Every Day Do Something That Won’t Compute

Fertility, Hope, and the Machine

Any minute now my wife will call and let me know that it is time. I will rush back home from my office, load her into the car, and head to Magee Women’s Hospital in the Oakland neighborhood of our fair city of Pittsburgh. She is 38 weeks pregnant with our third child.

This is an unusual pregnancy. We are both 44. We also have two teenage children. We were five years away from the coveted “empty nest.” We both have relatively flexible, well-paying jobs. I am even employed by a university, which means that I do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition costs hanging over my head, if my children choose to go to college. We were on the cusp of vacations and brunches.

When people hear of the pregnancy and consider our age and the age gap between our children, they often ask me if this is the same woman. Maybe, this is a second family situation. No, this is my first and only wife. People also ask if this was an “oops,” a mistake, an accident. Although certainly a surprise, this pregnancy was quite intentional.

We made a conscious choice at 44 years old to have another child with teenagers in the house. This is surely quite strange. But, even ignoring our age and family structure, there is something fundamentally strange in 2024 about having a third child at all.

Fertility rates are crashing around the world. The rate in the United States has dropped to 1.6, the lowest in our history. This is far below the rate of 2.1 necessary to simply replace your population (i.e. replacement rate). The situation is much worse in other countries. The birth rate is in South Korea, for example, is down to 0.7. This is an existentially and catastrophically low fertility rate if you think the existence of South Korea is, on the whole, a good thing.

People disagree about whether or not we should be concerned about these rates. Many argue that having fewer births is a net positive, especially those deeply concerned about global warming and resource depletion. Perhaps this is Mother Nature saying to us “enough is enough.” Others argue that having collapsing fertility rates is catastrophic for modern welfare states. I tend to be on the “fertility decline bad” side though, as a good personalist, I get squeamish with the idea of procreating for the sake of the economy or the Social Security system. At the very least, I think that a basic function of a healthy society is to ensure its continued existence. I suspect we’ll just have to wait and see if this all leads to a civilization-level collapse.

Whether for or against collapsing fertility rates, many experts have opined about the causes. I am no expert, but I do read a lot about the subject. In my assessment, the most common explanation tends to be a mash-up of the economic and educational arguments. Birth rates are going down because we are getting richer and better educated. Basically, children are for lower class people. As we progress, we logically choose to have fewer children. Taken at face value, this explanation works. Fertility is negatively correlated with women’s income and education. Likewise, as countries get richer and more educated, fertility rates go down.

In recent months, Lyman Stone, my favorite demographer of fertility, published a series of essays for the Institute for Family Studies questioning this economics/education explanation. He shows that the correlation between income, education, and fertility is not some immutable fact. Standard analyses of income, education, and fertility do not consider pregnancy timing and instead focus too much on women’s earnings as opposed to family incomes. He points out the obvious fact that women tend to have kids when they are young, when earnings are at their nadir. Likewise, highly educated women with higher earning potential tend to delay pregnancies and generally do not have as many children later in life for various reasons including simple biology. It is statistically more difficult to conceive when you are older, for a number of reasons. In fact, he shows that, when you consider male earnings and overall family income, income is positively associated with fertility rates.

What is probably most important here, though, is that the relationship between income, education, and fertility differs across racial and religious groups. For example, Whites and Asian Americans have a U-shaped relationship between income and earnings. The highest fertility rates are found among the highest and lowest earners. The relationship differs, however, for Hispanic and Black women. Here you see consistently lower fertility rates as women get wealthier. Among the most religiously observant Americans, even the highest earners outpace their secular neighbors by a factor of 3.

This all leads Lyman to believe that culture, not income and education, is driving the decline in fertility rates. But what exactly are the cultural factors that might lead to lower fertility rates? Lyman does not address this specifically. However,

Johann Kurtz

in his excellent Substack Becoming Noble takes this question on directly. In an essay called, “It’s embarrassing to be a stay at home Mom,” he argues that it is all about “status.” Specifically, the value systems of liberal societies confer low status on childbearing and mothering. Kurtz argues here that pre-Enlightenment status systems supported or at least did not oppose childbearing and mothering:

In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status. The primary sources of her status were therefore upheld by the Church (which held a role of social dominance incomparable to today) and her family (embedded within a formalized class structure). In other words, the pre-Enlightenment woman derived her status from virtue and dominance games. These virtue strategies did not tradeoff with fertility, and likely supported it, with the Church teaching ‘conjugal duty’ and families demanding heirs.”

