THE CITY
The City: From the perspective of a young person who is either coming out of college or is college age, what would you say to them about the case for why that would be damaging both to them and to the child? Eberstadt: Well, for starters for those who have been through it themselves, they know that intuitively. There is a great deal of social science evidence about this, an enormous amount. In fact, the late, great James Q. Wilson said 17 years ago or so that there’s so much evidence about the problems for children of non‐traditional family arrangements that even some sociologists now believe that he was correct. The sociologists didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence is there. And the question is, how do you use it without stuffing it down people’s throats and making them feel as is you’re pointing fingers at them and clobbering them with it? And I think it’s really tricky. On the other hand, people do learn. People are rational creatures. And it’s not an impossible thing to explain to a young adult that if he or she asks himself or herself what they want most, I think most peo‐ ple would still answer that they’d like to be in a committed relation‐ ship with somebody. We have human nature to work with here, is my point. And I think between it and being delicate and sensible about handling the empirical record, we can get through to people.
The City: I want to close with this. When it comes to your attitude to‐ ward the experience of the Millennial generation here, are we dealing with a problem that has a half life? In the sense that the people who are making the case that marriage is unnecessary, that child rearing is not necessarily some‐ thing that is affirming for women, that the sexual revolution was a great and grand thing, and has all these wonderful consequences, also tend to be people who don’t have many children. And on the flip side, those who reject those arguments implicitly, whether they do so explicitly in their own minds or not, tend to have a lot of children and tend to raise them. Is this a problem that essentially will work itself out in society as those younger children grow up without opposition to marriage and acceptance of the ideas of the sexual revolution?
Eberstadt: There are a number of people who have written really well about this. One is Eric Kaufmann, an academic who wrote a book called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? And his point is to work with demographic literature and statistics. He says this is what’s going to happen across the world in every religion, because in every religion the religious have more children. And across the board 56