What parents reveal with the phrase “well, life isn’t fair”

“Parents are not interested in justice — they want QUIET!“

-Bill Cosby

When a child protests about unfairness, it is often in the context of a disputed parental verdict. Parents who want to keep peace and quiet sometimes reply with the phrase “well, life isn’t fair”, with the emphasis on life. Whenever I have heard parents or other authority figures say this so smugly, I’ve always thought it was an immature defensive reaction constituting an assault on the integrity of the child’s critical thinking ability, training them to equate some unchangeable entity “life” with the decisions of the speaker. But the words reveal more than the smugness that accompanies power. When parents say “well, life isn’t fair” they unknowingly reveal an important fact about the natalist attitude to life and to children. Life isn’t fair, which means, prima facie, that perpetuating it is an injustice. In order to tolerate and extend the injustice of life, persons intent on reproduction must value life more than fairness. Are parents aware of this, and what do they mean when they say “well, life isn’t fair”? Do they really stand by this statement, which seems so self-accusing?

To begin, we might note that the definitions of fairness and unfairness, because they cut across so many semantic domains, incorporate both a moral and an amoral dimension. The word “good” can refer to a capacity that is devoid of moral content (being good at or for something), as well as being good toward something (the moral sense). Similarly, “fair” can apply to a business deal or an employment contract that is carried out by two parties that are at each other’s throat, with one getting the upper hand, even though from a higher standpoint (such as that of class exploitation) we can clearly see that the deal is unfair, because one party is in a privileged position of power. The amoral sense is what we refer to when we say “fair enough” or “he won it fair and square”. This narrow sense of “fair” refers to a victory that does not violate the rules of the game, while the wider sense refers to a standpoint that explicitly takes the rules of the game itself as being “fair”. Conversely, “unfairness” can refer to a person or persons who are acting unfairly in relation to what is socially approved, or it can mean that those rules are themselves unfair.

When parents tell their children that life isn’t fair, which of these meanings do they have in mind? Do they mean that some parties are bad parties, that some actions violate the social contract, or do they mean that life itself is unfair?

If the first is what they mean, why not just say that some people are bad people? Why say that life itself is unfair? Are they not actually referring to the rules of the game itself? In some contexts, parents might escape the wider implications of the statement by claiming that they are referring to a particular action as being socially unfair. But usually, when a statement like this is uttered, it is not really with an acceptance that the dialogical anchor, or the event in question, really was unfair. They believe that it (usually their decision) was fair.  Most parents, if they feel that their child has been the object of some social injustice, typically attempt to mitigate it, rather than to inculcate acquiescence. These facts, in addition to their use of the term “life”, lends force to the interpretation that parents are referring not to their decision, but to life itself, which demands that, as parents, they make unfair decisions.

Probably, several of these meanings are packed into the statement:

1. The speaker is noting that “life” is amoral, and in so being it is impossible for life to adhere to human concepts of fairness. This is the factual heart of the statement, which is indisputable. The unfairness is everywhere, such as in distinctions of ability and intelligence. If anything, we might say that in the view of nature, fairness is equal to force, and might makes right. This being the opposite of human ideas of justice, we reach the paradox expressed by Pascal: “it is just that the just be followed, it is necessary that the strong be followed”.
2. At the same time they are passing judgment on the statement of the child, and are not-so-subtly blaming the child for asking too much from life. In doing this they reveal that life is the object of their true loyalty. If it were otherwise, they would ask life for absolute justice on behalf of the child, rather than deferring to life.
3. It is a defensive response and an accusation toward the child, a counter-judgment. Paradoxically, it expresses the belief that asking for too much fairness is in fact unfair. In their position as arbiters of justice in an amoral universe, asking parents for too much fairness is in fact unfair to them.
4. The parent (or authority figure) is defensively justifying their position through a shift in blame, toward an anthropomorphized other, “life”. It is an attempt, as in a real bureaucracy, to push the source of the unfairness up to the higher level. “I’m just following orders”, is the cry of the authority figure who appeals to life as unfair.
5. They are presuming to act in an informative role, telling the child something they are unaware of, by appealing to a wider experience. It is this experience of life’s unfairness which is supposed to lend support to their statement. The implication of the appeal to experience is to teach resignation; parents themselves tolerated the unfairness of life, and therefore so should the children.
6. It can also amount to a pure dismissal and an outright gesture of force, because it talks down to the child from a vantage point from which the child cannot change the verdict that has been decided. When the parent says “well, life is unfair”, they mean by life their own self-aggrandized view of their own power, which, to the child, is totalizing and inescapable. In the defensive mode of counter-judgment, they take pleasure in this fact. In doing so, they reassert their own power against the destabilizing effect of a direct questioning of a verdict.
7. It forms a social function by placing the child in opposition to an entire system of power. It lends its force to all acts of authority as such, with the result that the child learns to accept the determinations of authority figures with finality and conform to them. In this sense, parents mean by “life” the bourgeois concept of social arrangement, under which the child themselves will be harmed by, but also benefit from, socially construed unfairness. In this use, it constitutes a direct on assault on the capacity for critical thinking toward social forms.
8. If spoken in the presence of other adults, it construes an in-group and out-group with respect to the social power that is being exerted. Because of its smugness, the statement is an attempt to raise the status of the adult speaker within the adult group, by displaying a show of verbal force towards a weaker party.

