Family in 2050 guardian article

I've known quite a few mums who planned to go back to work, keep career as a priority, but changed their view due to the experience of motherhood. In fact after year long maternity leaves became the norm here it became more common from where I stood, I think being away from career for that long, finding value in something else important, has an effect on people's choices and goals.

Some things do create a choice. Do you take time to be with your kids, something that could be 5 years or more depending on how many you have, or do you pursue your career with a lot of ambition and drive. And some types of careers really require that if you want to go to the top.

There isn't some kind of policy or program that will mean that you can do both in the way you might like.

ArabellaDoreenFig makes a very good point. We have to question what is the purpose of slaving over long hours at work and viewing career as the ultimate goal and something worthy of respect. Yes, some people will be obsessed about these things, but for most people what they really want is more time. More time with partner and family. More time with friends. More time for hobbies. More time to travel. And so on. These are the things that bring most of us joy and contentment in the long-term, not accolades and job titles from corporations; corporations that would not hesitate to kick you out if they felt it would ultimately improve their profit margins in some way.

I do wonder how many jobs need us in for 5 days a week. Again, why are we feeding the system rather than it feeding us and working with us.

There's a theory that the key purpose of working five days is demonstrating loyalty to a company over other outside priorities. It also keeps people time poor enough that we have to spend more on time saving purchases. So under that women choosing pay for artificial wombs to have babies is both demonstrating extreme loyalty to the company in choice of time and spending money on "time saving" purchases.

Humans never seem to learn that interfering too much with the delicate balance of nature / evolution can lead to terrible outcomes because of unintended consequences.
I'm not saying we should eschew every modern scientific and medical advancement, but caution and humility should not be dirty words.

People think humanity will reach some apex of civilization by inventing the most impressive technology, but I believe humanity will reach its pinnacle only when it learns to responsibly manage the balance between our desire to conquer Nature with our needs that arise from being a part of Nature. This might involve conscious decisions to not pursue certain technologies because they could divorce us from what it is that makes us human in the first place.

Humans are good at solving the technical aspects of issues or undesirable / tedious problems. The efficiency and clever designs of machinery and factory production lines are a marvel, for example.
However, humans are notorious for causing more damage and suffering because of our arrogance and overconfidence about how 'good' we really are at the things we do. Introducing a predator to deal with a pest and then realising it has decimated a whole load of other rare species to the point of extinction is a good example.

The question is not so much about whether babies can be gestated in artificial wombs - I'm sure it is a 'problem' that can be 'solved' given enough time and money.
To me, the bigger question is how has evolution shaped the reproduction of our species and what limits should there be (if any) on our interference with it due to our history of unintended consequences?

You know the explanations around time travel, the grandfather paradox etc and how every action you do in a specific timeline could have ripple effects on other timelines or even affect your own existence in your timeline?

I think there are parallels on a biological and ecological level in that every human interference generates consequences against ourselves and our environment and society. The key is figuring out what consequences we can live with versus ones that we shouldn't.

Contraception, abortion, fertility treatments etc have all had positive as well as negative consequences on our society, but overall, we judge the positives to outweigh the negatives and therefore worth pursuing.

Artificial gestation could bring in positives, but it could also cause some terrible problems or lead to an ethical quandary.
Wombs are not just a sterile sack for zygotes. As the foetus develops it is linked to the outside environment via its mother. Babies hear their mother's heartbeat, her voice, acquire nutrients and immunity via the umbilical cord, hear other voices of family members and sounds etc. There are so many factors that we don't understand or are still learning about in terms of how our bodies and biological mechanisms have evolved.
Also, the physical and biological processes of pregnancy and childbirth is what enables mothers (and by extension fathers as well) to actually bond with their offspring. Yes I know some women struggle due to various issues, but our species has continued because for the vast majority of mothers the bond created with their babies is sufficiently strong enough to ensure the children are protected and well looked after until adulthood. Lots of other species have similar mechanisms, especially mammals. It is gestation and birth that invests parents in the well-being of their progeny.
By severing the physical and biological link between parent and child, it could have serious implications for our ability as a species to successfully continue over time.

I sometimes think we are looking at it from the wrong way- as in who defines what ‘achievement’ means and why is having a career seen as the ultimate ‘modern goal’ ?

Personally I think a society which was based around everyone working part time and we all have a brilliant work/life balance would be best for us, we would be much happier as a race, and best for the planet as more time means less consumerism, of course I appreciate that this is a vague pipe dream for most!

But why is having a ‘career’ suddenly the be all and end all, from an evolutionary point then achievement in terms of a career means very little, that’s only something that’s happened in the last few centuries, it would fascinating to be able to study why!

But that's not untrue. You can have the debate about why but I've currently got 3 senior female employees on maternity leave who were marked out for promotion who have made it quite clear they want to return 3 days a week and are no longer looking to step up

Yup. I’ve noticed this as well. I can understand it (can’t get that time back with your kids yadayada) but it sure doesn’t help close the achievement gap!

But they haven’t ‘abandoned’ their careers, have they, Ariadne? They’ve decided not to press for promotion now so they can have a decent balance during the small child years. If society weren’t both ageist and sexist, that would make very little difference over a working life. I would also argue that it’s impossible to disentangle social conditioning and innate behaviour in the society we live in where both they and their partners will have grown up to expect them to be the main carers (why does my iPad not recognise the word ‘carer’?!)

