The Globalisation of Weariness

I. What the data show

In a measured and careful analysis, Gabor Steingart has gathered what demographers have known for some years and what politics has not yet caught up with. In more than two thirds of the world's one hundred and ninety-five countries, the average number of children per woman has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1. In sixty-six countries it now lies closer to one than to two. In some regions the most common number of children per woman has become zero. Childlessness is no longer a peculiarity of the wealthy world. It has become global, and it no longer distinguishes between religions, levels of prosperity, or political systems.

Steingart clears away three explanations that have carried public discourse for decades. The economic thesis — first wealth, then the renunciation of children — does not hold against reality, because Mexico, Tunisia, Iran, Brazil, and Sri Lanka are today below the American birth rate without having reached anything close to American prosperity. The emancipation thesis — that career women have fewer children — is refuted by the fact that in Sweden, Finland, the United States, and Germany, those with the least education are now most often childless, not the women with academic degrees. The welfare-state thesis — that better family policy will bring more children — fails empirically in Scandinavia, where, despite thirty years of model family policies, birth rates are now collapsing most steeply.

What remains is a diagnosis that Steingart and Diana Kinnert formulate together: the problem is not the lack of children desired. The problem is the lack of couples. And before the lack of couples lies something Kinnert, with Hannah Arendt, calls Unbehaustheit — a homeless condition in which the preconditions for binding, trust, and community are no longer given.

Steingart closes his article with a sentence that means to sound hopeful: This problem, too, is man-made. From understanding grows the solution. It is a good sentence, a friendly sentence, a sentence that leaves the reader a door open. It is also, perhaps, a sentence that does not quite bear the weight of the findings the article itself has built up.

II. What lies beneath the data

Forty-three years ago, in 1983, a slim book appeared by a then thirty-four-year-old scholar of English literature and writer. Ulrich Horstmann called it Das Untier — Konturen einer Philosophie der Menschenflucht (The Beast — Contours of a Philosophy of Anthropofugal Flight). The book was a scandal of its time because it did something philosophical books are not supposed to do. It took seriously the question of whether the species to which we belong deserves to be perpetuated. And it arrived, in a language oscillating between melancholy and cool sharpness, at an answer that has not since lost its capacity to shock.

Horstmann himself later, in a short and slender Beipackzettel — a package insert to the original book — commented on it in retrospect. It had been, he wrote, a mocking philosophy, a doctrine of contingency, written in the awareness that after a nuclear apocalypse no one would remain to make sense of the end — and so the great apology had to be set down in writing beforehand. The makeshift instrument available for this in 1983, he writes, was himself: a beast among beasts and a gallows-bird primed for trouble. It is important to hold this fast before one quotes Horstmann. Das Untier was not an anthropological doctrine claiming validity for all time. It was a tool for a specific situation, in the shadow of the atomic threat of the Cold War, with the point that the medium of the inquiry had to be black humour, because the gnawing hunger for meaning could not be addressed otherwise.

It is not necessary to follow Horstmann in all his severity to see how his diagnosis and Steingart's findings illuminate each other. What Steingart and Kinnert call Unbehaustheit takes on a sharper edge in Horstmann. What we are seeing today is not the loss of a virtue we once possessed. It is the surfacing of a situation that has been changing — except that the familial camouflage of the bourgeois epoch is now breaking down and leaving us without its curtains. When one carries Horstmann's vocabulary across, one does so not as a creed but as what it was: as an instrument for describing a situation for which ordinary vocabulary does not suffice. What in 1983 was the nuclear threat is in 2026 something else — quieter, but no less. The apology would have to be prepared again, with other means, in a different register.

III. The inversion of the concept of progress

Steingart unintentionally formulates a sentence that supports this reading. He writes: The poor countries grow old before they grow rich. It is a finding that contradicts the old model of the demographic transition. According to that model, populations were supposed to reduce their birth rates only after reaching the economic plateau that allows for a different form of life-planning. Today it happens otherwise. Demographic reduction proceeds without the economic foundation.

What does this mean? In the economistic reading it means that the poorer countries have imported a Western pattern without being able to import Western wealth alongside it. That is true on the surface. But it is an explanation that leaves the phenomenon untouched beneath itself. It treats global childlessness as a transmission error, a cultural contagion, a faulty imitation. It leaves open why this contagion is accepted with so little resistance.

The other reading would be that the populations of these countries now know enough. Not economically — they have not become rich. But existentially. Through the globalisation of images, news, narratives, experiences, they have arrived at a state of knowledge about the world in which the simple answer of progeny no longer follows of itself. They have seen what the West has become with its wealth. They have heard what life was like for their ancestors. They know how their neighbours live. And they respond with a form of knowledge-induced restraint that cannot be influenced by enlightenment or family policy, because it does not come from a lack of enlightenment but from its surfeit.

