"Our childless dystopia"

A magnificent essay by James Bowman, about PD James' novel The Children of Men, a dystopia in which all mankind has lost through disease the ability to have children:

P. D. James’s 1993 novel, The Children of Men, was an insightful if not entirely satisfactory look at the world we know through the lens of futuristic-apocalyptic fiction. Her version of the eschaton is a sudden inability of human beings to reproduce themselves, beginning in 1995. This is the year called Omega, and the last people to be born, now in their twenties as the novel begins in 2021, are known as Omegas. Such near-future fiction is always an iffy thing, and all the more so if the predicted hour of apocalypse is near enough to be noticed when it doesn’t happen. 

And yet, in a way, James’s future has happened. As we now know, 1995 did not bring the demographic doom of the human race. And yet The Children of Men was much more accurate than most eschatological fiction, for it presents an exaggerated version of a problem — namely the gradual depopulation of the developed world through below-replacement fertility rates — that in the years since its publication has begun to seem rather scarily unexaggerated...

The central insight of the novel is that all ideas of social improvement and reform, all justice, hope, and love depend on the existence of future generations for whose sake all the good that we do is ultimately done. “It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society,” writes P. D. James, “but not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words ‘justice,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘society,’ ‘struggle,’ ‘evil,’ would be unheard echoes on an empty air.” Thus, it is not just coincidental that the parents of the first child born in twenty-six years are leading the only movement for reform. Without the ability to bear children, James tells us, we also lose the ability to care about anything but our own comfort and safety — which is what the Warden of England promises in return for his absolute and unquestioned power. There is much to be said for this view of things, but I wonder if it may work the other way around. When we start to care only for our own comfort and safety, do we lose if not the ability then the need or desire to reproduce?

Please read the whole thing. The nightmare James envisions fortunately is not upon us, despite the most consequential event in modern times-- the invention of the Pill. Contraception will be the demise of secular Western civilization, in some generations-- a century or two. It's effect on genuine Christian civilization and on Islamic and pagan civilizations remains to be seen. But we have seen in secular Europe a plunge in birth rates-- far below replacement-- that has never been witnessed in history, except for pestilence, famine or war.

The consequences of our pervasive self-gelding will reach to every cranny of life. It will ravage our social systems, our arts and sciences, our philosophy, our religion, and will transform even the banalities of our everyday lives. We do not yet understand what we have done. People like James and Bowman are beginning to explore it. It is a deep darkness.

Mankind's survival literally depends on the survival of worldviews that reject contraception. Those worldviews may be genuinely Christian or Islamic, or they might take a totalitarian form-- a world in which perpetuation of the human race is dictated by commissars and Five-Year Plans. We know only that it will not be secular hedonism. Whether anti-contraceptive worldviews will survive, and what form the triumphant worldviews will take, we cannot yet know.

Perhaps we would rather not know.