For what it’s worth, I carried on FT work and DH stepped back to very part time. But that has costs for me: if we split up, DD will rightly stay with DH as her main carer (and people will see me as the selfish woman who abandoned her daughter). It’s not irrational to factor that kind of thing into decision making.

The idea of agreeableness comes from psychological testing. I think there is a set of five or maybe seven characteristics they consider quite basic to personality. Agreeableness is interesting because it has a significant difference in men and women across cultures, whereas the others don't have such a marked difference.

There must be a reason the incels like him so much though?

Yeah, he's said some things they seem to identify as talking about them, though i'm not convinced they really are. The thing is if you ever read on their forums, a lot of them are very messed up people, deeply self-hating and often especially around their physical appearance. And not really capable of understanding other peoples reactions or motives. I don't know how well they really understand what someone like Peterson is really saying.

But he does say that in some ways young people have been put in a position where society doesn't really support or reward young people for getting into solid long term relationships. And I think he says that at a certain point this can hit young men particularly hard, especially since society also no longer teaches them what they need to know to be appealing as partners.

I think he says that for women it tends to hit them later on when they are getting toward the end of their fertility and would like kids but can't find a partner.

He has made some comparisons to radicalisation which often targets young men who have little or no hope of marriage or good jobs, and that if there are a lot of these people it can become a dangerous population. What he suggested which got a lot of press and outrage was that in order to minimise that societies had developed "enforced monogamy" which people though meant forced marriage. It actually just means a norm where there is only two people in a marriage, so that most people have a good chance of finding a spouse as opposed to systems where some people have many wives or for some other reason a lot of people never marry. But that wasn't reported much and I'm not sure hw many incel types would have caught on to that.

Choosing in a society that exerts various pressures.

In a totally equal society, who knows what things would look like. Impossible to guess, tbh.

Which kind of ties in with

'Capitalism seems intent on severing the mother-baby bond in myriad ways IMO.'

But according to plenty of political philosophy type people, capitalism depends on a class who have to work + unpaid labour of women growing rearing etc next generation for free, ++ all the shit work that keeps everything going.

Agree mother baby thing is something wanted gone, but is that capitalism, or just men? They resent being dependent on us for this and are v insecure about it, paternity etc, hence the desire to control us.

x-posted I think.

There are considerable reasons why the women are pressured to take on the child care role - unless you have the sort of pay scale that can afford a live in nanny - and among them is that men are reluctant to take a career cut to care for children. Until divorce, that is, then the father's rights lot are all over 50-50 childcare!

Um I do get that. The point I was making is these 3 women have abandoned their careers. They don't have to but they are choosing to do so.

Plus you have to look at the pressure for the woman to take on the child-caring role - societal pressure. And the reluctance of the man to say, go down to 3 days a week.

Ariadne, yeah - women bear the children - so maternity leave is a cornerstone of women's rights.

Children grown in artificial wombs is horrifying. Capitalism seems intent on severing the mother-baby bond in myriad ways IMO. This is the most extreme - do.away with mothers entirely.

Yes.

Unless, perhaps, they're obediently performing their gender role.

But he says stuff like "women tend to be more agreeable than men" "less career focussed" "gravitate towards caring roles" - that sort of thing

But that's not untrue. You can have the debate about why but I've currently got 3 senior female employees on maternity leave who were marked out for promotion who have made it quite clear they want to return 3 days a week and are no longer looking to step up.

But he has countless academic lectures online too - which are on politics, the dangers of totalitarianism etc.

Does anyone consider the effect that artificial wombs would have on the babies that come out of them? We already know that lack of human interaction and body contact has profound psychological effects on infants. How can we be sure that pre-natal attachment is not equally important if not more so?

This.

Children grown in artificial wombs is horrifying. Capitalism seems intent on severing the mother-baby bond in myriad ways IMO. This is the most extreme - do.away with mothers entirely.

The best thing to watch on this is his C4 interview with Cathy N.

I think it's slightly more complex than that, Ariadne - I don't think he's straight out said that.

But he says stuff like "women tend to be more agreeable than men" "less career focussed" "gravitate towards caring roles" - that sort of thing.

But obviously his views are not compatible with feminism, because the reformed manchild will, being a good prospective husband himself, probably expect his wife to fulfil her gendered role expectations, and raise the children, do all the housework etc

Is that Peterson's position? That women should not have a career?

There must be a reason the incels like him so much though?

I don't know if that is true. My son and a younger male colleague like him- they are absolutely not incels.

If incels do like him I suspect they aren't fully understanding him. His position as I understand it is "man up if you want to have a chance at having a proper relationship" but there's still no guarantee one will happen. He's keen on obligations and responsibilities but not a sense of entitlement.

Maybe because he speaks against feminism, fraggling ?

But obviously his views are not compatible with feminism, because the reformed manchild will, being a good prospective husband himself, probably expect his wife to fulfil her gendered role expectations, and raise the children, do all the housework etc.

Which is fine, if a woman wants that role - some do- but not if it's categorically expected of her by society/her husband, or if she's left trying to hold down a career and do all the childcare/wifework as well.