The Fifth New Commandment:

Thou Shalt Limit the Human Population

of the World

Well, I did my best. Unfortunately, however, as you can see from this New Commandment, we're not through with sex just yet. What we're dealing with here is actually a consequence of the Fourth New Commandment (not to restrict instinctive urges) coupled with reason's ingenuity: that if reason doesn't do something about it, the human population of the world is going to explode, and we'll outrun our food supply.

Here we have the first of the commandments that isn't simply a restatement of permissiveness. We must do something that prevents the disaster of having kids who can't be supported with the resources left in the world; and if you don't happen to like this, that's just too bad. "Family planning" is a must.

Note, however, that this imperative is not actually couched in moral terms; as I pointed out earlier, it couldn't be, or it would appear as just one of those things that you can do if it feels right to you and you can avoid if you don't happen to like it. But population control for the New Moralist is far more serious than that. (Note this: for the New Moralist, what they want is far more serious than morality. Ironic.) We can't let people have all the kids they want; they're fools if they want too many kids; and even if they can support them, society can't. Practically speaking, it just won't work; if we just advise people not to have large families, there still will be too many of them who want to, and we'll be awash in human beings, and in the last analysis, in starving human beings. We can't have this. It's compassion, you see, feeling for the starving kids, that drives the New Moralists here.

So for them, it's not a moral issue, but a practical problem. We have to do something, or catastrophe looms. You will notice as we go along that the tactic is always to predict some dire consequence that demands immediate action to avert a crisis. But notice that there's an implicit moral evil lurking underneath this. What do you mean, "disaster"? People dying of starvation because there's not enough food. Wars because the starving are fighting for survival. All the rest of it. All right, but why is all this bad? Why? Well it's obvious, isn't it?

That is, there's the implicit command that we must avoid having human beings dying of starvation. But why? Just because. I mean, what kind of a person are you? You can't just sit by and let people die in this horrible way. How would you like it if someone else with a lot of food just sat there while you died of starvation? I see now; do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

What's wrong with that? Nothing at all. I'm just pointing out that the basis of the New Morality's command is the taken-for-granted notion that it's inhuman not to limit the population to those who can survive (and prosper, really) on the resources available. So once again, even this commandment rests on not doing what is regarded as objectively inconsistent with yourself as human. I need to point this out, because otherwise you can't see the inconsistency in prescribing something inhuman to avoid being inhuman.

The insidious thing about this particular New Commandment--like so many of the New Commandments--is that it has a lot of truth to it. If you can't afford to bring up a child decently, with the result that he doesn't really have a chance to live a human life, then your act of causing this human-who-can't-be-human is inconsistent, and therefore inhuman. So you do have an obligation to limit the size of your family.

But, you see, different people have different notions of what a "decent human life" is, and different people have different resources, not only financial, but physical and emotional. Only some people think that life is not worth living without a cell phone and two cars. There are even those who would count it a blessing not to have a television set. As the Unabomber, a kind of saint of the New Morality, showed in his living in a shack, a human life can be deliberately chosen to have very little in the way of material resources. (One can argue, of course, that it's not very human to use some of those resources to make letter bombs to blow up the people you disagree with, but that's another story.)

But after pointing out to people that it's morally wrong to have more children than you can support, what's the problem? The problem is the global problem, damn it! If you let people alone and just "advise" them, we're headed for disaster!

That is, the Population Control Crowd recognize that lots and lots of people think that it's great and human to have lots and lots of children, and that "God will provide." But, they contend, these people don't seem to realize that in the real world, God doesn't provide, and if you have all the children you're physically capable of having, then, people being as stupid and short-sighted as they are, you're going in practice to have lots and lots of children who are forced into inhuman conditions. So even if you think that having large families is a good and moral and human thing, you're objectively mistaken, and (a) you must be educated away from this false view, and (b) if that doesn't work, you must be stopped from following through on it, because what you're doing is objectively inhuman.

--According to this view of things, of course. So you have to force people to accept "reality," and to act in accordance with the real, objective situation. In other words, you have to force people to follow your moral standards, even when theirs differ from yours.

