Beverly Brewster is a California-based cleric who, in a recent letter to the editor of the New York Times chooses to play the “oh-but-I-am-so-wonderful-and-liberal-and-inclusive” card against Susan Jacoby, in particular against one of the latter’s recent published essays.

The world’s enduring religions offer much more wisdom and meaning than a child’s idea of God as a superhero. As a Presbyterian minister, I often say to self-proclaimed atheists, “Tell me more about the God you don’t believe in; I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in that God either.”

(Hat tip to Eric MacDonald from bringing this letter to my attention.) I admit it is tiresome to deal with the intellectual and moral condescension in remarks like this (as an atheist, it really doesn’t matter how sophisticated your understanding is — characters like Brewster will always insinuate as she does here that any disagreement you have with them is because you’re a brutal idiot and that if you’d only read some other thousand-page work of theobabble like they had you would understand that, etc. etc.). But I’ll put that aside for now and just answer the question.

A bit of reflection has suggested to me at least three gods I don’t believe in.

The first is the Great Creator or Great Engineer, who somehow made the universe as a wonderful and commodious place for us to live in. Darwin slew this entity: our very bodies are obviously riddle with kludges and design errors, from the vermiform appendix to the narrow pelvic girdle that makes childbirth such a danger and a torment. And our minds are no better designed than our bodies: we are full of longings and desires that we can never fulfill. The only thing it seems that the human mind was designed well to do is to suffer.

The second god I do not believe in is more abstract: I do not believe in any person, entity, or concept the instantiation of which either justifies, redeems, or compensates us in any way for all the suffering we undergo in this life. We do not deserve to suffer. Our suffering is not merited payback for our “sins.” There is no “meaning” that somehow makes up for or makes sense of the suffering we undergo. There is no Big Story, whether the Greatest Ever Told or otherwise, in which we are playing a part and in which we could possibly want to play a part if only we understood it. There is no Big Picture which, if only we could see all of it, our suffering would become something worthwhile. There is no blissful afterlife besides which the sufferings of this life will seem as the merest pinprick. A rational individual must reject claims like this (why will also be the subject of a future post on something I call “the Snake Oil Dispersant Heuristic”).

And the third god I do not believe is is any person, entity, or concept that is somehow objectively worthy of worship. I believe this alone on the strength of my conviction that there are, and indeed really cannot be, any objective values — which will be the topic for posts in the future — but even if I did believe in them, those that I would believe in would include a belief in the immense negative value of suffering, and thus would lead me to something that might be described as an antinatalism with respect to the whole universe. A god worthy of the title did not have to create the world full of suffering. Even if the world as it is represents the best world that a god could have created, a god worthy of the title could have chosen to create no world at all, and hence could have avoided all the suffering.

If there is a creator of the world, that entity is a monster. However powerful it is, it is not worthy of worship, hence not a god.

There is a part of me (only a part, mind you) which is actually sorry that there is no god. Satanic defiance would be magnificent in a way that merely acknowledging the uncaring universe is not. But it is a folly to defy a fiction. Gods and devils die together, as someone one said.

One interpretation of antinatalism is that it would be a desirable thing if all procreation were to stop now, and perhaps that it would be good if the human species were to go extinct very soon. Being something of a squish, I confess to being not-entirely-persuaded of the truth of either of these propositions.

People could be killed off or they could die off. One might imagine a “big red button” which, if pressed, would instantly and painlessly terminate all human life. Someone more ruthlessly utilitarian than I am would be tempted to push that big red button. But as it happens, there is no big red button. There are ways in which people die off in very large numbers, and perhaps these could be pressed to the point of extinction: global thermonuclear war, catastrophic global warming, the release into the human population of a genetically-engineered super disease organism. The suffering that would be occasioned by these events would be truly horrifying and widespread, even if they were relatively quick. They are not the sort of things any sane person, even one who thinks that extinction sooner rather than later is something to be welcomed, would contemplate.

