Turn the burners up
Yes indeed, the thing to do when the planet is relentlessly heating up such that future humans are going to have a giant nightmare to deal with is have more children.
A Conservative MP has claimed the UK’s low birthrate is the most pressing policy issue of the generation and is caused in part by “cultural Marxism” stripping young people of any hope, at the start of a populist-tinged conference in London.
Addressing the National Conservatism gathering, run by a US-based thinktank, Miriam Cates said western countries faced an existential threat from falling reproduction…
Of course that depends on how you define “existential.” I assume she means “western countries” are going to change a lot because people from non-“western countries” will be migrating to them. By “western” of course she means white. But change isn’t automatically an existential threat. What’s really an existential threat is a planet that’s hot, dry, and empty.
She explained the conditions for “starting a family” i.e. having children.
“You must also have hope for the future. And that hope is not reaching so many of our young people today, because liberal individualism has proved to be completely powerless to resist a cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls.”
“When culture, schools and universities openly teach that our country is racist, our heroes are villains, humanity is killing the Earth, you are what you desire, diversity is theology, boundaries are tyranny and self-restraint is oppression, is it any wonder that mental health conditions, self-harm and suicide, and epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion characterise the emerging generation?”
Hang on. The bit about the earth – that’s not “cultural Marxism.” The floods in Pakistan were not cultural Marxism, the dead coral reefs are not cultural Marxism, the drying up of the Colorado River is not cultural Marxism, the deadly wildfires in Australia were not cultural Marxism, the worse and more frequent hurricanes are not cultural Marxism, the deadly heat waves in Europe and the western US were not cultural Marxism.
The use of “cultural Marxism” as a description by the Penistone and Stocksbridge MP is controversial because it is a term referring to a conspiracy theory often associated with the far right and antisemitism.
When Suella Braverman, the home secretary – who is addressing the conference later on Monday – used the phrase in a 2019 speech, she was criticised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Cates’s argument for a higher birthrate echoes those made by European populist leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, although they are explicit about contrasting this with what they see as a parallel threat from immigration.
Let’s make cultural Orbánism a label.
Cates said the low birthrate was “the one overarching threat to British conservatism, and to the whole of western society”, and was a greater concern than the climate emergency, Russia or China.
If she really thinks that she must not know a damn thing about the climate emergency.
I don’t think that optimism/pessimism correlates with political ideology.
There is certainly a strain of doomerism on the left: that climate change is not just a crisis, but an insoluble one that will kill us all, that fascism is already here and only going to get worse, etc. But you could say the same about the left: our values have eroded, western civilization is facing collapse, the government is building death camps for conservatives, blah blah blah.
Screechy, the climate crisis is insoluble. Unless you can get a consensus on actual change, and fast, it will be too late. It may already be too late, but even if Biden was right (he wasn’t) and we have 11 years (from 2020) we need a major commitment globally which will mean life style changes in the first world, reduced population everywhere, and a determination to work together. If you see the possibility of that happening, so that you can say the problem is not insoluble, I would love evidence of that. And Greta Thunberg is not evidence; she has had little impact on the things that count.
That’s certainly how it looks to me. It’s iknklast’s field, she doesn’t need my agreement, but from everything I’m seeing these days 1. it’s way too late to avoid much of the worst and 2. nobody has any intention of doing what it would take. The melting permafrost is a time bomb, and the giant cruise ships continue to ply to and fro a mile or two from where I’m sitting.
Yeah, climate change isn’t anything to do with Marxism. Sure, class analysis of environmental exploitation is often Marxist, but that’s a completely separate issue from climatology.
A tool that always gives a positive result is as useless as one that always gives a negative result. You can’t just call everything Marxist, just as you can’t just call everything racist or sexist or whatever. You have to be able to (gasp!) discriminate between P and not-P.
That’s why I added the “will kill us all” part.
Climate change is already happening, and it’s exactly the type of problem that is really tough for humans to address (I mean in terms of political will, not technically), so I agree that there is zero chance of just making climate change go away.
