What I am going to talk about this week is my excitement as we anticipate the wedding of our eldest granddaughter, Sophia, at the beginning of June. But this seems to require that I tell you what I am not going to talk about , and not talk about at considerable length: namely, the theory of the so-called “Great Replacement,” according to which sinister forces with sinister motives are consciously attempting to alter the broad ethnic composition of the populations of the United States and various European nations. This is a topic that has been much in the news of late, especially in the wake of a murderous rampage perpetrated by a homicidal maniac in Buffalo NY ten days ago. I do not use the word “maniac” idly. The killer is a mentally disturbed teenager whose mind, if we can judge by on-line evidence scattered about the Internet, is crammed with hate-filled thoughts and crackpot and randomly gathered ideas, one of which is a racially inflected version of the Great Replacement theory. In the prevailing political climate, this horrible event was immediately discussed mainly in political terms; but it is now already the day before yesterday’s news. Yesterday’s news, the slaughter of small children in a Texas elementary school, Sandy Hook redux, has effaced it. While ideas can have consequences, I myself doubt that rational theory inspires such wickedness; I am more reluctant than some others to use the word reason to denote the rationalizations of infirm minds. The mystery of iniquity remains for me mysterious—though mainly iniquitous.
Brett Stephens, an official conservative paladin of “viewpoint diversity” at the New York Times and in my view among the writers with one of the higher ratios of matter to manner on their editorial pages, had what I thought was an excellent essay about “replacement”. While in no way dignifying the febrile “theory” of political kooks, he does point out that “replacement,” sometimes violent and sanguinary, sometimes as imperceptible as the mutation of old growth forests, has been the recurrent pattern of American history. He begins with the removal and frequent liquidation of the populations native to this continent in the seventeenth-century by newly arriving Europeans. He could have begun earlier, with the inter-tribal Indian genocides, some of them documented to a degree, which ante-dated the arrival of the principal European colonists from Spain and England. And what was the history of these newcomers themselves? Iberia had for centuries been an arena of struggle, of conquest and reconquest, a clash of races and religions. In the British Isles invading Germanic tribes overwhelmed and literally marginalized a mixed Celtic population. After a great deal of further national and international strife the resulting “Englishmen” themselves were conquered by the Normans, who, as their name might tell you, were originally Scandinavian Vikings, though long enough settled in the last place they had conquered to pick up its French language.
And really so it goes, but not (one hopes) in infinite regress. Because the recurrent pattern of American history is in fact the pattern of history, period, just as replacement is the recurrent pattern of human biology. So far as I can tell from what science can teach me my only actual purpose on earth is to cooperate in my own replacement. This is one of the reasons I prefer to look to philosophy and religious tradition for the guidance needed to interpret the teachings of science. Being replaced, after all, is a continuous process, and mostly not all that scary. You remember chairing that committee back in the ‘nineties. Somebody moves into your old office. You used to be able to play tennis with your son. Now he plays with his son. Are these evident “replacements”? Heterosexual mating, though now talked about by some of our advanced thinkers as a mere option among a bewildering array of others, has had a pretty long and successful run in perpetuating the human species, and as I write this, I see little prospect of its abandoning that role any time soon. Yet in individual life a point arrives when the sexual imperative, which supervises the replacement business, loses its imperium. Then, if not before, the realization of one’s own impending and definitive “replacement” can become quite concrete. Though I admit the subject’s gloomy potential, I am just now finding it rather joyful and energizing as I contemplate the young couple about to be wed and poetically designated as our replacements. At least I was until our national pathology once again rendered joyful thought difficult. Weddings are by nature family events. The marital partners, formed by family, come together to form a new family. Our granddaughter Sophia—beautiful, brainy, ethically rock solid, and in her late twenties already strikingly successful in a useful and productive profession—is as fit for the world’s fight as anyone my imagination could conjure up. Her radiance is her own, but the sparkle of her loving and talented parents is there as well. I naturally know her better than as yet I know her fiancĂ© Raymond, our future grandson-in-law (if there is such a thing), but I can see that he is a gentle genius with a great and loving heart and an impulse to leave our world a better place than he found it . I shall be most content to be “replaced” by the likes of Sophia and Raymond.
But surely the whole notion of “replacement,” as often used, is a retrograde idea that is not well suited to a forward-looking world. It seems to me to derive from modes of thinking no longer very helpful: categories of hereditary royal dynasty and aristocratic lineage. In the dynastic mode of thought too much attention is focused on a glorious past and too little on a possible future. Perhaps a better term would be the “great continuation” or even the “great advance”. It is obvious from current world events that old and violent modes of population exchange have not disappeared from the earth, but they are no longer the norm as they were in the times of the Barbarian Migrations or of Genghis Khan.
I have to hope that my posterity is marked with some benign traces of my influence, but their world should be what they are able to make of it, not what I have saddled them with. Perhaps the metaphor here should be that of flow, as in the great Isaac Watts hymn, “Time, like an ever-flowing stream…” Heraclitus tells us one can never wade in the same stream twice. Strong families are like fine works of art as described by Eliot in his wonderful essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” A great artist can reflect the work of a predecessor with respect and admiration even while setting off in an entirely new direction. Like Heraclitus’s stream: the same, but not the same.
