On the demographic technology of religion

and the "tendency of the rate of people to fall"

Marc Chagall, Pregnant Woman (1913)

In last winter’s volume of American Affairs (not exactly fresh, I know), one Philip Pilkington makes the curious case that Marx was right about the tendency of capitalism to erode its own foundations and collapse on itself, but wrong about the mechanism of action. Instead of a trend toward ever falling rates of profits, Pilkington suggests that capital’s bête noire is actually the irreversible decline in birth rates that follows its domination.

This makes intuitive sense: what happens to the Coca-Cola Company’s earnings over time when there are increasingly fewer people on the planet who can buy their products? And then what happens when all the Coca-Colas of the world begin laying off workers to cut costs and please shareholders in the face of reduced demand? (“Death spiral” is a possible answer.)

Thomas Piketty’s second fundamental law of capitalism (capital/income ratio equals savings rate times growth rate, β = s/g) implies that in a nation with a stagnating population, generational wealth acquires an increasingly disproportionate influence, engendering the gross inequality and boiling resentment that can be very, very bad for business as usual. Pilkington cites a recent book that forecasts a period where the younger generations, reduced in size, suffer from runaway inflation while their more numerous forebears cling to financial assets and gobble up pension funds—another scenario that could trigger violent civil spasms.

I’m not sure whether I buy Pilkington’s spiel (and I happen to be one of those people who believes an across-the-board reduction in the human population would be better for the world in the long term), but it’s an interesting argument—and the data does show an unambiguous correlation between economic development and fertility decline. South Korea and Japan are the obvious exemplars. China’s rescinding of its one-child policy evidently won’t be enough to reverse its negative population growth. India’s demographic curve is on its way towards flattening. Africa’s birth rates are falling, and the Economist notes that across the continent, “fertility rates are much lower for urban women, who typically have 30-40% fewer children than those in the countryside.” Here in the United States, immigration is all that keeps our national headcount from shrinking.

Pilkington (whom Google tells me is “an Irish economist working in investment finance”) proposes several reasons why this might be. From the beginning, the process of capitalist development has entailed an emptying out of the pastures and provinces and drawn people into cities, and urbanites typically don’t need to (or can’t) augment their household’s labor power with a pile of children. Developed economies usually have a pension scheme, so raising kids is no longer the sole retirement investment the wage-earner can make. Something Pilkington doesn’t mention—but which the most striking part of his spiel takes as a given—is the tendency of a capitalist society to atomize its subjects by rending those communal bonds of affiliation which were once useful in finding a suitable and willing mate, and to promote the social liberalism which permits and encourages women to pursue careers alongside men.¹

But the issue Pilkington dwells on is that for urbanized people in advanced economies, the incentives for having children override the incentives for not having them. When it’s framed as a matter of “do I want to continue to focus on self-actualization, or do I want to change diapers, fret about daycare, and write checks to pediatricians, orthodontists, psychiatrists, and SAT tutors for two decades?”, remaining childless seems positively appealing.

“[P]eople increasingly see themselves as workers and consumers first and progeni­tors second,” Pilkington writes. “Family life is no longer a core aspiration of every person but becomes a ‘luxury,’ another consumer choice to be made when one’s career goals are achieved and one’s optimal material con­sumption level has been reached.”

He notices an exception to the rule:

The most striking intranational trend, however, is not class-based but cultural: the fertility rate of Americans varies significantly according to their religious affiliation. A very interesting picture emerges from the data. For one, the largest religious groups in the American population—Protestant, Catholic, “Nones,” and Atheist/Agnostic—have a combined fertility slightly below replacement rate. On the other hand, “believing” religious groups who adhere to traditional ways of living have birth rates far above replacement, including traditionalist Catholics (3.6), Orthodox Jews (3.3), Mormons (2.8), and Muslims (2.8), not to mention voluntarily isolating sects like the Amish. This suggests that the current tendency for American culture to secularize will not last forever; at a certain point, groups with a more robust capacity to reproduce will replace groups with less robust capacities in a simple Darwinian manner. Currently, these groups represent a very small fraction of the American population, but because human reproduction follows a multiplicative path these groups could grow rapidly in numbers, especially as the other groups decline.

