Theodore Dreiser on Natalism

In A Book About Myself Theodore Dreiser, reflecting upon his romantic outlook during the courtship of a woman who later became his wife, declares that the "world . . . has trussed itself up too helplessly with too many strings of convention, religion, dogma," not least "rules . . . all calculated for the guidance of individuals in connection with the propagation and rearing of children, the conquest and development of this planet." Is there no more to life than that? Dreiser asks. What about those of us who are simply not interested in participating in that project, especially on the monogamous terms that he criticizes as possibly repressive ("Is it everybody's business to get married?" he wonders), but perhaps on any terms at all, for ? "[c]annot the world have too much of mere breeding? Are two billion wage slaves . . . more advantageous than one billion, or one billion more than five hundred million?"

Indeed, Dreiser saw in this treatment of reproduction as central in life as devaluing much else--as with the value of "the mere contact of love" that "produces ideas, experiences, tragedies even" as against the "raising a few hundred thousand coal miners, railroad hands or heroes destined to be eventually ground or shot in some contest with autocratic or capitalistic classes," the sustenance of what we would today call the "prime working age" labor supply and the age cohorts suitable for military service that are really the concern of elites for whom, in an age of democratic hypocrisy, the broad population is merely a means for their ends of profit-making and the success in realpolitik power games crucial to it.

In recent years the matter of natalism has become topical again--but it is reflective of the tenor of today's politics, and especially its "cultural warfare," that few of those questioning the exhortations to have more children in anything like this way, the dialogue as cowardly as it is dumbed down and disoriented by the phantoms of contemporary imagination.