So odd how society is choosing extinction, something even these science fiction writers couldn’t predict. Louise’s talks and writings are what pointed out to me that almost all the defaults in current western society are anti-fertility. Several years ago when my wife and I were 39 (yes, we’re old) we already had two children (boy and girl) and welcomed our third (another son). Our friends and family either assumed it was a “careless mistake” or we were crazy. Why would you have a third kid when you have two already, especially when you already have a boy AND a girl?…as if kids are like something you collect or a fashion accessory, so odd….for what it’s worth for you youngsters, as someone now in his mid-40s who is (finally) done with changing kids diapers (booze helps) having a third kid is the life decision I’m most happy we made and if I regret anything it’s not having another child (I think we could have slipped one in between #2 and #3 and not needed any additional nanny years). My Irish grandmother who had six kids used to say if you have one kid he/she takes up 100% of your time and if you have ten kids they take up 100% of your time. Not sure parents spending 100% of their time on one kid is generally the most healthy balance. Societal collapse can be a bit of a downer, kids distracting you from it helps :)
When I was pregnant with my third child, I noticed immediately that I got a lot of comments like “another one? Don’t you know what causes that?”
My small New England town is surprisingly family-friendly, with many of my fellow Gen X moms having 3-4 kids. However, my Boston friends were a bit scandalized. And when I visited our relatives in the NYC suburbs, I was the recipient of stares and whispering when I took my brood to the playground - partly for having so many children who were clearly not a multiple birth, partly for obviously being their mother (the other kids at the playground were all there with nannies), and partly for being (as one nanny said to me) “so young” - I was pushing 40, so hardly qualified as a young mom! It was bizarre.
We’ve just added a fourth child to our family - I’m nursing him as I write this - so I’m obviously pro-large family, but I do think there is something healthy for children about not being the sole focus of adult attention. And having children is a commitment to the future - we can’t maintain a jaded fashionable detachment from the future of the human race. We’ve tied ourselves to the mast.
For what it's worth, Louise, your content has in large part shepherded me along the way from obnoxiously childfree anti-male feminist to trying for children with my husband, which has been quite the whiplash albeit happening gradually over about 5 years. What has been my lodestar in this journey is the conviction that mine and my husband's values, culture and advantages are excellent, and worth passing onto the next generation. Also helpful is the belief that my husband will protect me if the worst happens - something that many women today can't rely on. Who knows how I'll cope when pregnancy cometh, but I am dying to read your next book.
Spreading baby dust on you! Hope you get preggers soon! I have two kids and got divorce my only regret is that I'm too old and single to have more. Good luck!
‘South Korea is currently on track to produce between 4 and 7 great grandchildren for every 100 Koreans alive today, constituting a 93-96% reduction in population over the course of a century. No plague or war has ever achieved as much.’
Put like this, it sounds alarming. But say you got stranded on a desert island for fifteen years, eventually saved (Castaway style) and the people who pick you up tell you that the population reduced by 93%. What’s your first guess as to why going to be?
While there are many good points and interesting thoughts throughout this post, I think you deeply overrate how much the average person ever felt personal continuity with the great culture of the past; and underrate how much the young elite does still does, regardless of its more multiethnic makeup. Surely for someone your age at a top university your peers in the humanities “move[d] arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas”? Mine at Cambridge certainly did.
Is funny how you read about so many lost civilizations Anasazi, Easter Island, Lemuria, The Nazca lines creators.... and wonder what happened to them and suddenly the more likely answer is staring right at you...
On a similar vein, why have we heard from no alien civilizations even though you would think it would’ve happened by now? Is there a level of technology or wealth after which civilizations self destruct?
Civilisations self destructing isn’t actually uncommon. In fact it’s actually its main cause of death (see Toynbees a study of history). To put it simply, civilisations are built around a narrative that was highly successful during the civilisations growth phase but highly dysfunctional during the decline (because the decline occurs in a completely different set of circumstances)
My other thought is that the thing about the dystopian world of children of men (or even the hand maids tale), is they are much more clear cut/certain. Ie We definitely know the human race is dying out, roughly when it will happen etc and the fixed certainty is reassuring in a perverse sort of way.
The real world we live in is messy, complicated and extremely uncertain. This both offers hope and fear for the future.
When I got married in the late 70s I wasn't too sure of children as they hadn't been part of the sexual revolution and fear of the bomb made the future look rather bleak. But my wife was keen and I'd become a Christian and thought, so what if the bomb, and then was surprised at the delight and privilege of having children. Nothing beats a four year old daughter saying, 'daddy I love you'. And our somewhat alternative church had no money but loads of children and such a lot of food and fun.
Excellent and disturbing piece, Louise is one of the few commentators taking demographic decline seriously. This must be a new phonemon, if a society stops reproducing itself, it sort of stops believing in its own future. At the most basic - anthropological - level, religion surely is just the belief in something beyond our here and now. We sacrifice the present for a future benefit, so one day my son, this will be yours, and however hard things are, they will be better one day.
Wanting to build a utopia, a heaven on earth cleansed of all sin of the past is unfortunately a fundamental impulse built into the psyche of western civilisation. The ‘woke’ of today are simply acting on the same impulse that drove the French Revolution over 200 years ago or the reformation 500 years ago.
The trashing of our heritage is simply an attempt IMO to avoid noticing the fact that the prosperous wizz bang high tech world we were all promised isn’t really happening, or at least the high tech is happening in a (usually) unhealthy, unhelpful way and increasingly not in a way that actually benefits humanity or improves our living standards.
