Get a bunch of women sitting around and talking and more often than not they express their regret for not having had kids or not having had more kids. We were the generation who waited too long before we had kids and who suffered through infertility and often ended up with max two children. It was all about career etc. I was once in a book club of about eight women and only two had their own kids including me, the rest having had to adopt (most of these adoptions turned out to be ‘difficult’ for one reason or another). This was a very wealthy crowd who had the max flexibility to do what they wanted. That said, I have two daughters, 30 and 31 whom I have admonished to start having kids earlier than I did. One has been married for five years and is in finance with no kid in sight and the other is not married at all. It’s worrisome to say the least. Have kids! And then more kids!
The Western crisis of meaning started long before the birthrate fell. It's correlated much more with the decline of organized religion historically (and the rise of romantic love).
I think your basic point is right here — public meeting places don’t replace the family relationship — but I don’t think that means the parks-and-libraries crowd is entirely wrong, either. I live in a smallish city where there are a lot of public spaces available. I think those spaces give the city a sort of cohesion and a sense of togetherness that would otherwise be harder to keep in mind. That’s the outermost ring of connections; the least strong bond after families and churches and schools. But it’s still nice to have multiple layers of connection, of varying degrees of strength. So I can see the argument that such spaces are a meaningful public good.
But I agree that they generally can’t create a meaningful life on their own.
If the American Left (or Right, for that matter) had any brain at all, it would minimize immigration, encourage large families, develop an industrial policy at a national level that restored the ability to live off of one income, crack down on large publicly held corporations that break communities apart and destroy small businesses, reduce the tax burden to nothing for those who have 3 or more kids, and cut the defense budget by a half or more and then reinvest that money in the nation's infrastructure. Doing so would give them the power they so desperately crave, for generations, and they would gain it legitimately for once.
There is not and cannot be any substitute for them.
I remember getting a pissy lecture from an attractive young woman on some feminist type issue. She used a phrase like “social construction” of something or other. And I’m looking at her and I’m thinking: The fundamental shape of your body, which I’m looking at, your waist, your hips, your breasts, evolved over millions of years to make and feed babies. That is older than politics, older than Society, million of years, thousands of times older. The biological organisms speaking to me was built by forces so ancient that she can’t even imagine them, and she is saying things that deny those forces even exist, though they compose what she actually is, down to the most basic feelings and urges in the oldest parts of her brain. And she has somehow missed all this. Women suffer the most from the loss of marriage, family and children. They are built for it, literally. And when they lose the chance to have it, nothing can ever make up for that loss.
"Hertz argues that since people are having smaller families, we need to ask ourselves how to replace the meaning they used to find in children, siblings, and cousins by encouraging them to find ways “'to care for people who are not necessarily linked to them by blood.'”
Organized religion used to play that role in people's lives, I suspect (I don't know personally, because my parents weren't religious and neither am I), and its ongoing collapse seems to me to have created, at least partly, this lack of meaning and personal connection for a lot of people. A library is a poor substitute, clearly.
I think you're correct about ideological commitments preventing people like her from ever advocating the most basic solutions to this problem. I would just add that a big one of these is environmentalism. When I used to be on the left in my younger days, population growth was a huge concern. Having more than two kids were considered selfish and feckless, and having none at all was considered an admirable sacrifice for the good of the planet. You don't hear as much of this sentiment today, as birth rates have declined and there's more triumphalism about turning the US into a majority minority country because diversity is so great and all, but I think it's still there, hiding beneath the surface.
Really well written. This is exactly right, and I think where all the real cultural energy is now. It’s still nascent, obviously, but I think this form of community building and the philosophy behind it will be the next big “movement”.
When we talk about people being dissatisfied due to lack of meaning, I think we are misdiagnosing the problem. I concede that having children is one way to assign meaning to one's life, but this is not the only possible meaning to life and never has been: people have fought and died for their country; people have taught youth philosophy, law, medicine, or some other topic of knowledge which would be used by their students to benefit themselves or others; people have written great works of literature still read centuries later; people have led their states successfully through times of crisis, or introduced reforms that changed their states for the better; people have made great scientific discoveries that changed the way we live or see the world; people have built structures that continued to stand beyond their own lifetimes; people have founded businesses that continued to be successful after they died: you might say that most of these are difficult for most people to achieve, but more modest meanings can also be assigned to one's life, such as building a garden in one's backyard that would continue to be enjoyed by birds, insects, or other animals beyond one's lifetime; or collecting a small library of books and storing them in a safe place so that, if civilization should collapse, there would be one more place for future historians to uncover and rediscover the literature of one's own age: the possibilities are really limitless, as long as they involve some aspect of your life "pointing beyond" your own existence.