But, liberalism changed the game. Status in a post-Enlightenment liberal culture is less about virtue and more about success. He argues:

Thus, the Enlightenment initially opened up new status opportunities for men (success) whilst undermining those that supported women (virtue). We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time-intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

I agree with Kurtz’s assessment, but I think there is a bit more to it. My take is that we are no longer having children primarily because we are too bored to do so. In a recent Substack post, I explored the notion of boredom and how it is a uniquely modern experience. I argued that boredom is a functional emotion that alerts us to a deeper despair, which is a psychological state marked by a lack of meaning, purpose, and hope. In a state of boredom born from despair, we become listless, and we ultimately cannot come up with any particular reason to do something rather than to do nothing.

I recently read a report that surveyed adults who did not have children and adults who were not planning on having any.  They were asked why they did not plan on having kids, and the most common response was “I just didn’t want them” or “I wanted to focus on other things.” That seems consistent with boredom to me.

Any parent knows that raising children, despite the joys, is exceptionally difficult. To actively choose children, one has to really believe that it is something that is worth doing, that there is a deep purpose and meaning in the act itself. This is especially true in a Machine economy where we are constantly bombarded with advertisements for various desirable consumer products and experiences. Without some deeper sense of purpose and meaning that guide childbearing, children are merely another good that can be obtained to satisfy our novel appetites. Children are left to compete in a crowded marketplace against other products and experiences with no external purpose that might render children ontologically more desirable than an Aerostream. Sometimes children win out but often they do not.

Ultimately though, choosing to have children is an act of hope. You really have to be hopeful that there is something worth passing on to those spawn. In my younger years, my vision of the world was formed extensively by the work of Stanley Hauerwas, a great philosopher, theologian, and curmudgeon. He puts it this way. “For Christians do not place their hope in their children, but rather their children are a sign of their hope... that God has not abandoned this world.” He is speaking to Christians using Christian framing, but this feels universally true to me. Maybe not the part about God abandoning the world but that there is something in the future that is worthy of hope. Choosing to have more children is implicitly an act of hope, an act of anti-despair. Without such hope, I would be likely to choose the most pleasurable and expedient thing in front of me like vacations and brunches. A child is certainly not that thing.

I have to admit that I am deeply sympathetic to this argument, despite my actions to the contrary. Again, I have two teenagers, and they are excellent kids. My wife and I are working hard to stem the rising tides of despair that threaten to engulf them. Still, I often feel hopeless about the future. I shudder to think about one potential future that my son faces: one where the robots have taken his job prospects, and he is left with porn, weed, and loneliness.  I do believe strongly that my wife and I have provided him with enough of a substructure of purpose and meaning that he will be able to navigate this dystopian future. But if this is all we can hope for, why have kids?

Of course, hope is a virtue.  It must be practiced, and the hopeful action must be actively chosen. In our last post, I wrote a little dispatch from a recent Doomer Optimism gathering in Margaretville, NY. I argued that Machine resistance, if effective, will necessarily be joyful, specifically full of a joy that is born out of hope. This is not a naïve hope but a hope that advances with eyes wide open about the true state of the world.

Machine resisters must take little hopeful actions in the world. We are reminded by Wendell Berry in his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” that these acts of hope simply will not compute within the Machine logic. Here’s a selection from that poem:

So, friends, every day do something
    that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
    Love the world. Work for nothing.
    Take all that you have and be poor.
    Love someone who does not deserve it.
    Denounce the government and embrace
    the flag. Hope to live in that free
    republic for which it stands.
    Give your approval to all you cannot
    understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
    has not encountered he has not destroyed.

    Ask the questions that have no answers.
    Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
    Say that your main crop is the forest
    that you did not plant,
    that you will not live to harvest.
    Say that the leaves are harvested
    when they have rotted into the mold.
    Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

In November 2021, my wife and I did something that does not compute. We drove our family 600 miles from Pittsburgh to St. Louis to have a vasectomy reversed. We used the Machine against the Machine to reopen ourselves to life. In some future essay, perhaps in a more Catholic context, I will talk more about how this life was made possible only through the intervention of Our Lady of Lourdes. But that is for another day.

I’ll just end with this. I did not take this action because I am already hopeful. Instead, because in this act of hope, I desire to practice living more hopefully. Clearly, our act to bring new life into the world will not be everyone’s hopeful act. But, to truly create a culture that can resist the Machine, we all must make our own little incomputable and hopeful acts.