A Civilization's Will to Live

Samuel Huntington once posited that the world was headed for an inevitable "clash of civilizations", wherein cultural and religious identities will fuel the next batch of conflicts following the Cold War.

But, according to the anonymous "Spengler" of Asia Times, the divide of civilizations lie elsewhere.

The decisive divide in today's world lies between nations that have a future, and nations that don't. Contrary to the prevailing pragmatism, which demands that we take every society on its own terms, an objective criterion has emerged that does not easily fade in the wash, namely the desire to live.

The desire to live is most expressed in a civilization's willingness to propagate and provide a "next generation". Spengler goes on to state that the purpose of civilization is "existential".

I submit that the basis for our great civilizations (Judeo-Christian, Chinese, Hindu, Orthodox Christian, Islamic) is existential. Civilizations exist because men wish to overcome death, and have learned that ties of blood and language are not sufficient to win immortality. They require a form of social organization that rises above mere ethnicity, that promises a higher form of continuity between the dead and the yet unborn.

This desire for immortality is in concordance with a belief in immortality itself. One cannot believe in something one cannot perceive.

Unlike animals, human beings require more than progeny: they require progeny who remember them. To overcome mortality we create culture, a dialogue among generations that links the dead with the yet unborn. Even the Neanderthals buried their dead with grave-gifts, a token of belief of life beyond the grave. Whether or not we pray to a personal god or confess a particular religion, the existential question remains the same. Without the hope of immortality we cannot bear mortality. Cultures that have lost the hope of immortality also lose the will to live.

Without this link, without this dialogue between the dead and the unborn, then a civilization has no reason to be. The result?

Ethno-suicide follows on the death of faith in the future. My research supports the conclusions of Philip Longman, George Weigel and others who link the respective declines of belief and birthrates. But what belief is in question? The families of humankind have learned to believe in only two things: a supernatural god, or themselves.

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A great gulf is fixed between the successful supra-ethnic states, and the ethnicities marking time until they die out of ennui and self-loathing. Ethnicity is fading as a credible basis for personal identity or national life, for the nations have learned that they are mortal, and their sentience of mortality is a sorrow too great to bear.

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The type of man we encounter in the dying nations, not only in the remote rivulets of the human current but on the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Sea of Japan, is a stranger to modern social science. He is not Sigmund Freud's man, driven by libido, nor economic man, pursuing utility. He is averse not to life's hardships and dangers, but to life itself, for he rejects life precisely at a moment when hardship and danger have begun to fade. He suffers from the restless heart that St Augustine ascribes to those who are far from God.

No man can live without purpose. Multiply that truth by millions, and you'll see that no nation can survive without purpose. Those who cannot see a future will not make one.

Here is a prime Western example of a person with no hope, and thus a person with no future.

Along with the emancipation of women, sexual liberation has become very much a part of politics around the world. To the conservatives, both these issues challenge ‘family values’.

But what if there were no families? What if we say no to reproduction?

My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression. Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered (as I analyzed here) and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent money the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism.

So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, reproduction has to go. Of course there is an ecological responsibility to reduce the human population, or even end it , and a lot was said about that on the blogosphere recently (here, and here), but an ecological consciousness is not how I came to my decision to remain child-free.

Because reproduction is seen as a psychological need, even a biological impulse, that would supposedly override any rational concerns arising out of a sense of responsibility, ecological or otherwise, I would like to propose emotional conditioning to counter such a need or impulse to reproduce. Using my own life as a case study, I conclude that I came to a resolve not to reproduce through largely unconscious emotional reactions . I like children, but every time I fantasized of having one, I felt pangs of guilt over how for this 'impulse' of mine, someone else would have to put their body on the line.

This woman is part of a culture, a civilization, of death. And as poetic justice demands, she and her kind will die out due to sheer stupidity borne out of sheer hopelessness. In the midst of her complex and highly fantastic rationalizations lies a heart without that will to immortality and continuance only hope can give.

No hope, no future.

No God, No Man.

We cannot give in.