Anti-Natalism and Existential Pessimism By James Reed

     I flipped through a book left on the desk of the university library here in Melbourne, David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford University Press, 2008). It is argued that human life (animals, plants??) always involves some harm of coming into being, and hence, it is better never to have been. We can call this position anti-natalism, and it is not just a thesis restricted to those publishing posh books with a leading university publisher:
  https://www.amazon.com/Better-Never-Have-Been-Existence/dp/0199549265
  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/anti-natalists-childfree-population-climate-change

“In February, a 27-year-old Indian man named Raphael Samuel announced plans for an unusual lawsuit. He was going to sue his parents for begetting him. “It was not our decision to be born,” he told the BBC. “Human existence is totally pointless.” Samuel recently told me over Skype from Mumbai that his is a good life, and he is actually close to his parents. His complaint is more fundamental: he believes it is wrong to bring new people into the world without their consent. He wanted to sue his parents for a symbolic amount of money, such as a single rupee, “to instill that fear among parents in general. Because now parents don’t think before having a child,” he told me. Samuel subscribes to a philosophy called anti-natalism. The basic tenet of anti-natalism is simple but, for most of us, profoundly counterintuitive: that life, even under the best of circumstances, is not a gift or a miracle, but rather a harm and an imposition. According to this logic, the question of whether to have a child is not just a personal choice but an ethical one – and the correct answer is always no. In 2006, the South African philosopher David Benatar published a book which is widely credited with introducing the term anti-natalism. In Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, Benatar quotes the Greek tragedian Sophocles (“Never to have been born is best / But if we must see the light, the next best / Is quickly returning whence we came”) and the text of Ecclesiastes (“So I have praised the dead that are already dead more than the living that are yet alive; but better than both of them is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun”). These quotes suggest that the sentiments at the heart of anti-natalism have been around for a very long time.

In modern history, another strain of thought emerged, warning against the dangers of population growth. In the late 18th century, Thomas Malthus sounded the alarm that the population would outstrip the food supply. In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul Ehrlich published the bestselling book The Population Bomb and co-founded the organization Zero Population Growth (later renamed Population Connection), arguing that the growth in global population would lead to famines and ecological crisis. He also suggested that people have no more than two children. One member of Zero Population Growth struck out on his own with a much more radical agenda. A man named Les Knight launched the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) with the goal of “Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed”, as stated on the website that he launched in 1996. While Benatar also sought to discourage reproduction, his ideas grew out of different premises. The objective of anti-natalism, as Benatar sees it, is to reduce human suffering. Since life inevitably involves some amount of suffering, bringing another person into the world introduces the guarantee of some harm. He argued that “the quality of even the best lives is very bad – and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.”

Benatar told me recently that he has heard from many readers of his book who “have often felt that they were alone in the world. It was a great comfort to them to read a philosophical defense of a view they found intuitively correct.” Dana Wells, the Dallas-based YouTuber, felt validated by Benatar’s work. About five years ago, she reunited with her biological brother (she was adopted), and he grilled her about why she didn’t have children. Feeling annoyed after their meeting, she searched online for books – “I’m a reader. I’m a nerd,” she says – in hopes of finding out about others who didn’t want kids. For the first time, she encountered the terms “childfree” and “anti-natalism”. She began “to see that this life game is an imposition”. For her, it was simple: “Living things can be harmed. Non-living things cannot be harmed.” As “The Friendly Antinatalist”, she posts videos with titles like First American Use of the Term ‘Antinatalism’ and Can Parents Be Antinatalists? The answer to that question is yes, Wells says, looking into the camera. “It would be great if all anti-natalists could be childfree, but the world just doesn’t work out that way, you know? Especially for people who have recently learned about anti-natalism … you can’t fault those people for having children in the 70s, 80s, or 90s.” She also discusses the distinctions between true anti-natalists (those who believe that creating new life is always wrong); the childfree (who don’t want kids themselves but don’t necessarily consider procreation unethical); and “denatalists” (who disapprove of procreation only under certain conditions such as people with genetic disabilities they will pass on to offspring, though this disapproval doesn’t usually transfer to racial or ethnic groups). Real anti-natalism, Wells emphasizes, means opposing all births, under all circumstances.”

     Should we be concerned about anti-natalism? Isn’t just one more mad philosophy tossed upon us? Stated as a philosophical position, it really only will have impact upon very Left environmentalist types, and it is not a bad thing at all that Leftists cease to breed. There could be a genetic basis to Leftism, a propensity to accept the Leftist conceptual baggage, so anti-natalism could be a blessing in disguise. The same selectionist argument has been applied to religion, whereas the religious may have more children, secular humanist types will gradually, and non-violently be pruned from the tree of life:
  https://www.amazon.com/Shall-Religious-Inherit-Earth-Twenty-First/dp/1846681448
  https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/shall-the-religious-inherit-the-earth-by-eric-kaufmann-1939316.html

“This may come as a shock to secular sensibilities. Religious fundamentalism is set to bury the ghost of secularism. Secular liberalism is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions and the fundamentalists are about to take over the world. This is, says Eric Kaufmann, who teaches politics at University of London, not necessarily a bad thing. It may make us more secure, more grounded in our identities and communities, and much happier. The main weapon in the fundamentalist armoury is demography. The world is going through an unparalleled shift from population growth to decline. The trend is led by Europe, where the numbers of people being born are hardly replacing those dying. India, South-east Asia and Latin America are also following the same path. Prosperity, urbanisation, birth control and female education have all contributed to the overall rate of decline in population. Only fundamentalists are bucking the global trend. Everywhere you look, argues Kaufmann, the religious fundamentalists are multiplying. Consider the ultra-Orthodox Jews. Once a tiny minority in Israel, they now constitute one-third of all school-going children. By 2050, they will be the majority. In the Muslim world, fundamentalism has seen an extraordinary surge since the 1960s. Soon, the puritan Salafists, with their high birth rate and isolationist tendencies, will become the dominant majority. Fundamentalists also have a few other tricks up their sleeves. Unlike the materialists who embrace the here and now, they are happy to make sacrifices. They are content with their non-consumerist lifestyles. They work hard to build a parallel world, away from the mainstream, with their own schools, universities, media and even separate beaches, hotels and shopping malls. They have a stronger sense of community, marry within their own groups, and work together to promote the collective good. Strong religious ties also generate powerful motives for people to remain within the groups, and equally powerful disincentives to leave. So, the secularists have little chance of luring away their children.”

     Expect almost all of the insane philosophies of the postmodern era disappearing in the future without trace, since nobody is going to preserve thought that is not worthy of surviving. The internet finally going dark will eliminate a lot. As for books, well who reads them now, most of the libraries are trucking their books out to storage or just recycling the paper, so there will not be much of the bs left of the Left, at the end of the day.