By John M. Grondelski
The Institute for Family Studies has just published “The Demographic Dead End: Without Action, the U.S. Population Will Soon Decline,” the latest of numerous studies pointing to the imminent cataclysm facing Western societies due to prolonged periods of fertility below replacement level. The IFS study is no isolated case: more and more individuals and institutions are addressing demographic decline and the aging of societies.
Despite the laments, however, few politicians or other public figures are doing anything about it, and the proposed solutions are polarized: the left mostly proposes importing “replacement” populations from the Third World, especially to perform heavy labor, while the right recommends supporting the market’s “invisible hand” with pronatalist state subsidies. Both positions ignore a fundamental tenet of Pope St. John Paul II’s thought: culture precedes politics and economics. We will not solve our demographic shortage without first healing our culture.
And that means resolutely confronting the “ethics of choice.” Western liberal societies consecrate free “choice” as a paramount value. The United States, in particular, has long defended a laissez-faire type of choice. But that adoption of free choice was tempered in our societies by other cultural factors.
American society, when still shaped by traditional Protestantism (with a minority of Catholic immigrants), moderated unrestricted choice through moral norms. Even in Western societies that consciously sought to uproot their religious roots—for example, la France laïque—cultural Christian remnants partially kept the worst impulses of unfettered free choice in check, not least through the palpable experience of what happens—as in the Reign of Terror—when such restraints are ignored.
Those societies have practically disappeared. Secularization has dissipated cultural Christianity, even to a great extent in the United States. Numerous Christian denominations have abandoned normative goods: it suffices to observe the fractures, mainly around sexuality, in America’s historic Protestant churches. There are also those in Catholicism who would like to follow these new neo-Protestant Pied Pipers. And, in the face of accusations that opposing such infidelities amounts to importing a “pelvic theology” into a Christianity that has “advanced” toward “more serious” matters, pelvic issues are hardly ancillary, given that no one would exist without them.
Traditional Christianity recognized that people have choices. However, there are good choices and bad choices, whose value does not depend on the intention of the one making them, but on the very nature of what is chosen.
That was before the predominance of what Joseph Ratzinger called “the dictatorship of relativism,” a phenomenon fostered by modern philosophy’s resistance to recognizing normative good and evil, seconded by a weakened “Christianity” that cloaks its cowardice behind the seemingly virtuous phrase: “Who am I to judge?”
Alongside that relativization of the good came the exaltation of freedom. Atheist existentialism, especially after Sartre and Camus, altered the very function of freedom. Free choice, and not pre-existing reality, became constitutive of the good. Instead of making the good (or evil) my own, freedom made morally amorphous acts “good.” We obtained “my good” and “your good,” but not “the good.” (The former Harvard president, dismissed after her disastrous congressional testimony on antisemitism, meekly complained of not having been able to express “my good.”)
That redefinition of choice has had profound consequences for children. Instead of being a gift from God received as a good, children became “choices.” The entire ethics of abortion in the United States (and in much of the Western world) was founded on the ethics of “a woman’s choice.” If she decided to continue her baby’s life, that was good; but if she decided to end it, that was also good.
Pro-life stickers summed up a profound truth: “It’s a child, not a choice.” The ontological dignity of every child (the fundamental truth of having been created in the image and likeness of God) and their right to life are neither established nor annulled by a maternal “choice.” She may choose to ignore or deny that truth, but such a decision does not alter either the reality or the underlying moral question.
Which brings us back to the starting point of our initial thesis: there are choices we should (and should not) make. There are options within our freedom’s reach for which, nevertheless, that freedom should not be used.
In affirming this, we must be aware that the very formulation that “there are choices we should (or should not) make” is, in certain respects, incomprehensible to contemporary man. For those educated under an ethics of choice in which the very act of choosing constitutes the determining factor of morality, the notion that a decision might be subject to a “should” (or, even more so, to a “should not”) makes no sense whatsoever.
Such reasoning is never applied outside the sexual sphere. Few would argue that, because one can choose to lie or steal, the mere decision exhausts the moral judgment. The proscription of “should” is a peculiar exception reserved to the realm of sexuality.
This distorted conception of freedom of choice installed in our culture constitutes the primary cause of our demographic winter. Blame may be attributed to all sorts of “socioeconomic factors,” which certainly exist; but, at bottom, the common-sense premise, indisputable to past generations, that one must have children has been lost.
The certainty that, upon reaching a certain maturity, most men and women must unite in marriage and subsequently conceive offspring. Begetting children does not constitute merely a biological process, much less a “curse” to be suppressed through pharmacology or technology. Having children is not simply a social requirement or a predetermined role. It constitutes the natural development through which the person matures and transcends their individuality in favor of responsibility toward others. That is what Erik Erikson pointed to when he postulated his psychosocial development stage called “generativity.”
Restoring our culture requires uprooting the false notion of “choice”—especially in the procreative order—according to which the intrinsic dignity of a new life can be subordinated to individual whim. As long as our cultural horizon is not once again imbued with solid social principles that reaffirm that having a child is a noble, natural fact proper to human vocation, importing labor or increasing maternity allowances will provide only marginal relief, without correcting the root of the problem.
About the author
John M. Grondelski John Grondelski (Ph.D. from Fordham University) was Associate Dean of the School of Theology at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. All opinions expressed in this article are his sole responsibility.