Liberal societies don't have children

This purposeless iteration of our civilization will never have positive birthrates again

In February 2022, The Girl With the List went viral.

A creator called Yuni - the now abandoned yuniquethoughts on TikTok - posted a screen recording of her Notes app in which she detailed her perceived pros and cons of having children.

The final version of ‘The List’ - still viewable on her blog - includes 350 cons and 35 pros. Many of the cons are serious, often horrifying medical complications (pre-eclampsia, bleeding gums, hemorrhoids, miscarriages, post-natal depression) while the pros are mostly ironic - ‘Special treatment (not even guaranteed tho)’.

For months after Yuni’s post went viral, women would spam ‘Where’s the girl with the list?’ in the comment section of other TikToks about the difficulties of pregnancy and raising children. This category of content - pregnancy horror stories - is extremely viral; these clips elicit strong emotional responses and engagement. When my wife was pregnant, her whole feed was filled with them. Yuni’s list had a lot of reach.

My audience knows me as a father and as an advocate of starting families. It may come as a surprise, then, when I say: I think Yuni is right, and I largely agree with The List.

My accepting view of The List comes with a stipulation: I only agree with the list’s implication - that it is irrational and possibly disastrous to have children - when I evaluate it within the framework of liberal values and liberal truth-claims which all of us were raised to accept.

In my last post on fertility (which went quite viral itself, with millions of views across Substack and Twitter) I made the case that status is the primary explanatory factor underpinning declining birthrates. In this followup essay, I’d like to expand on the fundamental philosophical shifts which led to this evolution of status dynamics. Understanding this phenomenon requires a radical analysis, centered on exploring how our relationship with truth itself has changed in the last five centuries.

Along the way, we can evaluate and address some of the critics of my argument (which mostly revolved around the accusation that I was trying to make ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ a reality).

As a quick refresher of the core thesis of my status argument:

In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status. The primary sources of her status were therefore upheld by the Church (which held a role of social dominance incomparable to today) and her family (embedded within a formalized class structure).

In other words, the pre-Enlightenment woman derived her status from virtue and dominance games. These virtue strategies did not tradeoff with fertility, and likely supported it, with the Church teaching ‘conjugal duty’ and families demanding heirs.

The Enlightenment brought with it not just intellectual, economic, and scientific revolutions - it drove a status revolution. It challenged the dominance of the Church and aristocracy through the elevation of the ideals of equality, freethinking, and meritocracy.

In turn, this emphasis on the moral primacy of meritocracy changed the primary status game from dominance and virtue to ‘success’, with those who demonstrated exceptional knowledge or professional skill held in newly high esteem. Importantly, meritocracy is an individualist model of status. The status accrued by a prominent scientist does not necessarily extend to his wife or children…

Thus the Enlightenment initially opened up new status opportunities for men (success) whilst undermining those that supported women (virtue). We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time-intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

Over time, this set of status mechanics spread, intensified, and deepened, particularly during the process of urbanization during the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately this culminates in today, when the standard introductory question has become ‘What do you do?’. This is because the most effective way to gauge the status of one’s interlocutor is to understand their level of success within our meritocracy. Unfortunately, ‘I’m a mother’ is not a good answer to this question, because this conveys little status within a success framework, which is usually the operative one. Women are, understandably, hesitant to be continuously humiliated in this way, and will make whatever tradeoffs are necessary to ensure they have a better answer.

Two commonly suggested (but unfortunately impossible) solutions provided by liberal respondents were ‘Why don’t we make having children a marker of success, and thus a source of success-status?’ and ‘We must find liberal ways to revive virtue games.’

Children will never be an independent marker of success, simply because a lot of unsuccessful people have them. Indeed, the underclasses are amongst the most fertile in Western societies. We also cannot raise birthrates by relying on making ‘successful children’ - ie. high-achievers - a marker of success, as this quickly devolves into a game in which it is advantageous to have fewer children so that one can concentrate limited resources to ensure that the children one does have can secure every advantage in the pursuit of success.

Nor can liberal society revive high birthrates as the product of liberal virtue games. It is difficult to generate incentives to have children within a liberal framework. This is because liberalism is a philosophy of freedom, in which ‘freedom’ is understood to be emancipation from unchosen and non-consensual bonds. Liberalism is a project of liberation, of radical personal freedom.

A societal project with a central ethic of autonomous freedom is a poor foundation upon which to expect that individuals will make personal sacrifices for the good of the collective. And, for all the reasons that The List identifies, having children is a sacrifice. At its core, having a child represents the creation of an inviolable bond and is thus an illiberal act.

The notion that children will ever provide virtue-status outside the extended family is unlikely, precisely because children are family and their existence is of concern to that structure. As our ‘nations’ increasingly resemble ‘economic zones comprised of free agents’ rather than ‘extended families’, this possibility becomes less likely still.

In fact, the sacrifice of having children only makes sense in the context of a worldview which liberalism is historically unique in rejecting: a teleological worldview. Purpose - telos - is a necessary precursor to binding virtue games.

Permit me a detour into the history of philosophy to explain how our present society cannot view having children as truly good. I promise that it will become clear how this philosophical digression is relevant to birthrates.