America has been good to my family but I’m genuinely worried whether we came here in some sort of terminal stage of American society. I’m terrified my own kids are going to adopt these ideas. What would have been the point of leaving all our friends and family behind to immigrate here if our family just dies out on this stupid continent?
This entire paragraph is three assertions given without evidence. Feel free to own these ideas as if they are truths but arguing axiomatically from them is just wrong.
For me, I think you can find a plethora of examples throughout history that show positive societal contributions from people divorced from child rearing and raising a child is the very definition of personal choice.
Finally, I’m in about the most liberal, urban, educated environment you can live in the US and I can’t imagine how much more engaged the community could be in for parenting. It’s a source of constant joy to me how engaged my family is with our community and vice versa.
Perhaps your view on this reflects the specific choices you made in where to live and raise your family? Try not to extrapolate too much from a singular data point.
Sure, morality and the purpose of life are generally axiomatic. The notion that society should elevate personal choice, instead of impressing upon people expected behaviors, is also axiomatic. But there’s also an empirical element. In North America, virtually all population growth will come from Latin American immigrants who have more traditional notions of family. In Europe it’ll be Muslims. Individualistic culture is at the height of its power, but there’s a good chance it’s on the wane.
> Finally, I’m in about the most liberal, urban, educated environment you can live in the US and I can’t imagine how much more engaged the community could be in for parenting. It’s a source of constant joy to me how engaged my family is with our community and vice versa.
Except there’s no kids! We’re down from children being 36% of the population in 1960 to 22%. In places like San Francisco it’s 13%. There’s network effects to parenting and being a kid that disappear when the concentration of parents and kids decreases. Parenting is a lonely experience in a modern American city, especially if you have kids in your 20s. You may know other parents, but you have to “organize something” to see them socially. The “roving band of neighborhood kids” is a distant memory. (I’m reminded of the show “Hey Arnold,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Arnold!, which depicts urban life full of kids in a way that seems almost anachronistic.)
The first is the end result of 50 years of car centric city planning. It is unsafe for kids to rove in many places.
The second is the gutting of local public schools. Because wealthy parents are now encouraged to transport their children to far away schools and non-school affiliated activities the family spends all of its time in cars away from their neighborhood.
And for what it’s worth roving bands of kids are a common occurrence here in Hyde Park Chicago. It’s one of the reasons I live here.
The point would be that, hopefully, the move enabled you and your children to have happier lives. It's enough to enjoy good things while they last, regardless of how long that is.
The future of the world itself is pretty uncertain at this point. I, for one, wouldn't want to father a child, only to have their experience growing up be like chapter 1 of Ready Player One (the book), i.e. civilization in decline, with parents who weren't prepared for it. Why risk adding to the suffering that might be coming? There will certainly be enough people having children to keep humanity going regardless.
Obnoxious cosmopolitan liberals are, well, obnoxious about valorizing childlessness, which is not by itself a moral virtue. But forgoing the comforts of family in the service of a greater goal is. You're trying to take soi-disant elites down a peg, as you often do, but you've wildly overshot your mark here.
I’m not taking aim at “elites.” Living life to maximize personal self-gratification is pervasive in American culture. I’m mad at the elites only insofar as they’re fishing for moral justifications for this practice, where I think non-elites at least are a little beholden to traditional socialization and feel a little guilty for “not doing what they’re supposed to do.”
I don't have any pets. Do I need a special interest group?
It depends on the culture that surrounds you.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/19/growing-sha...
[3] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/childles...
[4] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-rise-of-childless-america
[5] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/29/childf...
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-havi...
[7] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/topics/resource-library-h...
I understand the axioms that lead to this assertion, but I reject the premise. It’s a terminal-stage evolution of western individualism. You don’t just have an obligation to yourself. The “child free” deprive their parents of grand kids, their siblings’ children of nieces and nephews, their neighbors of a bustling joyful society full of children.
From a technologist point of view it’s also just sad and defeatist. At the limit, we could solve climate change by just all killing our selves. You’re proposing to do that, just slower.
Life is lived and enjoyed, not owed.
I assume these differences in views are cultural, and will continue to drift as cohorts age in and age out of the populace.
Terminal-state Western individualism. Not everything is about “choice.” Life chooses for us, gives us roles and duties and obligations. We come into this world owing a debt to our parents and family who help care for us that we can never repay, only pay forward to the next generation.
Are you sure this belief is not the long-term effects of a kind of Stockholm syndrome? Namely, a irrational reaction to those years when you were utterly dependent on your parents?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox
Being as people have been around for at least 500 centuries, and birthrate are leveling off, if this were going to "self-correct", it would have already.