Anytime there is a discussion about population management or the effect of population on our carbon footprint, someone always trots out the epithet, "eugenicist," or "Nazi!"
Granted, the holocaust should have conditioned us to be wary of failing to accord due respect and humility when it comes to direct interventions inclined towards producing a superior race. So, we became rightly concerned about test tube babies, genetic manipulation, stem cell research, government financed/accorded abortion, and population management incentives.
Still, when it comes to deciding whether to procreate, to choose to trust to blind chance is itself a form of choosing. No one trusts purely to randomness when it comes to any other important function, such as driving, working, or even playing. To decline to make difficult moral choices is itself a form of choice -- often an irresponsible one.
It is past time to question some uncomfortable or unquestioned assumptions. In this day and age, to leave procreation entirely to quantum chance is not just silly -- it is socially irresponsible. Choosing to rely entirely on random chance is simply choosing to be irresponsible.
While often having hearts in the right places, Catholics' notions about sex and procreation too often stretch too far into absurdity. Simply put, God is too important to entrust entirely to fundies.
Regarding human reproduction, what should be the most significant factors for distinguishing between what is to be encouraged versus what is to be discouraged?
Factors To Be Receptive To: Specific affronts to present human dignity versus general incentives or disincentives to future reproduction; what is needed to sustain a decent and viable civilization; what is reasonably consistent with spiritual values, without being unnecessarily counterproductive to scientific quests; what forms of incentives would be least intrusive upon human freedom and dignity; manning and defending national borders.
No Choice Not To Practice Eugenics: We need not imagine that, absent our intentions, evolution somehow refrains from “practicing” eugenics. Rather, every interaction imparts a eugenic tendency or effect, even if only in present meme leading to eventual gene, whether of not directly intended to do so. So it hardly elevates us, morally, to pretend not to notice how the acting out of our intentions so obviously affects eguenics, regardless of whether or not a specific eugenic effect was intended.
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In death, all particular perspectives of consciousness must eventually become collateral damage from the unfolding purposes of the field of consciousness. Our material world is not the best of all possible; we are only its gardeners, always pursuing communion, and perhaps eventual merger, with a happier state of being.
3 comments:
Were it up to any one of us, each of us would likely have a different notion for what would be an ideal mix of flora and fauna. (To me, the mix is overbalanced with too many people. At least, in most places I have found employment.) Regardless, I would not advocate that any person, tribe, or sect should be given power in any direct way to regulate or enforce some demented, fascist scheme like "cap and breed."
That said, I wish the majority of voters were less easily manipulated by sloganeering and deceit, as well as less driven by envy and avarice. I wish more were assimilated and energized with empathy and respect for pursuing civilizing behaviors, balanced for preserving decent expressions of freedom and dignity. Were we better educated, perhaps voters could be more trusted to avail indirect encourgements (tax allocations?), to such effect that children would more likely be reared by parents who had time, resources, and inclination to provide decent homes.
For examples: Everyone in a society benefits to the extent the next generation is nurtured, educated, and prepared for the time when the preceding generation becomes too infirm to continue to lead. It is no good to say that childless adults should have no responsibility to help finance or produce the infrastructure and institutions (of government and charity) that are needed to continue that process. It is also no good to encourage adults intentionally to procreate when they obviously lack means (even with a reasonable social safety net), maturity, and will to provide a decent home. And it is no good to encourage only those who are least likely to be responsible as parents to produce the bulk of the next generation that is needed to sustain society.
I think society should and does play a role in reconciling broad concerns, such as for quality of environment, numbers needed for sustaining human liberty, and quality of childhood. That is, I think we have a social responsibility to work with God, rather than simply to pretend to leave such concerns entirely to God. It would be best to avoid waiting to address such concerns until their resolution can be renormalized only through catastrophe. It would be best to address such concerns while we are still able to address them, with indirect incentives, rather than with regulatory bludgeons.
Perhaps, a more refined, better educated, more assimilated society could reasonably make such efforts. However, as things stand, I expect demogoguery will prevail and growing concerns will be kicked down the road. On one extreme, there are the regulatory cappers. On the other, there are the deniers. I think both extremes may as well be united in an unholy alliance for leaving us with no alternative but to await cataclysm.
The unholy alliance against human liberty is rationalized by leftists in the name of the environment. Soon, as populations get out of hand, the sacrifice of liberty will be rationalized by bi-political elitists in the name of keeping individual access to "death-star" technology under ever more necessary and constrictive watch by Big Bro.
That is not to say that I think a population or environmental cataclysm is imminent. I don't. But I do think a more enlightened society should help nurture a better quality of civilization and environment. Certainly, indirect incentives for bridging us to a more balanced level of population would be less stiffling to human liberty than the programs our bi-political elites have in mind for us.
Unfortunately, humane and indirect incentives may prove inefficacious, inasmuch as idiocy presently reigns with a death grip on most of our important social institutions, especially in academia. To fight that inefficacy, we need more people in the vein of what some of our founders represented: "Extreme Moderators."
Unfortunately, for the foreseeable future, there seems not so much that can be done in terms of smart government, except to cut the spreading tenacles of the federalizing and globalizing governmental beast wherever possible. As the federalizing beast withers, we will be able to do more on local and voluntary levels. That way, we won't have to choose between a federalized zombie-hood of bureacratic make-workers versus a babble-hood of unassimilable cults, warring via population strategies.
A good start for "extreme moderation" would be to agitate Muslims and Catholics to discuss and re-think their fascist and/or silly population strategies. What's so great about any philosophy, even a religious-based philosophy, to the extent it is rationalized and designed to keep people barefoot, pregnant, living in squalor, and dependent under the whip of necessity?
Every new legal classification that is accompanied with coercive regulations is a device for imposing a program that will affect the subsequent unfolding of culture and evolution. Every new law tends to have a general eugenic effect, even though that seems never to be considered, even though most people reflexively deny that they have any intention to sponsor a program of eugenics or racial cleansing. By now, isn't it clear that Obama wants to cleanse America of being a bastion for strong, independent-minded, work-oriented people (often racially denigrated as Whities)? Isn't that a perverse kind of eugenics (or world cleasning)? Indeed, what aspect of the crony-socialist-corporatist juggernaut is not a program bent on eugenic establishment of a perverse NWO? Traditionalists have caught the name calling for so long that many of them have come to believe that those who would impose a perverse NWO are the good guys. By the time the perversity is fully appreciated, it will be too late to restore good sense. Self determination under a system that sponsors liberty is appreciated as an ideal by those who have to fight for it and by those who have lived without it. For many of those who merely eat liberty's fruit, freely given, liberty has no value. Such are the locusts who think nothing of devouring liberty at every opportunity. They argue "fairness" while they eat your flesh. Enough! Gay marriage is a front for cannibalizing thugs. It is meant to replace family oriented civilization with an intrusive system for governmental enforcement of fairness, as "fairness" is to be defined and kicked about at pleasure by a new crony elite of liberal-fascist thugs. Obama is their pretended messiah.
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