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.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 ‘After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory’ is a revolutionary history of the conception of truth and goodness in the West. MacIntyre seeks to explain how we arrived at a point in which our society is riven not just by divides on specific moral questions, but by the lack of a deeper and shared concept of goodness itself which resolution of specific moral questions would require.
One of his most fascinating investigations concerns the history of the word morality. Surprisingly, this is a more modern term than most of us would expect.
In Latin, as in ancient Greek, there is no word correctly translated by our word ‘moral’; or rather there is no such word until our word ‘moral’ is translated back into Latin.
— Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
This indicates ‘morality’, as we now understand it, would have been alien to ethical systems which reasoned in Latin, including early Christianity and all which came before. When we think of the ancients as discussing ‘morality’, we are thus committing a subtle anachronism. The pre-moderns were conducting investigations of a different nature to those we conduct today.
It is in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that [morality] recognizably takes on its modern meaning… In that period ‘morality’ became the name for that particular sphere in which rules of conduct which are neither theological nor legal nor aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own.
— Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
That is to say: the philosophy of morality seeks to define the good without allowing participants to make fundamental theological declarations, and ascribes no ultimate value to statements of a purely legal or fundamentally aesthetic nature.
Structurally, modern ‘moral discourse’ takes on a different form from earlier ethical investigations. Influential older investigations used a teleological framing and structure.
This earlier teleological structure uses the following logic: man has an end, a purpose. This purpose is inextricably linked with the good - an absolute. The task of ethics is to identify this end, and then to observe the present state of man and discern which laws would orient him towards his end. These laws are thus virtuous because respect for them takes man closer to perfection by rightfully pursuing his purpose.
The mutual adoption of this teleological framework by Christian philosophers and the pagan philosophers of antiquity is the reason that one group was able to build upon the other. Aristotle becomes a major influence over Aquinas. Both traditions followed the same fundamental logic: one accepts an absolute good for man and is thus able to work backwards with certainty to judge and guide an individual man and his actions.
…there is an excellence that belongs to a coat, for a coat has a particular function and use, and the best state of a coat is its goodness; and similarly with a ship and a house and the rest. So that the same is true also of the soul, for it has a function of its own… And the function of each thing is its end.
— Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics
Cardinal Ratzinger - later Pope Benedict XVI - clarifies the necessity of this absolute reference point in defining a man’s purpose and action within the Christian system:
It is a human way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality… it is the bestowal of meaning without which the totality of man would remain homeless, on which man’s calculations and actions are based, and without which in the last resort he could not calculate and act, because he can only do this in the context of a meaning that bears him up. For in fact man does not live on the bread of practicability alone.
— Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity
Liberal moral philosophies reject this logic. They do ‘live on the bread of practicability alone’. By rejecting the necessity of a telos - of beginning philosophical investigations with an identification of a universal purpose - they follow a different logic: a non-teleological one.
Rather than asserting an ultimate end and working backwards, liberal philosophers attempt a sceptical task akin to the scientific method: they begin with observations about reality and work forward, attempt to use these as a foundation to suggest ethical action, which they call morality.
We can conceive of the change in the structure of philosophy as follows:
Classical: [Man’s purpose] demands [laws] which bind [man’s present state].
Liberal: [Man’s present state] allows us to induce [laws].
When laid out as above, one can see the irresolvable nature of the liberal moral project. Man’s observations about reality are too varied, his possible interpretations of these observations too wide, and potential laws derived from his interpretations are too personal to be universally binding.
The liberal quest for freedom requires expanding the vista of acceptable action, which in turn requires denying that man has a specific telos. Unfortunately, it emerges that achieving absolute freedom requires destroying absolute good. Without an statement of man’s purpose which references a universal conception of the perfect, rules become arbitrary.
This pursuit of a universal ‘pure morality’ independent from the traditional sources of ethical truth was structurally doomed to failure. And, indeed, it has failed in delivering widely satisfactory answers to the questions it pursues: there is no universally agreed upon moral system, and each person, in practice, follows their own instincts and temptations, adopting whichever moral system conforms with these.
This necessitates the liberal rights-based paradigm. As there is no universal end which man must pursue in the liberal system, and each person is free to set off in whichsoever direction he chooses, liberal laws seek to accommodate and reify this freedom, and endow man with positive ‘human rights’.
Now - how does this translate into a lack of children?
Back to Yuni.
Without reference to man’s greater purpose, and guided only by the priorities of the unconstrained and atomized individual, childbirths will decline.
If people do not believe that man has an end which it is necessary to satisfy, but instead adopt the arbitrary but inevitable prioritization of whatever brings them the most ‘happiness’, children are one of the first things to go. It turns out that the portion of the population who are strongly convinced that children will bring more pleasure than pain is limited. This is rational: children are not toys, and are ill-suited to a world of pleasure.
Yuni is right: childbirth and rearing is dangerous, difficult, and an irrevocable commitment. It is a sacrifice. But the liberal paradigm is unable to answer the question of ‘What is the sacrifice for?’.
(A nation that is able to answer this question is Israel, which is a teleological nation founded with a specific purpose: the preservation of the Jewish people. A shared recognition of this purpose - and of the difficulty of achieving it in a hostile region - allows for the revival of virtue status for mothers. It should be no surprise then, that Israel has a positive birthrate even among its secular populations).
