In reference to K-Punk's attention-seeking, My Dad's Bigger Than Your Dad, Maternally Deprived bitchathon on the "atavistic impulse to reproduce" (Bless: he means the desire to have children)- which you can find here - I can find but one point of error: Mussolini (and he's bad, remember folks, so what he does must be bad too - got that? Nasty boy, nasty boy...)didn't enforce policies so that batchelors got higher taxation because they were opting out of the 'lifestyle choice' of reproduction; they got higher taxation because they were a bit crap.
4 comments:
What a thorny and vital issue... Sadly next to impossible to be objective on 'cos you've either got kids or you haven't. I haven't. I agree with a lot of K-Punk's arguments (though I would never bother phrasing them in such a jargon-heavy way).
I certainly don't think it's ethical in the current world to have more than one kid. There's the whole issue of whether the act of having more than one was informed or not though, before you even get to the informed arguments. And yeah, I've a huge amount of admiration for people who adopt - it does seem like the most caring, ethical, rational thing to do at the moment.
The thing about Terence McKenna I always found most distasteful was his advocation of the idea of one-child families - even though he himself had two kids.
The thing I found odd about K-Punk's piece was this mashing together of absolutist world-denying stuff like Schopenhauer and Gnosticism with contingent ecological arguments about the current world. Just as there are plenty of supposedly eco-activist "Earth Mothers" spawning like they've not heard of resource depletion, there are plenty of people (mostly but not exclusively men in my experience) latching onto the mostly sound overpopulation arguments as a way of dignifying their bitterness at life, maybe lack of success at the whole mating and breeding thing. Doesn't lessen the argument for population control - just seems like a dangerous mix-up of motives.
The "lifestyle" thing is certainly there, though I think the people who are shallow enough for it to be JUST a lifestyle thing are very few, if they exist. Seems odd to bang on about the necessities of the biosphere in terms of resources and population limits, and not acknowledge the obvious underlying biological imperatives of breeding. I think cultural stuff can override such things, but let's not kid ourselves that they get driven out of the picture completely. We're bodies.
I love my friend's kids, every one of them, and certainly haven't ruled out having any. But while batchelorhood is, and always has been in some sense, a bit crap, let's admit that we're now in a situation where reproducing too much (and some might argue, rightly or wrongly, that that means at all) may be little more than a bit crap.
That last bit should be "a little more"...
a fair point Gyrus, I guess flippancy is my forte... though i've always used 'a bit crap' as an affectionate (okay, maybe a teensy bit patronsing) evocation of the type of guy who has yet to 'move on', to psychically develop beyond the isolated autism of youth (I'm thinking particularly of those mid 30s balding guys (earrings, pony tails, jeeps) who used to hang around Yeovil College, pretending to like Pop Will Eat Itself and hoping to 1) sell some drugs and 2) snog some teenagers in various acts of psychic vampirism...
As ever, this does not have to refer to everyone but would be much more fun if it did...
Fine - let's throw some more dead white guys in to the mix.
.....since when was it rational to have kids? Tell my wife it's irrational to have kids and I'll show you irrational....
Did evolution drag us all this bloody way from sub saharan Africa,through all those nasty, brutal, short generations - all that struggle, all that care and love for little scraps of people which half the time barely made it through their first years, so that the process could culminate in some pampered teenage offspring who dragged out the battered and broken philosophical meccano set and declared the whole thing 'irrational'? ("Mum and Dad, you don't understand, I wish I'd never been born!")
Wasn't Nietzsche supposed to have sorted out all of this rationality stuff when he slayed that 'catastrophic spider' Kant? a man who's rationality could tell us objectively ABOUT the world, but never how to live IN the world.
All human existence is a compromise between biology, history, culture and yes, rationality - but let's not go elevating what Barth called our 'corrupt' human reason.
Make your place in,and peace with, the world - if you want kids, I hope you get the chance to have them. Whatever happens, the quality of your personal, creative, HUMAN existence will rest in part on an accord with your own biology - 'rationally' repress it if that works. That's OK, it's an individual response. Schopenhauer wasn't too keen on the world we bear our children into, but his solution was an at least an inward one.
As for 'rational' large scale attempts to reduce populations....now where have we come across those before?
'Sad Dad' over and out....
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