This morning I discussed the decalogue, and how we no longer honour our parents. This leads to a point where parents — well potential parents — simply walk away from being parents. They do not want to provide. They see the single life as far too pleasant: they want to be gay in the older sense of happy and carefree, and they just see caring as a burden.

This has consequences. I’m quoting Bill Price about Seattle, but he expresses how I feel about Auckland. I no longer live there: the place does not allow one to breathe.

The liberal elite he’s talking about are not the Pacific and Maori families I grew up with, who (like my grandparents) moved to the city to work in the factories: to feed their family, and because the minimum size of a financial viable herd was 100 cows on 40 hectares. (It’s now closer to 400 cows on 100 hectares: I know of 700 to 1000 cow herds. Farming is not a family business in NZ: it is our biggest business, and we are very good at it).

It was not about a lifestyle but about the factory floor. But those very floors, where I worked when I was at high school, are now shopping malls and office blocks.

I’m beginning to think that one of the most important reasons cities have become so overwhelmingly liberal over the last generation is because people came to cities not so much to work and raise families as they used to, but to experience the “lifestyle.” For those of us who grew up in cities, much of this experience was an annoyance or, at best, a source of amusement. The things we really liked about the city, such as the convenience, the sense of community in the old neighborhoods and the tolerance for assorted characters who wouldn’t fit in anywhere else is gone, replaced by left-fascism, overpriced goods and real estate, congestion and endless fees and taxes.

Well yeah. I grew up in one of those areas that are marked Orange or Red on a map of poverty: but almost everyone I knew during that time has moved out of the bottom fifth of the socioeconomic scale and live in the non marked areas. I now live in an area counted in the top fifth.

And in those higher areas, there are expectations that one will have a kind of experience, that one will be able to live a hedonistic life, that one will not age. My parents did not have this: they were happy, fulfilled, in their decision to adopt four kids (thanks Mum and Dad) and raise us in a middle class enclave that no longer exists: my old suburb is a red light district.

But these people miss out: we are not designed to be alone. We are designed to be with others, to care for each other. Christ once challenged us by saying that no father, would give a stone to his child if he asked for bread, or a scorpion if she asked for an egg. If we, who all sin, know what is good for our children, we should honour those who do that duty.

What my father did was instill indelibly in my mind that his role was to provide. I never thought of that in terms of love. Only in terms of material goods, which amounted to food and shelter and clothing in our sparse, dirt farm existence, and my Dad was a genius at providing those things. My mother and I turned the goods of his labor into “value-added” products, to be certain, but we would have had no flour to mill, no butter to churn, no eggs to collect, no firewood to burn, no cookies and cakes and breads and loaves to sell without him.

My most basic understanding of men is that they keep you from starving or freezing to death.

My three brothers played a key role in that they made me appreciate my chores were so much easier. At no point would I have ever traded churning butter or kneading bread with pitching out stalls or baling hay.

Dear women of Singapore, I empathise with the increasing number of you who prefer not to get married or have children. You said you have lots of options besides raising a family. Marriage has become a game of “cost-benefit analysis”: It seems more beneficial to stay single and have friends through “networking hobbies” rather than raise kids in isolation, which is also very costly. The increasing divorce rate is a turn off, and increases your scepticism about finding the right partner. You lament, “Why should I produce kids for society?” when that would mean counting the years until the time when you could get a job and a house. Furthermore, you feel that you are “hyper-connected” with others, and can still easily switch off when you need “me” time. The high cost of living, high cost of education, uncertainty about the economy, and the norm that women juggle both family and work are reasons why you delay marriage or do not have children altogether.

It feels as though an ecosystem has been created where childlessness is the preferred option. We live in a prosperous society that reveres material success. Glossy advertisements for luxury goods, apartments and fancy holidays feature elegantly dressed individuals, or couples living the high life with no kids in sight. We have a growing sense of failure due to the prevalent achievement mentality that has come with growing prosperity. People around us say that familialism is breaking down, and that maybe a lack of deep intimacy — characteristic of societies that exhort material success — could be having an impact on childlessness.

What we need to remember, though, is that a society with no kids has only wisdom, but that this needs to be counterbalanced with the dynamism and enthusiasm which we can only get with young people.

But the idea of bringing up children is not very appealing to you. How will you manage the prevalent cultural premise of the “sacred child” among your family members? Children’s education is a conversation topic at the dinner table as soon as the baby is conceived, and there is an inordinate amount of focus on quantifiable education rather than experiential education, because the former is deemed as the key to the successful life.

Quite frankly, singlehood seems like a legitimate option for many of you, rather than the traditional family life with the “marriage package” of children and in-laws. Even though some of you who are single may actually want children, you know that births outside of marriage and cohabitation are not accepted norms in your society — yet.
Dear women of Singapore, I personally do not have the answers to these questions, but I share with you one thought. As a mother of three young children, I have had my share of agonising and frustrating moments of motherhood in an urbanised society. However, during all my frustrations, my husband has been my pillar of strength and support.
I believe the role of men in the creation of a nurturing society for parenthood is critical. We need to start recognising this, and giving men the support and motivation to be the best fathers they can be.

We can decide to honour those who choose to raise children, to remain with the wife of their youth, and work to put food on the table. We can decide to honour the woman who cares deeply for her husband and children and makes raising them her main task.

Or we can honour those who chase the pleasures of this life, and in the end leave… nothing. If we honour them, we ourselves will end up, as… nothing.

The gay life, without cares, has always been a falsity: a vanity fair. Sacrificing one’s fertility to be part of this is the work of fools, deluded by those who want you neatly corralled into voting blocks for your appointed tribunes, and unable to think.

The ongoing trial involving journalist Mark Steyn – accused of defaming climate change theorist Michael Mann – reflects an increasingly dangerous tendency among our intellectual classes to embrace homogeneity of viewpoint. Steyn, whose column has appeared for years on these pages, may be alternatingly entertaining or over-the-top obnoxious, but the slander lawsuit against him marks a milestone in what has become a dangerously authoritarian worldview being adopted in academia, the media and large sections of the government bureaucracy.

Let’s call it “the debate is over” syndrome, referring to a term used most often in relationship with climate change but also by President Barack Obama last week in reference to what remains his contentious, and theoretically reformable, health care plan. Ironically, this shift to certainty now comes increasingly from what passes for the Left in America.

These are the same people who historically have identified themselves with open-mindedness and the defense of free speech, while conservatives, with some justification, were associated more often with such traits as criminalizing unpopular views – as seen in the 1950s McCarthy era – and embracing canonical bans on all sorts of personal behavior, a tendency still more evident than necessary among some socially minded conservatives.

But when it comes to authoritarian expression of “true” beliefs, it’s the progressive Left that increasingly seeks to impose orthodoxy. In this rising intellectual order, those who dissent on everything from climate change, the causes of poverty and the definition of marriage, to opposition to abortion are increasingly marginalized and, in some cases, as in the Steyn trial, legally attacked.

This elite are not your friends. Their very promotion of a party lifestyle (particularly at college) acts, as does their gutting of all content from education, as a barrier to stop people joining the elite, as you can only survive the institutionalized debauchery that is the modern American college if you have a trust fund, a cast iron liver, and a family firm to join once you sober up.

Far better to live away from the crowds. It may mean that you have to order your clothes from Amazon and post your camera film to another Island (both are real examples from my life). But living a more fulfilling life is its own revenge. Those who chase the social whirl will not find joy: nor will they have grandchildren.

And history is written by those who are of the next generation: if we do not do our duty now we will, like the generations before us, be seen as feckless, foolish, and destructive: the marks of Babylon. And of that, be not a part.