Population: It’s a Cultural Issue : Change from the bottom up--not politics--is what matters

Any major international gathering like the U.N. population conference taking place this week in Cairo tends to attract a penumbra of unofficial or semiofficial delegations. The Cairo conference may be something of an exception, however, in that the forum of thousands of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that adjoins the official conference may actually be the main event.

The success of governments in either promoting or inhibiting population growth has been mixed to extremely poor. Individual countries may be pointed to as examples of either population explosion or population stabilization, but the determining factor in nearly every case turns out to be cultural rather than political.

Capitalist West Germany absorbed communist East Germany and the German birthrate is the world’s lowest. But if communist East Germany had absorbed capitalist West Germany, would it be any higher? Probably not.

A cultural value may be reinforced by determined political leadership. On the whole, however, politics does not build culture but rather builds upon it.

CULTURAL CLUES: Can we name a cultural rather than a political change that might stabilize the world’s population at a sustainable level? The question is reasonable because if population growth is inevitable, the size of the growth is not. The U.N. Population Fund estimates that the world’s population in the year 2050 will be between 7.8 billion and 12.5 billion. The difference between the two extremes exceeds the current population of the world! If the outcome were more predetermined, culture might play a minor role. But we are entering a period of radical demographic unpredictability. There are all sorts of ways of limiting population. But only human behavior can expand it.

The cultural change on which many of the most thoughtful observers of the looming population crisis stake their hopes is a change in the status of women. This change, which has been taking place as a bottom-up social transformation rather than a top-down political one, has brought about a striking reduction in the birthrate in countries as different as Kenya and South Korea. For this we should be grateful. Changes of this sort, so difficult to begin, can be all but impossible to stop, and the world needs a change in the culture of human reproduction that can match the speed of reproduction itself.

RELIGIOUS CONCERNS: But where does this reading of the world population crisis leave the Roman Catholic Church, whose role in Cairo has been so problematic? It leaves the church not as Vatican diplomacy at the official Cairo conference but rather as a Christian NGO, albeit the largest in the world, taking its somewhat less lordly seat at the unofficial conference. Stress culture rather than politics and it matters less what the Pope’s delegates say about the controversial paragraph 8.25 in the official conference declaration than what the average parish priest is saying to the women of his parish--and what they are answering back.

If, at the Cairo conference, abortion turns out to be an insoluble question, the American delegation should be the last to be surprised, given the intractability of the abortion issue in this country. But if the main conference was itself a sideshow, then the abortion dispute that bedeviled it was doubly a sideshow.

Because there is no single world culture, any change in the culture of human reproduction will have to take place multiculturally. But just as the challenge of child care, managed differently in different cultures, is still, in the end, the same challenge, so a change in the way the human race thinks about controlling its own reproduction can be undertaken, in all its multiplicity, as a common change. That is the lesson of Cairo.