{"id":9906,"date":"2007-01-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-03T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/our-childless-dystopia"},"modified":"2020-09-26T14:07:46","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T18:07:46","slug":"our-childless-dystopia","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/our-childless-dystopia","title":{"rendered":"Our Childless Dystopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

P<\/span>. D. James\u2019s 1993 novel, The Children of Men<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, was an insightful if not entirely satisfactory look at the world we know through the lens of futuristic-apocalyptic fiction. Her version of the eschaton is a sudden inability of human beings to reproduce themselves, beginning in 1995. This is the year called Omega, and the last people to be born, now in their twenties as the novel begins in 2021, are known as Omegas. Such near-future fiction is always an iffy thing, and all the more so if the predicted hour of apocalypse is near enough to be noticed when it doesn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

And yet, in a way, James\u2019s future has<\/em> happened. As we now know, 1995 did not bring the demographic doom of the human race. And yet The Children of Men<\/em> was much more accurate than most eschatological fiction, for it presents an exaggerated version of a problem \u2014 namely the gradual depopulation of the developed world through below-replacement fertility rates \u2014 that in the years since its publication has begun to seem rather scarily un<\/em>exaggerated.<\/p>\n

James does not attempt to explain her more drastic collapse of fertility, vaguely suggesting that it might be caused by some kind of sperm-killing virus. Writing in the first person as her hero, an Oxford don called Theo Faron, she claims that \u201cWe are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species, less even by our inability to prevent it, than by our failure to discover the cause. Western science and Western medicine haven\u2019t prepared us for the magnitude and humiliation of this ultimate failure.\u201d Well, that may be how an Oxford don sees the world, but she also makes it clear that, to most of the people in her fictional Britain, the anguish of being unable to reproduce is the greatest calamity. That anguish is certainly greater than any apparent (so far) in our own world of largely voluntary infertility. Perhaps this is because we do<\/em> know the cause, even though we are reluctant to delve into it. For anything that might call into doubt the feminist-led cultural disparagement of traditional female roles \u2014 not only motherhood but the whole panoply of activities that used with good reason to go under the name of \u201chome-making\u201d \u2014 and the attempt to replace them with male or unisex ones remains an almost-taboo subject.<\/p>\n

There is no mention of any of that <\/em>sort of infertility in The Children of Men<\/em>. On the contrary, childless women in James\u2019s story are in the habit of keeping dolls and dressing them and taking them out for walks in prams. They live in a world in which mothering appears by its absence to be still as socially approved as it was in the 1950s. Of course, this is doubtless due to its unattainability, but if that longing for the unattainable has produced in any other way a counter-revolution against feminist ideas of social progress James does not say so. It certainly seems to have produced none against the sexual revolution, since in 2021 Britain\u2019s relatively benign fascist government \u2014 presided over by a cousin of Theo Faron calling himself \u201cthe Warden of England\u201d and his hand-picked \u201cCouncil\u201d \u2014 operates state-sponsored pornography shops.<\/p>\n

A tiny dissident group called the Five Fishes demands that these shops be closed. It also seeks to end the practice of state-sponsored mass suicide known as the Quietus, and calls for the reform of a penal colony on the Isle of Man where, apparently, unspeakable horrors are tolerated by the authorities because they are visited by one lot of criminals upon another. They also demand full citizenship for immigrant guest-workers or \u201cSojourners\u201d who, under the Warden\u2019s rule, are expelled from the country when they are too old any longer to function in the role of helots to the native population. But the real point about the Five Fishes is how utterly ineffectual they are. Not only are their liberal aims much less popular than the Warden\u2019s severity \u2014 though he doesn\u2019t hold elections anymore, it is conceded that he would win in a landslide if one were held \u2014 but the very idea of dissidence has died out of the population with the advance of its aggregate age.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>he central insight of the novel is that all ideas of social improvement and reform, all justice, hope, and love depend on the existence of future generations for whose sake all the good that we do is ultimately done. \u201cIt was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society,\u201d writes P. D. James, \u201cbut not in a world with no future where, all too soon, the very words \u2018justice,\u2019 \u2018compassion,\u2019 \u2018society,\u2019 \u2018struggle,\u2019 \u2018evil,\u2019 would be unheard echoes on an empty air.\u201d Thus, it is not just coincidental that the parents of the first child born in twenty-six years are leading the only movement for reform. Without the ability to bear children, James tells us, we also lose the ability to care about anything but our own comfort and safety \u2014 which is what the Warden of England promises in return for his absolute and unquestioned power. There is much to be said for this view of things, but I wonder if it may work the other way around. When we start to care only for our own comfort and safety, do we lose if not the ability then the need or desire to reproduce?<\/p>\n