If we suppose, as is not at all likely, that all procreation were to stop right now. Barring other events that were to accelerate our collective dying off, or the development of technologies that dramatically lengthen the human life span, that would bring about the complete extinction of the human race in about a century or so. If on the whole one thinks that the sooner-rather-than-later extinction of humanity is a good thing, that it might seem like such a decision to completely stop procreating is a good thing. But as David Benatar points on in Chapter Six of Better Never to Have Been., the experiences of the last generations of people before the hypothetical end in this scenario are likely to be pretty ghastly. At some point several decades from now the world would be inhabited by a few billion elderly people, with at best limited capacity for supporting themselves as they are consumed by the debilities of age. They would, in all likelihood, suffer terribly (including from hunger and disease) as the social and physical infrastructure of human life as they would be increasingly unable to maintain began to fall apart.

The mass suffering of billions cannot possibly be the right result for someone motivated by the ethical concern with human suffering that animates antinatalism to begin with, so that result seems like it can’t be right, which is why Benatar ends up defending instead a phased die-off of the human species, achieved through sustained long-term sub-replacement fertility. He admits — as I think he must — that the lives of the last people living will still be very bad, and that in the meantime there will be the creation of new lives in which there will be a fair amount of other suffering. It is at least plausible, though, that the aggregate suffering in a phased die-off will be substantially less than in a sudden die-off. (And it seems certain that the aggregate suffering will be less than simply a continuation of the human status quo that heads off for indefinite thousands of years into the future.)

Phased extinction also seems highly feasible in ways that sudden extinction does not. As I’ve recently noted, some advanced countries have already achieved significantly sub-replacement fertility, and I don’t think there’s any reason to think that this achievement cannot be replicated globally. It wouldn’t even require that most people be antinatalists — just that they might come to value the sort of lives that are possible to those who have few or no children.

But we must note that this path, while feasible, would not be quick. Doing some hasty spreadsheeting based on some data available from the United States Bureau of the Census, one can estimate the existence of about 2.5 billion people in the world who are either women under the age of 45, or girls. Suppose (very optimistically) that a crypto-antinatalist program were to succeed right now in reducing around the world fertility to the levels now seen in Japan, viz about 1.4 children per woman. We could then do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to watch the global human population decline over time.

Something worth noting is that it will be a rather long time in human terms. We would expect a human population still in the millions for at least twelve generations into the future, and at least in the thousands about 21 generations into the future. If we assume a mean time between generations of roughly 25 years, that means that there will be a lot of people still around for at least five centuries into the future.

That’s a number with significant policy implications if you care about preventing suffering. Since a lot of people will live in that future, even a curtailed one, it suggests to me that antinatalists ought to take a broad view about the necessity of preventing things like global ecological damage (e.g. through climate change), avoiding future wars, and other catastrophes that will cause vast suffering if they are allowed to happen. It also suggests to me that antinatalists shouldn’t take a fatalistic view or shrug off efforts to improve the quality of human life. On even optimistic projections about the future, there will be a lot of human life yet to come.

Persuading people of the truth of antinatalism is hard. It is not for want of good arguments, of which antinatalists have many. But reason is a frail weapon what it is attempting to persuade a creature which has been wired up for the sake of reproduction not to reproduce. Our genes made us vehicles to serve their own purposes, and aren’t about to let us uppity vehicles go and start getting ideas of our own.

So what to do? Perhaps an indirect approach is better. Here is one suggestion: increase the opportunity cost of having children. By this I do not mean punishing or even taxing people for having children. Doing that has the intrinsic awfulness of all coercion. And even if you think that people who become parents somehow deserve to be punished for the misdeed of procreation, suffering landed on parents has a way of falling — almost inevitably — into the lives of children who did not consent to, and are completely innocent respecting, the decision to bring them into existence in the first place — a consideration to which antinatalists of all people should exhibit the highest sensitivity.

No, by “raising the opportunity cost” I have something else in mind, which is doing things in society that adults who remain childless can get more out of than those who do have children. As anyone who has been a parent can attest, having children means less time for adult pleasures. High culture. Real food. Travel. Sophisticated company. Scholarship. Sex. Booze. Porn.

Make things that people who have kids would have enjoyed but will have to miss out on, or at least will be able to enjoy less of, for their having had kids. Start a library. A school of advanced studies. A really awesome bar. A salon. Or become a pro-bono pornographer. And but sure to advertise the adult pleasures your are putting on offer to the world. Promote them. Celebrate them.

