Ross Douthat: Why Digital Life Threatens Freedom and Family

In this episode of Just Asking Questions, we're joined by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss the cultural, political, and demographic pressures reshaping the modern world. His recent essay, "An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's How to Survive," explores how digital life—from AI companions to algorithmic distraction—is accelerating trends toward social atomization, institutional collapse, and even plummeting birth rates. We talk with Douthat about how libertarians should respond to these changes, whether neo-traditionalism offers a credible path forward, and what it means to maintain meaning and community in the 21st century.

This interview was recorded on April 29, 2025.

Sources Referenced:

• Douthat's New York Times essay: "An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's How to Survive"
• The New York Times: "The World's Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next?"
• U.S. college enrollment decline statistics
• Slow Boring: "Cities aren't back"
• Just Asking Questions with Derek Thompson: "Democrats Must Change"
• Just Asking Questions with Tim Carney: "Why Aren't People Having More Kids?"
• An introduction to G.K. Chesterton's fences

Chapters

• 00:00 Coming up…
• 00:37 Introducing Ross Douthat and the age of cultural bottlenecks
• 04:57 Are digital technologies disrupting cultural transmission?
• 09:57 How the internet reshapes politics and encourages radicalism
• 15:22 Digital media and the decline of institutional trust and localism
• 18:42 Demographic decline and the fading urgency to preserve culture
• 26:52 Free choice or social breakdown? The libertarian tension
• 34:27 Suburbs, adaptation, and the future of normie culture
• 41:12 Risk aversion, parenting, and the erosion of community life
• 47:17 Fertility, tradition, and the rise of large families as a subculture
• 54:07 Neo-traditionalism in a bespoke age: coping or coping well?
• 58:32 Can we rebuild meaningful culture in a post-traditional world?

Transcript:

This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting.

Liz Wolfe: What will survive the digital apocalypse? Just asking questions. Our guest today is Ross Douthat, one of the few people living openly as a conservative at The New York Times, and one of my personal favorite writers on Catholicism, faith, and forging meaning and community in an increasingly atomized age. He wrote a piece for the Times called "An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here's How to Survive." Welcome, Ross.

Ross Douthat: It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Liz Wolfe: Thank you for coming on the show.

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, it's great to have you because, I mean, every once in a while, you read one of these pieces that seems to capture something about what is in the air, what is in the ether. And this is just a really remarkable piece that we will definitely link to, and I recommend reading it to go along with the podcast.

It argues that the digital age is forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a bottleneck. So we can imagine this extreme, rapidly acting new evolutionary pressure, and only a tiny fraction is going to make it through that little opening in the bottleneck. So, just to set this up, what are some of the biggest telltale signs that you observe that lead you to believe we're facing an age of extinction?

Ross Douthat: Sure. Well, first of all, I should say, hopefully it's more than a tiny fraction, right? You can imagine a bottle with a thinner neck or a thicker neck. One of the points of alerting people to these realities is to try to instill and encourage habits and intentions that get more people, more ways of life, more cultures through the bottleneck.

But basically, the argument that I make is that digital life and digital existence are really, really hard on what we think of as normal, basic modes of cultural transmission from one generation to another—and then also the literal reproduction of the species. And these two things are actually connected. The way we live digitally tends to distract us from the forms of creation and educational transmission of literature, art, religion—all the stuff of human culture that people take for granted.

It also tends to distract us and separate us from the normal, in-real-life ways of hanging around with other people—making friendships, going on dates, finding romance, having sex, and having kids—that allow for the very literal continuation of the human species.

So there's a lot of things that people did sort of casually without thinking too much about it in much of human history, that people now need to do with a lot more intentionality in the landscape we're in—a landscape of constant virtual distraction.

If you don't have a certain kind of intentionality about those things—whether it's the religion you're trying to pass on to your kids, or the novel reading you take for granted as what a literate person does, or again, just the literal continuation of Spain or South Korea or Italy or Taiwan as nations—that's the most urgent part of this: the connection to demographics.

But all of that is not going to happen as automatically as it did in the past. You're going to have lots and lots of opportunities to live a virtual existence that doesn't have normal, real-world correlates. And this is only going to increase, presumably, in the age of AI. You don't have to assume that AI will make all work obsolete or anything like that to see this happening.

You just have to assume that AI is going to be especially good at generating addictive slop on YouTube, or generating artificial companions and friendships that substitute for real ones. And that's already happening. The more it happens, the tighter the bottleneck gets.

Liz Wolfe: Well, I mean, I am very sympathetic to this thesis, especially because I send Zach a replica-related rant approximately every two weeks, where I'm very worried about the chatbot girlfriends proliferating. I find it to be one of the creepiest, most dystopian things in the world. Zach is very sick of me blowing up his DMs with my worries about this.

Zach Weissmueller: I agree with you that Her by Spike Jonze is our future. That's our trajectory, for sure.

Liz Wolfe: Absolutely.

