2004-02-11 - 10:49 p.m.
If my entry about the disturbing brevity of my remaining life did not sufficiently depress you, and you fear that I must necessarily disappoint you in this regard so that you must turn instead to cable television to remind yourself of how little there is to feel good about in the world, then fear not! We got y'all a fresh supply of depression right here.You must think only of the VHEMT, whose sunny acronym stands for the "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement." The idea, in a nutshell: everything that is wrong with the world is demonstrably the result of our indiscriminate colonial seizure of every natural space we can get our hands on -- the destruction of ecosystems, consigning numberless species to extinction every day, etc. -- and the best way of dealing with this is to cut ourselves out of the picture by ceasing altogether to breed.
The movement identifies all sorts of feeble-minded, selfish reasons people have for breeding. Its "volunteers and supporters" insist that anyone with plans for procreation is conscienceless, wasteful, cruel, and interested only in assuaging their own greedy hungers. The problem is not our refusal to control ourselves, our destructive habits and our lazy refusal of moderation, our lack of respect for the ecology and the food-chain we have worked so hard for centuries to remove ourselves from -- these things are, after all, human inevitabilities beyond all hope of change, so instead of righting these wrongs we must apply our big brains to a single task of artificial selection, a nice bit of worldwide human seppuku to make the globe safe once more for otters and other symbols of all that is horrible about the thought of earth-as-a-smoking-hole.
I am being snotty as usual. I tend to think these inevitabilities as well, at least in the sense that it seems to be in the nature of big brains connected to limbs to one day command those limbs to pick up an animal's bleached thighbone and use it to thump the other apes for usurping the nearby watering-hole. We innovate, everything we create, no matter how ghastly, bearing the imprimatur of the mighty god of Because We Can. Yeah, we suck.
So there might well be something to this whole VHEMT business. Sure, six billion bodies dying within 70 years of each other might create a hell of an unpleasant mess, but how much worse could that mess possibly be than, say, North America? The human report card reads "does not play well with others," that much is true. Our expulsion may indeed just make sense.
But this is just a cynical bugger and not a wounded Malthusian talking, so naturally this is the part where I cop out and say something about my gaucherie in the face of stating a specific opinion one way or the other about this because it takes away valuable time from being snide. For this reason I instead quote the following passage from Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature:
If a student is brilliant but terrible in examinations -- if, say, she simply collapses with nervousness at the very thought of an exam -- then her brilliance will count for nothing in a course that is tested by a single examination at the end of the term. Likewise, if an animal is brilliant at survival, has an efficient metabolism, resists all diseases, learns faster than its competitors, and lives to a ripe old age, but is infertile, then its superior genes are simply not available to its descendants. Everything can be inherited except sterility. None of your direct ancestors died childless.
Man, that Mother Nature's a bitch. It would be so much easier for the tiny segment of the human population clever enough to come to such a suicidal conclusion as VHEMT to at least have the opportunity to pass this superior constitution to an offspring that can be conveniently inculcated with such philosophies at its knee. Instead, it'll take a human lifetime for natural selection to snuff them out and leave the rest of us to laze around on our couches like bloated whale carcasses, eating cheese out of environmentally-unfriendly aerosol cans and taking periodic breaks to buy useless crap on Ebay while our many, many children play video games and avoid their homework. Heh heh.
