"Pronatalism": Explaining Sex Rules and Getting Down to Nationalism's Biological Basics

"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

(Exodus 1.8-12)

            "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.

Insulting Hillary Clinton (and Others)

This question introduced a long post on my Facebook page: "Why do some Bernie supporters and leftists insist on insulting Hillary?" My lightly edited response follows.

            Attacks on Hillary Clinton's record and positions are legitimate, keeping pressure on her and her campaign to do what her critics want her to do: that is how this very serious game is played. To speak to this as a non-rhetorical question on insults, though — here, I think, are some of the broader reasons.

            (1) Too few Americans spend a lot of time in actual communities, i.e., places where people are stuck with one another for the foreseeable future. This leads to the temptation to say any damn thing one feels strongly about.

            (2) Where Americans do live in communities, many of us live in the results of "the big sort," i.e., surrounded by people with similar attitudes, so saying any damn thing we feel strongly about probably will bring agreement.

            (3) Many of us spend time in virtual "communities," with "community" emphatically in quotation marks: places where we can be pretty anonymous and enter and leave at low cost, and places where we feel we can say any damn thing we feel strongly about.

            (4) We're in another age of sentiment ("Get in touch with your feelings, Luke"), where it's seen as unproblematically good to feel strongly and share those feelings with the group.

            (5) As the custom of "busting" ("signifying on," "cut contests," "doing the dozens") show, the adolescent male tradition of the flyting — insult contests — is alive and both well and ill and increasingly unisex. Insults are sincere and sincerity is good ... and again, people can say any damn thing, with extra points for "transgressivity," until they breach some still- or recently-fashionable taboo.

            (6) Relatively few Americans grow up political and so haven't learned that there are instances when one must affront the neighbors and get into arguments, and therefore one should rigorously avoid pissing others off unnecessarily.

            (7) Relatively few Americans grow up political and in real neighborhoods, so many fail to learn to never piss off the neighbors unnecessarily because you never know when you might need a favor.

            (8) Many young Americans have had their self-esteem maintained strongly and work under the idea that they can say any damn thing and insult people and still be able to ask those people for favors.

                        (The editor of The Miami Student student newspaper sent me a Christmas card, which was a nice gesture, and used the opportunity to drop my column. She reassured me, though, that all was well since she'd replaced me with a colleague of mine who was a highly popular professor who she was sure would make an excellent columnist. My friends and I joked that she'd probably ask me for a letter of recommendation, and I said I might write her one because at a young age she had the sort of total sociopathic insensitivity typical of real-pro newspaper editors. Within a week, she asked me for a letter of recommendation.)

            (9) The relatively hard Left and hard Right attract people who put ideas above people and put their ideas above just about any people they are not politically infatuated with. Such folk will say any damn thing they think demonstrates their love of the Good, the True, and the pretty ugly, but screw it: if you disagree, you're just wrong and evil. 

What If You Did Everything Expected …? (7 Dec. 2012)

            If you're reading this, you're a modern person, free from the anxiety of primitive life and its taboos, probably free even from the complexities of following the 613 mitzvot ("commandments" — sort of) of the Mosaic law or the straight, strait, and narrow path for Christian salvation. Okay fellow free, modern folk, I have a question for you: What would happened if your tried to do everything expected of you — if you'd try even in our state of liberation to get everything right?

            Let me get into this question with a couple of stories. (I'm an old fart; I get to tell stories.)

            First one is from about the mid-1970s, when I found myself on Miami University's Student Affairs Council looking at proposed rules and came upon the locution, "Students are expected to …." I asked, "By whom, and so what?" Who expects them to do what this rule says, and why should they care: "what happens if they don't?"

            I was told, "Oh, then we can throw them out of school."

            I pulled what rank I had as an English teacher and former parliamentarian and — let's say liaison (and not "lobbyist") — and as someone who had dealt with student-targeted laws in the Illinois General Assembly.

            "'Shall'," I said; "You need to say, 'Students shall.'"

            Part of my sensitivity to this usage came from near the end of my first academic year at Miami when I received a very nice letter — fancy letterhead, really good paper — from the President of the University telling me that full-time, tenure-track faculty members "are expected to attend commencement."

            I asked myself, "By whom and so what" and concluded that I could skip those questions and read the sentence, «Untenured assistant professors had better get their asses to commencement», which turns out to have been much of what it meant.

            Behind that was my experience as a sophomore undergraduate moving out of a biochemistry program and into the Microbiology Department with a growing knowledge that what I really liked was English and history. I got a note telling me to report to the office of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and declare a major; "You must declare a major." That was back when one talked to humans about such things, and I asked the woman at the desk, "Uh, what if I don't? Don't declare a major." And I was told, "You must" and asked again "But what if I don't" — and was answered, "I don't know; no one hasn't before." After a moment of secretarial consultation, they told me to just be sure to declare a major before too long into the semester I graduated — "But don't come in during the first week or so; we've got too much work then."