Ross Douthat: Well, and in fact, you've probably actually created your own chatbot that now sends Zach those messages, so you don't even have to do it yourself. He's communicating with Liz Wolfe Avatar. I mean, that's the alarmism bot. All of my own dystopian tech columns are themselves written by Ross Douthat AI at this point. I should just confess that up front.

Liz Wolfe: But I—OK, I want to sort of get, you know, right off the bat to the heart of what I think the libertarian objection would be to your essay, which is: Are you erroneously blaming a lot of these problems on technological shifts when, in reality, the thing that you're bemoaning is the fact that our cultural defaults have sort of gone away?

Ross Douthat: I mean, yes, I am suggesting that certain cultural defaults have gone away under technological pressure—

Liz Wolfe: Are they necessarily linked, though? Is your argument that the two are just intrinsically linked?

Ross Douthat: I mean, I guess my general view is that you should regard technological change as causing—well, put it this way, to use a biological metaphor: Any culture contains within it multiple tendencies at any given time. Technological revolutions act on cultures. They interact with preexisting tendencies and heighten or accentuate or cause—again, "cause" is like causing a gene to be expressed. It's like saying, "OK, under certain environmental conditions, some gene in your body gets expressed."

So under the conditions created by the internet and the iPhone and now AI, you get a kind of accentuation of an already existing tendency toward hyper-individualism, atomization, separation from institutions, churches, families, and so on.

And again, yes, all of these trends preexist and predate the internet. I would certainly not argue that there's a monocausal story here where it's just the internet driving, say, distrust of institutions. Distrust of institutions has been rising steadily in America—with a brief shift around September 11—since the 1960s. That's a long-term trend. It's not driven by the internet alone.

Is the internet an accelerant for people's alienation from institutions? Yes, I think it obviously is.

But the other thing I would say is that the essay and the argument I'm making is not a kind of Luddite case for saying these technologies are bad and we need to get rid of them. The argument is more—and I probably could have put in a few more paragraphs to make this explicit—that this technological change is happening. We're not likely to have a Butlerian Jihad, Dune-style rebellion against sentient machines or something. To be clear, I can imagine futures where that happens.

But where we are right now, in 2025, people are going to keep using iPhones, keep living in virtual reality, and adopt whatever the new AI technologies are to some degree. Given that we're not going to go around smashing the machines tomorrow, it's like: You need to be aware of what these new technologies are doing, and you need to focus on how human beings can master the technology rather than the other way around.

How do you make the use of the iPhone, social media, digital media—all these things—fit into a world where human beings keep making great art and having families? That is the challenge. It's a case that assumes technological change. It's not trying to resist it. It's assuming the change and saying, "OK, how do we deal with this? How do we ensure that when society has fully absorbed whatever the technology is doing to us, we still have human things on the other side?"

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, it strikes me as a very McLuhanite argument. Marshall McLuhan—who I find persuasive in this day and age to a large degree, more than I would have expected—argues that technology, specifically communications technology, reorders the human senses in certain ways. Then you need to have an awareness of what those effects are in order to adapt to it.

He goes as far as to say that this is really the prime mover in terms of creating new historical and cultural phenomena. I don't know if you go that far or not, but one example that you give of the way it sort of reorders the political landscape is what you call the rise of these weird, bespoke radicalisms. We've got Luigi Mangione fandom on the left, World War II revisionism on the right, and you describe it as an extinction of a certain kind of political discourse.

Why are those two particular examples outgrowths of the digital age of extinction?

Ross Douthat: I mean, it's partially just that the digital experience discourages norminess in all its forms, you might say. Liberal democracy historically has thrived on people being loosely engaged with politics in ways that are not bespoke. You're part of a broad coalition that is trying to get particular things done in politics and has a defined set of interests, but you're not sculpting and crafting this hyperpersonalized political identity.

Now, again, this is a case where you don't want to just say this is bad, full stop. In fact, some bespoke political identities get at real truths about the world that are lost in a world of boring normie liberalism. And as someone who is not myself a normie liberal, I have a real appreciation for the ways in which the internet can enliven political argument, increase the range of available ideas, and expand political debates.

So it's not as simple as saying this new world is 100 percent worse because we're all going to be living in weird fusions of Hindu nationalism, Fabian socialism, and the Black Panthers—or something. But again, you want to be aware, as a citizen engaging in politics, of the way your own political engagement is being rewired.

I didn't talk about this at length in the essay, but the other thing it does is create these weird "politics as fandoms," where you're engaging with politics not by knocking on doors or canvassing or forming an institution organized around a particular issue, but more in the way people might engage with football or hockey. Clearly, the internet encourages some version of this. Social media especially encourages a version of this where it's like, what is the thing your "main character" is doing today?

So many influencers, right and left, are clearly offering this kind of politics-as-fandom. And again, democratic government is not really well served by this kind of mentality. It's not how republican government is supposed to work. So it's not going away, but you want to be aware of it. You want to figure out: How do you, in your own life, avoid thinking of politics in this way? And also, how do you, as a senator or congressman or someone who takes political institutions seriously, avoid existing in that kind of landscape?

