MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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At the end of yet another world population conference pitting religion against realpolitik, KEVIN CAREY looks at some of the underlying issues.
Copulation is the engine of the future; and it has, for commentators of the human condition, the peculiar advantage of bringing out the biological best but moral worst in those who practice it. Perhaps surprisingly, given its centrality, the ethics of the subject entered Western consciousness relatively late.
The Greeks and Romans hardly alluded to the subject in their philosophical writings and in spite of the febrile scratchings of Christian fundamentalists, the two Testaments have hardly anything to say on the matter. Not unusually, the rot set in with St. Augustine who, reflecting in old age on a spectacularly, ecstatically libidinous youth,
concluded, in the course of filing his insurance policy with the Almighty, that good was in inverse proportion to pleasure.
It was a morally short but a chronologically lengthy step to forbidding the clergy from marriage which, in turn, led to the inevitable dog in the manger attitude; if I can't have sex you can't enjoy it.
The introduction in the early 16th Century of syphilis into Europe from the Americas further tightened the moral screw - to coin a phrase - and led to a much greater animus against coitus by Martin Luther, an ardent admirer of Augustine, and John Calvin,
an ardent prohibitor of everything.
This background must be the sensible starting point for any discussion of the recent wranglings at the World Population Conference. Christianity, unlike Islam, abandoned the pleasure principle but not the competitive imperative which it shares with it; both believe, from Georgia to Georgia, that society should be organised to optimise the sexual dominance of men but should regulate otherwise unfettered competitive behaviour.
Population issues in rich countries are, therefore, largely a matter of deciding to
what extent our natural urge for self preservation through procreation should be regulated as a result of our moral view of the role of women and our assessment of the impact of the separation by contraceptive technology of sex from conception.
Everything that has happened since in the relationship between education, economics and demographics has proved the supposedly out of touch Papacy to have been correct: extended breast feeding rather than using corporate America tinned milk increases the space between births; the education of girls and young women decreases the number of births per fertile woman; the richer per capita a sector of the population the higher
its infertility; the greater the wealth redistribution to the poorest, the faster the decrease in the birth-rate.
The fundamentalist Protestants, however, will have none of this, shunning foreign aid and taxation as redistributive engines and simultaneously denouncing Darwin, including that part of his theory which explains why poor people are more fertile
than rich people. This is yet another instance, against the popular perception, of liberal coherence, backing birth control as a short-term measure in parallel with a longer-term strategy of redistribution. With the exception of Roman Catholics, religious fundamentalists have nothing worth saying on the subject.
It is almost impossible to frame a credible set of questions to deal with the balance of
advantage which this has brought about, taking into account such diverse factors as freedom from random parenthood, the ability to plan families, the associated increase of comfort and safety and the decrease of a sense of risk. How far is the alleged emasculation of men and the increased perception of women as sex objects the result of the technology? Although the questions may be difficult to formulate, let alone answer, it is reasonable to assert that we have handled the transformation with a
remarkable degree of individual and social competence.
There is, too, more than a little hypocrisy in Western male-dominated societies castigating Islamic and other countries for misogynistic practices. It is also somewhat odd for the Catholic Church, which takes such an enlightened view of redistribution, to take such a rigid line on contraception; one would have thought that a Church which has recognised its errors over Galileo, Newton and Darwin might have been
able to come to terms with Marie Stopes. Humanae Vitae, as we have noted, made some telling points against contraception but its fundamental assertion, that no sexual act should exclude the possibility of procreation, reduces human beings to the random behaviour of dandelions.
This Lutheran fatalism runs directly counter to the Church's moral teaching on every other subject where free will is to be exercised in the light of conscience. Consistency isn't everything - and the Catholic Church has already found that authoritarianism and conscience are incompatible but whereas for rich countries these are vital moral
matters, where there is poverty they are also a matter of too many lives and too many deaths.
Kevin Carey can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".On this occasion, given its huge coverage elsewhere, it is simply necessary for the sake of coherence for me to record the general contempt in which women are held by Christian and Islamic practice (as opposed to scripture) and that this contempt is in direct proportion to what we might loosely term "Fundamentalism". The Christian "Religious Right", however, is not a homogeneous mass. Protestants and Roman Catholics may be united in their opposition to birth control but when Pope Paul VI issued his Papal Encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in the eye of the mid '60s sexual storm generated by the availability of the contraceptive pill, one of his basic arguments for opposing it, particularly in developing countries, was that this solution to the population explosion was fundamentally immoral. Its primary purpose was, in the Pope's view, to free rich Western countries from their obligation to redistribute income and wealth between and within countries.
Another basic reason why Pope Paul VI was opposed to the use of artificial contraception was that he quite rightly saw that there would be serious social consequences once sex and procreation were separated.
The problem at the global level is that the moral questions in affluent societies concerning self indulgence and self control bear no relationship to the sexual dialogue in poor countries where the driving force is survival.
KEVIN CAREY is a writer, broadcaster and social entrepreneur. His interests range from the relationship between information technology and social exclusion and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. He is the director of a UK charity, HumanITy, which combines rigorous social analysis with experimental field projects on learning IT skills through content creation. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard before a spell at the BBC, followed by 15 years in Third World Development, Carey offers a unique perspective on world affairs. He is a politcal theorist, moral philosopher, classical music critic and published poet.
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