            So my last semester I declared an English major, and a sweet little old Credentials Analyst told me I could have a split minor of Microbiology/History, which she recommended because, "We've never had one of those before." Which is what I did, and I graduated as an English major with a split minor in Microbiology and History; and the whole process was very good for me. And it was good for rule-writing by Student Affairs Council (for a while, and uniquely in the school's governance) because they adopted a policy of trying to be clear when we were making suggestions or requests and when we were bloody well giving an order backed up with, say, expulsion.

            The experience was good for me because I had grown up doing what I was told, asked, and/or (often just) expected to do.

            In my family, I was The Good One.

            It was fair. My sister was clearly my father's favorite child, and I was my mother's — talk about living a cliché! — and she was The Smart One, and I was The Good One.

            My father took this judgment with him to the grave in spite of occasional evidence to the contrary.

            After my father had a stroke and my mother came down with Alzheimer's disease, my sister was more loyal and helpful than I was; but I was still The Good One. With my father's encouragement, I ran a charity at age 18, and I pretty much ran a fraternity chapter at 21; I made Phi Beta Kappa and got Wilson and Danforth Fellowships for graduate school, took an MA at Cornell and a PhD at Illinois; helped manage the student strike at the U of I at Urbana during the Troubles in May of 1970, and managed to get work in my field and eventually get promotion and tenure at a pretty good university.

            My sister was still The Smart One, and I was not. (Indeed, when my sister called our father to tell him her son had made Phi Beta Kappa, our father congratulated her, paused, and then said, "But Phi Beta Kappa can't be that big a deal; Rich made Phi Beta Kappa.")

            Returning to topic — responsible students stay "on task" — returning to the topic, we can allow that I had some experience questioning authority and resisting social pressure. "And yet the old schooling sticks," and I still get anxious whenever I stray from the Good-One role and try to ignore (or reject) social demands.

            And this means a lot of low-grade anxiety for me, and probably for you. One of the easily-resolved paradoxes of the 1960s was that most of the radicals and counter-cultural people in The Movement were the good kids from high school, so even at a time of a lot of apparent rebellion most of us, most of the time, conformed and complied; and nowadays it's possible that more of us, more of the time, conform and comply.

            Or we try to.

            Think about your life if you did all you were supposed to do — just socially "supposed to do," ignoring serious stuff like moral dilemmas when social pressures conflict with internal ideals; ignoring big issues and major life-choices. What would life be like if we complied in all things in just the small stuff of daily life?

            What if you kept all your receipts, performed routine maintenance on your car and appliances, ran your virus scans, read the labels when you shopped, read the manuals with your cell phone and computer and the GPS on your car; if you spent all the time with your spouse and kids that you're supposed to nowadays; if you "gave 110%" on the job or to a sports team or volunteer work?

            If you got your holiday shopping done early — don't forget Halloween! — and studied up before you made big purchases; if you carefully reviewed the releases and contracts and terms of use that you sign; if you seriously skimmed a significant portion of your electronic and hard-copy mail and carefully considered all the requests for your support of worthy causes.

            If you followed the campaigns of all the candidates you're entitled to vote for, and read the full texts of the propositions and initiatives.

            If you replaced those batteries, checked the wiring, checked the furnace and the vents and the ducts and got the right amount of the correct exercises and kept up with the latest research on proper nutrition and got checkups and early treatment when you were supposed to (which can get tricky: check the health websites for current views on checkups, and learn the symptoms you should just keep an eye on for a few days before seeing a physician).

            What if you kept careful track of your spending and the packages you send and put in the necessary time to get the best deals on insurance and shopping: if you were a totally responsible investor, consumer and producer, worker and parent?

            Etc., etc., etc.

            What would life be like if, in all your roles, you gave that "110%" — or up to 20% in each role — to respond just to all of the legitimate demands on your time and effort?

            And remember that anyone who asks for "a 110% commitment" is demanding a blank check, and that someone who seriously wants more than, say, a quarter of you is making an illegitimate demand.

            As Curtis Armstrong's character Miles says to Tom Cruise's significantly named Joel Goodsen — "good son" Get it? — in RISKY BUSINESS: "[…] you wanna know something? Every now and then say, 'What the f*ck.' 'What the f*ck' gives you freedom."

            Maybe more exactly "What the f*ck" or its equivalent is necessary for survival.

            "Students are expected to …"; "Good citizens will always …" "Warrantee is voided if …" — Yeah, most of this stuff we should do, and in some cases it's a real risk if we don't. But part of the low-key horror of modern life is that we just can't do it all or even most of it. Fairly often we must say, "What the f*ck," which guarantees that now and then we will fuck up.