It is this compact and effective constellation of meanings that explains the persistence of the phrase “well, life is unfair” as a performative act directed at children. It would be an interesting study to see how similar meanings are expressed in other cultures, and against what linguistic background.

All of these senses, perhaps because they are so confused in the minds of the parents who voice them, seem together to constitute a whole which is (or ought to be) persuasive. But in reality there is nothing about the statement that holds water. The shift in blame proves nothing and is in fact an act of irresponsibility, not maturity. The idea that life is amoral and unfair and cannot meet human standards of justice has nothing to do with the specifics of the judgment in question. Revealing their true loyalty to life is a confession of the selfish (or at most species-level) motives behind reproduction, motives which never place the interests of the child as of first importance. And the implication that they tolerated the unfairness confers no force to the idea that anyone else should.

But what is striking is the extent to which the second meaning, that life is the object of the parent’s true loyalty, goes unnoticed and unremarked upon, and coexists with so many other hypocritical protests of personal love we meet with everyday in parent-child discourse. By loyalty we mean that one stands by another against a third. Loyalty arises most patently in the context of an injustice done by that third, which is then to be decided against by the loyal party. In this statement, the parent has sidestepped the call of such loyalty by making life itself the third party, and then lending greater importance to the interests of life than the interests of the child. They are saying, in effect, “there is no justice in this universe where I have created you, I cannot provide it, and so no matter what I may say to the contrary, my loyalty does not lie with you, and cannot lie with you, but rather with the life I have brought you into”.  How can their true loyalty be expressed otherwise, if by the statement they mean in any literal sense that life is essentially amoral? This overlooked meaning is the most significant of the meanings, for it gets to the reason parents have children in the first place. It is from a loyalty to life and a biologically imparted love of the species that children are brought into the world, not from individual love.

Before the reader protests that I leave parents with no option for handling children questioning their decisions, let me offer my suggestion for a performative act that is both more satisfying to the child’s critical thinking ability and less smug in its assertion of power. “Well, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” or some variant is one response that could be better in these cases. Although it does not directly incorporate an admission of unfairness, it does incorporate the idea that life, as such, is unconcerned with providing the lemonade of fairness that humans must squeeze themselves from the lemon of an indifferent universe. It does not convey an unwarranted sense of closure, but a sense of openness and process. Although it might be the subject of ridicule from the child to be asked to make a better situation out of being denied what he wants, it would place things in the right perspective, by teaching him that as long as he has been brought into the world unfairly he must act as part of a cooperative social form to mitigate the suffering inherent around us. He would learn social compromise and be made to view what he sees as injustice in terms of imagination rather than passive acquiescence.

This loyalty of parents to life, rather than the child, is eloquently expressed in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, which mirrors the performative act “well, life is unfair”. Today we like to think that we are more enlightened and would never engage in child sacrifice. But “well, life is unfair” expresses the extent to which the natalist attitude and worldview must sacrifice the child’s interests on the altar of unchanging circumstances, personified as “life”, and the way in which it does so through a symbolic replay of human sacrifice. The words may be different, but the essence is much the same.  The phrase “well, life is unfair” is much like a replay of the attempted sacrifice of Isaac in the following ways:

1.  A greater force than the parent, which cannot be completely personified, (“life”), is deemed as unfair from the human standpoint, and in the mode of this unfairness demands a sacrifice of the child’s interests. This is like the call of God to sacrifice Isaac. It is a sacrifice no parent wants to make, but which they are made to make by the overwhelming force of the quasi-entity.
2. Abraham accedes to this call because of the overwhelming force of the interlocutor, which cannot be reasoned with or dissuaded. This amounts to the recognition of the content of the phrase “life is unfair”.
3. In order to rationalize what he is doing, Abraham suspends his own reason and what he is forced to view as his “merely human” values. This is like saying that “the notion of fairness must serve life, not the other way around”. This leap of faith explains how the statement “well, life is unfair” can coexist with the natalist attitude.
4. At the last moment Abraham regains Isaac, and his hand is stayed by God, when it turns out that it was all a test. In the same way, present-day parents hope that the “voice” that calls for the sacrifice of the child’s interests (in the phrase “well, life is unfair”) will also be the voice that calls to stay the sacrifice of the child’s interests. Parents hope that this statement will make their child better adjusted to the world. The sacrifice that the voice calls for is a paradox: it calls for the sacrifice of the child’s self-interest, and in the same gesture, it hopes to stay the sacrifice of the child itself through instilling in the child social-interest and the setting-aside of self-interest.

