Europe, Youth and the Challenges of the 21st Century
It is no secret to anyone that the future of Europe at this beginning of the
Third Millennium, does not seem to promise to continue the upward trend of
the last 200 years. The dramatic aging of the population will continue to
present in the next 2 or 3 decades extremely serious problems in the spheres
of the economy and public assistance. And if we consider the growing loss
of civility and order which begins on the boarders of our cities, and is
becoming ever more pervasive, it becomes obvious that real steps must be
taken to ward off total social chaos which is unavoidable in our changed
society.
The situation in which we find ourselves is the result of a clash of
cultural trends which is causing serious disruptions in all the world’s
societies. For the time being each country and each culture is convulsed by
changes that are hard to handle. These changes are due mainly to two great
advances: the technological advances which have given extraordinary
opportunities for information and communication, on the one hand, and the
inventions which have freed so many millions from the isolation of grueling
manual labor, be it at home or in the fields.
We cannot say that these advances are not good. They are giving the
world’s populations the opportunity to be more informed, and freer to reach
their mental and spiritual potential.
However, these technological advances came so suddenly that they
have been very difficult to absorb. The generation before mine was born
before the automobile and the airplane were invented, and lived to fly
intercontinentally in great comfort. Meanwhile, two World Wars pretty well
wiped out 2 generations of young men.
For this reason, and because of the sudden arrival from the 1950’s of
many labor-saving devices and comfort, in the Christian West, the
phenomenon of the hippy generation appeared and materialism and
feminism spread. A culture of “use it and throw it away” became popular,
which is also now applying to human life.
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Throughout the history of humanity, the virtues which were the basis
of human progress had always been learned the hard way, through arduous
work in fields and farms and the huge difficulties for women raising their
families. These virtues were suddenly no longer needed in order to live
comfortably. All that was needed was money, which became the main goal
in many lives.
The state of the world we live in is the result of this process, in my opinion.
Discovering virtues.
Virtue, however, at least in the West, has been a word which for these
past 50 years has been considered practically an indecent word: judgmental,
bigoted and thoroughly “un-PC” (un politically-correct!). During most of
history, virtue was taught, admired and generally sought after. Then, as we
all know, relativism became dominant in our culture, pragmatism was
espoused, and the most unpardonable solecism was to seem to be
“imposing” an opinion or way of life. And so we find a world in deep
trouble.
Thirty years of work in this field has convinced me that virtue is still
the heart’s longing. In spite of this sinking into immorality, corruption and
even lawlessness that we see about us, every human being knows virtue
when he or she sees it, and desires to possess it.
My son works with gangs of young criminals: murderers, thieves and
traffickers. These young men, like anyone else, understand and admire
courage, loyalty, generosity, perseverance, justice, and so on. But they have
no idea how to live these virtues. They apply them completely wrong.
How to teach virtue once more is the big challenge. Former
generations had the benefit of parents and grandparents who held virtue
high. They had the benefit of a huge literature, both written and oral, which
told of virtue, how to acquire it and examples of every kind. And, more
importantly, perhaps, former generations had the advantage of living
realism, at every moment. Physical effort had to be made to gain each
desire: for water one had to go to the well; to have food one had to plant and
cultivate; one had to walk to get to where one was going…or dominate some
beast.
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All this is now gone and children and young people are born into a
world where it is difficult to separate fact from fantasy. So much is easy; so
much is to be bought. Distances seem not to exist. Commitment is
avoidable; virtue is distorted and anti-values appear admirable.
And so in many parts of the world, particularly the urban world, many
distortions occur and young people are led, willy-nilly, to a life without the
benefits of virtue, and suffer the terrible consequences. Promiscuity, with its
results of disease, heartbreak and breakdown of every sort; and the
nightmare of boys joining gangs of young criminals are problems we see
every day. These are considered social problems, but in fact they are but the
result of a society that no longer teaches the logic of the virtues.
