence farmers.
*****
The writings of John Calhoun and Paul Ehrlich, the twentieth’s two most prominent prophets of demographic doom, catalyzed a concerted effort to reduce global population. China had its one-child policy, Singapore its “Stop at Two” campaign, while the ecologist Garrett Hardin, in his Tragedy of the Commons (1968), demanded an immediate end to the “freedom to breed” through “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” Back in my salad days as a young student of anthropology, my adviser was one J. Kenneth Smail, whose cause célèbre can be easily gleaned from the title one of his papers, “Confronting The 21st Century’s Hidden Crisis: Reducing Human Numbers by 80%.” Dr. Smail began with the premise that a global population of ten billion would be insupportable, but an eighty-percent drop could be effectuated not by coercion — dystopian sterilization programs, eugenics, and the like— but “with relative ease by establishing a worldwide average fertility rate of approximately 1.5 to 1.7 over the next several generations.” He foresaw that a consequence of this demographic shift would be “the fact that populations will inevitably get ‘older’… as both mortality and fertility rates decline and human numbers (hopefully) reach stable levels,” a development that would present “unique set of problems to resolve.”
Now that we are living in a world of sub-replacement fertility, we are becoming quite familiar with that “unique set of problems,” which should never have been downplayed. While there is nothing objectionable about a global population of two billion — the world of 1950 was hardly a barren wasteland — the numbers at present do not lie. In South Korean, with its current TFR in the 0.7 range, there will only be 4.3 great-grandchildren for every 100 great-grandparents. Faced with a completely inverted population pyramid, and the inevitability of economic atrophy as a consequence, China and other counties are desperately trying to reverse course on the population control measures of the past. Policymakers throughout the developed world are legitimately terrified that decreasing fertility will mean GDP contraction, and that no amount of human capital investment or productivity gains can offset a rapidly dwindling populace, which presumably plays no small part in the ongoing mad rush in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, and elsewhere to admit unprecedented numbers of immigrants, legal or otherwise.
University admissions departments worry that enrollment numbers will suffer given the oncoming deficit of college-aged Americans, though the shortfall will no doubt be made up either by relaxing standards or admitting more international students. Japan was forced to close 8,580 public schools between 2002 and 2020, for lack of pupils. Churches and cultural institutions are confronted with dwindling congregations and audiences and donor bases. Demographic concerns even implicate national security and war-fighting capabilities. Despite being outnumbered by the invading Russian hordes, the government of Ukraine first set the draft age at 27, and only recently and very reluctantly lowered it to 25, in an understandable effort to preserve the country’s most reliable contributors to its demographic future. The result has been a military in which the average soldier is 43 years of age, a very different dynamic from the Second World War, in which the average solder was 26, or Vietnam, in which the average soldier was around 22. Elsewhere, militaries are exploring the possibilities of drone technology, and autonomous, driverless military ground vehicles, the better to make up for demographic deficits.
Advocates for negative population growth grasped the demographic monkey’s paw, the withered finger curled, and their wish has now come true. Sub-replacement fertility rates are here to stay, for now in the developed world, and eventually all across the globe, an unavoidable consequence of modernity. There are those, like the British Conservative MP Miriam Cates, who have argued that “the most pressing issue of our generation” is “not climate change. It’s not Russia or China or Iran. It’s not the neo-Marxist ideology that has so weakened our institutions. It’s not inflation or taxation or poor productivity. No. There is one critical outcome that liberal individualism has completely failed to deliver and that is babies.” We are belatedly realizing the extent of the oncoming demographic crisis, but there are, as yet, no solutions to this complex problem; in the words of Ben Sixsmith, “no one actually knows how to raise birth rates.”
As frightened as we were of Universe 25, we now face the equally frightening prospect of demographic collapse, which poses “threats to economies, food security, health, the environment, and geopolitical security,” and will produce a world likely to be dominated by drones and automata, artificial intelligence chatbots and algorithms, and also by mass immigration, with all the societal upheaval that will surely follow. And thus we see, as Robert Burns put it in his poem dedicated “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785,” how “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.”
*****
Speaking of rodents, let us endeavor to end on a slightly more optimistic note. We have seen the horrors to which Dr. Calhoun subjected members of the Mus musculus species in Universe 25. Other behavioral experiments, involving morphine-self administration, have demonstrated that mice and rats, kept in small metal cages and offered the choice between water and a morphine solution, would attach themselves to the morphine bottles, ignore basic needs, lapse into torpor, and eventually expire. The Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander and his team at Simon Fraser University, however, suspected that the conditions of the heroin-addicted mice were profoundly unnatural in their austerity, and instead provided them with the opposite of Universe 25. In Alexander’s “Rat Park,” the little creatures were given ample space, and toys, and plenty of opportunities to exercise, play, and mate. The rats of Rat Park eschewed the morphine-water solution, and even rats that had been brought up in cramped conditions, with only morphine-laced water to drink, flourished when introduced to the Elysian Fields of Alexander’s rat paradise. Environments matter. (READ MORE: Most Americans Can’t Find Ukraine on a Map. That Doesn’t Dilute Our Duty to Defend It.)
We do not live in Universe 25, not yet at least, but our society does share some of its afflictions. “We’re in a crisis of connection,” according to Niobe Way, psychologist and founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University, a crisis of “disconnection from ourselves and disconnection from each other. And it’s getting worse.” As Bruce Alexander demonstrated, the onset of seemingly fatal apathy can still be reversed by improvements to the social and physical environment, and by changes to the prevailing culture. We may rightly lament, as did Rabbie Burns, that “man’s dominion, / Has broken nature’s social union,” but we can and must keep fighting for a world of vitalism, beauty, and hope, without which we will be reduced to the level of lotophagi, with the real end of the world, the destruction of the spirit, sure to follow.
The post The Human Disappearing Act: Why Are We Not Reproducing? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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