In discussions about fertility, I quite often encounter the view—even among intelligent, well-educated people—that in the past people were told having children was a good thing, so they had children. Today they are told having children is a bad thing, so they do not. The solution, supposedly, is to start telling them again that having children is a good thing. If only the world were that simple!
But behind this lies a more interesting question. Could the decline in fertility be caused by a change in those values and ideals that we perceive somewhat vaguely in the background, yet which still influence our everyday decisions? And behind that lies an even more important question: Is our everyday life shaped by our ideals, or are our ideals shaped by our everyday life?
Ideally, we could answer such a question by comparing two theories:
- One theory explains how great and lofty ideals grow out of everyday habits.
- The other explains how great and lofty ideals change everyday habits.
We would ask what follows from each theory, compare those implications with empirical facts, and then determine which theory holds up better.
In this case, however, there is a problem: we have nothing to compare. There is a solid account of how an entire worldview, including values and moral principles, emerges from everyday habits. Repeated actions become habits, habits become institutions, and those institutions eventually require explanation and justification. This is how values and moral principles arise, and ultimately entire worldviews that explain, in retrospect, why established institutions are right and self-evident. Agriculture came first, then the principles of agricultural life, and finally agricultural deities—not the other way around. Berger and Luckmann described this process as early as the late 1960s in The Social Construction of Reality.
Yet there is no corresponding account that adequately explains the path from ideals to everyday life. There are only simple moralistic exhortations. And we cannot rule out the possibility that this is because no such account can actually be constructed—that it conflicts too sharply with reality.
This brings us back to fertility. If everyday practices generally come first and the ideals that justify them emerge afterward, there is little reason to assume that fertility should work in the opposite direction. For the time being, it therefore makes more sense to start with the practical conditions under which people make decisions about children. People may not be having children because doing so has become impractical and disadvantageous; the ideals and ideas circulating in the public sphere may be changing only afterward, providing an intellectual and moral vocabulary for a reality that already exists. The fact that the same collapse in fertility is occurring across radically different religious and civilizational settings would seem to support this interpretation.