Seeing the breakdown, not only of society, but also of faith, that is
putting our civilization at risk, the Church is launching a huge effort to
evangelize. I believe, however, that a firm basis of what we could call the
“logic of life” must be laid down in the minds and consciousness of human
beings before the mysteries of the faith can be comprehended. A sense of the
realities of cause and effect must prepare young people for commitment to
what the faith will require of them. Young people must learn to see beyond
themselves and their desires, in order to be capable of self-gift.
If we are to correct the problems of loss of faith, loss of ambition,
family breakdown, of the incredibly low birthrate that threatens our very
existence, and the problems of violence and abandonment, we must teach
once more the fundamental virtues. In our time, however, we cannot
necessarily count upon parents. Parents today are obliged to go out to work,
because of high taxation and low salaries.
The need for Fathers, Mothers and Marriage
Motherhood and fatherhood, the love of children and the desire for
children have been tragically subverted by the ‘responsible parenthood,’
‘smaller family,’ ‘sustainable growth’ philosophy. The generous love of
children, of many children, is the sign of healthy marriage, healthy faith and
healthy society, no matter what religion or society we speak of.
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Governments must dare again to encourage large, intact families.
This takes real courage, as it is the most “un-Politically Correct” stand of our
time. Almost any belief is tolerated today, except the desire to have many
children. A society, as we know, is measured by its attitude to its weaker
members and especially to children, and the late 20th century scored very
badly.
Our societies, and frequently good professionals, are undermining the
love of children with a false and dangerous ‘understanding’ of the ‘need for
responsibility,’ reinforced by increasing levels of material comfort. At the
same time we witness impotently the devaluation of fatherhood, which is
each day becoming more feminine, as changing diapers has become more
important than firmly insisting on good behavior.
Fair wage for fathers so mothers have a choice to bring up their
children.
At the start of this century, the Church wrote much about the just
family wage for workers. This teaching was vital and it was effective.
Unfortunately, since the disruption of the World Wars, it has been derailed
and neutralized. We have been confused by the often-correct rhetoric about
the education and inclusion of women. However, their right to work has
become the obligation to work and the effect has been that we have tolerated
changes in the economy and in taxation, which have lowered the effective
pay of fathers and caused the woman’s wage to become indispensable. The
bearing of multiple children has come to be considered a privilege for the
elites. (Elites, who frequently are the ones who least desire them).
All Christians must re-examine the importance of children; the
incomparable value, and immeasurable satisfaction of having large families,
and unite their efforts to insure that laws, international treaties and the
economy cease to penalize the large family.
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Human Capital
Until now we have spoken of theory. Now we must talk about
practice: what are we to do about the situation we face as we speed toward
2030?
A wise professor I heard in England 20-some years ago, Richard
Whitfield, had a marvelous way to describe the situation. He said “If
someone falls off a high cliff, we send an ambulance immediately. If another
young person falls from the same cliff, we send another ambulance. After a
number of them have fallen, rather than send more ambulances, we should
really go up and see why they are falling off.”
All periods of decadence have had the same characteristics.
Promiscuity, vulgarity and the degradation of the arts are followed by the
refusal to bear children, and then economic stagnation sets in.
The ancient Greeks had a saying that “when the gods want to destroy
a people, they first make them mad.” Well, by the same token, when the
Devil wants to destroy a civilization, he first undermines love, and that of
course he does by glorifying sensuality. Our time not only has made “sex”
the one driving force, commercially, culturally, socially, but together with
this has made selfishness the order of the day. The “me” generation, the
“why not?”, the “just do it” mentality, which started in the 1960’s, has
devolved in a widespread breakdown of families, and threatens the cohesion
of our whole society. The utter folly of this so-called pursuit of happiness is
causing ever increasing misery, poverty and destruction.
The continuous development and enrichment of our society in the last
200 years is now at serious risk of stagnation and decline, due to the
negative population growth resulting from these attitudes that have
overtaken almost every developed country, as well as many not yet
developed ones. Russia we hear is losing 700.000 population each year.
