Interesting piece here from Spengler in Asia Times Online.
Spengler is commenting on a 1985 paper on ethics and the marketplace wiritten by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
Spengler’s recurrent theme is “nihilism“:
The Europeans are paying for their own nihilism. Having invented the perfect post-Christian society with cradle-to-grave services, they have not found anyone willing to live in it, except for the immigrants who well may inherit it from the disappearing locals.
In this latest piece he applauds Ratzinger for identifying the moral emptiness of the market-driven, consumerist, low-birthrate society.
Underlying the crisis is the Western world’s repudiation of life, through a hedonism that puts consumption or “self-realization” ahead of child-rearing … Economics simply never has had to confront a situation in which the next generation simply failed to turn up.
It’s always tempting to respond to Papal scoldings about our reluctance to breed in the manner of a U.S. politician of forty years or so ago: “You no play-a da game, you no make-a da rules.” And the then-Cardinal does not seem (on Spengler’s account) to take up the issues that underlie the underlying issues Spengler claims he identified, e.g.
- Should the human race return to pre-modern levels of reproduction? Given the life-preserving powers of modern medicine, that would get you a generation-on-generation multiplier of four or five. So for each person alive today, there would be 256 or 625 alive four generations later, bringing the U.S. population to something in the range 80 to 200 billion. Is this a desirable goal?
- Given that the cratering of European birthrates has been most sensational in the most traditionally Catholic countries (Spain, Italy, Ireland), possibly the Catholic church may not be the most effective instrument for restoring demographic vitality.
- As Heather keeps pointing out, the connections between religiosity, social order, and moral behavior are, to put it mildly, not clear. The least religious state of the Union is Oregon, 18 percent of whose inhabitants declare themselves as having no religious affiliation. For murder (2007, per 100,000), births out of wedlock (1995, percentage), and persons living with AIDS (2007, per 100,000), Oregon’s stats are 1.9—28.9—76. The most religious state is Mississippi, with only four percent having no religious affiliation. Mississippi’s stats are 7.1—45.3—109. If it’s responsible, ethical behavior you want, religion may not help.
- How do you re-religionize a de-religioned populace? Ratzinger’s paper is a generation in the past, so obviously learned articles by eminent church intellectuals don’t help much. My guess would be that the one thing that does help is seriously hard times. “In good times you don’t burn incense; in bad times you hug Buddha’s foot,” say the Chinese, who know a
thing or two about bad times. Getting people to believe the things that you believe, when they currently don’t, is quite a trick. In our age, when the top three IQ quartiles, at least, have gotten used to legal and scientific standards of evidentiary demonstration, it isn’t easy. And if only the bottom quartile gets persuaded and starts pumping out kids, you get Idiocracy.
These are the dilemmas of our time. Certainly they are nontrivial. That Ratzinger’s paper, on Spengler’s acoount, offers any help, or even gives a full analysis, is not obvious to me.
Our economic order, like our political order, is built on the notion that if you get the structures right, self-interest will keep your system afloat, and the lower human instincts will be restrained, or at least will never go so unchecked as to sink the system. That’s a democratic ideal. It was appealing to the 18th century in part because of the horrors of the preceding age, when moral authoritarianism ruled.
Ratzinger’s position is — and must be, since he is a functionary in an authoritarian church — that a return to moral authoritarianism is what we need. (How these clerics hate the Enlightenment!) He also believes that his brand of moral authoritarianism, based on the “truths” of Christianity, is just the ticket. Those truths are a hard sell in a skeptical age, though; and Ratzinger does not, probably cannot, confront the fact that the 18th-century arrangements, the ones that got us where we are, were better, in every way, than the moral-authoritarian order that came before.
Those arrangements are throwing up problems now; but a return to the earlier, failed synthesis is neither desirable nor (probably) possible. We need to work on the structures, that’s all. Ratzinger’s notion that we should get everyone going to Mass and making babies, isn’t going to happen; and if it did, it would in very short order create problems far greater than those we now face.
Spengler is right, though, that the current economic system, as it applies in advanced countries, is based on some demographic assumptions that no longer apply. This needs figuring out.
