% !TeX program = xelatex
% 由 articles 中的原稿生成；请编辑对应源文件后运行 pnpm content:sync。
\documentclass[UTF8,11pt,a4paper,fontset=fandol]{ctexart}
\usepackage[margin=25mm]{geometry}
\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb,longtable,booktabs,array,calc,graphicx,etoolbox}
\usepackage[normalem]{ulem}
\usepackage[unicode,hidelinks]{hyperref}
\setmainfont{TeX Gyre Pagella}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}
\setlength{\parindent}{2em}
\setlength{\parskip}{0.4em}
\emergencystretch=3em
\providecommand{\tightlist}{\setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}\setlength{\parskip}{0pt}}
\providecommand{\pandocbounded}[1]{#1}
\AtBeginEnvironment{longtable}{\small}
\newcommand{\XinChartDown}{\begingroup\setlength{\unitlength}{0.7pt}\begin{picture}(12,12)\put(0,0){\framebox(12,12){}}\put(2,10){\line(1,-1){4}}\put(6,6){\line(1,0){2}}\put(8,6){\line(1,-2){2}}\end{picture}\endgroup}
\newcommand{\XinChartUp}{\begingroup\setlength{\unitlength}{0.7pt}\begin{picture}(12,12)\put(0,0){\framebox(12,12){}}\put(2,2){\line(1,1){4}}\put(6,6){\line(1,0){2}}\put(8,6){\line(1,2){2}}\end{picture}\endgroup}
\title{Fertility and Dissociation}
\author{New Millennial Wayfarer}
\date{}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\begin{center}\small\textit{Translated by GPT}\end{center}
\section{The Collapse of the Myth of High-Fertility Strongholds}\label{section-1}

The decline of fertility in modernized societies is unstoppable and unavoidable.

Amid anti-migrant and anti-immigration sentiment at home and abroad, fertility is portrayed as closely bound up with culture, region, religion, and similar backgrounds. On the one hand, this serves to cast outsiders as alien and to depict the places popularly imagined as high-fertility strongholds as something akin to insect hives. On the other, consciously or unconsciously, it creates a myth about fertility: if only society were driven into reverse and the old tools of ``culture, region, and religion'' were used to put people back in chains in earnest, fertility could always be restored---the only obstacle is an unwillingness to lose face by doing it.

Yet a closer look at fertility-related phenomena shows that even places traditionally regarded as high-fertility strongholds have experienced clear declines over the past decade. The same phenomenon has appeared across regions with widely differing cultural and religious backgrounds.

From a global perspective, India, the Middle East, and Central Africa are widely regarded as high-fertility regions and sources of migration. According to data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs' Population Division and the World Bank, total fertility rates in all three declined steadily over the decade from 2014 to 2023. India's total fertility rate fell from 2.3 in 2014 to 1.98 in 2023, moving from near replacement level to below it---a decline of about 13.9 percent over ten years. Across a Middle Eastern sample comprising Iran, Qatar, Bahrain, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, the total fertility rate fell from 1.8 in 2018 to 1.7 in 2023, a five-year decline of 6.3 percent, continuing its descent below replacement level. Central Africa remains a genuine stronghold of population growth. Yet in a sample comprising Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of the Congo, the total fertility rate likewise fell from 5.4 in 2018 to 5.1 in 2023, a decline of 4.8 percent in five years.

Turning to China, the change came earlier and more sharply over the past decade in the very places traditionally imagined as high-fertility strongholds---whether regions with active clan structures, culturally conservative Confucian regions, or regions that send large numbers of migrant workers elsewhere. Neither shifts in population policy nor economic incentives have stopped fertility from rushing downhill like water across level ground, irresistible once released. Most regions have long since fallen below replacement level, and some provinces traditionally known for their large populations have already begun to experience negative growth.

Fertility is commonly associated with cultural, regional, and religious background. In reality, the connection appears less close than assumed. At the very least, none of these factors is a miracle tonic capable of determining fertility.

\section{The Disintegration of the Reproductive Chain}\label{section-2}

How should we explain declining fertility during industrialization and modernization? Some accounts approach the issue economically, weighing the costs and benefits of having children. In the course of urbanization, children gradually shift from being partial contributors of labor to units of consumption; housing, health care, and education grow more expensive; and the resources required for population reproduction prove insufficient. Other accounts approach the issue culturally, focusing on changing values and social currents. During social transformation, educational attainment rises; women's status improves and women participate deeply in social production; family bonds weaken and society becomes atomized.

All these views begin with the social attributes of human beings and rationally analyze economic incentives and social currents. We must recognize, however, that although modern society has been iteratively designed and optimized through reason, its foundation remains modern \emph{Homo sapiens}. The natural attributes of modern humans were selected and shaped over millions of years in small hunter-gatherer societies. This essay will discuss the factors affecting fertility from the perspective of those natural attributes.

In a natural environment, the reproductive chain runs from heat to mating, pregnancy, birth, and rearing young. Within this chain, natural attributes---or instincts---operate at discrete stages and are concentrated to a large extent in going into heat and mating, and in rearing young. The work of genes and hormones goes no further; in a natural environment, the remaining stages occur as a matter of course. The links in the chain connect smoothly under natural conditions, and this pattern has operated successfully for millions of years.

Industrial society, however, has fully exposed the fragile connections between these links and delivered a precision strike against every one of them. First, the abundance of inexpensive entertainment and recreation in modern society has greatly reduced the importance of going into heat. Second, the target of a person's heat is not necessarily a potential mate; even going into heat does not necessarily lead to mating. Third, mating does not necessarily lead to conception, because contraception is highly effective. Finally, conception does not necessarily lead to birth, because medical intervention provides a last line of control.