Japan, which 30 years ago ruled the economic world, is gradually losing
position as the results of the “2-child family,” established as the norm in the
40’s, begin to kick in.
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Poverty, violence, drug abuse are rife in the cities of the world. These
are symptoms and they require deep analysis and positive thinking to
determine and eradicate the causes. Obviously, a deep faith and a practiced
Christianity would be very helpful for solving all these problems. We are
urged by the Holy Father to be missionaries and apostles. However, we find
that this is quite difficult. People do not want to hear the Christian message.
Somehow the noise and the ethic of selfishness seem to blind our listeners.
People want to hear “facts”, or “Science”, not religious teaching.
Fortunately there is a great deal of science to help us to understand the
phenomena we are witnessing and to help us to find solutions: so we are in
luck.
Viktor Frankl, the great neurologist and psychiatrist, has given the
world the most marvelous scientific explanation of what is happiness.
Frankl, an Austrian Jew, explains neurologically the human and cerebral
reasons why the message of Our Lord is true. He explains why the only way
to happiness is dedicating ourselves to something outside our self and more
important than our self. He proves this through his science, and also through
what he witnessed in the Nazi concentration camps during the 7 years of
WWII.
Development theory has also finally come around to a startling and
most unexpected conclusion….just read the books coming out of Harvard
and other Universities! The professor who won the Nobel Prize for
Economics in 1994 won it for quantifying the value of what he called
Human Capital. Human Capital according to this Prof. Gary Becker, is the
proportion of the population that is endowed with the values and virtues of
honesty, loyalty, laboriousness, and so on and without which a country
cannot thrive. Becker maintains that these values are taught by mothers, in
the home at an early age.
It is now being taught that “there can be no development without
education in values.” This from Lawrence Harrison, who directed the US
Agency for International Development in Latin America for 30 years or so.
And what are these values? Well, according to Bernardo Kliksberg, a World
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Bank authority on development, they are the values that make up Social
Capital: the values that allow cooperation and collaboration, which are
honesty, responsibility, trustworthiness, and so on.
So these wonderfully scientific people, experts in economy and
development come to our aid with practical arguments for teaching people to
live good lives.
Then there are other scientists looking at another side of the social
problems we would like to solve. And what do we find? More allies. What
is now known about economics and development coincides interestingly
with the latest findings in neurology.
The Family and the brain
The formation of whole, healthy and happy individuals is certainly the
most important element of any society, and the origin of what is now called
‘emotional intelligence’ is to be found in the developing brain of small
children.
In the closing decade of the millennium, the 1990’s, astonishingly
detailed information about the human brain, its formation and its needs,
began to be known.
The most advanced studies of neuroscience, and the explosion of new
data made possible by a technology never before dreamed of, have been able
to plot to an astonishing degree the neurobiology of emotional development,
whose foundations are laid down in the first 2 or 3 years of life.
A remarkable interdisciplinary work has been done by Dr. Allan
Schore, who has collected the most outstanding new data from hundreds of
recent studies from many fields involving the human brain and human
emotions. This important work is entitled Affect Regulation and the Origin
of the Self1. For us, who are concerned with children and family, this work
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Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self by Allan N. Schore, 1994, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Inc. Publishers, 365 Broadway, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 07642
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is of vital importance because in this age of facts, we require solid
knowledge.
Outstanding in these brain studies is the importance of the mutual
gaze of mother and baby. This interaction, which every mother will
recognize immediately and which make a baby so time-consuming, is now
discovered by science to be more than simply the intense enjoyment derived
by mothers and babies from the hours of eye-contact that they have each
day: while feeding, changing, gurgling at each other, or just gazing. What is
actually happening is that the mutual gaze is forming, building, arousing,
exciting, imprinting the baby’s brain and causing him or her to develop,
physically, the in-born potential to be a happy, balanced, self-aware and selfconfident individual.
