Leon de Winter, a Dutch writer who spends some of his time at Pajamas Media, was on the Dennis Prager Show yesterday. Asked about the declining European population, he said the problem was that Europe had thrown out cultural traditions during the 60s and 70s. Tradition gives you a sense of time as something larger than here and now. You exist as a link in a cultural chain, an important part in continuing the existance of France or Germany or Italy as France, Germany or Italy. When they gave in to cultural equivalence, they lost all sense of time and place. They could no longer define what it meant to be French and it therefore made no difference whether or not there were any more French children.
I'm struggling through The Cube and the Cathedral right now which deals with the same subject. It's not very well written and so I'm not sure if it's saying the same thing, but in it's foundational chapters it goes into great detail about the decision to exclude Christianity from the EU Constitution. The preface to that document describes the cultural bases of Europe. The constitution's authors deliberately omitted Christianity from that description in a spasm of multiculturalism. Their constitution is a codification of their sense of the world. They've deliberately severed connections with their past.
Leon de Winter's explanation has got to be the best one I've heard yet about why Europeans aren't having children. Only when you live completely in the here and now are your decisions motivated solely by personal economics and pleasure. Sacrificing for the future of your nation or culture becomes a stupid waste of energy. Why give up your vacations in Spain so you can raise the next generation of Frenchmen when being French has no meaning at all?
There's a religious aspect to this as well. When you lose connection with God, you lose a connection with time, too. There is no sense of eternity, only life in the here and now. Again, that leads to a very different set of calculations when making decisions about life.
4 comments:
I see chosen childlessness in much simpler terms: pure selfishness. Children are like a form of savings for the future. People that shirk that responsibility are as feckless as grasshoppers.
Of course there are reasonable exceptions, but most of the living examples I see around me do not fall into those categories.
Now let me go put on my fire resistant haz mat suit.
Considering that people choosing to be childless ought to be self-limiting (they certainly aren't going to be passing on a desire to remain childless to their children), I don't really see where this is a problem.
And the selfishness argument can go both ways, depending on your starting beliefs: if you believe that there are too many people for the earth to support, and therefore that having your own children will doom somebody else's children, then *not* having children becomes the moral choice. I'm not saying that this belief is correct, just that if somebody holds it, then they are morally obligated not to have children.
Finally, I personally think that if somebody is having children *just* so that there will be more French, or Americans, or Catholics, or Mormons, or whatever, then they are having children for The Wrong Reason. My wife and I have two children because we wanted to have two children, and we love them. That, I think, should be enough.
I've heard the selfishness argument many times, but I'm not sure I agree with it. de Winter is suggesting that it's a cost-benefits decision made from an empty core - that this (money and possessions and your body) is all there is. Even that is a broad statement which papers over a lot of soul-searching decisions made by a lot of people.
I still think he's got the best generalizable answer yet. When I look at my own life, I've not been about the business of just raising children, but of raising Catholic children. Their faith and the faith of their grandchildren and so on is intensely important to me as it was to my parents and their parents and so on. de Winter's argument speaks to me.
Hey! I didn't get flamed for my provocative comment!
Tim, if you think about it, your reason for having two children is just as instrumental as mine is.
I think it's pretty easy to make the case that if you expect to live out your putative old age in relative comfort, that depends on the reproduction of your population as a whole. If you refuse to contribute to that in order to enjoy a higher standard of living now, then I think the grasshopper analogy applies pretty well.
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