But there’s a difference between loss of life, decreased living standards, and loss of human and non-human habitats, on the one hand, and “total extinction of the species,” or even “the world becomes a hellscape in which life is not worth living.” If you gave me a choice between living a new life in the 22nd century or the 12th, I’m going with the 22nd. Now, it may well be that the 22nd century is going to be worse than the 20th, and that’s a massive unenforced error on humanity’s part.
Nobody needs to justify their reproductive decisions to me or anyone else, but when I hear people claim that they won’t have kids because it would be cruel to bring children into a world affected by climate change, my eyes roll.
I don’t doubt that we’re capable of screwing up the planet badly enough to put ourselves into extinction, but I don’t think that’s inevitable. And when people talk as if it is, all it does is instill helplessness — if we’re already doomed, then why bother doing anything about it?
When I hear people claim that they won’t have kids because it would be cruel to bring children into a world affected by (insert one: impending nuclear war, economic disaster, climate change), I wonder who they think should be having kids instead of them.
Papito: Perhaps nobody should? But the real answer is conservative religious people ARE. Look at demographic trends in Israel for example
Screechy, I always hear about doom and helplessness causing paralysis. I don’t know. I think the problem is we have been too much the other way, allowing people to shove the climate to the back burner (which happens to be turned up to high), thinking there is another year, another decade, another century, another millennium. Why? Because we don’t want to scare them. So they aren’t concerned.
Another thing we do is manage to couch it as though it is always someone else’s fault. Big business, big oil, big ag. Sure, they are serious problems, but they are selling a product. Who are they selling it to? Themselves? I don’t think so!
Meanwhile, the Republicans scare the shit out of everyone over non-problems (gay marriage? Fine. Nothing there that’s going to destroy us. Abortion? Not going to destroy us. Black Americans voting? Not going to destroy us). They use fear quite successfully; in fact, without fear, they would be bystanders.
So fear doesn’t have to doom us, but in this case, it appears lack of fear may do just that. Extinction of the species? Why does everyone think it has to be full blown extinction to be a catastrophe? And that it has to be our species? Yes, we can go extinct. No, it isn’t inevitable (at least, not yet – a large mammal such as ourselves usually can only expect about 100 million years. The dinosaurs, large reptiles, got about 165 million, give or take a million). Extinction isn’t inevitable, perhaps, but the type of world we’ll be living in if climate change continues (and it will; nothing is happening to even slow it down) is catastrophe enough. Why the hell does everyone act as if it doesn’t matter as much if we stop short of extinction?
I would rather be extinct than living in the sort of world we are on track to become.
iknklast,
I think there’s a crucial difference between the stuff Republicans fearmonger about and climate change: the GOP isn’t asking people to really give up anything they care about.
The GOP’s message is that gay marriage, immigration, critical race theory, etc., are going to RUIN OUR COUNTRY, but you can stop it by… voting for GOP candidates! What will they do about those issues if elected? Well… (mumble mumble mumble). Mostly, they’ll hold some showboating hearings, maybe pass a law that the courts will strike down immediately. Even when there are actual real consequences, it’s stuff that doesn’t directly affect GOP voters. It’s no skin off their nose if their state’s universities lose faculty and cease attracting good students — they don’t like those elitist professors anyway! If gay people don’t feel safe in their state, well, sounds like a problem for gay people, right? (There’s a reason why so many conservatives suddenly come around on gay marriage when a family member comes out.) I think we’re seeing some interesting dynamics with abortion now: for decades, the GOP’s abortion extremism didn’t really affect their voters personally — their proposed laws either didn’t pass, or were struck down, or made abortion harder to get but still possible. But now that conservative women might actually find themselves unable to get an abortion because all the clinics are closing….?
Conversely, although as you note there have been attempts on the left to present climate change mitigation as just being a matter of sticking it to certain villains (fossil fuel companies), most voters have seen through it. Any effective measure is going to have consequences for the average person, e.g. higher gas and energy prices. Just look at how angry people got at the thought that the gub’mint was telling them what kind of lightbulbs to use.
