Fertile Territory.
Doctor:
The biggest killer in this place is infection. That’s why we have you under quarantine. We don’t know what you brought in with you yet. Your test results will be back this afternoon. Okay. Almost done. I think there may be a cyst on one of your ovaries.
Lt. Thrace:
Is it serious?
Doctor: [jovial]
Nah, it should be fine. We’ll keep an eye on it. Gotta keep that reproductive system in great shape. It’s your most valuable asset these days.
Lt. Thrace: [sarcastic]
Right.
Doctor:
I’m serious. Finding healthy child-bearing women your age is a top priority for the resistance. And you’ll be happy to know you are a very precious commodity to us.
Lt. Thrace: [increasingly taut]
I’m not a commodity, I’m a Viper pilot.
Doctor: [increasingly condescending]
Do you see any, any Vipers around here? I mean, you do realize that you’re one of the handful of women left on the planet actually capable of having children. Right? I mean, that is your most valuable skill right now.
Lt. Thrace:
Well I don’t want a child. So just drop it, ok?
Doctor:
Well, no one’s forcing you. Just take a moment and think about where you are and what’s going on. The human race is on the verge of extinction. And to be quite frank with you, potential mothers are a lot more valuable right now than a whole squadron of Viper pilots. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I should have know you’d have been sensitive. A lot of women with your history forego child bearing of their own.
Lt. Thrace: [wary]
My history?
Doctor: [compassionate]
I saw the fractures on your X-Ray. A lot of old fractures from childhood. It’s interesting how you managed to break every finger on both hands. [touching her hand gently] Every break on the exact same place between the first and second knuckle. --Did someone break your fingers, Kara?
Lt. Thrace:
Get out.
Doctor: [gently]
Children of abusive parents often fear passing along that abuse to their own children.
Lt. Thrace: [furious]
Get out!
Without going into too much of spoilers for this second-season episode of Battlestar Galactica (series concept spoilers, though) I have to say that this interchange is entirely plausible - and that is without the ostensible excuse of the near-extinction of our species. In the show, there are only known to be about 60,000 survivors, most of them on the illusory safety of the "ragtag fleet" of Dunkirk-like assorted civilian vessels that escaped the initial Cylon attack, the rest scattered about the conqurered homeworlds, or (possibly) in as-yet unknown other surviving stations and ships elsewhere in the Galaxy.
With barely the population of a small modern city (although a tremendous number of people by the standards of antiquity) and the massive number of casualties suffered quite at random, leaving survivors equally at random, with no selection for youth or health or skill or anything but having been a little farther away from the wrong places at the wrong time, by chance (or the will of The Gods, which is a definite possibility in the Galactica 'verse) concern for increasing population as fast as possible is as real as it was in the 20s, when this was discussed in magazines in the wake of WWI, or during WWII - although the idea of breeding rapidly to replace soldiers lost in battle is one of those junk-science things that only a monomaniac could take seriously.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of monomaniacs out there. In the context of the story, the doctor's urgings, however offensive and unwelcome, might be allowed to have a little sense: Lt. Thrace after all is somewhat used to giving up her will for the Common Good, being a soldier and "under authority" - even if she is a rather undisicplined and rebellious one well-acquainted with the brig. The argument that the ability to give birth is more valuable to the community as a whole than the ability to fly fighter jets well, which can be taken over by those who cannot do the former, and that one who can do both ought to consider the common good over personal desires, has its points in this "desert island" scenario.
But in the 21st century, on planet Earth, humanity is far from danger of extinction - at least not in terms of dying out from lack of numbers or genetic diversity! Extinction, if it does not come via a bolt from the black of space (not rebellious robots but random rocks) will come as it has come to all previous past inhabitants of Terra: through environmental change too fast and drastic to be accomodated. That it will come through our own actions will be irony that most of us fail to find amusing.
So there is no legitimate scientific reason for arguing that women of Earth should be treated as breeding stock of an endangered species, first and foremost - which means we have to ask, when we hit people arguing this position, or from this position, what exactly is their reason?
Usually you don't have to dig very deep, nor even sneak around hospital corridors with a freshly-stitched bullet-wound, to find out (although the digging and revelations can be pretty painful and traumatic) as the urgers of Generic Mandatory Motherhood can not really restrain themselves from letting their Ids out off the leash.
