Books

What are people for?

A.N. Wilson

Sex and Destiny: The Polities of Human Fertaty Germaine Greer (Seeker and Warburg £9-95)

The Warmer for Modernisation in EvelYn Waugh's novel Black Mischief ,—"Innes a Dinh Control Gala for the "melleation of the people of Azania. A Porter is distributed showing two pictures_ ane side is shown 'a native but of squalor, overrun with children of '-worg age, suffering from every Phl"sical_,_.11- h...,,caPaeltr; on the of a comfortable. rich. married couple with one child at ease in a bright parlour_ Between '0 Pictures is an emblem of a con- tive The natives get the cs75age at once, 'See: on tight hand: there hs letf- rich man: smoke pipe hie big chief: but ti,e she no goodz sit =taw meal: and irr7k_uutri no good: be only one sou Sem on hi, ..„'d: Poor man: not much to tat: but ,....711e site very good, work hard in field: abra—m be good tom clean (*Ado= one *or" l'eTY holy- And in the to 0,7-"Jus inin. Make you like that good -72rith den= diftdrese 1„..7117-two years after that novel's ali- `1;147. Germaine Greer is repenting the lake in a 'wady awned and handy form. This is what she drinks. taorlai;! orito des to festal „ihnighth and vitimiZr_the f arc wholly at variance Cho---"mp of the POwtty-sisidral errantlY POAoI We niajorky of the mud's um- The pampered people of the Z.,5edtend by a 'consumer came' lee that thel,- need ever greater caro- l".

space and homey, are

---'11ced

- - by the 'seat religion', instituted

thev _Mane Slopes. into thinking that

'ma Pair off into lbw units so that

'111111_ elonnestrate on achieving honer NtsclizEler„,„ orIntsurs. Anything which inter-

quest for lousy and amic ecstasy

.sowned panicidark diatom. "'taut hat as rPeopie do not like children. They *u as Postale. Those Who succeed

rn. - *auk n. in some soulless hospital

aohdt clinddY shoved

to the handers of

ze-trowt bey are not encouraged to t Zr73/"Ib n 4 tir ancoS., • up commtation' oar to ri _ as_ grandmothers grgro711"hals-up 'fans111r "CY their Man% 117464:= _ eniaugh they bundle 774. No rammer* home or akid alDre upon couples concenuate 2.11-lie the European barr it= we b efforts of —immigrant populations, the majority of whom are in their childbearing years, gently declines. and the sales figures for sex aids go up. In the end, the modern nuclear parents gel whet they deserve' (my italics) long bar- ren meaningless old age • „ The rich the drunk in retirement x,Elages; the poor rot away in substandard housing in the decay- ing inner suburbs.'

Don't protest and say that you reject this Picture of Weston society. You have only had half the argument. Contrast all this honor with• the primitive peoples of the world who, though poor, count children as their greatest blessing. When a poor woman in ntual Egypt has a baby, she is not imbed into a National Health hospital.. At the onset of birth pangs, her house buzzes with the sisterhood of village women. Her mother takes her back„ two other members of the sorority take her legs, and the others Ina in rhythm with the spasms_ Never mind that dada= born in suds circumstances stand a high chance of dying or being hideousb diseased_ Euciyone accepts their existence. Instead of living off into 'nuclear families% the pensaimY of the v. odd mioine in their manhaship of a larger farn3Y- "They Fenny their old people. They do not need contraoeptito devices. Should an unmanned pp panty occur, thew are plenty of' goad oftl-faskro' ned methods of abortion to be Pactisrd- in "'mend, however, they are pond of their fatality_ ftestraint„ not pill, chalk", not iftmilnagms, snit people who at not con- centrating on themselves and their organns. The women of the Eton) in IGew Gana. for itstmoceare alias chaste_ And if you ask the manic hal question. 'Chased where?' the answer is, 'Imo the forests', for they do not penult- serval imitinconne in their hats. The saes hue separately. While the women are in one hat, the nou are ill another, getting the rguie boys to muftow

their semen b„ they say, is =tom* nutritious.