To go a step further, genes and hormones may in fact influence no more than going into heat and mating in modern humans; they do not directly determine whether a child is born. The process from heat to birth was once supposed to unfold naturally, until genes and hormones took over again after the next generation appeared. In modern society, that chain has become completely dissociated.

The dissociation of the reproductive chain is one of the most conspicuous conflicts in modernization, and it reflects a fundamental conflict within modern society. Social structures are generally constructed on the basis of reason, while the endogenous forces driving social development intertwine reason and instinct. The social and animal components of human nature are also in conflict: animality is simple, social structure complex. As social construction continues to develop, this mismatch will steadily widen.

\section{Threefold Dissociation}\label{section-3}

Modern society is a complex of contradictions. On the one hand, the advance of modernity continually reinforces its material foundations; on the other, it steadily weakens the organizational foundations of its own existence. People are less and less able to survive outside social networks, even as direct connections between people weaken in parallel. These seemingly contradictory phenomena did not appear in succession but unfold simultaneously. Their inner logic can be summarized as a threefold dissociation.

The first dissociation is atomization: the separation of individuals from the traditional order.

Traditional order has no fixed form. It varies by era, region, and class, and is closely connected to a particular socioeconomic foundation. Despite their varied forms, traditional orders generally share two features. First, they grow out of relatively stable conditions of production and life; people obey them voluntarily because, under those conditions, they allow society to function at the lowest cost. Second, their structural foundation is generally a high-frequency circle of no more than twenty acquaintances. Larger societies are built by layering these small units atop one another. Modernity has gradually displaced such circles. Interpersonal exchange continually gives way to interaction between individuals and institutions. The individual no longer appears as a concrete person, but becomes an abstract component of an institution: this is precisely what atomization means. Since the hunter-gatherer age, human beings have always existed as social animals. The so-called ``association of free individuals'' has, from antiquity to the present, largely remained an idea---yet modernity has brought it closer to reality. Once the resources on which a person depends no longer come primarily from concrete people nearby, but from society in the abstract, the foundation on which traditional order rests ceases to exist.

The second dissociation is the separation of humanity's natural attributes from its social attributes.

One precondition for the low-cost operation of modern society is the socialized person. Yet the training through which people become socialized comes primarily from the very traditional order now disappearing. A stronger economic foundation and the dissolution of communities of acquaintances have produced unprecedented freedom of expression---especially the expression of natural attributes, or the release of animality. In modern society, so long as a person can perform an abstract institutional role, that person is subject to almost no other constraint. Thus, as social structure grows ever more intricate and abstract, the microscopic forces driving its operation come increasingly from the expression of animality.

The third dissociation is the separation of society's operation from human existence.

The atomized individual spends daily life dealing mainly with abstract institutions. What institutions actually need is not a concrete person, but the completion of metrics and tasks. It merely happens that, for now, the units capable of completing them are human beings. As soon as more efficient units appear, people will naturally be replaced---and that process is already under way.

\section{An Unnatural, Overwhelming Force}\label{section-4}

The most successful descendants of the dinosaurs are chickens. Their total biomass far exceeds that of all other birds combined, and no other bird is so widely distributed. This is modernity.

Measured by genetic continuation and the expansion of the species, chickens have achieved astonishing success at an incredible speed. It is a statistical miracle of evolution, yet merely the tip of the iceberg of the monster that is modernity.

Instrumental rationality has won a total victory on every track that can be quantified. The development of modernity carries instrumental rationality into every corner and every aspect of the world. It is a self-propagating, spontaneously expanding system. With absolute power, it defines a single, crude, quantifiable standard, then overwhelms and eliminates through sheer numbers every participant that refuses to be measured by it. Any goal outside quantifiable metrics is dissolved---or rapidly turned into a metric itself.

This immense force was created by human beings. Drop by drop, it has now become an ocean that sweeps humanity along in its current.

May we live long.

\section{Translation Notes}\label{translation-notes}

\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
  \textbf{``生育''} shifts between the broad ideas of fertility, reproduction, and bearing children. The translation uses each according to context rather than forcing a single English equivalent throughout.
\item
  \textbf{``生育高地''} is rendered as ``high-fertility stronghold.'' The original is a spatial metaphor for places believed to sustain unusually high fertility, not a technical demographic category.
\item
  \textbf{``虫巢''} literally means an insect nest or hive. ``Insect hives'' retains the original's deliberately dehumanizing image.
\item
  \textbf{``倒车'' / ``开拴'' / ``大力丸''} form a series of colloquial, sardonic metaphors. \textbf{``开拴''} is Chinese internet political slang: it means to begin shackling people, invoking the coercive restoration of older social controls rather than the opening of a valve. It is therefore rendered as ``put people back in chains.''
\item
  \textbf{``发情''} is rendered throughout with the animal-breeding expression ``heat'' or ``go into heat.'' Its jarring application to human beings is intentional and reinforces the passage's emphasis on animality.
\item
  \textbf{``自由人的联合''} is rendered as ``association of free individuals,'' preserving its political-philosophical resonance without attributing it to a source not named in the original.
\item
  \textbf{``非自然伟力''} combines the ideas of something unnatural and a force of immense power. ``An Unnatural, Overwhelming Force'' retains both elements, though not the original's compactness.
\end{itemize}

\end{document}