Mark Steyn (who to my disgust turns out to be another sort-of neighbor of mine just like the still-more-revolting Brothers Judd - it's a small state, afaik I've never crossed paths but probably less than six degrees) for example in a Wall Street Journal essay summarized by Tbogg as "I can't decide if we should fuck more or commit genocide. Probably both." gives as overt an exposition of the Xenophobic Defense of "natalism" as anything published in The Wanderer ranting about mosques in Europe in the late 1970s:
It's the Demography, Stupid
The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.
One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.
Americans sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department...
As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.
This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free world," as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to reshoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.
There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called population explosion was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.
Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge--isn't significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.
And by 2020?
So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world...
And yes, the Cylons are trying, mostly successfuly, to wipe out humanity. (At least at first: it becomes more complicated as the series goes on and their situation develops.) And yes, it turns out that they're radical monotheists equally incensed at the blasphemy of the older, "idol-worshipping" culture that created them - a society now apparently (if superficially) secular and not even believing in "the gods" these days - and they believe that they are as it were the engines of the One True God's will, smiting sinful, bloodthirsty humanity as they pursue their own salvation. (This aspect of the Türing Test has occasionaly, but very rarely, been explored in fiction.)
The problem is, it's equally applicable as a fictional parallel to the history of Christianity and conversion by the sword, as it is to Islam - q.v. this imprimatur'd 1910 justification of the slaughter of the Cathars on the grounds that their belief system was self-destructive! There is even more than a little of the Inquisitor about Number 6's complicated arguments of the Proof of the reality of God, and the urgent pressure on Balthar to believe, confess, and be spared. Any work of art worthy in the slightest degree of the name is going to be too nuanced to be any good for uncomplicated affirmation of one's own narrow slice of humanity.
The us/them dichotomy of the Cylon zealots versus the unbelievers is on the one hand tarnished from any theocratic purity by the element of revenge for former slavery, defeat, and exile and on the other hand mitigated by the mystical, chiliastic aspect of their beliefs, which allow for unfolding revelation and changes in plan, holding as they do that they too are merely agents of God's Ineffable Plan. The Borg just want to engulf: the Cylons want to remake the galaxy in God's own image.
But then again, how different is that from our own history? Revenge and greed formed no small part of the Western internal wars of religion no less than the colonial from the time of Arius onward; avarice and wrath always hidden under the cloak of holiness; the desire to assimilate, to convert, to win over the Other to one's own side ad majorem gloriam mei has always warred with the desire to extirpate all challenges to one's authority.
Again, the Cylons are so much more worrying in this iteration, dramatically speaking, not for the simple reason that an enemy who looks just like you is impossible to detect the way that giant chrome androids or reptilian aliens are, but for the more subtle resemblances: the rationalization, the sophistry, the utter conviction and refusal to consider the possibility of error - the reason that Number 6 et al blend in chameleonlike so well as double-agents is that they are indeed Humanity's offspring.
Thus the (possible) forming of factions among the Cylons, and the belief that they need humanity for the working out of their own redemption, in a way that rings discordant bells of recognition for a Neo-trad Catholic: Be fruitful and multiply. Since they have made themselves bodies of flesh, they thought that they had succeeded in their duty to become the younger children of the Creator, working towards the divine design - but (shades of R.U.R., although it all seems to work properly, they cannot beget offspring amongst themselves, they can only clone themselves, many multiples of a few patterns. All their sex is non-procreative, by default. So, considering this as a failure, in order to attain the true "image and likeness" they conclude that they need to mingle with humanity for independent reproduction to work for them.
They pursue this by several different paths, which I can't go into without major spoilers, but suffice it that none of them are without significant squick factor; on the one hand, you have the human President eagerly adding to the tally of survivors in the Fleet when a birth is announced, on the other you have the no-holds-barred approach of the mystic-but-pragmatic Cylons towards the production of a saving child, with or without the consent (prior or after the fact) of the human father or mother.
But as we see from Mark Steyn's not-untypical OMG!!!We're Outnumbered!!! screech of ahistorical panic (fling him back fifteen hundred years, and he'd be screeching about how these Visigoths were going to destroy Europe and civilization forevermore and no one will ever know the name of Rome hereafter) this is actually a very human thing. "Breeding our way to victory" was tried by Mussolini, among others, in living memory; it's a key element in the plot of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here as American women are banned from the workplace for all but a few "nurturing" and "appropriate" jobs like nursing and hairdressing once the Corpos take power.