Mutual gaze with a series of care-givers, as found in day-care
facilities, will not have the same effect, it now becomes apparent. Lack of
that special and abundant eye contact with one special woman (usually our
mother) will mean a deficiency in the actual brain ‘hardware.’ Other studies
in this extraordinary collection explain the neurobiological importance of a
great number of other normal activities between mothers and toddlers. The
brain, then, does not simply grow according to a set pattern when sufficient
exercise and nutrition are provided. No, the loving and intense presence of
one particular person must be guaranteed in order to cause optimum
development.
Science now tells us without a shadow of a doubt, that mothers, in
constant contact with their babies, are actually forming the baby’s
brain…particularly in the right hemispheric orbitofrontal cortex…the
cortico-limbic lobes and in the intricate connections which will determine
his or her emotional well-being and sense of self for the remainder of earthly
existence. She does this with her eyes, her voice, her reactions and her
touch. It is a transfer, if you will, of creative energy---of love-- from her
brain to the baby’s brain through their senses, mainly their eyes.
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When we see the extensive studies since 1990 so brilliantly collected
by Dr. Schore, it becomes obvious that the age-old fascination with
motherhood has not been misplaced.
This discovery has, of course, grave implications for our generation of
professional mothers, but is also a cause for great joy. It promises to return
to motherhood the primary and privileged importance which our ancestors
gave it from earliest recorded time. Mothers provide the first formation of
the human heart. And cause, even more provably, the formation of the
human brain, that amazing organ whose electrical-chemical workings and
development are increasingly known, but whose intuitive capacities remain a
mystery.
So, the health of the human heart begins with the earliest and most
intimate experience of family: the mother and her new-born baby. But more
is needed. More data and more facts are coming to light which show that
mother and child, inextricably and indispensably as they are bound up, are
not a complete family. Much as the social sciences and loving, wellintentioned people have wanted to believe it, a family without the
dependable presence of a father suffers almost intolerable pressure. The
data on poverty, school desertion, delinquency, and violent crime, all
indicate that fathers are essential. Fathers are vital not only in order to give
mothers the security and time to do the brain- and heart-building that the
children require. Fathers are necessary also for their unique and contrasting
manner with the children which builds parts of the emotional and cognitional
hardware which mothers do not develop.
Statistics today, studied in the USA (Mapping America,
www.MARRI.frc.ORG ), are proving conclusively that between 80% and 90%
of social problems are the result of abandonment of the father. This applies
to violent crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, school desertion and
others. Where the biological father and mother raise the children to
adulthood, these social problems are rare.
However, as the work of fathers has taken them further and further
from the home, fatherhood has lost status. It has lost status to the degree that
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our world, a world that has less and less experience of fatherhood, has lost
touch with fatherliness to the point of almost declaring it unnecessary or
non-existent,….or even harmful.
But the security that the perceived strength and wisdom of his or her
father gives a child is immeasurable, at least by current technology, although
probably the neurological effect will soon be measured as are so many other
influences presently being discovered at the brain level.
Church teaching, which applies to all of us, must support mothers by
supporting fatherhood; this seems clear. But I would add that the Church
must help and revitalize fathers by encouraging motherhood.
A family, then, needs mother and father, both unconditionally
committed to each other and to the child or children. The requirement of
unconditionality in the commitment is another subject, but one which is
indicated by a growing body of impressive research.
Forming people to form families
Family, peace, happiness, whichever way you combine them, come
back to an unpopular concept: commitment. In our age dominated by
emotion, sensation, and new ideologies crying out for emotional and
sensational liberty, commitment has become the Cinderella of the virtues.
Not only unappreciated, unpopular and misunderstood, commitment is now
discouraged and even discriminated against in many ways.
But the worst thing that has happened to commitment, and to families,
is something called Sex Education.
Sex Education has been the most effective vehicle of the 20 th century
for changing---destroying if you prefer---concepts and behaviour in regard to
relations between the sexes and the functions of family.
