Homeopathic antinatalism?
Channel: rozeboosje
Date: 2012-05-06

Having spoken out against antinatalism, I was told by some that there are "softer" versions of antinatalism, versions that don't necessarily involve a complete cessation of human reproduction. But having heard that, I can't help but wonder how far you can dilute the basic principle of "antinatalism", an opposition to birth, before you really can't call it that anymore.

We can all agree that human overpopulation is something that must be avoided. Some would even argue that we are already overpopulating the earth and the human population needs to be reduced to sustainable levels. But even if you agree with that (and I lean toward that), a solution that doesn't involve a continuation of human reproduction just below the maintenance level (that which would equalise births and deaths), so that the population gradually declines while the demographic remains viable and able to carry the needs of the whole population including the sick, the needy and the elderly, is unacceptable. Ballpark, that requires the births of tens of millions of people a year. As long as it's less than the death rate which currently stands at about 60 million a year, the population WILL gradually decline and the population stress on this planet will slowly ease. But there are no easy solutions.

I do admire those who take the personal decision to adopt rather than procreate themselves. But I simply cannot bring myself to call that decision in its own right "antinatalist". Not unless the person making it fails to see that in order to adopt a child STILL needs to be born, and that children still NEED to be born.

Perhaps, if you are that committed to calling yourself an "antinatalist" on the basis that you have decided to adopt rather than to procreate yourself, we could distinguish your position from that of the "fundamentalist" antinatalists that wish to impose their ideology on the whole of humanity by calling it "personal antinatalism". In that case I would be happy to agree that the world NEEDS some "personal antinatalists", but you must realise that we must qualify that by observing that the world only needs SOME "personal antinatalists". If we ALL adopted that worldview, well, that's what I'm exploring in this video. It would be a humanitarian disaster the likes of which had never been seen before. And this is not an intangible "risk" factor, but a quantifiable certainty. If such a policy was adopted universally, it would lead to intense suffering of 1.5 to 3 billion people, without a shadow of a doubt.

Even the sort of sustainable, gradual, population decline that I am describing here, based on a birth rate of, say, 30 million a year, will still lead to a very strongly ageing demographic. We can't just go and do it and hope for the best. Already, in European countries where the demographic IS shifting due to decreased childbirth, we are facing problems with ageing population, and this has already led to increased pension ages. We need to look into establishing technological and social solutions that will allow for this.

This, by the way, neatly segues into my final observation, and that is the fact that populations that enjoy high affluence tend to naturally lead to smaller families. The ageing problems in Western Europe are not the result of coercive policies like the family planning policies in China, but simply the result of family planning choices made by wealthy people in an affluent society. I think this gives us a glimmer of hope when it comes to the problem of overpopulation. But the proof of that will be in the puddin'

Finally: In this video I am not interested in discussing "David Benatar's Asymmetry Argument", the "hedonistic principle" and the other teats on which the fundamentalist antinatalists like to suck. If you want to be the umpteenth inmendham kool-aid drinker who is going to drone that mantra at me, kindly do so in the comments of the other videos I posted on the topic recently. But you might like to try telling me something I HAVEN'T already heard before and that failed to convince me the other 500 times I heard it already :-)

World Demographics (current):
http://www.indexmundi.com/world/demographics_profile.html

Population 1950 and 1955:
http://www.npg.org/facts/world_pop_year.htm