by Erik Dolson
Liberals and conservatives are colluding.
Each advocates for population increase, even though humanity may be the greatest threat to our planet since the last asteroid strike.
Individuals create wondrous art, discover the secrets of physics, contemplate music of the spheres. All well and good.
But add us all together, and we are a pathogen destroying its host, a virus ripping through a ravaged body, a melanoma spreading across the face of the Earth.
We are a noisy, dirty, thoughtless species. Ships deafen other mammals who evolved listening to each other across oceans. It’s as if whales came into our kitchens and started screaming like police sirens.
We foul the air, we pollute the water. We dump concentrated bat shit into the ocean, fertilizing algae blooms that suck oxygen from the water and blood streams of fish. We dump our own shit there, too, as if piping it out of site didn’t matter.
We ruin ecosystems we don’t understand to grow ever more crops to feed ever more people. We turn vast miles of ocean into biological deserts as we strip mine for protein after damming rivers that used to provide more than enough to generate ever more electricity to send to ever more buildings that need ever more air conditioning because we’ve broken the weather.
Humanity is at the apex not because we are the best, any more than a fast-growing cancer is the best cell in the human body. We are at the apex because we evolved the best tool for survival, the human brain.
And survival is what the game is about. At the level of genes, survival is what the game has always been about. And genes rule.
Ever since those first molecules responded to patterns of light / dark, warm / cold, summer / winter, genes that found an advantage to survive change and the constant winnowing of hardship, and passed that advantage on to their offspring, were those that became us.
Until now, hardship has always been a controlling factor, whether food shortages, competition from other genes in the form of disease, or cataclysmic change in the environment that rewrote the rules.
As we acknowledge “laws of nature” as they impact other species, we must accept that the impact of those laws on individuals is always awful. Laws of nature conflict with the urge to survive and with emotions such as love and fear of loss that encourage propagation of genes.
With our wonderful brains, we successfully fought back against factors that limit the expression of genes until here we are, on a planet overrun with the malignancy of humanity and Conservatives colluding with Liberals to create ever more people.
Tucker Carlson wants more White babies raised by stay-at-home mothers because he fears the demise of northern European culture in America. Other Republicans echo the same refrain.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez knows poverty hurts, is unfair, and can be self-reinforcing, but her solutions are to make it easier for poorer, less advantaged populations to have more babies.
Elizabeth Warren advocates for more people by removing economic barriers.
China, which infamously prevented people from having children a generation ago, is now promoting pregnancy.
The arguments are similar. Those on the left and right say we need increasing population so there will be workers to support an aging population, to keep the economy growing.
It’s an ugly argument: In other words, we need to create humans so they can slave for the improved existence of other humans?
The sister argument, that the economy needs more workers to grow, is nearly as malign: the primary value of a human being is as a producer or a consumer of food, cars, iPhones, baubles, Bitcoin.
Stripped of complications, it’s a tautological argument as well: growth is good because we need more growth.
To say nothing of whispers in various corridors of power: “What happens if we run out of soldiers? We won’t have poor people to shoot out of cannons at our enemies, who are shooting their own poor people at us.”
Both the left and the right argue under the premise that the status quo of how things work is the only possible way they can work, and needs to be maintained.
False. The status quo is changing more rapidly than at any time in history. The Internet, cell phones and even television are new to the species and within two generations have come to dominate our lives. Amazon, Apple and Google did not exist a generation ago.
The very definition of “success” as a human is changing. Once, a good father was a provider and a good mother a nurturer (promoting the survival of their genes) in a close knit extended family, tribe or society (more genetic reinforcement!).
But those roles are changing with blinding speed as the feedback loop of technology and information alter our environment.
Robots are now taking jobs from those “needed to raise their children, support their elders and keep the economy humming along.” That this revolution started with low income jobs mutes the volume of its impact except when it comes to the ballot box, where it’s often misdirected.
To those who say, “everything happens for a reason,” yes, the law of “cause and effect” still rules, but is very different than “means and ends.” This drastic alteration of the environment is not “for the good of mankind.”
We are being pushed in a direction over which there is no guidance. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop and almost guaranteed to become chaotic. Our brain and its capacity for language, the evolutionary advantage that allowed humanity to dominate the planet, is creating a new environment that’s changing evolution itself.
We are hurtling into the unknown.
Perhaps we could still exert a modicum of conscious control. That might begin with the idea of voluntary population decline that does not have to end in catastrophe.
Population reduction across the world would result in a lower impact of humanity on the planet: less energy required therefore less pollution; less protein harvested therefore less taken from other species; fewer people scrambling for the basics of survival therefore higher standards of living for all.
Scarcity increases value. Fewer people working may increase the value of each person at work. Higher productivity from linking those fewer people to machines could increase goods available to all, even if distributed to smaller markets.
Today we are a species that will populate until all else is destroyed, unless limited by disease, starvation, catastrophe, war. Making it easier to have Liberal or Conservative babies will accelerate the destruction.
Having fewer children is the single most effective path we can follow to save the planet, and the future of our genes as well if we are able to move beyond the genetic imperatives of cave men to procreate and accumulate.
Carriers of those genes would have a better place to live in the future, and perhaps we’d evolve into a species that deserved it.