Thus, no matter what is actually going on in the plot intricacies of episode 2.05, the idea that a resistance leader would pressure a female military officer to "choose life" rather than risk the valuable commodity of her womb in combat, to consider it her moral duty to get knocked up ASAP and leave the fighting to the males, under the circumstances of a realtime population crash, is totally plausible. After all, we don't even need a population crash, or a genocide waged by rebellious AIs acting in scary unison, as an excuse: we just need fear of being outnumbered by people who aren't organized, or connected, or actually out to get us in any meaningful sense of the term.
There's just one problem with the tactic, in the Primary World. They may start out with the same combination of praise for female fecundity and the nobility of Motherhood, and guilting for female selfishness in those of us who don't want to marry, or have children, or have more children; but the Natalists here on earth can't hide their misogyny any more than they can hide their xenophobia.
Spain's Vagina Monologue: Feminization
by Alec Rawls
Senior Staff Writer
Islamic terrorists planted 12 backpack bombs and the Spanish people surrendered. They immediately switched from supporting a Spanish government that had backed the war on terror to electing a socialist enemy of the war on terror. We now have a scientific measure of Spanish instincts. They can be described in one word: female.
Faced with the choice of whether to fight against a violent invasion or surrender to it, men and women face very different, sometimes opposite, biological imperatives. Throughout mankind’s evolutionary history, if a man fought against an invader he risked death in proportion to the strength of his foe, while if he surrendered, he faced almost certain death, at least in the biological sense. At best he would be enslaved and denied further access to females. Thus the reproductively more successful strategy for a man would almost always be to fight invaders, and this is how we should expect the male instincts to be programmed, according to the precepts of evolutionary psychology.
For a woman, fighting against an invader also risks death, but surrender offers much better reproductive prospects for women than for men. A woman’s reproductive capacity is part of the booty, often the primary booty, that invaders have always been after. Thus a fertile woman could almost be guaranteed that, with surrender, her reproductive capacity would not be wasted. This difference in biological incentives will have left women with stronger instincts to surrender.
The disparity between male and female instincts is watered down by the biological incentives that men and women have in common. Both have incentive to save their existing children from being killed or enslaved, especially their boys. (Enslaved girls will still reproduce.) But the disparity still remains. Women with children should have a marginally stronger instinct to surrender than men do, while young childless women should have a much stronger instinct to surrender.
This comes from one Alec Rawls, who is currently the object of considerable amusement in Left Blogista for his monomaniacal insistence (complete with napkin-drawing "proofs" and equations) that the monument to the downed plane in Pennsylvania is a crypto-Islamofascist symbol - but whose xenophobia is not limited to the New Crusades style (though he is one of those sort of my coreligionists, weaned on Belloc it is clear) but extends to all who are Other than White Christians (for the moment, fighting over the right sort of Christianity comes later) for he once indulged in a nasty bit of anti-Japanese-American bigotry at IsThatLegal? (scroll down to 9/14, permalink doesn't work) and, obviously, his contempt for what he sees as the failures of Old Europe are equalled only by his contempt for us uterus-possessing demi-humans.
Rawls may be a laughable Malkin-clone, but he's not in an asylum, he's a college graduate from a reputable establishment, the son of a famous ethicist, an editor of the Stanford student magazine, and the worldview he represents is held by far too many of the elite leadership, political, fiscal, and academic, of this country. (And seductive to all too many others who should know better.) There's no difference between the fearmongering sexism of Rawls, and the fearmongering natalism of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. The rights, desires, aims and needs of individuals do not matter - except for their own - compared to the abstraction of Civilization/Christendom/The West that they have created in their heads, and particularly anything which fits into their definition of The Feminine, which is to them both necessary and loathesome, and thus must be kept sequestered away from the Masculine Norm of Humanity, not allowed to contaminate the noble processes of politics and war with our cowardly biological-imperatives, so unlike manly free-will and intellect--
Unfortunately, everything is personal for women, including politics, at least at the level of biological disposition. Women, throughout our evolutionary history, have lived their lives under the power of men. While men have looked outward, engaging the world outside the home in order to provide for the home, women have looked inward, managing the household and establishing their status in it through their emotional relationship with the resident political authority, the man. Men and women both have the same open ended faculties to discover and pursue value, but the difference in our instinctive natures is large.
