Jen Gerson: Okay, but we do need more babies

I mean, not me personally. But in general. Especially for you lefties out there.

By: Jen Gerson

Listeners of The Line Podcast will know very well that I've been struggling to articulate a Big Theme that I see repeated endlessly in smaller policy battles between left and right. Or, perhaps more accurately, between the dying political consensus that existed on a range of assumptions and was largely upheld by the generational ethos of the Boomers, and the ideals and rejections of that ethos that are still coalescing in the minds and hearts of the coming generations.

The theme is that we keep on trying to tack material solutions onto spiritual problems. Our humanist, secular, small-l liberal materialist societies are bereft of the language required to articulate problems that are inescapably moral and transcendent. We have easy conversations about individual rights — the things the government owes me — or, say, taxation policy, but no ready answers to questions of duty, sacrifice or the ethics of what it is that we owe to one another.

See, even I'm struggling to explain this point!

Yet, I see this habit — the material solution for the spiritual problem — in just about everything now. And I think it's the issue that sits at the divide between the materialist establishment, and the spirit of populism. Neither side really understands what the other is going on about. It's not just that these groups are consuming different informational spheres — though they are. It's that their values are, increasingly, fatally misaligned. Both lack the common language and mutual understanding required to bridge the gap. Each then assumes the worst in the other.

Take, for example, one of the most basic and foundational problems of any human society: reproduction and family formation. We can argue endlessly about how many immigrants to bring in to prop up a declining birth rate — that's an immediate, material fix — but if a society can't sustain its birth rate and population internally over time due to a host of economic, cultural and spiritual deficits, it's Game Over pretty damn quick. Unless you're envisioning a future in which AI-powered robots are mass-harvesting tiny humans out of gooey pods, human survival is a very straightforward math problem. We need to form families. Those families need to create enough children to replace the dead.

There are many different ways we can structure society and incentivize individuals to perpetuate ourselves, but as of now, we are no longer meeting this most basic brief. Canada's total fertility rate sits at 1.33 babies per woman, below America's 1.66. Neither of our countries is close to replacement, which requires slightly more than two births per woman — enough to replace both parents, with a small margin for children that don’t survive to adulthood. Like most of the developed world, Canada's fertility rate has collapsed and most of the developing world is not far behind. This is an issue that we, collectively, need to resolve. And material solutions alone — tax incentives, better maternity leave, daycare policies, and cheaper housing — are demonstrably not enough to get us there.

Because our replication as a society is more than just a material problem.

Conservatives, who are generally more comfortable rooting their ideology in a spiritual ethic, understand this. Progressives, as far as I can tell, largely ignore it, and often regard conversations about birth rate and demographics as suspect. As if the shared hope of continuing humanity forward for another generation is just code for dragging out the red robes and imposing the state of Gilead.

Granted, the fact that the most famous advocate for pro-natalist policies is Elon Musk is enough to make anyone want to sterilize the whole human race. Natalism has also long been a fixation of white supremacists, which taints the whole conversation further. (I am going to assume my readers will offer enough good faith to know that I have no sympathy for any of that ideology. I don't care what colour anybody's baby is. They're all cute and smell pleasant.)

There is a major trust divide here. When Conservatives talk about "family values," I think most progressives detect hypocrisy, or hear a dog-whistle attack on gay or trans rights, and abortion access. There is some truth to this. But when I hear Conservatives talk about these issues, I infer a far more holistic meaning. Conservatives understand the importance of sustainable family formation, and put that understanding at the core of its ethic and policy goals.

This ceding of one of the most important and basic realities of human society to the right has led to some bizarre and counter-productive policy outcomes for the left. Put bluntly, since people tend to raise children in line with their own beliefs, the left is opting out of the demographics race, and that is allowing conservatives to win policy battles, or at least put up a hell of a fight, by sheer weight of numbers.

This isn’t untested theory. We're already studying how even marginal disparities in fertility rates between liberals and conservatives have had generational impacts on politics over time, both in Europe and the U.S. One study in of the subject in the U.S. suggested that: "This demographic phenomenon raises opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion by 3 to 4 percentage points. It accounts for 7.9 million of the nation’s 54.8 million opponents to same-sex marriage."