Perhaps this particular correlation between the present day performative act and the biblical story is not an accident, and the myth betrays something very basic about how parents have to relate to their children. In the story of Abraham’s sacrifice, we may be seeing what amounts to an inverted form of the coming of age ritual: it is the picture of a parent coming of age in parenthood. Parents often embark on parenthood with all idealism of youth. They will provide the child everything. A little later on, they discover the real nature of the bargain they have entered into on behalf of the child, and must then manifest their faith in life a second time, by sacrificing the child in one way or another to a greater whole. But what both the story and statement betray is that the loyalty of persons to their offspring is not what it appears. Loyalty does not lie with the individual, but with something more powerful than the individual, which the individual is then sacrificed to.

What has to be noted is that this is all well and good only for the already existing. It is hard to question the wisdom of deferring to life once a child already exists, since life is so much bigger than the child or the parent. But who is to say that a child must exist in the first place and then be subject to the unfairness of life? The child is a separate entity whom we cannot confer with prior to creating it. Perhaps the painful path of self-abnegation required by life is something no future child would wish to embark on. Why, when there is no responsibility to another, should a potential parent set aside their own human idea of justice, by taking the leap of faith in believing that “life” knows better than human reason? It is not as if unborn children float in the ether calling out to be born. The human sacrifice is inherent in the act of procreation itself, long before there is any responsibility to another party. And this is to say nothing of the sacrifice natalism means for the already existing orphans of the world.

“well, life is unfair” therefore reveals a contradiction between the amorality of the universe and the supposed individual love parents have for their children. There remain only two possible ways for the natalist attitude to get around this contradiction. The first is to deny the amorality of the universe, the second is to deny the reality of individual love. The first is the method of a religious upbringing, the second is the method of what we might call a socially interested upbringing. In the next post, we will look at the second of these, examining how the natalist attitude might frame the higher value of life and social interest, as opposed to the interests of the individual, such as in the social interest theory of Alfred Adler, and examine how such framing– though useful from the standpoint of the already existing– fails to account for the ultimate contradiction between social ideals and the reality of the universe we live in.

I Don’t Know the Meaning of Life

I sometimes teach English at a highschool, and occasionally spend ten minutes waiting in the halls between classes. ESL teachers don’t have a place to go, or a proper office, so I often find myself nodding and smiling at the students as they walk by, never knowing if they are actually my students or if I’ve ever seen them before. It’s usually a pretty boring time.

But at the highschool today, something that would happen in a movie happened to me. A girl came up to me and asked the meaning of life. I guess it wasn’t in those terms, but that’s how it struck me at the time. She came up to me out of nowhere and asked: “what did your philosophy teacher tell you is the meaning of life?”

Pardon? To begin with, I never had such a philosophy teacher. I think she was assuming that this kind of thing might actually be taken on authority. That’s not really the view of adult Chinese, but the youth are pretty much kept innocent for as long as possible. The tendency to actually believe what teachers say is extremely strong.

It turned out she was asking me a comparative question: “in your country, is the meaning of life to serve society?” That is what her philosophy teacher had said, and she disagreed with him. She was looking for evidence that I would support her. So although it looks like a kind of comparative question, it was a little hard for me not to personalize at the same time, since it was authority for another view that she was looking for. And of course, she probably expected that it would be an easy answer.

Well, I would love to be taken on authority about this topic, if I knew the answer. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really ready for this question, especially since at the time I was thinking about logotherapy and the lack of anchoring going on in human existence, faced with the Lovecraftian cosmic void. It was really weird timing.

One reason I was irritated by this question is that I had to restrain my impulse to say a bunch of bullshit. I’ve noticed this tendency when talking to Chinese people to speak like I’m an expert on everything American. They are particularly receptive to what I say, which is only more dangerous for my bullshit engine. It’s not that I disagree with what I’m saying (an impossibility for me), it’s rather the glib way I say it that bothers me. She wanted to know what people in the United States think, and whether they have a compass like hers. But who am I to say what people think in the United States? They certainly seem to be serving society; it’s not for their own happiness that they have endless mortgages for giant houses and work so much at jobs they can’t even explain. But I don’t know what they want.

