Bookends for Living a Meaningful and Moral Life

In her novel Middlemarch, George Eliot writes, "The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward." She also rhetorically asks, "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"As bookends for living a meaningful and moral life, you could do worse.We all begin as helpless newborns, completely dependent upon the adults who have brought us into the world. Without them, we roll over and die, and so too the future of our species. From an evolutionary perspective, of course, we need our offspring to not just survive, but to also thrive, which is why caring for children must be the chief project of every civilization. On Mother's Day, The White House launched an initiative to encourage certain of us to have more babies. They say there is a population crisis. They seem to think women just need more positive motherhood vibes. In the rest of nature when birthrates drop it's because the world has become inhospitable for babies. It's a response to…