Observing from a distance, I have noticed there are countries (of which Japan is perhaps the modern world’s best-known example) that have created a rich material and intellectual culture much of which is for adults only, and I do not think it is much of a coincidence that their birthrates have fallen to fertilities below replacement (about 1.4 children per woman in Japan, for example), which if sustained will result in the eventual disappearance of at least these parts of humanity. That’s sad for people who will miss out on what these groups of people might have had to offer the world in the future as well as for existing people in this nation many of whom are now aging, but for untold millions of otherwise would-have-been children it will mean suffering that will never begin. Perhaps these are examples to be emulated…

Found at the tumblr Nudity and Nerdery.

Astute followers of links from this blog might have noted that I carry on a number of…curious activities on the side. I write, commission, and publish a webcomic called the Tales of Gnosis College, an interconnected set of stories set at an eponymous (but fictional) liberal arts college where the reckless, overssexed studentry is seen as a convenient source of experiment fodder for the many mad scientists on the faculty. Needless to say, the resulting visual narrative is decidedly adults-only. I also commission a lot of art in the theme of “erotic mad science,” which I publish at a different section of the same site as the comic. All of this creation is available to the world for free under Creative Commons licenses, so it is free to spread throughout the world. This enterprise makes me a very odd duck, a pro bono fetish pornographer.^*

Why am I engaged in this costly, time-consuming, and socially-unacceptable hobby? One of my earlier attempts at self-explanation, my Thaumatophile Manifesto, focused on autobiography. it was an account of what I had been through and how I came to embrace my own inner weirdness. But the work I am doing is connected to larger concerns, and curiously, it is linked to the philosophical stance taken as a result of my revulsion to human suffering, the same stance that motivates my writing this specialty blog.

I shall begin with myself and move outward in my explanation.

I need pallatives. It might seem obvious that I don’t like my life very much. As I explained recently, I don’t regard suicide as an appropriate or feasible response for me (in the near-term, anyway) to that ugly fact. It would have been better for me not to have been born, but I was and here I am. Looking at the actuarial tables suggests a few more decades in front of me at least, so if I don’t want to suffer to much in that time I need to find something to do with myself. And doing that means finding palliatives, uses for resources that while they might meet with social disapproval, will at least distract me enough to diminish the pain of existing.

The effect of getting older have broken many former palliatives. Food and alcohol used to serve admirably here, but unfortunately as I got older I began to develop some health conditions (diagnosed, ironically, very shortly after my premature boast of good health) which, if left unchecked, would make me very sick in short order. I suppose that it would have been an option to just let my vices consume me and shorten my suffering that way — perhaps that is just what some people are doing — but on reflection that seemed like a bad idea. The considerations that weigh against fast suicide also weigh against slow suicide, and what is more, the shortening of suffering would be purchased at the price of magnifying its intensity. The sorts of things that make you sick enough to die from will make you very miserable before you die, generally.

So I gave up my palliatives and took up an abstemious regimen instead. It “worked” and I am now regarded as being in “excellent health.” It is a pity for me that my hedonic condition does not match what doctors can measure. And I now also look forward again to decades that won’t be good for me, as they will continue to be abstemious.

When I was younger scholarly pursuits were an absorbing way to spend time and feel better, but the effects have age have dimmed the value of these as well. Scholarship, if you’re going to do it for real, demands of its acolytes immense amounts of time and energy. I don’t have these any more. Getting older diminishes your energy, and it also usually means — it does in my case — assuming quotidian obligations that mean you don’t have much time, either. (Developing presbyopia, also an effect of advancing age, also makes the sort of library-labor involved in scholarship more of a physical strain than it used to be as well.) So that’s out.

But one thing that hasn’t gone away is good old lust, and stoking and slaking that can focus one’s attention for rather a long time. Since I don’t have that much hope of doing this in partnered (or group?) contexts, partly as a result of my weirdness, partly due to my lousy personality, and partly due to the ugly Hobbesian logic that dominates romantic pursuits, writing scenes in my head and then realizing them in data and pixels turns out to be the most efficient (not to say the most hygienic!) way of achieving this end. Being your own pornographer turns out to be an excellent palliative.

