Children and a shared vision of a common future

Quote 1:
Comanches, by T.R Fehrenbach, published 1994

This mountain hunter was not a “noble savage.” Such concepts were always illusions of highly organized, overbureaucratized societies, wanting desperately to believe that man’s nature was to be free, and that somehow civilization had tyrannized him. The Shoshone hunter was hardly a joyous creature of nature. The People were not clean, not “good,” not “noble,” not merciful, nor, hard as their life was, were they industrious. They were a people surviving by the skin of their teeth, beset by forces they could not comprehend.

Source:
https://www.kvetch.au/p/sketching-the-bars-of-our-cage

Quote 2:
The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, published 1916
Page 64

[I]n many Greek cities the law punished celibacy as a crime. This was in accordance with the ancient belief: man did not belong to himself; he belonged to the family. He was one member in a series, and the series must not stop with him. He was not born by chance; he had been introduced into life that he might continue a worship; he must not give up life till he is sure this worship will be continued after him.

Source:
https://dn710303.ca.archive.org/0/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.81548/2015.81548.The-Ancient-City.pdf

Quote 3:
The last fertile nation: Why Israel refuses the demographic collapse
by Deconstructionist Jew
Dec 02, 2025

The deeper truth is that Israelis broadly live in what Benedict Anderson called civilizational time, that is, the sense of moving through history as part of a collective project that extends before and after you. It creates a lived feeling that your children are not just ‘your kids,’ but the next link in a chain you are responsible for perpetuating.

Even secular Israelis, perhaps especially so, inhabit this space. They genuinely believe their children will build something they won’t see completed. The state is young, the project is unfinished, and the future feels like it depends on them personally.

Outside Israel, this perspective has largely collapsed. People no longer experience their society as a transgenerational project. Time is experienced individually: optimize your life, maximize your experience, then make a clean exit. There is no ‘we’ that persists through generations, no story large enough to justify the inconvenience of children.

Source:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-180491961

Quote 4:
Substack Note
by Kaiser Bauch
Dec 19

Where I live, in the Czech Republic, life does not feel particularly anti-family at all. There are playgrounds everywhere, children are visibly present in public spaces, pavements are easy to navigate with strollers, and grandparents in most cases play an active role in helping to care for their grandchildren. There is also a reasonable and non-negligible level of state support for families.

And yet, fertility remains far below any desirable level. The reason, I suspect, is that something more fundamental is missing: a shared grand narrative. Post-communist Europe is not strongly shaped by the openly anti-familial or oikophobic, self-critical progressive ideologies found in parts of the West. Instead, the dominant leitmotif of the past thirty-five years has been essentially material: let’s get wealthy, let’s grow, let’s catch up with the West. That, however, is not enough.

Source:
https://substack.com/@kaiserbauch/note/c-189471398

Some thoughts:

• Fertility rates are low throughout the developed world.
• Our societies view having children as a personal choice, similar to having a hobby or pets.
• We basically treat parents as strange outliers to society, who are potentially evil and must be watched at all times in case they mistreat their children. So, from the point of view of a parent, society itself is dangerous to the family. It leans hostile.
• To reproduce effectively, humans must exist in a religious group of some sort. Otherwise, you aren't part of an eternal chain of existence, and it's hard to justify the expense (in time, definitely, and often in money).
• Our birthrate is low because we exist outside of a meaningful shared story. The only story that our culture tells itself is that it's bad and should end. I completely agree. A new story will rise, this much is certain.
• The most interesting question to me is: What story comes next ?