Should You Have Children?

People nowadays for children or offspring use the word “kids,” which I find gross because it trivializes something most important to the human condition – reproduction to preserve the species. If someone asks him/herself the question posed in this blog post, he/she is a candidate for the anticatalyst camp (about which I say more later). If you have to think about having children, you’ll have none or one or two at most. Anticatalysts are against having children for many reasons. Antinatalism is associated with pessimism concerning the human condition (predicament is a better word). The main representative of antinatalism is the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990) shown here. His pessimism did not prevent him from living to a ripe old age.

That pessimism was expressed long ago in Ecclesiastes 4:

2I congratulate the dead, who have already died, rather than the living, who still have to carry on. 3 But the person who hasn’t been born yet is better off than both of them. He hasn’t seen the evil that is done under the sun.”

The feeling was echoed by the Greek playwrights:

Mourn for me rather as living than as dead.

Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus

Zapffe himself said, Having children is like bringing wood to a burning house.

Zapffe is known to English readers only for his The Last Messiah because his major opus Om het Tragiske (On the Tragic) hasn’t appeared in English yet.

The Last Messiah, to be brief, argues that man is a freak of Nature, which has overendowed him with consciousness, which makes him painfully aware of his hopeless predicament. Zapffe discusses the remedies man has devised against panic.

Some day I hope to have a look at the pessimistic philosophers. Schopenhauer is perhaps the most important one, but his pessimism pales before the pessimism of Julius Bahnsen (1839-1881), who said, Man is a self-conscious nothing.

The Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno (1864-1936) repeated this thought when he said, Consciousness is a sickness.

Ever more people today are choosing not to have children. Most of them haven’t read the pessimistic philosophers. They just instinctively feel that having children isn’t for them. Children cost too much, they take up too much time, when they grow up they are ungrateful (and might even kill them), etc. People who want to have children and those who don’t have a hard time understanding one another.

As societies become wealthier, they afford individuals more opportunities for self-fulfillment. They also make greater educational and occupational demands on people. The best child-bearing years are already past by the time an individual thinks he/she is ready for parenthood, from which a person is distracted by the duties and pleasures of our society.

This set of circumstances has reduced the birth rate of the economically advanced countries to below replacement level. Demographers are expressing alarm that Western civilization will become extinct. Populations are like water that flows to where there is little or no resistance. The depopulated Roman provinces succumbed to the barbarian flood. Japan has a very low birth rate, but the Japanese, unlike Western nations, are loath to admit foreigners to their country. They are pioneers in robotics to fill the low-entry service jobs needed to keep the society going.

It has been estimated that the population of Africa will reach four billion in the next couple of generations. The European countries will be swamped.

Fear of the population tsunami from the Third World was expressed some time ago in Jean Raspail’s prophetic novel The Camp of Saints. Many critics have called it racist, others have called it visionary.

That is one aspect of the problem. The other aspect is the philosophical/metaphysical one.

Zapffe came to the conclusion about not having children on account of his view of our predicament:

We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

If we stop having children, won’t humanity become extinct? Zapffe says:

For me, a desert island is no tragedy, neither is a deserted planet.

Horror author Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy against the Human Race) is equally (if not more) pessimistic:

And the worst possible thing we could know — worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms — is that we are nobodies not somebodies, puppets not people.

Look at your body— A painted puppet, a poor toy of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing with a head full of false imaginings.

Another important figure in the antinatalism movement is David Benetar, who in his 2006 book Better Never to Have Been argued that bringing children into the world is cruel and irresponsible.

The antinatalism movement has a publication entitled The Antinatalism Magazine (from 2017).

Here is their program:

Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

Goethe (1749-1832), one of the greatest geniuses of Western civilization, was of another opinion.

Of our sojourn on Earth:

O, you lucky eyes, what e’ér you have seen, it was yet so beautiful!

Of our chance for happiness:

And so the spirit looks neither ahead nor behind. The present alone is our joy (Faust, Part II).

Despite everything, Goethe thought it was worth having lived. Does his experience refute antinatalism or was he just a fortunate and gifted exception?

Or if the suffering of the animal and plant worlds exceeds the joy, should we close up shop and call an end to our brief sojourn on this planet? Antinatalism cannot be dismissed so lightly.