So much for relieving my own suffering. Do I relieve the suffering of others? There is no doubt in my mind that I do.

However strange you are, you are not alone. There are doubtless other people — I have met many of them online — who like what I do and who get a measure of diversion in their own lives from reading it. (Others do not, of course, but they have the option of simply surfing for things elsewhere.) That helps relieve their suffering. Good. There is a first-order effect here in that they can, how to put this delicately? retire to their chambers and relieve certain pressures. Possibly more important still is a second order effect (for those who share my fetish) of just knowing that they are not alone. Ugly stereotypes of masturbators in their basements aside, porn at this level actually connects peole who share common interests (here, in mad science tropes, but the examples could be multiplied ten-thousand fold). I have argued before at length that specialized porn is an inducement to association and friendship. It certainly has been so in my own life. Friendship and solidarity among us freaks reduces our suffering.

Antinatalist effects. Encouraging people to get get their freak flags up and flying also helps to divert their erotic energies out of procreative activities, perhaps out of partnered sexuality altogether. It certainly makes them take control of their erotic destinies. To the extent that it does so, it helps discourage procreation — and thus, the creation of new loci of suffering in the form of new people — in the best possible way, which is by giving people an alternative to making new people which they will enjoy more than that.

Observation. Romantic involvement is negative-sum. Any satisfaction you might take in finding a partner is counterbalanced by the agony of defeated rivals for that partner. Resources used up in the struggle for attention are just wasted. If you pursue love, you will be trapped between the hammer of a collective action problem and the anvil of search costs. But pro-bono porn distributed over the Internet is an almost-pure case of a non-rival good; one person’s enjoyment thereof does not detract from any other persons’. Positive sum as well as a reduction of suffering!

Another observation. There is a certain deep satisfaction in taking the brain mechanisms installed in us by our non-friend natural selection that are there because they perpetrated procreation (and thereby keep the suffering going on and on) and cleverly hijacking them to reduce suffering. That’s something that porn does, and dong it feels like a revolutionary act.

To the extent that I am capable of being proud of anything, it’s being a pro-bono pornographer.
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^*Rather less altruistically, I do a fair amount of porny tumblring, both of my mainstream erotic mad science, a more disturbing variant thereof, and generic imagery, much of it adults-only, that makes me happy. My time and effort of selection is a donation to the world, at least. Back to main text.

At about the age of five or so I taught myself to read with paperback versions of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. It would therefore not be difficult to give a folk-psychological account of why it is that I turned out the way I did.

Found at the tumblr Gotham City Hardcore. Not created by them, obviously. I plead fair use in my deployment of what is now part of the common cultural heritage of humanity.

I am pro-choice with respect to suicide. This position is a difficult one to hold in the society in which suicidal thoughts are often considered as conclusive evidence that one is “mentally ill” and must therefore be subject to massive “therapeutic” coercion. It is nonetheless a position with an ancient and respectable pedigree. As recently as within my lifetime a group of luminaries was willing to sign onto suicide as a fundamental civil right in the Humanist Manifesto II.

To enhance freedom and dignity the individual must experience a full range of civil liberties in all societies. This includes freedom of speech and the press, political democracy, the legal right of opposition to governmental policies, fair judicial process, religious liberty, freedom of association, and artistic, scientific, and cultural freedom. It also includes a recognition of an individual’s right to die with dignity, euthanasia, and the right to suicide.

The ability to end one’s own life is the one unbreachable firewall against suffering and indignity, and it is the path to the one refuge from tyranny where no secret policeman can ever follow. Small wonder the Manifesto signers were willing to group it right up there with freedom of speech and association. I maintain that in any genuinely civilized society the best available means of suicide (probably something like the protocol used by the assisted-dying organization Dignitas) would be available to any non-delusional adult who could articulate a clear wish to die.

