I used to find myself quietly, yet haughtily, indignant about other people’s unwillingness to have more kids. This is a sentence that should make the reader cringe. It certainly has that effect on the writer.

Our society’s drastically declining birth rate (starkly represented as a precariously top-heavy, upside-down pyramid) and its potential consequences inspire anxiety.

At times, wallowing in doom and gloom seems preferable to facing up to the massive responsibility of raising the children I birthed.

Who will be there to run all the critical functions of an advanced society? Who will be there to take care of the elderly?

Who will be there to maintain our Western traditions and unspoken moral codes before wave after wave of immigrants from high birthrate societies arrive, immigrants largely unwilling to assimilate and unconcerned with becoming productive citizens?

Who will save us from ourselves?

Cleaning our room

When I discovered Jordan Peterson in 2015, I was a junior in college. By then, campus leftism was dialing up in ways that had begun to grate my conscience — even as a standard-issue lib.

I didn’t like the fact that the administration had begun sending surveys requesting my pronouns, asking how it could better accommodate social contagions that were a strange minority, almost universally rejected by the student body.

There was one guy who wore dresses. I once found myself alone in a bathroom with him and left as soon as I noticed we were alone, the hair on my neck bristling.

Peterson’s now infamous exhortation to “clean your room” spoke to me. He invited students who concerned themselves too intensely with the state of the world — be it the impending climate apocalypse or their peers’ “transphobic” use of standard English — to turn their attention to more immediate, personal responsibilities.

Instantiate order in all the small ways first, he said. If you aren’t capable of the small, you’ll never be capable of the large things that currently overwhelm you. The message, simple as it was (our mothers had been saying something similar for years), was revolutionary. For those with ears to hear, it was liberating.

New specters

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

The liberation was short-lived. While I no longer feared the prevailing liberal bugaboos, other specters emerged to haunt me. Enthralled by my new “dissident” stance, it didn’t occur to me that I had simply swapped one distraction for another. Surely, I was nothing like those misguided activist-students Peterson humbled in those iconic YouTube videos.

This habit of mind — seeing every political dispute in the most totalizing, civilization-threatening terms possible — has been hard to shake, especially given my flair for the dramatic.

For the most part, I’ve successfully confined my political despair to my online interactions. But lately, I’ve noticed it bleeding into my real life. My despair distracts me. Opening X first thing in the morning sets the day up for failure. Have I become addicted to upsetting myself? Is this any way to live?

'Hath much to love'

Wordsworth’s “Character of the Happy Warrior” comes to mind:

—He who, though thus endued as with a sense

And faculty for storm and turbulence,

Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans

To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes;

Sweet images! which, wheresoe'er he be,

Are at his heart; and such fidelity

It is his darling passion to approve;

More brave for this, that he hath much to love:—

Can we maintain a sense of civilizational purpose without indulging despairing images of the future we strive to avoid?

What optimism requires

We can — and must. In fact, this is essential to the character of the happy warrior: hope without fear, courage without anger, purpose without despair.

Collapse — however we imagine it — may still be imminent. My concerns are still valid; the denial of base reality at the heart of transgender ideology, for example, remains dangerous.

But I can acknowledge this truth without letting it overwhelm me. Our family’s recent move to Budapest from suburban South Carolina has included all the expected challenges, as well as some unexpected ones.

At times, wallowing in gloom and doom seems preferable to facing up to the massive responsibility of raising the children I birthed, and I realize that I’m no less tempted by such negative escapism than I was as a liberal.

What optimism requires is far more tedious and labor-intensive. Here, as in much of life, the “fidelity” Wordsworth mentions makes all the difference. The “homefelt pleasures and ... gentle scenes” of domestic life aren’t distractions from some larger battle but the very foundation of any civilization worth saving.