Let’s set aside that last implication for now.

At the conclusion, Pilkington returns to this point to suggest a provocative means of nipping the demographic crisis in the bud:

Another potential solution to the problem of demographic decline is a religious revival. We have extensive evidence, at both the national and international level, that religious groups, with their high birth rates, have a powerful evolutionary advantage over secular groups. So there is good reason to think that, if there were a mass revival of religion and traditional life in the world, it would offset the impact of capitalist accumulation on the fertility rate. An alternate version of this solution does not rely on a mass conversion from irreligion to religiosity, but simply relies on the fact that more traditional religious minority groups in secularized countries multiply at very high rates and may eventually become the majority of the population. But given the often minuscule size of these religious minorities in secular countries, the process would likely play out long after capitalism collapses under its self-generated demographic contradictions.

I have to wonder if Pilkington is religious himself. Only a very peculiar and cynical believer would speak of faith and practice in such instrumental terms. But he nevertheless identifies religion for what it is: an ancient technology of behavioral control, developed ad hoc and retained for its social utility.

The ubiquity of spiritual belief, organized worship and sacrifice, and superstitious taboos throughout the ancient world suggests they not only provided a world-narrative that answered tantalizing but empirically insoluble questions (where does the rain come from? what are the stars? how was the world made? where did we come from and where are we going?), but that belief and practice helped to provide for a group’s stability and survival. If it were otherwise, societies across the globe would have sloughed off religious institutions long before the modern age.

BF Skinner characterized religion as an extension of group or governmental controls, distinguished by the subject’s understanding that he can expect certain “virtuous” and “sinful” behaviors to be eventually but inexorably rewarded or punished, even if no human being observes them, and regardless of the particular circumstances in which they occur.² Abrahamic religious narratives maintain that a transcendental world-controller continuously monitors our actions, and has informed us of his preferences. The infidelity of a husband may escape the community’s notice, but the deity sees it, and will eventually see that the philanderer answers for it. Likewise, the performance of a good deed that may not bring any immediate recompense (say, helping an elderly person to cross the street, returning a lost wallet, confessing one’s sins to a priest, etc.) is believed enter into the divine awareness and factor into the determination of whether one will be ultimately rewarded or punished in the next life.

The belief in a divine panopticon can foster pro-social and stymie anti-social behavior; compunctions and self-encouragement on the private level go a long way when every member of the group is nudging him or herself towards behavior that usually works to preserve social cohesion. (It can also make people profoundly neurotic, but let’s leave that aside for now.) But what’s curious about religious schemes of social control is that while they’re retained over time for their social effects, the explicit formulation of their ethics is non-consequentialist. The Israelites of the iron age didn’t get sick from eating improperly prepared pork or shellfish, but the prohibitions on these foods weren’t articulated in terms of public health.

But the deontological ethics instilled by religious indoctrination are only half the story. Though Confucius cared little for theological speculation, he insisted upon the importance of ritual in preserving social harmony—and was thus far ahead of his time in observing the true social function of religious institutions. Organized religious practice can mitigate class conflicts and foster a sense of shared purpose among members of a society that might otherwise tend towards disintegration. In theory, the country parish or the urban cathedral is a place where laborer and landlord, janitor and vice president alike see each other in the same place, bowing their heads as equals in reverence to the same unimpeachable authority. Religious ritual acts as an equalizer and emulsifier—though its effects in this capacity mustn’t be overstated.

An urbanized people whose members are wrapped up in the private business of life and leisure (“private” must be underscored), and only confront each other in the course of their daily transactions, can easily lose sight of their interdependence. And members of a group that have had their interrelatedness and shared obligations impressed upon them tend to monitor one another and subtly enforce community norms. (Or not so subtly, as seen in the Salem Witch Trials.)

So that’s it, then: the traditional religious subculture within an urbanized and secular milieu holds fast to a communal ethic grounded in a narrative of supernatural authority, which is socially expressed as group behavior that resists the atomization which the capitalist system of social organization promotes. (Oftentimes this entails voluntary segregation, and in other cases involuntary marginalization plays a role in strengthening communal bonds along religious lines.)

