Fruitless

Welcome back, ducks. You know, when you're in the blog business, one of the things you do when casting around for a post is to comment on another blog. It's all part of the content-creation racket.

Yesterday I found out that even famous columnists like David Brooks do that:

Every day, I check a blog called Marginal Revolution, which is famous for its erudite authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, and its intelligent contributors. Last week, one of those contributors asked a question that is fantastical but thought-provoking: What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth that happened to be facing the sun?

Wow. OK, I've read science fiction, some of the post-apocalyptic variety, and that's a familiar enough scenario. An interesting space of speculation. Let's see what Mr. Brooks comes up with:

If you take an individualistic view of the world, not much would happen immediately. [...] People would still have an incentive to go to work, pay off their bills and educate the children who were already with us. For 20 years, there would still be workers flowing into the labor force. Immigrants from the other side of the earth could eventually surge into the areas losing population. If anything, the mass-sterilization might reduce the environmental strain on the planet. People might focus on living for the moment, valuing the here and now.

Hey, that makes sense! After all, plenty of people don't want kids anyway, so I'm sure that...oh, wait, there's more:

But, of course, we don’t lead individualistic lives.

I sense a sermon coming on...

Material conditions do not drive history.

Unless you're a Marxist! Or, you know, poor.

People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives. If, say, the Western Hemisphere were sterilized, there would soon be a cataclysmic spiritual crisis. Both Judaism and Christianity are promise-centered faiths. They are based on narratives that lead from Genesis through progressive revelation to a glorious culmination.

Of course, both those religions believe in a culmination where people won't have kids anymore, but that seems to be besides the point! The point is, uh...crypto-racism?

Some people might try to perpetuate their society by recruiting people from the fertile half of the earth. But that wouldn’t work. Immigration is the painful process of leaving behind one culture and way of living so that your children and children’s children can enjoy a different future. No one would be willing to undertake that traumatic process in order to move from a society that was reproducing to a society that was fading. There wouldn’t be the generations required to assimilate immigrants. A sterile culture could not thrive and, thus, could not inspire assimilation.

This makes sense because...because...because America isn't a nation founded on immigration! No, wait. Because there wouldn't be any bountiful and fertile white people around to assimilate people! Or something. I have no idea; I thought the beauty of America was that it was supposed to be an idea each generation reinvents for itself--that the ideals of the American republic were supposed to be available for all humankind. But maybe it's like baseball, you can't really get it unless you were born here.

Or Taiwan.

Now, the thing is, I know something about posterity and sterilization. Because, you see, I'll never reproduce.

I didn't say, I'll never have children, because I don't know that; maybe someday I might adopt, or become a parent in one of the many ways that don't involve my own DNA. But the traditional way is closed to me, as part of my GRS.

Some trans women freeze their sperm before they have the surgery, but I wasn't one of them. Even when I was married, I was extremely ambivalent about having children, and since I'm primarily attracted to men these days, it didn't seem all that important to have my own genetic material lying around. So I didn't bother, and it mostly doesn't bother me now.

There was a point, not long after I got back from Thailand, when I did feel a twinge of regret over not being able to let my genes carry on after me; I like my genes, I think they're a good mix, and it did seem a bit of a shame to not be able to do so. But that passed, and I've not felt that twinge since.

And you know what? I carry on just fine, even knowing that no part of me (except this blog, of course) will carry on after I'm gone. I still plan for the future, still make my plans, still am excited and engaged by life. And while yes, I have a niece who is related to me, I think I'd feel the same whether or not she existed or whether or not she was adopted; if I have a compact with the future, it is with the future of humanity as a whole, not my own personal bloodline.

Maybe that makes me odd. I don't know; but of my four closest female friends, only one of them wants children, and I've met a bunch of other people who are childless by choice in my travels. And somehow they go on living life just fine.

Maybe mass sterilization would change how I and the others feel; I don't really know, though it's interesting to speculate about it. But somehow I don't think it would mean the end of the world or even the end of America, given the number of people I've met who've adopted children from other parts of the world.

Within weeks, in other words, everything would break down and society would be unrecognizable. The scenario is unrelievedly grim. An individual who does not have children still contributes fully to the future of society. But when a society doesn’t reproduce there is nothing left to contribute to.

Except, you know, the future. Even if it doesn't look exactly like you.

ETA: The comments on the Times' site are fascinating. Some folks seem to feel that Brooks is writing about the declining white birthrate in the U.S.; others call him out for not seeing (or purposely ignoring) the displacement of the American First Nations by the European invaders; others call him out on his weird take on Christianity; and many just think he's being ludicrous.