Causes of Demographic Implosion in Late Twentieth Century

By Dr. Thomas Molnar

In this brief contribution I try to bring together the symptoms of decay among which the crisis of the family is the most profound but is not the only one. In every society the family is the center-piece of social stability and change, the Archimedean lever from which the social structure can be manipulated for good and evil. Family life is in a natural fusion with society, religion, myth, law, and culture; the family is also the basic mechanism which directs economic life and productivity, social mobility, and division into social classes; it is also the paradigm for the life of culture.

Thus whoever undertakes the radical transformation of society must first elaborate a family-model opening on a new society. He must control the family: its structure, its partnership, its mobility or stationary character, the role of parents and children. The means of restructuring the family arena central surveillance, demographic manipulation, the sexual education of the child—and of course the economic pressure. In regard to the latter, modern industrial society claims the power of a wider structuralization than the previous models which were paternalistic, feudal, Christian, or bourgeois. Industrial society which regulates production and distribution cannot afford incalculability on any level; in its conception the family must be planned, the number of members regulated, their ambitions guided and channeled.

The manipulative project for the family, thus for the demographic calculus, influences and determines the entire society. The social engineer targets the family in order to create a new society down to its precise elements—a kind of definitive version of family coexistence, just as industrial society as such is also regarded as the final stage of mankind’s evolution. The end of history.

Technological society thus prescribes the family structure more severely and more "mathematically" than any previous model where spontaneity and self-determination (by the family unit) played a much greater role, and where the family was guided by such factors as religion, morality, tradition, inheritance, respect of natural ties. Today (late 20th century), when mechanical thinking prevails and the collective idea1 narrows the family options, the social engineering aims at the strict regulation of the family for fear that too much freedom and spontaneity may jeopardize society’s precise functioning. Hence there appear such mechanisms on the family level as central control, legal abortion, bio-genetic experimentation, sperm banks, contractual relationship between parents and children, and school curriculum whose task is to condition children according to industrial society’s requirements, nothing beyond.

While the professed goal is, among others, the "well-being of the family," it is obvious that the control increasingly gained over society diminishes the significance and uniqueness of the family model. Mankind’s alleged objective points today to the mechanical ideal to which the family too is sacrificed in the name of an ultimate in history. The consequence is the near suppression of natural forces and aspirations, so that parents are considered from the industrial-economic point of view: reduction of the number of children below the desirable threshold, vast program of abortion, preference at conception for this or that sex, sperm banks for the production of "geniuses," sex education encouraging a hedonistic and controlled view which helps bypass the birth of spontaneously conceived children. The result is that in the name of a "scientifically directed" mankind, social engineering eliminates such considerations from family life as religious belief, moral imperative, parental function based on love, the pleasure of having a large family. Instead, the family is reduced to molecular components and contractual partnership and is increasingly controlled by what is called "science."

Totalitarian societies are of course easiest to manipulate, but they may be said to present the naked model of what other industrial societies also adopt, even if with more hesitancy and attention to other considerations, called humanistic or humanitarian. In China under Mao, supervisors of the countryside separated husbands from wives, lodged them in different barracks, and organized collective visits on certain days, so as to produce the necessary number of children. Later, even after Mao’s death, laws regulated the number of children allowed to be born; the rest were aborted and utilized in the substitution of organs or for industrial purposes. One consequence was that families murdered their newly born girls, granting life to boys only. Such a procedure is well-known in Western democracies, too; it is a common feature of modern industrial society and its ideology of absolute, mechanical supervision over family, the birth of children, the social model, and sexualization. The little regard in which the family is held can be ascertained when legislation admits marriages between members of the some sex; it shows the antifamily orientation, the purely mechanical role of the parents in "founding" the family, the adoption of children by homosexual couples, and the dissolution of natural relationships. Social engineers and ideologues in the Soviet Union used to complain that all the "enlightened" efforts to modernize the family failed on the grandmother’s resistance who taught the children that there is a God, moral commandment, good and evil, and other superstitions weakening the child’s Soviet loyalty. Some critics attribute the Soviet collapse to the "subversive" influence of the older generation, active within the family while the parents were working throughout the day.

