Who Has The Most Babies, Wins: A System Analysis Of America’s Angst

Facebook traffic and news items tell us a lot of Americans of
northern European extraction are anxious and even fearful about the prospect
that White Americans will soon be a minority. A subset seems further offended
by court decisions bestowing civil rights on gay people. Another subset is
inflamed over removals of the Confederate battle flag from public spaces. Then
there are environmental regulations that seem to snatch job opportunities from
an already embattled middle class – and other kinds of federal regulation that
have set some Whites on anti-government, secessionist, or survivalist paths.

Only hermits have missed the outcomes: A terrible mass shooting in
a Charleston church, police brutality disproportionately directed at Blacks, a
general increase in hate speech, massive rallies in Ferguson and Baltimore, and
suspicious fires at predominantly Black churches.

Whatever’s going on here presents ample human and moral (as well
as geopolitical) challenges. For those of us who see all things connected and love
to think of the world as a giant causal loop network, it also invites system
analysis.

The transition of whites to minority status has already occurred
in several US regions. In the country at large, all the people “causing” the
demographic transition have already been born, so the outcome is inevitable. Simply,
these persons of color and of non-Protestant persuasion have parents and
grandparents who bore more babies than their White Protestant or Evangelical
neighbors.

White folks, you can take your partners to the bedroom and get
busy right now, and it will still be too late. Your anti-abortion legislation –
especially combined with your disinterest in caring for others’ unwanted
children carried to term – is a candle in the wind compared to the Catholic
church’s centuries of opposition to contraception, and the general dominance of
that church in Latin America, the region that has given us so many immigrants.

We can sympathize with Whites’ apprehensions; they know how
minorities tend to be treated, in our country and in others, and they’re not
looking forward to being on the receiving end. Rightly or wrongly, they feel
that certain American cultures dating from the 1776 Revolution and before are
suddenly under attack.

Nonetheless, the sensible thing to do is to get used to being in
the minority. No doubt there will be those who refuse to do the sensible thing,
and I can only hope that whatever wacky, radical action they take won’t result
in much injury to others.[1]

Why have pro-birth sentiment and a selective view of the Sixth
Commandment (it being okay, apparently, to kill in war) become a part of
religious doctrines? It is, and always has been, about survival of the tribe. A
tribe holds its own against neighboring groups by having enough population to
maintain a bigger warrior class and a bigger scholar/artist/artisan class, to
exert military and cultural influence respectively.

It’s logical that religious injunctions against homosexuality had
similar roots, because homosexual activity produces no babies. Those
injunctions, however, predated the modern understanding that (i) gay aunts and
uncles help care for siblings’ children, thus protecting the gene pool[2]; (ii) women’s gay male
friends provide valuable social glue; (iii) the artistic contributions of our
gay neighbors are undeniable; and (iv) we have too many people already; more
will not advance survivability. Number i has supposedly been shown
scientifically, number ii is slightly facetious (though I believe it), and
number iv is the central culprit in environmental problems that climate
scientists, for example, quietly acknowledge but feel discouraged from mentioning
publicly.

It’s then interesting that Pope Francis, much the reformer in
other areas, has not (yet?) renounced the no-contraception doctrine. Our
notional causal-loop diagram shows the irony in this: The doctrine worsens environmental
problems, but has set the Pope at the leadership of a huge number of people,
rendering his screed on climate change influential.

We can’t stop, though, with just a shrug at the irony. We have to
appreciate the complexity of the feedback loops, acknowledging that a negative
local effect can, in the context of a larger set of loops, help create a
positive outcome. We must acknowledge that indirect effects are important.

An example of the latter: A Philadelphia professor has noted that technology
embraced by the service industries has virtually eliminated summer jobs for
teens. We now push buttons at automated car washes, and on automated menus
order food at restaurants and fast-food joints. These are the kinds of
simpleminded service activities that used to be conducted by inexpensive and
less-trained humans, i.e., teenagers (if you consider teens to be humans). They
are the jobs that introduced teens to a work ethic, and taught them how
businesses work. Lacking this knowledge leaves teens less employable in their
future years, and lacking legitimate jobs this summer pushes teens into street entrepreneurship
of an illegal nature, and thence to prison.[3] This loop is strongest
among urban teens, and guess what’s the predominant racial make-up of urban
teens? The end result: perpetuating racial inequality.