And of course there's the big meaning that most people throughout history have hoped for or feared: that after they died, they should have a second life lived in accordance with how they lived in the first one. There's no greater, more totalizing meaning to one's life than the knowledge that when one dies one will go to the underworld to be punished for one's misdeeds, yet I doubt most people would be happy if they were told that this was the meaning that their life in fact had. And, on the other hand, people in heaven probably are no less happy for the knowledge that their eternal happiness in paradise is meaningless, that it doesn't in turn point to another post-afterlife. So I find the handwringing over meaning vain: meaning is readily available to all and the possibilities for meaning are numerous enough to suit all preferences and capabilities; and the extreme examples of heaven and hell show that meaning is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for happiness. What people are really searching for is "it": the one meaningless but all-encompassing experience that everything they've done was building up to. This is why people hope to go to heaven, because they think heaven is "it"; the same impulse leads people to experiment with drugs, strive to attain prophetic ecstasy, and probably also to have children: in the moment, it seems that nothing else matters than to have these experiences, but unfortunately the experience doesn't last. Even parents suffer from empty-nest syndrome, if their children do survive to adulthood.
So the search for meaning is a red herring; the real question is whether the ultimate meaningless experience exists, and then how it can be attained. In recent centuries people have come to doubt the existence of heaven or a posthumous paradise for good people to enjoy forever; I think there are good reasons to doubt its existence, and this doubt has certainly caused a psychological crisis, but calling this crisis a crisis of meaning is the opposite of the truth, and certainly having children is neither here nor there.
Great article. I was thinking about my small town, which has a huge library and countless parks. I never see childless adults there.
Exception: the dog park. It's the only public community space childless adults meet up with others and sometimes make lasting friendships. I wonder why...
Have you considered the possibility that an economic system in which individuals are treated as replaceable cogs might have something to do with why people do not want to have children?
Speaking of political activism: “ If anything, we should be taxing it.”
I’ve long thought that each level of government should tax the total incoming cash flow of subordinate levels of government. (Taxes, fees, fines and debt issuance.) This would help offset the tendency to treat public spending as free. It would be especially effective at deterring big debt-backed boondoggles. If we had a VAT, I’d make the rate equal to the VAT.
And I’d also add an income tax on the income of government workers at a rate that is higher by a percent equal to the the income tax rates applied to private workers by the subordinate governments. (This would offset the fact that the government can pay market wages, but then tax some of it back, which gives them an advantage in recruiting personnel.)
The relative cost of getting married and having children has gone up drastically in the last 50-75 years. Before if you wanted to have fewer children to have more more things you also more of less had to forego sex. Social Security had also reduced the annuity value of having children. And the relative price for women was even steeper. Societies have not yet adapted to this.
Personally I think that a child tax credit would at least be a symbolic step for recognizing the value of family formation and having children.
OTOH, I don't think there is a strong IDEOLOGICAL hostility to family and children although the mistaken perception that having children has a significant detrimental effect on ACC probably does play some role as does our financing SS and Medicare out of a wage tax rather than a VAT.
The solution to "Bowling Alone" is not public spaces. As the public sphere expands, it takes the energy out of the private spaces that historically made the US unique. Those private spaces existed to provide benefits to their members, whether the League of Women Voters or the Knights of Columbus, or yes, the neighborhood book club. That change was exacerbated by electronic communications, which allowed transactional relationships to replace the less-flexible but deeper relationships that preceded them.
School and participation in sports survives and draws people, together. Politics, too, although much less so.
Note also the perhaps unsurprising phenomenon that "hostages" taken by Native Americans often refused to return to their prior lives when given the chance, while many Native Americans who grew up away from their bands often returned to them, rejecting their adopted way of life, opting for a greater sense of community, despite the other sacrifices involved.
To YOU. That’s the problem with all of this essay: you think your experiences constitute conclusive evidence for your arguments. Let me provide some of mine: at least as many of my friends want to escape forever from their parents and siblings as want to be near them. Families are probably more often sources of trauma than anything else. My husband hates every member of his family of origin except his late mother and his brother, and his opinion of his brother is skeptical. Forcing people into the abusive misery that is the patriarchal family will only make more people miserable, but misery is what conservatives want.