Faced with an invader, the combination of woman’s instinct to submit, and the tendency for her political thinking to revolve around the personal, can be a disastrous pairing for a nation that allows women to vote. The problem is even worse in Europe because European society has become thoroughly feminized. The European man no longer thinks like a man.
How is it possible for male instinct to be occluded? Very simple: instinct is shaped by calculations of reproductive benefit, crunched numerically by natural selection. Our open ended faculties of intelligence grasp and reinforce these calculations. By changing the conditions in which boys are raised, the risk-reward calculations they face can be shaped so as to set their rational faculties against their instincts, causing instinct to be suppressed.
Consider the impact of European civilian disarmament. Every Spanish man, from the time he was a boy, has been deprived of the means to defend himself and others. Faced with any serious violent threat, from as little as a knife or a piece of pipe, he has always been at a total disadvantage. His open ended faculties of intelligence have always understood clearly that his only rational course is to flee.
The normal male biological calculation- that it makes sense to fight in defense of self and others-is conditioned (in our evolutionary number crunching) on a man having done what he can to be prepared to fight. Our ancestors did not disarm themselves! Europe, by not allowing its boys ever to be prepared to fight, sets their rational faculties to overcome their biological nature. Instead of coming to grips with the moral use of force, European male character formation all occurs in conditions that push males to the female calculation: that it is better to submit.
The result is a vagina monologue. European males and females both see the world in the instinctive female way, as the Spanish displayed last month. By choosing not to fight for their survival, the Spanish are, at the biological level, seeking to survive by making babies for the invader. Here in America, our women (or at least our Republican women), grow up thinking of themselves and their men as armed. Thus their rational faculties grasp that it makes sense to fight. Faced with an attacker, it is the female instinct that gets overruled.
Such good girls, even helping out behind the lines while our boys methodically stuff the Jihadis into the meat grinder. There is a long way to go, but women, don’t worry. We will never let the vermin take you. You can go to them if you want, the flakes amongst you. We allow you your weakness. What we love is your strength.
Thus it comes, in the Primary World, even more so than (as yet) in the Galactica 'verse, the so-called Defenders of Humanity/Western Culture™/Civilization here are so much more like the utilitarian Cylons (whose unpersonhood, and corresponding lack of rights to not be tortured as POWs, is defended by conservative fans, btw) than they grasp. --But among themselves, at least, the Cylons apparently are egalitarian when it comes to gender. (Meanwhile, here, British sociologists speculate that it will take another full generation, or more, to attain any meaningful equality between the sexes...)
This is the worldview that Alito stands for: unlimited power to authority figures; police to act with impunity for their overreaching against us sheep; a president unaccountable to any peers, elected representatives or the electorate; the rich unaccountable to the poor, the physically strong unaccountable to the disabled, the minority without appeal against the entitled majority, in which none of us are our brothers' keepers - except in the manner of jailers, which is the proper role of husbands towards wives.
If that sort of brave new world is your cup of tea, it certainly isn't mine and I don't feel the slightest moral responsibility to uphold it. --Au contraire, as the man on the boat said when asked if he'd dined...
If you want us to breed, and not just to do so out of the necessity of having no means of contraception, but to be proud and happy to be only (or primarily) broodmares, O ye leaders of the conservative hierarchy, you should at least try to conceal your utter scorn for the whole business of procreation and us as bearers--
Or, to put it another way, what my mother would say when she was "speaking Air Force" - Go fuck yourselves. --With all due respect. After all, why would you want to have anything to do with us, if you hold women in such disdain?
--Oh, and Lt. Kara Thrace, better known as "Starbuck", who is - despite regularly and with great gusto engaging in non-procreative sex with whoever takes her fancy - sworn to the service of the Virgin Huntress and certainly seems to have Her blessing, given her luck in battle - goes off at the end of the episode without guilt and without remorse for failing to breed (though other failures are another matter) to serve as Guide and Guardian for the leaders of humanity's remnant: having served as the agent of Doom brought in through their own gate for those who wanted to use her only as a Sacred Vessel, valuable only for what she might potentially contain...
