Chatter about the Birth Dearth seems to be growing among Western elites, and my sense is that Christian public intellectuals are disproportionately involved in this topic. Unless perhaps you’re like Peter Thiel, harboring some murky, idiosyncratic reservations about the survival of the race, it does seem to be increasingly acknowledged as a real and difficult problem with no clear solution. Looking at fairly recent American history, I’ve tried to add a historical context to this discussion. In this post, I’d like to bring in something from antiquity.
Early in Josephus’ Antiquities, he retells the story of Joseph in Egypt. When he comes to the part where Joseph’s hungry brothers arrive in Egypt looking for grain and fail to recognize the sibling they sold into slavery, Josephus imaginatively elaborates on what the conversation between them was like—fully within the bounds of what was considered appropriate ancient historiography, by the way.
Joseph, feigning xenophobia, questions his oblivious brothers, saying that
they were there to spy on the affairs of the king and that they had come together from many different places, claiming that they were family as a pretext: for it was impossible for a normal man (andri idiōtē) to raise such children who were also so distinguished in their appearance, as even for kings, such childrearing as this is difficult (dyskolou).[1]
Of course, this remark appears in a stylized speech rather than as Josephus’ blunt statement of fact. Even so, there’s clearly a social assumption embedded in this off-the-cuff comment; Josephus as the historian would not have included it unless it made sense to his (definitionally elite) readers. Namely, even kings could find it tough trying to feed ten to twelve children (the word dyskolos often has connotations of hunger specifically). Clothing and educating so many, with the result that they could actually pass as the aristocrats Josephus wants to depict in the patriarchs, was so much the harder.
While modern Westerners are incomparably wealthier than even the most elite of Josephus’ world, we do seem to have something in common here, mutatis mutandis. From all the numbers and fancy charts I’ve seen, fertility rates do seem to decline everywhere in the world as societies grow wealthier and education (and the cultural expectation thereof) increases. Josephus might suggest to us that this is not a “new” problem per se: rearing a bunch of would-be elites (or even just white-collar workers) who contribute little economically before leaving the household has never been easy for a family’s resources.
That’s not a solution to crashing fertility rates, obviously, but in the meantime, it could make some of us—especially those of us raising children—feel a bit less dislocated in the modern world. The situation is difficult in large part because we have higher cultural expectations on many fronts.
Josephus’ Antiquities 2.4.2. My translation. ↑