Reversing The Fall: Our Next Demographic Transition
Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable — and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.
Daniel Quinn
Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life.
Lierre Keith
In this blog, I have written extensively about the need for building concrete model communities as triggers for wider social change. I call these communities Bigger Home Bases, and I see them as part of a 3-pronged approach that also includes Universal Basic Income and Modern Money Theory. Each of these three pieces is crucial, if there is to be even a whiff of long-term success, because the needed changes are so broad and so deep.
Feel free to look at those older posts to get a sense of how that 3-headed plan works. But for this piece, we’re going to explore the model communities segment more deeply. On the surface, the Bigger Home Base idea probably just looks like another iteration of the typical literary utopias and communal experiments that have been going on for centuries. But in pushing for BHBs, I have something else in mind. There are much larger issues at play, and the BHB may be the last silver bullet in our gunbelt. Model communities address very specific challenges, and deploying them is highly strategic, not just an exercise in ‘wouldn’t it be great if we all…’
To set the scene, let’s be clear about where we are, at this moment in history. We are now in the midst of the slow collapse of industrial consumer civilization. This is not just a crisis of growth capitalism, or the decline of democracy, or the challenge of climate change, or the rise of China and threat to US Dollar monetary hegemony. Those are all certainly aspects of what’s going on, but the biggest of big pictures is the unravelling of the entire global-industrial-consumer system. This system is unsustainable at its core, as it is too fossil-fuel dependent, too energy-intensive, and too destructive of the natural underpinnings of life itself. I won’t belabor or summarize the evidence here. Check out Jem Bendell’s indispensable new book “ Breaking Together “ for the definitive compendium on our Up-the-Creek situation.
Technology will not save us from this already-in-process collapse. The magnitude of our human impact on the earth’s natural support systems is just too great. Certainly, as is always the case, some countries will fare much better than others. But the sheer scale of the damage we have done (global heating, species eradication, ocean acidification, coral reef die-off, toxic material buildup, disappearing topsoil, rainforests, and potable water, etc.) ensures that we will all pay the price — a steep one — as a species.
What we are confronting, then, is really a religious question played out in an evolutionary framework: is humanity a failed species? Akin to the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, is the large-brain of modern humans an evolutionary maladaptation, with the destruction of the environment as our perpeturally-inherited Original Sin?
This is not a new concept, and there is a similar version that portrays humanity as a cancer on the body of the earth. But there are many thinkers who object to these framings, insisting that it is only our particular culture that has done the damage, not humanity itself. The problem is not with our big brain, which obviously does great and noble things all the time, but with specific actors, agents, and systems that go awry in very arbitrary and contingent ways, which could all be corrected in the future.
I can’t arbitrate that dispute here. I think it’s safe to say that the jury is still out on whether we’re a successful species or a failure. But considering that our ‘success’ seems to come at the expense of the natural systems that produced us in the first place, it’s not looking great right now. Suffice it to say, things are precarious.
What we can look at a little closer is the nature of this Fall, this change from pre-human and archaic human ancestors, who appear to have been one creature among many, to modern humans doing maximum damage to the planet. And it is here that I want to insert a demographic transition theme.
In its current use, “demographic transition” refers to older pre-industrial societies, based purely on agriculture, to more modern societies with expanded education, manufacturing, women’s rights, and other features of contemporary culture. The results of this demographic transition are well-known: lower birth rates, lower death rates, lower infant mortality, extended lifespan, economic growth, expanded opportunities for women, etc. Depending on your perspective, these transitions can be positive or negative. For the more liberal and eco-minded, population downscaling is good, as is the opening up of life and career options for women. But the transition also brings problems: aging populations reproducing below replacement rates can dampen economic growth, which can then drive increased immigration (legal and illegal) to fill the labor gaps, which can then create nativist backlash at the changing society (sound familiar?).
Leaving aside this current use, we can transport the concept to a much more important demographic transition that happened from about 6000–3000 years ago: the shift from nomadic and semi-nomadic tribal societies to the settled agricultural civilizations of the Near East, Far East, and India. In terms of basic lifestyle changes, this was the big leap, as the general number of domestic intimates dropped from 50–150 in tribal societies to the the tiny 4–8 range for households in the earliest settled civilizations.
The key in this change was the advent of the household, which is the true driver of civilization. While most of the attention goes to agriculture, urban life, slavery, social classes, economic specialization, metallurgy, and the like, the real engine of this demographic transition was the household itself. In chopping the intimate relationships down roughly ten-fold from tribal societies, the household creates the atomized conditions necessary for all other aspects of civilization to flower. In these tiny domestic enclaves, economic conditions become precarious, trust in others proves perilous, anonymous indifference to suffering arises, and vulnerability to powerful ideologies and protectors emerges.
These crippling effects of the household have carried all the way through to modern industrial-consumer societies. The loneliness and insecurity of domestic isolation spawn much of the excessive consumption of modern life, which in turn generates the relentless pursuit of land and resource exploitation. The economic precariousness of the lone household is the fundamental precondition for the huge surge in inequality, as collective action in defense of regular citizens and workers proves elusive and forever-receding.
So the bottom line is that the household platform is a complete failure, and has been since the beginnings of civilization. It is the primary vector for all of the deleterious effects of technology, social injustice, economic uncertainty, and psychological despair. As in Ghostbusters, we have chosen the form of the destructor, and it is the household.
To finish up, let’s look at some numbers. According to a raft of anthropological, biological, neurological, and psychological studies, the optimal size for human groups is around 50–150. According to Robin Dunbar (look up “Dunbar’s Number” for for more background), humans need a layered set of relationships inside this range, maxing out at 150 as the magic number. But even as the larger layered groups become less intimate inside that 150, the key is that there should be regular, ongoing, and close contact inside that 150.
Contrast that to some of the latest US numbers. As of 2022, the average household size was 2.5, with almost 30% of households consisting of a single person. Also in 2022, just 39% of US adults reported feeling connected to others, and 49% report having three or fewer friends (up from 27% in 1990). It’s no wonder that a recent Surgeon General report was titled “ Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.”
So our current household format is a tripartite bust: it is ecologically destructive, economically precarious, and psychologically crippling. Any attempt to address our many-side gemstone of collapse that leaves the current household pattern intact is futile. An attempt like that won’t work fast enough to turn the liner away from the iceberg, and it won’t end up working at all in the long run anyway. The only way to effect massive change fast enough and deep enough to stick, is to swap out that basic household format on the ground first, for much larger BHBs, and then let a transformed infrastructure evolve to serve the needs of the new household realities.
That is the next demographic transition we’ll need, from vulnerable micro-households to robust BHBs with lower levels of consumption, sharply-reduced labor participation, and permaculture paths to maximized self-reliant sustainability.
Again, check out earlier posts to see the mechanics of the UBI/BHB/MMT proposal, so you can see how it might work.
Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on July 4, 2023.