Either way, these are serious matters, but the new movie supposedly based on James\u2019s book ignores them all. In typical Hollywood style, the apocalypse is treated as nothing but an excuse for trotting out yet again that most clich\u00e9d of all movie heroes, the lone righteous man who wages his solitary struggle against a massive governmental establishment out to destroy him and\/or against the breakdown of society itself. As the novel\u2019s timid, donnish fiftysomething Theo Faron, Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s movie gives us the well-muscled forty-year-old action hero Clive Owen, recently edged out by Daniel Craig in the race to succeed Pierce Brosnan as the latest incarnation of James Bond. In place of the popular and strict but apparently military-less government of the Warden of England, and the feral Omegas living in forests, it offers us a brutal thugocracy of leaderless soldiers engaged in perpetual guerrilla warfare with a rag-tag but well-armed insurgency of rebels without a cause.<\/p>\n

In both the novel and the film, Theo acts as escort and protector to the first pregnant woman in over twenty years, but the film\u2019s unexplained guerrilla warfare gives him many more terrifying obstacles to overcome than the novel thinks necessary \u2014 and almost no reasons either for the existence of those obstacles or for his efforts to overcome them. He is meant to be running the gauntlet of the fascist police and soldiers on the one hand and the rebels on the other to get the young woman, who is about to deliver her child, to a point of rendezvous where she can be picked up by an oceangoing science lab \u2014 apparently inaccessible to an inexplicably navy-less central authority \u2014 called the Human Project. But why fascists and rebels alike wouldn\u2019t simply welcome the new life and join Theo in doing all that could be done to protect it remains a mystery. At one point they actually stop fighting and gaze in awe when they realize that the first pregnant woman in decades is among them, but she passes on her way and they resume the war.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s explanation for the equivalent of the Flight into Egypt of this science-fictionalization of the Holy Family \u2014 which is not to seek the movie\u2019s scientific savior but just to find a safe and private place to give birth \u2014 is as feeble but at least it is an explanation. The novel\u2019s Mary, named Julian, thinks the Warden is \u201cevil\u201d and doesn\u2019t want to give him the benefit of a propaganda coup. Herod obviously missed a trick by Slaughtering the Innocents instead of issuing to the media a picture of himself smiling and holding the infant Jesus. The movie makes Julian (Julianne Moore) into Theo\u2019s ex-wife and gives her child-bearing duties to a new character, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), whose antecedents are as unexplained as her reasons for trying to escape the authorities. The movie does away not only with the novel\u2019s explanation but with the Warden himself. Dark cinematic visions of our fascist and\/or anarchist future \u2014 Children of Men<\/a><\/strong> <\/em>hedges its bets by offering both \u2014 are now apparently so taken for granted that they don\u2019t even bother to explain the political circumstances of the rise of either the fascists or anarchists.<\/p>\n

C<\/span>ertainly Cuar\u00f3n, who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with no fewer than four collaborators, misses the subtlety of P. D. James\u2019s connection between a childless future and the waning, rather than the increasing, of political passions. Yet James, who cannot be happy with such an incoherent adaptation of her novel, in a way foresaw this failure as well. For the filmmakers\u2019 mindless pessimism is an unconscious echo of the sentiments Theo\u2019s now-aged former tutor, Jasper, expresses about the impending end of humankind:<\/p>\n\n\n

On the whole, I\u2019m glad; you can\u2019t mourn for unborn grandchildren when there never was a hope of them. This planet is doomed anyway…. If man is doomed to perish, then universal infertility is as painless a way as any. And there are, after all, personal compensations. For the last sixty years we have sycophantically pandered to the most ignorant, the most criminal and the most selfish section of society. Now, for the rest of our lives, we\u2019re going to be spared the intrusive barbarism of the young, their noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, that annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed. I intend that my life shall be comfortable, and, when it no longer is, then I shall wash down my final pill with a bottle of claret.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

The movie makes Jasper, played by Michael Caine, into one of its few heroes rather than a sad old man whose self-important contentment with the idea that the world should end with him was surely intended to be repellent \u2014 just as the mention of Christmas was meant to look ironically ahead to the echoes of the Christmas story to come in Theo\u2019s and Julian\u2019s odyssey. Such a misunderstanding only seems to confirm the novel\u2019s link between the end times and our culture\u2019s Jasper-like state of self-satisfied hostility to the innocence and idealism, as well as the awkwardness and rambunctiousness, of the young.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

P. D. James\u2019s 1993 novel, The Children of Men, was an insightful if not entirely satisfactory look at the world we know through the lens of futuristic-apocalyptic fiction. Her version of the eschaton is a sudden inability of human beings to reproduce themselves, beginning in 1995. This is the year called Omega, and the last people to be born, now in their twenties as the novel begins in 2021, are known as Omegas. Such near-future fiction is always an iffy thing, and all the more so if the predicted hour of apocalypse is near enough to be noticed when it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","article_type":[14],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5041],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/9906"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/9906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=9906"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=9906"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=9906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}