Because it's a landscape where it's really hard to actually get anything done politically. I don't think it's a coincidence that the internet has accelerated the impotence of the U.S. Congress. Again, to your previous question, it's not the only reason Congress has become increasingly impotent, but internet-age politics are especially ill-suited to real-world legislative deal making.

Liz Wolfe: Wait, why is that? Is it just because localism doesn't matter, and you can't sort of gin up enough support for a person who's representing a relatively small contingent?

Ross Douthat: I think it's partially that local interests seem to diminish in salience dramatically. Politicians become less dependent on local interests—even when they're getting elected locally—and more dependent on national constituencies.

Yuval Levin at the American Enterprise Institute has written a fair amount about this: the way in which institutions, in the digital environment, become platforms rather than common enterprises. So you see members of Congress for whom being a congressperson or senator is less about participating in this institution that exists in the real world—where you go into a building, follow particular protocols, attend meetings and committees—and more about building up your digital reality.

Liz Wolfe: This is sort of exemplified by Nancy Mace's big hubbub over sharing the women's restroom in one of the congressional buildings with trans people. It felt like something that wasn't really narrowly tailored to what actually serves her constituents, but rather a means of making the name "Nancy Mace" itself more prominent and higher profile.

Ross Douthat: Yes, right. But it's also that her own constituents—I think it's clear—would not reelect her if they weren't participating in this as well. So it's not just that as a congressperson you're trying to gain some national or even international audience. I think it also has to be the case that ordinary voters in a South Carolina district somehow find it more real that Nancy Mace is out there not just doing cable news hits anymore, but creating viral videos and showing up in your TikTok feed or whatever.

That's somehow more real than Nancy Mace coming back to the district and saying, "Good news, guys. I added this bit of spending that benefits our district through this larger legislative compromise."

I mean, it's an interesting question. There are politicians who have endured and thrived successfully in this landscape using the old model. I think it's easier for senators than for congressmen and congresswomen for some reason. I don't want to say the older model has completely disappeared, but there clearly is a transition to a world where what people are looking for from their representatives is this kind of participation in the virtual drama—not concrete legislative achievement.

Liz Wolfe: OK. The literal extinction that I think we should probably surface is that we're facing a falling birth rate. We're already below replacement rate in the United States, and this is even worse abroad—in places like South Korea and Japan. We're seeing this trend across so much of Western Europe.

I mean, in the U.S., we're at, like, what—1.66 births per woman? What are your biggest—

Ross Douthat: That's a good—that's a good rate by…I mean, it's below replacement.

Liz Wolfe: Relatively. It's better than other countries are doing. What are your biggest anxieties about this?

Ross Douthat: I mean, you want to start by being very basic, right? I like Italy. I like South Korea. I enjoy South Korean popular culture, like a lot of people around the world. I enjoy the existence of distinctive human cultures and countries. So I would prefer that these cultures and countries not disappear.

I think that's a reasonable impulse before we get into other questions about how a world of falling birth rates affects me economically or politically. Right now, South Korea has a birth rate that's bounced up a tiny bit—so now, let's say, it's at 0.7 or 0.72 births per woman. If you extend that into the future by 50 years or so, there may still be a South Korea—although North Korea might have just walked in and taken it. But if you have 50 or 60 million South Koreans today, you will, at that pace, soon enough have 20 million South Koreans.

You will also have a society in which the age skew is like nothing we've seen before in human history. These societies will be emptied out—though probably intensely concentrated, as people move to big cities—but there will be depopulated hinterlands, depopulated areas.

Yes, there will still be people speaking Italian in 50 years and people speaking Korean, but there will be a kind of actual collapse of real-world nations and cultures, if this trend continues to a certain degree.

Liz Wolfe: So you're telling me there's hope for eradicating the French?

Ross Douthat: Well—I mean, no. The French actually have one of the higher birth rates in Europe. I'm sorry if you're anti-Gallic. The French are more likely to be around than the Greeks or the Spanish.

Liz Wolfe: Terrible.

Ross Douthat: No, but I think this is actually part of one of my weirder theories. The same point we were just talking about with politics applies, in a weird way, to nations. The nations that still have a certain kind of arrogance about their own importance—I do think they're more likely to continue to reproduce themselves in this environment.

The more the environment you are in feels peripheral and provincial to the drama playing out on your phone, the less likely you are to feel urgency to build things, create culture, get married, and have kids. And the people in those societies who do have that agency are just going to want to leave. That's the other fascinating thing about this dynamic.

People say, well, as population growth slows down, you'll have less migration, and the immigration crises of our own day will abate to some degree. Maybe that's true. But if you're a talented young person in, let's say, Argentina or Chile—two cultures where the birth rate is headed down to around one, half of replacement—would you stay in Argentina or Chile if you had opportunities to go to places that still had a birth rate of 1.65 and stronger prospects for economic growth and opportunity?