And that's the impact of a relatively small disparity; the fertility gap between the two groups is continuing to grow, and we should expect to see this fact impact politics in weird and wild ways in coming generations, according to Lyman Stone, a senior fellow at Cardus.

Cardus is one of the only think tanks in this country that is consistently even asking questions about family choice and fertility, and is an explicitly Christian organization based in Hamilton, Ontario. (That they're one of the few even asking these questions is itself indicative of the problem.) Their studies show that both religiosity and political affiliation predict family preferences and outcomes. The more right-leaning and religious you are, the more children you are likely to have.

Now, it should be noted here, that both left and right-leaning women are having fewer children than they want, and neither group is hitting a fertility rate that meets replacement. Economic factors account for this in both cases. But for women who lean left, those economic obstacles are compounded by cultural considerations and assumptions that further reduce the number of children she is likely to have.

When asked, the top-five family planning concerns were, in order: “Want to grow as a person,” “Need to focus on career,” “Overall low income,” “Desire for leisure consumption,” and “Desire to save money.”

Any one of these concerns is perfectly understandable, even laudable, for any individual person focused solely on his or her individual outcome. And of course — of course! — not every couple can or should have kids. I would sincerely request that anyone reading this article avoid taking personal offence — none of this ought to be regarded as judgement on any individual's choices or circumstances. Not everyone is straight. Fertility is a real struggle for many couples. Even for those who could have children, there are other factors. Children are expensive. Raising them is hard. They do limit a person's ability to focus on a career, or spend money on vacations and clothes. Hey, we've all only got one life to life. Might as well get the most out of it.

But for those who prioritize the needs of society and family over the needs of the self, what's indicated by this data is a catastrophe playing out, slowly, over the course of generations.

“Want to grow as a person”?!

An ideology that is rooted in the primacy of individual self-actualization over the most basic needs of collective survival is an ideology of self-annihilation. A political ethic that won't address the need for children is one that is ceding the most basic human necessity to its opponents.

It is also fostering a default assumption about who ought to be having babies, and who can be free of the messy financial and physical burden to pursue lives of fulfilled careers, leisure, and travel. If, for example, your answer to a collapsing fertility rate is to argue for greater immigration, I'd ask you to consider the fact that you're effectively outsourcing the burden of birth to women in the developing world to sustain the population of wealthier societies. Not only is this questionably ethical, it's also not sustainable. Birth rates in the developing world are also collapsing, which means we can't harvest the developing world's best and brightest indefinitely.

The assumptions implicit in these policy preferences often go unstated — but they are clearly communicated, consciously or otherwise. About who ought to be having babies, and who gets to avoid the trouble. And this communication fuels right-wing conspiracy theories around education. This is the heart of why so many families have come to the conclusion that public schools exist to brainwash their children into an ideology that cannot sustain itself internally.

And is there not at least a small nugget of truth to the charge?

Remember the furor from parents furious at the prospect that schools would allow their children to socially transition without informing them: Even parents entirely in favour of trans rights were put off by the implicit assumption that they — and their retrograde values — were a problem to be solved by the benevolent moral leadership of school boards and enlightened technocrats.

Conspiracies aside, the outcomes of all of this are clear. In the U.S., higher fertility correlated heavily with votes for Donald Trump in the last election. We can argue the Chicken-Egg problem interminably; does conservatism incline a family toward more children, or does having more children foster a more conservative outlook? I'm not sure that answer is resolvable, but it's also irrelevant.

Our political debates increasingly focus on the marginal at the expense of the foundational. We have all grown accustomed to friendship-killing online battles about trans women in sports, slut shaming, and the fluidity of gender, and yet avoid far more substantive conversations on issues that are radically more common and crucial: demographic decline and healthy family foundation are existential problems. Perhaps we avoid them in favour of more peripheral debates because there are no clear answers to the hard problems that don't force us to confront unquestioned assumptions about who we are and what we value.