Well, if there’s anything uniquely of value in Western philosophy, it would be the Socratic method of not knowing the answer to these things, so I did that. I could do nothing but keep asking questions. I asked her what she thought it was, and she said it was serving one’s self and self-development.

She was the picture of young idealistic youth. A big smile, attractive, her self-respect unbroken. She was the kind of girl who, if she had grown up in America, would probably gravitate to Ayn Rand at this same age, when the ego becomes so apparently real.

Because of how bright-eyed and enthusiastic she was, I had the uncomfortable sense of feeling like I was obligated, dramatically speaking, to offer some fact about American philosophy that would contradict her teacher’s. To agree with her or tell her to follow her dreams and go against the grain of communist indoctrination. This irritated me because that has nothing to do with the truth, which I often think is that life is meaningful the more you serve others. In that respect, the narcissism of youth is a straight-up lie, though it’s useful for development at a time when ego individuation is everything.

So I asked her some questions. She said she wanted to be a scientist. I said, do you think you would be serving society as a scientist. She said yes, but first doing it for herself. And then I asked her about working for a boss, would she be serving him. And she said she would be serving them at first, implying she could work alone later. Some of my questions were pointed, others were wastes, like “what would you be studying (chemistry)”, and “what would you have to do”.

It happened very quickly. I had to go to class and ended up just saying that both ideas had been suggested. A pointless, academic answer without balls. I had not led her into any realization, or into any fucking recognition of anything. I fucking suck again.

Say No to Happiness

Here  is an excellent interview piece on happiness from CBC Radio, discussing the elusiveness of defining happiness, its detachment from meaning and purpose in life, and the potentially motivating force for change that is inherent in being radically discontent. It reminded me of my favorite passage in Betrand Russell’s autobiography:

“One day, Gilbert Murray came to Newnham to read part of his translation of The Hippolytus, then unpublished. Alys and I went to hear him, and I was profoundly stirred by the beauty of the poetry. When we came home, we found Mrs. Whitehead undergoing an unusually severe bout of pain. She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me. Ever since my marriage, my emotional life had been calm and superficial. I had forgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with flippant cleverness. Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. The Whitehead’s youngest boy, aged three, was in the room. I had previously taken no notice of him, nor he of me. He had to be prevented from troubling his mother in the middle of her paroxysms of pain. I took his hand and led him away. He came willingly, and felt at home with me. From that day to his dead in the War of 1918, we were close friends.”

Could postpartum depression represent a justifiable value judgement?

For a long-time I doubted the validity of most mental illnesses, viewing them as primarily social constructs. This wasn’t as the result of any particularly constructivist reasoning, or from exposure to Foucault, but more out of instinct. It seemed that suppressing unwelcome views or perspectives would be more likely, given the essential lack of imagination that most people have, than that the variety of mental illnesses existed out there in the world. Nor did it help that I can convince myself that I have most, if not all, mental illnesses, just by reading the diagnostic criteria and finding examples of how I exhibit these behaviors.

However, some experience I had with a narcissist have refined my view, to the point that I now believe that some mental illnesses must have a degree of truth in them. Basically, without those illnesses as a category, and without reading about the category, one is doomed to confusion in dealing with such persons. And so the question becomes how to distinguish between a constructed and a biologically valid illness, which would be real outside of a particular set of social norms.

I think a mental illness is meaningfully described if (1) it distinguishes a constellation of idiosyncratic behaviors or symtoms that occur with such collocative frequency that they form a seemingly organic whole, and (2) if at the same time the person is impossible to understand in the absence of that description.

I think that a mental illness, if it is to be a mental illness, must particularly fulfill the second criteria, because the first is more prone to manipulation (even given that we look at organic things like biological cohorts to the illness). The second criteria means that the disease must be all-consuming or all-explaining in reference to the victim. Here the DSM criteria of “interference” of the illness with life is critical. In other words, I am looking for wide-scope coverage for a variety of behaviors. This wide-scope coverage is what reacts upon the constellation of symptoms to give it the appearance of something seemingly improbable.

You can’t predict people’s behavior like a physical system. I would suggest that the psychological equivalent of a theory’s predictive validity is this wide-scope coverage of behaviors, which is also its utility. If a person were just opposed to social norms, it might well be that a description generated from within those social norms would provide strong descriptive validity in certain areas of friction with the system, but not in others. What I am asking is that a person’s behavior (as an organically improbable whole) make very little sense at all outside of a mental pathology.

