To tired to write, so…

Found at workshoperotica, and ‘

Found at retrogasm.

Appropriate to the theme of this site, I hope.

Found at Tech Sergeant Jenn.

You could imagine someone holding antinatalist views holding out for some pretty dramatic public policies.  Here are some, arranged in a rough ascending hierarchy of stridency:

1. Eliminating forms of public expenditure that reduce burdens on people who have children, e.g. subsidies to public education.
2. Taxing people who have children more than the childless.
3. Forced sterilization.
4. Forced abortion.
5. Criminal punishment of people who have children.

One could make a case for policies like these, and the worse you think human life is, on the whole, the higher in this hierarchy one might be tempted to go.  The argument for going there might be something like this:  if human life is on the whole bad and if from this we can reliably infer that the prospects for any given human life are bad, then by creating a child you are harming that child by bringing ver into existence.  While using coercion against people is generally repugnant, it is appropriate when it is necessary to prevent people from doing harm to innocent others.  Most of us, I suspect, would hesitate to use force (or at least endorse the use of force by public agents like the police) ex ante to prevent someone from committing a rape or a mugging, and ex post to punish such an activity once it occurs.

So the argument goes.  But I do not wish to go down that path.  My reason for not going there starts with the fact that anti-natalism isn’t a very popular position at the moment; indeed, it’s one that most people regard with a mix of shock, disgust, and incredulity.  So to begin with, there’s a good political reason not to start advocating policies like 1-5:  they make people already inclined to hate you hate you even more and be even less inclined to listen to you than they would have otherwise. Any attempt to actually put into practices like 1-5 will meet massive resistance.

If you’re a moral realist you might harbor nonetheless that policies like theee might be the right thing to do, if by some means you had the force available to carry them out.  That’s because if you’re a moral realist you believe that right or wrong can somehow be determined as matters of objective fact, like the masses of subatomic particles or the phylogenies of different kinds of bat.  Once you’ve done that to your satisfaction, people who disagree with you still aren’t just disagreeing with you but with The Truth, and you therefore think you have the makings of a warrant to override their wishes, because in so doing you are bringing them to The Right Thing To Do, even if it means forcing them to.

I am not a moral realist; I am a moral skeptic.  I have no contact with any source of higher knowledge about The Right Thing To Do and don’t think anyone else is either.  All I have is a generalization that life is on balance suffering, one based on half a lifetime’s experience and a lot of observation about the world, and an attitude of repugnance toward that suffering.  I have no categorical imperative — Don’t Have Kids, Morality Says So! — to offer.  All I have is a pure hypothetical imperative — if you don’t want to cause unnecessary suffering, then don’t have kids.    I don’t have much optimism about the human species, except that I do think, deep down, that most people don’t want to cause unnecessary suffering.    What other people also have, rather less fortunately, are a lot of false beliefs and cognitive biases that contribute to, and in large measure form the basis of, pro-natalist attitudes.    They think that the future will be better than the past (usually not true).  They believe that they are superior to other people in some way, and so they can avoid the general misery of humanity for themselves and their offspring (also, generally not true). They think that life has “meaning” and that this somehow makes up for its misery. (The “meaning” of life is a phrase without meaning, except perhaps insofar as it designates a cheap synthetic substitute for the genuine article of happiness, which seems to be in permanent short supply.)  They think that the sufferings in this life will be compensated by joy in a future state (oh, puleez!).

I have only so much time and energy in my life; in that way I am exactly like everyone else.  There are only so many hours: I can spend any given one of them on politics (pushing for policies that other people will hate) or one education (trying to combat the false beliefs and biases).   Taking up the former course of action means conflict and strife, and these are normally generators of suffering in its own right.  Failure will cost terribly, and even success is likely to come at an awful price:  just imagine what measures pro-natalist people might take to prevent forced sterilization, to say nothing of forced abortion.  Taking up the latter course of action means that if I fail I look ridiculous — unpleasant for me, I guess, but at least no blood will be spilled.  If I succeed — if I succeed even a little — I might prevent the coming-into-existence of lives that would otherwise have been filled with suffeirng.  That’s a win.

