The Survival of Culture (II)

Kerry Howley, refusing to fret over birthrates and cultural change:

I'm not enough of a cultural hegemonist to care whether the people living on this particular piece of land maintain the dominant American culture into perpetuity; if, in the year 3000, the entire world is dominated by Danish mores, I will not feel slighted. Still, the “conversion versus inheritance” debate is a relatively unhelpful way to approach the issue. The word conversion suggests a wholesale repudiation of one set of beliefs and acceptance of another, but cultures shift as the result of millions of choices at the margin. Europe is rapidly secularizing; you wouldn't call that inheritance, nor would you call it conversion. (You might call it spiritual drift, though I tend to think they're drifting toward something better.) The conversion/inheritance framework assumes that the host culture remains static as outsiders bend to its dictates; it allows for no single person to claim a place in more than one tradition; and it fails to acknowledge that we are moving toward a more mobile society with ever more return and circular migration....

Part of the reason we find it so difficult to think about demographic change is that we fail to notice the goalposts changing around us. It’s true that the people we call social conservatives in this country are reproducing faster than the people we call social liberals. But what will it mean to be “conservative” in America a century from now? In 1908 being a social conservative meant something far less amenable to tolerance than “legal marriage is for straight people!” Yes, Utah’s birthrate is higher than that of Bangladesh. I don’t know how to worry about that particular factoid, because I have no idea what it will mean to be a socially conservative Mormon in 30 years. It certainly means something different today than it did 30 years back.

The point about the weakness of the conversion-versus-inheritance dichotomy is well taken. Saying that we shouldn't fear a Scandinavianized world, though, seems a little beside the point; as Poulos points out, "the question Kerry and her fellow travelers need to answer is whose mores they’d not want to take over the world, ever, under any circumstances." The fertility alarmists (the smarter ones, at least) aren't upset about the prospect that Western culture won't survive in exactly its current form; they're upset about the prospect that whatever Western culture emerges from those "millions of choices at the margin" will be changed for the worse by demographic pressure from cultures that look nothing at all like modern Denmark.

Now it's entirely possible that this alarmism is, well, alarmist, and certainly Kerry's right that the intersection of cultural and demographic change is way too complicated to be effectively predicted. But the mere fact that cultures don't stay static and that cultural change happens swiftly doesn't guarantee the endurance of liberal norms. What Kerry's banking on, perhaps correctly, is the fact that in the modern era, the sort of goalpost-shifting she's talking about has, in a broad sense, moved us consistently in a modern liberal, secular, Dane-like direction. But past results don't always predict future ones (to take a very extreme example, the Pax Romana was very good at assimilating barbarian tribes until, well, it wasn't), and at the most basic level, it remains the case that cultural norms are passed on more effectively from parents to children than in almost any other way that we've devised. Birthrates aren't the only factor in the survival of a given set of norms, but they are a factor, and not a small one either. And so while they may not offer good reasons for wild alarmism, I think falling birthrates among people who share your norms are at the very least a legitimate cause for concern, assuming you approve of the norms in question and disapprove of others.

Comments

I think I'd worry more about demographic changes within our culture, rather than pressures from without.

People on the downward side of the bell curve reproducing much less than those on the upward sloping side, for instance.

Posted by Jeff | June 23, 2008 11:17 AM

What Kerry's banking on, perhaps correctly, is the fact that in the modern era, the sort of goalpost-shifting she's talking about has, in a broad sense, moved us consistently in a modern liberal, secular, Dane-like direction.

Who is "us" and what's "the modern era"? If we're talking about Europe, the US and parts of East Asia in the past 60 years then that may be accurate. But are South America, Russia, Africa and the Middle East moving "consistently in a modern liberal, secular, Dane-like direction"? Leaving aside a debate about the objective value of liberal ideas, I don't get the impression that, practically speaking, they're particularly appealing (or even comprehensible) to many people.

An appreciation that liberal societies are only a tiny sliver of the world, haven't been around very long, and might be fragile seems like a useful perspective to keep in mind. Given all the various ideologies/cultures that might, in the next 1,000 years, come to dominate the globe, I don't think the smart money's on the worldwide triumph of Scandanavian welfare statism.