But you can't say this is what you're doing (you can't even think it), because it violates the Second New Commandment, that no one should force his moral standards on anyone else--and then it's not only inconsistent with objective morality, it's inconsistent with your own moral stance. Therefore, you have to blind yourself to the fact that it's actually a moral standard, and claim that it's just common sense. Of course. And if you're fudging the truth a bit, what is truth anyway? Remember the First Great Commandment.

See how it all fits together?

But it gets better. How are you to reconcile this New Commandment with the Fourth New Commandment, not to restrict the sexual drive? The answer is obvious. Reason, which makes reproduction so very successful in humans, must now be employed to maximize sexual gratification and avoid its obvious consequence. Contraception must be aggressively promoted, and any attempt to say that there is something wrong with it must be discredited at all costs.

That is, when the Religious Right in its evil perversion presumes to limit family size, it does so by restraint, which, for the New Morality, is a direct contradiction of the essence of human nature, the reproductive drive. Hence, the Religious Right's reasons must be treated as fallacies--valid, perhaps, in medieval times when the world had too few people in it, but now not only foolish but pernicious.

An interesting facet of this attack on the Religious Right is that it is said to be "obsessed with sex." This was one of the accusations against Kenneth Starr, who as far as I know didn't have sex with someone while discussing affairs of state on the phone. But he's supposed to be obsessed with sex because he doesn't think that all sex all the time is a good thing. Once you presume to say that there are limits on sexual activity (as opposed to limiting the results of sexual activity), then you're obsessed with sex. I know. This is one of the things I've been charged with myself.

The idea is that you're not "obsessed" with sex if you think that it's just something like eating or urinating, that you do when you feel the need and then forget about it. The fact that you feel the need every fifteen minutes is not really relevant; it doesn't bother you, because you have your sex and then go on about your business. On this criterion, the alcoholic isn't obsessed with drinking, it's the ones who think maybe he ought to cut down that are obsessed with the subject.

In any case, we should promote both sex and contraception, because in this way we can obey both New Commandments: we can have as much sex as possible, in as many ways as possible, and at the same time ensure that there will be as few children as possible; and while we're at it, we have the bonus of the fact that "every child is a wanted child," and so we solve the problem of child abuse.

A world in denial.

I tried to point out in the preceding chapter how this view is inconsistent with what sex objectively is; and there might be some who say, "Well yes, even if for the sake of argument you're right; still and all, if you try to limit the population by preaching restraint, it's not going to work, and so we've got no choice; it's sex education or mass starvation down the road."

And this sounds fine in theory; but we've been trying it for a generation or more now, and look what it's got us. The reason is that logic has a way of working itself out in practice, and things have their real consequences--all of them, not just the consequences we'd like them to have.

The flaw in it can be seen by a simple description of what it is: having irresponsible sex responsibly. That is, contraceptive sex, as I pointed out, is a deliberate attempt to divorce the act from the consequences intrinsic to the act: to have fertile sex without having to be bothered with the results of the act (since if the contraceptive fails, the act succeeds). So you "free" people to do whatever they feel like.

But the trouble is, you have to use the contraceptive in order to do this, and you have to use it carefully, or it will fail. If you don't take The Pill every day of the month, then it won't work, and you'll find yourself pregnant. If you're not careful using the condom, it might leak or rip, and then pregnancy follows. So instead of being careful in when and with whom you perform the act, now you have to be careful in how you perform it.

Because, of course, there are other inconvenient practical aspects to promiscuous sex besides pregnancy; we are awash in a sea of sexually transmitted diseases. And The Pill does nothing to protect people from these, nor does the IUD or Norplant or any of the rest of the contraceptives except condoms. So, having graduated from condoms to the "natural" methods of contraception, we're now back to where we were when I was a kid--except that now, instead of thinking that sex with a condom is unnatural and wrong, we've transmuted it into the idea that sex without a condom is unnatural and wrong.

And, filled with this idea, we hand out condoms to kids, because "they're going to do it anyway," and we wonder why we have so many teenage mothers. Why? Consider this: We know that smoking is bad for people, because of the tar and so on in the smoke. We also know that filters lessen the amount of tar that gets into the person, and so they're "safer" than unfiltered cigarettes. Further, kids, as is evident, aren't listening to the advice that smoking is dangerous; they smoke in spite of our warnings. So why don't we hand out filter cigarettes to kids, if they're going to do it anyway? Smoking filter cigarettes is "safer smoking."

