According to a report in The Guardian, the second iteration of the Natal Conference is scheduled to take place in Austin, Texas at the end of this month.
For a registration fee of $1000, participants can hobnob with figures on the leading edge of fixing what ails the human population.
Natalism is a big deal these days. For evidence of this, one needs to look no further than Marc Andreesen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, in which the author evinces the belief that with appropriate technological augmentations, humanity might reach 50 billion.
Natalism speaks to one of the most profound anxieties afflicting Europe and the United States. The fear is widespread that low birthrates will compromise economic growth. This synergises with the fear that fecund, non-white cultures will swamp European cultures.
Where one finds natalism, the view that people need to produce more babies, one almost invariably finds eugenics. This event is no exception, and is commonly echoed by far-right politicians such as Giorgia Meloni and her obsession with Italy’s declining birthrate.
Natalism certainly has problems all its own. Its incidence coincides with regressive ideas about gender roles, since unless the babies in question are going to be raised by bots, the burden is assumed to fall upon women.
For similar reasons, those (in the vast majority of cases men) who are obsessed with filling quivers full of new humans tend to be dead set against the proposition that women might want to A) have abortions, B) opt out of the process, or C) have any meaningful control over their bodies.
This way of thinking dovetails quite nicely with the worldview Men’s Rights Activists, incels, and men put off by women’s rights.
It also synergises quite seamlessly with eugenics. If one is mass producing babies, the right kind of babies must be made.
At the vanilla end of the spectrum, there is the attempt to select for traits such as height or IQ. It gets darker when efforts are made to ensure that one sex of baby is preferred to another.
Further down the road we get into selecting to avoid birth defects, a journey whose conclusion is often not apparent at the outset. From that starting point, it’s a short jump from voluntary to compulsory.
In his notorious opinion in Buck v. Bell (1927) the great American legal sage Oliver Wendell Holmes noted concerning forcible sterilisation, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
With these words, he justified the forcible sterilisation by the state of Virginia of a young rape victim on the grounds (false, as it turned out) that she and/or her child were mentally defective.
The Nazis enthusiastically took up this approach. They began by offering plenty of propaganda for their eugenicist project, producing placards and other images showing the “burden” that people with developmental disabilities placed on society.
Other materials made the point that Nazi Germany was not alone in forcibly sterilising people. One particularly notable placard placed the flags of such countries (most prominently that of the United States) under the headline, “We don’t stand alone.”
In 1939, a group of high-ranking Nazis led by Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, concocted a program in which parents of developmentally disabled children would be encouraged to admit their kids to one of a series of special paediatric clinics.
The children would then be killed, either by phenol or other lethal injections, or by starvation. Parents would later be notified that they had died of natural causes.
This project resulted in the murder of an estimated 10,000 children. It later morphed into the similarly horrific T4 program for the systematic mass murder of mentally ill adults.
This latter project was still ongoing at the end of WWII, with allied troops discovering several sites in which the last victims had only recently been killed.
All of this might seem like ancient history. Eighty years on, Germany’s National Socialists hover on the outer edge of living memory. Yet their close cousins are now better represented in European and American politics than would have been imaginable after World War II.
Natalism in both the US and Europe is very much on the rise. In part it is baked into the liberal system. Social welfare schemes on both sides of the Atlantic were designed with the assumption of a continuous upward curve in population growth.
The demographic slowdown, as noted above, has triggered a complex of anxieties that is, in part, behind the intensification of policies meant to control women and, in particular, their reproductive lives.
Several European countries (notably Hungary and Russia) have instituted policies involving pecuniary incentives for larger families. These recall in some measure the hysteria on this topic that afflicted European states in the interwar period.
The natalist obsession is one of those things that only makes sense if economics are a choice between expansion or demise.
Therein lies one of the primary problems with natalism: pace Andreesen, that the prospects the biosphere can sustain humanity according to the current economic model are tenuous at best.
The call for a significant expansion is an invitation to mass extinction.
More alarmingly, the connection between natalist ideas and the issue of what sort of people the world needs more of means that a heightening, and perhaps a mainstreaming, of explicitly racist ideas is integral to the natalist project.
When natalists talk about the need to expand the human population, they always mean expanding certain parts of the population. Not minorities, immigrants or the poor.
There is, occasionally, an attempt to camouflage this by trying to make the issue selecting for higher IQs or factoring out birth defects. But the racial agenda is never far away.
At its root, attempting to “fix” the human population involves a fundamental devaluation of human life.
The idea that some human beings are less worthy of existence because they might (and one must stress the subjunctive aspect here) be less intelligent than others is to further imbricate human beings in circuits of value production and reproduction.
But to do this gets the relationship backwards. These circuits exist to facilitate humanity, not vice versa.
To get this wrong is to confirm the implicit justification for the domination of people by the productive forces that they themselves have created.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
