Western Nations Worry That Children Won’t Be Better Off
The 2006 movie Children of Men (based on a novel of the same title) explores a dystopian future in which an 18-year pandemic of infertility leaves the planet entirely child-less. The film’s premise of social breakdown goes unchallenged since we intuit humanity as a kind of pyramid scheme. The next generation is synonymous with a people who are smarter, healthier, longer-lived, more diverse, and more tolerant than the lot in which we find ourselves today. Whether or not we assume the future will have more people, we all presume that the future will have better people.
With this unspoken assumption we undertake the project of civilization. The church in the German city of Ulm took 513 years to build, depending on how you count. This is a project that was started by a people who knew they would not live to see it completed. Western civilization as a whole is not much different; while we toil for our own survival and fulfillment, we in addition seek to participate in that which will persist beyond our departure, that time may collect his debts from us but can never entirely erase us from history, that those future better people are in some small part better because of us.
Except when they aren’t. A future generation that struggles where we did not is a black mark on the record of a society perhaps a little too obsessed with cutting its own taxes and lining its own pockets.
We know how to deal with those who steal from others, but what court can prosecute this far more heinous crime, the crime that robs us all of our chance to touch immortality, the crime of those who steal from the future?