The Catholic times. [volume] (Columbus, Ohio) 1951-current, 1960-03-04
JOSEPH BREIC-
Hail the
New Age

Sometimes, as | read or hear the contraception
propaganda that is all around us nowadays, a strange
feeling comes over me that the anti-birth advocates
must have awakened just this minute from about a
century of Rip Van Wrinkle snoozing, and have not yet
been told about the things that happened while they
were sleeping.
AFTER ALL, THE year 1860, more than any other
period in history, is precisely the time when it seems
most dinosaurlSh and antediluvan for anybody to 60
into a great fret about whether there might come to
be SO many human beings that we won't be able to
feed them.
Isay this not merely because the American people
are spending billions of dollars annually to farmers
for not farming, and for storing the enormous food sur
pluses that pile up In warehouses anyhow although
surely this fact alone ought to make us suspect that
there is something very foolish about the population
explosion" uproar.
BUT AM ooKiNG at much wider horizons.
What has been achieved in America through scientific
agriculture and substitution Of machinery for hand
labor will certainly be accomplished soon III dozens of
other lands. | should think it highly likely that in a
decade or two most of mankind will have far more
than enough to eat.
Even when that has been said, only the surface
of the future has been scratched. Mankind is emerg-
ing into a new age of breathtaking marvels in produc-
t ion, transportation, communication, technology, re-
search and development.
A sheer embarrassment of riches in what we prob
ably will be facing before long; and our problem will
be to persuade human beings not to become material
istlc pleaSure-seekers rather than where to find
food with which to keep them alive.
UNLESS YOUR MEMORY is shorter than mine
- and of that | would accuse nobody - you can recall
that only a decade or two ago one of the popular SUBJ
lectS of discussion was whether there we're any new
frontiers for coming generations to explore.
Today. the question to be decided by any young
person is, which of a beWildering variety of frontiers
should he or she select?
Human knowledge has multiplied to the point
where nobody can hope to know much about many
things. Everybody must specialize. Projects must be
carried out not by individuals but by teams and big
organizations; and only electronic c%omputers can
wreStle successfully with the immensely and COM
plexity of the data assembled.
WE ARE SHOWED UNDER in frontiers - if |
may use SO scrambled a figure of speech. Merely by
looking upward, one can see space filled with them.
Even right here on earth, there are almost count
less frontiers-geographical, scientific, medical, tech
biological, physiological, philosophical and the like.
This is not to deny that there are special problems
in places like India. But the right solution is to hasten,
by national and international effort, the development
of such nations-not to teach the people contracep-
ton.
A FROM HAVING too many of us on our
planet, we are likely to find soon enough that there
are not going to be enough of us to do the great things
that are crying out to be done.
The reality about the 1865, | think, is this: we
are moving toward a breakthrough into a dizzingly
magnificent era of progress and development through
world cooperation.
Slowing this breakthrough for the moment is
musty. stone-age goddess Marxist reactlonarism, and
some other follies almost as anachronistic. Once the
iron curtain falls, as | am convinced it must, ! think
everybody will be laughing at this period of nervous
nellie fears about "oyer-population,"