Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button

All politics is local, as they say. And so, before we proceed to the big question of this essay—Can modernity survive for much longer?—I want to start with a small one: Will the recent change of government make a difference to the people of Britain?

The recently departed Conservative government was sunk partly by a set of challenges that will be familiar to anyone in a high-income country—or, increasingly, a middle-income one. To start with, taxes are the highest they’ve been in generations, and yet the Conservatives felt compelled to keep funneling money towards health (20 percent of public spending) and pensions (10 percent of public spending) because both kinds of spending benefit their most reliable voting bloc. The Labour Party, in winning power, made exactly the same ­promises, and for exactly the same reason: the grey vote. This means that spending is not going to fall and neither will taxes, the under-housed and over-taxed young be damned.

Meanwhile, discontent over immigration policy was the key driver of the violent unrest this summer. Along with almost every other high-income Western country, Britain is experiencing mass immigration against the wishes of the majority of its voters. Having taken the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum literally rather than seriously, the government has stopped the flow of migrants from Eastern Europe and replaced it with a much larger flow of migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. A country that was 99.9 percent white in 1951 is projected to become minority-autochthonous at some point before the end of this century.

This process has been represented by the British government as a natural phenomenon, as inevitable as weather. Other governments have adopted the same tone. “Over the past few years we’ve seen a massive spike in temporary immigration,” said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in April of this year, carefully understating both the likely permanence of this demographic change and his own culpability (his government has “seen” these changes, rather than engineered them). Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, described as “far-right” by her critics, has thus far failed to deliver on her promise to reduce immigration. And even Japan, which has historically been alone among ­high-income countries in keeping immigration levels extremely low, is loosening its border ­restrictions.

Either there is a conspiracy at play, or—more likely—something much bigger and more ominous is going on. Britain may have pursued mass migration more intensively than most other countries, but a larger pattern is evident worldwide: The flow of people from the poor world to the rich world in the twenty-first century is as strong, and as historically significant, as the flow of people from the Old World to the New once was.

The governments permitting this flow have made an economic pact with their voters: You may not like mass immigration, but the payoff is lower taxes and higher-quality public services. It’s inevitable anyway, so there’s no point complaining.

And yet it is increasingly apparent that this pact is not being honored. At the time of writing, Britain is in recession, after fifteen years of stagnant growth: a stagnation which has coincided with a historically unprecedented surge in immigration. Britain’s miserable economic prospects are not unique among its peers. Earlier this year, The Economist published a report that analyzed data from thirty-five rich countries. “Whereas in 2017-19 the median country in our sample ran a budget surplus,” wrote the report’s authors, “last year it ran a budget deficit of close to 2.5% of GDP.” The story is the same across all of these countries: weak tax receipts combined with profligate state spending. “How long can the firehose keep blasting?” The Economist asks of these outflows, which are particularly directed towards health and welfare. Now there’s a big question.

I listen to the tentative optimism of my British friends and family, all hoping that our current problems are set to be remedied, at least partially, by our brand-new government. I cannot agree with them, and not only because I take a dim view of the Labour Party leadership. I am pessimistic because I believe that our various problems are in fact just one problem, and it’s a problem that no one—certainly not the British Labour Party—knows how to solve. 

Put bluntly: The people on whom modernity depends are failing to reproduce themselves, which means that modernity itself is failing to reproduce itself. Most voters have no idea that this is happening. Nor do most politicians. But it is happening nonetheless, and we are experiencing its early ­stages in the form of diverse political crises across the modern world.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” is the phrase coined by Peter Thiel to describe the nature of twenty-first century innovation, or the lack of it. Digital technology gives us the impression of explosive growth, but it is a false impression. As Thiel wrote in these pages in March 2020 (before the recent spate of Boeing failures, which have further underlined his point):

When Boeing introduced its flagship 707 jet airliner in 1958, the power to cruise at 977 kilometers per hour did more than enable routine transcontinental commercial flights. It fed the optimistic self-­understanding of a society proud to have entered the Jet Age. More than sixty years later, we are not moving any faster. Boeing’s latest plane, the 737 MAX, has a cruising speed of just 839 kilometers per hour—to say nothing of its more catastrophic limitations.

As a civilization, we are running on the fumes of the accomplishments of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. They gave us electricity, sanitary engineering, antibiotics, antisepsis, vaccination, rail transport, the airplane, the computer, and the theory of evolution by natural selection. We haven’t been back to the moon in fifty-two years.