So odd how society is choosing extinction, something even these science fiction writers couldn’t predict. Louise’s talks and writings are what pointed out to me that almost all the defaults in current western society are anti-fertility. Several years ago when my wife and I were 39 (yes, we’re old) we already had two children (boy and girl) and welcomed our third (another son). Our friends and family either assumed it was a “careless mistake” or we were crazy. Why would you have a third kid when you have two already, especially when you already have a boy AND a girl?…as if kids are like something you collect or a fashion accessory, so odd….for what it’s worth for you youngsters, as someone now in his mid-40s who is (finally) done with changing kids diapers (booze helps) having a third kid is the life decision I’m most happy we made and if I regret anything it’s not having another child (I think we could have slipped one in between #2 and #3 and not needed any additional nanny years). My Irish grandmother who had six kids used to say if you have one kid he/she takes up 100% of your time and if you have ten kids they take up 100% of your time. Not sure parents spending 100% of their time on one kid is generally the most healthy balance. Societal collapse can be a bit of a downer, kids distracting you from it helps :)
When I was pregnant with my third child, I noticed immediately that I got a lot of comments like “another one? Don’t you know what causes that?”
My small New England town is surprisingly family-friendly, with many of my fellow Gen X moms having 3-4 kids. However, my Boston friends were a bit scandalized. And when I visited our relatives in the NYC suburbs, I was the recipient of stares and whispering when I took my brood to the playground - partly for having so many children who were clearly not a multiple birth, partly for obviously being their mother (the other kids at the playground were all there with nannies), and partly for being (as one nanny said to me) “so young” - I was pushing 40, so hardly qualified as a young mom! It was bizarre.
We’ve just added a fourth child to our family - I’m nursing him as I write this - so I’m obviously pro-large family, but I do think there is something healthy for children about not being the sole focus of adult attention. And having children is a commitment to the future - we can’t maintain a jaded fashionable detachment from the future of the human race. We’ve tied ourselves to the mast.
For what it's worth, Louise, your content has in large part shepherded me along the way from obnoxiously childfree anti-male feminist to trying for children with my husband, which has been quite the whiplash albeit happening gradually over about 5 years. What has been my lodestar in this journey is the conviction that mine and my husband's values, culture and advantages are excellent, and worth passing onto the next generation. Also helpful is the belief that my husband will protect me if the worst happens - something that many women today can't rely on. Who knows how I'll cope when pregnancy cometh, but I am dying to read your next book.
Spreading baby dust on you! Hope you get preggers soon! I have two kids and got divorce my only regret is that I'm too old and single to have more. Good luck!
‘South Korea is currently on track to produce between 4 and 7 great grandchildren for every 100 Koreans alive today, constituting a 93-96% reduction in population over the course of a century. No plague or war has ever achieved as much.’
Put like this, it sounds alarming. But say you got stranded on a desert island for fifteen years, eventually saved (Castaway style) and the people who pick you up tell you that the population reduced by 93%. What’s your first guess as to why going to be?
Ah, Aunty Louise... cheered me up no end, that...
While there are many good points and interesting thoughts throughout this post, I think you deeply overrate how much the average person ever felt personal continuity with the great culture of the past; and underrate how much the young elite does still does, regardless of its more multiethnic makeup. Surely for someone your age at a top university your peers in the humanities “move[d] arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas”? Mine at Cambridge certainly did.
Is funny how you read about so many lost civilizations Anasazi, Easter Island, Lemuria, The Nazca lines creators.... and wonder what happened to them and suddenly the more likely answer is staring right at you...
On a similar vein, why have we heard from no alien civilizations even though you would think it would’ve happened by now? Is there a level of technology or wealth after which civilizations self destruct?
A few thoughts:
Civilisations self destructing isn’t actually uncommon. In fact it’s actually its main cause of death (see Toynbees a study of history). To put it simply, civilisations are built around a narrative that was highly successful during the civilisations growth phase but highly dysfunctional during the decline (because the decline occurs in a completely different set of circumstances)
My other thought is that the thing about the dystopian world of children of men (or even the hand maids tale), is they are much more clear cut/certain. Ie We definitely know the human race is dying out, roughly when it will happen etc and the fixed certainty is reassuring in a perverse sort of way.
The real world we live in is messy, complicated and extremely uncertain. This both offers hope and fear for the future.
When I got married in the late 70s I wasn't too sure of children as they hadn't been part of the sexual revolution and fear of the bomb made the future look rather bleak. But my wife was keen and I'd become a Christian and thought, so what if the bomb, and then was surprised at the delight and privilege of having children. Nothing beats a four year old daughter saying, 'daddy I love you'. And our somewhat alternative church had no money but loads of children and such a lot of food and fun.
Excellent and disturbing piece, Louise is one of the few commentators taking demographic decline seriously. This must be a new phonemon, if a society stops reproducing itself, it sort of stops believing in its own future. At the most basic - anthropological - level, religion surely is just the belief in something beyond our here and now. We sacrifice the present for a future benefit, so one day my son, this will be yours, and however hard things are, they will be better one day.
Wanting to build a utopia, a heaven on earth cleansed of all sin of the past is unfortunately a fundamental impulse built into the psyche of western civilisation. The ‘woke’ of today are simply acting on the same impulse that drove the French Revolution over 200 years ago or the reformation 500 years ago.
The trashing of our heritage is simply an attempt IMO to avoid noticing the fact that the prosperous wizz bang high tech world we were all promised isn’t really happening, or at least the high tech is happening in a (usually) unhealthy, unhelpful way and increasingly not in a way that actually benefits humanity or improves our living standards.
Beautifully written, if unsettling
Louise, have you talked with Douglas Murray about his book, The Strange Death of Europe?