Ragabul wrote:Although farming continues to hold a revered place in Amish life, in many settlements the majority of Amish people have abandoned their plows. In some communities, fewer than 10 percent of the households receive their primary income from farming. This shift to nonfarm work is the biggest change in Amish society in the last century.
Does their unbowed population boom disprove the r/k selection justification?
I'm pretty much on the "lower than replacement birthrate causes giant problems" side of the fence as I've already said and need no convincing this will eventually cause decline. I will refrain from continually chasing after the "it will destroy society" stuff unless you just want to hash that out beyond saying I think this is Nostradamus stuff based mostly on aesthetic preferences. But I'm still unsold on why significantly *above* replacement is a good thing (beyond idiosyncratic family by family personal preference) when we don't have appallingly high infant mortality or need for lots of unskilled agricultural labor. There's an argument to be made that insanely high birth rates producing excess people in the 3rd World is part of what allows modern societies to import people instead of make their own. There is no economic model where you out Africa Africa by producing native cheap labor without reducing our standard of living to Africa's.
"Destruction" isn't the best word because of the connotations. It's correct, in that a mass mindset that fails to propagate will cease to exist as is. The urban Becky Girlboss only exists so long as people who don't embody that lifestyle allow their daughters to become one. Their permissiveness is the control valve.
If we built a utopian city of wonder, peace, and plenty, but it was occupied solely by eunuchs and the barren, it would be facile to claim that anything desirable or meaningful came from it. We all possess an intuitive sense that permanence matters, in all matters. DNA, businesses, architecture, relationships, science, books, recipes, they all "yearn" to exist indefinitely, and ideally we can tell which should. We leveraged massive resources and labor to make the lifetimes of an arbitrary group of arbitrary people wonderful, and then it ceased to be. Only Sam Harris could argue that scenario would be "good." How can we value a socioeconomic model that invariably does not value its own permanence? It's nonsense, like a book that commanded you to burn every copy, or a scientific theory that can only apply to one, singular event ever, or arguing in favor of entropy.
A rationalistic economic model would deify American Jane if she went to college, partied hard, had a career, 2 abortions, and maybe 1 kid that comes out as trans, then retires at 60 as a divorcee, because colleges, liquor stores, drug dealers, companies, abortionists, doctors, toy stores, pharmaceuticals, and lawyers all make a fortune from her, her life is a great boon to the economy. While African Annie should immigrate with her 5 sons, because they'll toil to provide the "necessaries," which undergird everything, and maybe move up the ladder someday to be like Jane. "Good numbers always go up" is a kind of permanence that enables horrors too, if we look at the last century.
And I must admit I tend to be suspicious of models that tie "the good life" to some immutable vision of very large families because I think that many of the people that put this model forward blame most modern problems on female control over fertility. More specifically, they believe that lack of control over fertility in the past rendered women into a state of necessary dependency and female agency specifically is a huge component of modern decline. For these people, huge families are not a goal of themselves but are simply an indication that female control over fertility has been undone and thus female dependency has been reinstated. I don't like this for obvious personal reasons, but it's also just silly on historical grounds.
That seems backwards. Lack of control over fertility is an issue because there's already a lack of control over everything else leading up to that. To use an inhumanly rationalistic model, even if everything that prevented or ended pregnancy became illegal in America, there is no legal compulsion for women to have sex, control over fertility is retained if we ignore how people actually behave. Whereas the inverse case, limited means of movement and wealth accumulation, but total control over fertility, would make no sense.
But as to people who hyper-focus on a pet issue that they extrapolate to "this is why everything is going crazy," yeah, they exist. I see them a lot, much less these days because I read different sources. But I understand the mindset, it's trying to make a symbolic point without the language or concepts to, because we're trained to be literalistic bugpeople. So if someone is saying that not keeping the dames barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen is why the west is dying, to steelman the argument, they're touching on something important but in a terribly expressed way.
Female labor has always been used.
Assuming that under liberalism that this spectrum accurately correlates with fertility, what is the sweet spot between total dependency and total agency?