            Every bit as much as "primitives," surrounded by innumerable taboos, every bit as much as more recent folk with 613-and-counting divine demands or the infinite obedience a devout Christian owes a God who became human and died for your sins — as much as most people, most of the time, we will fail to live up.

            Freedom and responsibility means trying to do what is right as much and as often as we can, but now and then saying "What the f*ck" to things in general — and to some people making demands on us and placing their expectations, to everyone who wants more than their legitimate 25% or less —just saying (now and then, with an asterisk), "F*ck off."

"Macho A**holes," "Wogs," and Other Terms of unEndearment

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PATROCLUS.

No more words, Thersites; peace!

THERSITES.

I will hold my peace when Achilles' brach bids me, shall I?

— Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 2.11

            When Right-wing folk complain about "language police" and "political correctness," they're frequently complaining about what my mother would have called decency in language, and simple manners, and I think she would have been pleased to learn that we've reached a point in America where it's pretty much taboo for White folk, in public, to use the word "n*gger." Personally, I'd prefer if we went for a couple generations with "n*gger" taboo outright, maybe especially among young Black males — and I'll throw in for taboo also casual use of the word "bitch." If one wants to refer to a female dog, let's go back to the old word "brach," which can also be used for the "bottom" in an unequal male/male relationship: in Shakespeare's bitter satire, Troilus and Cressia, the on-stage satirist, Thersites, reduces the epic, love of the Greek heroes Achilles and Patroclus to just another form of lechery and dismisses Patroclus as "Achilles' brach," later repeated as "Achilles' male varlet," and, since Patroclus doesn't know this meaning of "varlet" gets made totally explicit as "his masculine whore" (5.1).
            If people want to call other people whores of the male or female variety, let's insist that they do so outright. "Ho'" seems to be dropping out of fashion, and we could at least have a moratorium on "bitch" and "bitches," and nothing would be lost. There's nothing you can say with "bitch" that you can't say with "brach," and there's no way nowadays you can just throw "brach" around as a cliché buzz-word, sounding relatively cool just filling out a sentence.
            ("Varlet" I'll give you as a freebie, although in the sense of "bitch" it never really caught on.)
            A complete taboo on "n*gger," though, comes with a price, and going over part of that price is the transition between this introduction and topic indicated in my title.
            Consider the story told by Sudhir Venkatesh, at the time, a University of Chicago graduate student doing a sociological study in one of "projects" on Chicago's South Side. Venkatesh asks the gang leader J.T., "How does it feel to be black and poor?"
 “I’m not black,” he answered, looking around at the others knowingly. “Well, then, how does it feel to be African American and poor?” I tried to sound apologetic, worried that I had offended him. “I’m not African-American either. I’m a nigger…. Niggers are the ones who live in this building. African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work."
I've heard, anyway — this one I couldn't track down on the web, but there are some fascinating articles of a more earnest sort — I've heard or read somewhere that some of J.T.'s contemporaries can do extended shtick on all the variations of terms for …, I put it their people and the realities these words point to. Loss of "n*gger" may, for a while, make it harder to speak and hear street-level analysis of race issues in America.
            On balance, though, a taboo on "n*gger" is a good idea: for a while, at least if we can move toward the "Utopia" that Arthur C. Clarke presents in his 1953 novel — soon to be a Major SyFy Miniseries! — Childhood's End (ch. 8). In "The Golden Age" given to us before the end of our species, we meet a character of ultimately sub-Saharan African descent and are told that "A century before," in our time, "his colour would have been a tremendous, perhaps an overwhelming, handicap." In the future-present of this novel, "it meant nothing. The inevitable reaction that had given early twenty-first-century Negroes a slight sense of superiority had already passed away." Indeed, race relations were so ideal that "The convenient word 'nigger' was no longer taboo in polite society, but was used without embarrassment by everyone. It had no more emotional content than such labels as Republican or Methodist, conservative or liberal" — although Clarke didn't live to hear "liberal" pronounced by the more immoderate sorts on Fox News.
            There are two other terms of abuse, though, related ones I'd like see come back, a return useful for naming some unpleasant and dangerous realities.
            The first is "macho asshole," which I was surprised to learn was a term and concept pretty much unknown to my students in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. For my students — at least for those who spoke up — "macho" was a positive term, and linking it with "asshole" surprised them, even allowing for any surprise from a professor's saying "asshole" in class. (I noted in my policy statements and made clear in my speech that the one absolute taboo I observe is not pronouncing the name of God [YHWH]; beyond that my rule was decorum in the technical sense — appropriateness to context — so those who attended class regularly wouldn't be shocked to hear me say "asshole," followed by my standard apology to the anus [an innocent orifice and an important one in evolution].)
