Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Conservatives and Family Formation

Some conservatives are actually quite good at perpetuating their own lines. If you come from a liberal city, like I do, you might be under the impression that the sort of happy, intact, and numerous families might be next to nonexistent. Especially these days, having more than one vanity child in one of the big cities tends to appear to be a fashion faux pas at the best, and a sign of moral turpitude at the worst.

Just thinking about numbers here, the side that actually focuses on making and raising healthy, happy children will overwhelm the one that focuses on overstimulating a small number of neurotic, unhealthy kids who fail to mature into self-sufficient adults.

For all of their problems in red-state-landia, on the other hand, once you leave those enclaves, it’s actually somewhat common, if less so than it used to be, to find healthy-looking parents with bunches of healthy-looking kids. A sign of success is a room covered in photographs upon photographs of all the various children with the conventional markers of bourgeois happiness, without many traces of the over-educated neuroticism which has become the common language elsewhere.

You just walk into the washing machine room, or whatever, and there are photos posted up of all six kids, at baseball practice, choir, in the graduation cap, all that kitschy stuff that sophisticates like to sneer at. While as a method of interior decoration, it could use some improvement, and one might wonder of the theological implications of making shrines to one’s children, but the phenomenon there symbolized by the photos is worth encouraging.

I should think that any sort of right-leaning cultural thought should focus on making more of the former type of person, and fewer of the inwardly-focused neurotics. This is one of Steve Sailer’s hobbyhorses, but for whatever reason, the mainstream right tends not to emphasize this simple, wholesome message. Partially because America’s political structure is fundamentally ill at ease with the same social and economic dynamics which make families stronger relative to corporate-democratic structures.

It tends to be difficult to maintain a conservative attitude towards family while living in a liberal area, even for work, just because the culture that supports family isn’t present. If it’s socially awkward to get married and have kids, it’s just not going to happen, except during some onset or another of baby rabies. If it’s socially normal to get married and have kids, it tends to happen more often, even among average yokels who own pickup trucks, a good portion of whom have more money than the typical city neurotic, anyway.

It’s not just about ‘affordable family formation.’ It also has to do with shared attitudes towards religion, life, and work.

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Conceptkin

Intellectuals have a certain tendency to look for ideas to identify themselves with. They want to become the idea, and the idea becomes them.

As time goes on, the idea tends to take on more importance than the person himself. The man, if there really was much of one to begin with, shrinks and shrinks, as he feeds more and more blood, to plump up the idea so much that it starts to come to seem real to the man and to others. Why ideas are so thirsty for human blood, I’m not sure, but they do seem fond of how it tastes, much like mosquitoes enjoy the taste.

In the case of an intellectual movement, more and more people come to believe in the concept, and they feed it more and more with their beliefs, energy, and money. They start to carve images for the sake of the idea, if it’s a particularly impressive one. Certain people who feed a lot to the shared notion come to embody some of the numina of the idea, and come to be seen as mediators between the invisible concept and the corporeal reality. In this, the people come to be subordinate to the idea, and what goes on underneath it is much less relevant than the preservation of the belief is.

When liberals think of religion, they think of god as an idea, rather than an embodied thing, which can be touched and seen. Atheism tends not to be the rejection of abstract concepts, but comes first in the conception of God as an abstract concept, and then the rejection of that particular concept in favor of a different one (like Objectivism or Atheism+).

The conservative way of thinking is a bit different, in that it focuses more on figuring out the right way to live often empirically, rather than on selecting the right idea to feed for how one ought to live. In liberalism, love for the idea comes first. For conservatives, love for the people who are close is the primary thing.

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Babykillers and Bastard Factories

There are a couple female life patterns that feed contemporary leftism in the West: that of the babykiller and the bastard factory. The babykiller lifestyle tends to be for more up-market women, whereas the bastard factory lifestyle is for the poorer and usually (marginally) more religious demographic.

Babykillers, we’re all familiar with, perhaps intimately so. They get their first birth control prescription when they’re maybe around 14, perhaps a little older — whenever their parents start to become nervous about what their daughter is up to. The usual euphemism is that it’ll help her control her acne.

Of the two, the babykiller lifestyle is the most glamorized. They’re the heroines of romantic comedies and TV shows. They fall in love, enjoy sterile sex within a succession of relationships, advance their careers, and live in cities or tony suburbs.

Bastard factories, on the other hand, tend to be objects of pity. Conservative pro-life activists tend to be somewhat mislead in that they tend to encourage pregnant single women to go and have their bastards. This may be right, writ small, but writ large, the moral acceptance provided to mothers of bastard children is completely a-historical and opposed to traditional morality. Women who go and have their babies out of wedlock will sometimes be accorded a patina of grace from both progressives and conservatives. The former, for being ‘strong single mothers,’ and the latter, for not deciding to kill their bastards in utero.

The two types of behavior result in different kinds of damage. Bastard factories create external costs for the rest of society. Bastards, like children of divorce, tend to create disproportionate amounts of public disorder. Many single mothers wind up relying on welfare to make ends meet, which necessitates higher taxes on everyone else and enormous government programs besides.

This tends to make babykillers feel morally superior to their less ‘responsible’ sisters. Why, they have real jobs, real educations, and fabulous lifestyles! Besides, they mostly just sterilize themselves chemically, only occasionally making a visit to the abortionist when something slips up. From the perspective of the government, shouldn’t more women be productive, taxpaying babykillers?

The rest of the society is not really that much better off with babykillers as compared to bastard factories. With the former, the country misses out on all the potential added productivity from children raised in a productive and intact household. One woman, like my grandmother, can put out six children, give or take a few.

While the babykillers are probably net taxpayers rather than taxeaters, the future value of their potential progeny gets gobbled up, even so much that they fail to even replace themselves. Because the most productive babykillers tend to be the most intelligent and genetically desirable of women, the lost potential from their sterility is much higher than the EBT and childcare expenses of even the most fertile bastard factory.

Sterilization culture is central to the lived reality of leftism in a way that most of the stated ideas of the left are not. Similarly, the dysfunction created by the bastards provides grist for the leftist-bureaucratic mill. Few really care about equality. Many more care about being able to fuck without planting an infant.

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