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Notes -
Adding to the interminable hand-wringing conversation in these parts around the “fertility crisis” and what to do about it, I’ll submit an interesting Substack piece I stumbled upon today. The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.” That no amount of cajoling, cultural/media propaganda, government-provided financial incentives, etc. will prevent an intelligent and perceptive woman from noticing this basic fact about biology and doing whatever is in her power to limit her risk of being forced to do something that she’s going to hate.
Now, certainly this author is far from the first woman to make this case, nor even its most effective advocate. However, her piece resonated with me simply because it closely mirrors statements that have been made to me by multiple women in my life whom I respect and value. One of them is my younger sister, who has said explicitly and in no uncertain terms that she will not be having children. She has even discussed with my (aghast and befuddled) mother the possibility of undergoing a tubal ligation (“getting her tubes tied”) in her early thirties to prevent any further concern about the possibility of becoming pregnant. My sister is in a happy cohabiting relationship with an intelligent, well-paid, all-around great guy; her concerns have nothing to do with the fear of being an abandoned single mother, or of being poor and struggling, or anything like that. She just recognizes that having a child would represent a considerable and arguably permanent deduction in her quality of life. It would substantially decrease her freedom to travel, to make decisions without intensive planning around childcare and child-rearing costs, etc.
Our brother has three daughters, ages four, two, and infant. I love them to pieces and am extremely grateful to have them in my life. I envy my brother, and my desire to have children of my own gnaws at me daily. However, I have to acknowledge that a great many things about my brother’s life became infinitely more constrained, more stressful, more irritating, when he had children. His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare. He is very fortunate to still live in the same city as both our own father and his wife’s mother, which provides access to free childcare; I cannot imagine how much more constrained his life would be if he and his wife had to pay for childcare every single time he had to leave the children unattended. Nevertheless, we see him more rarely, and get less quality time with him, than we would if he didn’t have children. His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror. I am so happy for my brother that he gets to experience fatherhood (and again, I fervently hope to experience it myself in the future) but I admit that it has negatively impacted my relationship with him in a number of important ways. And my sister sees that - and sees how even more constrained our sister-in-law’s life has become - and has, understandably, said, “No thanks, I’ll pass.”
At least his children are healthy and his wife seemingly content and well-adjusted, though. My very good friends - well, formerly my very good friends - had a far worse experience. I’ve known these two since high school; we were inseparable friends for over a decade, both before and after the two of them got married. My buddy always talked about wanting a large family; his mother was one of nine siblings, and he dreamed of having a similarly-sized brood. However, his wife is small-framed, physically fragile, and somewhat sickly. It was always clear to me that she was not built for having lots of children. And, in fact, when they had their first child, it totally wrecked her, both physically and mentally. She was briefly hospitalized for postpartum depression. Probably a large part of that depression was due to the fact that her baby clearly had something wrong with it even from an early age. (My brother and I would, sheepishly and in secret, occasionally sing a certain Stephen Lynch song and he would smugly crow about how much better-looking his own newborn daughter was than theirs.) Well, it turns out the kid has pretty severe autism. She’s now four years old and can barely speak. She’ll likely never know more than a handful of words. She’ll need lifelong intensive care and support, which will consume the rest of their lives. The experience of childbearing was so taxing and so confoundingly disappointing for them - and for her especially - that she has recently undergone a hysterectomy. They moved to a different state years ago, just before having that child, and my relationship with them has cratered, partially because the stress of the experience and the extreme impact on their lives made them so stressed-out and insular. It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays? Their whole lives are about caring for this broken child, with whom I can’t even have a rudimentary conversation. It was so damaging for them, and I guarantee if she could go back in time and undo the whole thing she would. Hell, I hope she would. Surely many women are profoundly and justifiably terrified by the possibility that something like this could happen to them.
I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them. And once we admit to ourselves that white and East Asian women are probably never again going to organically desire large families, we can then focus on reducing fertility in the third world, since the TRF differential between advanced and non-advanced countries is the real problem that we as a global species need to deal with.
Damn, dude.
I always really liked your posts. Their relative infrequency also made me pretty stoked when I saw a new one. "Oh, shit, Hoffmeister just dropped a new track!"
For a long while, you actually owned the GOAT'ed (quantitavely by upvtoes) Motte post.
But this just doesn't make any sense. Like, srsly bro, whutt?
It's more than anec-data, it's close to a human universal that women (and men, but whatever) tend to go "holy shit, my life changed after I have kids and I won't trade them for the world." It's kind of like, I don't know, wired into us as a species or something.
The thought-piece articles by largely PMC mothers who openly opine about "being better off" if they didn't have kids is exactly the backwards anti-social and hyperindividualistic status games that some of the threads you alluded to were trying to deal with. The women complaining about counterfactuals aren't at all representative of the species or society. Furthermore, they're being incredibly arrogant in their thinking; do they truly believe they're the first women in history to go, "Oh, shit, kids are kind of a big commitment, maybe I should think this through?" It's deeply embedded in the language; going through childbirth can be "traumatizing" - this assumes you make it through childbirth. Up until the 20th century all over the world (continuing in much of it today) pregnant women were aware that they might not make it out of delivery alive. The very assumption that "post childbirth life" could be "worse" is actually a verbal demonstration of how much better and easier than it ever has been to be a mother.
Aside from that, there are real difficulties in raising children that are specific to current society that ought to be address. I agree on the childcare hassle points - a lot of the proposed solutions had to do with massive tax incentives for childbearing couples so that we can bring back a one income household.
Delaying childbirth past 30 is, unfortunately, kind of a risky move even with modern medicine. Again, lots of solutions had to do with incentivizing earlier family formation and having children (side benefit for the dudes out there: being married and cohabitating with wife and children does great things in terms of your "likeliness to get arrested" quotient).
