Should There Be a Human Future?
This, according to Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, is the fundamental question. Is it good that there are human beings? They do not answer the question, but rather identify it as the basic question that underlies young adults’ ambivalence about having children.
Theirs is a fascinating book, What Are Children For? They know the ambivalence many young women today have about children, yet they also think that most reasons for postponing children are, in the end, answerable and thus insufficient. There are career or personal objections, the idea that having children would be basically the same as jumping off a cliff, to-wit, the end of one’s personal life and career. To which Berg and Wiseman reply that it is only in recent times thatchildren have been understood as a choice. Previously, people (generally married people) just had children and figured out how to live with it. One of the authors asked her mother how she, as a professional woman, decided to have children. The answer was basically a question: “Decide?” Children were just something married people had, or tried to have, and they then got about working children into their ongoing lives. They had children, from our perspective, rather early. Our current cultural pattern of delaying marriage and children is what they call the “Slow Love” movement.
Berg and Wiseman note the many cultural encouragements to think of having children as basically the end of life as you have known it: children are expensive. Children ruin your career. It is hard to find a good partner. At the end they take seriously also the environmental objection to having children, that each child (especially a child born in the western world) adds a burden to the environment that is already failing. They face seriously the arguments that human beings are bad forthe earth, and that the earth might be better off if there were fewer of us. Nonetheless, for reasons I won’t go into, they think this is, in the end, not a well-grounded reason for any particular woman to avoid having children.
In the end, the one reason that is worth our serious consideration is whether it is good that human beings exist. This is bigger than just the environmental question. It is whether there is reason for the human race to continue propagating: Do we think it is good for there to be people? It is bigger than economic questions, questions like “How will Social Security survive if there aren’t younger people paying into it?” As they put it, “above all, for all its cruelty, for all the suffering it entails, is human life still worth the trouble?”
I was in the pews last Sunday as an out-of-town visitor. This church had three baptisms at that service. Afterwards the priest remarked that, in addition, two babies had been born in their church in the previous week. He also noted that (as far as he could tell!) there were quite a few other babies going to be born in the coming fall season. It is good, he said, to be in a church community where babies are continuing to come to birth, to be baptized, to join the congregation of the faithful. As it happened, I got to visit an old friend who is now the mother of a three-year-old. This child was very much at home in that particular congregation of the faithful!
Are we glad that human beings exist? Do we think that it is good for human beings to go on existing? If the answer is yes, then Berg and Wiseman (and Austin) would say, cut through all the other questions, and do what you can to welcome new children into this world, whether they be yours or others’.
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Out & About. Sunday, Oct. 4, I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas.
The fall theology lecture is set for the evening of Sun. Oct. 4 in the Great Hall of St. Matthew’s at 5 pm. My topic is: "What's Salvation Have to Do with It? Reflections after the Camino." From the beginning of my pilgrimage earlier this year (when I walked the Camino Frances for the third time), I noticed the importance of salvation to the Camino. Salvation in Christ is of course an originating theme: the camino exists only because Saint James (Santiago) brought the Good News to Spain, and was buried there. But salvation is also a present-moment question for a number of pilgrims. The lecture will be followed by responses from Dean Tom Smith and the Rev. Kate Smith, who also have walked the Camino.
Good Books & Good Talk: Also at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, the second session of our fall discussion of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov will be Sun. Oct. 11, at 5pm, to discuss Part Two (Books 4, 5, and 6). Newcomers are welcome, and many people testify that the book is awesome: so take courage and be not dismayed at its length!
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On the Web: Berg and Wiseman have a great conversation with an editor of Comment, a journal of “public theology for the common good.” The piece is called “Why Have Children? Thinking with patience, rigour, and generosity about a contentious topic.” You can find it here: https://comment.org/why-have-children/