If this is right, then the globalisation of childlessness is not a defect transported by the globalisation of knowledge. It is a consequence of that globalisation. What has become global is not only the knowledge, but the weariness.

IV. The failure of money

The third point in Steingart's article is perhaps the most important, precisely because it comes across so unassumingly. Since the 1980s, developed countries have tripled their real per-capita expenditure on child benefits, subsidised childcare, and parental leave. The share of childcare carried by fathers has risen steeply. And birth rates have continued to fall — from 1.85 to 1.53 per woman.

That is not a small observation. It is the empirical refutation of a policy that has held, in nearly all Western countries, as the consensus for decades. If thirty years of tripled family expenditures and doubled childcare places and halved gender differences in childrearing have no effect on birth rates, then the question does not lie at the level on which politics has located it. It lies beneath that level.

This is exactly what Horstmann has always maintained. Incentives act on decisions made at a level that is accessible to incentives. If the decision — if one can even call it a decision — falls at a deeper level, incentives are blunt. Money is not too little here. Money is in the wrong storey.

What has shifted is not a preference that could be reversed by different incentives. It is a constitution in which incentives no longer arrive.

V. The question that remains open

If this is so, what remains to be done? Steingart answers with the sentence about understanding from which solution is to grow. It is an obligatory answer, in the sense that every article about a crisis must end with it so as not to leave readers discouraged. But it hangs in the air.

If global childlessness is a knowledge-induced reduction, then more knowledge will not reverse it. If it is a symptom of what Horstmann called the constitution of the beast, then it is not a pathology but a species that, after long self-endurance, is growing accustomed to silence. And if the camouflages that made the endurance possible have once peeled away — who reconstructs them?

There is no cheerful answer to this, and any attempt to find one would damage the finding. What can be said is quieter: the fact that a species reduces itself in number is not in every case a calamity. It can also be a passage. In the passage we find ourselves in, the question is no longer how to get the old birth rates back. The question is what a smaller humanity will do with the world it leaves behind. And whether the silence that is settling in is a silence of exhaustion or a silence of comprehension.

Horstmann would probably have given no answer here, but would have deepened the question itself once more. Steingart, in his format, will not pose it, and it is not his task to pose it. But between the two of them, in the layer that the one does not reach and the other no longer enters, lies what may be the actual finding of our time: that the world is withdrawing from us long before we withdraw from it. And that we must learn to dwell in this situation without trying to undo it.

VI. A note in passing

It remains to say that this essay does not claim to be right against Steingart, against Kinnert, against the demographers who produce our data. They are right. The diagnosis is sound, the findings are solid, the three wrong premises are indeed wrong.

What has been attempted here is only to go one layer deeper, at the point where the data fall silent and anthropology would have to take over. To enter this layer is not to inhabit it. It only means acknowledging that it is there — and that any policy that ignores it will continue to see no change in its birth rates.

Horstmann is today seventy-six years old. His seventy-seventh birthday falls in a few days. He lives with his wife Helene in the southern quarter of Marburg, at Friedrichsplatz, in a refuge he once described in an interview: no computer, no answering machine, no television — only books, a treadle sewing machine in the corridor, handwritten manuscripts. In 2005 he publicly declared he was ending his life as a writer. He did not keep the promise. On his website untier.de new pieces continue to appear, most recently in May 2026.

In March of this year Horstmann published there a correspondence — between Claude, Hans Ley, and himself. It bears the title KI an UH: E-Mail-Wechsel und „Untier"-Essay (2026) — "AI to UH: e-mail exchange and 'Beast' essay" — and ends with Horstmann's sentence: Ulrich Horstmann throws himself into his cerebral shell and is not seen again. The sentence is wit and farewell at once, and it belongs to Horstmann; it asks for no reply. What can be said of it says itself: that a brief exchange took place, that it is filed on a website under Found Objects, and that this essay is not intended as a continuation but as a different movement that runs parallel to it.

It is worth reading Horstmann's book — not because it offers consolation, but because it provides a vocabulary we now urgently need, for a situation our ordinary language can no longer accommodate. And it is worth reading the Beipackzettel alongside, because it frames the book correctly: as a mocking philosophy, not as doctrine. Whoever takes the one without the other will miss Horstmann — as in 1984 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung missed Horstmann by mistaking black humour for inconsistency.

The vocabulary of the globalisation of weariness does not need Horstmann's authentication. It needs the authentication of the data Steingart has set out before us. Those who take the finding seriously will encounter it. Those who shy away from the melancholy register will reject it. Both are possible. What is not possible is to ignore the finding and thereby undo the birth rates. Thirty years of family policy with tripled per-capita expenditure has not achieved this. The next thirty will not achieve it either.