Nor can we facilely dismiss the Pope as a hypocrite. Just as
paranoids can have real enemies, hypocrites can be right. Bill Cosby’s sordid
past doesn’t invalidate his moral lectures of recent years, nor does the
Pontiff’s stand on contraception mean his remarks on climate change are
incorrect.

When I share the above argument with virulently religious anti-gay
folks (not neglecting to point out that they themselves observe other biblical
injunctions mainly in the breach), they retreat to the simple stance that
homosexuality disgusts them. (As one social media commentator wryly noted, that
disgust presumably does not extend to lesbian porn.) This, though, is an
argument well removed from the political realm, and irrelevant to policy
formation. If they (as I) have never engaged in homosex because the idea is
somewhere between uninteresting and distasteful, it becomes no different from
the fact that I have, for the same reasons, never eaten stinky durian fruit,
but have felt no call to condemn those who do.

Well, it’s a little different, because people can have sex
discreetly, but no one can eat durian without alerting the whole neighborhood.

Many of my homophobic
interlocutors are anti-black and anti-immigrant, with similar virulence. I remind them that Southern Whites
brought or bought the unwilling African immigrants whose descendants today’s
radical Whites wish would disappear. I remind them that complaining about the
crime rate among Blacks without comparing it to the rate among Whites is
fallacious. Judging from their responses, I guess I disgust them too.

In this connection, the words of Prof. Steven Conn,[4] about the difference
between heritage and history, are apposite:

History… is our attempt to reconstruct and understand the events, lives,
and experiences of those who came before us - the good, the bad, and the ugly.
History follows rules of evidence and interpretation. Most important, it is
debated and revised constantly as new evidence and new ways of interpreting the
evidence come to light.
History reveal[s] the complexities and contradictions of the human
experience and force us to grapple with nuance and paradox. It is
intellectually challenging and can often be deeply unsettling.
Heritage, by contrast, is a mythologized version of the past, stripped
of all the unpleasant parts. Heritage remains largely impervious to historical
evidence and relies instead on a past-as-we-wish-it-were version of events.

Separating the
two is a challenge liberals have not met. Substitute Japanese or Turkish for
Southern White: We may not forget or forgive former atrocities committed under
their banners, but we do not begrudge the annual cherry blossom viewing or Turkish
festival. We love the yearly Polish fest and the Chinese dragon boat festival,
cheerfully ignoring history at least for a day. We might allow ourselves to
enjoy bluegrass music, grits, and Dr. Pepper in the same way.

In this
connection, the recent removal of Confederate flags from public spaces made
minority groups feel better (in the short term only, I fear) because a symbol
of racism has been officially shunned. However, the indiscriminate rhetoric
used to achieve it – conflating heritage with history – was a clumsy
attack on Southern pride, thus portending a worsening, rather than an
amelioration, of racism. An easy target, the flag diverted our attention from
the real problems of race relations and gun violence. It invites easy rebuttals,
like, okay, the Confederate flag flew over a slave society, and the Stars and
Stripes flew over “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,”
Abu-Ghraib and Guantanamo, so why take down one and not the other (aside from
the fact that the South lost the Civil War and hasn’t got over it)? The symbol
is down; the racism persists. The Confederate flag takedown was badly
conceived.

There’s one
important difference between Southern heritage and Japanese-American or
Italian-American heritage: Southern Whites are the only American subpopulation
that talks about secession from the United States. Even as they rant against
federal regulation and Supreme Court decisions. As it seems impossible to
simultaneously secede from the Union and be the boss of it, what are they
hoping to accomplish? Is this a threat, a
give-us-what-we-want-or-we-will-secede? Bad move on their part. It assumes
Americans are as gung ho to preserve the Union as we were 150 years ago, that
we feel the same pull of manifest destiny. No plan has been put forth stating
what territory they’d want, who would be eligible for citizenship, or the
status of non-citizens. So, no credibility. The rest of us hate it when we are made to feel less American than everyone
else, and here is a group voluntarily positioning themselves as less American
than everyone else. Go figure.

There’s a
sociological reason for the ambivalence about seceding. Conservatives have
always stood for “local control.” This is one of their gripes about federal government,
and has given rise to continual states’ rights movements. However, these folks
cannot come to agreement about how local is local, an issue that has now come to the boil in Texas.
Facebook postings show some of a libertarian bent have already taken this to
the limit predicted by theory, retreating to communities of about 150 people.