It may sound triumphalist, but the contributions of Britain and the British diaspora to this era of innovation cannot be understated. All the innovations listed above can be credited, in whole or in part, to men of British descent born between 1700 and 1900: Benjamin Franklin, Michael ­Faraday, ­Joseph Bazalgette, Alexander Fleming, Joseph ­Lister, Edward Jenner, George Stephenson, the Wright brothers, Charles Babbage, and Charles Darwin. Note that Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins are also surnames originating in the British Isles. Modernity was disproportionately the creation of this particular ethnic group. Why it was the British, and not some other group, who gave the world this blessing and this curse is a question too rarely asked.

An important part of the answer is demographics. One key difference between the era of British innovation and our era of stagnation is that ­eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons had a lot more children than their descendants do now. Strange as it now seems, Britain was consistently a net emigration nation right up until the 1970s, and in some years in the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1815 and 1914, approximately ten million people emigrated from Britain, overwhelmingly to the settler colonies of America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as to live and work in other parts of the British Empire. This migration was made possible by a high total fertility rate—that is, a high average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime. The nineteenth-century British TFR peaked in 1820 at 5.56, much higher than the replacement figure of 2.1, which modern governments regard as economically necessary, and much much higher than the 2022 British figure of 1.49. Even with a child mortality ratefar worse than today’s, the old TFRs were enough to fuel enormous population growth.

“Economists know a few things about economic growth,” the economist and futurist Robin ­Hanson told me in an interview last year, 

and one of the key things we understand is that innovation happens roughly in proportion to economic activity. . . . A key point here is that the population matters a lot for production.

The growth in British population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not incidental to British world dominance, but rather an essential precondition for it. You cannot turn a third of the world pink without manpower. Britain was able to achieve this demographic feat because it was the first country in the world to industrialize, which meant that it was also the first country in the world to experience a simultaneous increase in both population and per capita income. Industrialization was in many ways a trauma for the British working classes, who were removed from their rural homes into filthy factories. But, contrary to the popular association between industrialization and ill health, the Industrial Revolution in fact enabled a significant drop in mortality. Other European countries later followed Britain in industrializing, and they experienced the same population explosion, allowing them to join the modern culture of innovation.

Europe and her colonies attained military and cultural power only because they had a large supply of warm young bodies to send to war, and many eager young minds capable of innovation. Explorers, scientists, and business founders have always been overwhelmingly drawn from the youthful male population, and empirical analysis of the career trajectories of eminent scholars and inventors reveals that creative output of all kinds begins to surge in one’s twenties; by the late thirties or early forties, it has peaked. Medical ­science may have allowed us to extend the human lifespan, but we have not managed to extend this crucial period of life, characterized by both useful dynamism and reckless aggression. The more young people you have, the more of this energy you have. “Quantity,” as Stalin is supposed to have said, “has a quality all its own.”

Exactly why Britain underwent industrialization precisely when it did is a matter of historical controversy. Plentiful coal reserves, a break with the clannish social structures of the Middle Ages, and a culture tolerant of spinsterhood are all possibilities. Blind luck may also have been at play.

Whatever the cause, we can now confidently separate world history into two distinct periods: pre-industrialization and post-industrialization. If you look at any number of long-term trends—wealth, population size, carbon emissions, life expectancy—they all show exactly the same inflection point, around the year 1800. Futurists warn against the so-called “singularity,” the point at which artificial intelligence becomes so sophisticated that technological growth becomes uncontrollable, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for the human species. In his 2023 book, Invention and Innovation, the scientist Vaclav Smil casts doubt on these warnings. The singularity has already occurred, he says: We have already gone through the one, great technological breakthrough, which has altered the world more profoundly than its progenitors could ever have realized. We call it the Industrial Revolution.

Almost every piece of modern speculative fiction assumes that life will change as much in the coming two hundred years as it did in the two hundred years just passed. Many academics assume the same thing. The future is expected to contain manifold wonders and horrors, from super-intelligent AI to interplanetary colonization.

There are just a few notable exceptions to this consensus, including two of the most influential dystopian novels of the late twentieth century, both concerned with the same scenario: a sudden drop in fertility. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The ­Handmaid’s Tale—set in America in the early 2000s—imagines a world in which all but a small number of women are made infertile by some disaster. P. D. James’s 1992 The Children of Men—set in Britain in 2021—imagines a world in which all men are made infertile by some other disaster.

Neither novelist could have known at the time of writing that birth rates in the rich world had already begun their dramatic decline. They both deserve credit for realizing that low fertility—rather than the feared “population bomb”—would come to dominate the politics of the near future. And they both realized that the result of a low-fertility crisis would be a withdrawal of ­modernity: ­technological decline, impoverishment, ­de-globalization, and—in Atwood’s vision—a ­return to theocracy.

