This tweet makes an excellent point:
The context was the cost of summer camps when you have two working parents, without anywhere near enough holidays to cover the summer. This has to be one of the odd contradictions of modern thinking; I first noticed in in Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged" where she glossed over the role of children in a hyper-capitalist society. While not everyone is a fan of Ayn Rand, it was an early sign of a fault point in the individualist culture we have created.
The problem is that we can't really decide on two things. One, is the basic unit of humanity individuals or families? This isn't meant to be exclusionary, but simply to point out that humanity, as a project, requires new humans so if there is a commitment to the species they have to come from somewhere. I don't want to say how these come together -- family is a very diverse entity -- but they are real mechanisms for child rearing.
Two, is the social contract that Western Democracies have created is about previous generations being transferred wealth in their old age from upcoming generations. This works best when there is a continuing flow of upcoming generations and that requires some investment in the future as well.
I am not sure about the solutions, but I am pretty sure that the solution set does not include seeing children as expensive consumer goods.
“The problem is that we can't really decide on two things. One, is the basic unit of humanity individuals or families?”
ReplyDeleteMaggie Thatcher couldn’t decide either: “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” But once you make that concession — that things larger than the individual are in fact real — you’ve opened the door to the reality of larger and larger groups.
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