This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Stop lying about why you don't want children
If you don't want them, just be honest about why
Those in search of an invigorating blast of pop-nihilism could do worse than Seven, the feature-length directorial debut by David Fincher. (We do not speak of Alien 3, or indeed any Alien film after the first.) Set in an unspecified American city perpetually besieged by inclement weather, the film follows two detectives, Mills and Somerset, in pursuit of a serial killer calling himself John Doe. Each of Doe’s killings is modelled on one of the seven deadly sins of Catholicism: for example, the first victim discovered (gluttony) is a morbidly obese man forced at gunpoint to eat until his stomach bursts.
The two detectives act as foils to one another: the impulsive, idealistic and hotheaded Mills contrasting with the soft-spoken, jaded and cynical Somerset. Mills has only just transferred to the film’s unnamed city, while Somerset is on the brink of early retirement, his career coming to an end just as Mills’s is beginning. The captain of Somerset’s precinct admits he cannot understand why a talented detective like Somerset is retiring prematurely, in response to which Somerset endeavours to illustrate the scope of his disillusionment with the city and its inhabitants.
Mills’s wife Tracy invites Somerset to dinner, and subsequently confides in him that, unbeknownst to Mills, she is pregnant. Although she wants children, she is of two minds about raising a child in such a decrepit and violent city. Somerset admits that he once faced a similar dilemma, and persuaded his partner to terminate the pregnancy.
The film’s literal and figurative darkness, its almost relentlessly dour tone and the viciousness of its murder scenes might lead a casual viewer to assume he is being invited to agree with Somerset’s world-weary, ultra-doomer outlook. That Somerset is portrayed by Morgan Freeman, Hollywood’s go-to man for homespun folksy wisdom for more than three decades, certainly lends itself to this interpretation.
But there’s a wrinkle to this reading, which hints that Somerset’s perspective isn’t identical to that of Seven’s screenwriter, that the film can’t be reduced to a reactionary rant about how everything in the modern world sucks, maaaan. On the evening of the day the fourth victim is found, Mills and Somerset repair to a bar to drown their sorrows, where they have a frank discussion of their respective worldviews. After listening to Somerset fulminate about how apathy, laziness and greed have become the rule rather than the exception, Mills interjects that he isn’t buying it.
What to make of this exchange? Perhaps it only exists to hammer in how naïve Mills is just before the film’s climax, at which point the full extent of Doe’s sadism is unveiled for the first time.
But on the other hand, perhaps Mills has got Somerset’s number. Maybe several decades in the police force and witnessing the worst that humanity has to offer hasn’t made Somerset jaded and cynical. Maybe the only reason he’s retiring is because he wants a quiet life. He just wants to grill, for God’s sake.
But Somerset must have been aware that his impending retirement means depriving the city of one of its best detectives (which it sorely needs) for no good reason.
As ever with cognitive dissonance, when faced with a choice between changing our beliefs or changing our behaviour, the former is always the path of least resistance. So rather than admitting that he’s putting his own interests ahead of those around him, Somerset persuades himself that his absence from the police force won’t be keenly felt at all – indeed, won’t make a blind bit of difference. He doesn’t go full Robert Towne and claim that, in such a wretched world, the most ethical decision a police officer can make is to do "as little as possible". He more modestly claims that the world is beyond saving, and hence that police work is a fundamentally futile exercise, analogous to “picking up diamonds on a deserted island and saving them, in case we get rescued”. His cynical disillusionment is a carefully constructed façade, a defensive posture through which he hides his selfishness even from himself. The Last Psychiatrist would like a word.
And if this latter interpretation is true, it casts Somerset’s earlier conversation with Tracy in a very different light. By Somerset’s telling, persuading his partner to terminate her pregnancy was done out of mercy: that it would be cruel to their unborn child to raise it in the vicious hellhole that is the film’s unnamed city. But perhaps this explanation for his actions was another of Somerset’s defense mechanisms. Perhaps he had much more banal and selfish motives for not wanting to become a father (e.g. concern that a child would disrupt his lifestyle or his career advancement), which he rationalised away, insisting to himself that his motives for not wanting a child were noble, even heroic. Per Robert Trivers’s theory of self-deception, this may not even have been something he did consciously. “I persuaded my partner to terminate her pregnancy, because it would be cruel to bring a child into a world as wicked as ours” sounds a lot better than “I persuaded my partner to terminate her pregnancy, because I’m emotionally immature and unprepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood”, doesn’t it?
Yes. It does sound a hell of a lot better.
Richard Hanania has been beating the drum for many years about falling fertility rates across the developed world. Some of his proposed solutions for this problem I can get behind (I must admit I’ve never really understood the moral objections to surrogacy); others, not so much (I don’t endorse female secondary school teachers getting pregnant by raping their male students). But I absolutely agree with Hanania that this is a real problem which needs to be addressed urgently. Indeed, I agree with him so much that it’s a problem I can hardly even bear to think about: whenever I see a graph charting plummeting live births in South Korea, I feel depressed and hopeless for the rest of the day.
