"I love my kids so much that I didn’t have them."

Ignatius Insight ^ | June 18, 2010 | Carl Olson

[NYer]

Peter Singer's June 6th essay for the New York Times about whether or not we should be the "last generation" to humans to live, suffer, and mess up the planet elicited much response (here is my post about it), and Singer has now responded to some of the responders. If nothing else, it confirms what his first essay demonstrated fairly well, despite its relative brevity: Singer's arguments are generally pedestrian and hollow, as well as sometimes incoherent. For example:

The claims made by some readers that my essay reveals philosophers to be gloomy, depressed people are therefore wide of the mark.   Even further astray, however, are the suggestions that those who believe that life is not worth living are somehow committed by this position to end their own lives. Mmrader of Maryland, for instance, asks:  “If you think life is so pointless and painful, with most pleasure a fleeting illusion, why are you still here?”  I don’t, of course, think life is so pointless and painful, but someone who did might still decide to stick around — might indeed think that it would be wrong not to stick around — because he had the ability to reduce the amount of pain that others experience.

But, then, the desire to reduce the pain of others must be based on the belief that 1) pain is bad, and 2) reducing it is good, which means such a person possesses a basic sense of morality and believes there is, in fact, a point to living: helping others. Someone who really believed life is pointless wouldn't be seeking to help others.

One respondent made the following comment:

My life’s low points are nowhere near as severe many other people’s; but that’s actually not the point. My own conclusion was “Why take the risk?” especially with my own kids — if the natural instinct of parents is to prevent the harm and promote the good of their offspring, why would I even contemplate bringing my kids into a rickety planet to be raised by imperfect parents.

I love my kids so much that I didn’t have them.

What to make of such a sad and lame attempt at squeezing humor out of such a barren, lifeless view of life? Would he think better of his parents or love them more if they didn't have him? Oh, wait, it's not actually possible to love and live unless you actually exist! Perhaps the most direct way to put it is that love is risk because real love is a gift; it is given without control of a coerced response. To say that you love your potential child so much that you wouldn't "have them" is to admit, I think, that you fear to really love. This perspective is wrapped in a pretense of moral superiority, but is both intellectually myopic, it is spiritually barren, closed in and self-absorbed.

But isn't there, frankly, a strong similarity to this approach and to that of Buddhism, which is based on the the "Four Noble Truths", which are that (1) life is suffering, (2) the cause of suffering is desire, (3) to be free from suffering we must detach from desire, and (4) the "eight-fold path" is the way to alleviate desire? Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in reflecting briefly on Buddhism in Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (Ignatius Press, 2004), while recognizing the various strains of Buddhist thought, summed it up in this way: "There can be no talk of 'Deus sive natura' here. The world in itself is suffering—and is thereby also void of truths—and only removal from the world can in the end be salvation" (p. 227). Or, in the case above, the purposeful refusal to bring new life into the world.

What if God had said, "I love man so much, I won't create him?" What if the Creator had said, "Why take the risk? They are going to fall, stray, harm themselves and others. Why should I even contemplate creating man and putting him on a rickety planet?" And what if, after the Fall, God had said, "Why would I even contemplate becoming man and offering mankind salvation when I know the risks of rejection, rebellion, refusal to accept redemption?" What if John 3:16 said, "For God lost interest in the world, and he turned his back on man?"

The real issue here is that of hope. As Pope Benedict XVI put it in Spe Salvi:

Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well. So now we can say: Christianity was not only “good news”—the communication of a hitherto unknown content. In our language we would say: the Christian message was not only “informative” but “performative”. That means: the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known—it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.

My pastor recently gave an exceptional homily on hope, and brought home one of his points by asking this question: What would you think if you saw a campaign poster with a politician's portrait above the word, "FAITH"? How about "LOVE"? It would, he noted, be cheesy at best, but more likely disconcerting, even upsetting. Yet we're all familiar with these posters. So why is it that the virtue of hope can be co-opted—in a very ambiguous but effective way—for political purposes? There are probably several reasons, but one of the most basic is that humans need hope to live, and if your hope is not based on something outside and beyond this material realm and temporal arch, you will be tempted to put your hope in political platforms, messianic-like overtures, and empty ideological myths. As Benedict pointed out, our times and these temptations are similar those of the first few centuries of the Church:

Yet from the beginning there were also conversions in the aristocratic and cultured circles, since they too were living “without hope and without God in the world”. Myth had lost its credibility; the Roman State religion had become fossilized into simple ceremony which was scrupulously carried out, but by then it was merely “political religion”. Philosophical rationalism had confined the gods within the realm of unreality. The Divine was seen in various ways in cosmic forces, but a God to whom one could pray did not exist. Paul illustrates the essential problem of the religion of that time quite accurately when he contrasts life “according to Christ” with life under the dominion of the “elemental spirits of the universe” (Col 2:8). In this regard a text by Saint Gregory Nazianzen is enlightening. He says that at the very moment when the Magi, guided by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ[2]. This scene, in fact, overturns the world-view of that time, which in a different way has become fashionable once again today. It is not the elemental spirits of the universe, the laws of matter, which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs the stars, that is, the universe; it is not the laws of matter and of evolution that have the final say, but reason, will, love—a Person. And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly the inexorable power of material elements no longer has the last word; we are not slaves of the universe and of its laws, we are free. In ancient times, honest enquiring minds were aware of this. Heaven is not empty. Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love[3].

Singer and Co. seek to find meaning, or say there is meaning to be found, while implicitly adhering to a materialism that has no meaning aside from what man subjectively stables onto it. Most people, I'm convinced, can't and won't live with such an approach to reality and truth. Most people want to really live and love. Which is why we must be able to give an account for the hope we have been given (1 Pet. 3:15).

[Nobodymuch]

He is leading by example. He hasn’t had children and there is no indication that he will not die without offspring.

The thing is, his atheism is pretty much beside the point. He follows in the tradition of a number of Christian offshoot sects which have reached the conclusion that it is better for humanity to abjure reproduction. He does it to refrain from spawning pain and they did it to abstain from spawning sin. He refrains from suicide because to commit suicide is to bring more pain into the world. They refrain from suicide because to commit suicide is to bring more sin into the world.