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-Short Attention Span Theater-
Why Is the Left So Anti-Baby? Monasticism?
2017-07-18
[American Thinker] Last week we learned that the Danes are working hard to reduce baby production in Africa. No doubt, because sub-Saharan African women are powering a baby boom that will make Africa into the Ground Zero of the Population Problem later in the century. Steve Sailer writes that women in Niger want about nine babies but usually have to make do with seven.

Meanwhile Japanese youngsters are reported to be remarkably uninterested in sex, and, of course, U.S. feminists insist that "Rule No. 1 for female academics is: don’t have a baby."

My own personal experience is that the closer an American identifies with academia the less likely he or she is to have children.

The "educated" have been anti-baby and pushing population control for at least a century. What is going on here?

In part, of course, the push is to discourage other people from having children: eugenics and the "unfit." In part, it is that upper-class women prefer to outsource child-minding.

So Birth Control was invented. And the educated classes decided to make abortion respectable. But it looks like the only people interested in birth control are the We, the educated, the evolved. Ordinary people just go on having babies like they always did, only now a lot more of the babies are surviving. How unfit of them.

I’d like to believe that this anti-baby culture is all part of the left’s foolish dream to create heaven on earth. You may have noticed that people don’t have babies in Heaven; they just live happily ever after.

But I think there is something else at work: monasticism. The scions of the rich and powerful very often don’t have the chops for the powerful life; they go, or are sent, into a monastery. I think that many of our liberal friends want to retreat from the rough and tumble of babies and parenting; they want to retire to a monastery.

Official Narrative tells is that monasticism is a Middle Ages thing, but the more I live the more monasticism I see around me. There’s the woman excited that her 11-year-old kid got into Juilliard. What is Juilliard but a novitiate for the monastic practice of the ancient texts of classical music? Conservatories are there to preserve a cultural tradition, to keep it going in all its purity, in perpetuity.

What is the purpose of a university but as a place where people can withdraw from the rough and tumble of ordinary life to think deep thoughts, instruct the young in the one true religion, hold endless committee meetings, and ease up on the baby production?

This not new, for monasteries are not just a Middle Ages thing. They flourished in the Dark Ages in the time of Charlemagne and the Franks, when a king might dump a troublesome relative in a monastery on one day, but then on another day nominate a relative to be abbot of a wealthy, powerful monastery in his domain. What was that all about?

What about the Buddha? Here was a handsome prince that dumped his wife and kids and took up the contemplative life. Pretty soon there were Buddhist temples that were as big as cities where rich young men from all over could go and meditate.
Posted by:Besoeker

#6  "Listen carefully,
it takes TWO different sexes to make a baby!"
Posted by: Skidmark    2017-07-18 21:09  

#5  "Not if you don't stick around"

Parentin' B. Hard
Posted by: Frank G   2017-07-18 19:59  

#4  Because, once you have children, you have to grow up.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2017-07-18 16:05  

#3  The "educated" have been anti-baby and pushing population control for at least a century. What is going on here?

Instead they are importing illegal aliens with high-birth rates? It's not so messy/icky and doesn't get in the way of careers. It's a twofer (or threefer); you get cheap labor and expand the Donk voter base.
Posted by: JohnQC   2017-07-18 11:20  

#2  There are two simpler explanations.

1. Babies get in the way of hedonism. If you want to be an irreligious hedonist, you therefore cannot have babies.

2. When you design a society where the apparatus of state takes over the functions of the family, nobody has any families any more.

If people wanted to join monasteries, they still could. Since they aren't doing that, the two explanations I suggested make more sense.
Posted by: no mo uro   2017-07-18 05:25  

#1  But I think there is something else at work: monasticism.

The tenets of Monasticism include self-denial, selt-mortificaton, paryer and holiness. I believe the author needs to dig a bit deeper.
Posted by: Besoeker   2017-07-18 05:06  

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