Nonetheless, parties, movements and ideologies that forgo the spiritual conversations around family formation will always be fighting a rear-guard action in their attempts to win converts to their material agendas. If you are a champion of more collectivist economic policies, for example, your struggle is and will continue to be a fight to persuade the children who are the product of more culturally conservative families.

Will there be progressive and liberal families from which to draw your future political class? Of course. But that pool will diminish over time relative to the alternatives, especially as the fertility gap between the two groups widens.

Many Conservatives regard these trends with a degree of totally unwarranted triumphalism, Stone pointed out. The outcome of this is actually far more wacky and difficult to predict. Political affiliation is only loosely heritable. While we can see the impact of family formation on political movements in hindsight, parties and ideologies are competitive and dynamic. No one can look at a disparity in a fertility rate today and accurately predict what that will mean for the outcome of an election, or the probability of the success of a specific policy proposal 20 or 40 years from now.

However, there are some possibilities we can consider. Political movements that depend heavily on converts to juice growth behave differently than institutions whose populations are self-sustaining. "High zeal and high volatility," are common features of movements that depend on converts. These groups tend to score more highly on the "kinds of behaviours we associate with exclusive religious cults," he added. Cutting off ties with family, for example. More emphasis on public demonstrations would be another.

At present, I think these behaviours can be spotted in both the extremes of both the right and the left. We are in a moment of political realignment in which various political ideologies are growing at each other's expense — seeking converts — and behaving more zealously as a result. Stone argues that over time, these underlying demographic realities suggest that these more extremist social elements will increasingly be features of "left" leaning movements. That is, if current trends continue.

I will further note, although this is purely anecdotal, that the most ardent and committed cultural conservatives I know are the products of unhappy and loosely liberal childhoods that resulted in divorce and dislocation.

One of my pet theories is that the dramatic demographic and political shifts we are now witnessing — especially the movement of the young back into more traditional and conservative values — is a direct result of this very phenomenon. Millennials and under are the collateral damage of Boomer excess, and our generational response to it is a categorical rejection of the political assumptions of our forebears. But we don't yet have the language or intellectual foundation to replace it with anything better — hence all this populist flailing. We sense our systems and assumptions are failing. We want to burn it all down, but we are bereft of the moral vision required to build it back up again.

I will add that nothing about this is predestined, by the way. There really is no reason progressives can't flip these alignments and become champions of working-class families, yet again. In our ongoing discussions about housing policy, it amazes me how little we're talking about cooperative housing, for example. If we're going to subsidize housing projects, let's build options that are both affordable and highly communal to try to foster the social links that our hyper-individualistic values have blown apart.

Or, if you prefer, perhaps we should be talking about a truly radical redistribution scheme. Let's pay families who raise a lot of children a subsidy that makes multiple babies as lucrative as any other professional career. And tax everyone else accordingly.

But more needs to be done here than simple material policy fixes. A progressive movement that puts family, however defined, at the forefront of their ethic and material pursuit can reverse a lot of trends, and quickly.

Because I will warn you, my lefty friends, the right sees this problem very, very clearly. There is a reason that the most extreme are fixated on seemingly niche policy goals like homeschooling, charter schools, and property rights. At the far end, we even have Rod Dreher-types advocating for things like his so-called Benedict Option — the formation of Christian communities that exist parallel to secular society. They are carving out the legal and social infrastructure they need to counter-program their own children in a way that perpetuates their own values.

These are the politics of retrenchment: if they can't win the argument, they can outlast it. They have figured out that they don't need to win the culture war, they just need to wait for the internal logic of cultural liberalism to annihilate itself over the course of a few generations.

I believe that this attitude is profoundly unhealthy, and likely to backfire by producing psychologically damaged children and dysfunctional families who will themselves be made more vulnerable to zealous conversion. But the core logic of it isn't totally wrong, either. Cultural liberalism does indeed seem bent on its own annihilation.

"Sustainability" isn't a word that ought to be confined to environmental policy. We, humans, must also be culturally, mathematically, sustainable. We must organize our societies in a way that ensures survival, adaptation, and replication.

History belongs not to the righteous but to those who can teach their kids to maintain healthy family structures; to those who see themselves as one part of a grander project of humanity.

A spiritual project, if you will.

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