Falling Birthrates Won’t Make Humans Extinct

January 21, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Sometimes I see articles discussing how far the birthrate has fallen in many countries and pointing out that this is a worldwide trend. Families are much smaller than they were in the past, and many young adults are opting not to have children at all. The authors often make dire predictions as to what will happen if this trend continues for another millennium or so, leaving a tiny human population on the brink of extinction.

There aren’t enough reasons to want children in today’s society, they say. In past generations, large families had economic value because children worked on the family farm. As they grew older, they took care of their aging parents, who might otherwise be left destitute upon becoming unable to work. But nowadays, a child is just an expensive, time-consuming luxury item. Even in countries where the government provides good child care and pays generous stipends to parents, birthrates remain low. Simply put, modern-day humans have many other things they’d rather be doing than raising families.

While I agree with the short-term prediction that the world’s population will soon reach its peak and then begin falling, I don’t see this as a cause for alarm. As I see it, the resulting labor shortage and high salaries will be very good for wage-earners. Raising a family on one parent’s salary, while the other parent stays home with the children, will be an affordable choice. Lost career opportunities won’t be as much of a concern because the average lifespan will continue to increase. A parent who stays home raising a large family until age 50 might reasonably expect to have a productive career until age 100, or perhaps even longer. Employment discrimination will be much less of a problem because of the labor shortage. Because the young adults of the future will not have to face today’s social and economic constraints with regard to families, their choices may turn out to be very different from what we’re seeing now.

When I wrote this post, my main purpose wasn’t to reassure worried readers that humans are not heading toward extinction. Nor am I suggesting that all children would be better off with a parent who does not work outside the home. Rather, this post is meant to illustrate how current trends often become absurd when they’re extrapolated out too far. We lack a sufficient frame of reference to predict what will happen in the long term because our baseline assumptions soon become outdated. Thus, although a calm, well-reasoned focus on solving present-day problems may not get as much attention as shrieking about a coming apocalypse, the former approach generally results in wiser policy decisions.

Thistles and Cultural Myths

August 18, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags:

Even with this summer’s extreme heat and drought, I still had to spray thistles in my yard; the heat doesn’t bother them. Not much bothers them. Thistles are very persistent weeds. Pulling them out by hand is useless because their root system is so thick and deep, they can just send up two new sprouts for each one you pull. Spraying them works much better because the herbicide gets carried down into the roots and prevents any new growth from coming up.

Much the same can be said about ridding our society of its prickly old prejudices and stereotypes. They’ve been around long enough to have a strong root system—that is to say, a large set of cultural assumptions or myths from which they grow. Trying to attack a prejudice without also going after its roots has little effect. Many people put huge amounts of time and effort into arguing, on the Internet and elsewhere, about how ignorant someone else’s beliefs are. But without addressing the cultural context of the beliefs, attacking those who hold them is about the same as trying to pull up thistles one at a time. Some may decide that they’ve had enough of arguing; but they still have no clue what the opposing view is about, and others who share their beliefs get even more vocal as a result of feeling threatened.

To dispel a prejudice effectively, one first has to consider: What is its history? What other beliefs are associated with it? What social structures reinforce it? What role does it play in the cultural drama in which it appears? If our social world is made up of the stories we tell ourselves about it, as has sometimes been said, then we have to understand these narratives before we can rewrite them.

That doesn’t necessarily mean social change begins in the library with a stack of books about history, folklore, politics, rhetoric, and so forth. Much of what’s involved in changing the world—“radical” change, in the original Latin sense of the word, from the root—is an intuitive process. We know what kinds of stories resonate with our culture because we’ve grown up with them and incorporated them into our own lives. When we feel the earth quivering under our feet, we know there’s a fault line close by. As Bob Dylan’s classic song puts it, we don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Today’s world may be more amenable to change than the world our ancestors knew, simply because the pace of change has become so rapid. We are witnessing cultural transformation on an unprecedented scale and, as a result, we don’t have strong expectations that our lives will stay the same. We’re more willing to consider ideas that would have been dismissed out of hand by past generations. But we may also feel so unsettled by the lack of constancy that we cling to old ideas long after they have outlived their usefulness, just because we can’t deal with any more revisions to our mental maps. I’ve sometimes thought that reworking our cultural narratives is much like composing social stories to help an anxious child get used to new places and events. For both, what’s needed is a reassuring storyline and enough repetition to make it familiar and comfortable.

