Some things you could do to promote antinatalism

 Uncategorized  3 Responses »
Jun 112011
 

Instead of or in addition to advancing arguments why not

  1. Open a really neat bar or restaurant,
  2. Hang out in a really neat bar or restaurant, looking to hook up with someone,
  3. Create some yummy porn and give it away for free,
  4. Program a really neat video game.

What do these items have in common?  Well, they’re all adult activities, they’re all fun for someone, and they’re all harder to do for people with children.  They raise the opportunity cost of having children, because having children takes away from fun times out or even just playing video games (ask any parent if you really must).  The more adult fun in the world, the less people will want to have children.  From a philanthropic antinatalist perspective, this is win-win.  Existing people have fun (or at least, the sufferings of their existences are palliated) and future people are never brought into existence and thus never have to suffer at all.

I am shamelessly stealing an idea here from the psychologist Geoffrey Miller, who uses a similar concept to explain the Fermi paradox.  Why don’t we see alien civilizations out there?  Maybe because once they got sophisticated enough they managed to amuse themselves into extinction.

Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children.

Although Miller also notes the existence of a version of the Shaker problem.

My dangerous idea-within-an-idea is that this, too, is already happening. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and anti-consumerism activists, already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our Creative-Class dream-worlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the earth, as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery.

And that does look like a real problem to me.

The Shaker problem for antinatalism

 Uncategorized  6 Responses »
Jun 042011
 

There was once a small religious sect known as the Shakers.  Originating in the eighteenth century, they led lives remarkable for their simplicity, gender-egalitarianism, and…celibacy.  Since the dominant mode of cultural transmission for religion is from parents to children, the survival of their communities was problematic.  They survived for some time by making converts and adopting orphans, but they are now nearly extinct:  there are perhaps three Shakers left in the world.

Antinatalists face a Shaker problem.  I do not know if it is insurmountable, but it real, at least if three generalizations obtain:

  1. The extent to which people are persuadable by antinatalist considerations varies from person to person.  (Some people, for whatever reason, will think of life as some sort of precious gift.)  Some people are incipiently pronatalist, others incipiently antinatlist.
  2. The extent to which people are incipiently pro- or anti-natalist is strongly influenced by their parents in various ways.  This can happen both through genetics (people who inherit a genetic predisposition to optimism are likely at least ceteris paribus to be pro-natalist) and through transmission of values and belief systems (e.g. most religions, unlike Shakerism, are pro-natalist).
  3. Pro- or anti-natalism affects people’s propensity to procreate, with pro-natalists like to have children and anti-natalists likely to refrain from having children.

(1-3) seem highly plausible, and if they are then what happens?  Anti-natalists have no (or few) children, while pro-natalists have many.  Anti-natalists dwindle away like the Shakers, while the world fills up with people who are disinclined to listen to what anti-natalists have to say.

That’s bad for anti-natalism.  The Shaker problem might be a good reason for anti-natalists should adopt children.  Also for working much harder for anti-natalism.