One Unicorn could be just a figment of your imagination. Herd several together, and you get a Blessing of Unicorns upon your day.
***
Derek Thompson reflects on “The Antisocial Century” (many thanks to John Haas to sending this my way). Overall argument: “Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.”
No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.
To this I say: this is another unfortunate side effect of the great dechurching, even if we leave aside the obvious spiritual issues. So much of my social life is through church—and the same is the case for many people who are active in their local church.
***
If the airport piano is out of tune and you have a layover, you just fix it, obviously. Well, at least if you’re this guy.
***
This Monday was Holocaust Remembrance Day—and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. If you missed Paul Nesselroade’s moving essay here at Current that day, you should go back and read it. I also appreciated this profile of the only Jew who is living in the town of Oświęcim (the Polish name of Auschwitz) today.
***
On another note, if Karen Swallow Prior reviews Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis, obviously there’s only one thing to do: read it! A taste:
The best part of Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson is Genesis.
Although, as they say, everyone is a theologian, Robinson is a literary critic (as well as a literary writer) before she is a theologian. And Reading Genesis is foremost the work of a literary critic. One should read this book for that, most of all, just as one would read John Milton or C.S. Lewis more for their literariness than their theology. Robinson is at her best when she is simply reading Genesis, bringing to the fore her astute intellect, letting the voluminous library of her mind remain in the background like the ubiquitous bookshelf backdrops for streaming news commentators. She reads with her keen literary eye, spying surprising repetitions, reversals, and parallels woven throughout the narrative, each one laden with meaning and resonance.
***
Okay, lots of great stuff on family and parenting this week, beginning with this manifesto: “A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right.” A taste:
A new era of technological change is upon us. It threatens to supplant the human person and make the family functionally and biologically unnecessary. But this anti-human outcome is not inevitable. Conservatives must welcome dynamic innovation, but they should oppose the deployment of technologies that undermine human goods. We must enact policies that elevate the family to a primary constituency of technological advancement. Our aim should be a newly re-functionalized household for the twenty-first century.
Technology is meant to empower the human person. We have seen, however, that if left ungoverned, technological advancement too easily comes to hinder human flourishing and threatens the human person and the family. Many of the most important political questions of our day have been prompted by the moral implications of new technologies: Should human life be artificially created or destroyed? Can people change genders? Should digital obscenity be accessible to all ages in the name of free speech? Should jobs that sustain families be automated? We must discern prudent ways to govern technology in order to keep the human person, human dignity, and the common good as the central goals of our politics. We must ensure that new technologies serve human life and the human family, not the other way around.
***
Stephanie Murray makes a compelling case that we—as a society—need parents. But also, our society needs kids. A taste:
Today, it’s considered sort of distasteful to talk about the practical, economic benefits of raising children—the fact that today’s kids will become the workers and taxpayers who keep the show running when we are all too feeble to do so. But raising productive laborers who will contribute to their communities and care for the elderly has always been a major purpose of bearing children. It’s just that parents of the past captured more of the fruits of their labor. They raised kids who worked for them, on their farms and in their trades, and then cared for them in old age. These days, most of us are raising kids who will spend the majority of their lives working for someone else. In other words, modern economies have created a pretty fundamental disconnect between who raises children and who benefits from their labor as adults. In a very literal sense, society needs my kids more than I do.
***
The data shows that the decline in kids is correlated to the decline in marriage. Married people are having kids just like before, demographer Lyman Stone explains. It’s just that fewer people are getting married. A taste:
…in the public’s imagination, nonmarital childbearing is running rampant, while marriage is becoming a thing of the past. In short, these impressions are wrong. In the U.S., the share of births born to unmarried parents is gradually drifting downwards these days. But more to the point, far from being a thing of the past, marriage remains overwhelmingly predictive of fertility behavior. Married people make more babies, and this is true all around the world, as we showed in a 2022 report…
A whopping 75% of the total fertility decline since 2007 is attributable to the shifting likelihood that people are married.
***
Ivana Greco explains “What Women Want.” In a nutshell, “Policymakers want women to join the workforce to boost America’s economic metrics. Ignore them.” A taste:
For years, policymakers across the political spectrum have wanted more women to join the workforce to boost America’s economic metrics. In 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post bemoaning the drop in women’s labor-force participation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, writing: “Studies have shown that our gross domestic product could be 5 percent higher if women participated in the workforce at the same rate as men.” The Biden administration had an explicit goal of increasing women’s labor-force participation. So did the first Trump administration: its first Council of Economic Advisors issued a report titled Relationship Between Female Labor Force Participation Rates and GDP. Readers will not be surprised to learn the Council’s chief concern was that same piece of economic data, concluding that more women in the workforce grows the GDP, and that this is what matters, because “there is much room to bring additional women into the labor force and to grow the economy as a result.” Professor Emily Oster recently summed up this line of thinking in an essay arguing that government should not support stay-at-home parents “because the loss of their tax dollars would have a major negative externality.” Under this analysis, moms (and presumably dads) at home are little more than missing numbers in a workforce data sheet.
This kind of thinking is usually framed as a “women’s rights” issue: rooted in past attempts to remedy the formal and informal discrimination that kept women unjustly out of the workforce. We can and should celebrate women’s incredible educational and workforce achievements over the past century. However, this type of analysis—more women in the workforce leads to better economic metrics, and those metrics are what mean America is better off—is long due for an overhaul. First, it fetishizes these metrics in ways that one of their original creators warned against. Relatedly, it misses the value of what homemakers (both male and female) contribute. While there have been attempts to remedy this gap through the creation of new metrics, these are ultimately unworkable. Most importantly, it leads to policy solutions that prioritize what economists can measure over what they can’t, leaving our country worse off.
***
Last but not least, I’m excited to be one of this year’s Public Life Fellows at the Center for Christianity and Public Life! This fellowship is an initiative of The Center for Christianity and Public Life, directed by Michael Wear. It fits into the Center’s larger mission “to contend for the credibility of Christian resources in public life, for the good of the public.”