To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Saturday, September 28, 2019
 
These days there are a lot of arguments for and against bringing more children into a world that is already overburdened and not exactly a hospitable place. The nature of life itself being what it is isn't something one would want to wish on anyone. In spite of the 'against' arguments though there doesn't seem to be any slowdown in the rate of increase of the human population; perhaps this increase happens to be higher in parts of the world where these considerations don't hold as much water as traditional or religious ones. Of course, in the final analysis it isn't any of these kinds of considerations but biological imperatives that get the upper hand one would imagine.

While that may be the case, purely as an intellectual exercise let’s consider this question in two ways: one way is that by giving birth to a human in this world we actually ‘create’ the human. Now if we as in human beings produce a human by plain biological processes then that reduces all of us to plain biological organisms. In other words, until we bring this person into the world the essence of this person does not exist; similar to what we would say for a cow or a bird. It makes sense that we would want to create this individual after our own likeness so to speak but it only serves to fulfil an egoistic necessity and has no higher meaning. It's just a living fact as all other living facts and cannot claim any ‘value’ status of itself. The second way to consider this question is theological where we believe that in a larger sense we don't produce this human at all in that we don't produce the essence or the soul but merely an earthly body in which this essence or soul is conveyed to earth. The soul pre-exists its birth; you merely deliver this soul into an earthly existence. It is not the same as giving birth to a cow or a bird because this human is not just a biological organism but a transcendental entity couched in an earthly frame. When it dies only its earthly frame returns to dust but the soul lives on. If this is the case, which seems like a more logical case from a religious point of view, then not bringing a new life to bear on earth should not make any material difference at all because the essence of this life that you would have given birth to exists independently anyway and all you would be doing is not creating an earthly cover for it which is not something one imagines a soul would be coveting anyway! Even though you do not get to know this ‘unborn soul’ whom you could have potentially loved more than anyone else in the world you are in a way acting in its own interest or for its own benefit by making it possible for it to skip earthly suffering. Instead of making sacrifices for it in life, you are making the biggest sacrifice possible by not giving it a life that it must then endure for better or worse until it again becomes a soul.

Looked at in these two ways, biologically and theologically, the arguments seem to favour the position that it is better to not proliferate the world with more humans. Yet we do. Most likely because our instincts are bigger than us... or perhaps it's just that misery loves company ;)

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 3:36 am 0 comments
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