Old Stories from the Bottom Drawer

February 22, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

This scenario will be familiar to many writers: You start working on a story, but it doesn’t unfold the way you had in mind. Some parts of it resonate very well, perfectly expressing the feelings and ideas you wanted to get across. The other parts aren’t right, but you can’t spot the reasons why. Although you know that the story needs more work, the details of what’s wrong with it are unclear.

So you put the half-finished draft away in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, if it’s written out by hand. If it’s on the computer, you drop it into the folder where old incomplete stories go to die. Then you move on to another project, kind of thinking that you’ll come back and finish it after a while, but knowing that there is a high chance you’ll never look at it again.

Time passes, and you don’t think about the story at all. One day you’re cleaning out the file cabinet or deleting old files from your computer, and you discover the story again. Now all of the flaws that eluded you before are embarrassingly obvious. Scenes you once thought hilarious look silly and juvenile. Those brilliant insights on the world are trite. There’s a factual error here and a clumsy ungrammatical sentence there. You used a word or phrase that all your friends were using ten years ago, but now it is widely seen as ignorant and offensive. You wonder what you were thinking when you wrote it.

Even with all its flaws, though, the story has some good points. There are descriptive paragraphs that create vivid mental images, fantastic settings that make you wish you could go take a walk there, and — even after all this time — a lively cast of characters who pop right out of the story and have a few things to say to you about their world. So you decide it’s worth revising. You chop out the stuff that doesn’t work, and you write new material to bring together the parts you like. When you’re finished, the story may not look like you first imagined it would, but you’re pleased with the results.

I believe that our society goes through a similar process of revising its cultural stories. We have lots of faulty assumptions, stereotypes, and outdated models of how the world works; and they’re all stuffed into the collective bottom drawer, right next to the bogeymen and scapegoats that go along with them. On the rare occasions when the drawer gets opened far enough to let a bit of sunlight and fresh air into its dim musty depths, we may notice that something in there doesn’t look quite right. But often it seems like too much trouble to find out what’s in need of fixing, so we just push the drawer shut and keep on doing the same old stuff we’ve always done.

We can go on like that for a very long time before an unexpected event prods us out of our complacency. A new scientific or technological discovery shows just how far wrong the experts had been on a particular subject, or a disadvantaged minority group starts advocating for equal opportunity loudly enough so that they can’t be ignored anymore. Then we’re faced with the difficult task of rewriting cultural narratives long taken for granted. But after we’ve owned up to our mistakes and invested the resources needed to fix them, not only do we find that it was worth the time and effort — we wonder why we never got around to it before.

Introduction: A Place to Stand

February 14, 2012 · 25 comments · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Welcome to my blog/story website! A little about me: I live in Vandalia, which is a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, in the United States. I have two grown children, who went away to college in other cities—both within driving distance, but far enough away to develop some independence and not hang around too much with their friends from high school. My husband and I thought that was just right. (Update, May 2014: They’ve graduated — YAY!!)

I work in the legal publishing industry and have a law degree from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Although I’m originally from Southern California, I came to Ohio in 1983 because I received a scholarship to law school. I met my husband while he was an engineering student at Case, and we have been together ever since.

I’ve always had an interest in how changing cultural narratives shape the development of our society, weaving together various aspects of history, law, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychology, philosophy, politics, religion, mythology, folklore, and the arts. On the occasions when many of these strands intersect and align, that’s where to find a place to stand with the lever to move the world.

One such change took place when the neurodiversity movement spread across the Internet several years ago. As with other civil rights advocacy efforts in the modern era, it calls for acceptance and accommodation of human differences—in particular, autism and other neurological differences. I expect that some readers will have come here from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, where I serve on the Board of Trustees, or from another site that focuses on neurodiversity and disability rights issues. My personal website may touch on these topics occasionally; however, I don’t intend it to be specifically about neurodiversity or autism politics. I’m not writing it to change anyone’s views or to promote any particular agenda.

Rather, it’s meant to reflect my impressions of life in a society that is changing more rapidly than any other in history—a society that is just beginning to discover the vast diversity it contains, to understand and feel comfortable with differences instead of suppressing them, and to draw strength from our shared stories and traditions in positive ways while navigating this complex cultural shift. I hope that my readers will find it meaningful when seen from this perspective.

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