By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, February 14, 2021
Today is the commemoration of Saint Valentine, a
celebrated martyr who, in spite of that bedazzled skull with his name on it
reverently displayed at a certain basilica in Rome, may not have technically
quite . . . existed. Or there might have been three of them — Roman
record-keeping, once rigorous, had declined somewhat by the third century, a
victim of imperial torpor, so it is difficult to say.
In any case, I do not expect Tetsushi Sakamoto to join
the many pilgrims who will visit Saint Valentine’s popular shrine (which is in
Dublin rather than in Rome) today, but perhaps he should. It is a beacon for
the lonely, and Sakamoto is Japan’s freshly commissioned “minister of
loneliness.”
Sakamoto, a member of a Japanese political association
described as “ultraconservative,” has much in common with a certain breed of
American conservative: His current portfolio includes projects intended to
revitalize economic backwaters in Japan and to reverse declining birthrates.
The latter job is not an easy one: Japan’s pregnancy rate declined steeply in
2020, by more than 5 percent, a consequence of the epidemic. Another way of
looking at that: Japan’s birthrate was hit almost exactly as hard by the
coronavirus as was its GDP.
“The spread of the coronavirus has many people worried
about getting pregnant, giving birth, and raising babies,” Sakamoto told the Straits Times. But this is a trend that
long predates the epidemic.
Japan has relatively few out-of-wedlock births, and its
declining birth rate is in part a consequence of its declining marriage rate.
In 1990, about 5 percent of Japanese 50 and over had never been married, and by
2010 that share had risen to more than 20 percent for men and more than 10
percent for women. The Japanese government projects that 15 years from now,
nearly a third of Japanese men and nearly a fifth of Japanese women will go
unmarried.
(It is a feature of many societies that the number of
never-married men far exceeds the number of never-married women: From a purely
evolutionary point of view, male reproductive capacity is expendable relative
to the female.)
The marriage trend is not much more promising in the
United States: Marriage has been declining steadily for decades, achieving a
record low in 2020. The United States has more out-of-wedlock births than does
Japan, but our relative promiscuity won’t save the fertility rate, which also
hit an all-time low last year.
It is not good that man should be alone.
Writing in the New
York Times last week, Melissa Kirsch explored “Cures for
Loneliness.” None of them sounded very convincing. The rest of the week’s
headlines contained much more of the same: a worrying study of the health
effects of loneliness on elderly people in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a
similar study of young people from Harvard’s
Graduate School of Education, con artists using dating apps to victimize
the lonely from the Netherlands to Turkey, “I
Sexted with a Bot to Quell Pandemic Loneliness.” Well-intentioned people
are distributing robot pets to the aged.
Japan appointed its loneliness czar in response to a
sharp increase in suicide rates. The great weight of loneliness is too much for
many among us to carry, from Tokyo to Baltimore. Between 2000 and 2016, the
rate of suicide among American men increased by nearly one-third. In the same
years, the suicide rate among American women increased by half.
Michel Houellebecq’s infamous novel about voluntary human
extinction was published as The
Elementary Particles in the United States, but in the United Kingdom the
title was Atomised, which more
economically describes the end state of an exclusively consumerist society, in
which personal relationships are more like restaurant meals than expressions of
a sacramental life. We live together alone, each at a table for one.
It is a life largely without any context other than
consumption.
Here, surrounded by wealth and power that would have
stunned a Roman emperor, our churches are full of women and men who are praying
for husbands and wives, for family of some kind, or for a friend. And behind
the doors that shut so many of us in are millions more who would be making the
same prayers if they knew how. We could, in at least this case, answer our own
prayers — not individually, one at a time on our own behalf, but together, as a
people and as a civilization. The way in which we choose to live is not the
only way to live.
Christians once studied the lives of the saints for
examples of that. The lives of The
Bachelor, picturesque though they may be, offer no such illumination.
Saint Valentine, if he existed at all, probably was
unmarried. He is not remembered for his commitment to romantic love but for a
passionate love of another kind, one that he would not abandon even under
threat of torture and execution. A martyr dies, but he does not die alone,
waiting helplessly for the Ministry of Loneliness to send the helpful Mr.
Sakamoto around to give him that which he already possesses.
And if we are lonely because of disappointment in marriage and family, that loneliness is only a portrait in miniature of the more profound separation between atomized people who, having too much and too little at the same time, sometimes in despair take their own lives because they have forgotten how to live and why.
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