Freedom

At JFK, on the way back from Italy, eager for something to fill a six-hour plane ride across the country (I had already endured seven hours crossing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic without any reading material), I picked up Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom.  I had been meaning to read The Corrections for a long time but just hadn’t gotten around to it. However, that title wasn’t in stock at Hudson News in Terminal 8 so the new novel was a stand-in.  I slowly warmed to it and appreciated that one of the primary characters in this utterly mainstream novel was obsessed with the issue of population control.  Way back in college I wrote a paper on how India needed to get its population growth under control in order to start the development engine, because to develop, you need to create a surplus.  You first have to get a toehold beyond subsistence.  Back in the late 60s and early 70s there was plenty of talk about zero population growth (ZPG) even though there were only about 2.5 billion people on the planet then and we weren't facing the environmental depredations we are now, but around the end of the 70s the subject went silent.  People’s eyes started to glaze over if you brought it up, and they hurriedly changed the subject.  It seemed to have become a taboo concept, maybe because people of my generation were then into their child-bearing and child-rearing years and consequently their brains were being overridden by a combination of their instincts and hormones, plus social expectations. They were too busy doing what they were programmed to do by nature and the social order.  Now world population is up to 7.5 billion, three times what it was back then, and we are facing some pretty serious consequences. 

Just before the trip I’d remarked to a couple of people about how this issue had been swept under the rug, no one talked about it in public anymore, which is bizarre considering that it’s the root of all our environmental problems.  I mean, so long as the human population continues to expand at the current rate (thirteen million a month of net gain, according to Franzen), any green efforts amount to little more than pissing into the wind.  Conversely if we could stabilize or, better yet, reduce it, those efforts would lose some of their urgency.  And yet, there has been so little public discussion of this issue. 

Franzen has a theory as to why: capitalism cannot contemplate the stabilization of population because its ideology relies on the assumption of infinite growth, first of capital, and to support that, markets, and therefore, ultimately,  population.  But you don’t have to think about this very much to see that it’s an untenable proposition.  You can’t have infinite growth in a finite world.  This is a piece of the old, outdated notion about the inexhaustibility of nature. 

Because of its implacable and impractical opposition to birth control as a way to get a handle on population growth, the Catholic Church has made itself the villain of this story.  

An issue related to this which Franzen does not raise is Free Death.  The Catholic Church plays an evil role here too, in its opposition to suicide.  When will the individual finally gain rights and control over his or her own life?  When will that happen?  I get exasperated whenever the issue of suicide barriers for the Golden Gate Bridge is brought up.  What gives some people the idea that they should have the ultimate say over whether someone else gets to die or not?  Each person’s life should belong to him or her alone, not to the state, or the society, or the church, or the family, or the neighbors; and each individual should be able to die whenever they choose.  We may not agree with their choice, we may try to talk them out of it, but ultimately it’s not our decision to make.  We don’t know how it feels, being them.  Both as a mercy for every individual and for the sake of humanity as a whole, suicide should be made easier, not more difficult.  But although the mainstream may be coming back to ZPG, I guess it hasn’t come around to this, yet.