Ed West’s contribution to NatCon UK is up on his excellent Substack. (You should subscribe to it — after you sign up for NRPlus, of course.) West writes about cratering fertility rates, which is a problem so many of us are dwelling on:

The theme of this panel is the issue of biology and the most notable recent fact of biology has been the collapse of birth rates. Where you sit on the political spectrum will inform whether you think this simply reflects liberation and choice, or a tragic loss of faith in the future. Obviously, most of us tend towards the latter.

There are financial and social factors pushing this trend, but there is also a deeper spiritual issue, about meaning. And optimism. Family may give us meaning, but children are an expression of hope in the future.

I’m probably not the best person to speak on the subject of optimism, but if we’re going to make our ideas more popular, and reverse the overwhelming feeling of decline that shadows our country, we need to offer a vision that is better than what we have now. We need to offer hope.

If we live in a culture that is overwhelmed by pessimism and worry, it is not surprising that people don’t want to have children.

Now, I happen to think that material factors are a crucial element here. It’s not a coincidence that the collapse to below-replacement-level fertility happened after the invention of the Pill. And it’s possible that the socialization on offer in a lower-fertility society has a compounding effect on lowering overall fertility. That is, if you don’t see your near peers building large families, it won’t easily occur to you that this is an option. I’ve seen people come into a traditional Catholic parish, and their sense of possibility begins to open up when they see some families pushing toward ten children and other very young families are already graced with four kids.

But the spiritual aspect to the crisis is a compounding one as well. I hate engaging in attempts to explain or re-explain the ideas I buried in my book, My Father Left Me Ireland, because it feels self-indulgent and it slightly mars the effect I wanted the book to produce on its own. Nonetheless, the book articulated a parallel idea. West is right that having children is a sign of hope for the future. It’s also a sign of gratitude for the past. There is a kind of spiritual ecology at work in humanity. The responsibility toward the unborn drives us back with appreciation to those who died before us. And the ghosts of those who died before us ask of us to preserve what is good, true, and beautiful for posterity.

A low-fertility society will tend to not just be pessimistic about the future, but iconoclastic and hateful toward the past both at the collective level of nations and at the smaller level of families themselves. The recovery of appreciation for our civilizational inheritance will only come when we are determined to create a posterity to inherit it. Until then, our cultures are going to be marooned in the present and more fearful — having neither the comfort of our ancestors nor the hope in our children.