Going Solo

Fertility and the loss of the social infrastructure of togetherness

When people from the west encountered the intensively irrigated rice paddies in Bali, they could only imagine that they were the outcome of raw executive power. Marx called it the “Asiatic mode of production,” what later scholars referred to as “hydraulic societies.” The coordination of something so complicated must have been accomplished by the control of a king, who, in turn, derived his power from successfully managing essential infrastructure. This kind of thinking would prove disastrous for Balinese rice farming, just as its analog in the social realm has decimated the infrastructures that once supported childbearing.

By the mid-20^th century, rulers of a now-independent Indonesia had also come to see rice farming as a straightforward technical system, one that could be optimized with “Green Revolution” technologies. As Stephen Lansing recounts in his book, Priests and Programmers, the ensuring technical transition was disastrous. Bureaucrats thought that hybrid-varieties and new chemicals made traditional irrigation schedules obsolete, that rice could be cropped continuously. The result was water scarcity and a boom in rice pests and diseases.

What the architects of this transition had failed to see was the ingenious way that the traditional Subak system had solved a series of coordination problems in order to ensure that rice paddies were well watered, provided with nutrients, and made free of pests. As Lansing uncovered in his research, irrigation was organized to ensure that large patches of land alternated between being flooded and dried, a pattern that disrupted the lifecycle of rice pests. This was organized in a nested series of organizations, from the local Subak to regional water temples.

Like other commons-tragedy-solving institutions, the Subaks meet periodically to resolve disputes, set cropping schedules, and maintain the canals and weirs. But on top of this democratic infrastructure was also a spiritual one. The travel of water from upstream was understood in sacred terms, as a purifying element but also as itself purified of human impurities as it returned to the sea. Farmers had small shrines where water entered their field, participated in a range of ceremonies and making of offerings, and delivered small amounts of “holy water” alongside the irrigation canals. Lansing sees these as part of the “sociogenesis” of the Subak culture, one that sustained the necessary social relationships to make the society flourish, namely by imbuing productive relationships with symbolic meaning.

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.” But not all whys are equally powerful. In his book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argues that religion is uniquely powerful, because it combines belief and practices into strongly binding forms of community. He cites a study of communes that found that the ones rooted in religious beliefs not outlasted the secular versions (six percent to 39 percent). Moreover, they were strengthened rather than weakened by demanding sacrifices, such as abstaining from alcohol.

Even though it is cliché to speak of our own culture as “disenchanted”, we too are driven by a quasi-religious belief system that gives meaning to our daily toils. As individualists we bear the burdens of more frequent bouts of loneliness; we regularly move households and cities in service of something we call a “career”; we repair our homes, raise our children, and suffer illness increasingly without the help of a supportive community; and many of us are seemingly locked in an endless quest to discover an authentic identity for ourselves.

We not just tolerate but often venerate such individual toil. Modern secular peoples often describe their self-actualization through what philosopher Charles Taylor has called “subtraction stories”, wherein they describe the subtraction of previous social forms in religion and community as having been a necessary step in the journey toward a more authentic and meaningful life as an individual.

And there no shortage of ritualistic celebrations that reflect and reinforce these beliefs: the cliché and unbearably self-congratulatory LinkedIn post made when switching jobs (“I’m thrilled to announce…”); the divorcee who writes social media paeans to their new-found freedoms and opportunities for self-exploration; or the online affirmation that the last couple generations of young people (deprived of collectively set rites of passage) have sought in curating their self-identity to match an ever proliferating panoply of cultural and gender subgroups. Every culture has a set of practices for reinforcing a set of dogmas about how to live, which in turn make the burdens those dogmas entail more bearable. Ours are just evermore oriented toward keeping us apart.

In his post a few weeks ago, Michael Bouchey likens the decline of fertility to a leaky pipeline, attributing the source of the decline to the ever proliferating barriers posed by those or that aspect of contemporary societies. Practical challenges around dating, educational requirements, and growing parental expectations lead to potential parents simply running out of time to have as many kids as they might want. But part of me, even though I’ve probably described my own family situation in similar terms, thinks that such a metaphor more describes a series excuses than offers an explanation.

Dating challenges, the de facto requirement to study for a good career, and whatever other explanations that people give today for why they delay having children have only recently become respectable reasons. They pale in the face of the relative impoverishment and survival risks faced by previous generations. My parents didn’t have three kids in their 20s because times were good. They weren’t. The births of me and my brothers bankrupted them. They just didn’t see financial uncertainty as a reason to not have children. In contrast, I long held fast to a litany of excuses, which a Bangladeshi friend of mine in grad school didn’t shy away from pointing out. Every reason I gave about delaying parenthood until after grad school (or tenure, or..) rang hollow. She would point out that the grad school offered parental leave, that a tenure-track job wasn’t guaranteed, etc.

I could only ignore my colleague’s counterarguments, not refute them. And I could only live with the cognitive dissonance, because excuse making was the commonsensical water that I swam in, something legitimated by the epochal changes that have given birth to networked societies.

Demographers call these changes the “Second Demographic Transition.” It is marked by broad shifts in cultural tastes, away from relational commitments like marriage and family and toward individual fulfillment. Sociologists from Robert Putnam to Robert Bellah (along with countless other researchers not named Robert) characterized it through their observations of the decay of associational life, the disappearance of bowling leagues, sewing clubs, parent-teacher associations, and fraternal organizations and their imperfect replacement by the pseudo-relationships television and media fandom and social networks—and today by AI romantic partners.