I have no certainty as to whether postpartum depression meets this description. One thing we can be certain of is that it is defined as a transient phenemena, which means that it is happening in an otherwise well person. This alone should make us call it into question if there is another possible explanation.  

One hypothetical explanation which I will suggest (originally suggested here) is that in some cases postpartum depression might express a value judgement towards the baby’s life and the act of giving birth. This value judgement might be subject to various degrees of conscious recognition but it would be based upon real factors that would lead a rational decision maker to question giving life to the child.

In support of this idea, it is interesting to note that the incidence of post-partum depression (according to the A.D.A.M. Medical Encylopedia) correlates well with just such factors. All of the risk factors for post-partum depression would  also make a rational decision maker question giving the “gift” of life to a person who can’t consent, and isn’t asking to be born. Some of these factors (along with my explanation of their relevance to this theory) are:

being under the age 20

People under the age of twenty are less likely to have the financial resources or experience to really give a child a relatively good life and instruction.

Alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and smoking

If a person is a substance abuser, this is also likely to harm the child’s development.

The woman did not plan the pregnancy, or had mixed feelings about the pregnancy

If the pregnancy wasn’t planned, this increases the likelihood that there are probably very real reasons it wasn’t planned. A woman’s doubts about pregnancy also would have a more complicated role in the ontology of post-partum depression: very rational and deep seated apprehensions about giving birth might only attain to a threshold significance after the mother has been divested of the child, and the child has been externalized and is visible and vested with its categorical status as a “person”.  It is at that point that the child being committed to life strikes the woman as an ethical decision she has made for it. Even if the child has a life worth living, will it have a life that was worth starting?

Depression, bipolar disorder (for example, manic depression), or an anxiety disorder before pregnancy

A person with depression is more likely to pass on the risk of depression, thereby imposing life on someone who will regret being born. Even if this is not brought to consciousness (and our society usually will not protect future people from such risks, making the thought unlikely), nevertheless a depressive person may reason from their own experience and ask whether, in their experience, life would be worth starting all over again.   

The woman had a stressful event during the pregnancy or delivery, including personal illness, death or illness of a loved one, a difficult or emergency delivery, premature delivery, or illness or birth defect in the baby

An emergency delivery, premature delivery, illness, or birth defect are all likely to be stressful on the baby, possibly causing developmental defects, and all increase the likelihood of future suffering.

Have a close family member who has had depression or anxiety

The situation here is the same as above. A history of depression in a family would cause any reasonable person to wonder what the justification is for bringing a new depressed person into existence, and this might cause feelings of guilt.

Have a poor relationship with your significant other or are single

This bodes ill for the child in many obvious ways. 

Have financial problems (low income, inadequate housing)

Again this relates to the child’s future life and the prospects of getting a good job, etc.

Have little support from family, friends, or your significant other

It is difficult to raise a child without such support systems, hence the outlook for the child decreases even more when there is no support for the pregnancy.

It seems to me that all of these factors which influence the mother’s quality of life can be tied directly to the child’s well being. If they are present, a woman would naturally feel guilty. Otherwise, what kind of person would she be? All of these risk factors are in fact things that would make a woman question the wisdom of childbirth.

My question is this: could postpartum depression be a justifiable value judgement toward the pregnancy? Could it be that after the child has been born mothers begin to take account of the commitment they have not only made for themselves, but that they have made, in proxy, on behalf of the child, by conceiving it and bringing it into the world?  PPD is the inverse of “survivor’s guilt”, under this conception. It is guilt about starting life. It is “birther’s guilt”.

A person talking with these new mothers, and who listened long enough, would not be in a position to validate such concerns under the present taboos in favor of evaluating reproduction positively. After all, you can’t turn back time. Therapists would be in the position of framing such issues in terms of the mother’s present responsibilities, and might well be right to do so. The woman brought the child to term, has given birth to it and now (in our legal system’s realm of black and white thinking) the child must be taken account of as a person with interests seperate from hers, though dependent on her. Why should the woman not just get over such ideas, and do the best for the child now that it is already born?

This sounds reasonable, but it probably doesn’t correspond to the mother’s felt reality. To the mother, the baby’s new independent reality is not so easy to distinguish, or is perhaps multidimensional. With the horror of modern hospital birth– the lack of intimacy, the clinicizing of the body, the blood, the screams, the agony– the independence, dependence, and causal dependence of the baby on the mother might cut across the mind in myriad ways. The child holds a liminal status with real and suddenly apparent value of life concerns but with an undiminished relation to maternal autonomy. Though it is assumed that time will heal these psychic scars, at bottom there may be, after such an undeniably traumatic introduction to the world, the haunting question of why: why bring a child into the world?

