David Brooks on the sterilization of half of humanity, hail David Brooks

Today he writes:

Every day, I check a blog called Marginal Revolution, which is famous
for its erudite authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, and its
intelligent contributors [TC: that's you!]. Last week, one of those contributors asked a
question that is fantastical but thought-provoking: What would happen
if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth
that happened to be facing the sun?

His Burkean answer is here and I very much agree with it.  Excerpt:

Without posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high
ambitions. Politics becomes insignificant. Even words like justice lose
meaning because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the
here and now.

And:

If millions of immigrants were brought over, they would populate the
buildings but not perpetuate the culture. They wouldn’t be like current
immigrants because they wouldn’t be joining a common project, but
displacing it. There would be no sense of peoplehood, none of the
untaught affections of those who are part of an organic social unit
that shares the same destiny.

Here is the original inspiring MR post.