I can at least take solace in the fact that more and more people are starting to recognise that this is a real problem, not a paranoid conspiracy theory. A few years ago, when I suggested there was a very real possibility that South Koreans might literally go extinct in the next hundred years, people tended to scoff. For the most part, they’re not scoffing anymore. By the same token, it’s been a long time since I saw anyone seriously claiming that the world has a problem with overpopulation.
As with any complex problem which spans continents, it’s hard to pinpoint which specific causes might be behind falling fertility rates. Some pin the blame on the sexual revolution and its associated normalisation of divorce, contraception and abortion. Hanania’s timescale is more recent, arguing for a dramatic inflection point circa 2014, the year the iPhone achieved market penetration in a critical mass of Western users. Not coincidentally, as catalogued by Noah Smith, 2014 was the same year we observed a massive spike in gender dysphoria, teenage unhappiness, loneliness and so on.1
But regardless of what the underlying causes of the decline in fertility are, I think we have more than enough information to make an educated guess as to which causes to rule out. Below, I will provide an estimate for the number of adults who decided not to have children specifically because of their concerns about climate change.
Zero. The number is zero.
I’m quite serious about this. I don’t believe that there is a single adult anywhere in the entire world who was in a position to have children, but elected not to out of concern that having children will exacerbate climate change, or that climate change will soon render the world uninhabitable. I know there are people out there who will swear up and down that this really is the reason they’re not having children, and I don’t believe them, any of them. I think the percentage of these people who are accurately describing their true motivations for refusing not to have children is 0.00%.
Rather, I think these people (every last one of them) don’t want to have children for ordinary, banal reasons, but have come up with a narrative which makes this decision seem noble and heroic. The dead giveaway is – these people are never people who desperately wanted to have children, are they? You never get the impression that their decision not to have children is one that truly pains them, that they’re reluctantly but graciously making a tremendous personal sacrifice for the common good. As Somerset would put it, the fact that they don’t seem that broken up about their decision "doesn’t seem in keeping with martyrdom". On the contrary, refusing to have children is almost always the only "sacrifice" they’re making to combat climate change. They certainly aren’t giving up air travel, eating meat, or putting almond milk in their coffee.
The reason they aren’t giving these things up is the same reason they’re not having children: because doing so would disrupt their lifestyle.
The absolute nadir of this preening exercise in specious self-regard came five years ago, when that pair of insufferably sanctimonious twats,
PrinceHarry andDuchess of SussexMeghan Markle, were presented with an environmental award in recognition of their pledge to help fight climate change by having no more than two children. (Curious how one reconciles that with the family’s heavy use of private jets, but whatever.) As my mother pointed out, when Harry made this pledge in September of 2019, Meghan was thirty-eight years old. Allowing for the amount of time it would take her to get pregnant, and assuming an interval of at least a year between pregnancies it would be profoundly difficult for her to have more than two children even if she wanted to.But even if I accept these claims at face value, the strategy doesn’t make sense on its own terms. As pointed out by Scott Alexander five years ago, if even 1-2% of Democrats elect not to have children for the sake of the environment (but no Republicans follow suit), the immediate result of that decision will be a succeeding generation in which Republicans have a slight electoral advantage, as children tend to vote the same way their parents do. That generation will hence go on to elect conservative politicians who are cosy with the fossil fuel industry and who may not even believe in climate change, exacerbating the problem even faster.
I was persuaded by Scott’s argument. None of the people claiming they aren’t having children because of climate change will be persuaded by it, because they aren’t being honest about their real motivations for not having children. You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.
Some childless people offer a variant on the above excuse, claiming that the reason they’re not having children isn’t because of climate change specifically, but because of how terrible the world is in general, insisting (as Somerset does) that it would be cruel to bring a child into it. The examples used to illustrate the supposed awfulness of the modern world will generally be a vague mish-mash of Trump, Brexit, the “rise of the far-right”, assorted genocides (some of them even deserving of the label), and whatever conflicts are currently ongoing in the Middle East.2
For the sake of argument, let’s accept the implied principle that having a child is not a morally neutral act, but rather that it can constitute an act of sadism if the world is sufficiently awful. Let’s accept that our world is awful enough to meet that description, and hence that anyone carrying a pregnancy to term is being knowingly cruel.
Then, consider the following:
As I pointed out two months ago, as recently as the eighteenth century there were European countries in which fully half of all children did not live to see their fifth birthday. Do you mean to tell me that it is crueler to have a child now than it was to have one then?
If we take this claim at face value and follow to its logical conclusion, it implies that there is nothing particularly cruel about having a child today; that it is less cruel to have a child today than in eras past; and that having a child becomes progressively more cruel the further back in history one looks. Indeed, if it is cruel to have a child today (with its attendant low rates of murder, infant mortality, hunger, disease and so on) – this logically implies that just about every European parent in the fourteenth century was unimaginably sadistic, like some kind of unholy offspring of Jeffrey Dahmer, Josef Mengele and Simon Cowell.