The biggest killer in this place is infection. That’s why we have you under quarantine. We don’t know what you brought in with you yet. Your test results will be back this afternoon. Okay. Almost done. I think there may be a cyst on one of your ovaries.
Lt. Thrace:
Is it serious?
Doctor: [jovial]
Nah, it should be fine. We’ll keep an eye on it. Gotta keep that reproductive system in great shape. It’s your most valuable asset these days.
Lt. Thrace: [sarcastic]
Right.
Doctor:
I’m serious. Finding healthy child-bearing women your age is a top priority for the resistance. And you’ll be happy to know you are a very precious commodity to us.
Lt. Thrace: [increasingly taut]
I’m not a commodity, I’m a Viper pilot.
Doctor: [increasingly condescending]
Do you see any, any Vipers around here? I mean, you do realize that you’re one of the handful of women left on the planet actually capable of having children. Right? I mean, that is your most valuable skill right now.
Lt. Thrace:
Well I don’t want a child. So just drop it, ok?
Doctor:
Well, no one’s forcing you. Just take a moment and think about where you are and what’s going on. The human race is on the verge of extinction. And to be quite frank with you, potential mothers are a lot more valuable right now than a whole squadron of Viper pilots. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I should have know you’d have been sensitive. A lot of women with your history forego child bearing of their own.
Lt. Thrace: [wary]
My history?
Doctor: [compassionate]
I saw the fractures on your X-Ray. A lot of old fractures from childhood. It’s interesting how you managed to break every finger on both hands. [touching her hand gently] Every break on the exact same place between the first and second knuckle. --Did someone break your fingers, Kara?
Lt. Thrace:
Get out.
Doctor: [gently]
Children of abusive parents often fear passing along that abuse to their own children.
Lt. Thrace: [furious]
Get out!
Without going into too much of spoilers for this second-season episode of Battlestar Galactica (series concept spoilers, though) I have to say that this interchange is entirely plausible - and that is without the ostensible excuse of the near-extinction of our species. In the show, there are only known to be about 60,000 survivors, most of them on the illusory safety of the "ragtag fleet" of Dunkirk-like assorted civilian vessels that escaped the initial Cylon attack, the rest scattered about the conqurered homeworlds, or (possibly) in as-yet unknown other surviving stations and ships elsewhere in the Galaxy.
With barely the population of a small modern city (although a tremendous number of people by the standards of antiquity) and the massive number of casualties suffered quite at random, leaving survivors equally at random, with no selection for youth or health or skill or anything but having been a little farther away from the wrong places at the wrong time, by chance (or the will of The Gods, which is a definite possibility in the Galactica 'verse) concern for increasing population as fast as possible is as real as it was in the 20s, when this was discussed in magazines in the wake of WWI, or during WWII - although the idea of breeding rapidly to replace soldiers lost in battle is one of those junk-science things that only a monomaniac could take seriously.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of monomaniacs out there. In the context of the story, the doctor's urgings, however offensive and unwelcome, might be allowed to have a little sense: Lt. Thrace after all is somewhat used to giving up her will for the Common Good, being a soldier and "under authority" - even if she is a rather undisicplined and rebellious one well-acquainted with the brig. The argument that the ability to give birth is more valuable to the community as a whole than the ability to fly fighter jets well, which can be taken over by those who cannot do the former, and that one who can do both ought to consider the common good over personal desires, has its points in this "desert island" scenario.
But in the 21st century, on planet Earth, humanity is far from danger of extinction - at least not in terms of dying out from lack of numbers or genetic diversity! Extinction, if it does not come via a bolt from the black of space (not rebellious robots but random rocks) will come as it has come to all previous past inhabitants of Terra: through environmental change too fast and drastic to be accomodated. That it will come through our own actions will be irony that most of us fail to find amusing.
So there is no legitimate scientific reason for arguing that women of Earth should be treated as breeding stock of an endangered species, first and foremost - which means we have to ask, when we hit people arguing this position, or from this position, what exactly is their reason?
Usually you don't have to dig very deep, nor even sneak around hospital corridors with a freshly-stitched bullet-wound, to find out (although the digging and revelations can be pretty painful and traumatic) as the urgers of Generic Mandatory Motherhood can not really restrain themselves from letting their Ids out off the leash.
