If you want to know why declining birth rates are bad for humanity writ large, and the United States in particular, then Chapter 6 of Tim Carney’s new book, Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, is definitely for you.
But if you are already convinced the world is a better place with more babies in it, then Chapter 14 on civilizational sadness will be more thought-provoking. Carney begins the chapter by noting that Germany, Italy, and Japan led the world in declining birth rates decades before other nations. “One couldn’t help but notice that the countries least interested in reproducing were the countries that had been on the wrong side of a world war or two in the previous century,” Carney writes.
“One of the factors driving Germany’s extraordinary Baby Bust,” Carney continues, “was the belief that they, as Germans, were not good. … How much of our resistance to family formation is rooted in the belief, stated or unstated, that we simply aren’t good?”
Turns out there is a growing demographic in America that does believe we aren’t good.
Among all Americans, the vast majority, 72%, either believe the U.S. is the greatest country on Earth, (20%) or “is one of the greatest countries” (52%). Just 27% say other countries are better than the U.S. But among Democrats between the ages of 18 and 29, 50% say other countries are better than the U.S.
“Liberals, especially liberal women, are significantly less likely to be happy with their lives,” Carney quotes University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox. And it is these unhappy liberal women who are least likely to have children. “Liberal women ages 30-44 average about 1.5 babies,” Carney reports. “Conservative women in that age range average about 2.4.”
“This hints toward a politically controversial but mathematically straightforward explanation for our falling fecundity,” Carney concludes. “Liberal women have long had fewer babies and have them later; the change over the last twenty years has been that more and more young women are liberal.”
Why are liberal women so unhappy? And why does the number of unhappy liberal women keep growing? Carney says those are questions for another book, but the very next section of his current book is about how “religion is an inoculation against civilizational sadness.”
“Our birth rate is falling because we’re becoming less religious,” Carney writes. “The fastest-growing ‘religious’ group in the U.S. is the ‘nones.’ These aren’t all devout atheists, but they are people who simply don’t belong to a religion.”
As it just so happens, I am one of these “nones.” I believe in God, but I was not raised in a religious community, and my parents never took me to church. Even if I wanted to join a religion, I wouldn’t know which one to pick.
It’s not that I’m against religion. On the contrary, I believe the Catholic Church has been a tremendous, but also imperfect, force for good since it was created almost 2,000 years ago. I just have not experienced anything in my adult life that would draw me into any one faith.
And unfortunately, it seems like more and more people are having similar nonexperiences. Should we reverse that? If so, how? Perhaps that can be Carney’s next book.
I do agree with Carney, though, that “food and shelter are not sufficient for human life. It turns out that parties, sex, video games, Netflix, and margaritas in Paris are also ultimately unsatisfying. Something is missing in modern wealthy lives.”
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For Carney, in addition to the church, there is no better way to fill your life with meaning than becoming a parent. “If you aspire to anything beyond self-satisfaction,” Carney writes, “if your guiding star is a higher one than hedonism — that is, if you aspire to a good life, and to become a man or woman of virtue — then there is no easier road than the road of parenthood.”
I totally agree. Maybe we can start by convincing everyone of that.