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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25742 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Phrased differently, it seems to me South Korean's may be too realist and grounded in their evaluations of things. Again, having children is hard. If you analyze all of the realities of child rearing, you are going to find thousands of reason not to do it. Without a faith-level "Yeah, but fuck it!" decision making mechanism, it makes sense that a highly educated and highly rational community would not see many kids.

I'll conclude by asking the Motte to chime in on anything about the above, of course. More specifically, however - To what extent are the Judeo-Christian roots of the United States responsible for cultural attitudes of "hyper optimistic belief" around things like child rearing, entrepreneurship, scientific frontier-ism (space travel, moon landing, AI). I worry that on the Right, Judeo-Christian ethics are mostly touted as ways to keep social order and cohesion and, on the Left, they're derided for a lack of acceptance and as an inhibitor to full self-expression. That's one axis, sure, but I don't think it's the entire problem space. Moreover, is much of the rising Western trouble with pervasive anxiety, sexlessness, poor family formation, etc. partially due to a loss of a quasi-faith belief structure.

I’ve said this before, but birthrates in the post-contraceptive world depend on whether people expect to enjoy raising kids. South Korean childhood seems legitimately awful for everyone involved; of course a realistic thinker opts out of doing it a second time!

If you look at groups with the pill that have above replacement fertility rates, by contrast, you see people who want to have kids. Rednecks really look forwards to going to their kids’ sporting events and taking them fishing and teaching them to work on cars, and have an entire genre of very popular music about how wanting to be a mother turns otherwise plain-looking women phenomenally beautiful.

And it’s not necessarily that one is clear eyed and the other is hopelessly romanticized; South Korean childhood is legitimately much more unpleasant than redneck childhood, for both parties. But you don’t have to go to South Korea to see the impact of attitudes towards Natality; blue tribe fertility is on the lower end of average for the developed world and blue tribe culture is full of fretting about how awful motherhood is. You contrast that to red tribe culture and it’s obvious.

People want kids when they expect to enjoy parenting. I’m not saying there aren’t economic or structural issues going on. But remember the study of teenaged girls who had to take care of a baby doll like a real baby, discovered they liked it, and then went and got pregnant? Wanting kids is a pretty big factor and people on the motte underrate it significantly.

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