I think you would probably leave. So I think you'll see a continuing emptying of areas that feel peripheral—of their most talented inhabitants and citizens. This will create certain concentrations of population. If you're in the places where population is concentrated, you won't feel the demographic decline to the same degree. But you will have these vast areas of stagnation and depopulation covering large swaths of the planet.

At the very least, it will be strange. It'll be a very strange future. Think about all the new cities China has built in the last 20 or 25 years. A number of those cities are just going to stand empty—with wolves and…feral pandas. Maybe not the feral pandas—I'm trying to come up with a China-specific image. But there's just going to be a lot of weirdness.

The broad trend will be toward slower economic growth, more economic stagnation. The big risk is that this compounds—it already has in these places. If you're a young person, your social landscape looks bleak. You're in a society filled with old people, spending all its money on old people.

And I think libertarians should care about this, because libertarians have generally been humanists. They've liked the idea that human beings are good—Julian Simon, yes; Paul Ehrlich, no. But all of the things libertarians have tended to focus on—economic growth is good, spending endless amounts of money on an old-age safety net is maybe not the best use of human resources—well, guess what? The depopulated future is the libertarian nightmare in that sense.

It's steadily slowing economic growth, and a society that's top-heavy with old people who just keep voting to spend more and more money on retirement programs. It is, in fact, the libertarian dystopia. It's just been freely chosen—which is the challenge, I think.

Liz Wolfe: I want to push back on this. I mean, in a sense, I think I've already sort of shown my hand because I write about this all the time on the internet. I'm pretty obviously a pro-natalist. I'm a Catholic. I am a mother. I live in New York City, and I actually chose to have my first child well below the average age for New York City mothers with my education status.

But to try to steelman the argument that I vehemently disagree with—one that's nevertheless put forth by many of my colleagues, who have good reasons for believing the things they believe—is that this happens in every developed, educated society. As women amass more status, more ability to be choosy about their mates, more passion for their careers, higher educational attainment, they feel a sense of: "When I exit the workforce" or "When I have more constraints on my time," there are massive tradeoffs that come with that.

And this is sort of an unavoidable phenomenon that we see play out over and over again. As women get more opportunities, they make different choices than being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. And it's really hard to get people to freely choose a different alternative than the one available to them now.

What do you say to this sort of libertarian argument of, like, "Well, duh, of course this happens—they're freely choosing it, they're making rational choices, and it's not the end of the world for women to want to be freed of their shackles and be allowed to do more than they did before"? How would you convince a libertarian who's like, "Look, this was freely chosen, and it's a sign of living in a wealthy, sophisticated society"?

Ross Douthat: So, first of all, I would say that's true to some degree, right? And that's why it happens to some degree everywhere. It's a universal phenomenon of wealthy—and not even incredibly wealthy, just middle-income—modernity. There are certain aspects of it that are just a built-in feature of living in a wealthy society.

A couple of things, though. Well, more than a couple, but let's try.

So, the first point is that something—this relates to the essay that I wrote, the one we were talking about at the beginning—something has actually changed specifically in the last five or ten years that is distinct. It appeared for a while that a lot of developed countries were just going to have their birth rates settle in a range below replacement but not so far below that you started talking about things like empty cities and wolves roaming the streets.

You had models in places like Scandinavia where it seemed like certain forms of gender egalitarianism were compatible with birth rates around 1.7 or 1.8. Add in a little immigration, and you're OK. There seemed to be a kind of gender-egalitarian model, and the United States was sort of an outlier with a birth rate relatively close to replacement. So you could tell a story that said, "Look, this issue—it's a real issue, but it reflects people's choices. They're understandable choices. It reflects wealth and female emancipation, and we shouldn't worry about it too much."

But in the last five or 10 years, a lot of places that seemed to have a relatively low but stable birth rate have kind of fallen off a cliff. We already talked about South Korea as the lowest low. You've had a bunch of places go from low fertility to lowest low. And you've had places—including Scandinavia—go from just below replacement to much lower fertility.

And that doesn't seem to be driven by some general trend toward female emancipation. It seems to be driven by a more immediate shift that clearly has something to do with virtual life, smartphones, digital existence—something that's just making it harder for the sexes to pair off in the most basic way.

A lot of this is just: fewer people are in couples. It's not just that people used to have three kids and now they have two. It's that people are having zero kids because they don't have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. They don't have a spouse. And that doesn't seem like it's just an issue of feminism or women's equality—unless you think there's been some complete sea change in the status of women in, say, Norway in the last five or 10 years. That seems wrong.

It seems more like something about this mode of existence we're in is making it harder for people to get married. A lot of people want to get married. A lot of people want to have kids.

That's the second thing: there's plenty of survey data on what people want, and people do still want kids—especially in the United States, but also in other places. So people are in this environment with unfulfilled desires. That should be somewhat concerning from a libertarian perspective. It's not just a matter of people "choosing their choices." People have unfulfilled desires that something about this particular moment is making it harder to fulfill.

And then finally—and this is the most important point in a way—at a certain point, this trend, created by wealth and emancipation and equality, hits a place where it undermines all of those things in a profound way. That is where I think everyone, but certainly libertarians, have to be concerned.

