The Technician's Apprentice

Why the silence of countless absent children is the price of our own immaturity

Today a brief discussion at the university where I spend much of my time set me thinking and provoked this flurry of words. The theme was pronatalism and the widening birth gap. I find the former compelling and the latter deeply alarming. My sentiments, however, were not widely shared. What became apparent in the exchange was that the frameworks through which I approached the issue were largely unintelligible to my Boomer interlocutors (although both have children). Unable to untangle and parse the conceptual gulf on the spot, I set my thoughts down here.

Every technology embodies a disposition—a pattern of priorities, assumptions, and incentives—and over time our relationship with it begins to mirror those values. The historical pattern is familiar. Whether the automobile, the computer, or social media, what begins as convenience gradually becomes infrastructure. Once embedded, technologies cease merely to serve us; we begin to reorganise ourselves around them. Systems develop their own imperatives—efficiency, optimisation, control—and institutions, habits of thought, and social expectations slowly crystallise around those imperatives. The logic of the system begins to guide human judgement rather than the other way around. In this way, tools quietly become environments, and the environments they create reshape the societies that inhabit them.

A further difficulty lies in the peculiar spirit with which modern societies approach technological innovation. Our relationship to our own powers remains remarkably immature. Goethe captured the problem well in the figure of the sorcerer’s apprentice: powers are invoked that exceed the wisdom of the one who summons them. Unlike the apprentice, however, we cannot expect the master to return and restore order once the spell runs out of control. The operative question is rarely whether a technology should exist, but simply whether it can. This immature orientation toward technical possibility continually propels civilisation into territories for which it possesses neither the moral imagination nor the practical wisdom to prepare.

Against this background, I find a simple distinction proves useful when considering the ethical character of particular technologies. Some technologies operate in a restorative mode. Spectacles are a mundane but instructive example. They restore sight to the wearer, allowing him to exercise a natural capacity that has been impaired. The technology remains subordinate to the human being who uses it. Many forms of medicine function in a similar fashion. Though accompanied by the ever-present possibility of side-effects and unintended consequences, they are nevertheless ordered toward the restoration of the body’s natural powers.

Other technologies, however, operate in a fundamentally different register. Rather than restoring human capacities, they inhibit or override them. Birth control belongs to this latter category. Its function is not to repair the body so that it may fulfil its natural processes, but precisely to interrupt one of those processes. It deliberately inhibits the biological orientation of the female body toward conception and the nurturing of new life. In this respect it differs in kind, rather than merely in degree, from the therapeutic technologies that characterise most of modern medicine.

The distinction I am making here, while admittedly simple, echoes themes present in the work of thinkers such as Ivan Illich and Aristotle. Illich used the term iatrogenesis to describe interventions that undermine the body’s own capacities or generate new forms of dependency. His concern was not merely the side-effects of medical intervention but the broader cultural displacement of human capacities by technical systems. In a similar vein, Aristotle asked whether actions or tools supported or frustrated the natural telos of a faculty—whether they assisted the fulfilment of a natural function or impeded it.

Debates about pro- and antinatalism are frequently framed in terms of political anxieties—women’s rights on the one hand, or nationalism and eugenics on the other. Yet such framing often obscures the deeper issue. The more fundamental question concerns the technological orientation itself: what it means for a civilisation to direct its technical ingenuity not merely toward healing and restoration, but toward the suppression of one of its most fundamental and mysterious powers. The matter, in other words, is not simply demographic or political but civilisational. It concerns the trajectory of technological power and the degree of wisdom with which human beings govern the forces they have unleashed.

It also seems to me that the very people most likely to make use of contraceptive technology are often the least equipped to wield it wisely. When this technology is deployed within the broader imperatives of a technological society such as ours—where efficiency, convenience, and economic calculation increasingly shape the conditions of life, and where the state steadily assumes functions once carried by the family—it is hardly surprising that many young people become unwilling or unable to have children. The wisdom required to understand what has been relinquished, if it emerges at all, tends to arrive much later in life, when the very possibility that has been so successfully suppressed can no longer be recovered.

Gustav Kimt “Die Familie”

From the outside, the prospect of having children—particularly under the pressures and incentives of technological society—may appear daunting and even irrational. According to the shallow consumerist values of our culture it certainly does not resemble the sort of decision that a calculating individual would freely choose. Yet this observation may reveal something important. For most of human history it was not experienced as a “choice” in the modern sense, and perhaps for good reason. The joys that outweigh the sacrifices of raising a family cannot be grasped abstractly, for they do not belong to that mode of thought. They can only be understood from within, through the actual experience of those who become parents.

Perhaps those in a position to genuinely gainsay me will do so, and perhaps they should. I write all this as someone who has yet to become a father—though the prognosis in my case looks favourable. However, recently I became godfather to my sister’s first child, a healthy boy whose arrival has invigorated our wider family in ways that transcend mere words. Even the simple act of bringing his face to mind stirs in me a sense of meaning that finds few rivals in my nearly forty years. If this small participation in the mystery of life is any indication of the real thing, then there is little I would not give to experience and inhabit this gift myself.