Bogus Gold

This one is a difficult topic for me to broach, though I care deeply about it. It's just that in my experience many people take this topic defensively and personally.

In fact, were this article written by someone who had many children I very likely would read it and let it pass - no less persuasive or interesting to me; but far more easily dismissed by "Us vs. Them" argumentation.

As it is, this article is written by Lionel Shriver, a 48 year old childless author of several novels, and self-proclaimed representative of the "Anti-mom." Even the title of her article is more incindiary than I would dare: No kids please, we're selfish

Yet she raises many points that people ought to ponder. Among them...

Contentment. Happiness. Satisfaction. Fun. There's nothing, strictly speaking, wrong with these concerns, but they are all of a piece. They fail to take into account that our individual lives are tiny beads in a string. Our beloved present is merely the precarious link between the past and the future - of family, ethnicity, nation and species. We owe our very contentment - which Hurricane Katrina reminds us heavily relies on potable water and toilets - to the ingenuity of our ancestors, yet it rarely seems to enter the modern childfree head that proper payback of that debt might entail handing the baton of our happy-happy heritage on to someone else.

Many, myself among them, have noted the problem of the suicidical demographics of Western Civilization. But unless people of childbearing age have a personal reason to care, all it gets is a Gallic shoulder shrug. It's someone else's problem, after all.

It's notable that until the modern age, people with such values would be considered borderline sociopathic. Yet today this is the norm. I don't raise the point to accuse anyone in particular, because no one person in particular can do anything about it.

This is one of the issues where I find myself in most profound disagreement with atomistic philosophies, such as libertarianism. I, like Edmund Burke, see a social compact between the living, and the dead, and those yet to be born. I think this is a fundamental pillar for sustaining any civilization. I think we've allowed our society to discard this value very cheaply. And I think unless there is a massive cultural shift, all but the oldest among us today will learn in very personal terms what was so important about Burke's compact.

But whether you agree or disagree, Ms. Shriver gives much to ponder in her article.