Opening Doors for Inquiry

I listened to about three and a half of Eric Weinstein's Portal podcasts on my drive from Bemidji to Saint Paul yesterday. In one, he was interviewing fellow venture-capitalist-in-Peter-Thiel-orbit (and now Vice Presidential candidate) J.D. Vance, shortly after Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy was made into a move (Vance said he had just seen the "rough cut" before arriving at Weinstein's studio). I don't think the conversation made me a Vance fan, but it certainly suggested to me that the guy has some ideas.

One of the things Vance seems to stand for, if you go by what he said to Weinstein in April 2020, is "old" traditional extended families. He is a vocal critic of childlessness (which has been called antinatalism in academic circles), but he is also a critic of the American nuclear family, which became such a hallmark of the "new" tradition created in the second half of the 20th century and celebrated in the media (compare Leave it to Beaver with The Waltons, which appeared a generation later).

I became familiar with the terms "pronatalism" and "antinatalism" as a grad student at UMass, when I read a book written by one of my professors. Laura Lovett wrote a PhD dissertation on agrarian women and reform movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so it was natural that she would take an interest in my agrarian radicals in Peppermint Kings and that I'd be fascinated by her descriptions of women activists during the same period. Lovett had been a combined history and literature major in her undergraduate years and her PhD was from UC Berkeley, so the dissertation and the book that came out of it focused on idealizations of women's roles based on what she called "nostalgic modernism". Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family, 1890-1938 told stories of populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease, sociologist Edward A. Ross, Theodore Roosevelt, California water reclamation activist George H. Maxwell, and eugenicist Florence Sherbon. Although I didn't agree with all of Lovett's conclusions, I think she opened a lot of doors for me, for further inquiry. For example, I remain very fascinated by the ideas of eugenics as understood by (especially) 19th-century regular people.

On the "natalism" issue, Lovett was definitely a critic of "pronatalism", which she described as a social pressure favoring the production of children and as a result supporting roles for women that they (and Lovett) considered too restrictive. The idea that a nation or a culture would assign a positive value to children and the stable families that make them most likely to be born and thrive seems to have been regarded with distrust and derision by Lovett and her many of her peers. I understand how women (especially during the second wave of feminism) would object to a social expectation that their main role or highest purpose was the breed the next generation. But isn't it also true that a nation or a culture that doesn't care at all if its people reproduce, is going to disappear relatively quickly? The Cathars were a medieval French religious sect that practiced celibacy. It's ironic that the Catholic Church practiced a genocide on them, since they likely would have disappeared in a generation or two just from declining to reproduce!

There was a bit of talk in the Portal episode about the sort of national suicide that some conservatives believe we and other western nations are engaging in, by failing to replace our numbers. I think it would probably be a good idea to dig into the actual ideas behind this position, rather than just caricaturing it (Taibbi and Kirn mentioned this in last week's America This Week, in a way I thought missed the point a bit). There's a lot to unpack, in areas like the similarity of today's discussion to fears of "race suicide" a century ago during the previous "Progressive Era". Weinstein and Vance talked about how the "productive class" and the "reproductive class" are separating, which I think is something that ought to be more widely discussed. There are even international implications, like the replacement of native European populations that are failing to reproduce with immigrants, and the implications for European cultures.

In any case, I was a bit impressed with the conversation and as a result I'll probably listen to Vance's audiobook narration of his book. Like my reaction to Lovett, I don't expect to agree with all his conclusions. But I'm curious about how he came to them and I suspect the book will open some more doors for me, for further inquiry.

PS. I made the review I did last year of Lovett’s book accessible to all readers. If you’re interested you can find it here.