Those who work with PPD could probably bring out many anecdotes about women who are priveleged and fall into none of the classes above, and so have no reason to think their child’s life will be anything but charmed. But how exceptional are those cases? And what elements of truly valid pessimism are revealed in therapy with other women, who do fall into these classes, and who might feel a valid sense of birther’s guilt for having handicapped their children from the beginning?

Post-partum depression seems to incoporate elements of such birther’s guilt for having imposed life on an unconsenting being who was not asking to be born. And with PPD we are also looking at the number one complication of childbirth, which means, under this interpretation, that anti-natalist sentiment could be far more prevelant than anyone would at first believe. Could postpartum depression (at least in those cases) be a social-construct, similar to homosexuality as a mental illness, or any of the other fictional mental illnesses that have been invented in the past to justify the inflication of harm? 

The infliction of harm on future people is not something our society has made a priority. Underprivelaged children of teenage mothers, like those I see a profile of in the data about postpartum depression, are exactly what our pro-natalist society requires for cannon fodder and cheap labor. Under such a system, would it be any surprise if women who felt a justifiable sense of remorse for functioning as breeding machines for unconsenting have-nots were branded as mentally ill and then medicated?

One of the more interesting effects of postpartum depression is that mothers are ideating about harming or killing the baby. It’s important to note that this is exactly what that baby’s future self would want, considering the chances that (if all of the above true) they are saddled with a miserable life from day one. As we know, once a child has passed outside of the vaginal canal he or she receives their legal package of humanhood, which makes infanticide wrong. Post-partum depression appears to be, at least in this hypothetically extreme case, the desire to right the wrong. If mothers were only allowed to listen to their maternal instincts, how many children would be strangled to death in the cradle?

Philanthropy is held to a higher ethical standard than the “gift” of life

It’s commonly said that life is a “gift” of some kind, and this misnomer, repeated over and over, is one of the reasons that suicide is considered wrong. Of course, if we mean that life is a “gift” given unselfishly, anyone who has ever fucked can see that there is no sense to the statement at all. But of course, reminding is needed. The fact is that an unselfish gift is held up to incredibly high standards of perfection in our society, standards which are never applied to reproduction.  One main reason for this is that, in a world of such vast disparity of wealth, everyone is always looking for a rationalization not to give to the people below them. Reproduction, however, is basically selfish in a number of ways, both genetically and culturally, and so it is conveniently viewed as self-evidently justified.

For instance, just today I was thinking about sponsoring a child, when I came on this famous article from New Internationalist, criticizing child sponsorship on a number of grounds. There are a number of good points made (though they are inferred or anecdotal, and don’t seem to backed up by any scientific evidence).  The difference between community aid and sponsorship is definitely something I will look into further. More than anything else, however, this article really exemplifies the extreme scrutiny people hold their giving to: a scrutiny that no one applies to starting a family. The reason, of course, is that everyone knows that fucking, gestating, then pushing out a new human, simply because your genes want to reproduce themselves, is in no way a philanthropic gift. Euphamising it as such is just a way of enforcing a taboo on suicide.

Just imagine a world where reproduction were a charitable gift. Can you imagine the scrutiny it would be held to?  Reading the article on sponsorship, we can see that there’s no criticism in it that doesn’t apply to people having their own children.

Take the first criticism: “Helping one identifiable person ALSO Causes divisions and creates more inequality.” Does anyone dispute that almost every action a parent takes with their children is to create more inequality by giving their child more advantages than other children?

Or take another: “Paying for regular information about your own child ALSO Leaves less available for the project.” This “Paying for regular information about your own child” is exactly what parents do, at the expense of orphans around the world. Would this author be willing to complete their preference ranking?

 impersonal aid > sponsorship > parenting

Philanthropic antinatalism is, as I see it, one of the few irrefutable philosophical arguments, and it dare not speak its name. Reproduction is never taken to task to defend itself. One still has to congratulate one’s friends on bringing new life into the world– life which is a harm to already existing orphans who need resources.

In such a situation, wouldn’t it be convenient if aid didn’t work? Wouldn’t it be great for our selfish genes if there were no way of helping? At the end the author makes the dubious claim that the best a potential donor might do is keep their money. How so? What a paradise for genecism! The chances are that such money from potential donors in developed countries will be spent on their own children, who don’t need it. How can this be overlooked?

So…you bore offspring.