Into happy and ancient chanties's of this kind, the peoples of the West have had the sheer duck to intrude their own 'admire- Their comma with "over- panda:on' in die world is hosed purely on Weed- They 'swot to matt money selling EmPelloes jujus 10 the natives of Africa, South Amulet and Asia- If the jujus are cf- fecivr.„ that' be fewer gloving children to stank what is len of the Western corn- dam. Westerners have gone among the Ifanomano )runless and had the arrogance to assume that their pats and condoms were the best way of controlling the popolation; whenuts„ left to themselves. digit enfighten- ed race could go on jumping on the bellies of pregnant women [their method of abor- tion) or, if they forget to do so, practising infanticide.

Germaine Greer is, in other words, as far as possible from echoing Hilaire Belloc's sentiments: I thank my God for this at the least, I was born in the West and not in the East, And he made me a human instead of a beast Whose hide is covered with hair.

With the strident vigour and good humour which has made her popular with so many readers, she pours out statistics, opinions, anecdotes, case histories, and a torrent of semi-ordered facts, an- thropological, gynaecological, anatomical, medical, political, tragical-comical- historical-pastoral. Miss Greer does not speak quietly to her readers_ She harangues them with a loud blend of disparate erudi- tion and a rich mixture of metaphors. ('The Malthusian hypothesis is a sword to slice through the Gordian knot of mounting human misery., and many people, conscious of no desire to Wring the withers of the poor, baffled and hurt by the spectacle of their misery, need such a simple explana- tion'). By the final chapter, when our head is spinning and oar ear-drums are aching, she presents her conclusion of the whole matter: 'The Mvth of Over-Population'.

Let us take a .deep breath, and see how the argument runs, if there is an argument_ Fig, she addresses those who believe that 'if there west faux people, that would be mow of everything to go round'. Well, more of what? as bliss Greer. Take dives. In rural Tuscany., the only popula- tion. apart from. ev-edil ors and es- ministers, is an aging - peasantry. Ali the young people have left.. When the oldies get too decrepit to climb ladders, we will have seen the last of that worderftd thiek„ green olive of they make, and we wig al be eating Euro- lsalad dressing_ So, here we sec tilat fewer people Ile-Arls not to a water distrilsti- lion of resources bat to an and of those resources. Anyway, even if it didn't, we are not like the C:hinese Intro an have ration books. We are not committed Ito Noah* dings go tonal, so why should we deprive the poor of their one consolation? 'A child is neva an cnounbrance to a benne Besides, we haven't got to the point where human numbas base outstripped the earth's capadsly for food production and akeady they're starving_ Miss Greer once saw a filthy scurfy peasant woman in Intro., aippicd with porn. Site had a son at her side, and she was pennant again, and she "smiled like a goon". And another thing. Even if the world is overpopulated, and we are hoicks for catastrophe, 'perhaps catastrophe is the right human environ- urge_ (b?) While we art about it she ccialudes, why don't we ban tea, sugar and oft yes, someone has told her (one wonders who?) that that are a lot of swindlers mak- ing money at the commodity markets, par- tindarly in the Malaysian Metal Eszhange. 'Let us therefore abandon the rhetoric of crisis, for we are the crisis.'

I am not trying to make Miss Greer sound like the thinking woman's Glenda Slag. But it would be misleading to suggest that Sex and Destiny is a particularly well- balanced or well-argued piece of work. Facts and examples come flying at you from everywhere. They represent a prodigious range of reading, but they are quite un- distilled. Miss Greer throws them at us, huge numbers of examples and quotations, in such profusion that she easily loses the thread of her own argument. In a very lively chapter, for instance, called °Chastity is a form of birth control', she summons up a cloud of celibate witnesses: Catholic virgins, Burmese monks, soldiers and dons; the Dani of Irian Jaya, the Western Abelam of New Guinea; the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Ghegs of North Albania. The effect is not intended to be comic, but they all seem as if they have been lined up to be put into a patter song by Noel Coward. All we learn from this catalogue is that sexual restraint does not necessarily send people mad. But we knew that already, Miss Greer remains the Cambridge Ph.D. student, unable to believe that her readers will credit her with any knowledge at all unless she floods the page with exempla. The notes groan with the names of sexologists and an- thropologists. She takes pages to make points which could have been made succinctly in a few paragraphs.