Posted by JB | June 23, 2008 11:23 AM

"it remains the case that cultural norms are passed on more effectively from parents to children than in almost any other way that we've devised. "

Hey, I don't have kids either, Ross, but I know plenty of people who do. And I can say without a shred of doubt in my mind that, for better or worse, cultural norms are passed on more effectively by cable television and peer group pressures than any other method that's ever been devised. Parenting against cultural norms -- unless you're prepared to isolate your kids within an insular community, home-school them, and systematically brainwash them -- is a lost cause if there ever was one.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | June 23, 2008 11:59 AM

Whats happening demographically and culturally in the liberal West is probably as chaff compared to the revolution going on in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Clive Crook in an Atlantic article, October 2002, The Next Christianity The Next Christianity writes:

If we look beyond the liberal West, we see that another Christian revolution, quite different from the one being called for in affluent American suburbs and upscale urban parishes, is already in progress. Worldwide, Christianity is actually moving toward supernaturalism and neo-orthodoxy, and in many ways toward the ancient world view expressed in the New Testament: a vision of Jesus as the embodiment of divine power, who overcomes the evil forces that inflict calamity and sickness upon the human race. In the global South (the areas that we often think of primarily as the Third World) huge and growing Christian populations—currently 480 million in Latin America, 360 million in Africa, and 313 million in Asia, compared with 260 million in North America—now make up what the Catholic scholar Walbert Buhlmann has called the Third Church, a form of Christianity as distinct as Protestantism or Orthodoxy, and one that is likely to become dominant in the faith. The revolution taking place in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is far more sweeping in its implications than any current shifts in North American religion, whether Catholic or Protestant. There is increasing tension between what one might call a liberal Northern Reformation and the surging Southern religious revolution, which one might equate with the Counter-Reformation, the internal Catholic reforms that took place at the same time as the Reformation—although in references to the past and the present the term

Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations argues that in the long run religious developments have the greatest effect on cultural change.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | June 23, 2008 1:23 PM

Ross, I'm pretty sure the "dominated by Danish mores" thing was a sly joke, which I'm afraid you've succeeded in missing entirely in your therefore mostly irrelevant blog post. Wince!

Posted by Ergonomic Slingshot | June 23, 2008 2:00 PM

"the question Kerry and her fellow travelers need to answer is whose mores they’d not want to take over the world, ever, under any circumstances."

I'm sorry, have we started being overtaken by honor killings (Muslim immigrants), widow suicide (Hindu immigrants) and communist revolutionaries (Latino and Slavic immigrants)? Nope. But the fact that we must be scared now over what potential scary ideas future waves of brown people will bring into the US is silly. This is a better method of brainstorming the next crappy Wes Craven picture than a way to think about policy and society.

We aren't going to completely cut off immigration (and if we do, that's the day we hand the next century definitively to the Asian giants). Reacting to the danger that liberal values will be compromised by having more brown people come and spread their scary ideas onto their children is like trying to save a butterfly by crushing it to death. The more intolerant you are to recent immigrants and their children, the less likely they are to actually assimilate in any meaningful way (think of France, Germany and Japan). You give immigrants the option to assimilate - or not - and you will find the vast majority do assimilate. Those that don't out of free will, such as the Pennsylvania Dutch and the older residents in Chinatowns - tend to not hurt anyone outside their neighborhoods, so everyone adopts a live and let live philosophy. Adopting the "you must become French in every way possible and even then you will never really be French because you aren't white" approach leads to disaster.

Posted by Reality Man | June 23, 2008 2:31 PM

Doesn't it matter that you're dealing with a biased set of immigrants? That is, that you're already looking at people who've expressed a certain preference for (at least some of) our cultural norms?

Posted by Sanjay | June 23, 2008 2:58 PM

I think the problem of conservatives with their "fallen birth rates" stuff is that:

1. They assume that the people they don´t want to reproduce in a higher rate than those who "share their values", cannot adopt the basic values of liberal society. They imagine culture of "the other" (the inmigrant) as static and unchangable. I think sociological work with the sons of inmigrants suggest that is not the case.