The deeper question that your posts raises by implication, however, is around the costs of childbirth outweighing its benefits on some sort of happiness rubric. Your brother can't hang out with the boys as much - ok, does 10 more years of football and beer really mean a whole lot? Women can't travel and pursue their careers if they have children - do instagram photos in Amalfi and being promoted to associate director of spreadsheets really actualize your inner Girlboss? If life's mission is happiness (side note: I don't think it is) then it stands to reason people should try to find the deepest and most durable source of happiness possible. Wouldn't you know it, for most folks that's close interpersonal relationships, specifically; their family.
The diabolic sleight of hand of modernist pseudo-philosophy was that "following your bliss" and maximizing personal happiness was some sort of self-evident Permanent Truth and Totally Right. Besides being wrong on a moral level, it's wrong in its own terms! The things you think are going to make you happy don't and the one's that really do have been the cornerstones of society forever.
Sorry if you think I fell off.
Is this genuinely true? I had no idea. Do you remember what the post was about?
There is a lot more to be gained from travel than just an album of Instagram thirst trap photos. I’ve found travel to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life, personally. As for your question about careers: You are, I hope, aware that there are some (presumably large) number of women who do actually have fulfilling, important jobs which give them a sense of purpose and self-actualization? Sure, there are plenty of women in bullshit jobs - and plenty of men, myself included! - but the idea that every woman, or even the lion’s share of women would be more fulfilled by motherhood than by a career… that seems like the real “typical mind fallacy” here.
I think I’m just starting to return to my primordial wariness and contrarianism about “what human beings are hard-wired to be like” because of the recent and unrelenting discussion in online right-wing spaces about how “within every man there is an innate and burning desire to conquer, to struggle, to do great violence and to hear the lamentation of the enemy’s women”. I get told that my life is meaningless and empty and degenerate - that I’m a bugman - because I would rather attend classical music concerts than get my arm hacked off in a muddy field, or get blown to smithereens by an artillery strike. And that this should just be instinctively obvious to me as a human man, and that there’s something broken and mutated within me if it’s not. Dealing with that has made me quite a bit more sympathetic to the plight of a woman who is similarly atypical or who dreams of transcending the often unimaginable suffering endured by humans living under traditional models of society.
I think there’s a huge amount to glean from the past, and I recognize the value of respecting time-honored understandings of humanity. I also recognize, though, the extent to which so much of life under those traditions was simply a matter of making the best of the things we had no power to affect or change. But what happens when we do gain that power? When agency can be effectively applied to reducing suffering? Surely nobody here would voluntarily refuse anesthesia during surgery simply because “suffering inculcates virtue” and “sometimes the hard thing needs to be done.” When humans have the opportunity to reduce pain and inconvenience, we eagerly do so, and that’s a great thing! It’s one of the things that elevates us above the beasts, who are mere slaves to their evolutionary programming. And if - I get that this is a very big if - we can figure out a way to carry on the species without subjecting women to the horrors that this author points to, then I think we need to be open to exploring ways to do so.
I was pointing to the memetic desire of travel. A lot of women "like" travel because they think it is the right thing to like. A lot of men "like" sports for similar reasons (or any of a host of other domains, for both men and women).
Here's the thing - No! I am not. That's kind of the point of a lot of these threads. It's the entire point of this Last Psychiatrist post.
Women (again, and Men) may self-report that their job is fulfilling and important. The argument I'm making is that this largely a cope. Most jobs do, in fact, suck. People do these shitty jobs because of the meaning they find elsewhere. That could be a "mission" oriented meaning (i.e. being a public defender because they believe in helping those who cannot afford an attorney etc.). It could be a means-to-and-end motivation (i.e I'll work the midnight shift at McDonalds because I think it'll show initiative and maybe lead to a path to manager). Or, most commonly, family motivation (Homer, from the Simpsons, has a famous episode wherein the camera pans over his desk at the power plant to reveal a photo of Maggie, his daughter, captioned with "do it for her.")
The point is that it is extremely unlikely for either men or women to truly believe that their primary job gives them a superabundance of transcendental meaning. A job can be part of that sense of meaning but there's usually something else.
Family is a really good "something else" for reasons I covered in my initial response. It's a really good something else for both men and women. Gee, wouldn't it be fantastic if there was a way for men and women to start a family and then agree upon a positive sum system for raising that family? That's what these threads are arguing for - that what makes people truly happy is very different from what current ideologies say makes people happy and the downstream negative impacts on society are kind of a big deal (to wit; declining fertility rates).
Childbirth can be dangerous and is always painful. But calling it "unimaginable suffering" or a "horror" seems to be hyperbole to me. Hyperbole caused by motivated reasoning, is my suspicion.
I think I meet you half way on this one.
Evolutionary programming is literally a set of skills that has resulted in evolutionary success. I am very happy that I am a slave to "fire is hot don't touch it" evolutionary programming. I am very happy that I am a slave to "I can run upright for long periods of time because I am a low body-hair bipedal" even though that means I will never, ever, ever bench what a juvenile chimp can. The gift of human insight and introspection is wonderful for humans and a large part of societal organization is used to control unruly evolutionary programming, but that doesn't make or evolutionary programming or instincts fundamentally wrong. If you follow that slippery slope long enough, you get to gender / sex abolition and all of its accompanying WTF-ery.
If we designate childbirth as a "horror" for all of society, we are committing ourselves to eventual species level slow suicide. Sure, sure, "artificial wombs" and Magic Technology Stuff will save us. It won't. Society is social and ideas matter.
Gene editing to make pregnancy and childbirth easier could also save us.
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