“For most couples, every child you create to love means another child you pass over for love. We do not care about these others because they are not made from our genes – we might consider it a kind of prejudice based on genes: genecism (pronounced jin-NEH-sism). Ignore the neologism if you wish, but consider prospective parents who spend hours, months or years and ludicrous amounts of money on fertility treatments, yet ignore the plight of children all over the world who need basic housing, health and nutrition. Children without parents but needing parents. How about taking all that money you would use on fertility treatments and giving it to a child who does exist, or perhaps investing in an adoption agency to acquire a child who is already on this planet? (To many, this seems the classical utilitarian failure: it asks too much. This does not apply in this instance, since it is actually asking for something less demanding. You will still have a child, but not one that has come about through struggle, time, therapy and failure.) Every time I pass a parent knowing they have created a child, I see nothing but double-standards, prejudice, and immorality. On what basis are we ignoring the plight of those who need our help? Why do we continue to create people, when there are people who need our attention?”

-How Philosophy Killed My Children

Schopenhauer not a Materialist

The most famous antinatalist on youtube is a guy called inmendenham, who is very prolific, and has made over 2,000 videos essentially ranting about how the system of life is a game where parents create “need machines” that then create more need machines. His view of the universe is in some ways very brutally honest, and there’s no doubt in my mind that his general conclusion that perpetuating human life should be avoided is the correct one.

Inmendenham is basically furiously indignant at the systemic problems with life, and he speaks for the inner discontent of a lot of people. He is not only opposed to procreation, but he is on an active crusade to prevent it (though he admits there are conceivable plan B’s, like virtual reality, to mitigate some of the necessary suffering of existence). He’s a bit of a consequentialist when it comes to ethics, since his view is that destroying the earth, if it were possible to do so, could be an ethical action, taken on behalf of future generations. The road to convincing people of this is of course a long one.

Inmendenham has been compared to Schopenhauer, and on the other hand there has been some discussion of why he seems quite different. My point in this post is that any comparison is in many ways unjustified, since Schopenhauer represents a form of antinatalism that is transcendentalist in its outlook, while inmendenham is surely a materialist. This difference is fundamental and touches on all aspects of their views.

As the maker of the video above points out, Schopenhauer does apparently value certain activities that are pointless from the nihilist perspective that would be commonly attributed to him as an atheistic pessimist. The problem is that that perspective just isn’t his. No one who reads Schopenhauer can avoid the aspect of his philosophy that is not nihilistic at all, but values knowledge, resignation from the world, and transcendence through pure consciousness. So, although Schopenhauer prefaces The Wisdom of Life with the remark that there is ultimately no hope of succeeding in his outlined eudaimonology (or systematic hedonism), he nevertheless says that he going to present it for the sake of presenting it. Why? The reason for seeking out knowledge (conceded later in the book) is that Schopenhauer views knowledge to a great extent as an independent good. Or, as Gracian would say, “when we seek out wisdom our search is anything but vain”.

How does Schopenhauer come to reconcile knowledge or intellectual achievement as an independent good with the pointlessness and vanity of existence? I think that the reason for this valuing of knowledge is underpinned by his philosophy in the World as Will and Representation, practically from the beginning, in at least two ways. The first way is through his idea that knowledge will help a person to transcend the will. Secondly, perhaps more basically, it is because of his equivalence between epistemology and ontology. This equivalence is best exemplified in the quote that “all that is, exists for knowledge”. Because of this, Schopenhauer’s ultimate value seems to me to be consciousness:

“THE world is my idea:” this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this: for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of ideas; whereas the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes, is that form under which alone any idea of whatever kind it may be, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical, is possible and thinkable.”

The difference is not only one of values, but of basic perspective. To paraphrase, Schopenhauer holds the view that that which does the knowing– consciousness– does not have a simplistic ontological relationship with the things it knows– the universe. It is not as if some things have happened in the past, historically, which now make it possible for some object called consciousness to know other objects out there. Schopenhauer would call this view naive. To say that consciousness could evolve from matter is not his position. It is more probably the view of Darwin, who said ”the mind is the fortress that cannot be taken by direct assault”, implying that we will one day get to understanding its physical origination, but only by going at it from many different directions. Instead, in Schopenhauer’s view, the relationship between consciousness and the universe is going to remain deeply paradoxical. This perspective is far different from that of inmendenham, who views consciousness as more or less a disease.

And so Schopenhauer not only values knowledge (placing him at odds with nihilism), but he also views consciousness as transcendental to the physical world. And yet Schopenhauer’s view is not theism as it is understood in the West. His view of consciousness as fundamental and inherent in all beings was greatly informed by Kant, who is remembered for having demolished every conventional metaphysical argument for God. Instead, Schopenhauer reaches a conception equivalent to the Brahman of Hinduism through this primacy of subject/object duality, and the independence of consciousness from the object.

