Over at that bulwark of the hopelessly middlebrow The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf earlier this month engaged in some thumb-sucking about what porn is supposedly doing to young men.

In Time’s current cover story, “Porn and the Threat to Virility,” Belinda Luscombe writes, “A growing number of young men are convinced that their sexual responses have been sabotaged because their brains were virtually marinated in porn when they were adolescents. Their generation has consumed explicit content in quantities and varieties never before possible, on devices designed to deliver content swiftly and privately, all at an age when their brains were more plastic—more prone to permanent change—than in later life. These young men feel like unwitting guinea pigs in a largely unmonitored decade-long experiment in sexual conditioning.”

Young Friedersdorf sees fit to quote further someone called Denny Burk, a professor at one of America’s all-too-many Christian madrasas, who looks out at our putative sexual culture and really, really doesn’t like what he sees.

[The sexual revolution] has not given us men who know what virtue and honor are. It doesn’t teach men to pursue their joy in self-sacrificially loving and being sexually faithful to one woman for life.

Let’s call this complaint the “Porn breaks sanctioned sexuality” hypothesis,” PBSS for short. “Sanctioned” here meaning the kind of sex that Jerry Falwell and the Pope approve of — penis-in-vagina intercourse between married (to each other, wiseguy!) people undertaken in the hope of pooping out babies that you will then rear.

Now if I were being uncharitable I suppose I could spend some time bashing this Burk fellow for certain rather-too-obvious forms of moral obtuseness. (Does he not realize that there are a lot of women who look at porn, or that women young or old might be just as interested in sexual variety as young men? Does he really think that it’s worthwhile teaching gay men to be self-sacrificially whatevered to one woman for life? I guess you never can tell with Christians, who will believe the darndest things.) But such carping would be pointless and, in any event, wasn’t where my mind was on reading those words. My focus was the welcome implications of PBSS itself. My takeaway from PBSS was to think “Great! Not only does porn benefit humanity by providing an ever-available palliative to the misery of life, but it also discourages family formation by providing a diversion for young men away from sanctioned sexuality, and thus the production of children, and thus creation of more and more loci of suffering. Perhaps it even has a role to play in guiding humanity to the noble moment when we all give up the game and walk hand in hand into extinction. Truly, pornographers are among the world’s great humanitarians.”

Of course, as a pessimist, my second thought was that PBSS is probably not true. You just can’t win in this world.

Blogged by a well-liked-by-me twitterer Nullius in Verba ‏@GRIMACHU.

It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy. The following acts are examples of perfidy: (a) the feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender…

— Geneva Convention/Protocol I, Art. 37 (From Wikisource)

That august and self-important publication The New York Times has recently started a “philosophy” blog called “The Stone” and take it from me, it’s pretty damn awful: lots of middlebrow religious apologetics, precious little real philosophy. Still, it can at times make for interesting reading, if one reads with the eye not of a philosopher by as a connoisseur of cultural pathology. Here’s a recent item which caught my eye, written by one William Irwin, the chair of philosophy at King’s College in Pennsylvania (don’t fret, I had never heard of it either). It plays on a rather tired theme (“can’t we all just be more humble about our religions or lack thereof”) using a rhetorical mode that this non-believer can readily recognize, that is, smug condescension toward non-believers wrapped in the cloak of false humility. Irwin claims irenic intentions:

What is important is the common ground of the question [Faustus: about God, or whatever], not an answer. Surely, we can respect anyone who approaches the question honestly and with an open mind. Ecumenical and interfaith religious dialogue has increased substantially in our age. We can and should expand that dialogue to include atheists and agnostics, to recognize our common humanity and to stop seeing one another as enemy combatants in a spiritual or intellectual war. Rather than seeking the security of an answer, perhaps we should collectively celebrate the uncertainty of the question.

Why do I see it this way? Well, for one, he appears to buy into a smarmy argument by Gary Gutting (also on “The Stone,” surprise, surprise) that even if we don’t believe that there is a God, we should hope that there is one. The gutting of Gutting will be the work of another day here at Pyrosophy. Let me note for now that Irwin thinks that non-believers should at least be acting like believers, at least some of the time.

The nonbeliever might embrace the ethical teachings of Christianity, the yogic practices of Hinduism, the meditative techniques of Zen Buddhism, or any of the vast array of teachings and practices that the world’s religions have to offer. Such embrace may lead the nonbeliever to belief in God, or it may not.

Now if we’re being genuinely humble, humble on all sides, shouldn’t we be reciprocally suggesting that believers ought to at least sometimes act like nonbelievers, perhaps engaging in one of their mental exercises? It will do Irwin no good to insist there are no such exercises, because here’s an obvious one that many non-believers (myself included) do rather a lot: think really hard and for a good long time about the proposition that the nature of reality is only what physics says it is and nothing more. If this be so, should you want to to continue to live and, if you should want to continue to live, how should you live?

The unwillingness (or inability) of Irwin to specify a way for believers to reciprocate on the humility act is the tell, the giveaway that his call for disarmament in wars of religion is only superficially directed at both sides. When looked at carefully it turns out to be humility for thee, infidel, but not for me. It’s a false flag of truce.

This is not to say that religious peace is a bad idea. Pessimistic atheists like me in particular would like nothing better than to get on with their lives in peace, as long as we can enjoy our ecbasic liberties. This fact would suggest that there is an obvious path to peace, one which would begin with religious people (Christians especially) giving up on the idea that because they’re so special they have the right to police what’s in the bedrooms and on the bookcases of nonbelievers.

I won’t be holding my breath waiting for that give-up to happen.

Environmental journalist Madeline Ostrander, writing recently in The Nation:

Even in the restrained language of science, the future holds unprecedented difficulties and disasters. For many people, these problems were an abstraction, but as an environmental journalist, I knew enough to imagine them in front of me. Driving across the bridge to my house, I pictured city beaches drowned by the rising sea. Watching the news, I wondered when the next colossal hurricane would strike the Gulf of Mexico or the mid-Atlantic. These thoughts are not paranoid. According to scientists’ predictions, if society keeps pumping out carbon dioxide at current rates, any child born now could, by midlife, watch Superstorm Sandy–size disasters regularly inundate New York City. She could see the wheat fields of the Great Plains turn to dust and parts of California gripped by decades of drought. She may see world food prices soar and water in the American West become even scarcer. By 2050, when still in her 30s, she could witness global wars waged over food and land. “It does make me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have kids,” one of my friends whispered to me.

The whole article is worth reading, especially to see that there are some people beginning to take seriously proposition that the future is bleak enough that it really is wicked to bring new lives into the world. It’s not full-bore antinatalism by any means. But full-bore antinatalism is such a counterintuitive idea for most people that it’s remarkable to see even baby steps (ahem!) being taken in its direction.

Of course, if one ever does decide that it is wrong to bring children into the probable future that we face, the next step might be to ask, what future is it acceptable to put children into?