On this last point, Atwood has not yet been vindicated. So far, it is James’s vision that has proved more prescient. Many of the cultural phenomena that we are now seeing in low-fertility cultures are phenomena that she foresaw almost three decades ago. A detail that anyone who has read the novel will surely remember is the bizarre obsession that many of the people of 2020s Britain develop with their pets. Just as the dogs and cats of childless (or grandchildless) people today are given prams, clothes, and Instagram accounts, James’s characters treat animals—particularly kittens—as baby replacements.

Some pets are even christened by half-mad Anglican vicars: The church’s rejection of orthodoxy in the face of a fertility disaster is another point on which James got it right. “During the mid-1990s,” the narrator tells us, “the recognised churches, particularly the Church of England, moved away from the theology of sin and redemption to a less ­uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism.” Does that sound familiar?

James and Atwood both foresaw a future in which modernity stalls and goes backward because of a biological failure, rather than a technological one. This biological failure has come as something of a surprise to experts in population studies. What demographers describe as “the first demographic transition” seems to be an essential component of industrialization: Birth rates remain high, mortality drops, and population grows. But the possibility of a second demographic transition was, until recently, merely theoretical. At the end of the twentieth century, some demographers noticed that the total fertility rate in parts of the rich world was dropping below the replacement level, and they wondered whether that change might stick. After all, why should any group of people alight on exactly 2.1 as its ideal rate of reproduction? Why not go lower?

And so we did. Every single country in the Western world now has a TFR below replacement, along with much of South America, North Africa, and Asia, particularly Northeast Asian countries. The single best predictor of a country’s fertility rate is its level of affluence. Once a country crosses the threshold of $5,000 USD in GDP per capita—the wealth of a country like Indonesia—it starts the journey towards sub-replacement fertility. And those whom affluence loves most—the urbanized, the secular, and the educated—are those it sterilizes most aggressively.

The nature of geometric progressions means that a population drop can be very sudden if the fertility rate does not recover to replacement level. When fewer children are born, fewer future parents are available to raise the next generation, and so on. In South Korea—the country with the world’s lowest TFR, at 0.7—the number of babies born in 2100 is on track to be 93 to 98 percent lower than the number of babies born this year. No disease or invading army has ever managed to destroy a country so thoroughly, and the word that springs to my mind, when contemplating such an event, is “biblical.” The question that preoccupies me is this one: Is it possible that there is indeed a God, and that he does not want us to be modern?

Because the fertility crash really does pose an existential risk to modernity as such. A common assumption among people who are relaxed about low fertility in the rich world is that life will remain much the same, just with a smaller population. We will still enjoy all of the nice things we currently enjoy—a welfare system, hospitals, sophisticated infrastructure—but there will be fewer people around, and so less pressure on all of these resources. Advocates for population decline insist that we can keep the important parts of modernity and just trim the hedonistic fat.

They’re wrong about that. Which is not to say that the endless growth model is sustainable either, given that we have finite resources here on earth. The core environmentalist claim is correct: The Industrial Revolution really was a catastrophe for the natural world. The pattern of graphs showing post-industrialization human population growth is also visible on any number of graphs showing other trends: carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, topsoil erosion, deforestation, the pollution of waterways. These are all direct consequences of the technological progress that has benefited us so much in the here and now, allowing us to experience a level of comfort ­unthinkable to our ancestors. This is what technology is, in fact, in Martin Heidegger’s analysis: a kind of epistemological violence done against the natural world, as everything comes to be regarded as a“standing-reserve” that exists only to be consumed by human beings.

This could all end in a variety of ways. Techno-­pessimists predict that our natural resources will become utterly depleted, potentially causing the destruction of life on earth. Techno-optimists predict that we will technologize ourselves out of this crisis through the use of green energy and space colonies.

Looking at the birth-rates data, I suggest another possibility. Modernity may be inherently self-limiting, not because of its destructive effects on the natural world, but because it eventually trips a self-destruct trigger. If modern people will not reproduce themselves, then modernity cannot last. One way or another, we’re going to return to a much older way of living.

Our various political crises in 2024 represent the early stages of the transition we are all about to go through. As older voters outnumber the young, aging democracies become increasingly gerontocratic, and spending on the old is protected even as the tax burden on the young becomes ever more punitive. Desperate for young people to keep the economic show on the road, governments permit massive flows of migrants from poor parts of the world that are still fertile, on the assumption that human beings are little more than fungible economic units. These regions’ populations are dissatisfied, but mostly passive—at least thus far. This is the stage at which we find ourselves.

It’s not clear what will come next, because this hasn’t happened before. But we can make a few ­educated guesses.

First, conflict over immigration is sure to become more intense.In 1900, the populations of the West—Europe, North America, and ­Australasia—accounted for almost a third of the world’s population, in contrast to just 8 percent on the continent of Africa. By 2100, that ratio will have almost exactly reversed: Nearly forty percent of the world is projected to live in Africa, and 13 percent in the West. And for a simple mathematical reason: African parents are having three or four times as many children as their European counterparts. Thanks largely to the technological innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these children are far more likely than in times past to survive to adulthood.