If any of the people claiming this is why they aren’t having children had thought about this for two minutes, they would instantly realise what an absurd claim it is on its face. Along just about any metric you compare to mention, the modern world is safer and cleaner than it was in the past. If indeed it is cruel to bring a child into a sufficiently wretched and unpleasant world, then there has never been a less cruel time to become a parent.
But none of the people making this claim have thought about it for two minutes. They didn’t look at the state of the world and decide that, as much as they might want children, it would be cruel to bring them into a world as nasty and vicious as ours. Rather, they didn’t want children, and invented a superficially persuasive motive to make them look good to their fellow-travelers.
A very small minority of people actually are willing to bite the bullet I presented above. Yes, they will say, it is cruel to have a child today; and yes, it was more cruel to have a child a hundred years ago; and crueller still a hundred years before that. I speak, of course, of the antinatalists, a philosophical school which holds that, because any given human is guaranteed to experience more suffering in his life than pleasure,3 it is always an act of cruelty to bring a child into the world, and the morally correct thing is hence to abstain from having children, eventually rendering the human species extinct. Antinatalism is the modern incarnation of (and philosophical inheritor to) Gnosticism, a dualist offshoot of Christianity which held that each of us are immaterial souls who have been cruelly trapped inside our flesh prisons by a wicked deity called the Demiurge: thus, in the act of having children, we are condemning yet another soul to be trapped inside a flesh prison against its will. As deranged as this worldview might sound, it has real-world consequences, as when one prize nutcase attempted to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, under the explicit reasoning that the Supreme Court’s voting to repeal Roe v. Wade would result in a spike in births across the US.4
I don’t have much to say about the antinatalist community, and am terribly relieved that they are too small in number to have much impact on politics one way or the other. (r/antinatalism only has about 200k subscribers.) While I’ve previously expressed an aversion to Bulverism couched in armchair psychology, I nonetheless find it interesting to observe the overlap in subscriptions between /r/antinatalism and other subreddits.
Not exactly a cheerful bunch, are they? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that their philosophical belief that every human being will experience more suffering than joy in his lifetime might be the product of – um, overgeneralising from personal experience.
I’ll go one step further. I don’t think the antinatalists, for the most part, are people who could have children if they wanted to, but are electing not to for moral reasons. I believe they are mostly profoundly mentally disturbed people with whom no one would want to have children, and who have erected a towering edifice of convoluted reasoning wherein this deficiency in fact makes them morally superior to the “breeders” in their vicinity. Their worldview is ultimately the product of sour grapes.
There are lots of good reasons not to have children. You might believe, for one reason or another, that you wouldn’t be a very good parent. You might even be justified in this supposition. You might suffer from a severe disease (Huntington’s, say, or cystic fibrosis) which you have a high risk of passing on to your children.
Then there are the less good reasons. Maybe you’re immature and refuse to grow up. Maybe you’re happy being a “dog mom” to your various “fur babies” (ugh). Maybe you’ve just decided that, bundles of joy as they may be, children just aren’t for you. I’m not going to say that reasons like this are perfectly fine, and will admit to finding it sort of contemptible when a person voluntarily allows their family line to end with them purely so they can “focus on their career” or whatever. But while I can’t respect someone who openly announces “I don’t want to have a children because I myself am a manchild, and having a child would cut into my Funko Pop budget”, I can at least credit his honesty.
But if, like Jameela Jamil, you don’t want children because you like being childless and don’t want your lifestyle to be disrupted by them, just come out and say that. Stop pretending that this has anything to do with climate change, or Donald Trump, or AI, or the Middle Eastern war du jour. And if you insist on pretending that you’re not having children because of climate change, at least respect our intelligence enough to commit to the bit. Sell your car, travel everywhere by bike, stop using air travel, give up eating meat. Otherwise, you’re fooling no one, not even yourself.
1 To this end, while an outright ban on smartphones would be effectively impossible (that horse has well and truly bolted) – if such a thing could be done, I think it would boost fertility rates far more than many would have us believe.
2 Because it’s not as if previous generations ever had to cope with conflicts in the Middle oh wait. This article lists 108 conflicts since 1914.
3 Citations for this claim have been repeatedly requested, but none are forthcoming.
4 Are you even a little bit surprised to learn that this profoundly mentally disturbed young man – member of a community which is the philosophical inheritor to the dualist tradition of Gnosticism, in which members brag about having sterilised themselves, and who thinks that having children is evil – now identifies as a trans woman? Thanks to Kat Highsmith for bringing it to my attention.
The tribute that vice pays to virtue. We should want them to keep making excuses, because a world where no excuses are necessary is even worse.
I suppose that's a point. On the other hand it frustrates me, because if you're not having children because of how awful the world is – well, look around you. From a historical perspective, along most legible metrics (dirt, disease, violence etc.) the world has never sucked less. How much better does it have to get before you start making babies?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link