Mark Steyn (who to my disgust turns out to be another sort-of neighbor of mine just like the still-more-revolting Brothers Judd - it's a small state, afaik I've never crossed paths but probably less than six degrees) for example in a Wall Street Journal essay summarized by Tbogg as "I can't decide if we should fuck more or commit genocide. Probably both." gives as overt an exposition of the Xenophobic Defense of "natalism" as anything published in The Wanderer ranting about mosques in Europe in the late 1970s:
It's the Demography, Stupid
The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.
One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.
Americans sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department...
As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.
This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free world," as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to reshoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.
There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called population explosion was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.
Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge--isn't significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.
And by 2020?
So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world...
And yes, the Cylons are trying, mostly successfuly, to wipe out humanity. (At least at first: it becomes more complicated as the series goes on and their situation develops.) And yes, it turns out that they're radical monotheists equally incensed at the blasphemy of the older, "idol-worshipping" culture that created them - a society now apparently (if superficially) secular and not even believing in "the gods" these days - and they believe that they are as it were the engines of the One True God's will, smiting sinful, bloodthirsty humanity as they pursue their own salvation. (This aspect of the Türing Test has occasionaly, but very rarely, been explored in fiction.)
The problem is, it's equally applicable as a fictional parallel to the history of Christianity and conversion by the sword, as it is to Islam - q.v. this imprimatur'd 1910 justification of the slaughter of the Cathars on the grounds that their belief system was self-destructive! There is even more than a little of the Inquisitor about Number 6's complicated arguments of the Proof of the reality of God, and the urgent pressure on Balthar to believe, confess, and be spared. Any work of art worthy in the slightest degree of the name is going to be too nuanced to be any good for uncomplicated affirmation of one's own narrow slice of humanity.
The us/them dichotomy of the Cylon zealots versus the unbelievers is on the one hand tarnished from any theocratic purity by the element of revenge for former slavery, defeat, and exile and on the other hand mitigated by the mystical, chiliastic aspect of their beliefs, which allow for unfolding revelation and changes in plan, holding as they do that they too are merely agents of God's Ineffable Plan. The Borg just want to engulf: the Cylons want to remake the galaxy in God's own image.
But then again, how different is that from our own history? Revenge and greed formed no small part of the Western internal wars of religion no less than the colonial from the time of Arius onward; avarice and wrath always hidden under the cloak of holiness; the desire to assimilate, to convert, to win over the Other to one's own side ad majorem gloriam mei has always warred with the desire to extirpate all challenges to one's authority.
Again, the Cylons are so much more worrying in this iteration, dramatically speaking, not for the simple reason that an enemy who looks just like you is impossible to detect the way that giant chrome androids or reptilian aliens are, but for the more subtle resemblances: the rationalization, the sophistry, the utter conviction and refusal to consider the possibility of error - the reason that Number 6 et al blend in chameleonlike so well as double-agents is that they are indeed Humanity's offspring.
Thus the (possible) forming of factions among the Cylons, and the belief that they need humanity for the working out of their own redemption, in a way that rings discordant bells of recognition for a Neo-trad Catholic: Be fruitful and multiply. Since they have made themselves bodies of flesh, they thought that they had succeeded in their duty to become the younger children of the Creator, working towards the divine design - but (shades of R.U.R., although it all seems to work properly, they cannot beget offspring amongst themselves, they can only clone themselves, many multiples of a few patterns. All their sex is non-procreative, by default. So, considering this as a failure, in order to attain the true "image and likeness" they conclude that they need to mingle with humanity for independent reproduction to work for them.
They pursue this by several different paths, which I can't go into without major spoilers, but suffice it that none of them are without significant squick factor; on the one hand, you have the human President eagerly adding to the tally of survivors in the Fleet when a birth is announced, on the other you have the no-holds-barred approach of the mystic-but-pragmatic Cylons towards the production of a saving child, with or without the consent (prior or after the fact) of the human father or mother.
But as we see from Mark Steyn's not-untypical OMG!!!We're Outnumbered!!! screech of ahistorical panic (fling him back fifteen hundred years, and he'd be screeching about how these Visigoths were going to destroy Europe and civilization forevermore and no one will ever know the name of Rome hereafter) this is actually a very human thing. "Breeding our way to victory" was tried by Mussolini, among others, in living memory; it's a key element in the plot of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here as American women are banned from the workplace for all but a few "nurturing" and "appropriate" jobs like nursing and hairdressing once the Corpos take power.
