Another True Solution to Cultural Apathy

To pick up the depressing thread from yesterday, here’s this–“Amy Blackstone, a gender sociologist at the University of Maine who specializes in childfree research, hopes that her study helps question the assumption that little boys and girls will grow up to become parents.” The article summarizes her research which comprised a series of interviews with people who have chosen not to have children. Here are  some of the most heartbreaking quotes.

‘‘I think I’ve always been deciding that I don’t really want kids.’’ — Annie
“I was sort of observing families around me and wondering if I wanted to be a part of that dynamic in our world. … A lot of people with children didn’t look happy. … The majority were definitely stressed out. There was something there that was not inviting me to participate in this lifestyle process.” — Kate
“I’m really just concerned about our world. … Diving more deeply in the social issues, I really think that the world is against the child right now. At this time in our social structure right now it’s not going to be a good thing to have children. We can’t bring them up healthfully.” — Kate
‘‘People who have decided not to have kids arguably have been more thoughtful than those who decided to have kids. It’s deliberate, it’s respectful, ethical, and it’s a real honest, good, fair, and, for many people, right decision.’’ — Bob
And finally, the author of the study herself is quoted at the conclusion of the piece.
“People don’t really know what to do with us,” Blackstone said. “Sometimes we get left out of, for example, events at friends’ houses if there are children involved, because people assume that we don’t want to be involved. It can be a kind of lonely existence.”

There’s nothing in me that can provide any sarcasm to alleviate the great sorrow I feel in reading this piece. This isn’t the light, the funny, the ridiculous so worthy of derision. These few statements, by ordinary people, leading ordinary lives illumine the great loneliness that must be the logical endpoint of cultural apathy. A culture deciding that it’s not worth going on, it’s not worth doing the hard work of investing in another generation, either for environmental reasons, or because of disgust over the difficulty of human relationships, isn’t going to strengthen its hands against any kind of outside enemy, or do the work of caring for those within. To say something obvious, not having children, not being interested in going out to defend the weak against peril and evil is to have given up.

Babies are a sign of hope, of trust that humankind is worth it, no matter the trouble and woe.

One of the reasons that I have loved having children, even though they are difficult and occasionally break my heart, is because I am taken outside of myself. The child, the infant, the other pulls you away, however momentarily, from the crippling clutch-hold of selfishness and self doubt. I lug my ego around and it is a great burden to me. I need to be unencumbered of myself, pulled out of myself. Caring for another person, any person, is the first step in being relieved of the hindrance of the self. It’s the first step of self giving love, which is the kind of love that God self identifies with. It is the opposite of the love that drives these people who have decided not to have children–for reasons of the self, because their choice is as good as any. When you are always choosing yourself, and never letting go, never dying, however imperceptibly, for another, then you cannot know true love. The inevitable result is indeed loneliness, and increasing apathy.

What was it that Sarah said, when she learned that she, in her old age, would have a child? What was her question? “After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?” The child is a pleasure, the singlar kind of pleasure that lets a person experience, first hand, the salvation of the world–to hold, as that young woman did so long ago, the One who forsook himself to come be with us. True pleasure is never found in doubling down, in narrowing everything to the measure of your own choice. True pleasure is putting yourself into the hands of the One who risked it all, because you were worth it.