timeimmortal

Count Roland offers some reading material for the good Reader.

…account of Humanae Vitae, its dissent and the historical period of 1968.

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/catholic_stories/cs0308.htm

Give it a read!

John C. Wright has the details, linking to an article at First Things by Mary Eberstadt that looks at modern evidence, gleaned from sociological and sociobiological research and studies concerning the course and state of society, which demonstrates that the predictions of Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical have all come true.

Unfortunately.

Let’s begin by meditating upon what might be called the first of the secular ironies now evident: Humanae Vitae’s specific predictions about what the world would look like if artificial contraception became widespread. The encyclical warned of four resulting trends: a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.

…

Consider, as Wilcox does, the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof. In a well-known 1996 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Akerlof explained in the language of modern economics why the sexual revolution — contrary to common prediction, especially prediction by those in and out of the Church who wanted the teaching on birth control changed — had led to an increase in both illegitimacy and abortion. In another work published in the Economic Journal ten years ago, he traced the empirical connections between the decrease in marriage and married fatherhood for men — both clear consequences of the contraceptive revolution — and the simultaneous increase in behaviors to which single men appear more prone: substance abuse, incarceration, and arrests, to name just three.

Along the way, Akerlof found a strong connection between the diminishment of marriage on the one hand and the rise in poverty and social pathology on the other. He explained his findings in nontechnical terms in Slate magazine: “Although doubt will always remain about what causes a change in social custom, the technology-shock theory does fit the facts. The new reproductive technology was adopted quickly, and on a massive scale. Marital and fertility patterns changed with similar drama, at about the same time.”

To these examples of secular social science confirming what Catholic thinkers had predicted, one might add many more demonstrating the negative effects on children and society. The groundbreaking work that Daniel Patrick Moynihan did in 1965, on the black family, is an example — along with the critical research of psychologist Judith Wallerstein over several decades on the impact of divorce on children; Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s well-known work on the outcomes of single parenthood for children; Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur’s seminal book, Growing Up with a Single Parent; and David Blankenhorn’s Fatherless America, another lengthy summarization of the bad empirical news about family breakup.

…

In sum, although a few apologists such as Stephanie Coontz still insist otherwise, just about everyone else in possession of the evidence acknowledges that the sexual revolution has weakened family ties, and that family ties (the presence of a biologically related mother and father in the home) have turned out to be important indicators of child well-being — and more, that the broken home is not just a problem for individuals but also for society. Some scholars, moreover, further link these problems to the contraceptive revolution itself.

Consider the work of maverick sociobiologist Lionel Tiger. Hardly a cat’s-paw of the pope — he describes Religion as “a toxic issue” — Tiger has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of the sexual revolution to today’s unique problems. The Decline of Males, his 1999 book, was particularly controversial among feminists for its argument that female contraceptives had altered the balance between the sexes in disturbing new ways (especially by taking from men any say in whether they could have children).

Equally eyebrow-raising is his linking of contraception to the breakdown of families, female impoverishment, trouble in the relationship between the sexes, and single motherhood. Tiger has further argued — as Humanae Vitae did not explicitly, though other works of Catholic theology have — for a causal link between contraception and abortion, stating outright that “with effective contraception controlled by women, there are still more abortions than ever. . . . Contraception causes abortion.”

Catholics, and the Pope, were poo-pooed from pretty much every quarter for speculating that elevating birth control to the status of a social norm — or even a social expectation — would ultimately cause many more problems than it would solve. The opinion of the Church was considered to be one of ignorance, backwardness, and fear.

Instead, it has been shown to have been nigh-prophetic…which, unfortunately, means that society has indeed suffered a great detriment that it could potentially have spared itself.

Count Roland is, I think, seeking to supplant Ed Darrell as my most frequent correspondent. He writes in yet again with some supplemental thoughts on this article, which hinted at how our society’s loss of innocence in recent decades more or less parallels the reduction in the number of children our society is producing.

This has ben noticed, at least by ‘fringe’ ‘conservative’ not crazy intellectuals for at least 25 years with Neil Postman’s “The Disappearance of Childhood” and his and Diana West’s analyses (hers in “The Death of the Grownup“) pin the decline as definitively started in the 50’s and prepared for since about the time of Vatican I (Not to mention various papal writings which indicated part of this due to their topics - Humanae Vitae and adolescent sexuality for example).

It is a return to the situation of the middle ages and earlier without the large hanging anvil of the necessity of several children to survive oneself and have at least a couple children survive to adulthood. Our one designer baby and our pet or doll surrogates fill the rest of the psychological space, or so some are deluded to believe, and that one child will survive sans accidents and we have the government to support us in old age, not children, so one is enough.

But I agree with both of them that the ‘adultification’ you speak of is of a severely adolescent nature since adult and child are contrast classes with adolescence only recently bridging the gap in our thoughts. But, if one of the contrast classes diminishes, so does the other. Without children there are no adults and vice versa. Thus all that remains is the adolescent group which attempts to marry the rights of adulthood with the responsibilities of childhood. A system stable that does not create.

Mark Steyn and many others have spoken about the concept of permanent adolescence being the prevailing trend in our post-Christian society, and I do think there’s more than just a ring of truth to the observation. Adolescence, as I recall it, was a struggle to exert one’s rights as a fledgling adult while still retaining all the child-like ways of acting and living that made life “fun.” And it is no stretch at all to say that many people these days have not grown up past that point.

A glance at the birth control-addled, sex-obsessed meta-adults that roam about Edmonton’s downtown area on any given evening (especially on weekends) tells the tale more than any number of essays could: ours is a world in which “fun” (read: gratification) is the ultimate object for many people, and for whom “responsibility” is nothing more than an extremely hard-to-spell (more than) four-letter word. We have become a society of people obsessed with the things we have a “right” to do, and yet we care not a whit for any consideration that intrudes on, or gets in the way of, our fun. We are, in other word, a society of people stuck in a permanent adolescence.

And it will likely be up to Christians to pick up the pieces once that unstable social framework devolves into pagan chaos.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Seems pretty straightforward — the DVD apparently chronicles diminishing birthrates world-wide, although its principal focus seems to be on Europe, where no nation has a birthrate at (or even near) “replacement level” — 2.1 live births per woman. This replacement rate is the absolute minimum necessary birthrate for “zero population growth” to be a reality.

Most European nations have birthrates approaching half of replacement rate. There is no parallel in history for the kind of demographic implosion that is now imminent in places like Russia and Spain. Not that any of this comes as a surprise, of course. A replacement level birthrate basically requires a Catholic moral approach to marriage and childbearing, and every European nation (even once-strong Catholic bastions like Italy and Spain) have largely given themselves over to secularism, progressivism, and moral relativism — abortion and casual sex are now almost the rule, rather than the much-derided exception.

Funnily, that transformation in the soul of the nation has turned out to be destructive for the nation. Who ever could have seen that coming?

Besides the Church, that is?

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Mark Shea)

Update: Welcome, Steynians!