After the Pope said it was selfish to raise pets rather than kids, I turned on the radio to hear the public’s verdict. Apart from some anti-Catholic bigotry, which I enjoyed because it’s very chic to feel like a victim, a consensus emerged that it is in fact selfish to have kids rather than pets – because it increases your carbon footprint.
This might be the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. The idea that giving up your youth, looks and money to raise children is selfish – whereas doing what I did, running away from responsibility, is virtuous – was belied by a visit over Christmas from my friend Alex, his wife and two beautiful children. It felt like taking tea with a hurricane. While we did our best to prevent the girl, a ball of ferocious energy, from demolishing the front room, Alex’s son attempted to swallow his daddy’s car keys. After they’d left, Bertie, my dog, emerged from behind the sofa and said: “If you ever get one of those, I’m moving out.”
“I’m afraid on this subject,” said a radio caller, “I defer to David Attenborough, not the Pope.” And there’s the rub. Catholics are pro having kids; St David of the BBC says the world is overpopulated, an End is Nigh narrative that is largely false.
Parts of the developing world are crowded, but growth is generally slowing. The West has hit its peak and is in decline. In Germany they are razing empty flats to make way for parks; in Italy, maternity wards are shut. Much of the world is hurtling towards under-population, which means a shrinking base of young workers supporting an expanding base of pensioners with high medical bills. You can’t defeat the facts of life, which necessitate having babies even if just to keep humanity in balance. Several countries are now paying people to breed.
Britain’s solution, however, truly is selfish: we’re importing workers from poorer countries, sucking up the world’s talent like a bloated vampire. But this must end. China is predicted to fall from 1.4 billion now to around 730 million by the end of the century. Bertie will not look after me when I’m old: without a pool of migrant workers, who will?
The richest 1 per cent of the world has been responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution than the poorest half of the world, despite being crammed with all those bodies that so disgust the eco-prophets. Logic suggests we need a little material sacrifice by the West and a fairer distribution of resources (it doesn’t have to mean socialism – freer trade will help). So why many environmentalists leap to the conclusion that we need fewer people, especially when they are already going the way of the red squirrel, is bizarre. They favour fecundity in other species, so the Earth is brimming with tarantulas and great whites, yet almost sterility in their own.
It betrays psychology. The Pope wants to save the planet for people. The overpopulation crowd often wants to save it from people. Reading Laudato Si’, Francis’s encyclical on ecology, which helped convert me to environmentalism, one is struck by its language of fertility and abundance. Catholics are instructed to celebrate life and be open to it, because our bodies were designed to create it. Nature evinces a purpose and a plan.
It is the careless disposability of the consumer society, the wasting of divine gifts, that really angers the pontiff, especially when it comes to human beings – to the sad notion that we can “eliminate children because they are not what their parents wanted”. The future that haunts Francis is homes “full of things” but empty of people.
By obsessing about the individual’s carbon footprint, the militant environmentalist becomes what they profess to hate: a materialist. They reduce all of life to a zero-sum economic calculation that shifts the emphasis away from dynamic selflessness (active charity) and towards doing as little as possible: no driving, no encountering, just sitting at home, if you can afford to, warming yourself by a heat pump.
There are many reasons why people do not have kids that are none of our darn business. But those who boast they are saving the world by avoiding reproduction are only extracting themselves from the dirty business of living, eschewing the pain and worry of raising a family. By happy coincidence it also leaves them with a lot more money to go on eco-tours of Guatemala. Some of them arrive by private jet.
A tribute to another outspoken Catholic
Speaking of outspoken Catholics, I’d like to pay tribute to Fr James Doherty, AKA “Big Jim”, a Glasgow priest who died last week, of whom the stories are legendary. On one occasion, a man appeared at the presbytery with a notepad that read: “I am homeless, deaf and dumb. Please help.” The cleric had seen this trick before.
“Can you lip read?” asked Big Jim. The man nodded. “Well, I’ve nae money, honey, but if you’ll come into the house, I’ll make you a sandwich.” Thank you, the man nodded.
As they walked past the huge gong the house keeper would use to summon the clergy to lunch, Jim whacked it so hard it rang like Big Ben. “Good God!” cried the homeless man, “What the Hell did you do that for?!”
“Oh, it’s a double miracle!” said Big Jim. “Ye can hear and ye can speak!!”
“Aye well,” replied the man, rubbing his ears, “you’ve got to work bloody hard to get any money out of people nowadays.”
Jim made the man his sandwich.