The radical individualism which is both the byproduct and fuel of consumer capitalism sees self-actualization as the summum bonum, and having children is desirable only to the extent that doing so comports with that project—and oftentimes it clearly doesn’t. (Won’t it affect my career? Won’t it mean I’ll have no time for my hobbies? Won’t it mean I’ll lose my disposable income and can’t go backpacking, attend conventions, or do livestreams anymore?) But the religions that have survived the vicissitudes of history managed to do so by working sedulously to bolster their numbers. “Be fruitful and multiply” is a survival strategy clothed as a supernatural dictate. In a more barbaric age than ours, letting the belligerent tribe on the other side of the river outbreed yours meant running the risk of waking up to find your men being slaughtered and your women and children rounded up for slavery. The dogmatic conservatism which guides traditional religious communities ensures the dictate remains in place, in spite of radically changed circumstances.

Mac Chagall, The Wedding (1944)

Governments can kvetch about the birth rate and dangle carrots to fertile citizens in the form of tax breaks, financial assistance, and raised wages—and, to be sure, if the United States took the demographic crisis seriously, it would be a lot more generous in this regard—but if having a family means sacrificing the perks that have thus far made participation in our alienated and onerous society seem even remotely worth the trouble, the secular citizen will understandably balk at it. But members of a tight-knit religious subculture (and there’s a deeper story about the historical process of disjunction between “religion” and “society” to explore) who maintain that deferring from having a family is a moral failure can be expected to multiply at a rate well above the threshold for replacement.

What’s more, such people are apt to view reproduction not as a means to an end (personal happiness, self-actualization) but as an end in itself. We can expect them to be amenable to taking the plunge in spite of not having perfectly ideal finances, whereas completely lapsed and atheistic Episcopalians like me are apt to continue hemming and hawing about the pecuniary logistics until our gametes are no longer viable. We can also assume that a member of a traditional religious community has a more intimate and reliable support network than the secular citizen whose social circles mostly consist of coworkers, social media acquaintances, and the people with whom they play board games every couple of weeks—none of whom can be counted on to babysit, pick up the kids from daycare, or or run the occasional errand in a pinch. Lastly, it stands to reason that the greater the subgroup’s insularity—the more likely that its members’ relations are mostly restricted to other members—the easier time they’ll have finding a mate. After all, one of the myriad problems with dating in the twenty-first century is finding someone who shares your values and long-term goals, and I doubt this is much of an issue in, say, an Orthodox Jewish community.

The archaic social technology of religion apparently still works, at least as far as avoiding demographic collapse is concerned. Pilkington’s suggestion that a religious revival may, in one way or another, solve the economic problem of a decreasing population may be a bit kooky, but it provides the grounds for a fun thought experiment.

Let’s say that in 2020, the United States population was 330 million. (Close enough.) Let’s really fudge some numbers and say that five percent of the population (16,500,000 people) belong to traditional religious communities—definitely an overestimate—and the remaining 313,500,000 are effectively secular and aren’t making many babies. Now let’s say that the population of these religious groups increases at a rate of 3.5 percent a year (roughly the rate at which the global population of Haredi Jews is growing), and the population of the secular group decreases at a rate of 1 percent a year.

By the year 2100, we’re looking at a population of roughly 259,000,000 religious people and 140,000,000 secular people.

This is a specious calculation, and we’re making a whole lot of unfounded assumptions—including the idea that the secular folk remain secular (and don’t start breeding again) and that children with traditionally religious upbringings persist in being traditionally religious. (I am told by a secular colleague, whose father was one of her Mormon grandparents’ twenty-five children, that it’s an iffy proposition.)

But let’s roll with it for a minute and imagine that this doesn’t happen for a while. Maybe for several decades, young members of traditional religious groups generally arrive at the conclusion that the irreligious people at their jobs in town and in their university classrooms are all maladjusted and unhappy, and elect to remain in their parents’ “tribe.”

