"We can't restore our civilization with
somebody else's babies."
— Steven
King, (R-Iowa)
Then a new king […] came
to power in Egypt. “Look,” he said
to his people, “the
Israelites have become far too numerous for us.
Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they
will become
even more numerous and,
if war breaks out, will join
our enemies, fight
against us and leave the country.”
So they put slave masters over them to oppress
them with forced labor, […]
But the more they were
oppressed, the more they multiplied
and spread; so the
Egyptians came to dread the Israelites
"Pronatalism" is a word we
don't hear much any more, not for a generation or so, but it's an important
word — increasingly important in a time of heightened nationalism — and needs
to be recycled (recycled here from a couple of my essays from 2008 f.).
"Pronatalism" refers to
social policies encouraging the production and successful raising of children.
Often these policies have included conscious policies on population; more
often, pronatalism has been incorporated into religious beliefs and from there
into law and custom.
It doesn't matter much where
pronatalist practices come from. "Cultural evolution" is more than a
figure of speech: customs that function to help cultures survive will tend to
be retained the way useful genetic traits are retained--and pronatalism, by its
nature, has been useful for survival.
Until recently. Until humankind's
population went into the billions, and the unchecked reproduction of humans
became a threat to human species-survival. Until some cultures became somewhat
democratic and individualistic, and the press of population put stresses on
democratic principles and individuality. It has always been difficult to argue
that any individual human is special; the argument becomes almost impossible
when there are over seven billion other human individuals. "Freedom"
has been defined informally as the right to swing your arms until you endanger
someone else's nose; some place along the line, population density gets to
where there's little room for figurative arm swinging.
Alternatively, an individual human
has the same right as any other animal to urinate in the local stream; the
people of a small village probably have the right to put their excrement in the
river; towns and cities, however, have no right to dump in the river untreated
sewage, poisoning decreasing supplies of water.
More of that later. For now keep in
mind that surviving societies often have built in a strong degree of
pronatalism.
You need to know this if you're to
understand the underpinning of the sex laws and "morēs" of the United
States, including our rules on marriage and attitudes toward the wide range of
sexual activities.
Start with obvious questions: Why
would people care about occasional or even frequent masturbation in private?
Why were there ever laws against oral or anal sex, or just about anything done
between or among two or more consenting adults in private? The short and most
basic answer, one that underlies both religious and secular, official and
popular-culture prohibitions, is "pronatalism."
Humans are highly sexual animals,
and across a significant population people will practice all sorts of sexuality.
Cultures, though, can evolve ideologies and customs that tend to direct
sexuality into practices that are reproductive and nurturing. Consciously or
unconsciously, societies can try to limit sex to vaginal sexual intercourse
between fertile couples who are likely to conceive, bear, and then raise
babies.
Cultures can try to limit sex to
"making babies" by people who'll stick around to raise babies: for a
very important example, limiting approved sex to married heterosexual couples
who have conception as a goal--and, hence, don't try to prevent conception and
who avoid sex when the woman is menstruating.
Sound familiar? It should if you
know the traditional rules for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews.
Under a doctrine of pronatalism,
such rules make sense, and pronatalism itself makes a lot of sense in military,
nationalistic, and economic terms.
Pronatalism becomes a bad idea when
it's a game many societies play and the human population rises rapidly, when
the standard of living rises enough among many of those societies that they
strain the environment.
Think of a billion or two Chinese
and Indians starting to live like rich Americans.
Pronatalism in our time makes sense
for individual countries that want to maintain their eminence; pronatalism
makes sense for older generations who want to retire and be supported by lots
of young workers.
For the human species, and for
humans who like freedom, pronatalism is a problem.
"Be fertile and increase, fill
the earth and master it" (Genesis 1.28) was good doctrine when humans were pretty powerless to master much, and it may be
the one commandment we humans have fulfilled; but it is fulfilled now, and it's
time to cut back.
We--we humans generally--need to
move rapidly toward zero growth in our population, which means rethinking the
laws, policies, customs, and attitudes based in pronatalism.
People are going to have sex, but it
doesn't have to be reproductive sex; and contraception can be very low-tech,
inexpensive, and almost as effective as abstinence in preventing
sexually-transmitted diseases. To start, we need a campaign to "Wrap that
Willy," making condoms readily available and condom-use a manly thing to
do, and a womanly thing to demand.
For other things to do, look at the
pronatalists aspects of human cultures, and try to figure out practical ways to
encourage contraception and reproductive restraint.
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