If you're going from fertility of 2.4 to 1.6, I think the libertarian shrug is mistaken but totally understandable. When you get to the point of half-replacement fertility—whether people are choosing it or not, whether it's an outgrowth of wealth and progress or not—it's a big problem. It's just a big problem. And the libertarian world is not going to be sustainable under those circumstances, I think.

Zach Weissmueller: I wonder if—and I wondered this as I read your piece—if some aspects of the picture you're painting are a little too bleak. I mean, won't there be some obvious natural solutions that play out in this scenario?

For one, as we get technological progress, we do gain material wealth that makes it easier to take care of the elderly in our society. Secondly, it's just straight-up Darwinism: the people who reproduce will reproduce. There may be more and less fertile areas of the country and the world, but the people who are alive and living in that world really aren't going to care as much about these changes as we do now. It's almost like there's a nostalgia that's slipping away for us, but future generations aren't going to care about that loss the same way.

One section of your essay that really struck me in this regard was the part about the suburbs, because it's related to this dissipation of "normie-dom." You write about how chain restaurants are closing down because of millennials—here's an article from Business Insider that's representative: Millennials Are Killing Chains Like Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee's. Obviously, shopping malls are shutting down. You mentioned college enrollment rates flatlining, maybe even sliding a little bit.

Yet the reality is that suburbs are the one area that's kind of survived all this. They take a lot of flack in pop culture, but suburbs—as we were talking about with Derek Thompson on a previous episode—actually show consistent growth. Pull up this graph: that blue line at the top shows that large, high-density suburbs are the one area with sustained growth, while it's the cities that people are leaving.

So I guess my question, after all that setup, is: Is it possible that the suburban middle class and this "normie-dom" are not really facing extinction? That it's just morphing into something less recognizable to us as we project out decades into the future?

Ross Douthat: Yes, I think that's absolutely true—that part of what will happen is adaptation. There will be cultural evolution, and there will be new modes of existence. Many of them, I agree, will probably be suburban and not urban, because the suburbs are themselves a good technology for child-rearing.

Notwithstanding Liz Wolfe's admirable bravery in raising children in New York City, it is a lot easier to raise kids in the suburbs. And one of the advantages the United States has over parts of Europe and East Asia in terms of fertility is that we have a highly suburbanized society.

So yes, I agree. I would expect new models of suburban existence—particularly suburban family existence—to emerge.

Zach Weissmueller: If I could interject one thing there, I also think these technologies are, I don't know, blurring the lines or making life in a big urban center not as differentiated as it used to be. All the conveniences are there—you can get Amazon deliveries, Uber Eats, access to all the same virtual entertainment, at least.

Liz Wolfe: Zach Weissmueller and I eat the same types of food and watch the same movies. He lives in, like, sort of Jacksonville, Florida. I live in New York City. It's the same experience, roughly.

Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. So, yeah, the technology is in a sense homogenizing things in that way, and millennials, of course, are snobby about Applebee's and Dillard's, so of course that stuff is shutting down as they come of age and gain more wealth.

Ross Douthat: Well, so—but let's make a distinction between two ways in which the family restaurant might disappear. The family restaurant disappearing because of changing tastes is normal cultural churn. The family restaurant disappearing because people don't go to restaurants anymore—because they can just order various forms of better-than-Applebee's food in their homes—that's a little more ambiguous.

Maybe it ends up being a support for successful family life in the suburbs. You get to have your Thai food and work from home, and this makes it easier to raise kids. That's the kind of adaptation story, and there is going to be a lot of that.

Again, I'm not arguing that the bottleneck makes everything disappear. People who go through the bottleneck will do as you guys have suggested and use aspects of the new technology—from DoorDash to Zoom calls and so on—to enable forms of human flourishing.

However, there will also be people—and you can see this right now in our culture—for whom the absence of the family restaurant, or the local bar, or whatever, just means they don't see people anymore. They exist in a kind of virtual bubble in which they don't have enough friendships, they don't meet their future spouse, they don't do things in reality that are necessary. And those people are not going to make it.

Again, I agree, this is not the end of the world. Some people are going to make it; some people aren't. I have five kids, right? So I like to tell my kids, "You guys are going to make it"—maybe. Or at least, barring the AI apocalypse or whatever. Their choices will be their own.

But at the very least, at this moment, I don't imagine the things that I personally care about most—from my own family to my local Catholic parish—just disappearing. But I think it's good to say to people on a wider scale: Hey, the things you care about might disappear if you aren't intentional about this.

You need to sit there and say, "OK, I have DoorDash, and I have streaming, and I have all these things." Those things could enable a healthy, flourishing life outside a big city in a way that wasn't possible before—yes, absolutely. Or they could enable a kind of shut-in, sealed-off, email-job–dying-alone kind of scenario. And you have to choose.

But you have to be thinking about this as you make life choices, because the pull of the technology, I think, is clearly away from getting together with the guys for poker night, away from going on a blind date, away from marriage and real-world sex—right? It's clearly away from that, and from having kids, ultimately, as well.