All this is manifest in Western society, too, since control over technological society implies mechanization of the human response, its predictability, its schematization. In purporting as naturalness, freedom, and spontaneity, but also the attraction of transcendence, are removed from individual and community existence, two factors play roles in the demographic situation. One is that so-called socioeconomic imperatives tend to limit the number of children, as it is obvious when we compare the industrially developed with the so-called "archaic" societies. In the latter there is an abundance of births, in spite of Western propaganda of cutting fertility by birth control, operations, the distribution of paltry presents in the Gandhi family’s India, for example, to those who undergo sterilization. In developed societies where the fear of scarcity and the drive to consume have become traumatic, birth control has become a social must, and social ethics regards the large family as antisocial, even obscene.

Comparisons may be heard by fashionable young women that the fetus is like a cancerous growth in the female body. And another common argument is the feminist claim that women’s rights include free and legal, even collectively funded, abortion. In short, the new social value is directed, 1ike in the case of the Gnostics two millennia ago—then again of the A1bigentian heretics in the south of France—against human reproduction. The consequence is the tragic multiplication of aging populations in Western countries—a sure sign of decadence and of the drive to migrate by other races: first in the quest for jobs, then for territorial conquest.

We thus face a deconstructed family, in which not only industrial/social excesses, but also the secularization of life and its values, play a decisive role. Conceiving offspring is one of the basic realities of life, and even though human beings possess in this respect a much wider choice than animals and plants, they too are ordered according to this basic requirement of existence. If the process is interrupted at certain historical moments, the reason is either an aggressive annihilation by conquest, massacre and genocide, or the collapse of the will to live in a given community. Such a collapse seems to have spread over much of Western mankind, and the modern ideology finds innumerable pretexts to justify it, even to regard it as a positive sign. We have tried above to list the responsible factors; let us summarize them, although we must admit that what we call the "demographic implosion" is finally as inexplicable a phenomenon as are the other great movements of history.

Statistics, questionnaires, and other sociological studies do not present an adequate answer; they are stamped by the modern mentality which shuns natural impulses, on the one hand, and depreciate spiritual loyalties, on the other. In the middle there is the tendency to regard society as struggling for absolute autonomy, self-regulation, individual rights. From such expectations there follows the modern imperative to work out short-lived satisfactions, notably in the domain of instant happiness: sex exclusively for pleasure, the taking of drugs, excesses of ideological militancy, limitless pornography, the grotesqueries of a certain cultural achievement. When the Bulgarian "artist" Cristo wraps the great monuments of the past (bridges, palaces) in nylon, with authorization by the local government, we find just another manifestation of a pure arbitrariness which is present also in the refusal to have children, legalized marriage, and laws protecting the family. We call all these phenomena by the name modernity, emancipation, human rights, pursuit of happiness, when in fact we face the collapse of culture—and beyond a vast unknown.

It is questionable whether the adequate response can be given by an entire community. The latter’s social essence is inertia; it is commended primarily by routine. This was true in the age of faith and its social moves and gestures, it was true in the age of the bourgeoisie, and it is true again under the impact of technology and the expectations attached to it. Waiting for collectivities and for governments to act in defiance of the prevailing cultural habits is to underestimate the latter’s opportunism and commitment to the world-democratic structure in the state of gradual emergence. Let’s bear in mind also that reforms today are as hard to perform as ever; responsibilities are passed on to heavy social mechanisms hiding behind the false efficacy of slogans. We believe in a gigantic machine.

The response to the tragedy of demographic implosion can only be given by the relentless insistence and counter-practice of families and small groups. One may, of course, engage in lobbying at international organizations and congresses, and some recent events have demonstrated the benefits of such a mobilization. Yet these moves are underlined and justified by the decision of families which try to reverse the trend, welcome children, demand the protection and support of the state. There may, of course, come a moment in which Western nations, following the Chinese example, curtail birth and officially impose penalties in proportion of "extra" children. While this may or may not happen, families ought to act according to their deepest desire with regard to giving birth to offspring. The resulting population growth would oblige governments to build more housing, multiply work opportunities, provide for large families. The crisis of the family is perhaps the only form of social decay which may be arrested and eventually reversed by sheer human will.

Dr. Thomas Molnar, philosopher, is a visiting professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Budapest and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University. He is the author of over thirty books in French and English on a variety of subjects including religion, politics, and education. Among them are Politics and the State: A Catholic View and The Church, Pilgrim of Centuries.