2. It is the old charade for racism: do not let those darkies reproduce more than the whities.

3. It goes beyond simple concern, and pushes to use the State to favor and create privilidges for those who want to reproduce - of course, those "who share their values", which are of course, the whities.

Posted by Sergio Méndez | June 23, 2008 3:30 PM

I think Ross has a point.

I worry - not about being run over by cultures and beliefs of others - but about the creation over time of separate "...stan"s - kept separate but equal (in theory anyway), not so much by the dominant culture, but by their own preferences. Self-segregation, if you will.

Examples abound: hispanic immigrants unwilling or unable to learn English, Muslim cabdrivers refusing to drive passengers carrying liquor, African immigrants practicing polygamy and fgm.

And so the question, especially regarding the last example, is - in the interest of open-mindedness and liberalism, to what extent should we be willing to turn a blind eye to practices that we find offensive.

How will a tolerant society be changed if it continues to tolerate the intolerant? Will we like being members of such a society?

I, for one, find myself already suffering from multi-culti fatigue - and I am an Asian female!

Posted by NP | June 23, 2008 3:41 PM

I think Ross has a point.

I worry - not about being run over by cultures and beliefs of others - but about the creation over time of separate "...stan"s - kept separate but equal (in theory anyway), not so much by the dominant culture, but by their own preferences. Self-segregation, if you will.

Examples abound: hispanic immigrants unwilling or unable to learn English, Muslim cabdrivers refusing to drive passengers carrying liquor, African immigrants practicing polygamy and fgm.

And so the question, especially regarding the last example, is - in the interest of open-mindedness and liberalism, to what extent should we be willing to turn a blind eye to practices that we find offensive.

How will a tolerant society be changed if it continues to tolerate the intolerant? Will we like being members of such a society?

I, for one, find myself already suffering from multi-culti fatigue - and I am an Asian female!

Posted by NP | June 23, 2008 3:42 PM

"Examples abound: hispanic immigrants unwilling or unable to learn English, Muslim cabdrivers refusing to drive passengers carrying liquor, African immigrants practicing polygamy and fgm."

Oh no, random anecdotes separate from larger trends! Run away!

Posted by Reality Man | June 23, 2008 4:13 PM

Cultural Norms? Demographic Shift? Immigrants Changing the societal fabric of a county?

For a moment I thought I was reading a pamphlet by Burton K. Wheeler and the America First Movement. Apparently we should man the gates because the barbarians --Hoi Barbaroi the dog talkers-- are at the door with their high birthrates and pagan culture.

Fear of strangers (or for those of you who like big words Xenophobia) and respect for the customs of one's ancestors --the Mores Maiorum if you will-- go hand in glove. The fear that humankind and one's native culture is on the downhill slope is a largely irrational fear that has been given a sense of rationality by always being with us. Cicero complained of it in his day, and Calvin and Luther in their respective times.

More recent to our own time David Wilkerson wrote a book deploring the youth culture of the 1960's called Purple Violet Squish, Dean Acheson thought that Kennedy was a piss-ant compared to Harry Truman, and while in our own time conservatives rant and rail about the loss of "family values", while the counter-culture types lament the rise of a status-conscious "meritocracy" where people look out for themselves and refuse to protest the wrongs inherent in society. One is tempted to remember Mike Myer's remark in Austin Powers "There's nothing more pathetic than an aging hipster," be they left right or in the middle.

Should we be worried about demographic shifts in this county and in the places considered seats of "western" society? Possibly. However, the problem has less to do with high birth-rates among some segments of the population and lower birth rates among others than it does with the reasons why birth rates rise and fall.

Speaking in broad general terms there is a pendulum between custom and group/tradition based societies on the one hand, and, on the other hand, broad individualistic societies that value freedom and personal choice. In sort customs and social mores walk a fine line between placing the emphasis on the individual to the denial of the group and placing the emphasis on the group to the denial of the individual.

