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March 13, 2007
The Next Stage of Environmentalism: Antinatalism
Posted by Dave Blount at March 13, 2007 8:19 AM
We can't build homes, eat meat, domesticate animals, farm, drill for oil, generate nuclear power, exterminate mosquitoes, or even drive to work without committing some crime against Gaia and the animals. Even if we were to go back to living in trees, no doubt we would damage the branches and create carbon emissions with our flatulence. What exactly does the Left expect us to do?
The answer is straightforward: stop existing.
David Benatar provides some sophistical support for the ultimate in depraved objectives in his book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. From the Amazon book description:
Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence. Thus, if they ever do reflect on whether they should bring others into existence — rather than having children without even thinking about whether they should — they presume that they do them no harm. Better Never to Have Been challenges these assumptions. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. Drawing on the relevant psychological literature, the author shows that there are a number of well-documented features of human psychology that explain why people systematically overestimate the quality of their lives and why they are thus resistant to the suggestion that they were seriously harmed by being brought into existence. The author then argues for the 'anti-natal' view — that it is always wrong to have children — and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a 'pro-death' view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct. Although counter-intuitive for many, that implication is defended, not least by showing that it solves many conundrums of moral theory about population.
Benatar isn't the first to wish the human race would just go away. To quote the well-entrenched member of the liberal literary establishment Kurt Vonnegut:
We are killing the planet as a life support system. We may have gone so far already that there's no recovery from it. The game may be over. … I think the earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us. And it's high time they did. We are a disease on the face of this planet … it's time we got out of here. We are a disease on the planet, and I think we ought to become syphilis with a conscience and stop reproducing.
A group calling itself Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is also up-front about its hopes to rid reality of humans.
It's becoming clear why the one human activity the Left adamantly approves of is aborting our own children, as well as why it uses all the means at its disposal to impose its nihilistic view that human life has no special meaning.
People could be excused for thinking that past totalitarian ideologies such as Islam, fascism, or communism represent true evil. But under each of these ideologies, some people do benefit, at least to the extent they gain power over others. All of them offer a conception of utopia, even if profoundly twisted. None of them is sick enough to call for the extermination of the human race.
Only with modern environmentalism has humanity managed to attain pure evil. Like a polar bear, it looks cuddly at a distance. Only up close do you realize it's a monster.
On a tip from V the K.
