The Contradictions of Today's Rhetoric About Natality

In the advanced industrialized world those who like to chalk up "success" to "idealistic," cultural, factors rather than material ones set great store by "middle class" values. These values, which are highly individualistic, include "personal responsibility," not least in the matter of starting a family--particularly the principle that one should not begin one without reasonable expectations of being able to afford that family, which is to say, while meeting a certain standard of what Thorstein Veblen called "pecuniary decency," and with a certain minimum of security, such as that with which we associate the material side of middle class existence .

However, really generalized middle classness was always more a promise than a reality even in the more affluent countries, and if the gap between promise and reality has long been widening it may be that in recent years that gap has simply become too big to paper over. Unsurprisingly, young people are less prone to start families--entirely in line with the middle class values with which they are raised.

This, of course, raises a problem for those who would like to see higher fertility rates--who, of course, tend also to be vehement supporters of those changes in economic life that have eroded the middle class. (Thus is the right delighted with Emmanuel Todd when he attributes American and Western decline with declining religiosity and not enough young people studying engineering, and apparently criticizes the West's promotion of its gender politics in the world at large, but completely ignore what he has to say about neoliberalism.) The result is that they neither repudiate middle class notions of responsibility, nor the neoliberal economic program--and instead, in line with their tendency, lay blame on the individuals who have not got along for failing to get along. (Oh, things aren't so tough out there, they say. It's just that a lot of them would rather play video games in mom's basement than get a job--while the ones who do have money blow it on avocado toast and such.)

From their standpoint this may be the least unacceptable approach intellectually, but the dissonances are massive, and they are likely to find that mere hectoring of the young is not going to produce the changes in society's direction that they so clearly desire--implicitly, that even while remaining committed to middle class values young people reconcile themselves to raising their children in conditions of less and less security, comfort and opportunity in line with traditional lifeways, and the requirements of those whose minds are on business and on realpolitik for an ample labor supply, and large cohorts of military manpower age youth.