Historically societies with higher birth rates, while they oftentimes are economically poorer, place a larger emphasis on collective action, the importance of tradition, and service to one’s group/clan/demos or whatever you want to call it. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the size of the group a person wishes to serve and the number of children he or she produces. Those that feel themselves part of a global citizenry have fewer children than those that feel themselves bound by a national constituency. In the same way that those who feel bound by a national constituency have fewer children than those bound by regional, tribal, or familial based groupings. Consequently those with broader outlooks in part because of economic reasons and in part because of the social customs of their particular group are more apt to feel that their values are threatened or endangered.

In short as minority cultures are absorbed into the mainstream birthrates decline. However a symbiotic relationship develops where parts of what was once the majority culture is adopted by the minority culture and vice versa. Once has only to look at the spread, growth, and change of any institution to see that part of the older system of custom is preserved with the newer framework of society. The whole process is not happening any faster today than it was 100 200 or even 500 years ago. Perhaps we are more aware of it because of the spread of information. Perhaps in other more important ways we are not.

In any eventuality we should recognize that customs grow, develop, change, and die off over time. Civic participant society is not the last word in human development because unfortunately despotism has a longer history. Nor should we assume that despotism and un-democratic tendencies are contrary to the eventual development of civil society. Order and liberty are the father and mother of pluralism. Unfortunately they have often contradictory ends, and the maintenance of one is usually anti-ethical to the development of the other.

Posted by Sorn | June 23, 2008 4:14 PM

I'm struck by how in Kerry Howley's seemingly comprehensive coverage of "fertility alarmism," he or she never seems to mention the largest single public example of alarm over fertility and outmarriage: among Jews, both in Israel and in America. It doesn't seem terribly brave for him or her to ignore the Jewish example.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 23, 2008 7:11 PM

JB,

I would agree with you that liberal values certainly don't appear to be the "natural" norm to which cultures across the world tend, and I doubt that they will prevail far into the future. (I for one won't miss liberal society when it vanishes). However your criticism of "Scandinavian welfare statism" is puzzling. Leaving aside what you or I might _prefer_, it seems to be like social provision and an economically interventionist state are precisely the aspects of the Scandinavian model that are likely to have broad cross cultural appeal- particularly in the developing world, and particularly if the world enters another economic crisis. The people who are having the most children in, say, Latin America are not the Westernized, urban middle class who likes the free market- they are the rural poor who tend to respond to socialist rhetoric. Morales and Chavez know which demographic groups constitute their power base, and that is why they have both been encouraging higher birth rates among Bolivian and Venezuelan women. Russia appears to be similar- I suspect that some form of neo-socialist economics will prove more durable in Russia than the Scandinavian thinking about political or social freedoms.

It seems to me like something like the separation of church and state, or tolerance of homosexuality and abortion, or liberal democracy may not survive the next few centuries, but the idea that the state is responsible for providing a decent life for its citizens most probably will.

Posted by Hector | June 23, 2008 11:38 PM

ROSS: "the Pax Romana was very good at assimilating barbarian tribes until, well, it wasn't"

Are you so sure? I would say that the Germanic tribes of Europe entered into the Middle Ages pretty thoroughly Romanized in critically important ways, and the Empire survived to the East for quite some time.

SANJAY: "Doesn't it matter that you're dealing with a biased set of immigrants? That is, that you're already looking at people who've expressed a certain preference for (at least some of) our cultural norms?"

Excellent point.

NP: "I worry - not about being run over by cultures and beliefs of others - but about the creation over time of separate "...stan"s - kept separate but equal (in theory anyway), not so much by the dominant culture, but by their own preferences. Self-segregation, if you will."

Increasing rates of intermarriage pretty convincingly put that one to bed. As a person in my early 30s living in Southern California, I think I know as many or more interracial white/Latino or white/Asian married couples as I do same-race couples in my age group, and their kids are all being raised in a basically American secular tradition with the same sorts of light bicultural gloss we've seen in generations past. In my grandparent's day, the cultural differences between Catholics and Protestants, Irish and Italians, etc. were a very real, very potent daily cultural issue, but now most white people I know have elements of all of them in their ancestry and it's more a matter of curiosity than anything.