But it is all argued with great gusto, and sometimes her missiles hit the coconut with vulgar precision. For instance, she has now become the champion of coitus interrupt us which she considers less messy than coils, less depressing than pills. In the event of ac- cidental pregnancy, she favours quick abor- tive action. As she points out, there is a lot of muddled talk about abortion. Many devices which we call contraceptive such as IUDs are really abortifacients. And for Catholics who say that a human soul is created three days after conception, she has some rough words. 'A Catholic biologist may baptise the contents of his petri dish before he washes them down the drain. A Catholic woman losing her blastocyst at menstruation has never been told of the possibility that a human life has just ended. It may seem very complicated to keep a jug of holy water beside the lavatory bowl to baptise sanitary napkins with, but it is no more elaborate than many of the rituals which believing people all over the world practise several times every day of their lives.'

This is to ignore any distinction between pregnancies ended by natural accident and those brought to an end by the design of the mother. But it also ignores the point of the Catholic objection to abortion. The conve- nience of the fiction that a 'soul' is created at a particular moment in the womb is that it inspires a cautious respect for human life in any form, embryonic or otherwise. Dis- counting all the absurd fairy tales of unbap- tised babies being sent to limbo, one can see a sturdy logic in the Catholic position which is absent in Miss Greer. She thinks, as pro- and disease and famine were PricesSell paying for an ill-regulated and s cleanliness to filth, medicine to n'ti that great literature to illiteracy? I am g23101, my children were born in a clean '`°‘,,,eritY rather than in a mud hut. f Cat° years of Europe than a cycle 0,- r own One would not apply to Miss Greer. trablY words for Marie Stopes — to romantic and pretentious'. But she fa,1,11;lor convince at least one reader that s4viorth Africa and the Americans. But d° e'' to think Christianity preferable to barb2ease, to imply that European culture is silacly matter of sex aids, tinned food ann,skets• deals on the international stock tri' mean that our ancestors were wr°13r7soi, erotic satisfaction. But her general pictP' 10 tion is shrinking while the poor of °to lands multiply. Within our own Wesctof world, she seems exultant at the prosPee by an ever-dwindling 'elite' being swamps hordes of child-loving simpletons. It ly Doubtless, it was worse than foolish ft°Asis, onise and 'europeanise' the peoPles ° that the extent to which Miss Greer,e,,stiliall maternal love so much more big" ureic philistine and sentimental. She seenl.siisx crow over the fact that European eivither that fertility is blessedness. Many rea t too, will find something very Poignalleas large numbers of people in the Westaillose children. Equally, we can believe that ":00s who fly round the poverty-stricken natio of the world advocating population have lost touch with the primitive be dens, b the Western 'nuclear family' is se, necessarily the best way to live. Of Otirate cepts the gush of the Catholic position that all human life is infinitely precious such creatures are precious to God' possible reason can we have for want,' only people to Many of Miss Greer's arguments af,,e'dge tower blocks cinhi what she was talking about. Was it for 11 the clay grew tall? Not to ask the purpos°, human life in the end trivialises it She without giving a single reason to subs,„alisi tiate her position. Unless we believe ":„t from the divorce rate, it would $cent not mmaundyhuptoslio-ridden mothers of twelve .111 bleakly admirable about the sentiment. nu at the same time one is bound to ask h°.v; template the world's poor and ask what ue they are, as they joy and sorrow, rnaltiPslY, and die.' Here it could be Mother Germaine of Calcutta speaking. There is sonaeth,ill The two most striking sentences in her h001` must Wuest dnootnasotk assikr jwuhliaatnthHeuxtiigeeyr is distinguish a particular moment when same time she has an enviable warmth 0', heart and a deeply passionate humanisn' occur at the end of her chapter on Eugenie!: "What are people for?" We cannot con' ` `foetus' turns into a 'person'. But at th course, unexceptionable. T° .1",11-at ll- have anexistence Can chip-ibattyo-rstuffedomulodroknas01%,:, Better y. 7 March ,1 , squfeostt;i; rchol90

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