social conservatives want you to be r-selective
especially the ones who say otherwise
Intellectual conservatives (of the kind that are common on Substack) often frame life advice (and goals for policy that cover the same ground as life advice) at a very high level of abstraction. Two abstractions in particular they’ll use are:
be K-selective (like the noble elephant) rather than r-selective (like the lowly cockroach)
have low time preferences; prioritize the future
At the same time, their relatively more concrete life advice and policy goals, especially those around children, center around themes of:
people should have more kids, and start having them earlier
the average person should spend less time in school
we should be less “safetyist” and allow more risks in childhood
childhood is extended too long; people should grow up faster
Which of these does this sound more like?
Now, obviously, in a relative sense premodern humans are amongst the most K-selective creatures ever to exist, which is part of why they were able to conquer the Earth and lay the foundations for our modern and prosperous civilization today. But relative to us, they were r-selective for extremely good reasons.
In the context of high childhood mortality, society needed many children per woman to literally reproduce itself, and in the context of shorter lifespans, investment in education and delayed productivity had lower expected payoff. “Safetyism", a longer explore relative to exploit period, and fewer children per couple are natural responses to this.
There is no reason to suspect we are at the end of the process. Unless we face civilizational collapse without extinction, a return to social conservatives’ preferred fertility norms is unlikely; instead, we will reverse our species’ projected demographic decline through extending lifespan and reproductive period indefinitely. In a post-aging world, couples might have a child every century or so, these children would spend a long time before switching from education and exploration to direct productivity, and risks to them would be taken very seriously.
This is confusing cost with value. If you burn resources in the name of improving the quality of your mate or kid, that isn't K-selected unless it actually increases fitness. The conservatives are just saying that you should pursue fitness at all. Demographic collapse is not a pressing problem, but it is a sign that something has gone wrong.
I have read conservatives accusing liberals of pursuing r-selected strategies, but I don't remember what they actually said. I brainstormed and came up with a couple examples: serial monogamy increases the variance of male fitness, which is a related axis. If education is a lottery that decreases median fitness but increases mean fitness, that actually sounds like r-selection to me. It is possible the instinct favoring education is in fact r-selected (compare Hanson's Kings and Queens post), but probably it is a K-selected instinct.
I recently ran across a conservative pretty explicitly endorsing an r strategy. He felt hopeless against the memetic pressure of society for declining birthrate and thought the solution was to have lots of kids in the hopes that one would be fertile. Perhaps he was one of 8 siblings and the others hardly had any kids, so he estimated that he would have to have 8 children to reproduce himself as someone in favor of fertility. If he knew how to build a culture to make his children value fertility, he would settle for 3, but he has no idea how to do it.
Is primogeniture K or r?
>Which of these does this sound more like?
If you look at the reasons that these concrete points are favoured, youll find the conservatives dont agree with this pattern matching by eye measure.
They would argue that dating around for a long time before you settle down and get to the kids part is focused on short-term pleasure, that more school doesnt help much or is worse then a head start on career advancement, that safetyism results in more survivors that are worse in some way, etc.
>instead, we will reverse our species’ projected demographic decline through extending lifespan and reproductive period indefinitely
I mean, it seems pretty understandable that people respond to the situation as it is, and not as it will hopefully be.