I will not go into the vulgar details of the “Sex Education” currently
being applied in most countries of the world, nor the harm it is causing in
terms of disordered sexuality, particularly among teens. The statistics about
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Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD’s), teenage pregnancy, violence and
fatherless children speak for themselves for all those interested.
More to the point is to speak about an alternative. Children and
adolescents need facts, and need to know an enormous amount about
themselves and personal relations in order to be prepared to meet the
challenges of an increasingly complicated world. This knowledge must be
given in schools, where young people spend most of their waking days. I
think there is no argument about this. Knowledge is what school is all
about.
The question is: will young people be truly helped by increasingly
exhaustive description and study of every detail of the exterior human
genitals and by progressively scabrous depictions of sexual intercourse? Or
will the damage to their natural decency and reticence cause behavior and
experimentation which will endanger their happiness?
Would it not be preferable to give young people an education in
sexuality which would be education in wholeness, peace, and the human
heart?
The Alliance for the Family, of which I am founder, took the decision
some years ago to counter the invasion of scabrous sex education materials
which is threatening to take over the culture and religion of our region, with
a positive alternative.
This was an easy decision to take, but a very long and difficult task to
fulfill. We began by agreeing on a definition of Sex Education, which has
existed for too long without one. We said that “Sex Education is all that an
individual must learn, from birth, that will prepare him or her to live a happy
and permanent life as a couple.” Of course that is a tall order. So we
continued: in order to live happily and permanently with another person, one
must learn, at the very least, to be generous, loyal, just, truthful, responsible,
committed, and a long list of other desirable virtues. We included in our list
quite a few skills, such as negotiation and decision-taking.
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With the help of an excellent interdisciplinary team, we have put
together a series of 12 text-books for students aged 6 to 18, for use in
schools. The Series is called Alive to the World. Each text consists of 35
chapters or lessons, one for each week of the school year. There is a
Teacher’s manual for each year, with background information, further
reading, discussion points, activities, and so on.
We have drawn upon the wisdom of people so varied as Piaget, Viktor
Frankl, David Isaacs, Thomas Likona, Becker, Kliksberg, William Bennett
and others, to teach at each level the virtues and values which are most
readily learned at that age. There are windows of opportunity, as we know,
for learning friendship, confidence, tolerance, courage, leadership, decisiontaking. As most parents have experienced and Aristotle explained so long
ago, the best way to teach the young is through example and through stories.
So, we have woven all these things into an entertaining series of
episodes about schoolmates and friends and family members, and the
adventures, misadventures, discussions and interaction of these. Many
classic stories, such as the Ugly Duckling or tales of courage like Horatius at
the Bridge, are worked in as reading for class discussion and we are
therefore able to give meaning and practicality to many otherwise abstract
points.
This series is about commitment, fair play, and friendship. But it is
also about love, about cherishing, about the beauty of courtship, of marriage
and the miracle of life. Procreation is taught in detail, but without the
external organs or other elements which cause such embarrassment and
ultimately such callousness, in other programmes. These are not necessary in
order to understand the depth and fascination relative to being man or
woman.
Peace and the Human Heart
I will describe Alive to the World as an illustration of what can supply
young human hearts with the knowledge they require in order to choose
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freely to be whole, in order to form lasting families and in order to have
peace in their lives. It is not religious; it is about universal human values,
which are easily recognized as Christian virtues.
Book by book
Alive to the World is a complete curriculum designed for use in
classrooms and covers grades 1 through 12, as I mentioned. In books 1 and
2 they learn about what human beings are and how they are different from
animals, how they fit into families, have emotions and so on.
Book 3, We are a Great Team, for 8 year olds, is more challenging
and centers on the desire all 8 year olds have to be included and do well on a
team. This offers us the perfect tool to teach those prized virtues of fair play,
justice, abiding by the rules, respecting the authority of a team leader or
captain. Through the sports we can easily make them understand the
importance of each person and the responsibility of each to pull his or her
weight. Cheating can be easily recognized as ruining the game.