This disparity isn’t an accident, of course. The GOP deliberately chooses which subjects to whip up fear and fake solutions for. Even now when they’re creating this debt limit brinksmanship because of the supposed crisis of government spending, they’re careful to avoid specifying what government spending they want to cut, because they know that any real cuts might tick off their voters.
What has stripped young Britons of hope in the future is not ‘cultural Marxism’ but, in the main, the policies, incompetence and malice of the party this woman belongs to.
Complaining that your political opponents aren’t having children seems a bit… Stupid? Pointless?
BK,
To be clear, I’m not complaining about people not having children. I just think that one particular reason doesn’t hold water, but I don’t think anyone needs a reason beyond “I don’t want to.”
If you mean conservatives, I’d say it’s a mix of (1) parents who are miffed that their adult children are delaying giving them grandchildren (and yes, that’s the phrase they use); (2) white people pissed off that other whites, even filthy liberals, aren’t helping keep up the numbers; and (3) people who are just annoyed that other people made different life choices (“I had to deal with diapers and tantrums and parent-teacher meetings and endless sports practices and play dates, why shouldn’t YOU?”).
Oh, and I guess some fundamentalist “God wants us to reproduce” stuff, too.
It’s only a couple of days since The Pope was complaining that too few people were having children far too many o0wning pets instead.
That is a severe problem for the RC Church, insufficient children coming through the ranks may leave priests having to resort to bestiality instead.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65572153
So the pets will come in handy after all.
Screechy why do you think that reason not to have children doesn’t hold water? Isn’t it often part of people’s thinking about whether to have children, to wonder whether the future will be better for them or worse? Sure, the biggest reason is just wanting to, of course, but still, people do plan and consider and so on. Even if the climate disaster isn’t going to be apocalyptic, it’s surely clear that it’s going to be…let’s say, difficult. If the future children happen to pick the wrong place to live they could be wiped out in a wildfire or massive hurricane. They could have to deal with mass migrations or wars or both. They could run out of water, or food. Parents reliably want their children to be better off than they were, and that looks as if it won’t be possible in the future. I think I get being skeptical that climate change gonna eat yo mama, but surely it’s reasonable to think it’s going to make life increasingly difficult for all but billionaires?
Just ignore me if you don’t want to explain further. I’m just curious.
I think in the case of CRT and the other woke BS, what the GOP promise is literally nothing. As in, instead of doing that they will do nothing. Sometimes nothing is really something.
And when the promise to do nothing is compelling to the electorate, it behooves a candidate to examine the something they’re trying to sell.
If a Democratic candidate ran on nothing with respect to Genderism, that candidate would have my vote in a heartbeat.
When I hear this particular piece of nonsense my reply is always the same: If you don’t want brown people (or whatever type of people you happen to dislike) coming “here” join the campaign to end extreme poverty. (Yeah, I can hear dogwistles.) I mean you’d have to be pretty damn desperate to want to go to the US these days. I’m sure there there are many people in the Americas who like to have the option of not needing to do so.
Humans’ most salient feature is our ability to adapt. We have adapted to live in a great variety of climates in this world, from freezing to blazing. Within our lives, we adapt to changing circumstances with a rapidity that we don’t even notice (because we adapted to it). Think of how many people grow up with little money, then get professions where they make more money, and quickly adapt their habits to spend all that money. We change our expectations immediately and become accustomed to the new, whether that’s economic, political or climactic.
Humans will become accustomed to a world altered by climate change too. If the cities we live in (and most of us live in cities these days) increase in temperature so rapidly, within our lifetimes, that we have to plant different trees and our heating and cooling needs change, we’ll just adapt to it.
People who don’t have kids because they’re worried about climate change (or nuclear war, or economic disaster) won’t have any measurable effect on those problems as a result of that choice. They’ll just have to adapt to new circumstances without children – or, rather, without their own children; they’ll still see other people’s children all around.
Also, it’s worth considering this thesis: we are unlikely to change our behavior deliberately and substantially enough to prevent gradual change for the worse. That means that if we are going to prevent, avoid, or reverse the degree of climate change that would make large swaths of currently inhabited land uninhabitable, it will be accomplished not through our restraint but through our inventiveness. The prophets will not save us, but the wizards might.