Thus, no matter what is actually going on in the plot intricacies of episode 2.05, the idea that a resistance leader would pressure a female military officer to "choose life" rather than risk the valuable commodity of her womb in combat, to consider it her moral duty to get knocked up ASAP and leave the fighting to the males, under the circumstances of a realtime population crash, is totally plausible. After all, we don't even need a population crash, or a genocide waged by rebellious AIs acting in scary unison, as an excuse: we just need fear of being outnumbered by people who aren't organized, or connected, or actually out to get us in any meaningful sense of the term.
There's just one problem with the tactic, in the Primary World. They may start out with the same combination of praise for female fecundity and the nobility of Motherhood, and guilting for female selfishness in those of us who don't want to marry, or have children, or have more children; but the Natalists here on earth can't hide their misogyny any more than they can hide their xenophobia.
Spain's Vagina Monologue: Feminization
by Alec Rawls
Senior Staff Writer
Islamic terrorists planted 12 backpack bombs and the Spanish people surrendered. They immediately switched from supporting a Spanish government that had backed the war on terror to electing a socialist enemy of the war on terror. We now have a scientific measure of Spanish instincts. They can be described in one word: female.
Faced with the choice of whether to fight against a violent invasion or surrender to it, men and women face very different, sometimes opposite, biological imperatives. Throughout mankind’s evolutionary history, if a man fought against an invader he risked death in proportion to the strength of his foe, while if he surrendered, he faced almost certain death, at least in the biological sense. At best he would be enslaved and denied further access to females. Thus the reproductively more successful strategy for a man would almost always be to fight invaders, and this is how we should expect the male instincts to be programmed, according to the precepts of evolutionary psychology.
For a woman, fighting against an invader also risks death, but surrender offers much better reproductive prospects for women than for men. A woman’s reproductive capacity is part of the booty, often the primary booty, that invaders have always been after. Thus a fertile woman could almost be guaranteed that, with surrender, her reproductive capacity would not be wasted. This difference in biological incentives will have left women with stronger instincts to surrender.
The disparity between male and female instincts is watered down by the biological incentives that men and women have in common. Both have incentive to save their existing children from being killed or enslaved, especially their boys. (Enslaved girls will still reproduce.) But the disparity still remains. Women with children should have a marginally stronger instinct to surrender than men do, while young childless women should have a much stronger instinct to surrender.
This comes from one Alec Rawls, who is currently the object of considerable amusement in Left Blogista for his monomaniacal insistence (complete with napkin-drawing "proofs" and equations) that the monument to the downed plane in Pennsylvania is a crypto-Islamofascist symbol - but whose xenophobia is not limited to the New Crusades style (though he is one of those sort of my coreligionists, weaned on Belloc it is clear) but extends to all who are Other than White Christians (for the moment, fighting over the right sort of Christianity comes later) for he once indulged in a nasty bit of anti-Japanese-American bigotry at IsThatLegal? (scroll down to 9/14, permalink doesn't work) and, obviously, his contempt for what he sees as the failures of Old Europe are equalled only by his contempt for us uterus-possessing demi-humans.
Rawls may be a laughable Malkin-clone, but he's not in an asylum, he's a college graduate from a reputable establishment, the son of a famous ethicist, an editor of the Stanford student magazine, and the worldview he represents is held by far too many of the elite leadership, political, fiscal, and academic, of this country. (And seductive to all too many others who should know better.) There's no difference between the fearmongering sexism of Rawls, and the fearmongering natalism of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. The rights, desires, aims and needs of individuals do not matter - except for their own - compared to the abstraction of Civilization/Christendom/The West that they have created in their heads, and particularly anything which fits into their definition of The Feminine, which is to them both necessary and loathesome, and thus must be kept sequestered away from the Masculine Norm of Humanity, not allowed to contaminate the noble processes of politics and war with our cowardly biological-imperatives, so unlike manly free-will and intellect--
Unfortunately, everything is personal for women, including politics, at least at the level of biological disposition. Women, throughout our evolutionary history, have lived their lives under the power of men. While men have looked outward, engaging the world outside the home in order to provide for the home, women have looked inward, managing the household and establishing their status in it through their emotional relationship with the resident political authority, the man. Men and women both have the same open ended faculties to discover and pursue value, but the difference in our instinctive natures is large.
