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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Natalism, The Nation And Nazis

Becker says he’s not optimistic that any of the schemes underway in Europe and elsewhere to encourage having babies will work. “Since 1970,” he writes. “no country has had a large increse in its total fertility rate after this rate had fallen much below the replacement level.” The only solution, then, will be large-scale immigration, […]

Becker says he’s not optimistic that any of the schemes underway in Europe and elsewhere to encourage having babies will work. “Since 1970,” he writes. “no country has had a large increse in its total fertility rate after this rate had fallen much below the replacement level.” The only solution, then, will be large-scale immigration, which presents its own massive set of problems. But by the time that choice is squarely in front of us, there will likely be no other choice.

It strikes me that this whole topic makes people extremely squeamish for a variety of reasons. When I published some time ago a Phillip Longman essay about it in the section I edit at the Dallas Morning News, I got several critical comments from co-workers about how Nazi the whole thing sounded, re: having babies for the national good. ~Rod Dreher

Now I think people who respond to natalism or the idea of encouraging more births as a matter of policy with references to Nazism are rather silly, but they are not entitrely wrong on the facts.  What drove Italy and Germany to pursue such pro-natal policies?  (A separate question: is such a policy ‘reactionary’, ‘modern’ or simply common sense in certain circumstances?)  The first reason is obvious: both countries had lost a considerable number of men in WWI and both understood that in an age of mass labour and mass armies a larger population was the key to productivity and international power.   The other reason is more philosophical, and comes from fascism’s affinities with modern nationalism: the belief in the priority and preexistence of the nation, and the related belief that each individual owes his existence to the whole that has made his life possible. 

One of the things that did characterise historic fascism and Nazism was the assumption–hardly unknown among nationalists of various stripes and not entirely unreasonable–that the nation and the political community (which nationalists unfortunately frequently identify with a consolidated nation-state) take precedence because they preexisted any individual or group within the nation.  On a smaller, more humane scale, this may be less difficult to understand; in Aristotle’s Politics, he held that the polis was by nature prior to the family, “since the whole is of necessity prior to the part.”  Aristotle here sees the political community as a corporate entity of which individuals and families are members and this membership is easily demonstrated, he goes further, because individuals on their own cannot be self-sufficient.  In any case, humans are social and political beings, not naturally given to living in isolation. (Pol. I, 1253a) 

Everything about both the nationalist and Aristotelian ideas drives devotees of liberal autonomy crazy.  It suggests that you have obligations that you did not “choose,” and that you exist in relationship with others in ways that you should not be able to opt out of.  It suggests that your life ought to contribute to the good of the whole, or the common good, that is it not simply your single, solitary, individual life to be lived entirely as you see fit.  Probably what scares most devotees of autonomy about this is that it is an eminently normal way of thinking about social and political life, but this kind of thinking will interfere with everyone’s private and autonomous sphere.  Of course, when raised to a national level and once it involves a consolidated nation-state, the abstract nature of the “community” and the coercive apparatus of the consolidated state become real practical problems.  The scale of our political system becomes a significant barrier to arguing in favour of the obvious social good of the nation reproducing itself.  Because it is vaguely reminiscent of political systems where the obligation to the nation was taken to excessive and idolatrous extremes, people across the spectrum have been taught to be wary of these sorts of things, but the real reason why people react viscerally against the idea of a policy that encourage people to have more children is that it crosses several red lines of privacy and autonomy that modern Americans, especially in the post-Roe world, take far more seriously when it comes to reproduction or any aspect of their “private” life than they do about anything else.  (Americans will cede every constitutional right they have if it will help provide for “national security”–this is a kind of sacrifice they are frequently only too glad to make–but they will riot if you suggest that their preferences in “private” life are somehow askew.  One might go so far as to say that protection from real government abuse matters less to Americans than being able to shop at Wal-Mart without criticism.) 

Even if a policy does not actually “intrude” on a person’s private life in any discernible way, but makes some sort of common sense, boilerplate value judgement that “having more children is desirable for good of the political community,” people feel that it is intruding on the realm of individual “choice” by implying that the choice to have fewer children, or none at all, is unsatisfactory or wrong.  (Of course, as far as the political community is concerned, it is unsatisfactory and in some sense lacking in virtue.)  There are probably relatively few people who really object, as a matter of principle, to an actual natalist policy, but quite a large number of people will react badly to the idea because they do not want their lifestyles to be judged and found wanting from the perspective of the natural purpose of sex and one of the purposes of the institution of marriage.     

Like Rod’s co-workers, Americans today tend to see the idea of the precedence and priority of the political community as leading in a straight line to totalitarianism, because they have been conditioned for two generations to think that any system that opposes liberal autonomy and “freedom” must perforce be fascist or totalitarian.  It seems to be the only opposition that people can imagine: if one is not autonomous, one must become an ant in the fascist anthill.  It would be interesting to go into how autonomy helps to create the tendency towards such regimented conformity, but that is not the subject at hand.

 

The libertarian will argue right away that the problem in today’s society is not that we have been too self-absorbed and autonomous, but that we have been too willing to cede control to government in every sphere of life, but this mistakes–as libertarians usually do–the political habits of voters for their cultural mores and habits and on the other side mistakes any and all remedies for the social ills of individualism with some appeal to state power.  Of course, if Americans and Westerners more generally were willing to have more children, there would be no need to talk about political action to encourage this; as is frequently the case, autonomous individuals neglect their social responsibilities and obligations, which ends up dragging public authority into spheres where it should never have to go.  (On a related point, the inability to think about society itself except as a gaggle of individuals or as Leviathan seems to be a common problem for both libertarians and the people Rod called “mainstream conservatives.”)  

Political life has become more and more preoccupied with a certain definition of the common good, which has typically meant being preoccupied with giving more powers to central government in the illusion that this government has any interest in serving the common good; this is, to be blunt, the fundamental false assumption of modern liberalism, and one that more and more conservatives have accepted, whether as part of the New Right or in the form of “big-government” or “compassionate” conservatism.  One step that we all might take to avoid needing a national natalist policy would be to reimagine the common good in terms of concrete, living communities and to think of children as essential to the future of that real community in which you live.  If people in rootless, highly mobile lifestyles cannot imagine such a thing, that might very well be the proof that there is something wrong with such a lifestyle and perhaps even proof that it is contrary to our nature.

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