Destroying the Thing We Live By

T hroughout Anna Karenina, Konstantin Levin functions as a parallel protagonist to the title character, Anna. He has the same tragic potential and, like Anna, seriously entertains suicide (though, unlike Anna, he does not go through with it). What saves him in the end is a profound realization about the source of his unhappiness.

Levin recalls having seen his sister-in-law scolding her children for messing around with the food and crockery. She had explained to them that “if they smashed the cups, they would have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.”

And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which the children heard what their mother said to them. They were simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by.

In a similar way, civilizations “live by” their ability to produce and rear offspring. And yet, in recent decades, Western civilization has been undermining that life-sustaining social project by sacrificing the tried and the tested for the deranged and the ideological. For instance, there are those who think it a noble, liberating project to collapse the categories of male and female. Others, meanwhile, claim that babies are parasites and that having them ruins the planet.

What is surprising is how some of these ideas have been popularized in the mainstream. In the run-up to Mother’s Day, a congresswoman used the phrase “birthing people,” reducing the wonder of motherhood to the mechanics of the final stage of gestation. And when a columnist for the New York Times wrote a thoughtful essay about why she doesn’t regret having had her children at a relatively young age, there was an uproar on progressive Twitter. Prince Harry, meanwhile, has told Vogue that he and Meghan would only be having two children on account of climate change.

The fertility rate has been steadily declining for over a decade. The CDC now reports the general fertility rate in 2020 hit 55.8 births per 1,000 women between 15 and 44 years old, representing a 4 percent drop and a new low. Yet polling consistently indicates that most Americans desire more children than they end up having. So what might be contributing to the “baby bust”?

Some analysts point to political and economic factors, as well as new family friendly policies that could help reverse things. There is something to this. But it might be worth considering, as well, how it is that we have been smashing up marriage and squandering our reproductive potential.

The “gender revolution,” the monstrous sequel to the sexual revolution, may prove momentarily diverting, but we cannot get away from the birds and the bees. The origin of each human being is the fusion of sperm (from a male) with ovum (from a female). At the moment of fertilization, the combination of these male and female gametes creates an additional, distinct, and complete set of chromosomal DNA: a new person. Bringing sperm and ovum together is the easy part (indeed, it is so easy that it is often done accidentally), but to create a new person in such a way that his parents are both equipped and willing to raise him, we need some other incentive. While “love” sounds nice enough, historically, it has been marriage — understood as a lifelong union based on the complementarity of the sexes, primarily for the purpose of producing and rearing children — that fulfilled this social role.

Though this connection between babies and marriage was once obvious, the wider availability of contraception at the turn of the 20th century began this great unraveling. By 2013, a Pew Research Center survey found that while 88 percent of people thought “love” was an important reason to get married, only 49 percent thought “having children” was important. Children became a marital afterthought. A symptom of this, though by no means a cause, is the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage. (Same-sex relationships are, by their nature, not geared towards reproduction. But today, this is generally considered to be insignificant.)

The promise of the sexual revolution was that we’d have more choice and we’d all be happier for it. But this was predicated on the idea that people make choices with great conviction and independent of social expectation when they obviously don’t. Most people are ambivalent and go with the flow. They fall in love, then move in together, maybe get a dog, maybe buy a house, maybe get married, maybe have a baby (if they get around to it, or if she really wants one.) And if pregnancy happens by accident or if the baby daddy treacherously flees — at absolutely no social cost — there’s always abortion.

When anyone dares to mention that — regardless of the new technologies or social standards — sex, babies, and marriage are still necessarily connected if we are to sustain our civilization, they become the source of intense irritation. Just as in Tolstoy’s scene, the children resent their mother for reminding them that the food is for eating, not squandering, and the cups are for drinking out of, not smashing. The truth is that no government policy created the baby bust. We did that ourselves, by destroying the very thing we live by.