P.D. James was eerily correct in choosing 2021 as the year in the beginning of her unsettling novel The Children of Men. Her fictional tale is about a world in which man has lost the ability to procreate; the real-world 2021 is when we’re discovering that the “pandemic baby boom,” indeed any “baby boom,” is just not on its way. Quite the reverse seems to be happening with populations the world over teetering on the precipice of a demographic winter.
The nut jobs have been warning about it for decades, and now the statistics are bearing it out. The child-bearing obsessed may find the news sends their heart racing at the prospect of being so resoundingly proven right. This hollow victory is short-lived. For those categorically opposed to children, the news is met with little more than an apathetic shrug.
Reading through the reader comments on a New York Times article, one cannot distinguish the genuine contributions from the joke accounts. Let’s hope some of them were joke accounts! In any event, the general consensus among commenters was that the impending population implosion was excellent news and good for the planet. Sophisticated urban residents like “Kim,” undoubtedly tapping away smugly on her Mac, oat milk latte close by, imagines fancifully how splendid it will be—sadly after her time—when “humans are no longer the dominant species, and we are able to thrive as plant-gatherers.” Ah, yes, a glorious return to pre-civilization. Who needs I-phones or hot water when you can easily bumble about in the wild and find loads of edible plants?
More realistic earth-worshippers offered a different outlook. Demonstrating what James got right in her novel, many commenters pulled the thread connecting the loss of children and suicide. When people don’t have the prospect of future generations, the weight of raising children, they are susceptible to nihilism. In subtle yet profound ways, our lives are shaped by the people who came before and after us.
Like James’s character Jasper, sipping claret until life is intolerable and then disposing of himself with a polite note left for whoever discovers his body, the goal becomes comfort. One commenter on the NYT piece wrote, “As far as living longer, why would I want to endure such a horrible quality of life and inflict myself and my helplessness on my loved ones? No, no thank you. Societies around the world are in desperate need of a re-tool around end of life choices.”
Another commenter was more blunt, stating, “One thing we could do is encourage suicide. We could emphasize how humane it is. We could even make the tools available. When life has at long last become obscene, painful, addicted, diseased, and has lost any relevance whatsoever, it can hardly come as a surprise that some people (like me) will not want to be here.”
The suicide enthusiasts were often as enthusiastic as the environmental utopia crowd imagining how Mother Earth will recover from our climate sins and nature will return to a coexisting wonderscape of magical harmony. It really makes you wonder if these fanciful ideologues have never heard the panicked squealing of a critter caught under a shed in the middle of the night while a fox circles relentlessly, pawing the ground and looking to go in for the kill. Ah, yes, well, no doubt the problem was the shed. Once humans are gone and the sheds turn to dust, foxes will happily gather plants because there won’t be anything to trap opossums under.
A lone voice of reason in the comment section pointed out that an aging population is a different kind of world, one in which we are headed for a big “brain drain,” all over the world. The aged are not known for inventive, risky ideas, and the recklessness of youth brings benefits as well as suffering.
Like James’s imagined future, the imploding population is a phenomenon of choice as much as circumstance. We are choosing not to have children and applauding ourselves. Framed in terms of selflessness—saving the planet—the selfish choice not to commit to a family and raise the next generation is affirmed. That same selfishness leads to the taking of life at the end. Bringing life into the world was not important enough to make sacrifices for and continuing to live in suffering is seen as undignified. Life, the mysterious energy enlivening inanimate matter, inexplicable yet ever-present, is devalued at every stage.
If the world is collectively headed for suicidal tendencies, one might imagine, perhaps there will be an explosion of bold ideas and fearless experimentation. After all, people who have nothing to live for will do anything. It seems not. A survey of human accomplishment suggests that it is those who have the most compelling reasons to continue living who make the most heroic sacrifices. It is when we are deprived of meaning that sacrifice becomes more difficult. Instead of laying down our lives we are tempted to take them.
Elon Musk ruffled feathers by suggesting flippantly that many people will die before man successfully reaches Mars. This is obvious, and it is not as offensive as people think. Musk was not suggesting we coerce people into dying for the cause but simply make it possible for willing people to try. Eric Ellington, for whom Ellington Field was named, was an intelligent and promising young man. After attending the Naval Academy, he requested a transfer into the fledgling practice of aviation. Urged by his sister to choose something less dangerous, he insisted that aviation was an important advancement in human technology in the service of which many people would die. Ellington sacrificed his own life, dying when his aircraft crashed in 1913.
The world with fewer children is unlikely to be the peaceful, vegetarian splendor that many a commenter envisages. As some were smart enough to notice, the world without children is one with very many old people who will no longer find meaning easily in their increasingly small and isolated worlds. As one world-weary man described his life: “The loss of all pleasure.”
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