            Macho assholes are arrogant bullies, and recent attempts to rein in school bullies are right-minded and long overdue but, as practiced, often a variety of kid-bashing: such small-scale macho-assholitry is presented as a problem of boys and some mean girls, distracting from bigger and more general problems across the culture.
            For eight years, George W. Bush swaggered his way across the world scene, and he and his merry band bragged that "the gloves are off" and showed their manliness with shooting friends in the face (accidentally, Mr. Cheney claimed), kidnapping people, torturing people, and invading weak countries.
            Since the backlash against the 1960s — starting in the 1960s — popular culture in the US has habitually celebrated cowboy cops and "rebels" with badges and guns, who "Serve and Protect" far less than cutting Constitutional corners, "kicking ass, / And taking out the trash."
            Some of my students, who'd grown up on video games, had problems recognizing the rather blatant point that the James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd Terminator movies (1984, 1991), were centered on a literal deconstruction of the ultimate macho asshole: a/the Terminator.
            Pop Quiz.: What actor plays the male protagonist in The Terminator?
            Answer: It's Michael Biehn, who plays Kyle Reese, a normal human male who feels pain and is brave and helps save humanity. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the villain: The Terminator, who is the ultimate macho man, impervious to pain, a stone-cold killer, and, it turns out — for the ethical point of the movie — not a man at all but a machine.
            And, of course, the final hero in the Terminator is "the final 'girl,'" Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor.
            Villains are often more memorable than protagonists, and for a nasty set of pop quiz questions on Shakespeare's plays, a teacher can always ask for the names of the technical (male) heroes or protagonists of, say The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, and/or Richard III.
            (If you missed that one, the answers are the bland non-entity Portia romantically wants to marry in Merchant — named Bassanio; Macduff, the Thane of Fife in Macbeth; and Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond and a minor character in Richard III.)
            Still, Cameron and Hurd are explicit in their Terminator films, and it says something that my students, and a whole bunch of other people, deep down inside identified more with the obsessive killing machine than with more humane and human humans.
            And so on for Rambo, Dirty Harry, and the whole set of fictional and real-world bad boys in media from film to games to rap.
            The older macho sorts were bad enough as role models, but they at least tended to be the Terminator sort: the strong, silent type. As American popular culture juvenilized and the male ideal got younger, the understated truly dangerous man got pushed off to the side by the motor-mouth, trash-talking street punk: the loud and pugnacious macho asshole.
            Given current ideas of manliness by, especially, cops and street kids, it should come as no surprise that encounters between the two can get deadly.
            And the frequent violence becomes even more understandable if we take seriously expressions like "taking out the trash" — which brings me to "wogs."
            As the Wikipedia entry saith, "wog" is "a racially offensive slang word referring to a dark-skinned or olive-skinned person from Africa or Asia," but, as the article goes on immediately to note, there is the expression from at least the time of World War I, the "The wogs begin at Calais." This sentence is properly enunciated with a Colonel Blimp, pukka sahib, Rule-Britannia accent, with "Calais" carefully mispronounced to rime with "malice" and one's nose at a steep angle, smelling excrement. Significantly, in Australia, "wog" can (still) be used pejorative or affectionately for "Mediterranean and Middle Eastern immigrants."
            I want to stick to pejorative-abuse and put to use the obvious imprecision of "wog."
            Wogs are the "trash" of the world: all us "wretched refuse" as seen, not compassionately, but disapprovingly by macho assholes and their wimpier, less demonstrative allies. For Colonel Blimp and, with variations, his American cousins, having the wogs begin at Calais was progress, or that stereotypical, reactionary snob was in a particularly generous mood: more often the wogs began in lower-middle-class neighborhoods and could definitely include the uppity working poor, to say nothing of people who "can't find no work" and are "the undeserving poor."
            In America as in England for much of its history, the wogs can be our fellow citizens, living a couple neighborhoods away. They can be wogs in our view because that view is endemic to our family and neighborhood and/or because some powerful group or other has engaged in a "wogification" program, villainizing the other people and making them emphatically, capital "O," Other.
            When macho assholes have to deal with people they see as wogs, there is going to be trouble. When macho assholes deal with people, especially male people, who have had to practice at least some macho assholitry to survive on the streets — there will be blood.
            Arguably worse, when even generally decent people learn about the deaths of distant strangers they/we ever-so-unconsciously see as wogs, the results will be mild sympathy but little practical help.
            And so we get a big portion of the horrendous US statistics on homicide, including police deaths in both senses: death of police and death and injury by police; and so we get in December of 2014 the murder of over 100 children in Pakistan, and even concern over that not lasting two US news cycles.
            We've got the phenomena; we've got the problem; let's bring back the words.