So given a choice between attempting to persuade and attempting to coerce, I’ll take persuade, thank you.  I realize that if otherse choose likewise it could mean a longer human future than there might have otherwise been.  I can live with that, for I have reason to believe that it means less suffering overall.

I enjoy rooting out the lies my culture has told me, transmitted through the medium of well-meaning parents, friends, and professional helpers of one description or another.  One of them is that if you make the right kind of effort, you will find happiness and fulfillment in your intimate relationship with another person.   Not true or, at best, only rarely true.  Another is that if you hard and make sensible choices in life, you will find fulfillment and happiness through work.  Also not true, and it’s worthwhile exploring the dynamics of why not.

There’s nothing inherently degrading or awful about work per se, if by work we simply mean the focused exenditure of effort and attention in a manner that produces a visible product  or renders some useful service of one kind or another.  Work in that sense can be quite engrossing and fulfilling, indeed, a positive relief from the suffering that otherwise so fills up human life.  Even a sourpuss like myself finds, in activities like this blog (and other less high-minded Internet enterprises), an agreeable way to pass the time.  A few hours a week of time at most, as it happens.  The rest of my counscious hours on earth are spent in enterprises far less agreeable. — in alienated as opposed to unalienated labor, as a certain poète maudit of capitalism would have put matters.  And why is that?

We might begin with the observation that whatever you are, there are probably a lot of people like you with respect to what it is that you find engrossing or fulfilling.  And what is more, there are also a lot of people like you with respect to what they find soul-killingly dull terribly anxiety-inducing.  As a result there’s a lot of labor supplied in occupations that people might enjoy — there are a lot of would-be poets and musicians and artists out there — and relatively less so in ghastly combination-of-stress-and-boredom occupations, like being investment bankers or lawyers.  (And of course, there are many people who through no fault of their own have no shot at becoming either of these things — they get the worst of both worlds in the analysis that follows.)    These facts explain the compensation structure of the occupations. Poets aren’t paid much (or, at best, becoming a poet means something like buying a lottery ticket which might pay off big for infinitesimal odds of winning).   Investment bankers are paid rather too much.  I have lived in both the high-fulfillment and high-compensation worlds over the course of my questionable life, and so I know this structuring of the world by experience; I can tell you (even if I take no joy in the fact) that that’s how it is.  Other things being equal, the more shit you’re willing to eat in the workplace, the more you get paid.

Okay, so life has tradeoffs.  Can’t you at least hope to make them wisely, like the nice guidance counselor in high school said you should?  Carefully inventory your talents and preferences and select something that will at least give you the optimal point between starvation and soul-death?  Unfortunately, you are unlikely to make even this choice well.  Why?

Begin with the fact that we are status-seeking animals.  Statuses and roles appear to be human universals, extant in all known human cultures.  And believe me, you (and I) really would like to have our status be as high as it can be.  Status is everywhere and it influences pretty much every interaction we social creatures can have with each other, generally for the better the higher our status is.   It is the difference between prison and rehab when our vices get exposed.  It is the difference between that attractive person’s cool disdain (or worse) their accepting our invitation to have coffee sometime.  The exact same sentence which will be ignored when uttered by a person of low status will be listened to with great seriousness when uttered by someone with high status.  Who doesn’t want to be the high status person.

A contingent feature of life in a capitalist^* society is that status is pretty closely linked to money.  The association isn’t perfect, but to a very large extent how high you stand is a matter of how much money you have, how much you have the potential to make, or how much of it you’re somehow associated with (compare, for instance, Ivy League with state university faculty, even controlling for salaries).  The bigger house, the nicer car, the better-tailored clothes, the tonier private school — all these things cost money, and all are status-enhancers.  (All of these statements are other-things-being-equal, but not less true or less important for all that.)   But when this is true, you’re in a pretty deep bind.   Because now status is subject to the same ugly logic that romance is subject to:  a collective-action problem related to climbing and falling on various ladders.    You would like to go up the ladder as high as you can reasonably climb — going up feels good, as does being on the higher rungs.  And you definitely do not want to slip down; not getting as much respect as you’re used to is something that really hurts.   Eating shit in the workplace, however, is something you don’t like either, so once you’re climbed to the point where that isn’t worth it any more on some relevant margin, you stop.  Unfortnately, there’s always someone around who might be willing to eat just a little more shit and take your place on the ladder, slipping you down a rung.  You don’t want that, so you eat more shit that you’d like.