Faced with an invader, the combination of woman’s instinct to submit, and the tendency for her political thinking to revolve around the personal, can be a disastrous pairing for a nation that allows women to vote. The problem is even worse in Europe because European society has become thoroughly feminized. The European man no longer thinks like a man.
How is it possible for male instinct to be occluded? Very simple: instinct is shaped by calculations of reproductive benefit, crunched numerically by natural selection. Our open ended faculties of intelligence grasp and reinforce these calculations. By changing the conditions in which boys are raised, the risk-reward calculations they face can be shaped so as to set their rational faculties against their instincts, causing instinct to be suppressed.
Consider the impact of European civilian disarmament. Every Spanish man, from the time he was a boy, has been deprived of the means to defend himself and others. Faced with any serious violent threat, from as little as a knife or a piece of pipe, he has always been at a total disadvantage. His open ended faculties of intelligence have always understood clearly that his only rational course is to flee.
The normal male biological calculation- that it makes sense to fight in defense of self and others-is conditioned (in our evolutionary number crunching) on a man having done what he can to be prepared to fight. Our ancestors did not disarm themselves! Europe, by not allowing its boys ever to be prepared to fight, sets their rational faculties to overcome their biological nature. Instead of coming to grips with the moral use of force, European male character formation all occurs in conditions that push males to the female calculation: that it is better to submit.
The result is a vagina monologue. European males and females both see the world in the instinctive female way, as the Spanish displayed last month. By choosing not to fight for their survival, the Spanish are, at the biological level, seeking to survive by making babies for the invader. Here in America, our women (or at least our Republican women), grow up thinking of themselves and their men as armed. Thus their rational faculties grasp that it makes sense to fight. Faced with an attacker, it is the female instinct that gets overruled.
Such good girls, even helping out behind the lines while our boys methodically stuff the Jihadis into the meat grinder. There is a long way to go, but women, don’t worry. We will never let the vermin take you. You can go to them if you want, the flakes amongst you. We allow you your weakness. What we love is your strength.
Thus it comes, in the Primary World, even more so than (as yet) in the Galactica 'verse, the so-called Defenders of Humanity/Western Culture™/Civilization here are so much more like the utilitarian Cylons (whose unpersonhood, and corresponding lack of rights to not be tortured as POWs, is defended by conservative fans, btw) than they grasp. --But among themselves, at least, the Cylons apparently are egalitarian when it comes to gender. (Meanwhile, here, British sociologists speculate that it will take another full generation, or more, to attain any meaningful equality between the sexes...)
This is the worldview that Alito stands for: unlimited power to authority figures; police to act with impunity for their overreaching against us sheep; a president unaccountable to any peers, elected representatives or the electorate; the rich unaccountable to the poor, the physically strong unaccountable to the disabled, the minority without appeal against the entitled majority, in which none of us are our brothers' keepers - except in the manner of jailers, which is the proper role of husbands towards wives.
If that sort of brave new world is your cup of tea, it certainly isn't mine and I don't feel the slightest moral responsibility to uphold it. --Au contraire, as the man on the boat said when asked if he'd dined...
If you want us to breed, and not just to do so out of the necessity of having no means of contraception, but to be proud and happy to be only (or primarily) broodmares, O ye leaders of the conservative hierarchy, you should at least try to conceal your utter scorn for the whole business of procreation and us as bearers--
Or, to put it another way, what my mother would say when she was "speaking Air Force" - Go fuck yourselves. --With all due respect. After all, why would you want to have anything to do with us, if you hold women in such disdain?
--Oh, and Lt. Kara Thrace, better known as "Starbuck", who is - despite regularly and with great gusto engaging in non-procreative sex with whoever takes her fancy - sworn to the service of the Virgin Huntress and certainly seems to have Her blessing, given her luck in battle - goes off at the end of the episode without guilt and without remorse for failing to breed (though other failures are another matter) to serve as Guide and Guardian for the leaders of humanity's remnant: having served as the agent of Doom brought in through their own gate for those who wanted to use her only as a Sacred Vessel, valuable only for what she might potentially contain...