The people well-off enough and educated enough to choose not to have children because of abstract worries are people who might, if they had children, bring them up to figure out technological solutions to climate change or ocean acidification or deforestation or plastics pollution.
Climate change is abstract?
Ophelia, I think it’s fair to say that climate change is an abstract concept. Just because it’s abstract doesn’t mean it’s not real. It does mean that most people pay less attention to it than they do to more concrete, local, physical phenomena. It takes a certain level of comfort to worry about abstract things.
The local results of climate change – increased rainfall, decreased rainfall, increased temperature, rising sea levels, etc. impact people directly, and thus more people will worry about them and act on them. This means, for example, that people will build dikes and flood gates and pumps (e.g. Afsluitdijk), at great cost and carbon contribution to global warming, to keep rising sea levels out of their cities and farms. And then they will use fossil fuel power plants (Dutch electricity is 62% from gas and coal) to run those gates and pumps.
Well it may be fair to say it but I don’t think it makes much sense. Climate change is physical and concrete. It’s general – it’s about a whole lot of concrete physical things. But does that make it abstract? Not as I understand it.
On second thought I guess I see what you mean, in that climate change is about the future as well as the present.
Ophelia @15,
I’m not saying that it’s somehow irrational to factor in expectations for the future into the decision to have children. But (1) I don’t believe that climate change is a huge impact on the future prospects of the kind of people who are claiming to be taking it into account; and (2) I don’t believe that’s really what’s motivating them.
For (1): climate change is going to be devastating for some parts of the planet. And everyone is going to be affected to some extent, even people in the UK (where the article in the OP comes from), or the US. But the kind of people who proclaim that climate change is affecting their reproductive decisions tend to be the kind of people — educated Westerners — who will be most cushioned from the impacts. At least, relative to the kinds of things that people have declined to factor into their decisions in the past. I don’t recall a lot of people proclaiming during the Cold War that they wouldn’t have children because it would be cruel to raise them in a post-nuclear wasteland, even though that was a very real danger too.
As to (2), I don’t see the people making these declarations doing any other lifestyle changes. They continue to live in large coastal cities rather than buying up property in colder, non-coastal areas while the getting is good. But more importantly, as you say, “the biggest reason is just wanting to.” I am hugely skeptical of all the broad-minded, societal rationales people offer for having or not having children. I don’t believe the people who claim that they had kids because the country needs people to contribute to Social Security and keep society functioning in the future; I think they had kids because they wanted to, and fill in the high-minded rationalizations later. I think that people who don’t want to have kids are under particular pressure to come up with some reason other than “don’t wanna,” because that gets labelled as selfish etc. Saying “I’m not having kids because climate change” is a twofer, because you also get to signal how seriously you take climate change.
Screechy, I think that climate change may have been one of the reasons Trevor and Carol never had kids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
See I do remember people worrying about having children because of the Cold War. Not firmly deciding not to, but talking about it, fer sher. (I say “remember” but I think what I mean is reading about it later.) Birth rates fall in hard times. I too don’t believe for a second that people have babies to protect Social Security, but not having babies who will have miserable lives is a different kind of decision – one is Society, the other is My Own Babies. Big big difference.
I just think it’s going to be bad, like medieval plague kind of bad. Billions of people dying suddenly, and everything falling apart as a consequence. Eruption of 100 Mount Tamboras level bad. I think some prospective parents will at least pause to think about it.
No, the disasters themselves are not cultural Marxism, but apparently mentioning it and causing people to question the virtues of market capitalism is. Similarly, the iceberg that sank the Titanic was not Marxism, but pointing out the rising water in the hull and the inadequate number of lifeboats was.
Mustn’t forget the smiting of a God on whom America has turned its back. Of course, once things get worse, Republicans will point to the deteriorating climate as part of God’s just punishment, not the inevitable result of idiots with pick-up trucks sporting Confederate flags rolling coal.