The day before yesterday, we published a general interest piece on the Philippine birth rate. Within a day it had drawn over a hundred comments and stopped being about the Philippines at all. It became, in turn, a debate on female autonomy, a referendum on Islam, a quarrel about civility, and a meditation on why human beings have stopped reproducing themselves. This is what Brown Pundits does that almost no other space on the internet can do, and it is worth pausing to say why, and to say plainly where we stand.
The diagnosis and the cure
Qureishi proposed, with complete seriousness, that the only solution to collapsing birth rates is to restrict female access to contraception, higher education, employment, and political representation. We disagree with every word of that cure. Restricting half of humanity from education and public life is functional enslavement, whatever euphemism of “policy” it travels under, and we said so in the thread.
The ecumene does not breed any longer
But we will not pretend the diagnosis is wrong merely because the doctor is. Birth rates are plunging everywhere, faster than any demographer predicted, and the $300 billion South Korea spent on subsidies did not move the needle. Q is right that this is not a money problem. He is wrong about what kind of problem it is.
The fashionable answer is that women got free and chose otherwise. Our answer is the opposite: everyone got less free, and women are simply the first to act on it. People are voting with their wombs. They are refusing to manufacture children for a world whose only offer is endless consumption, a working (waged?) life that begins at twenty-five and ends at sixty-five, and a retirement of warehoused loneliness. Marx called the failure to see one’s own condition false consciousness. The modern consumer is the Ye Olde Peasant with better teeth and a credit card, and somewhere the peasant knows it.
On the day of the trillionaire
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