The Cult of Sterility: How Modern Culture Declared War on Human Fecundity

With steady regularity, news items appear in mainstream publications discussing male sterilisation or, in the conveniently obscure medical jargon, vasectomies. Although “discussing” is a stretch: despite the obligatory caveats about pain and permanence, the tone is uniformly affirmative. In July of this year, an article on BBC News ran under the headline: ‘Why I don’t regret choosing a vasectomy in my 20s.’ In May, a Guardian headline read: ‘My first thought after having a vasectomy: why aren’t more men having them?’ The Independent topped them both: ‘Why getting a vasectomy has made me feel more of a man.’ Critical commentary, to the extent that it can be found, is tucked away in harmless Christian corners of the internet.

Taken as a whole, mainstream discourse is indistinguishable from a concerted promotion campaign. The effort to normalise the procedure – to reduce it to another consumer ‘choice’ – is not subtle. The two men profiled by BBC News, for example, merely did what “thousands more men in England have done in recent years”. The numbers from the latest reporting period, we read, are up 16%, which includes – encouragingly – an increase among those under 30. Wherever it still lingers, the taboo around the topic is condemned as anachronistic, while the style of writing is often strangely ironic, even jaunty. ‘Snip happy,’ runs the title of another 2026 piece in the Guardian, accompanied by an image of a pair of scissors cutting a banana.

What is going on here? Vasectomies are first legitimised (there’s no shame in them), then normalised (everyone’s having them) and finally trivialised (they’re actually kind of a laugh). There is a studied refusal to entertain the deeper implications of the operation, which is further obscured by its euphemistic association with ‘health care’. For what, exactly, does sterilisation have to do with health? The aim is to inflict permanent injury on the body: not to make whole but to pull apart, not to heal but to destroy. However practical one might find it, the honest name for such a thing is mutilation. It is precisely for this reason that vasectomies were banned in France, under the Napoleonic Code, until 2001.

That the practice is medically sanctioned, and otherwise free of controversy, is surprising enough. But the ambivalence within certain Christian circles is more confusing, especially given the context of procreation. For Nietzsche, who mocked as decadent the aversion to children, such unscrupulous intervention into the human body would have confirmed the complacency of man under secular conditions. “Hubris”, he writes in the Genealogy of Morals (1887), “characterises today our whole attitude towards nature, our violation of nature with the help of machines and the completely thoughtless ingenuity of technicians and engineers.” Hubris, he continues, characterises our attitude towards both God and “ourselves – for we experiment on ourselves in a way we would never allow on animals”. Having abandoned the sense of restraint and humility that follows from the idea of God, modern man rearranges nature, including his once sacred body, as he please. Nothing is revered beyond the whims of the day.

The implications of mass voluntary sterilisation, however, run considerably deeper. True to the premise of his most famous title, the Decline of the West (1918/22), Oswald Spengler regarded the increasing deliberation over reproduction – the very concept of family planning – as a harbinger of the collapse of civilisation. In a remarkable passage from the book’s second volume, he writes:

When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard ‘having children’ as a question of pros and cons, the great turning-point has come. … When reasons have to be put forward at all in questions of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins the prudent limitation of the number of births.

The decisive point is that, throughout history, the recurring ambivalence towards procreation is not to be understood materially, in terms of economics or physiology. Contrary to today’s debates about falling birth rates, “the sterility of civilised man”, Spengler stresses, reflects “an essentially metaphysical turn towards death”. Advanced civilisations, whether in Mesoamerica or ancient Rome, inevitably lose the will to live. In each case, the rot sets in long before the invasion of the Spanish conquistadors or the Germanic hordes.

That the contemporary West, and increasingly much of the world, is shaped by this dynamic is hardly controversial. Vasectomy discourse is dominated by the question of who bears the ‘contraceptive burden’ (men or women). The need to avoid pregnancy, meanwhile, has become wholly axiomatic. Today, however, the ‘sterility of man’ extends far beyond prospective parents and their falsely coveted freedom. How else are we to make sense of the ubiquitous rainbow flag, for example? An essential part of secular iconography, the sexuality it represents has necessarily detrimental implications for family formation and, at the extremes, also entails the mutilation of the sex organs. The point here, of course, concerns the philosophical significance of the political campaigning, not the morality of individuals.

Whether in the context of family planning or sexual identity, the obvious effort to subvert human fecundity points towards a contrived cult of sterility. The word ‘mother’ might not yet be an obscenity as it is in Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), but whether we know it or not, the mantra of that dystopia has long become our own: “Civilisation is Sterilisation.” The effects of this logic are visible everywhere: not just in matters of procreation but also in the built environment – in the sleek, antiseptic style of the airport terminal, in which our culture finds its highest architectural expression. The collective hysteria of the Covid era, when being human meant spreading disease, is of course unthinkable without it. Nothing says more about contemporary society, its aesthetic sensibility and image of man, than the ready adoption of latex gloves, face masks and hand gel.

Where exactly this cult comes from, what motivates its misanthropy, is hard to say; Christians no doubt have their own ideas. But in the image of a comprehensive machine world, Huxley provides at least one plausible explanation. For the triumph of that world, which is almost total in the digital West, presupposes the defeat of nature and the creative chaos that it represents. Unlike the rich, humane values of our cultural tradition, whether freedom and beauty or dignity and justice, machine technology and the technocrats who administer it, know only one – efficiency. That which disturbs the seamless operation of the global societal machine, the compliant hum of the silicon hive, must be tamed, expelled or otherwise overcome.

This is why, at least since the onset of artificial intelligence, the technological future has acquired distinctly post-human connotations. For it is precisely the all-too-human individual, in his alternately fallible and creative ways, that represents the timeless troublemaker – sand in the gears, a spanner in the works. To the extent that humanity has any place in this future, it is not as a quality or condition but a mere zoological category: a uniform mass of ahistorical bodies with neither name nor kin. Followed to its logical conclusion, this dystopian vision is what sterilisation, as a cult or credo, ultimately implies. Terrified of life, it is the attempt to refashion man in the image of his proudest creation. As the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Georg Jünger writes, articulating the maxim behind contemporary thinking: “The world is a machine, man an automaton.”

Bleak though the outlook seems, there is no reason to believe that today’s machine-inspired sterility cult will last. I should know. Having once undergone a vasectomy myself, I promptly had it reversed, sensing – to my horror – the cult to which I unwittingly belonged. I have since welcomed my now two year-old son into the world, who is nothing short of a gift from God. Despite the relentless offensive, mounted from every aspect of official and corporate culture, there remains something awkwardly vital about modern man. Something that points, beyond the barren landscape of the all-encompassing machine, to the wild fecundity of nature. Something instinctively repulsed by the impotent automata that we are otherwise urged to become.

For Nietzsche, at least, this repulsion was the basis of all hope. It was the surest sign that one had not yet succumbed to the stupefied fate of the “last man”. In the prophetic voice of Zarathustra (1883), he writes: “I say to you: one must still have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star. I say to you: you still have chaos in you.” The danger is that, mistrusted and untended, this chaos – this “rich soil”, to use his tellingly earthy imagery – will wither and die. The danger is that the post-human future will triumph absolutely, leaving only an uncanny imitation of humanity in its wake. In the first instance, then, our task is to cultivate our instinctive reluctance: to recognise, resist and otherwise contend with our steady absorption into the totalitarian machine. The path out of the cult, to ‘recovery’, begins by courageously reclaiming the fallen image of man in all its ambiguous beauty.

Georg Dreyman is an academic and his name is a pseudonym.