That all said, there is an inner interlocutor who raises the following line of interrogation:

So, Faustus. you clearly don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with suicide. (Indeed, as you are a moral skeptic, it’s not clear you think there’s anything morally wrong with anything, but that is a discussion for another day.) You seem to be in a rather tricky position. You’re a hedonist pessimistic about the balance of pleasure and pain in your own future. You have elaborated an analysis of why the social world is so structured that you are unlikely ever to find happiness through love, and whether or not this analysis is correct, you personally seem unlikely to ever find much love, given your self-admittedly lousy personality. You also think you won’t find much satisfaction through work, either. As for the rest of your life, you seem to think that the balance of it will consist of an accelerating decline into misery.

Many people think that life has an objective value, or is characterized by something called “meaning,” which sustains them through the inevitable unhappiness that must come on this earth. But you have already sneeringly dismissed the idea of meaning in life as “a cheap synthetic substitute for the genuine article of happiness, which seems to be in permanent short supply.”

At the same time you appear to endorse an Epicurean notion of death as “the most peaceful sleep I will ever have.” That would appear to mark the end of a period of suffering that you see as inevitable in life. Something almost positively good, compared with the alternative.

So why don’t you just kill yourself?

I regard that as a good question. Here is my answer. It has two rational bits and one irrational component.

Irrational component: Homo sum. As a human being I am subject to the same psychology that affects all other human beings. Nature has wired us to fear and avoid death, even when life is largely miserable (natural selection is not our friend!). The Epicurean view of death, while correct, is a culture innovation layered on top of a vastly older psychology. The fear of death, even if dead wrong, is very hard to overcome. It’s like one of those visual illusions that, even when you know for certain that it is an illusion, does not go away, because our inner wiring is simply not made to deal with it.

Source here. The shade of gray at points A and B is the same. But it sure doesn’t look the same, and it never will look the same, no matter how many times you cut the image apart to compare the squares side-by-side to confirm that it is, in fact, the same. We’re stuck with this illusion, just as we’re stuck with fear at the prospect of our own non-existence. We are vehicles in the service of replicators which determine our design, and it doesn’t serve the interests of that in virtue of which designed us vehicles to be crashing. Whether this is in the interest of the vehicles is of no concern to the replicators.

Is this irrational? Yes. We’re stuck with it. It means that it’s hard to commit suicide. Moving on.

Suicide isn’t as easy as it might appear. As commentators like Sister Y have often pointed out, the best methods for committing suicide involve drugs that most people can’t easily or legally obtain — the fast-acting barbiturates in the Dignitas protocol, for example, are Schedule II controlled substances in the U.S., so good luck getting your hands on any. Other methods have a distressing tendency to fail. They fail because, well, human beings are imperfect at executing their plans and, perhaps more so, because our intrinsic fear of death makes it difficult for us to push forward and carry through on such plans as we might make. The knife at the throat quivers; the gun is mis-aimed, the knot in the noose is badly tied. And if they fail, what they’re likely to result in is (1) your finding yourself with some gross damage or debility as a result of your attempt and (2) your being delivered into an ugly institution of social coercion, the “mental health” system in which you will be subject to deprivation of liberty, forcible restraint and forcible medication. (Because anyone who dissents from consensus, “life is wonderful” values isn’t just someone who disagrees, but someone so depraved in intellect as to be unworthy of either liberty or dignity until ve is “cured.”) No thanks to all that.

Not wanting to cause suffering in others. Perhaps more importantly, I do care about not causing suffering to others, or at least, to some others. And I know full well — from the experience of having friends who have committed suicide — that it does cause suffering to those left behind. That’s a terrible thing. It might be less terrible if we lived in a society more genuinely sympathetic toward suffering individuals and thus more accommodating toward people who want out of it. But we don’t. Our culture is poisoned with ideas like “life is always worth living” (and still more hideous and incomprehensible, the notion that “suffering is a gift from God.”) My lousy personality notwithstanding, I have acquired loved ones in this life, and the thought of the suffering that my possible suicide would cause them has been a deterrent thereto, even during my Dark Times. Especially then, actually.