"But that's ridiculous!" you say. Exactly. It's ridiculous, because if you hand these things out to kids, then they'll smoke a lot more than if you tried to get them not to smoke at all, and the "safety" of the filters is more than offset by the dangers of the increase in smoking which is bound to happen. You notice that no one--but no one--nowadays calls smoking filter cigarettes "safer smoking," in spite of the fact that that was why filters were developed. If it's advertised as "safer," then that will encourage people to use these things, under the delusion that they're safe, not just slightly less dangerous.

But then, if you grant that condoms aren't a hundred per cent effective, and you hand out condoms to kids--and then you discover that there's an increase in teen pregnancy when this is done, shouldn't you have at least the suspicion that the logic you recognized with filter cigarettes applies here too?

Oh no! It's because we haven't done enough of it! It'd be much worse if we didn't do this! Then why is it that the abstinence programs seem to lessen teenage pregnancy? They don't. The studies show it. No they don't. That's just the agenda of the Religious Right. It's a falsification.

You see what I mean by the title of this section: a world in denial?

Consumer Reports a few years ago had an article on condoms, in which they pointed out that condoms, used carefully, are very effective in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The trouble with using them carefully, however, is that you can't use them at all until you're in the heat of passion; and when you're in the heat of passion, stopping everything so that you can go meticulously through the five steps (or whatever it is) of putting them on right and using them with care is not what is uppermost in your mind. So in the real world, they cut down the transmission of disease by about a half.

Now everybody's all excited about AIDS--which is understandable, since it's fatal and incurable. But as the article said, the chances of getting AIDS in (normal, heterosexual) sexual intercourse with an infected person (when neither have some other sexually transmitted disease which might cause lesions) are, as I recall, a tenth of one per cent--or one in a thousand--in any single act. If you use a condom, then, you reduce the chance of catching it from the infected person to one in two thousand.

Now personally, if I have 999 chances in a thousand that something--even something really, really bad--is not going to happen to me, I'm not going to be terribly worried about it. (And if I am worried about odds already that much in my favor, then I'm not going to take much comfort in the fact that I can up my chances to 1999 in two thousand.)

Not much (in fact nothing) was made of the fact that it's next to impossible to catch AIDS from ordinary sexual intercourse anyway (always supposing no other STDs as I said); but condoms were touted as a way to be a lot safer when having sex. (Remember what I said about advertising filter cigarettes as "safer smoking"?)

Interestingly, however, that same article mentioned that the likelihood of catching gonorrhea from an infected person was over 90 per cent in a single act with unprotected sex. Therefore, you'd better use a condom, they counseled--but neglected to mention explicitly that this reduces your likelihood of catching it, in real-world-usage, to about 45 per cent for each act with an infected person.

And here's where the laws of probability come in. That's the odds with a single act. Call it fifty/fifty for the sake of simplicity. Now if you have sex twice with that infected person, using a condom each time, what are the odds that you'll catch it one of those two times? Put it this way: the chance that you'll avoid catching it (i.e. avoid it both times) is one out of four (figure it out). If you have sex three times, the chances of avoiding it all three times is one out of six--and so on.

The point is, that having sex with a person infected with gonorrhea as few as five times using a condom every time gives you close to a ninety per cent chance that some one of those five times, the disease will be transmitted, and you'll come down with it. This is safe?

I wrote to the magazine pointing this out, and guess what? They didn't publish my letter. A world in denial.

Because, of course, the logic is the same as with advertising filters as safer for smoking. If you tout condoms as safe (or even "safer"), then people will think they're safe, and they'll use them. But they're not safe for many of the sexually transmitted diseases, and the more sex you have, the unsafer they get. And when people think they're safe (and they do; the dangers are always played down), then they'll have a lot more sex than they otherwise would if they were worried about getting a disease--and the "safety" is more than offset by the increased incidence of promiscuous sexual intercourse.