The other thing, too, is: It is OK to contemplate tech as offering solutions that are somewhat dystopian. Again, I'm not making a Luddite case. We're going to invent the tech—we don't want to live in a stagnant world where nothing ever changes.

But if you say to me, "Good news: All the old people in Japan who don't have networks of kin to care for them are going to be cared for by really kindly AI caretakers," I'm going to tell you that's a little bit dystopian.

My grandmother is 94 right now. She's in rough shape. She's lived in various circumstances for a long time. But she had a lot of kids, and so she has a couple of family members who live near her. She has my aunt, who lived in Turkey for a long time and doesn't have kids of her own, who's now taking care of her.

It's not the most pleasant situation. But I'm really glad that my grandmother has my aunt taking care of her. And if you said, "Good news, Ross. When you're 94, you won't have a child taking care of you, you'll have a robot," I'm going to have some questions about the desirability of that future—even if the robot might be lovely in all kinds of ways.

Liz Wolfe: A huge part of your thesis has to do with people's heightened risk aversion. This is an argument that tends to be really compelling to me—this idea that, for a lot of people, porn is easier than dating. Swiping on Tinder is easier than going up to somebody in person at a bar, asking for their number, and allowing for that vulnerability component.

We see a lot of examples of this in parenting culture today, where it's as if people's risk aversion is really inhibiting their ability to build a community in the blocks where they live—and to build in more bandwidth so mothers feel a little bit less burdened.

Like, whatever happened to the neighborhood child-care swap? That type of thing, in a lot of urban parenting environments, just doesn't exist today. So parents talk about needing to pay for cumbersome child care and what a difficult expense that is to fit in their budget. And it's like, well, in the past, we had community technology to solve this—meaning parents swapping out for one another.

What do you think we should do to increase our tolerance as a risk culture—or our risk tolerance as a culture—again?

Ross Douthat: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think with children in particular, there's this feedback loop where people have fewer children than in the past—for sound reasons. Modern educational culture creates incentives to hyper-invest in one or two offspring, instead of having four who each get less of your attention. People will cite surveys saying, "Guess what? Kids from small families outperform kids from larger families in these ways," and so on.

But then that helps create the environment you're describing around risk aversion. If you only have one or two kids, you're going to be more anxious about what's happening with them when you're not around. And the whole culture takes on this heightened risk aversion.

I was in the supermarket just the other day with my 11-month-old son, who is our fifth child. And at this point, with child No.5, he's sitting in the shopping cart and I step, like, 7 yards away to find the right pack of roasted chicken breast to feed to one of my other sons. I was not endangering my child. But I did step a little bit away from him.

A woman came up and started talking to him—he's a cute baby. But then I came up behind her, and she hadn't seen me. She said, "Oh, is this your child?" Then added, "You've got to watch out, I'm a designated reporter," or something like that. I don't even know what that means, but it was basically a veiled, "I could call Child Protective Services on you."

What was striking wasn't just her saying this—but that, as I pushed my shopping cart away, I could hear a couple other people nearby saying things like, "Oh, I wouldn't turn my back on my kid for a minute." And it's like, well, if you have five kids, you have to turn your back on your kid—especially in a public space like a suburban supermarket, where presumably if someone came along and tried to kidnap him, someone else would notice a random person grabbing my child.

But I'm not even answering your question directly, because I don't know exactly how you break that cultural loop. It's a loop: You're hyperinvesting in a small number of children, and then you become hypervigilant, and the whole culture takes on this hypervigilance.

It may be that this is a problem only solved through cultural evolution in response to the bottleneck. As children become rarer, the people who have children are going to develop their own norms. Having large families is already a weird subculture in a way that it wasn't 50 years ago. And in that sense, the people who are creating the future are going to develop subcultural norms that are just going to be different from the wider culture's norms.

I have another friend who also has a large family. I ran into her outside a store the other day—we know each other, but not that well. And she said, "Hey, could you just—I've got my two kids in the car and this one needs to go to the bathroom—could you just go stand by my minivan and watch my kids?" And I don't think that's something one of my friends with a small number of children would've done.

It's very much a large-family norm. And yeah, the people who create those norms are the people who are going to push through the bottleneck.

Liz Wolfe: It also feels like another type of problem where it's just going to be self-perpetuating. Like, I want to have a large family, and that's in part because I came from a big family. But if you come from a small family, you're probably just going to be a little more conditioned to perceive one or two kids as the default. Kids raised in large families will just have a little more of a familial script for how that's done and will be less put off by the concept.

Whereas the more you have children from only-child or two-child families, the more likely they are to do the same—if they have kids at all.

Of course, that approach can backfire. My husband is an only child, and he saw that upbringing as kind of lonely. So now he's totally on board with the big-family thing—in part because I've hectored and pestered him about it for a long time. But you do see a little bit of backlash to the small-family model.

Still, I wonder: Does this just get worse? Do big families just become more of this weirdo subculture?