The same logic applies to everyone else, and so they all eat more shit than they’d like.  Everyone runs faster to stay in place.  Work does not save you or them; it ends up ruining us all.

—

^*In societies that aren’t capitalist, this is not necessarily true, but I don’t mean this claim (necessarily) as advocacy of socialism or feudalism or anything else. Each society finds its own way to suck. Back to main text.

Cheesy but true.

Found at the tumblr Gotham City Hardcore.

We are all prone to the overconsumption of Bad Things, things which are likely to significantly reduce are health and produce “premature” death.  Tobacco, alcohol, most illicit and many licit drugs, tasty calorie-laden foods, even leisure (in the form of a lifestyle without enough physical exercise) all have this property.

(Icky but topical image found in today’s pre-dawn darkness at the tumblr PETER ZEELOCK 2012.)

Why do we do this?  There is a standard medico-therapeutico-educational answer that our culture spits back at us which runs something like this:  people consume Bad Things because they suffer from defects of rationality.  Either they are just ill-informed about what vices do to themselves, or they are victims of their own rationalizations (“I’m really not that heavy a user,” “I can quit any time I want,” “I’ll start exercising next year,”)  or they just have some sort of defect of self-control in the absecnce of which they would have healthier, longer-life-promoting habits.  People who offer this culture’s standard line about things like cigarettes and heroine might acknowledge that their users get a short-term hedonic boost from indulgence in their respective Bad Things, but emphasize that Bad Things come with a serious bug:  they shorten one’s life.  The answer to the problem of vices is thus some program of education or therapy which will enable the consumer of Bad Things to overcome vis consumption habits.

But there’s an assumption that underlies this answer, which is that the consumer of Bad Things actually somehow wants to have, or somehow has an interest in having, a longer life.  This premise is nearly universally held, but as readers of this blog must by now know, it’s now one I hold.   I happen to think that life is suffering, on balance, and as a corrolary to that thesis that there are many people who are quite miserable in their lives and who therefore want, or in some plausible sense have an interest in finding, an exit from life.  So in addition to the fact that Bad Things provide palliation from the misery of life (and I do not, in this post, wish to deemphasize the importance of palliation at all), they also tend to shorten life, and for people who are miserable, this shortening of life, the lethality of Bad Things, is not a bug but a feature of the Bad Things.

But if people really want their lives to be shorter, why do they end them slowly (and, more often than not, very painfully) through the indulgence of vices rather than through just committing suicide outright?  Good question:  the best answer I can think of is that it is part of human psychology (except perhaps for some people with extraordinary intellects) to be very afraid of imminent nonexistence.  To prepare to commit suicide means confronting this terrible fear, and this is something that most people will not do, unless their lives go terribly badly.

Consumption of Bad Things, though, allows the consumer to (mostly) avoid this fear.  Our ability to rationalize, to self-deceive, means that we can “know” in some way that what we are doing is killing us without having to squarely confront the fact that we are doing this.

But I suspect that the consumer of Bad Things still does know “at some level” that ve is killing verself with vis vice, and this knowledge is a driver of the consumer’s behavior.  Is the concept of such knowledge coherent?  I am defending a thesis here somewhat akin to Georges Rey’s thesis of meta-atheism^*. Professor Rey’s thesis is that while many profess to believe in God, most people (except perhaps for the least sophisticated among them) know “at some level” there isn’t any God. There’s not consciously aware of this, indeed might become quite indignant if you tell it to them, but nonetheless atheism is available to them “at some level” and this knowledge is on occasion betrayed by their behavior and reactions to real-world situations. Here is one of Rey’s illustrative examples:

Consider the reactions in two situations of a young, loving, “believing” couple who are ach seriously ill: In the first, the wife has to be sent off to a luxurious convalescent hospital for care, for two years before the husband can come and join her for an indefinite time thereafter. In the second, the wife is about to die, and the husband has been told he will follow in two years. If, in the second case, there really were genuine belief in a heavenly Hereafter that (let us suppose) they both avow, why shouldn’t the husband feel as glad as in the first case — indeed, even gladder, given the prospect of eternal bliss! However, I’ll bet he’d grieve and mourn “the loss” much like anyone else.