Do you wonder why there's an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases? Because we're being told we're safe from them if we have irresponsible sex responsibly.

Of course, also conveniently ignored is the fact that a poor man who can't support a family only feels like a man when he's actually made someone pregnant; and he feels more of a man the more pregnancies he causes. He doesn't need kids, of course; he can show his potency by getting as many girls as possible pregnant. And a poor woman feels fulfilled, not just by the act of sex, but by having a child she can mother, whether the kid has a father or not.

You can dream this psychological fact away, but it will be there no matter what you do, just as you can dream of a world where homosexuality will be regarded as just a different lifestyle, but it will never happen. New Moralists are so insistent on living in the "real world," but there's no ivory tower so high as the one they inhabit.

Similarly, in other cultures, where there's no social safety net, a large family is an asset to a couple, because (a) they've got kids who can go out and work or beg and bring in money, and (b) when the couple gets too old to work, there will be at least one or two kids left alive to take care of them. True, large families in cultures like this are a societal problem; but it's insane to expect that an individual will cut his own throat for the sake of society's well-being.

So in our blindness we aggressively promote contraceptives all over the world, with no consideration at all for the diverse cultures we pressure (by threats to withhold aid, or worse) to use "family planning," like the officially Catholic and Muslim ones who think that this sort of thing is intrinsically wrong. There's no tolerance for these lifestyles. Naturally not, because they're overpopulating the planet, and we just can't have that. So the Third New Commandment goes out the window--or rather, shows itself for what it really is: tolerance for anything that doesn't violate one of the New Commandments, and vicious intolerance for anything that does.

And the New Moralists are actually blind to the fact that they're running roughshod over their cherished "diversity." The problem, you see, is that if you're honest about any of this, then the way to solve the population problem (to the extent we have one--the propaganda about it is part of the agenda) is sexual restraint; but this flies in the face of the Fourth New Commandment, and we're back to the old, inhuman morality of thinking that sex, like everything else, should have limits on its exercise. But sex according to this view, remember, is the very reality of the evolving human being. You can't allow the idea of restraint to creep back into the culture, not after we've made so much progress in eradicating it. Besides, what's a little suppression of the truth? Everybody lies about sex; look at President Clinton.

And still we wonder why we've got a population problem. Because we're (1) undermining the basis by which people will exercise restraint, and (2) ignoring the real solution to the problem: free enterprise, which will allow the poor to become prosperous, when children become a liability rather than an asset. Before you laugh scornfully, let me point out what happened in poor countries like Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and so on.

And while we're at it, of course, we pay farmers in this country not to plant, because we've got so much food we can't sell it anywhere in the world.

Why the New Morality is so interested in schooling.

The point is that instead of looking at what's actually happening and connecting it with what you would logically expect to happen if you encouraged sex and tried technologically to erase its consequences, New Moralists close their eyes and scream that all of the consequences are due to "poor sex education." This in spite of the fact that in the past thirty years there is no subject that has been more thoroughly instilled into everybody's mind--in season and out of season--as the fact that we should have all the promiscuous sex we can manage, and take the myriad of "precautions" to keep ourselves healthy.

This is the New Morality mantra: health.

So the New Moralists have turned our schools into sex-education factories first and foremost, making certain that their classes are "value-free"--which is to say, free of all values except the New Morality, that (a) sex is a fine, fun thing, (b) there are all kinds of sex, and no one is to be preferred over any other; it's just a matter of what excites you most; (c) any attempt to indicate that refraining from sex is healthy is misguided and false (and unhealthy); (d) your parents, poor things, were brought up wrong, before we knew all the facts--about health--that have been discovered in the last thirty years, and so don't listen to them; and (e) besides techniques, the only thing you really have to know on the subject is how to avoid disease by using condoms, and pregnancy by using all sorts of devices.

You see, it would be teaching "values" if you taught that contraceptive sex was as dishonest as lying; but it's not teaching "values" if you say that if you don't use a condom, you'll get sick, and so you'd better use one. It's not "values" if you say, "Well, of course, if you don't want to have sex, that's okay; but sex is not something to be afraid of as if it were evil; it's a natural, normal, healthy thing." That's not values, that's health. Oh? Health is not a value? Well, yeah, maybe, but health is a value value, not a "value." I mean, there's no religion involved in health. Exactly.

