It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future

I believe it to be an arguable but inescapable truism that civilization has three goals - produce enough to ensure survival and continuity. How you achieve those three goals; productivity, survival and continuity, is of course a rich story of widely divergent choices. All three goals hinge to some extent on birthrates.

Ross Douthat has a column touching on these issues, More Babies, Please commenting on the recent decline in fertility in America. Fertility rates have been an age old concern of all cultures and civilizations. Any society that does not produce enough new members to replace the existing cohort inherently condemns itself to non-existence and simply serving, regardless of past accomplishments, as a case study in cultural suicide. It is easy to get dramatic and alarmist but fertility is one of those unavoidable Copybook Headings of Kipling.

Finally, there’s been a broader cultural shift away from a child-centric understanding of romance and marriage. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans told Pew that children were “very important” to a successful marriage; in 2007, just before the current baby bust, only 41 percent agreed. (That trend goes a long way toward explaining why gay marriage, which formally severs wedlock from sex differences and procreation, has gone from a nonstarter to a no-brainer for so many people.)

Government’s power over fertility rates is limited, but not nonexistent. America has no real family policy to speak of at the moment, and the evidence from countries like Sweden and France suggests that reducing the ever-rising cost of having kids can help fertility rates rebound. Whether this means a more family-friendly tax code, a push for more flexible work hours, or an effort to reduce the cost of college, there’s clearly room for creative policy to make some difference.

More broadly, a more secure economic foundation beneath working-class Americans would presumably help promote childbearing as well. Stable families are crucial to prosperity and mobility, but the reverse is also true, and policies that made it easier to climb the economic ladder would make it easier to raise a family as well.

Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.

An additional symptom which Douthat does not draw particular attention to is that the retreat from childrearing reflects a focus on consumption over investment. It is the ultimate vote of no confidence by a society upon itself.