Get a bunch of women sitting around and talking and more often than not they express their regret for not having had kids or not having had more kids. We were the generation who waited too long before we had kids and who suffered through infertility and often ended up with max two children. It was all about career etc. I was once in a book club of about eight women and only two had their own kids including me, the rest having had to adopt (most of these adoptions turned out to be ‘difficult’ for one reason or another). This was a very wealthy crowd who had the max flexibility to do what they wanted. That said, I have two daughters, 30 and 31 whom I have admonished to start having kids earlier than I did. One has been married for five years and is in finance with no kid in sight and the other is not married at all. It’s worrisome to say the least. Have kids! And then more kids!
The Western crisis of meaning started long before the birthrate fell. It's correlated much more with the decline of organized religion historically (and the rise of romantic love).
I think your basic point is right here — public meeting places don’t replace the family relationship — but I don’t think that means the parks-and-libraries crowd is entirely wrong, either. I live in a smallish city where there are a lot of public spaces available. I think those spaces give the city a sort of cohesion and a sense of togetherness that would otherwise be harder to keep in mind. That’s the outermost ring of connections; the least strong bond after families and churches and schools. But it’s still nice to have multiple layers of connection, of varying degrees of strength. So I can see the argument that such spaces are a meaningful public good.
But I agree that they generally can’t create a meaningful life on their own.
If the American Left (or Right, for that matter) had any brain at all, it would minimize immigration, encourage large families, develop an industrial policy at a national level that restored the ability to live off of one income, crack down on large publicly held corporations that break communities apart and destroy small businesses, reduce the tax burden to nothing for those who have 3 or more kids, and cut the defense budget by a half or more and then reinvest that money in the nation's infrastructure. Doing so would give them the power they so desperately crave, for generations, and they would gain it legitimately for once.
Do you have kids, Richard?
Good post.
Absolutely right about family and children.
There is not and cannot be any substitute for them.
I remember getting a pissy lecture from an attractive young woman on some feminist type issue. She used a phrase like “social construction” of something or other. And I’m looking at her and I’m thinking: The fundamental shape of your body, which I’m looking at, your waist, your hips, your breasts, evolved over millions of years to make and feed babies. That is older than politics, older than Society, million of years, thousands of times older. The biological organisms speaking to me was built by forces so ancient that she can’t even imagine them, and she is saying things that deny those forces even exist, though they compose what she actually is, down to the most basic feelings and urges in the oldest parts of her brain. And she has somehow missed all this. Women suffer the most from the loss of marriage, family and children. They are built for it, literally. And when they lose the chance to have it, nothing can ever make up for that loss.
"Hertz argues that since people are having smaller families, we need to ask ourselves how to replace the meaning they used to find in children, siblings, and cousins by encouraging them to find ways “'to care for people who are not necessarily linked to them by blood.'”
Organized religion used to play that role in people's lives, I suspect (I don't know personally, because my parents weren't religious and neither am I), and its ongoing collapse seems to me to have created, at least partly, this lack of meaning and personal connection for a lot of people. A library is a poor substitute, clearly.
I think you're correct about ideological commitments preventing people like her from ever advocating the most basic solutions to this problem. I would just add that a big one of these is environmentalism. When I used to be on the left in my younger days, population growth was a huge concern. Having more than two kids were considered selfish and feckless, and having none at all was considered an admirable sacrifice for the good of the planet. You don't hear as much of this sentiment today, as birth rates have declined and there's more triumphalism about turning the US into a majority minority country because diversity is so great and all, but I think it's still there, hiding beneath the surface.
Really well written. This is exactly right, and I think where all the real cultural energy is now. It’s still nascent, obviously, but I think this form of community building and the philosophy behind it will be the next big “movement”.
When we talk about people being dissatisfied due to lack of meaning, I think we are misdiagnosing the problem. I concede that having children is one way to assign meaning to one's life, but this is not the only possible meaning to life and never has been: people have fought and died for their country; people have taught youth philosophy, law, medicine, or some other topic of knowledge which would be used by their students to benefit themselves or others; people have written great works of literature still read centuries later; people have led their states successfully through times of crisis, or introduced reforms that changed their states for the better; people have made great scientific discoveries that changed the way we live or see the world; people have built structures that continued to stand beyond their own lifetimes; people have founded businesses that continued to be successful after they died: you might say that most of these are difficult for most people to achieve, but more modest meanings can also be assigned to one's life, such as building a garden in one's backyard that would continue to be enjoyed by birds, insects, or other animals beyond one's lifetime; or collecting a small library of books and storing them in a safe place so that, if civilization should collapse, there would be one more place for future historians to uncover and rediscover the literature of one's own age: the possibilities are really limitless, as long as they involve some aspect of your life "pointing beyond" your own existence.
