Monasteries as a solution to population collapse
why they might be the social technology to fix universities and solve population collapse
The biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse (source). The most intuitive solution to this problem is to get people to have more babies with a carrot and stick approach. No advanced country has gotten incentives to work.
There’s over 300 million people in the US. Sex is as essential to our genes as water is to our bodies. And yet, population growth is stagnant, especially among the most educated. A secular government solution would be preferable if there was one that worked. The pockets that do see population growth are small religious groups. We either keep iterating until a secular solution emerges, or we take what works.
Suppose you were tasked with solving population collapse in a month. What would you do? A secular solution would be out of the question. You’d have to look at religions, and there’d be two broad approaches. One solution is to give small, but growing religious communities a megaphone to help them attract more converts. Another solution is to pull the best ideas from these religions.
It’s going to be challenging to get most normal people to become Hassidic Jews or Mormons. It would be a radical departure. It would also be difficult to create a new religion by constructing it from various cults. But maybe the best solution has been right under our noses. Instead of trying something new, we can use niche religions to understand where Christianity went wrong.
To understand where to start, let’s look at 3 components:
Separation from the world
Stable marriages
Strict rules around sex
Why these 3? Communities that have lots of children frown upon divorce, don’t use birth control, and control how the sexes interact with one another. The purpose of these rules is to separate men and women and only bring them together for the purpose of children. It’s easiest to enforce these rules when there’s separation from the world. Hassidic Jews do it via dress and an all-consuming religious life.
It seems to me the best place to start is to create a separation between men and women. Or, more specifically, convince men to go live in remote monasteries where sex isn’t allowed. I suspect this offer is not going to be as hard of a sell as it would have been in recent history.
First, many men aren’t having sex anyways. Many turn to porn. A few decide to shoot up schools. The men who are having sex are often having it with women they wouldn’t want children with. Of the men who do marry, roughly half end up in divorce. Of those who don’t divorce, many suffer a dead bedroom. The established system isn’t very promising for men.
The situation for women is bad as well. Women marry later and later. We’re pushing women up against their fertility window. They’re less happy than ever despite being freed from traditional gender roles. Women can’t be honest about what they want because doing so is maladaptive. I’ll explain more about this later.
Men’s rights activists might succeed if they can successfully explain how their goals would help women. They might even succeed if they can show that pro-family laws are better for children and will therefore help the country in the long run. Child sexual abuse stats for step fathers are horrific, and maybe these stats can form the basis of better pro-family laws.
I think the problem is that we’ve replaced sex with simulation. Protected sex is similar enough to the real thing that couples forgo having children. A woman on the pill can have sex with her boyfriend and everything feels real, but it’s an illusion.
Ultimately, I think the fertility problem is a moral one. The problem to solve is to get people to give up short-term pleasures for a long-term goal. We need to get people thinking beyond their own existence because that’s what it’s going to take. Children are amazing, but the sex people are having isn’t leading to children because we’re stuck in a local maxima. Women have lukewarm boyfriends. Men end up either alone or unwilling to commit to their girlfriends, but stick around because of the sex. Women imagine that the sex means more than it really does to the men. Men convince themselves that they love their girlfriends to appease them. Women convince themselves that the men might eventually commit. We pretend to love when we only desire. We lie about how we feel, even to ourselves. These emotional lies erode trust between men and women.
I’m not suggesting we take away women’s birth control. Why do we need religion? Religion is a social technology that makes you think about life beyond your own existence. There are secular ways to do this, but in practice only the religious version of this works.
We can’t ignore the decline of Christianity, and the solution isn’t to fill the churches back up. The decline happened for a reason. The problem is we’ve neutered the religion to the point where it cannot sustain itself. My goal isn’t to bring back Christianity per se, nor to preserve the past. No, this blind devotion to the past is what resulted in Christians cargo culting their own religion. Religion is a social technology. If it doesn’t succeed in changing behavior, it ceases to be effective. The rituals don’t count as behavior.
The original Christian monasteries preserved Roman classics. When you imagine the Christian monastery, I don’t want you to imagine them as they are, but as they were. They were instrumental in reconstructing civilization after the collapse of the Roman empire. We might even say Christ was the first monk, and the first monastery was not a place, but a group of 12 men.
The point of a monastery isn’t to separate yourself from the world out of hatred. Instead, it should be done in the same spirit as one takes the hero’s journey. You leave so you can find something of value to bring back and share. Modern men don’t hunt down mammoths. Our battles are spiritual. Men can get a lot done when they separate themselves from distractions. Their desire for sex gets sublimated into their work.
How would this solve the fertility crisis? Men who live alone in the mountains are sexy to women. I’m not joking. Men who get together to make things happen are impressive, especially if they’re not building for themselves, but for a purpose beyond themselves.
Work creates buzz and attention. These men would make for amazing husbands. The next step isn’t to marry off the men. At some point, men and women will want to have sex. However, the rule would be that if you have sex, you’re considered married. If you choose to live on the religious property, the community can help you set up your life. If you decide to divorce, you’re no longer allowed to live on the property.
This all sounds wild, but I assume this is roughly how monasteries originally came to be. At one point, the Catholic Church owned half the land in Europe. Arguably, the unsuccessful monasteries are the ones that still function as monasteries, and the successful ones turned into universities, and maybe into entire cities.
About 50 years ago, the top universities became co-ed. If I’m right in thinking that the creative driver of universities is sexless men, then we’ve killed the golden goose and are reaping our what we sowed. Of course monasteries are attractive to women, especially if the men who stay in them for 4 years come out and do amazing things in the world. Why not be one of the few women to get access to these men before they’ve graduated? You might consider this to be a dim view of women. It’s not. I’m impressed by their ingenuity in getting into a boy’s club. However, if I’m right, the goose is dead. It’s taken over 1000 years, but maybe it’s time to restart this thing. Trust in existing institutions is low. I hope they start separating the sexes, but if not I don’t see a solution apart from building new monasteries. Unless I’m missing something important, the future of universities is monasteries and history seems to back me up.
I’ll sum up. The purpose of the monastery is to give men a special place where they can do important intellectual work. If a monastery succeeds, they’ll get a lot done and generate buzz and attention. This attention attracts women, while creating a blank slate for resetting relations between the sexes. I believe the reset would take a burden off both men and women and they can finally stop stressing about the present and focus on having children and building for the future.
This is good 👍🏻🥂🖖🏼