We’re all secularists about having kids

Plus: against camping, CT's first website, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

We’re all secularists about having kids

(via)

After last week’s post, a friend messaged to say he liked the argument but also questioned its framing, which basically conceded the widespread assumption that having children is just one lifestyle choice among many, on par with getting a dog or picking a college or seeking a walkable neighborhood. We ought to be challenging that assumption, he thought, instead of arguing within its bounds.

I understand the impulse, and to an extent I agree. Were I speaking to a smaller audience, one I knew to have some belief or commitment that would make it possible to brush aside that assumption, I would make a different case. But because I was speaking broadly—because my purpose was to make a universal case for having kids, one that specifically did not require the reader to share my faith, politics, or tastes to be persuaded—my sense is that the concession had to made.

It might be possible to persuade people that having children is a good lifestyle choice and maybe even one they personally should select. But I don’t think it’s possible to persuade them that children are something other or more than a lifestyle choice on the basis of beliefs they do not share.

And yes, yes, I know, I could simply convert everyone to my own beliefs, and then we could really get to talking. Alas, that tactic—for some strange reason!—has not worked out for me so far, and so I find it best to make arguments that my intended audience can at least seriously consider as they are now, with their current beliefs and circumstances, without having to first overhaul their entire worldview.

But let’s set aside the matter of rhetorical tactics, because there’s something else I want to highlight here: that issue of choice.

As I messaged back to my friend, part of why I’m inclined to concede the choice assumption is that it’s a lot like secularism in the sense famously defined by the philosopher Charles Taylor in A Secular Age: the result of “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”

Taylor explains in his introduction:

[T]he change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, but there are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty just dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at least not in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith. There will be people who feel bound to give it up, even though they mourn its loss. This has been a recognizable experience in our societies, at least since the mid-nineteenth century. There will be many others to whom faith never even seems an eligible possibility. There are certainly millions today of whom this is true.

Once you’ve become secular in this way, I don’t think you can cease to be secular. I say that as someone who, though a Christian, is very much secular by this definition. I know we all have options, and I can’t unknow it.

The choice of whether to have children is much the same. We’re all secularists about having kids, even ardent pro-natalists who see reproduction as a duty or close to it, because we’re all keenly aware that you can choose to forego childbearing. We’ve moved, you might say, from a society where reproduction as a default part of adult life is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.

This too is an option it is impossible to unknow, but the societal move here is far more recent than the shift to Taylor-style secularism about faith, and it is also far less examined. As Taylor notes in that quote above, the decision to give up religion “has been a recognizable experience in our societies, at least since the mid-nineteenth century.” By contrast, rising rates of childlessness and record-low fertility are relatively recent patterns that have not received anywhere near the philosophical and theological attention devoted to secularism and related matters. We talk about this stuff on a scale of about six decades (the post-Baby Boom era), and it’s been a fixture of popular public discourse in America for less than a decade.

The upshot is that we are required to make a very difficult choice about a very weighty matter that within living memory was not thus considered a subject of decision at all. Is it any wonder many find the choice so daunting? We shouldn’t be surprised when people dither.

I’m certainly not the only one to recognize that this newly realized choice is a factor in our cultural angst about reproduction, in why it feels so difficult to have children today. I’ve just started reading a book, What Are Children For? (more on this below), which makes essentially the same observation (albeit without drawing on Taylor, or at least not by name) in an early chapter. “Until not too long ago,” the authors say, “for most people around the globe, child-rearing was a basic part of becoming an adult. It was not, as it is steadily becoming today, one possible path to take among several equally legitimate others.”

It’s also worth noting that faith and childbearing are not the only two areas in which we’ve become secular. Marriage, career, relocation, and familial responsibilities are increasingly optional, too, and I suspect many feel similarly ill-equipped to make such big choices that in the relatively recent past weren’t much of a choice at all.

My fellow libertarians tend to argue (usually in contexts of the consumer marketplace or the ballot) that more choice is better, and in many ways I agree. But I suspect that humans have an upper capacity for choice-making which is lower than libertarians often imagine, and that we generally need institutions, traditions, and habits to cut down on the number and import of choices we must make. Habits you can set for yourself, but institutions and traditions are preserved or demolished at a larger scale, and it seems to me that the escalation in choice-making we’re experiencing with their modern decline must be a contributor the rising rates of (multi-causal) anxiety that

Jonathan Haidt

and others discuss.

On that subject, there’s been some buzz lately about the spreading realization that religion has some practical uses, actually, and maybe people will miss it if it’s gone from their lives, even in an ambient cultural sense. Derek Thompson had a good piece to this effect at The Atlantic, from the outside looking in, and

𝐎. 𝐀𝐥𝐚𝐧 𝐍𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞

wrote on the subject from the inside for CT. I am beginning to think that longing looks at religion’s provision of life scripts—its offer of relief from overwhelming choice—may be where that conversation goes next, though whether it will ever amount to more than longing looks I wouldn’t venture to say. After all, we are still secular.

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2. What I'm reading this week

What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice, by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman (forthcoming in June). As mentioned above! I’m only a little ways in and will be reviewing this for CT, so more to come, but so far I’m favorable.

Solid writing, and it includes original research with clearly recounted methodology. It’s at least markedly better than most treatments of this subject, which tend to get about as far as kids are expensive, amirite? or don’t you think it’s Wrong to bring a child into a world so ruined by Those Bad People? I haven’t read enough yet to be certain, but it seems like Berg and Wiseman don’t intend to shy away from deeper questions about, well, what children are for—a much more interesting topic than the usual rehearsal of which Nordic country has the best parental leave.

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3. A recommendation

The Lamp, a Catholic publication run by my former The Week colleague Matthew Walther, is speaking truth to power about camping, and you should read it before the dastardly coalition that makes up Big Wilderness (small boys, nostalgic dads, L.L. Bean, REI, the National Parks Service) coerces you into a wild-eyed reversal of perhaps the most basic achievement of human history: sleeping in a building, on a proper bed, out of the rain.

An excerpt:

I greatly enjoy the portrayal of camping trips in Bill Watterson’s unrivaled Calvin and Hobbes strip. I do not think these bleak names were chosen by accident. The deluded paterfamilias, presumably marked for life by reading too much Thoreau, dreams of a simple, elevating week among lakes and woods. He repeatedly drags his wife and child with him. As they arrive, a particularly dense, cold, gray type of rain begins to rush from the skies, and does not stop until they go home. To me, this is the truth about camping, and I wish more people would realize it. Much the same goes for several other kinds of supposed holiday. Having spent so much time and money obtaining an actual house, with plumbing and electricity, furnished with books and wine, why would I abandon it for a night among mosquitoes, on ground so hard that I can count my very bones, gnawing at things scorched on a fire? The pleasures of others are one of the great mysteries of life.

Read the rest here.

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4. Recent work

• There’s no U.S.-Israel mutual defense treaty, and it’s reckless for Washington and Jerusalem to elide that fact | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

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5. Miscellaneous

CT’s first website! Had no idea this was on our site. Click to see other iterations.

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