If you read enough feminist newsletters and websites you’ll eventually come across more than a few childfree by choice defenses. Setting aside the question of why brilliant, succesful, allegedly fulfilled women are feel the need to defend their choices so vigorously, their reasoning offers a clue as to why discussion of genetic factors in intelligence, talent, and personality must be suppressed.
The typical defense is that the world is already overpopulated and that people who refrain from adding to this problem are more level-headed and foresighted than those who have children anyway. This is frequently followed by admonitions that everyone who wants children shop for them at foreign orphanages instead of adding to overpopulation with a do-it-yourself project.
GNXP followers and most other thinking people know that overpopulation hysteria is about 30 years out of date. And the anti-white racism that this argument hints toward by encouraging white couples to adopt brown babies instead of polluting the world with their own racist DNA cuts no ice with most whites under 30 who have born the brunt of affirmative action, quotas,
and other anti-white campus policies. However, the crux of this argument hangs on the shibboleth that All Races Are Created Equal.
This Brave New World and White Parent’s Burden can only succeed in Lake Wobegone. If a child born to any Lagos prostitute will graduate from Harvard Medical School as easily as a Park Avenue scion named Benjamin Rabinowitz, if they both have a good secondary education and the tuition on hand, then the high-IQ childfree feminists are at least half-right even if their overpopulation theories are baloney.
But, if intelligence is highly heritable, and thus closely connected to race, not only are their racial theories in the dust bin, but their childlessness is a
net loss to society. In a purely Darwinian sense, by taking their high-IQ genes to the grave with them they are living antisocial, counterproductive lives. Although the genetic problems common in Third World adoptees are now being acknoweledged, the logical leap that healthy, intelligent, hardworking people should have children for the good of society would make childless feminists “feel guilty”. As liberalism promises a guilt and shamefree existance for those who renounce the evil powers of racism, sexism, and homophobia, this must be avoided at all costs, even at the expense of scientific truth.
Are people fortunate enough to be born at the right tail of the bell curve obligated to pay for their dumb luck by having a lot of babies to keep our complex society going? Clearly the decision to have a family is an intensely personal one that is fraught with emotion and subject to influences over which one frequently has little control. Do we owe society our high IQ genes in the next generation of the cognitive elite? Such a question will discomfort some libertarians, the kind who believe that the individual has no obligations to society beyond obeying the law and staying off welfare. Pre-September 11th, Steve Sailer shot down their open-border hallucinations with the genetic/financial inequality argument. Does the genetic inequality argument extend to increasing social pressure on high IQ people to marry and have large families?
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the ramifications of the Death of the Blank Slate will result in the greatest philosophical upheaval since the Enlightenment. Also, let me make it clear that as a Christian I believe that human beings have souls, and that we are more than just our genotypes. Certainly, the childless can contribute greatly to human societies, as they have for centuries. But in terms of Darwinian fitness, a fundamental genetic reality independent of and preceding human societies, the childless are irrelevant. As I’ve stated, I have no idea where to go from here, but the sooner we address these issues the better. But if our primary goal is to avoid hurting people’s feelings we’ll never even approach a resolution. We may as well start here. Let’s hash this out. I invite every possible perspective.
Razib adds: from the message board….
“humans don’t have sex to have babies, they have babies because they enjoy sex.”
it’s not often that razib is this spectacularly wrong!
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