Children in the hands of god and climate change

For a while, I’ve been meaning to write a column about the phenomenon of young people saying that they don’t want to have children because they fear raising them in a world laid waste by climate change. As with any idea that you keep on the shelf too long, I’ve now seen it executed by a colleague — in this case, Ezra Klein, who devoted his weekend column to arguing for an optimistic, life-affirming response to the challenges of rising temperatures.

I endorse my colleague’s argument, especially his reasonable historical perspective on how the risks of a hotter future compare to the far more impoverished and brutal straits in which our ancestors chose life for their children and, ultimately, for us. But I want to use his column as an excuse to push a little further on the subject and theorize a bit about the psychological roots of the procreation-amid-climate-change anxiety.

First, since I noticed some incredulous reactions from conservatives on Twitter, I can testify that the anxiety that Klein describes is real enough.We can argue about whether climate anxiety is a primary motivator for opting out of procreation or a kind of secondary excuse.

But at a certain point, even as an excuse, the idea becomes interesting. Why this, why now?

One answer is simple misapprehension: People steeped in the most alarmist forms of activism and argument may believe, wrongly, that we’re on track for the imminent collapse of human civilization or the extinction of the human race.

Another answer is ideological: The ideas of white and Western guilt are particularly important to contemporary progressivism, and in certain visions of ecological economy, removing one’s potential kids from the carbon-emitting equation amounts to a kind of eco-reparations. .

But the cycle also seems possibly connected to trends in religious adherence and belief. Why, for instance, has climate change seemingly yielded deeper procreative anxieties than the Eisenhower-era threat of nuclear doom, which didn’t exactly impede the baby boom? Perhaps because 1950s America was experiencing a religious revival, whereas the ‘70s were a period of rapid secularization or at least de-Christianization; likewise the past two decades, which have yielded the leastchurched younger adults in modern American history.

Just as it makes sense that superstitions like astrology would become more popular amid religious disruption or decline, it isn’t surprising that such periods would generate cultural anxieties about bringing children into the world. Framed as fears about the death of modern civilization, they arguably partake of a more primal fear of death itself.

Global warming is clearly the sharpener, the memento mori; like wartime or a pandemic, it forces a focus on a reality that might otherwise stay out of mind. But the reality itself — that all suffer, all die — seems more fundamental. In worrying about hypothetical kids faring badly under climate change, the secular imagination is letting itself be steered toward the harsh analysis.

Against these anxieties, my colleague’s column urges a belief in a future where human agency overcomes existential threats and ushers in a “welcoming” and even “thrilling” world. This is a welcome admonition; I believe in those possibilities myself.

But the promise of a purposive, divinely created universe is that life is worth living and worth conceiving even if the worst happens, the crisis comes, the hope of progress fails.

The child who lives to see the green future is infinitely valuable; so is the child who lives to see the apocalypse. For us, there is only the duty to give that child its chance to join the story; its destiny belongs to God.