Abort All Your Babies to Save the Planet!

There are those of us who are greens, who think we should be good stewards of our planet, who see ourselves as gardeners of the planet, and that that is the best way of keeping the planet healthy. And then there are the Environmentalists for whom Environmentalism is a religion. Compared to the couples in this article here, though, Al Gore is an apostate.

The article is about two couples who decided to abort and become sterilized in order to save the planet. This is perverse. Certainly, I think people should be able to sterilize themselves if they want -- one could consider it Darwinism thankfully at work -- but that does not mean I should not be able to judge them. The question you may have is why I would judge them so harshly.

I judge them harshly because what these people are expressing is not concern for the Earth, but a deep hatred for human beings. They see human beings as the problem, and eliminating humans from the earth as the solution. They are starting with themselves to be examples to others. They hope others will follow their leads. If such an idea were simply genetic, I would say good riddance to them, knowing we would soon be done with such nonsense. However, the problem is that ideas are memetic, not genetic. They can spread and infect other minds -- and that is a cancer we need to treat right now.

Humans are the solution to the world's problems. More, we are the solution to the paradox of biological existence. We are perhaps, even, if we take James Lovelock seriously, the reproductive organs of the Earth. Humans are exponentially (10x) more complex than life itself; life is exponentially more complex than is chemistry; chemistry is exponentially more complex than atoms and quantum physics. When we add more complexity to the world, we add value and meaning, and thus greater good, to the world. Thus, it is moral to sacrifice less complex entities to the survival of more complex entities, but not vice versa. This does not mean we should exploit those things less complex than we are -- in fact, our greater complexity gives us greater responsibility for the care of those less complex than us -- but at the same time, to destroy a greater good for a lesser good is bad; to knowingly do so is evil. We should be working to make the world more complex, not less. This is why artists of all kinds are so valuable to the world.

Elaine Scarry in her book "On Beauty and Being Just" says that beauty causes us to want to reproduce it. When you see a beautiful flower, say, you want to make copies of it. You may want to take a photograph, paint a painting, write a poem -- or at least tell someone about it. The same is true of people. When you meet a beautiful person, you want to reproduce them. You want to add more of their beauty to the world. Beauty has complexity and,thus, the addition of more beautiful objects to the world adds to its complexity. I have noticed that many single, professional men and women are against having children -- until they meet someone they want to make copies of. My wife was against having children, or even of getting married, until she met me. Each of us wanted to make more copies of the other -- and the result was our little girl. And we want to make at least one more. We want children because we think the world would be greatly impoverished without each other in it. This is the beauty of children and of having children.

Now I'm not saying people should go out and have as many children with as many people they find beautiful as possible. My wife and I only want two children, after all. We have to balance all our desires, wants, and needs, after all. We think we will raise our children better and provide more for them, including a more complex environment that will develop their brains into more complex minds, if we limit ourselves to two. In the same way, while I love those tiny flowers known as bluets, I have only written a few poems about them. Everything in moderation. But I am saying that if you choose not to have children for something like "saving the environment," then your values are perverse. Personally, I find the people interviewed in the article to be horrifying monsters. Their ideas are literally rotten, putrid, and putrefying. So why do I draw anyone's attention to their vile ideas? Because, in order to fight off a potential infection, the body has to have its attention drawn to it -- only then will antibodies be produced to fight off the disease. And this kind of anti-human, indeed, humanophobic virus needs antibodies made against it now, before such vile ideas spread.