To Reproduce Your Culture, Reproduce Yourself

Kerry Howley has come back with an outstanding post on the culture/birthrates/tradition meme flying around the intertubes. I know it is outstanding because I agree completely with over 90% of it. It is always thrilling when I agree in such large amounts with a libertarian, so let me count the ways:

(1) “The conversion/inheritance framework assumes that the host culture remains static as outsiders bend to its dictates; it allows for no single person to claim a place in more than one tradition; and it fails to acknowledge that we are moving toward a more mobile society with ever more return and circular migration.” Absolutely right. Though I don’t like circular migration, of course, because it erodes and corrupts citizenship. And, like any political philosophy, libertarianism is crap without political liberty! (Obviously the point of contention is whether political liberty is possible without citizenship as we [still] understand it. I challenge one of the several brilliant libertarians I know to make that argument — or to tell me why I’m right about citizenship after all.)

(2) “fertility alarmists tend to make very odd assumptions about the way people engage with a dominant culture over time.” The fear of losing cultural dominance is indeed amplified unnaturally by the conversion/inheritance framework. But surely fertility alarmists are right to think that couples who produce fewer than two babies are diminishing their own contribution to the gene pool and the culture pool. Really the whole fertility discussion boils down to this: “People like me: have more babies!” A totally harmless and respectable act of egoism. Emphasizes the positive, too.

(3) “It’s true that the people we call social conservatives in this country are reproducing faster than the people we call social liberals. But what will it mean to be “conservative” in America a century from now?” The charm of this rhetorical question is that an ironic answer is hiding inside: conservatives will always be (according to my understanding of What Conservatism Really Is, anyway) the ones wanting people like them to have more babies. (And having those babies themselves — and wanting to dedicate resources to raising those children to be reasonably culturally similar to them instead of using those resources to consume the goods of liberal market society.) Whereas it seems pretty clear to me that an increasingly central part of progressive, liberal, and sometimes libertarian thought involves deprivileging genetic and cultural egotism. Which brings me to today’s lone point of contention with Kerry:

(4) “I’m not enough of a cultural hegemonist to care whether the people living on this particular piece of land maintain the dominant American culture into perpetuity; if, in the year 3000, the entire world is dominated by Danish mores, I will not feel slighted.” There are few more sweeping cop-outs than the one practiced by an intellectual who proves his or her cosmopolitan bona fides by expressing a great love for Scandinavian society. (What a laugh it always is to see Martha Nussbaum praise Finland to the hills while studiously ignoring the small population, lack of foreign threat, and ethnolinguistically homogenous population of Finland.) If the culture of the Danes conquered the Earth in 1,000 years, I myself would feel only mildly slighted — buoyed up by the realization that Ugandan and Aztec and Portuguese culture had not taken over the world. Among others. The question Kerry and her fellow travelers need to answer is whose mores they’d not want to take over the world, ever, under any circumstances. That aside, however, hopefully we can strike a grand conservative-libertarian agreement in favor of responsible reproductive egotism.