Both Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat think young adults should have children in spite of the dangers created by climate change. Klein believes the future will be a rich and exciting place as the result of technological change; Douthat, on the other hand, contends that the bomb presented a much more daunting challenge than climate change, and argues that the baby boom of the late forties and fifties was the result of optimism tied to a religious revival. Is Douthat right?
Unfortunately for Ross, Jesus is not the answer to this question. Compare the condition of the country today with where we were in the late 1940s. After our national triumph over fascism, the GIs returned to a prosperous land which contained a staggering percentage of the world’s productive capacity. The Russian bomb was a threat, but only a conditional one; it had no impact on everyday life. Why wouldn’t you be an optimist under those circumstances? Today, by contrast, we have just lived through the Great Recession and an ongoing pandemic, China is becoming a greater threat than the USSR ever was, and our liberal democracy is under an existential threat from the far right, which refuses to appreciate that the system is already stacked in its favor. Finally, the damage done by climate change, unlike the use of the bomb, is inevitable, and will only get worse. You would have to be very brave or very foolish to be an optimist today.
There are, in fact, plenty of reasons to be a pessimist in the current environment. I will discuss two of them in my next posts.