The child has become the symbol of the deep contradictions of our modern societies. On the one hand, children are almost idolized; they are pampered like never before; they are spoiled and overprotected. We live in an era of the “child king” who must be able to do almost anything he wants, any constraint or discipline being rejected as outdated: the very principle of authority, and of parental authority in particular, is looked upon with an evil eye, as a vestige of obscure times fortunately over.
The modern child no longer needs teachers—he builds himself. The school’s function is no longer to transmit knowledge, but to accompany the toddler’s “freedom” to develop his self and to acquire by himself the knowledge he needs. Even in politics, the voice of youth is sacralized; it is only necessary to see how the world has bowed in admiration before the fierce injunctions of a 15-year-old girl castigating the whole world, saying good and evil as if she were wisdom incarnate! Today, in any field, being young is an asset, much more than the experience of age.
Ignorance of the Child’s Good
On the other hand, the child does not exist; he has been totally “invisibilized,” becoming the taboo of a society where the adult must also be able to do whatever he wishes, his will taking precedence over the good of the child. Because the fundamental modern principle is selfishness—advertising repeats it to us endlessly—and the adult still has the power of decision to the detriment of his offspring, thus sacrificed to the desiderata of the adults.
Thus, the child is subjected to the whims of men and women who can decide to eliminate it before it is born, or to “manufacture” it by genetic manipulation, and even to rent the services of a “surrogate mother.” There is very little concern for the interests of the child that is cherished and nurtured.
In the case of abortion, one is convinced that what is wriggling in the mother’s womb is only a vulgar mass of cells that one has no scruples to destroy and evacuate, because it cannot be a little man, even when, In the IMG (medical termination of pregnancy), abortion attacks a full-term baby, a terrible and yet totally legal murder which hardly moves the consciences of our beautiful souls, adepts of the absurd slogan “My body belongs to me!”
In the case of genetic manipulation, PMA or GPA, when it is not a question of a stable couple (a single person or two of the same sex), we force ourselves to believe that a child has no need of a father and a mother and that it is just as well to have two fathers, two mothers or only one parent, man or woman, because nothing should hinder the modern will to follow one’s desires, the “right to the child” having ousted the “right of the child.”
The incoherence reaches its paroxysm when the “precautionary principle” is preached to us, which is blindly applied to certain sensitive subjects, such as the climate and which disappears completely from the horizon when it is a question of the child who hinders the good pleasure of the adults. While it is impossible to prove, and therefore to be certain, that the aborted embryo is not a human being or that producing children in test tubes without a father or a mother is not seriously harmful, we blithely persist in superbly ignoring these uncertainties, even though they should oblige any honest mind to renounce such practices precisely because of the well-understood “precautionary principle.”
The Demographic Challenge
Two other serious subjects in the news confirm our point: immigration and pensions, whose clumsy and yet empty reform by Mr. Macron has unleashed an opposition that goes far beyond the framework of this badly made law. In these two cases, no political solution can be viable without a strong recovery of our birth rate. In other words, encouraging the French to have more children is the indispensable prerequisite for considering the assimilation of immigrants (while reducing their numbers) and guaranteeing the sustainability of a pay-as-you-go pension system. However, this is a taboo subject that very few dare to tackle in the political and managerial class. It is all the more criminal that France, like Europe—whose demography is catastrophic (the birth rate in the EU is 1.5, while the renewal of generations is only guaranteed beyond 2.1)—is slowly dying out, with all that this means in terms of aging populations and loss of dynamism and creativity.
If we add to this a certain ecological ideology which sees man as a predator to be fought and which therefore advocates not procreating any more, we have a complete picture of our inconsistencies which are hurling us straight into the wall.
It is nevertheless curious that an era claims to love children so much and yet is determined not to have any more or to kill those who could be born!
Christophe Geffroy publishes the journal La Nef, through whose kind courtesy we are publishing this article.
Featured: Mother with Child, by Léon Perrault; painted in 1894.