More than half of young sub-Saharan Africans already say they want to emigrate to the rich world, and that desire will only become stronger if climate change produces extreme weather events that make survival near the equator more difficult. We have already seen a stirring of right-wing nationalism across Europe, where proximity to Africa (and, to a lesser extent, Asia) makes these migrant flows more alarming. Political opposition to mass migration from the third world is likely to grow, and efforts to block illegal migration routes will become more forceful. Some countries will soon introduce remigration policies, as the German party Alternativ für Deutschland has already discussed. This issue will come to define the politics of the rest of the century.

Contrary to the hopes and fears of most twentieth-­century science fiction writers, technological innovation is likely to stall, and soon. Elon Musk will not colonize Mars. We will not live in Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality. Such breakthroughs depend on the rich world’s producing a sufficient number of young, hyper-intelligent people and putting them to those tasks—rather than to the task of, say, maintaining our basic infrastructure. Any Babbages, Faradays, and Listers who are now children are unlikely to be given the resources and freedom necessary to innovate in adulthood, since their talents will be put in service of keeping an enormous elderly population as comfortable as possible for as long as possible, not least by means of the tax system.

But the young can be drained of only so much vitality. Eventually, welfare systems in the rich world will have to shrink and die. When the old age pension was introduced in Britain in 1908, it was made available only to citizens over the age of seventy with an income of less than £31 a year, at a time when average annual income was £70. Only 24 percent of the population ever reached the age of seventy, and once they did, they would expect to claim their pension for an average of only nine years. Life expectancy has increased since 1908, but the pension age has not. In fact, it has fallen—­having been born in 1992, I will qualify for my state pension at the age of sixty-eight.

Except, of course, that I won’t. The Ponzi scheme of the old age pension is already collapsing, and it will almost certainly have collapsed entirely by the time I reach my sixty-eighth birthday. A ­gerontocratic voter base will cling to the state pension as long as possible—I wouldn’t be surprised if the British government abolished universal education before it abolished the state pension. But what can’t go on, won’t go on. The status quo has proved ­unsustainable.

In the end, we will have to revert to the system that prevailed for all of human history, up until a century ago. The elderly will be cared for privately, mostly within the extended family, and mostly by women. Healthcare for the old will be mostly palliative, and the only safety net for the poor and lonely will be provided by charities. Lifespans will shorten.

Until we get there, the only policy solution that is permissible within the dominant ideological framework is legalized euthanasia. We should expect governments to embrace this policy route as they scramble to save their dying welfare systems. For a period, the elderly will be offered a state pension, but they will also be offered state-administered death. A bitter and ­increasingly impoverished younger generation will be more than happy to push them towards the latter route.

So much for the next fifty years or so. Beyond that, predictions become more difficult.

One known unknown is the impact that differential fertility rates will have on the composition of our future societies. At present, social conservatism and religious belief predict fertility very strongly in low-fertility societies. The greater the ­frequency of religious service attendance, the greater the number of children a couple is likely to have, and some hyper-­religious and conservative groups have extraordinarily high fertility rates. The Amish, for instance, have a TFR at least as high as that of ­early nineteenth century Britons, and ­alsoenjoy low child mortality rates because they are surrounded by a high-tech culture that artificially suppresses infectious disease. If they maintain this level of growth, the Amish could soon come to dominate America, given the dwindling fertility of the rest of the population.

This outcome is not guaranteed. The number of young people leaving the Amish community could rise, as could their child mortality rates. They might not be able to withstand the fertility-­shredding effects of modernity while modernity still lasts. They might also be conquered by a more technologically advanced group. (What use are shotguns against attack helicopters?)

Nevertheless, it is hyper-fertile groups like the Amish who will define the future of humanity. The world they create will look quite different from our own, but I suspect that it will look neither post-apocalyptic nor techno-utopian. Rather, it will probably look much the way human societies have always looked: static, parochial, low-tech, clannish, religious, and dependent on sunlight and muscle. The great experiment of Britain’s Industrial Revolution may not be remembered at all. If it is, it will likely be remembered as a failure, displeasing to God. “So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.”

Some readers may wonder whether this might not be a good thing, in the end, given that modernity seems hellbent on destroying itself. As the conservative writer Dave Greene puts it, “for the more reactionary among us, the decline of modern cultural systems in the wake of modern problems may seem like a solution in itself. Isn’t it easier to live and let die?”

I don’t know the answer to that question.

Louise Perry is the author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

Image by Thomas Cole, public domain. Image cropped.