Presumably the members of these burgeoning but insular traditional groups would expand their enclaves and seek employment across sectors of the economy in which we find them underrepresented today. After all, an urban community of devout Muslims is just as dependent on transportation infrastructure, the electrical grid, rural farms, manufacturing, etc. as their secular neighbors, and they’ll see it’s in their best interest to (1) get jobs where there are jobs to be had (2) ensure the trucks keep rolling, the crops keep growing, and the lights stay on. With the additional presumption that there’s no rancorous sectarianism between the different religious groups whose numbers are exploding relative to the secular population (let’s say they can all agree to abide each other as Peoples of the Book), together they come into control of an increasingly sizable portion of capitalism’s machinery. We see more of them becoming venture capitalists in San Francisco, energy firms’ corporate officers, majority shareholders of private equity companies, business development managers at Amazon and Apple, and so on.

The question is: will doing so inevitably make them irreligious, as it did the rest of us?

So far as we’ve seen, capitalism produces secularity as reliably as combustion releases carbon dioxide. The capitalist is powerfully incentivized to bulldoze any and all proscriptions that would inhibit production on his preferred terms or restrict consumption in any way, and it is obligation and prohibition that keep religion alive. The United Arab Emirates offers a glimpse of this principle in action: the exigencies of reinventing Dubai as a resort for cosmopolitan tourists recently compelled it to relax some of its laws, becoming a little less halal and a little more liberal. Chic-Fil-A presents a hypothetical case: if the company were to go public tomorrow, it would be open for business on Sundays by year’s end, guaranteed. A traditionalist in the C-suite of a transnational firm on the stock exchange will find himself faced with the choice between either upholding the laws and principles of his faith, or making the business decisions that will keep his company competitive, ensure he has a job, and retain the employment of hundreds or thousands of workers whose disposable income makes the whole system function.

If, somehow, the traditionalists uniformly resist the temptation, then they have either to content themselves with an economic machine that isn’t being used as designed and performs far below capacity—or they can say the h-e-double-hockey-sticks with it, show’s over, we’re doing socialism with Leviticus characteristics from here on out.

This would prove Marx and Pilkington right about the capitalist system gradually but inexorably poisoning itself through its own metabolic activity on the condition that this is a global phenomenon. Unless the whole system of transnational capitalism sputters out before or at this point, then the outcome would be to turn the United States into a new USSR or North Korea: an anomalous economic zone perpetually under siege, and liable to get folded back into the neoliberal world-order during a moment of vulnerability.

Wild, weird speculations. I don’t seriously see any of this happening; the assumptions I’m making and the variables I’m not taking into account could fill a warehouse. Probably the course of the next couple centuries will run even stranger as the contradictions pile up and the arithmetic works at resolving itself.

1. I’m definitely not saying women exist only to push out and care for babies, but that unburdening them of that expectation apparently has demographic ramifications. It was never fair nor just that bachelors should have ever been regarded more kindly than spinsters, or that the stigmatization of stay-at-home dads and the modern necessity of the dual-income household precluded a reciprocal movement of men into the domestic sphere as women committed themselves to careers outside of the home.

2. From Science and Human Behavior:

[T]he well-developed religious agency which derives much of its power from the group may control largely in accordance with group practice. It works in concert with ethical control in suppressing selfish, primarily reinforced behavior and in strengthening behavior which works to the advantage of others…Variables are manipulated in ethical control because of some current threat to the welfare of a member of the group, but the religious agency maintains its practices according to more enduring criteria of virtuous and sinful behavior. Where eating and drinking may be restricted by ethical reinforcement only when they work to the momentary disadvantage of others, religious control may establish much narrower limits by classifying gluttony as a deadly sin and temperance as a cardinal virtue…Acquisitive or possessive behavior which leads to group retribution only in a competitive situation and is elsewhere classified as good may be wholly suppressed, regardless of the circumstances, by the religious agency which demands a vow of poverty or enjoins the communicant not to lay up treasures on earth. The boastful behavior of the Pharisee, which encounters only moderate group censure, is suppressed in favor of humility and modesty…On the other hand, behavior which benefits others is promoted. Love or charity as a disposition to favor others is encouraged, and the communicant is reminded that he is his brother's keeper and must give all that he has to the poor.