The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.
Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.
I have someone in mind you needs to read Charlie Pierce's reply, though I doubt he will.
Ross Cardinal Douthat, Patriarch Of Dweebopolis and Archbishop Of Dorkylvania, is back with a defense and clarification of his column earlier this week in which His Eminence was critical of white American ladies who are out there having child-free sexytime without his permission, and thereby shirking their moral duty to pump out white babies to keep the blahs and the brown at bay. This, to Ross, is not merely unpatriotic, but "decadent," a loaded word that indicates that His Eminence has lived the sheltered life of an entombed cleric. People reacted rather strongly to this contention, so he has come back today to revise and to extend — and I do mean "extend," if you understand what I'm saying, and I think you do — his remarks.
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