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This damned insomnia is causing me to lie awake for hours, doing that small-hours-of-the-morning thing where one's thoughts fall into a groove and circle endlessly, fretting. Last night: my eternal pre-occupation, overpopulation.
This has been sparked by two internet currents recently, the Obama administration's possibly politic but worrying backpedal on family planning in the stimulus package, and the bloody Duggar family, who have just produced their 18th child to the general approbation of their peers, viz. low-income, uneducated fundamentalists and fans of reality TV.
Both the Republicans who blocked the family planning and the Duggans themselves demonstrate the inherent problem in the overpopulation scenario, which is that having children is an emotional and religious hot button which, when jumped up and down on repeatedly as these idiots tend to do, overrides all actual common sense. As a purportedly thinking species we are incredibly mixed-up and disfunctional in our attitudes to sex: between the post-Freudian pleasure principle and the inner Victorian Judaeo-Christian prude, rational sexual function doesn't stand a chance. In the moral and social morass which results, logical consequence goes out of the window. Dear gods, can't these people do basic arithmetic? The world is a finite resource, its capacity even further reduced by humanity's joyous stuffing up of its climate with carbon emissions and other crud. Do the Duggans think that an America in which every family has 18 children is ultimately going to leave anyone anywhere to stand, let alone anything to eat or breathe? Or are they, like the dimwitted fundamentalist Republicans, content to cling to impractical Quiverful codes in the expectation that the Lord will provide? Because I have to say, He's doing a pretty shoddy job to date.
The population control issue brings out my inner jackbooted fascist because I honestly can't see any way in which we're going to reduce our teeming human numbers to anything like rational proportions without the intervention of either dictatorship or apocalypse, and while the apocalypse currently seems more likely I'm not vindictive enough actually to prefer it. The human impulse to breed has become an inalienable right when it really can't afford to be. If the bulk of humanity lacks the basic common sense, education, self-restraint or maturity to limit its own reproduction to suit its environment, then the minority who possesses those qualities has to damned well impose them on the rest in sheer self-defense.
I do believe in democracy, honestly I do, but the 2 a.m. wall against which I continually beat my head is the fact that right now democracy is a luxury for which we do not have the time. China can impose a one-child system successfully because they're a socialist dictatorship, but the outcry if almost any other country were to try it would be intense: our political systems across the world are too fundamentally broken to allow it. In a weird sort of way the current economic crisis is actually hopeful, because it's causing everyone to have to rethink their previous uncritical allegiance to the constant, unchecked growth on which capitalism is predicated. In an ideal world a sea-change in global consciousness would be the ideal way to adapt our population sensibly to our resources, but this is a pipe-dream: it's never going to happen in a short enough time-frame to prevent the consequences of population explosion over the last century. Basically, we're screwed.
As I keep saying, this sort of thing wouldn't happen if we were all orang-utans, who have that sensible tendency for their females to produce only one offspring every six or seven years. It worked quite fine for them until they came into conflict with our ridiculously overproductive species, who nicked all the resources. It's not much of a consolation to think that we're destroying ourselves as well as the orang-utans in the process.
This has been sparked by two internet currents recently, the Obama administration's possibly politic but worrying backpedal on family planning in the stimulus package, and the bloody Duggar family, who have just produced their 18th child to the general approbation of their peers, viz. low-income, uneducated fundamentalists and fans of reality TV.
Both the Republicans who blocked the family planning and the Duggans themselves demonstrate the inherent problem in the overpopulation scenario, which is that having children is an emotional and religious hot button which, when jumped up and down on repeatedly as these idiots tend to do, overrides all actual common sense. As a purportedly thinking species we are incredibly mixed-up and disfunctional in our attitudes to sex: between the post-Freudian pleasure principle and the inner Victorian Judaeo-Christian prude, rational sexual function doesn't stand a chance. In the moral and social morass which results, logical consequence goes out of the window. Dear gods, can't these people do basic arithmetic? The world is a finite resource, its capacity even further reduced by humanity's joyous stuffing up of its climate with carbon emissions and other crud. Do the Duggans think that an America in which every family has 18 children is ultimately going to leave anyone anywhere to stand, let alone anything to eat or breathe? Or are they, like the dimwitted fundamentalist Republicans, content to cling to impractical Quiverful codes in the expectation that the Lord will provide? Because I have to say, He's doing a pretty shoddy job to date.
The population control issue brings out my inner jackbooted fascist because I honestly can't see any way in which we're going to reduce our teeming human numbers to anything like rational proportions without the intervention of either dictatorship or apocalypse, and while the apocalypse currently seems more likely I'm not vindictive enough actually to prefer it. The human impulse to breed has become an inalienable right when it really can't afford to be. If the bulk of humanity lacks the basic common sense, education, self-restraint or maturity to limit its own reproduction to suit its environment, then the minority who possesses those qualities has to damned well impose them on the rest in sheer self-defense.
I do believe in democracy, honestly I do, but the 2 a.m. wall against which I continually beat my head is the fact that right now democracy is a luxury for which we do not have the time. China can impose a one-child system successfully because they're a socialist dictatorship, but the outcry if almost any other country were to try it would be intense: our political systems across the world are too fundamentally broken to allow it. In a weird sort of way the current economic crisis is actually hopeful, because it's causing everyone to have to rethink their previous uncritical allegiance to the constant, unchecked growth on which capitalism is predicated. In an ideal world a sea-change in global consciousness would be the ideal way to adapt our population sensibly to our resources, but this is a pipe-dream: it's never going to happen in a short enough time-frame to prevent the consequences of population explosion over the last century. Basically, we're screwed.
As I keep saying, this sort of thing wouldn't happen if we were all orang-utans, who have that sensible tendency for their females to produce only one offspring every six or seven years. It worked quite fine for them until they came into conflict with our ridiculously overproductive species, who nicked all the resources. It's not much of a consolation to think that we're destroying ourselves as well as the orang-utans in the process.