Posted by Brendan Moran | June 24, 2008 2:15 AM

it seems to be like social provision and an economically interventionist state are precisely the aspects of the Scandinavian model that are likely to have broad cross cultural appeal- particularly in the developing world, and particularly if the world enters another economic crisis.

I'd just draw a distinction between the general principle that a government should provide services and economic security to its people, and the specific attributes of the Scandanavian welfare states. There have been many attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to help the poor in various Third World countries by launching revolutions or implementing social and political reforms. But those are very different projects than the Northern European-style bureaucratic welfare states.

I don't think it's possible to reproduce a system that works in one country in other countries that have entirely different economies, cultures, etc. For example, you have to already have a strong economy and a reasonably effective government bureaucracy to support the kind of benefits people expect in Scandanavia. You can't just start handing out money and services; the money and the distribution mechanisms have to be in place already. There are a lot of countries where people would probably benefit from and desire a modern European-style (or even American-style) welfare state; how many of them would be able to actually implement that kind of system is another question.

Then there are the trade-offs involved that might turn people off to Scandanavian-style welfare statism. Magically turning everyone in the world into a citizen of a modern industrial (or post-industrial) society might alleviate a lot of the world's suffering. On the other hand, a transition from a traditional society where people rely on extended families to a modern society where people rely on the government imposes a lot of costs, and would probably have to take place over several generations or else turn into a disaster. And, as you implied, a lot of people might have strong moral or religious objections to welfare statism--they may be dubious that you can get the material benefits without being brought low by what they see as the decadence, moral drift, etc., of modern European and American culture.

All that said, I think the question of whether cultures can change quickly or easily is separate from the question of whether individual immigrants from one culture (or their children) can adapt to the culture of their adopted countries. I'm a lot more optimistic about that.

Posted by JB | June 24, 2008 3:40 AM

JB,

Yes, I see your point. It's also worth noting that, say, the Swedish welfare state builds on particular Swedish cultural traditions. It works (pretty well) at least in part because Swedish culture includes a strong work ethic and a strong notion of collective solidarity and responsibility. In a culture where these things were not present to such a degree, you might have problems like a lot of people tryinng to be free riders.

Bolivia is an interesting case of a country where the current government (and the broad popular movement that it speaks for) are trying to combine left-wing economics with, what would seem to us highly "reactionary" social norms (pro corporal punishment, pro-natalist, and so forth). Traditional Quechua and Aymara culture had a form of primitive communism on which the Morales regime is building, and they solved the free-rider problem by literally whipping lazy youths. You probably can't have one (in that cultural context) without the other, which is why the Morales government made the restoration of corporal punishment, and other aspects of "traditional Indian courts" a big aspect of their political platform in the 2006 election. So clearly some aspects of the Scandinavian economic model are attractive to Bolivians- but they are smart enough to recognize that in the cultural context of Bolivia, the liberal political and cultural norms of Scandinavia would not go together well with the economic revolution that they are trying to create.

Extended families, which you mention, look attractive from the point of view of someone regretting the weakening of the nuclear family in the West, but they have a great deal of problems of their own. A great deal. Further, they are already being weakened all throughout the Third World, and for the most part (as Marx predicted) by capitalism not by socialism.

Posted by Hector | June 24, 2008 8:44 AM

Extended families, which you mention, look attractive from the point of view of someone regretting the weakening of the nuclear family in the West, but they have a great deal of problems of their own. A great deal. Further, they are already being weakened all throughout the Third World, and for the most part (as Marx predicted) by capitalism not by socialism.

Yeah, extended families, clans, tribes, etc., do have a lot of problems of their own. A lot of those problems (e.g., reliance on personal relationships and the extreme suspicion of "outsiders" that often results) are exacerbated when traditional societies run up against modern cultures and institutions. I don't think it's impossible that the weakening of those kinship bonds will lead, in time, to the spread of modern economies and welfare states. But I do think it's a mistake to look at cultural progress as a single track that will eventually have the whole world looking like the United States and Western Europe. The consequences of cultural, institutional and political change seem very hard (if not impossible) to predict, and I think they're at least as likely to be disastrous as they are to be successful.

Posted by JB | June 24, 2008 5:38 PM