Would Cities Be Better Without Babies?
I've been entertained by the comments posted all over these Free Thinking blogs by "Jason" who says, amongst other things,
"Cities are bad ideas, people should live closer to nature, it is more sustainable. google thoreau and epicurus and learn more. Less people is the answer, more info at www.vhemt.org."
"Jason" ends his posts with links to , which is the site of the "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement" which calls upon people not to have babies. "Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense."
The site is intelligent and many of the arguments are irrefutable. Which prospective parent could justify their reproductive decision from the perspective of the environment? Can anyone argue that we need more human beings? And if you are having trouble with that question I would recommend the short on that site which imagines the devastating effects of an army of storks dropping its bundles on the world.
Jason gives a link to his , where he describes himself as a 35 year-old "bored bachelor", and we cannot know whether these life circumstances contribute to his feelings about reproduction. I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. He did however slightly damage his reputation for me with a post he made to Jonathan Rée's blog that said "The truth is that the morons have outbred the smarties, we are all doomed." This had a slightly eugenic tinge to it: it gave a sense that the writer might be more concerned with stupid people reproducing than with people per se, and it seemed to boast too much confidence as to his own ability to separate the stupid ones from the rest. (Most people who write such things do not put themselves in the "stupid" category.)
But I think the issue our friend raises is a deeply serious one. Let me make only the following observation. Many people who are otherwise fully invested in continuing the market-driven cycle of destruction and creation that rules our world face deep dilemmas when they have children. Their children are, by definition, a generation younger than them, and that is enough time for those cycles to have made the world of childhood unrecognisable to them. So much of what was magical and precious to them in their own childhoods has been destroyed, and much of what has replaced it is, when they look at it as parents (as opposed, say, to looking at it as investors, or business strategists, or advertising executives) hollow and alienating.
How can such people try to give their children a childhood that has some kind of continuity with their own? Every parent finds a different set of answers to this question; but one obvious answer for many is: intensify your commitment to those cycles of destruction and creation in order to extract a greater surplus, which you can use to insulate your children from an experientially poorer world, and build for them a simulacrum of your own childhood. Whatever your work involves - designing computer games, building shopping malls, marketing fizzy drinks - just do it better, faster, smarter - so that with your bonus you can build the kind of world (behind high gates, perhaps) where kids can still stay out playing in the street until dark.
This is a slight parody. But not such a grotesque one, perhaps; and even if half-true, it would give a sense of a great acceleration of market forces generated by babies. And bring us back to the question raised by our friend Jason: Would cities be better without babies...?
Babies are gift from God [or other Gods]. I think the World would be better without the negative aspects of progress [Politicians, Greedy Developers, Warmongers]
I am just trying to provoke free thinking, I have looked into all the solutions and www.vhemt.org is a logical paradox.
humans=problems
no humans=no problems
BUT it is true that the world population explosion has caused the ecological disaster, as james lovelock has said '1 billion would be fine'.
Glad someone actually reads my comments !
read this for info on eugenics and then decide
I quote Jason, above:
humans=problems
no humans=no problems
Am sure you realise this is a paraphrase of Stalin? He specialised in what Jonathan Glover calls the "cold joke", and liked to say, "One man, one problem. No man, no problem."
I had no idea it was.
www.vhemt.org is non violent, they suggest that people just stop breeding to reduce ecological impact
Perhaps the chinese policy of 1 baby per couple is more achievable.
the truth shall set you free :)
I can't see any grandiose all-embracing scheme for controlling human fecundity ever happening. Even the totalitarian Chinese government found it difficult to impose one child per couple, especially amongst the rural poor. Reductions in infant mortality and improvements in state welfare for the elderly encourage people to have fewer offspring.
Even if we don't bring it about ourselves, the human race will of course become extinct eventually, or at least be transformed into some kind of space travelling entity unrecognisable to us as human. As far as we know we are the only beings in the whole universe who have the capacity to be consciously concerned about anything, so it's silly to talk about healing the biosphere by removing ourselves from the planet. Who or what would even be aware that we'd done so?
Best we just carry on as we are, I think and see what happens when the oil runs out.
I'm with Cliff Phelps on this one. We are. Trying to be 'selfless'about 'being' or 'ceasing to be' is just nonesense. While we log onto sites like this to discuss our shelf-life other people in the world without internet access, without mobile phones, without 'news of wars & terror' beamed into their homes 24/7, without conspiracy theories or access to scare-mongering stories continue to....well, be born, live thier lives and then die. If you lie down on a couch for the rest of your life, never moving, you're still gonna have happy moments & sad moments. Life is the meaning of life. We exist. Babies are born in concentration camps. There is the joy of sex even in terrible times. If a happy moment comes along we grab it. Why wouldn't we? Do people not have nice times during war? The universe has enough to sustain us. How can it not? The fact that half the world is dying of obesity related problems while the other half is starving isn't to do with the planet, is it? It's to do with how the planet is managed. Life's fantastic even when it's rubbish because....it just is! Get on it.
but, vhemt.org is fun :)
I see all this in a very different light.We live in a secular society. The more we have moved away from God, the worse society has become.If we were obedient and wise and showed love as God has taught us, there would be no nastiness or rudeness or lawlessness that is rife in our towns, villages, and cities.
Human life is precious.We should be serving one another and not ourselves.A Christian parents job is to show and teach love, kindness, faith,compassion,and selflessness. Without these, we are nothing but a bunch of savages !