Modern Americans tend to make two mistakes when it comes to understanding culture, and both are tied to individualism.
First, we think about decision-making solely on the individual level, thus failing to consider how cultural trends can take hold.
Second, we seem to think that other people’s personal lives are none of our business — that we shouldn’t have an opinion about how people live, and that how other people live doesn’t affect us.
It makes sense. We’re a very individualistic people. We’re less socialistic and more spread out than most of Europe. We’re more rugged, and we value individual liberty more.
But this individualism can blind us to how things work and how interconnected we really are by nature.
Taylor Swift’s engagement to Travis Kelce brought this to mind.
Along with other commentators, most conservative and some not, I have speculated throughout the Kelce-Swift relationship that if they got married and had babies, it could help slow and possibly even reverse our collapsing birthrate.
Thus, I greeted their engagement with hope.
I’m not saying Swift is a workable role model for young women or men: She’s sui generis, the biggest female celebrity of my lifetime. I don’t think most people should plan on great career success before marriage in their mid-30s.
But I believe that the biggest celebrity in America getting married could create a pro-marriage cultural wave. And if she and Kelce quickly have children, then it could create a pro-baby-making cultural wave. At a time of record-low birth and marriage rates, this would be amazing.
Now, some are questioning how Swift’s planned marriage or possible maternity could possibly influence anyone else to get married or have babies.
It’s a fair question. I cannot imagine any couple concluding, “Hey, since Taylor and Travis are getting married/having a baby, we should get married/have a baby.”
But that’s not how cultural trends happen. Megan McArdle explained this very well in an essay from the blogosphere days. It discussed gay marriage and welfare, but it’s still relevant to the question of how culture changes and affects individuals.
“The limits of your imagination are not the limits of reality,” McArdle wrote. (The essay survives online here.)
Referring to the effect of welfare on marriage, McArdle described the error of those who said they couldn’t possibly imagine how a few bucks in welfare money could encourage a mother to stay unwed:
“They looked only at individuals and took institutions as a given. That is, they looked at all the cultural pressure to marry and assumed that that would be a countervailing force powerful enough to overcome the new financial incentives for out-of-wedlock births. They failed to see the institution as dynamic. It wasn’t a simple matter of two forces: cultural pressure to marry, financial freedom not to, arrayed against each other; those forces had a complex interplay, and when you changed one, you changed the other.”
I always say pregnancy is contagious, and marriage is, too, when we have fewer pregnancies, which makes the next pregnancy less likely. Why? Well, when birthrates are lower, people’s social lives are less child-friendly. Also, when nobody around you is having children, you have trouble imagining yourself with a child.
If someone who is constantly watched by millions of people starts living a married life and a mother life, then the idea of being married and a mother becomes more imaginable — even if her life is inaccessible in so many other ways.
And so posit a couple very close to deciding to get married or have a child: The images of the Swift-Kelce family could provide a tiny boost that pushes them over the line. A couple having children could convince their best friends or siblings to have children, which could gain momentum.
Of course, Swift and Kelce could announce they won’t have children. They could say they’re waiting until she’s done touring and then getting a surrogate. They could do all sorts of things to undermine the story of a nice couple getting married and then making babies.
The second mistake of over-individualistic Americans is positing that other people’s lives don’t matter to us. But a society with fewer marriages and fewer children is a sadder society. Other people’s marriages and families do affect us in a thousand ways. An older lady on my street told me this weekend how happy it makes her that there are so many children (17!) on our end of the block.
TRUMP’S (AND AMERICA’S) PUTIN PROBLEM
America needs more marriage and more babies.
So here’s to the new couple!