Lileks, on Peter Singer and other misanthropes.
I don’t believe that there’s any inherent good in having people on earth. We’re fond of ourselves, but that’s about it.
Uh huh. Well, here’s a question I find more interesting than Singer’s threnodies: if there was no sentient life on Earth, would Nature still be beautiful? Everyone loves the beauty of Nature, after all. Everyone agrees it’s a Good and Wonderful Thing, although some think some spiritual experience can be distilled from its contemplation. I don’t – I sense the inconceivable depths of time, the wonders of natural systems, and find aesthetic pleasures if they mesh with my own preferences, i.e., I like the colors of a sunset, but do not like the face of a spider. There is no moral component to beauty, no ethics in a great forest. I like them, but they are not my Brother or Mother anymore than the bear considers me a distant relative. I prefer a certain amount of distance from Nature, as in the form of walls and roofs and clothing and medicine and so on, and if this makes our lives “disconnected” from Nature, then talk to the beaver, who gnaws down trees and dams streams. But we cannot disconnect with Nature; we’re part of it. We’re just the clever part that figured out how to arm ourselves against its indifference.
We pay Nature the compliment of being Beautiful, but that’s a hard-fought luxury. Nature requires the application of judgment to be beautiful. It requires people.
That’s just as true off planet as on.
Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Paul Erlich holds the Bing Professorship at Stanford.
I’d say Western civilization is angling for a future Darwin award by appointing anti-growth crackpots to it’s highest levels of cultural leadership.
I agree with Singer that there are too many people in the world. We disagree as to weather he is one of the “too many”.
Too many people? WAR! What’s it good for?
I expect the next big one will be short and wide ranging.
When you depend on government by ponzi scheme, you need a continuing population growth to keep it from collapsing.
Get back to me when the “too many people” folks fix that little glitch.
When someone expresses that attitude I wonder why they do not just remove themselves from the world and let the rest of us get on with the joy of being alive. Reaons? I don’ need no stinkin’ reasons. I party, therefor I am and I like it that way!
You don’t threaten to take your ball and go home if you think you still have a chance to win. You don’t muse on the meaninglessness of human existence if you think your ideology still has a chance of working.
The evidence that the dominant ideology knows that it is doomed is all over the place. Whole documentary series on what the world would be like after the human race disappears. Fantasies of assassinating opponents of the ideology. Obsessive harping on the themes of humanity becoming extinct, or on how it deserves to (e.g. “Avatar”).
I’ve subscribed to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for almost 40 years, but I was thisclose to not renewing because of issues where every freaking story was on these themes. But then I realized, I should think of those stories as the lamentations of their women.
Well, if their memes must turn endo-toxic to perish… /shrug