The first and most disqualifying problem with Douthat's column and followup is the absurdity of talking about the value of population growth without taking global warming or environmentalism remotely seriously. In the thousands of words Douthat dedicated to the topic in these two essays, the only time he demonstrates any interest in environmental questions at all is in a purposefully dismissive reference to "radical environmentalism." That's it. This fact alone is enough to disqualify Douthat's opinion on birthrates. The are two reasons someone could claim that the effort to curb climate change is of interest only to radicals: they are ignorant or they are dishonest. And Douthat is not ignorant. The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is that climate change is a real, growing, and deeply serious problem. Climate change represents an existential threat to our way of life. And the single biggest contributor to growing carbon emissions is population growth.
The fact that someone can get a column and followup about our legacy to the next generation published in The New York Times without seriously considering global warming at all is, frankly, an embarrassment, to the writer and the publication. And it demonstrates that conservatism remains resistant to science, despite all of their gripes about the notion, and the often-repeated assertion that Douthat is a profoundly reasonable writer.
Beyond what his argument is missing is what it contains. And, frankly, what's there is not serious. Douthat expliticly refers to a moral obligation to hypothetical people:
After all, if children are not the only good in human life, they do seem like a fairly important one, no? Maybe even, dare one say, an essential one, at least in some quantity, if the pursuit of the wider array of human goods is to continue beyond our own life cycle? Or to put it another way, if we have moral obligations to future, as-yet-unborn generations, as almost everyone seems to agree, surely those duties have to include some obligation for somebody to bring those generations into existence in the first place — to imitate the sacrifices that our parents made, and give another generation the chances that we’ve had?Ethan Gach already made a hash of this, but to put it briefly: to posit moral rights for hypothetical people is such an immense ethical move that conventional western morality can't begin to contain it. Here's a question: how many kids does Ross Douthat intend to have? I'm sure he's planning on having a large brood. But how big is big? Is he gonna have, say, 15 kids? I recognize that Ross can say that he needs to be able to support as many kids as he fathers, but I am fairly certain that he's not going to have as many as he can really afford. After all, he explicitly points to higher quality of life compared to years past as a reason to think that people can afford more children than they are having now. You know, those virtuous old-timey folks made it work, so why can't you, yuppie? But that makes him susceptible to the question of whether he's maximizing his child-rearing capabilities himself. So is he working overnight to eke out as much money as he possibly can, in order to fulfill the moral obligation to have all the kids he could feed? Of course not. Male fertility is far less restricted to a particular age window than that of women. So is Douthat going to be pumping out kids into his 70s? How is it that a 33 year old dude only has one child, if he believes that we have "some obligation"-- oh, what a powerful "some"-- to bring new generations into existence?
All of this is not even to address the assumption that more human beings is better for those hypothetical beings. (Who are hard to talk about as moral agents, considering that, you know, they don't exist.) To simply say "more humans means more human flourishing!" is to ignore the fact that more humans also means more human suffering. You want to debate if more human life is better, even though more human life can often mean worse conditions for existing humans, fine. But you've actually got to do that mental work. Douthat refers to the moral obligation to produce new generations out of short-term rhetorical necessity and then quickly abandons it, likely because he knows he is opening himself up to questions he can't possibly answer. It's lazy and irresponsible.
Next, there's the gender equality issue. As is his tendency, Douthat almost entirely ignores the different material pressures that women operate under in his column. Fatherhood is, obviously, a serious obligation. But for a woman to have a baby is a level of physical responsibility and difficulty that men simply don't face. Douthat wrote a column that shames women for not having their bodies captured for nine months by the needs of another being, and permanently altered in the process, without remotely considering how much of a burden that is for them. Then he follows up, again without considering women's special vulnerabilities and interests when it comes to child-rearing. It's not enough for social conservatives, apparently, that women feel guilty when they don't carry a pregnancy to term. They now are expected to feel guilty for the pregnancies that don't even begin.
Finally there's the question of whether Douthat has the facts straight on declining birthrates. I have some sympathy here, as the question is complicated and it's a mistake I could make. But then again, I don't write for The New York Times, and I don't have the vast resources that he has at my disposal. I expect more from a professional writer operating under the masthead of the most widely-read and respected paper in the world.
There's something profoundly odd about the argument that Douthat makes here, of a piece with a lot of his work. It speaks to the dictates of supposedly reasonable social conservatism: Douthat has to reverse engineer religious morals into an argument he can make for a secular audience.
I made Douthat into my spirit guide in the comic for a reason, beyond that I thought it was funny. As I read his column I thought to myself "it's like he's my fucking fairy godmother or something." Douthat writes with a peculiar kind of moral didacticism that he takes care to express in irreligious terminology. The effect is jarring. To be frank with you, I don't know if Douthat himself really buys his own arguments here. (I know, that's the sort of thing you're not allowed to say.) I think that he frequently argues from a stance of religious conviction that he knows can't be expressed in religious terms, lest he lose a large percentage of his audience. The result is a confused mess. I would much rather Douthat say "there's a God, and his church is the Catholic Church, and his will as expressed through that church is that you make babies and only have sex for procreation." That would be retrograde and wrong, but it would make sense. Instead he takes this kind of amorphous moral guardianship without wanting to say exactly where his vision of morality begins. That's how you get such odd arguments, and that's how you get vague references to virtue or decadence that refer to some abstract moral system rather than the concrete moral calculus of the good of particular people. It all comes out seeming like spiritual pedantry for the sake of no particular group of people. I don't need a spirit guide, thanks.
As far as seriousness goes, well, there's a whole long argument I could make about "seriousness" and bad faith, or "seriousness" and our media. And I am a big believer in the necessity of being a bit of a punk, of being a bit juvenile in political argument. For now it suffices to say that I didn't express a particularly serious argument against Douthat because I don't take his argument seriously, because it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. The fact that so many people who oppose Douthat's politics feel the need to declare him one of the good ones speaks to the bullshit reverence that we bestow on publications like the Times, and the grand Reasonable Conservative Affirmative Action program. We grade social conservatives on such a curve, expecting so little of them, that if they don't excuse rape or call for the bombing of Mecca we treat them like geniuses. I don't think that Douthat's argument met a minimal threshold of honesty or coherence. That's not a big deal; I'll read him in the future, and if he says something smart, I'll say so. What I won't do is write as if I believe he has some sort of inherent gravitas that transcends whether a particular argument is right or wrong. Making a comic out of him is only some terrible libel if you endorse a view of politics as deeply reverent that I don't share. And as far as "personal" goes, well, to me it's far more personal to condemn millions of people for not wanting to have kids than it is to paste someone's face onto a coyote.
I am fighting against the notion that a person's place of publication, position in the media landscape, or credentials within our system should determine how charitably or critically you read that person's arguments. This is especially difficult when the person is using his status to jury rig arguments that enforce traditional inequalities without coming right out and saying so. One of my only weapons against that is insouciance. Insouciance, and Photoshop.
Update: Christ.
Yglesias's piece is well worth reading. Dear dudes: please, please stop telling women that they aren't the ones who bear a far heavier burden when it comes to building that next generation. It's really, truly, stupid and gross.
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