Yes, I’ll bet that too. And I’ll bet further that it’s because the husband in this example really does know something that his professed religion and even his inner consciousness disavows.

In the case of Bad Things and people’s knowledge of them, there should be behavioral reactions that would betray knowledge users of Bad Things have of their ultimate lethality as well as the fact that this lethality in part motivates consumption. One might find, for example, that therapy or education consistently fails to get a certain group of users to stop using, even though it might achieve other behavioral effects consistent with increasing awareness of a lethality’s vice in its practitioners, for example, it might fail to get alcoholics to stop drinking or heroin uses to stop shooting up, but at the same time get them to try harder to get people those users want to see alive and healthy (their own children, perhaps) to not take up their vice, or stop it if they have taken it up.

I might predict further that if there are people for whom lethality of a vice if a feature rather than a bug, that changes in external circumstances that make the vice harder to pursue will promote substitution of dangerous vices rather than cessation thereof. There are probably lots of natural experiments to be found here: a county might go dry by legislation, for example. Some alcoholics might reform, but I suspect others might take up other dangerous vices. Or a person whose supplier was arrested by the drug cops might take up a whole new dangerous drug (one to which ve was not previously addicted).

There’s some very interesting social science to be done here.

And if it does show that there are people for whom the bad aspects of Bad Things are a feature rather than a bug, then that’s compelling evidence in favor of my thesis that on balance, life is suffering.

—

^*See Georges Rey, “Meta-Atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception,” in Louise M. Anthony, ed., Philosophers without Gods Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). pp. 243-65.

Back to post.

Found today at THINK LESS! while a-tumblring.

That gets it about right.

In an earlier post I commented

we suffer in life…we are trapped in life…unless you happen to be unspeakably miserable or superhumanly philosophical.

Is anyone superhumanly philosophical? Perhaps the greatest philosophical intellect of the Anglophone world was. In a brief autobiographical sketch David Hume provides the following penultimate paragraph.

In spring, 1775, I was struck with a disorder in my bowels, which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits; insomuch, that were I to name a period of my life, which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this later period. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company. I consider, besides, that a man of sixty-five, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities; and though I see many symptoms of my literary reputation’s breaking out at last with additional lustre, I knew that I could have but few years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present.

Hume was cheerful in the face of his own impending death, a fact which left at least one distinguished literary witness. James Boswell visited Hume in his last days, and noted that Hume was apparently able to make use of an argument I find intellectually cogent by not necessarily emotionally forceful. Boswell records the story of their meeting at length in his Edinburgh Journals and apparently recollected at least part of it to Samuel Johnson in his Life of Johnson.

When we were alone, I introduced the subject of death, and endeavoured to maintain that the fear of it might be got over. I told him that David Hume said to me, he was no more uneasy to think he should NOT BE after this life, than that he HAD NOT BEEN before he began to exist.

Johnson was unimpressed.

JOHNSON. Sir, if he really thinks so, his perceptions are disturbed; he is mad: if he does not think so, he lies. He may tell you, he holds his finger in the flame of a candle, without feeling pain; would you believe him? When he dies, he at least gives up all he has.’ BOSWELL. ‘Foote, Sir, told me, that when he was very ill he was not afraid to die.’ JOHNSON. ‘It is not true, Sir. Hold a pistol to Foote’s breast, or to Hume’s breast, and threaten to kill them, and you’ll see how they behave.’

It is left as an exercise to decide whether Hume was as superhumanly philosophical as he represented himself, and as Boswell represented him. If Hume was what he claimed to be, then in this respect as in so many others he can but be envied by the rest of us.