Politicians have short attention spans. A long-term plan is the length of an election cycle. We are so dominated by politics that we forget that other institutions have longer planning horizons. The Catholic Church, for instance, famously thinks in terms of centuries. I got a demonstration of this last weekend in Rome, of all places.
I was in Rome for an Acton Institute conference entitled “The Family in the New Economy.” The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is a non-profit organization devoted to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles. I have been on the Academic Advisory Board of the Acton Institute since its founding in 1990. The occasion was a celebration of the 15th anniversary of Centesimus Annus, John Paul II’s magisterial encyclical on economics and society. The principle speaker was Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the President of the Pontifical Council on the Family. I was invited to offer comments as well.
Cardinal Trujillo emphasized that the family exists prior to the state, not as an appendage of the state. He proposed a kind of inversion of the famous Cartesian motto of the Enlightenment. Instead of “I think, therefore I am,” Cardinal Trujillo proposes, “I am loved, therefore I am.” A child becomes aware of his own existence through being in relationship with his mother, even prior to rational thought. A left-alone child has serious difficulty knowing even who he is, much less knowing how to relate to other people. He also reminded us that Aristotle had described the love between husband and wife as a friendship. In a very real way, society is built around the friendship between husbands and wives.
When it was my turn, I spoke about the demographic meltdown of the modern industrialized countries, particularly Europe. The total fertility rate for the European Union is a mere 1.47 babies per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. For some countries, such as Spain and Italy, the total fertility rate is a desperate 1.2. At this rate, the population of these countries will decline by half every generation.
I attributed the fertility decline to the cradle-to-grave European welfare state. The lethargic culture of public assistance drains the enthusiasm of the young for beginning families. And state financial support displaces the economic function of marriage, for women and men alike.