To become a parent is to move directly away from the highest good in liberal society - freedom - and to enter into the very thing that our society is oriented to abolish, which are unchosen obligations. Thus, we do not merely lack a pro-natalist teleology - we have a de-facto teleology which is actively opposed to reproduction at every stage. Babies, as the ultimate rebuttal to liberal individualism, are shunned.
This is exemplified by liberal support for abortion, which is an act that expresses the liberal primacy of adult freedom over the dependence of the child. Where the individual rights framework is challenged by potential contradiction (when obligations to a child evidently supersede the rights of parents to abandon them) liberalism permits ending the lives of dependents until the appearance of the coherence of the rights framework is restored. Adults are again free to go about their lives maximally unencumbered by obligations.
This requires implicitly redefining ‘human’ to mean ‘agent with the ability to exercise autonomy in the pursuit of pleasure’ - a deeply liberal conception. Thus foetuses, unable to exercise agency, are considered less-than-human. For the same reason, a greater license is extended to terminate the lives of the unborn with conditions that affect their ability to exercise agency (like Down Syndrome) or are likely to cause suffering.
A second-order effect of the liberal system compounds this anti-natalist outcome. If one’s children do not have an ongoing and inviolable obligation to their parents and the community which raised them, there is less reason to have them. Parents assume hardship and inviolable obligations without receiving guarantees of support and mutual obligation in return. Once children are grown, they are understood to be autonomous adults free to disperse of any shackles of obligation.
Thus there is a rationality to the paranoid obsession found within The Handmaid’s Tale. In this imagined transition from liberalism to a post-liberal society, women are truly reduced to servants and not participants in mutual service.
The Handmaiden’s Tale is instructive as an example of late-liberal fears because it imagines a new society which instrumentalizes women’s bodies - ie. understands them as purposeful - and integrates women into a system of unchosen obligations which includes having children. The book recognizes the tension between childbirth and liberalism, and comes to the natural conclusion of regarding childbirth as a threat to women’s rights as autonomous agents.
This strain of paranoia recurs in the work of female liberal authors. It takes a different but perhaps more extreme form in the work of Ayn Rand, in which the threat of children to her hyper-liberal ideals is solved by removing the existence of children altogether.
As
has pointed out, in Rand’s worldbuilding the near-total absence of children amongst the idealized heroic class is conspicuous. The few children who appear in Atlas Shrugged are reconceived as indistinguishable from fully-autonomous rational adults:You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker’s oath by his own independent conviction… here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
The difficulty of resolving the tension between liberalism and childbirth has been recognized since the philosophy’s inception, as far back as John Locke. Locke struggled to find any positive framing for parenting, instead presenting it as something that would inevitably happen and would have to be endured until the children were grown. Indeed, he cannot help but construe the illiberal nature of the parent/child relationship as inherently negative, choosing the odd word ‘subjection’ to describe a child’s deference to their parents:
…the bonds of this subjection are like the swaddling clothes they are wrapped up in and supported by in the weakness of their infancy. Age and reason, as they grow up, loosen them, till at length they drop quite off.
— John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government
This negativity is reflected in Yuni’s list, which refers to children as ‘parasites’. As Nathanael Blake aptly describes children in the liberal system:
…dependence, which is equated with subjection, becomes viewed as a temporary burden to be put up with, rather than an essential aspect of humanity around which society should organize itself.
— Nathanael Blake, Liberal Individualism Is Undermining Itself
All of this is to say that the liberal system is mis-calibrated for fertility. Extending people the right to have children does not cause them to have children.
Within a liberal system, there is no higher reason to have children at all. And without shared ends and reasons, there can be no virtue status games (as a virtue game extends status for conforming to behaviours that are mutually understood to be sacrificial in support of a shared good).
This is why my controversial list of necessary steps to revive birthrates at the end of my last piece was strikingly illiberal.
To revive virtue games it is necessary to create systems which reduce freedom. The groups that accept this and take up their purpose will survive. Others will not.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Excellent essay, not the only reason why not, but definitely a major one.
One strong argument for childbirth by the civilized; There goes the neighborhood, if you don't then as you age you're neighbors, replacing those that die off will be imported cat and dog eating barbarians.
Personally though I find raising children satisfying and great fun. My oldest is a bit wobbly but I still have some hopes she'll turn out OK. My youngest who turned 60 a few months ago, is almost in my opinion, a responsible adult. ;-)
BTW; The first 50 years of raising them is the hardest, it gets easier after that.
Insightful as always.
This essay helped me see more clearly how this kind of pleasure-focused teleology of the individual belies how liberals tend to view the use of space.
This is especially notable in how it's inculcated into young people's notion that living in the city is high-status. Not only is it high status, but the reasons for living in the city (all the reasons given to justify or "sell" it to college bound youth) reduce to the belief that the city is to function as a theme park. What is the telos of a theme park: amusement, fun, excitement, pleasure. An implicit teleology that the point of life is the pursuit of pleasure leads to viewing reality in this way.
Thus parts of Brooklyn have been transformed not into fruitful neighborhoods to be inherited and cultivated over generations, but into commodified, sterile pleasure arcades.
Thus rural villages in New Hampshire are not treated as someone's town and home, but a park in service to seasonal leaf-watching.
Maybe strangely, the acknowledgement of this teleology is not hard to produce. I've known many city-stricken millenials who, when this is pointed out, are happy to admit that this is how they see the world and want it to work, often being frustrated when it does not cater to their amusement. Literarily, George Saunders even shows its grotesque debasement of humanity in many of his short stories, in which all parts of history and culture are susceptible to becoming commodified theme parks.