New Moralists react violently to abstinence education, because, according to them, it's a back-handed attempt "to introduce religion into the schools." Never mind that abstinence was promoted by people like Plato and Aristotle, who last I looked, weren't religious preachers, and that abstinence programs work better at curbing the very problems the sex-is-great-but-be-careful programs are allegedly trying to solve. The reason is twofold: First, the agenda of the New Moralists is not simply to prevent STDs and pregnancy; it's first and foremost to promote the Third to the Fifth New Commandments: tolerance for all "lifestyles," sex, sex, sex, and as few kids as possible. Secondly, any moral system other than the New Morality is looked on as ipso facto a religious system, whether it mentions God or not. Why? Because it's a moral system, and any moral system is ultimately religious. That's another reason why the New Morality denies that it is a moral system, despite the fact that it's a spelling out of the practical implications of the Darwinian view of human reality.

For this reason, education vouchers must be fought tooth and nail. If parents can send kids to whatever school they want, then they can send kids to schools that teach restraint rather than promiscuous sex, and that absolutely can't be allowed. Separation of Church and State is the shibboleth that's used, but what's really going on is that vouchers prevent the New Moralists from getting their moral system embedded into the minds of the young, and putting the next generation "in tune with the way the world really is," not the way these kooky fanatics dream it to be. If we allow vouchers, then we'll have enormous numbers of kids who don't know how to use "protection," and we'll have an epidemic of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Beg pardon? (Or as they say in Cincinnati, "Please?") We've got one now. And it got really serious once the New Morality took over "health education." When the religious fanatics held their inquisitorial sway over these United States (in the 1940s and 1950s, for instance), the problem was a good deal less. Hm.

The effect on the family.

Once again, don't misunderstand me. I am not trying to say that all this is a plot on the part of a bunch of people to introduce a new moral code into the country. It's just that if you think that the reality of the world is that human beings evolved by chance because of their efficient reproductive systems, and that reason evolved precisely as the vehicle by which these systems became so efficient, then you have a mind-set that automatically works itself out into the kinds of things I have been talking about.

Similarly, the disintegration of the family is not something that was consciously and deliberately undertaken by the New Moralists, who very often like the idea of families. It's just that the old-fashioned definition of "family" doesn't apply any more to our more open (pardon, tolerant) world. "I love you, you love me; that makes us a family," sings Barney, and nobody bats an eye. So Bill and Monica are a family, are they? Oh, I forgot, Monica loves Bill, but Bill only loves Bill. (Remember? She had sex with him; he didn't have sex with her.) I see now.

The "traditional family"--in other words, the family family--existed for the regulation of sex that would result in children, allowing an atmosphere in which the children could be reared properly, knowing who they had rights against to supply the physical, emotional, intellectual, and social needs they had as they struggled to attain free and responsible adulthood.

But when sex is divorced from children, children become "options" for certain couples--those that want children. "Every child a wanted child" is the slogan. You choose whether you want a child or not; you don't accept the child as the consequence of the action you perform. The child is "planned" or "an accident"; he's not the result of what you've done.

So the family structure as it always existed applies now only to those people who want sex-with-children. For those who aren't interested, then why should they be restricted in how they're going to pair up? What's wrong with same-sex marriages, with same-sex couples who bring up kids that are adopted or conceived by technology or by sex outside the "bond"? I mean, after all. This "bonding forever" is all well and good, but it's unnatural and--here's that word again--unhealthy. It might have made some sense when you could have a kid any time before menopause, but when you know that you're going to have one this year and your second and last two years from now, why should you be stuck together your whole life long?

With this attitude, it was inevitable that "marriage" would be defined as "until love's death doth us part." It was also inevitable that, following the First New Commandment, studies would "uncover" the fact that kids from divorce do just as well as kids brought up with parents who constantly fight (never mind, of course, that the fact that kids do badly with fighting parents might create an incentive for responsible parents to cool it).