Ross Douthat: I think it's actually going to vary a lot by place. If you're a real demographic obsessive, you can look at low–birth rate cultures and see that in some places, you have clear pockets of large-family, high-fertility populations—usually religious. And in some low-fertility cultures, there's no pocket. Everyone's fertility is just a bit lower, and there's this persistent 1.5–child-per-family norm.

A lot of that is connected to particular religious traditions. In many Catholic countries, for instance, fertility is now very low. Whatever Catholicism is doing in those cultures, it's not stopping them from sinking demographically. But you'll often get a subculture of conservative or traditional Catholics who have big families. My sense is that in East Asia, that's less common. There, you're more likely to see a universalization of low numbers.

I do think—just speaking from personal experience a little—that large-family culture can become a kind of aspirational good. If you can be intentional about it and model the idea that it's fun and cool to have a large number of tiny human beings who look like you and your wife and hang out with you and go on trips, then, yeah, I think that can be appealing.

If I'm being optimistic, I'd say there are going to be places and ways in which, as that kind of life becomes weirder, it also becomes more desirable. More people growing up in one- or two-child families will have your husband's experience and think, "Oh, this might actually be a good thing to try—something to sign up for and embrace."

I try to be conscious of that. It's hard when you have a lot of kids not to fall into a mode where you're always telling your friends with fewer kids, "Man, I'm so tired. Look at the wrinkles under my eyes in this podcast video." But it's important to say—and I do believe this—that cultures that give up on having kids are leaving something incredible on the table. They're letting go of something amazing about human life.

And I think it's good to be—as you are in your writing, Liz—an evangelist for the idea that, yeah, why wouldn't you want to have a kid a little younger? It's an amazing thing to have a kid. It's probably more amazing than some of the things you could do with your late 20s or early 30s.

Liz Wolfe: Zach's the IRL evangelist because he is constantly regaling me with fun tales of stuff he's doing with his kids—like getting to coach his son's basketball team. Zach is low-key pro-natalist just in his own personal actions.

Zach Weissmueller: Well, that's the good news about this: Having kids is fun and cool. They're great to hang out with. And so I think, you know, we talked with Tim Carney after his book came out on this show, and he talks about this notion of fertility being contagious. You see areas like Israel as a counterexample to this whole falling fertility trend.

You actually mention Israel in the piece—well, actually the early Zionists and also the Irish nationalists—as these models of: "If we do want to preserve, or perpetuate and continue, these cultures, then we need to look at what these kinds of nation-builders did." And they're interesting examples to think about.

I wonder, though—they were facing real, immediate, eliminationist threats: armies and movements that wanted to squash them. We are facing what you call this slow… you know, killing us softly. It's not the meteor—it's the slow burn.

How optimistic or pessimistic are you that it's possible to marshal the kind of will to construct a new nation when the threat is of that slower variety?

Ross Douthat: Yeah, I mean, I'm not super optimistic. I think the evidence we have suggests that. The example of Israel is really telling. Israel has the highest birth rate of any wealthy society in the world by far. And Israel is surrounded by enemies and has this sense that it's repopulating—restoring—the Jewish people after the Shoah. That's a very unique set of circumstances, where there is a clear and immediate threat that's directly linked to higher fertility and a broader sense of national intentionality.

And that's hard. It's hard to achieve that when the "enemy" is wealth, comfort, distraction, and technology.

I do think, though, one reason for writing a piece like this is that people haven't thought enough about these things as threats—as existential threats to the continuity of things they care about. That's why I started out by asking: Is it good that South Korea exists? If it's good that South Korea exists, then people in South Korea should want to think a little bit more like Israelis.

And this is true everywhere. If you're one of the small nations of Europe, and you have a particular language or culture you want to preserve—do you think it's good that there is a Romania? Do you want there to continue to be a Romania?

OK, then you need to recognize that Romania—as a culture, a language, a set of traditions—is threatened by forces that want to unmake it and dissolve it. If I were a young Romanian who didn't want to move to London or Paris or Berlin, that is how I would be trying to think.

And I think the more people who can come around to thinking about the future that way, the more likely it is that local customs, local cultures, and local languages can all make it into 2075, or 2125, or beyond.

Liz Wolfe: You advocate neotraditionalism as one sort of remedy. And I must say, I recently bought an apron. The trouble is that when I'm wearing my apron, my sleeves of tattoos—I have a ton of tattoos all over my arms—they stick out. And it's a little bit of this terrifying juxtaposition of aesthetics.

Zach Weissmueller: So perfect neotrad aesthetic.

Ross Douthat: That's the neo. Tattoos are the neo.

Liz Wolfe: But how does this function without ultimately feeling and looking a lot like LARPing?

Ross Douthat: Again, a really good question. And I don't 100 percent know the answer. The problem with all traditionalism in the modern world is that everyone is always aware of how chosen it is—how contingent it is, how personalized and bespoke it is. And it's very hard. This is why I specifically use the term neotraditionalism and not just traditionalism.