Perseverance, sacrifice and generosity are obvious virtues valuable on a
team, and of course humility is what makes winners. Half way through this
book, when the virtues of sports are well understood, Charles and Alice
discover that family is their first team and subject to all of the above. The
school works by the same principles and of course so does their community
and any democracy.
In Book 4, Caring and Sharing, the story of Charles and Alice finds
them discovering about respect for property and their adventures lead them
to understand the need for and joy of sharing, lending, and the responsibility
of taking care of the property of others.
Book 5 Different and Complementary is a fun book where the
immense diversity of human cultures and ways of life are an introduction to
the fact that all humans share the same basic needs of shelter, food and
affection, even in apparently very different circumstances. Exploring the
reality of the enormous variety of talents and weaknesses of each human
person makes fascinating reading at this age, and helps the students to be
understanding and appreciative of his or her self and of others. Family is a
big factor in this book also and commitment is the underlying theme as the
complementarity of men and women is explored, with emphasis on the
different brain structure of boys and girls. These differences are explained in
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a way which also helps boys and girls to understand why they are so
different and sometimes so very annoying to each other and with such
different ways and speeds of learning.
Book 6 is called Friends! and is an exhaustive look at friendship of
all kinds, the virtues of friendship, with loyalty, truthfulness and respect at
the fore. Using and being used, as well as peer pressure, are important
topics in this book. Joining different kinds of groups is illustrated too as
Charles joins the Boy Scouts and Alice briefly gets sucked in to a group of
girls who like to shoplift.
Book 7 is called Changes and Challenges and deals with more
responsibilities, going deeper into living respect, generosity, and balancing
school and family. This book discusses emotional and physical changes and
the need for cleanliness and good grooming, as well as showing how their
changing attitudes toward their parents can be a source of new adult thinking
rather than a cause for conflict.
At each level some aspect of human procreation is covered, the
miracle of life, genetics and inheritance, and so on. No explicit material or
illustrations will cause embarrassment.
Books 8-12, for the 13-18 year olds, Personality Plus, Future Focus,
Worth Waiting For, The Future Begins Now and Facing the Big Decisions
all deal more in depth with the changeable feelings of teenage. Care is taken
in this story of Charles and Alice and their friends to show the difference
between attraction, the ‘crush’ and true love. These 5 books qualify as
Abstinence Education. Contraceptives are all described scientifically, with
their side effects and disadvantages. The ovulation method is briefly
described.
Each of these books has a companion book for the teacher or parent,
wherein each chapter is explained with background material and discussion
points and activities are suggested.
Alliance for the Family has produced teacher training courses of
varying lengths and intensity. The most used is a 16 hour course for
teachers. We have a 77 hour course for Seminarians interested in how to
approach the teaching of sexuality in harmony with Humanae Vitae and
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John Paul II’s anthropology. We have also organized several Specialization
courses for University Level in Latin America.
Our pedagogy uses what Thomas Likona calls the Head, Heart and
Hand approach. So each lesson has specific objectives for understanding,
accepting and doing.
What started out for one country now is circulating in 15, and has an
adaptation for Africa about to come out. Because it is anthropologically
based, we were happy to discover that the African version needed very little
changing, just some sports, idioms and of course the illustrations.
I believe that we will not convince our countries to protect unborn life
as long as the culture we live in is a selfish culture where the virtues are not
lived. We must continue to save babies and help mothers not to abort their
children. But I believe that the only approach that is realistic is to form the
children of our countries in the virtues which teach young people how to live
a virtuous life; how to choose their spouses with a family-oriented criterion;
to see the beauty and importance of raising children; and how to live a life of
commitment and self-gift with joy.
Our Lord came to bring us the Good News. That Good News is about
Love, sacrificial love. It is in generous families that this love can be taught
and learned.
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