The old social organizations fell, in part, because of how alluring the new options were. Some semblance of connection could be wrung out of new technological mediums with comparably less risk and fewer relational demands. But another necessary component was a shift in understanding. People needed to see themselves as the only important social unit being served social connection. And they needed to come to see relationships as a kind of portfolio, one expected to provide a suitable return on investment.

One clinical psychologist voiced the invariable philosophy of connection in a world premised on relational optimization: “What are relationships for all of us? They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”

The transformation into networked societies involved a literal restructuring of the geometry of togetherness. It has been an ongoing unweaving of webs of connection into something that literally resembles the sparse, peer-to-peer networks that constitute the Internet. Sociologists, namely Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton, have viewed this transformation in more triumphant terms, as a new “social operating system” that has provided people with “more freedom to tailor their interactions. They have increased opportunities about where—and with whom—to connect.” And, tellingly, they portray togetherness within this new operating system as an achievement, not a public good, one accomplished by social entrepreneurs with the right “combination of talent, energy, altruism, social acuity, and tech-savviness.”

In this view, however, we should have expected fertility rates to have cratered in developing nations decades from now, after their traditional social institutions were unwoven by the demands paralleling the establishment of modern market-driven networked societies. But as demographer Alice Evans has noted, they have “culturally leapfrogged.” Consuming the cultural content from the West, women in these countries not only come to feel imprisoned by local social norms but also embrace the dating expectations of the women they watch on screens. Men and women come to live in different realities, with men still clinging to tradition but women striving for autonomy and equality. The result is that relationship formation as a whole is in steep decline, as more and more women in these countries have come to recognize it as a raw deal. One woman told Evans, “Sometimes I wonder whether I should reduce myself…. but I don’t want to settle for less”.

In the West, the causes are somewhat different but the outcome is the same. Under the allure of an apparent glut of choices, there are the same expectations to optimize partner selection (and not to sacrifice career or fun in order to partner up with a potentially suboptimal relational investment). Yet, young people also spend increasingly more time alone engaging with online content, becoming more socially anxious the less they interact meaningfully with other people.

And for many of us, it’s because we’ve simply and inexplicably gone “all in” on a particular vision of the good life, one that we desperately want to believe that we came up with ourselves. In debating the prospect of parenthood with my grad school colleague, I had no image of success to guide me but the one that seemed to have just fallen into my lap during my early 20s. To fail to prioritize that journey in order to selflessly care for someone else filled me with dread, the fear that in doing so that I would be setting myself adrift and that I would miss out on a life that was supposed to be authentically mine.

All this isn’t meant to put the blame on careerism and smartphones. Nor is it to suggest that women in developing countries shouldn’t be balking against the unfairness of their country’s social norms about marriage and family. Rather, my point is that there has been a collective failure to adjust traditional social institutions to help people weather new pressures and realities. The trouble has been that the practices that sustained relationships at scales bigger than pairs of individuals and far thicker and meaningful than social networks have been increasingly abandoned rather than reformed.

We are now like the Bali rice farmers after interloping Westerners tried to “rationalize” their paddies and irrigation systems. An enchantment with rationalism rendered them obtuse to the reality that an array of rituals, myths, and relationships founded a complex system of coordination that analytical planning could only replace or advance with great difficulty—if at all.

In our case, what has been rationalized is the social fabric itself. Being unburdened by community, extended family, nuclear family, children, and increasingly even partnership itself, the last remaining practices of sociogenesis primarily serve individualism. Like the waters of a rationalized irrigation system, the atoms in a rationalized social universe are ideally freely flowing. But achieving that absence of friction required the removal of guideposts, and of landmarks on the horizon of significance that would help us understand our social toils as meaningful. What’s left is the enduring effort to overlay the tale of a heroic journey on top of a lifestory shaped largely by the anonymized forces of a globalized network society. We’re each in our own lifeboats, rowing with only minimal success against the currents while being buffeted by the waves, but are still nonetheless convinced that we’re the main character.

Although this system of meaning making is often good enough to get many of us to get out of bed in the morning and head into work—so long as we don’t think too hard about what happens to us when we grow old and begin to lack the of talent, energy, altruism, social acuity, and tech-savviness to operate social networks like we once did. We have stories that can work to maintain modern network societies. But they don’t seem to be up to the task of sustaining human civilization, much less families.

As Joseph Tainter pointed out, civilization is a sort of deal. It’s legitimacy rests on societies continuing to offer benefits in excess of the burdens inherent in sustaining them, at least on average across the population. That legitimacy ultimately relies on collectively held vision of a common world worth sustaining, at least in outline form. What Tainter never anticipated is that a society’s members could grow disenchanted with the deal even as it continued to generate massive surpluses, that societies could decline and shrivel because they no longer produced many people interested in the social commitments on offer, willing to make the decision to pair up, have children, and dedicate themselves to community institutions without being agonized by the risks, by the fear of screwing up or of committing at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and to the wrong people.

Our growing inability to people the planet is just yet another stage in the gradual unweaving of communal relationships and their increasing replacement with weaker and more transactional ties. The process is by no means inevitable, and my point is not to wax prophetically about demographic doomsday scenarios. That so many people describe their relationship with their smartphone and social networks mainly through lament signals the latent desire to lash our boats back together, to begin to row together. The question is what it would take to relearn how to do so, and to embrace the seeming irrational rationality that belonging entails, without romanticizing a reactionary return to the past.