The selfish society begins to crack

How will we cope with an ageing society if our common ideal has been individual self-fulfillment? The Social Action research service reports.

Longer life-spans combined with lower birth rates result in an ageing population, which America, along with Australia and other advanced countries is beginning to experience. The immediate problem appears to be economic. With relatively more aged people, and fewer workers or taxpayers, the costs of health care and age pensions become more burdensome. US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan says that the US "will almost surely be unable to meet the demands on resources that the retirement of the baby boom generation will make".

But this question needs to be examined in other ways, and not limited to economic considerations. Mary Ann Glendon is a professor of law at Harvard. She is also president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, a committee of experts from five continents. Her reflections in the US journal First Things on two recent meetings set out some of the wider issues. (1)

In June this year, the President's Council on Bioethics concluded that when our ageing society was discussed, there was a tendency to neglect important medical, psychological, ethical and social issues. Ways of remedying this are being examined.

At a meeting earlier this year in Rome, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences concluded that underlying the welfare crisis is a deeper crisis. It involves changes in the meanings and values that people attribute to ageing and mortality, sex and procreation, marriage, masculinity and femininity, parenthood, relations among the generations, and life itself.

Take, for example, the changes in sexual behaviour which began in the 1960s. Once the notion becomes widely accepted that behaviour in the highly personal areas of sex and marriage is of no concern to anyone, other than the so-called "consenting adults" involved, it is easy to overlook the effect on society. But individual actions add up. When there are a lot of them, they exert a profound effect on society.

Massive social experiment

According to Glendon "Eventually, when large numbers of individuals act primarily with regard to self-fulfillment, the entire culture is transformed. The evidence is now overwhelming that affluent Western nations have been engaged in a massive social experiment - an experiment that brought new opportunities and liberties to adults but has put children and other dependants at considerable risk."

Writing in First Things, Glendon says the family is an institution which sustains our culture. If the family is in disarray, that weakens other institutions. The spread of family breakdown has been accompanied by disturbances in schools, neighbourhoods, churches, local governments, and workplace associations - all of the structures that have traditionally depended on families for their support and that in turn have served as important resources for families in times of stress."

There are two developments, she believes that have had profound effects on the environment of children. One is the epidemic of fatherlessness. The other is the mass movement of women, including mothers of young children, into the paid labour force. Women now have more opportunities than ever before in history, which is a mark of great progress.

But there is a downside: "No society, however, has yet figured out how to assure satisfactory conditions for child-rearing when both parents of young children work outside the home. And no society has yet found a substitute for the loss of other types of caregiving previously provided mainly by women."

But while birth rates are declining, the majority of women still become mothers, and the picture of progress for them is ambiguous. Mothers of young children, if they enter the labour force, tend to seek work that is compatible with family roles: usually lower paid jobs with poorer prospects. The more she foregoes workplace advancement for the sake of her children, the more she and her children are at risk of poverty if the marriage ends in divorce. If she chooses the other direction, the more time and energy she gives to the workforce, the greater the likelihood that her children have less than optimal care.

Dual sacrifices

"It is not surprising therefore that women are hedging against these risks in two ways by having fewer children than women did in the past, and by seeking types of labour force participation that are compatible with parenting. In so doing, they often sacrifice both their child-raising preferences and their chances to have well-paid, satisfying, and secure employment."

So the net effect of all this is that women without children have made enormous advances. But mothers face new versions of an old problem: "caregiving, one of the most important forms of human work, receives little respect and reward, whether performed in the family or for wages outside the home."

Glendon says that the feminist ideas of the 1970s envisaged child care run by the state or employers, and the equalization of child care responsibilities between fathers and mothers. But these ideas don't have broad support, from parents or taxpayers. "Such ideas ignore the fact that for many women, caring for children and other family members is central to their identity, sustaining the relationships that make their lives meaningful."

Back to the dependency-welfare crisis. Families are still the central pillar of our caregiving system, says Glendon, but they are losing much of their capacity to care for their own dependent members. In fact, as a result of family breakdown and unwed parenthood, there is a new group of poor people, mainly women and children. At the same time, governments are becoming less capable of fulfilling the roles they once took over from families.

At the Rome meeting, attention was drawn to the dominance of narrow concepts in current political thinking which can lead to wrong conclusions. In reality human beings are influenced not simply by calculations of self-interest, (which most economic theories assume) but also by strongly held values. Society is not just a collection of self-seeking individuals, but a complex fabric of relationships.

Glendon says the most important conclusion reached by the Pontifical Academy was that if governments look at the dependency-welfare crisis, and decide it is all a matter of allocating scarce resources, the outlook for dependents is grim.

"The most ominous development, of course, is the growing normalization of the extermination of persons who have become inconvenient and burdensome to maintain at life's frail beginnings and endings."

And if the outlook for dependents is grim, says Glendon, the outlook for everyone is grim. "Despite our attachment to the ideal of the free, self-determining individual, we humans are dependent social beings.

"We still begin our lives in the longest period of dependency of any mammal. Almost all of us spend much of our lives either as dependants, or caring for dependants, or financially responsible for dependants. To devise constructive approaches to the dependency-welfare crisis will require acceptance of this profound and unchangeable fact or life."

Social Action is a Melbourne magazine of social affairs and commentary.

Notes

(1)Mary Ann Glendon. "Discovering Our Dependence". First Things. October 2004.