You can
remember the names, faces, families, and life details of at most about 156
people. (So say those who study such things. They speculate that this is the
historical reason for the size of a military company.
If you don’t believe it, review how many of your 500 Facebook friends you
really remember and feel familiar with.) There’s a spread, with the number
sometimes reaching 300, and within this range was the “natural” size for a
village or a nomadic group in times past.

In times
present, though, there’s a problem with local control being this local,
especially when it’s combined with a desire to isolate the group from others.
That is, it is just not economically viable. To make a living these days means
to engage with the global marketplace. Today a group cannot hope to remain
isolated, even if it wishes merely to die slowly with its heritage intact. A
more economically vital group will simply buy the businesses and land belonging
to the utopian group, and that’ll be the end of it.

Indians
complain that the fastest-growing demographic in India is Muslims, who harm the
society by valuing secular education less than the Hindus do. Similar criticism
of Israel’s fecund Chasidic Jews is heard from many quarters. Catholics have
been bearing this cross, so to speak, for centuries now. For better or worse,
who has the most babies, wins.

This doesn’t
prevent friendship and dialog across demographic lines. Like Dylann Roof, many
people who condemn Blacks in general have Black friends (who, obviously, are
showing great forebearance). Multiple-perspective system analysis resolves this
curious fact: People seem oddly able to partition their personal, political,
and organizational attitudes, insulating each from the others, with minimal
cognitive dissonance.

Further
upstairs in this column I used the phrase “embattled middle class.”  Actually,[5]

A mentor of mine, who was a techno-entrepreneur
billionaire, distinguished educator, recipient of the US National Medal of
Technology, and son of a “White Russian” family who had fled the Bolshevik
revolution, was surprised to die without having seen a revolution in the US or
Mexico. He did not fear one, and certainly did not want one; he simply expected
one. To stave off the inevitable rage of the dispossessed, he dedicated himself
to growing a middle class on the Mexican side of the US border, to innovative
manufacturing in the US, and to education and entrepreneurship for American
youth.

How much more surprised and dismayed he would be, 15
years after we dined in Ciudad Juarez with that city's mayor, to see (i) Juarez
become the most dangerous city in the world, with its nascent middle class jobs
lost to the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut, and the rule of drug gangs
substituting for revolution; (ii) the rapid dwindling of America's middle
class, which he had mistakenly taken for granted; (iii) the clownish
“revolution” of the Tea Party, who think government is their enemy, the
advertising machine having successfully deflected their attention from the
corporate depredations that are the true cause of their economic distress; and
(iv) the Supreme Court decision reinforcing the personhood of corporations. He
would have been the first to draw a parallel between the court's decision and
the final Italian corporatist excesses prior to the hanging of Mussolini. He
would have been the first to say “I told you so” as revolution simmered in
Egypt and Libya in 2011.

Income
inequality continues to grow dangerously in the US, the upper fraction of 1%
having interests and lifestyles startlingly foreign to the rest of us. They
show continuity, however, with the capital-versus-labor history of the country,
capitalists substituting equipment for labor and hiring employees only reluctantly
and with preference for Whites. Few people doubt that the plutocrats buy
elections and attempt to influence the media, trying to keep their persons and
their wealth safely isolated from the masses, and, as my mentor would say,
failing to show their appreciation for the opportunities America has afforded
them.

Given that, is
what’s happening in America revolution or race war? Are the Ferguson and
Baltimore demonstrations racial or economic? Hard to say, in that the segment
of the beat-up middle class most beaten up is Black. Certainly though, it is in
the interests of plutocrats to let others paint the situation as Black vs.
White, and to, um, whitewash the rogue police who are shooting Blacks in
horrendous disproportion. This sets us against each other, rather than united
against the few who are preying on all of us. One suspects the plutocrats’
covert, or at least tacit, support for white supremacy youth groups,
ensuring that racial strife will continue through the generations. They may not
have instigated the situation, but they’re smart enough to take no steps to
stop it.

Race, history,
heritage, income inequality, tolerance, religion, environment and fertility are
all connected. It is poor policy to whack at one of the moles without anticipating
which mole will pop up in reply. (This metaphor from system science implies no disrespect to moles
or anyone else.) We must act humanely, and act with our best knowledge of the systemic
connections.