The differences between Schopenhauer and inmendenham are even more pronounced when we look at Schopenhauer’s critique of materialism, which is as good today as it was over a century ago. It is a quote that ought to be borne in mind by all the Dennetts of the world:

“Of all systems of philosophy which start from the object, the most consistent, and that which may be carried furthest, is simple materialism. It regards matter, and with it time and space, as existing absolutely, and ignores the relation to the subject in which alone all this really exists. It then lays hold of the law of causality as a guiding principle or clue, regarding it as a self-existent order (or arrangement) of things, veritas aeterna, and so fails to take account of the understanding, in which and for which alone causality is. It seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it ; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility that is knowledge which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly; for suddenly the last link is seen to be the starting-point, the chain a circle, and the materialist is like Baron Munchausen who, when swimming in water on horseback, drew the horse into the air with his legs, and himself also by his cue.”

I think that it should be clear by now where inmendenham, Benatar, and most contemporary antinatalists come down on the question of consciousness, and how it differs from Schopenhauer. His pessimism, arising from the inevitability of cause and effect, was always tempered by these considerations of the transcendental nature of consciousness. Benatar would probably fall in with Dawkins and Dennett, and inmendenham definitely would. Most seem to basically hold the view that consciousness is a kind of supervening thing that has been evolved to ensure survival through complicated behavior. My position with respect to consciousness is that of Schopenhauer, and if one looks for its contemporary correlate, it would probably be found in the work of David Chalmers.

This brings me to my final point: how a transcendental view of consciousness relates to antinatalism. I think that its relevance comes when we look to establish the real basis of ethical intuitions, which remain problematic in a materialist philosophy. If indeed we can pull ethical intuitions out of thin air, it seems that on equally tendentious grounds we could postulate any number of values consistent with creating more humans. Why do we care if future generations suffer the indignities of existence? Why bother to prevent them?

The question is a complex one; my goal here is to stimulate thought. But I think that the basis of ethical intuitions is compassion: there is a singular quality to the consciousness under discussion, which results in a concern for those other beings who are essentially the same as the subject making the ethical intuition. The result of this is a feeling that if they suffer, we suffer. We can say, with inmendenham, that we care about future suffering because there is effectively no difference between my consciousness and the consciousness of other suffering beings, but this seems to me a vague restatement of the buddhist doctrine of no-self, which is another transcendentalist doctrine. How do separate beings come to be effectively the same, for ethical purposes, if they are not essentially the same? Why say that the consciousness in other suffering beings might as well be mine, simply pointing out, as the Buddha might say, that there are no distinguishing marks between them, but still not make the logical conclusion that it really is mine, as Schopenhauer would under the guiding principle of the singular nature of consciousness?  Here is a closing quote from Schopenhauer on the subject of ethical intuitions:

“In fact, all temporal happiness stands, and all prudence proceeds, upon ground that is undermined. They defend the person from accidents and supply its pleasures; but the person is merely phenomenon, and its difference from other individuals, and exemption from the sufferings which they endure, rests merely in the form of the phenomenon, the principium indiduationis. According to the true nature of things, every one has all the suffering of the world as his own, and indeed has to regard all merely possible suffering as for him actual, so long as he is the will to live, i.e., asserts life with all his power. For the knowledge that sees through the principium individuationis, a happy life in time, the gift of chance or won by prudence, amid the sorrows of innumerable others, is only the dream of a beggar in which he is a king, but from which he must awake and learn from experience that only a fleeting illusion had separated him from the suffering of his life.”

Schopenhauer’s views are therefore different than the way they have to be construed in order to be compared to inmendenham. But this view is not restricted to Schopenhauer either. There have always been persons who claim that consciousness is not an ancillary element of reality, and indeed that it is integral to the very structure of existence (and hence are in some way believers in “god”) and yet have nevertheless come to the conclusion of antinatalism.  It seems to me that Gandhi, who wanted all married couples to stop having sex, would also be classed under the heading of transcendentalist antinatalism. No stranger to the zero-sum game that is physical existence, Gandhi had become celibate after witnessing the atrocities of the Boer war: saying afterwords that after becoming celibate “the avenues of sacrifice seemed infinite”. It was there that his views became consolidated in such a way that would make possible the later implication that he was effectively an antinatalist. His stated view was that under such circumstances the human race would not go extinct, but would transcend to a higher plane. My personal view is much more akin to this one than to inmendeham’s recommendation that the earth be destroyed.

Better Never to Have Been

Love the people that are already here