Intregity of Life and Love

The coming demographic winter of the West delineated by many is described in indicative tones of finality and bleakness. But the imperative question seems to remain unanswered: why is it happening and how can it be avoided? Allow me to make an uneducated guess.

The seemingly fatal disconnect seems to run down a tectonic fault line between what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls "the integrity of the powers of life and love" (No. 2338):

This integrity ensures the unity of the person; it is opposed to any behavior that would impair it. It tolerates neither a double life nor duplicity in speech.

For all the talk, glee, ever-increasing, and seeming non-stop bombardment of sexual promiscuity and abortion-induced adolescence in popular culture, the Magisterium of the Church says our human integrity will not and cannot tolerate this rupture. The victims, besides individuals of both sexes, are the family and western culture. The vital connection between love and life is an ontological necessity, humanly reflecting the bond between Christ and His Church. Stray from it, and demographic desolation, famine, and suicide ensues.

The beneficiary of this withering of the fruitfulness of the human family in the West is Islam. Whatever one may think of its theology, intolerance, or gender inequality, Muslims have not forgotten the vital necessity of not letting go of the hand of the past generation nor the need to procreate another.

What has caused this malaise in the West, in my opinion, is the following: we have allowed the basest, most ignorant, and coarsest sources of false ontology and epistemology to define the terms of discourse, value, and commerce. We have heeded so many clammering and shrill voices unworthy of our hearing -- hawkers, hucksters, blowhards, and mandarins (if the spate of presidential candidate "debates" come to mind, so be it).

The result is a poor trade: instead of epistemological and ontological certitude we have opinions and attitudes; instead of lives grounded in lifelong, committed marriage and family, we have indecisive paralysis passing for "freedom" and pan-sexual debasement passing for "fulfillment": a waste at the individual level and a tragedy at the cultural. It is only a short step to matter-hating latter-day Gnosticism, if a step at all.

The prodigal son found that the shortest path out of the pig-sty and back to redemption was coming to himself and trudging back toward his father's farm [Lk 15,11-32]. If the West wants to pull itself up and out of the mud wallowing of sexual and psychological promiscuity, it must do the same thing. It is the only way out and away from demographic winter and total collapse of all that is still worth redeeming of western civilization.