True traditionalism doesn't make it. You see this in cultures that are still traditional and have tried to put up bulwarks against the modern world. Islam in the Islamic Republic of Iran—it's not doing that well. Catholicism in Poland—it's not doing that well.

So you have to have some kind of reinvention of the traditional that fully belongs—and accepts that it belongs—to the 21st century. That includes, again, if you think about this in terms of male–female relationships: The people online who think we're going to bring back the patriarchy, whatever that was—where you have trad wives in the kitchen taking care of the kids, and men occupying whatever role they imagine men had in 1870 or 1370, chopping wood—that's not going to scale.

There will be some people and communities that have versions of that, but on a mass scale, no. Any kind of traditional Catholic or Jewish manhood is going to have to be adaptive to the trends that created the world we now live in.

That doesn't mean liberal feminism is going to make it in its current form either. But you have to be inventive. You have to accept that, yeah, you're putting an apron over tattoos—and that's OK.

But the real challenge is: How do you build something your children can pick up on and imitate? Maybe that's the best way to put the challenge. In one cohort, neotraditionalism is going to feel like a larp to some extent, no matter what you do.

So the question becomes: Are you creating something your children can look at and say, "I'm Liz Wolfe's daughter. This is a model of how a marriage works, how churchgoing works, how having kids works"—something they can carry forward as an inheritance?

Maybe that's impossible. Maybe modernity just dissolves and dissolves and dissolves. But that has to be the goal.

Liz Wolfe: That's a really good way of framing it. And I think what you just said is such a useful corrective to the many people who think that those of us who advocate pro-natalism or more religious, traditional religion—

[Baby crying]

Ross Douthat: I hear a baby!

Zach Weissmueller: This is neotraditionalism in action.

Ross Douthat: You don't have to be sorry! This is a safe space.

Liz Wolfe: I might need to attend to that. No, but my point just being—let me see if I can get it to return. You know, those of us who advocate pro-natalism or more people attending church regularly, there's this idea that our critics often have, as if we're advising people to go back to this golden age that never really existed in the 1950s.

To me, that's one of my biggest pet peeves. Because I'm not saying you need to live the way people used to. And I don't really believe that a golden age like that ever existed. It's more just a matter of: examine [G.K.] Chesterton's fences. Examine the fences and why they might exist—why they might have been put there—before you attempt to dismantle absolutely everything.

And for whatever reason, people don't really grasp that nuance and that distinction.

Ross Douthat: Well, one thing, too, that's distinctive about our moment—so I've just written this book about religion that's sort of called Believe, that's sort of an argument for people going to church, among other things—but one of the distinctive things about our moment is, I don't think we're in a "don't take Chesterton's fence down" kind of landscape anymore.

It's more like: Chesterton's fence is gone. Guess what? There's no fence there anymore. And it kind of seems like we could use some fencing. We don't want to rebuild the fence exactly as it was. But we're going to take some wood that was used in the prior fence. We're going to look back at how that fence worked, and how it didn't, and so on. And we're going to build a new one.

And again, this is the important thing about any kind of traditionalism in the American context. Whatever the traditional world is—the one you imagine from AI-generated images of husbands and wives going to church in 1952—it's gone. It's just gone.

And anything we build now that is pro-family or religious or anything else is going to be new. And that's a big challenge. But it's also a reason not to worry that you're just being pulled back into some past. It's going to be new, no matter what. The aprons and the tattoos are both going to be there, I think.

Zach Weissmueller: Ross, last question of the show, which goes to all of our guests: What is a question that you think more people should be asking?

Ross Douthat: A question that more people should be asking….

I guess, since we've been talking about things like family and religion a lot—and talking less about culture—I think a question people should be asking is: How do you train your children to do things that people our age and older didn't have to be really concretely trained to do?

And that means, essentially, doing a bunch of things on your own without digital assistance before you start adding in the digital assistance. I think this is clearest with books. How do you teach young people to read books—texts that are longer than a few paragraphs, or even a chapter?

But I think it's also going to be increasingly true of math as well. People are just going to sort of not learn how to do certain kinds of math because it's easy to outsource it from a young age. So thinking about education as a kind of pre-outsourcing thing—where, before you're 18, you should be able to do X and Y and Z before you start asking the computer or the AI to help you—I think that's going to be one of the core questions facing parents and educators over the next generation.

Zach Weissmueller: Ross, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a fascinating essay and just a fascinating topic for us to ponder as libertarians who are trying to cope with what is unfolding. And I really appreciate that there's this call to individual action.

You can read Ross's work at The New York Times, and his new book, Believe, is available everywhere. Thanks for coming on the show.

Ross Douthat: You're very welcome. And Liz—go check on the baby, as I will go check on mine. There's crying, and then there's the suspicious quiet—which is equally dangerous.

Liz Wolfe: The silence is the problem.

Ross Douthat: All right. Thank you, guys. It was a pleasure.

Liz Wolfe: Thank you.

Zach Weissmueller: Thanks, Ross.

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Ross Douthat: Why Digital Life Threatens Freedom and Family appeared first on Reason.com.