Perhaps, then, one central issue that can’t be reached by tax changes or different housing policy that the enabling paradigm of modernity itself – of technology, of “progress” – is radically hostile to the mindset required to welcome children. This possibility then also provides a window into a great deal else, which has been marginalised by the ideology of Progress. For by extension, the technological mindset is at odds with any kind of interdependent relationship – because it is at odds with resonance, which is to say encountering the world and other beings in relationship rather than as resources.…
That might mean, for example, raising meat animals in accordance with their nature rather than in accordance with the industrial search for maximum yield. And meeting someone or something where it is means accepting limits on what we can demand. In the context of human connections, as for example a baby’s needs, we don’t call this “limits” but simply “relationship”. To accept relationships that fall outside transactional logic is to accept being bound by and to something we can’t always control, and can’t always opt out of. Belonging to others means accepting that those relationships place constraints on us. As a wife and mother, for example, I couldn’t just move overseas for three months at no notice. This is not oppression; it’s an enabling condition for the freedom I have to live the life I have well.