I am reading Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, over the last few days, and I could swear one of the characters in the small town of Gopher Prairie, about which Lewis feels so ambivalent, mouths exactly Douthat’s lament… and that was in 1915!  I guess if you have to write a column/blog every single day, you get decadent and lazy and shrug off basic sacrifices like thinking of new things to say.  One thing I love about conservatives, they so reliably exclude (“our” civilization, not yours).

I basically agree with Ross Douthat here by Tyler Cowen on December 2, 2012

The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

His link is here, and I willingly admit that I am in some ways part of the problem.