(One might note in passing that acquiring loved ones is itself an operation of nature’s dirty tricks. When we are young Nature’s Dirty Trick #2 — optimism bias — is especially forceful. In the health and energy of youth we build lives and relationships and acquire loved ones. Only when we reach middle age, only when we have experienced substantial suffering ourselves and have seen it in others, does it begin to dawn on us that we were wrong to have been so optimistic. But by then it is too late. We are embedded in a social web that we cannot readily abandon without painfully tearing away strands. We have incurred sunk costs and, as one of my favorite former teachers liked to say, “Our sunk costs are us.”)

And so here I am, existing. One thing I intend to do while I continue existing will be the subject of a near-future post.

I began this blog with a remark:

It was a great moment of enlightenment on my part when I realized that it would have been better for me to have died when I was 24 or thereabouts. But I didn’t, and here I am now.

I had another, more difficult, post planned for today, but preparatory to that post I would like to unpack that remark a bit.

As readers of the Thaumatophile Manifesto can readily infer, I went through a very bad patch in my life between roughly the ages of 24 and 31. Let’s call these Faustus’s Dark Times, a grim time of both professional and personal failure, a time when I couldn’t get either a girlfriend or a permanent, full-time job in a field I had worked very hard to prepare myself for. I didn’t kill myself (obviously), although there were points where I came close. My sanity was kept intact by my inability to rid myself of the false belief that the causes of my misery would eventually abate. I wasn’t smart enough to see through Nature’s Dirty Trick #2^* — the optimism bias or belief that things will get better in the future. (“Sure, I failed to get an academic position this year, but next year I’ll have a book out and there will be a whole new job search. Surely I’ll get a job then, and move to a whole new place, and then I’ll meet someone wonderful, and…” Such are the deluded scripts we write for ourselves in our heads.)

Nature’s Dirty Trick #2 might have kept my head together during these times, and it might have kept me going. What makes it such a dirty trick is that it probably caused me more suffering in the end than it prevented. Falling for it meant not only that I had to endure loneliness and deprivation of both income and status relative to my peers — things that would have been bad enough on their own — but that I also got to have the special experience — repeated over and over again in those years — of dashed hopes as well.

Things are not so bad now — the Dark Times appear to be over — but I am left with this thought: on any method of aggregation of the good and bad things in my life that starts with the start of my existence and runs up until the present moment, and includes the Dark Times, I find myself with a healthy balance on the negative side.^** There have been good things in my life (the bulk of them before the age of 24), and there are some good things right now. Perhaps over the last few years things have been (only slightly) positive. But the Dark Times are such a large negative that I think on the whole my life would come out negative. That’s how bad things were. The thing (or set of things) in future life that would have to come along that might outweigh or make up for the Dark Times would have to be of a magnitude so large as to be grossly improbable.

And what is more (and perhaps, more depressing), is that when I project forward into my life in the future, I don’t see this balance changing. Looking at actuarial tables, the ages of my antecedents, and so forth, I come up with a statistical expectation of several more decades of life. But I find the likelihood of anything really good in those coming decades to be minimal. It could happen, but its likelihood would be like buying a winning lottery ticket — nothing to bet on. More likely by far is that things will start with they are and get worse as I age. Because that is what I see happening to other people older than myself: progressive debility and enfeeblement and accumulating health problems (since my last post on the matter, I have already accumulated a few of my own), a process that accelerates and worsens as time goes by. The people I know to whom this is happening do not complain much. They try to put a brave face on the matter. No doubt they are as vulnerable to nature’s dirty tricks as I am, and so don’t want to protest their lives for fear that the alternatives are worse. But anyone can tell that they are suffering, and more so as time goes on. That’s a fate in which I will almost certainly share, as long as I go on living.

I thus stand by my judgment that it would have been better for me to have died (painlessly, peaceably) at the age of 24, even if I go on living now.

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^*Nature’s Dirty Trick #1 is a the belief (profound and apparently exceptional people) that death is something very terrible and very much to be feared. Back to main text.

^**I take the view, defended by Ben Bradley, that the most sensible way to do this is a aggregative as well as hedonistic. See Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Although since apparently unlike Bradley I think that life is more suffering than not, I am inclined to that it might be best to live as short a life as possible, rather than as long a life as possible. Back to main text.

Homer Simpson suffers from both a common human condition and a common human bias.

Found at the bumblr vintage vixen obsessed.