And when studies show that single parenting resulting from never marrying or from divorce creates a severe handicap for kids, who do well if both parents stick together or if one dies, then the studies are routinely rejected or downplayed. A world in denial.

Is it an accident that tax policy favors non-marital unions over marriages? I don't think so. Again, it's not a conscious attempt to destroy the family, but the attitude that marriages are really passé allows legislators to pass laws that favor people shacking up without realizing that they're penalizing them for making a lifetime commitment. In that connection, am I the only one who has noticed that the old song (sung by Sinatra, interestingly) is significant? "Love and marriage/love and marriage/go together like a horse and carriage." Set to a mocking tune, "Ya can't have one without the oth-er," it inculcates the notion that marriage used to go with love, but that this notion is as out-of-date as horses and carriages.

In the interlude, I'll point up the contribution that feminism has made to all of this, but just let me finish here with another little bit of logic. "Every child a wanted child" is bound to work out in practice as an increase in battered children--and indeed we find, to everyone's surprise except mine, apparently--that there has been a marked increase in child abuse since the sexual revolution began.

Why? It's simple. In the old days, you accepted children as the natural consequence of your act, and you performed the act with the idea that you were willing to take the consequences: that what you were doing was a serious thing, that could involve you in years and years of hard work.

But when the sex act is divorced from the child, then the child is a kind of side-effect, which is welcome if you want the child, and a positive catastrophe if you don't--or at best an "accident." (By the way, how would you like to be considered an unfortunate accident by your parents?)

The attitude toward the child who was not wanted, but intruded himself upon the happy couple, is obvious, and needs no discussion. The New Moralists decry this sort of thing; but instead of saying that people should learn to live with the results of their own deliberate actions, they blame them for not taking precautions in the first place. It isn't that the child is a wonder whose very existence validates the effort spent on trying to give him a chance to live a meaningful life; it's that the child is a "product of conception," an acorn too many that the oak tree has brought forth, no different from an extra Barbie doll that came out of the machinery. For the New Moralist, there's no immortal soul to think about; there's just a mistake. Don't make the same mistake again.

But New Moralists are surprised when the wanted children turn out to be battered. They shouldn't be. If I want a child, then I'm not thinking of the awesome responsibility of subordinating myself to another (extremely selfish) person's development, I'm thinking of how much more "meaningful" my life will be with a little kid running around.

That is, we want children now the way we want a dog. We see how the child can relieve boredom and provide a focus for our lives, as well as something we can buy presents for and show pictures of, and so on.

It isn't long, of course, before this wanted child begins doing things (like teething) that are not simply annoying, but intolerable. He wakes you up at midnight, and you have to get up at six to go to work; and it's your turn this time to soothe him and get him back to sleep. You pick him up and rock him in your arms and coo at him, and he finally calms down, and you put him back in the crib, and all is well.

Until two o'clock. So you get up again and blearily rock him and calm him down again, and put him back, and then stagger back to bed again. Until fifteen minutes later. And this goes on, night after night. And that's just the first tooth, and what you didn't realize is that children have five thousand three hundred teeth coming in one after another.

Is it any wonder that after a month or two of this, your picking up the child you wanted is apt to be a bit less gentle than the first time you did it? And it doesn't stop with teething, of course. By age two, the child has learned (from listening to you so often) the meaning of "No!" and is practicing it at times that not even Einstein could have devised as being more inconvenient.

You know the story. The only way you can survive in all this is if you forget yourself and consider the child's needs as far more important than any convenience or desire that you personally have. And the mystery of being confronted with a new person who blossoms before your eyes into something far, far greater than anything you could have produced is enough to make Old Moralists out of the vast majority of us. (I am reminded of what Whittaker Chambers said in Witness that brought about his conversion from atheism: he looked at his daughter's ear, and realized that chance couldn't have produced something so perfect.)

But of course there will be some who will be true to their New Morality upbringing; and the result will be a battered child. And we can expect more as the New Morality takes a stronger and stronger hold on our culture.

Notice, however, that New Moralists are always talking about doing things "for the children." Of course. This is conversion-propaganda. You can win over the traditionalists to any program you want by invoking the thing they consider as more important than themselves. But the actual policies are destroying the children.