We heard in 2019 about the Indian man who intended to sue his parents for giving birth to him without his consent. And while such legal action isn’t common, more so is the philosophy the fellow embraces: antinatalism, the belief that it’s wrong to bring children into existence. In fact, some of its adherents recently protested what they see as unacceptable fecundity — in an already barren world.
As the Western Journal reported Friday:
There’s no shortage of proof that our culture is in decline. But when people have to ask what babies are good for, it’s surely the death knell of a once great society.
Last weekend, left-wing protestors from a group called “Stop Having Kids” showed up in Edina, Minnesota, to get their message out, according to Alpha News.
Protesters held signs with messages like “Normalize antinatalism” and “Women can be whole without becoming a mom.”
The group’s website is replete with warnings about the misery of parenting and encomiums on the nobility of choosing not to bring life into the world.
“There is an unconscionable amount of needless suffering and death in the world. Birth serves as the catalyst for it all,” the site proclaims. The fewer people in the world, the less suffering, right?
On its Twitter account, the group offers counsel on how to achieve its lofty goals:
And in March, it offered this supposedly sage advice:
This much reminds me of a story about philosopher G.K. Chesterton. A character’s character, the jolly intellectual would always carry on his person a pistol and swordstick. Hardly a violent man, however, it’s said that the only time he drew his firearm was when someone issued a lament to the effect of, “Life’s not worth living.” He would then, as the story goes, produce his gun and ask, “Would you like me to shoot you?”
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
Chesterton’s offer was never accepted, and, likewise, one could wonder why the antinatalists don’t just kill themselves if a cost/benefit analysis informs that death — or non-existence, at least (from their afterlife-discounting perspective) — is preferable to life.
Of course, they might respond that it’s contrary to instinct to commit suicide or that their mission, advancing antinatalism, impels them to soldier on. If the latter, perhaps the idea is that they couldn’t off themselves until everyone else did. You first.
Regardless, the “Stop Having Kids” types certainly are in the man-is-a-pox-on-the-planet camp. As the group writes at its website, humans “are one of the few species, if not the only species, that could be eradicated to the benefit of all other species and ecosystems. The fewer humans who exist, irrespective of how they are raised and how consciously they live their life, the less problems and suffering would exist for all life. It is in everyone’s best interest to not be forced into existence.”
Yet we could now ask: Since all creatures suffer to some extent, with or without man (nature can be brutal), why not advocate eradication of all life, or at least all animal life? We could just do everyone and everything a favor and atomize the world — bing, bang, boom.
The antinatalists don’t thus ponder. They also don’t ask the even deeper questions: Why is it a “good” to “benefit … other species and ecosystems”? Why isn’t it “good” to benefit man? For that matter, what is (objective) “good,” anyway, and how can we say it exists? And, finally, why do we exist? What’s life’s purpose?
Taking more of a pro-natalist position on the latter questions is English atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of book The God Delusion. When he gave his “Royal Institution Christmas Lectures” in 1991, he told the children present that we “are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA…. It is every living object’s sole reason for living.”
“There is no purpose other than that [procreation],” he said on a later occasion.
And so we have The Dawkins Delusion, which was actually examined long before Dawkins was born by a fellow Englishman, the aforementioned Chesterton. Critiquing contemporary writer H.G. Wells in his 1905 work Heretics, Chesterton wrote:
In the opening pages of that excellent book MANKIND IN THE MAKING, he [Wells] dismisses the ideals of art, religion, abstract morality, and the rest, and says that he is going to consider men in their chief function, the function of parenthood. He is going to discuss life as a “tissue of births.” He is not going to ask what will produce satisfactory saints or satisfactory heroes, but what will produce satisfactory fathers and mothers. The whole is set forward so sensibly that it is a few moments at least before the reader realises that it is another example of unconscious shirking. What is the good of begetting a man until we have settled what is the good of being a man? You are merely handing on to him a problem you dare not settle yourself. It is as if a man were asked, “What is the use of a hammer?” and answered, “To make hammers”; and when asked, “And of those hammers, what is the use?” answered, “To make hammers again”. Just as such a man would be perpetually putting off the question of the ultimate use of carpentry, so Mr. Wells and all the rest of us are by these phrases successfully putting off the question of the ultimate value of the human life.
So Dawkins says having children is our purpose; the antinatalists say it’s our vice. The truth?
The truth is that it doesn’t matter — if their atheistic/nihilistic notions are correct. It’s then just “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” to quote occultist Aleister Crowley, for we all will end up the same: disappearing into nothingness.
This is why many say that true purpose is only found in something beyond this world — in particular, in the belief that we were made by God, for God, and to be with Him (hopefully) for all eternity.
And this is why ideas matter, especially those ideas — under the headings “theology” and “philosophy” — called “First Things”: They influence everything we do.
Case in point: “Antinatalists,” per se, are a small group. Stop Having Children’s Twitter account “boasted all of 85 followers as of Friday,” relates the Western Journal. Yet the ideas influencing them also sway millions of others, particularly Westerners; these are the young people who you’ll hear say they don’t want to have kids because they’re worried about “climate change,” or the environment in general, or because of the “state of the world” (when was it perfect? Would you rather have lived during the Black Plague [when people still had children]?). Thus are fertility rates collapsing throughout the West.
Of course, though, perhaps this is just the survival of the spiritually fittest. After all, it’s mainly now the deeply religious having large families, while the most barren are those who’d tell their kids they’re just self-replicating robots in an infinite loop of meaninglessness.
