"I think that all we can do is take the long view.
The planet/evolution produced humans, and now it is suffering the (inevitable) consequence, about which we can do nothing.
Just think of the energy expended on saving human lives, developing drugs, running hospitals, improving childbirth – everything is geared to produce ever more people living ever longer and destroying the planet.
More, more, more!
All you and I can do is count our own individual blessings and be as happy as we can, because our distress is not going to do anything to help the planet.
In the end antinatalism is a kind of sad self-indulgent grieving, even less effective in the Great Scheme of Things than vegetarianism
Like most self-styled realists in all previous generations, I don't think humans will last much longer. Thousands of species will disappear in the next 50 years. But when the dinosaurs went extinct there was one little mammal on the earth, a mouse-like creature, which was the ancestor of all mammals. So the earth will renew itself (probably) and evolution will occur, 'in a different direction’…and in half a million years everything will be hunky dory, and intelligent life self-generated from rotting plastic and sulphur dioxide will be on the up and up…"
3 comments:
Auban, your last paragraph is outright optimistic!
Cheerful rather than optimistic. I am a cheerful realist - or, if you are an optimist, a cheerful pessimist.
In good cheese, wine, and sex it is the subtlety of distinction that makes the difference. You split hairs. But as in all of the above, the splitting of hairs is quite delicious.
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