And of course there's the big meaning that most people throughout history have hoped for or feared: that after they died, they should have a second life lived in accordance with how they lived in the first one. There's no greater, more totalizing meaning to one's life than the knowledge that when one dies one will go to the underworld to be punished for one's misdeeds, yet I doubt most people would be happy if they were told that this was the meaning that their life in fact had. And, on the other hand, people in heaven probably are no less happy for the knowledge that their eternal happiness in paradise is meaningless, that it doesn't in turn point to another post-afterlife. So I find the handwringing over meaning vain: meaning is readily available to all and the possibilities for meaning are numerous enough to suit all preferences and capabilities; and the extreme examples of heaven and hell show that meaning is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for happiness. What people are really searching for is "it": the one meaningless but all-encompassing experience that everything they've done was building up to. This is why people hope to go to heaven, because they think heaven is "it"; the same impulse leads people to experiment with drugs, strive to attain prophetic ecstasy, and probably also to have children: in the moment, it seems that nothing else matters than to have these experiences, but unfortunately the experience doesn't last. Even parents suffer from empty-nest syndrome, if their children do survive to adulthood.
So the search for meaning is a red herring; the real question is whether the ultimate meaningless experience exists, and then how it can be attained. In recent centuries people have come to doubt the existence of heaven or a posthumous paradise for good people to enjoy forever; I think there are good reasons to doubt its existence, and this doubt has certainly caused a psychological crisis, but calling this crisis a crisis of meaning is the opposite of the truth, and certainly having children is neither here nor there.
Great article. I was thinking about my small town, which has a huge library and countless parks. I never see childless adults there.
Exception: the dog park. It's the only public community space childless adults meet up with others and sometimes make lasting friendships. I wonder why...
Have you considered the possibility that an economic system in which individuals are treated as replaceable cogs might have something to do with why people do not want to have children?
Speaking of political activism: “ If anything, we should be taxing it.”
I’ve long thought that each level of government should tax the total incoming cash flow of subordinate levels of government. (Taxes, fees, fines and debt issuance.) This would help offset the tendency to treat public spending as free. It would be especially effective at deterring big debt-backed boondoggles. If we had a VAT, I’d make the rate equal to the VAT.
And I’d also add an income tax on the income of government workers at a rate that is higher by a percent equal to the the income tax rates applied to private workers by the subordinate governments. (This would offset the fact that the government can pay market wages, but then tax some of it back, which gives them an advantage in recruiting personnel.)
The relative cost of getting married and having children has gone up drastically in the last 50-75 years. Before if you wanted to have fewer children to have more more things you also more of less had to forego sex. Social Security had also reduced the annuity value of having children. And the relative price for women was even steeper. Societies have not yet adapted to this.
Personally I think that a child tax credit would at least be a symbolic step for recognizing the value of family formation and having children.
OTOH, I don't think there is a strong IDEOLOGICAL hostility to family and children although the mistaken perception that having children has a significant detrimental effect on ACC probably does play some role as does our financing SS and Medicare out of a wage tax rather than a VAT.
The solution to "Bowling Alone" is not public spaces. As the public sphere expands, it takes the energy out of the private spaces that historically made the US unique. Those private spaces existed to provide benefits to their members, whether the League of Women Voters or the Knights of Columbus, or yes, the neighborhood book club. That change was exacerbated by electronic communications, which allowed transactional relationships to replace the less-flexible but deeper relationships that preceded them.
School and participation in sports survives and draws people, together. Politics, too, although much less so.
Note also the perhaps unsurprising phenomenon that "hostages" taken by Native Americans often refused to return to their prior lives when given the chance, while many Native Americans who grew up away from their bands often returned to them, rejecting their adopted way of life, opting for a greater sense of community, despite the other sacrifices involved.
Thank you for the clarity.
To YOU. That’s the problem with all of this essay: you think your experiences constitute conclusive evidence for your arguments. Let me provide some of mine: at least as many of my friends want to escape forever from their parents and siblings as want to be near them. Families are probably more often sources of trauma than anything else. My husband hates every member of his family of origin except his late mother and his brother, and his opinion of his brother is skeptical. Forcing people into the abusive misery that is the patriarchal family will only make more people miserable, but misery is what conservatives want.