Conservatism itself was rooted in the idea of inheritance and posterity.
Jim Geraghty writes about the declining number of births to Americans last year and the knock-on effects of this. He alludes to an issue that has preoccupied me for the last decade when he writes about how having children is the occasion upon which adults expand their long-term thinking. Jim writes:
This is not intended to pooh-pooh anyone out there who didn’t have children or hasn’t had children yet, but children are an amazing incentive for long-term thinking in adults. When people become parents, suddenly they have an enormous investment in the condition of their community, their country, and the world a decade or two down the road. The “burn it down” mentality has a much harder time catching on when you’ve got a lot more to lose.
The Institute for Family Studies regularly publishes detailed reports on the declining birth rate and delayed family formation, and those reports are chock full of recommendations. Yet other than nibbling around the edges — creating the $1,000 “Trump account,” increasing the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,220, and establishing the Moms.gov website — there’s little indication that halting or reversing the declining birth rate is truly a priority for the president or most members of Congress.
I think my generational radicalism is down to the fact that for me the numbers themselves suggest we are “burning it all down” presently.
It’s not just the long-termism of adults. I think Mary Eberstadt has shown rather conclusively that falling birth rates are a leading indicator, not a lagging indicator, of the waning of religious faith. Children become the occasion for adults to reconnect with their faith, and deepen it. The shrinking of kith-and-kin networks isn’t replaced on a one-to-one level with the radical expansion of digital social networks, or by the way modern life seems to loosely “connect” people. Kith-and-kin networks are tied together, even in the West, by bonds of affection and even a little duty. The people being born into smaller families with fewer aunts and uncles and siblings and cousins in some way experience “less care” overall, even if their parents love them dearly. They have less natural intimate access to the variety of personality types and even careers that these people have.
At a practical level, if you don’t have kids, you have less incentive to bed down in one community of other adults, invest in it long term, and improve its daily operation.
A cursory review shows that family policy, such as it is, has mostly failed at helping people achieve their stated desired fertility, wherever it has been tried. Governments will likely keep trying as it becomes clear this is a threat to the state.
Another aspect of this that is dawning on me is that our inherited political and social vocabulary comes from a much higher fertility world — with much larger and denser kith-and-kin networks. All the historic talk of individualism and rights had this as an assumed bedrock.
Conservatism itself was rooted in the idea of inheritance and posterity. What did we receive from our parents and grandparents that we want to leave preserved before we pass this world on to our children? When that natural pull toward the future is so considerably weakened, what will we do with what we have today? I suspect, collectively, we’re far more inclined to exhaust the assets and inadvertently destroy them.