JD Vance's natalism, biological evolution, and the purpose of human life

Vance says "grandparents are important", Left says "patriarchy!", I write about it

One of the big strengths of Christianity, I think, is its belief that the universe was created good, but is fallen. This means, one, that we can respect the natural order and draw lessons from it, and you see this in scripture and in Church history all the time, “does not even nature teach you…”. We should have a general bias toward the way things naturally work. On the other hand, since we believe the natural order is fallen, we don’t have to adopt a “whatever is, is right” sort of attitude. I have sometimes said that if you wanted to learn any single lesson from nature, it might be “the strong have power over the weak”, perhaps the big lesson of the whole animal kingdom. Of course that is the way it often is in human affairs as well, but Christians would be quite loathe to adopt any sort of “might makes right” morality.

Things get more complicated for the atheist. You might say it’s just impossible for atheists to talk about purpose at all. They live in a pointless, meaningless universe, and for them, “whatever is, is right”, or at least, “whatever is, is, so whatever”. On the other hand, maybe you’ve heard the quip that “teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public”, a quotation attributed to J.B.S. Haldane though I’ve seen many variations on it now. The temptation for anyone to talk about purpose, is huge. We can’t really avoid it. Take any biology class and, “the purpose of this adaptation is this” and “the purpose of this organ is this” or even “the purpose of evolution is this”. What do you mean all this talk about purpose? Whatever nature is doing it is doing, I thought.

But if you go that way, a very common statement would be along the lines of “the purpose of any organism is to have as many babies as possible, and/or generally spread its genetic material far and wide and so win the evolutionary competition”.

J.D. Vance’s Natalism

Now J.D. Vance… is not saying exactly that, and wouldn’t say exactly that, since he is a Christian, and I’ve yet to read any Christian catechism that says that the purpose of human life is to spread your genetic material. Again, we respect the natural order, but are not constrained to end our analysis there. But he does preach a message about the importance of families, which at least intersects with the “have lots of children” message… and the secular Left, which you might think (in an alternate universe) would be saying “amen, preach the gospel of evolution good sir!”, is instead provoking high panic at his “neo-patriarchy” that just wants to make women into baby-carriers. That isn’t what he is saying, actually, but that is… sort of what evolution might say, and I thought y’all were the “in this house, we believe in science” people?

This whole post was motivated by this, from yesterday.

Well, again, per Watts’ reaction, J.D. Vance did not say that. You know what might say exactly that, though? The Gospel of Evolution, which I’m guessing Shannon Watts is a passionate believer in. Vance is just a pro-family guy. And (and by golly on alternate-Earth this could be the Leftist position too), he thinks we should stop judging the value of an activity by how much it contributes to the market economy (ergo suspending your market job to help care for children is an honorable thing).

I’ll finish here by just quoting the audio, so you can see how terrible it is… mainly, Vance was just agreeing that it’s good for grandchildren to have grandparents. This was put out there as a terrible comment, but I think everyone reading this is going to agree with it, which is a comment on where we are today.

Vance: And you can sort of see the effect it has on him to be around them. Like they spoil him. There's sort of all the classic stuff that grandparents do to grandchildren, but it makes him a much better human being to have exposure to his grandparents. And the evidence on this, by the way, is like super clear.

Host: That's the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female. And in theory, did your in-laws and particularly your mother-in-law show up in some huge way?

Vance: She lived with us for a year. So, you know…

Host: There's this weird unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.

Vance: It's in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against sort of the hyper neoliberal approach to work and family. My wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship, still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval. And her mom just took a sabbatical. She's a biology professor in California. Just took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year… And it was just one of these things where it's like, this is what you do.

Host: So a biology professor, PhD… Drops what they're doing… To immediately tend to the needs of a new mother with her infant.

Vance: Painfully economically inefficient.

Host: Can I just propose…?

Vance: Why didn't she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it, right? Because that is the thing that the hyper liberalized economics wants you to do… The economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately going to unwind and collapse upon itself. It has to.

I think it's the abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market oriented way of thinking about what's good and what's desirable. If people are paying for it and it contributes to GDP and it makes the economic consumption numbers rise, then it's good. And if it doesn't, it's bad. I think that entire sort of, to me, that's sort of the root of our political problem.

THE END

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