"How could an omnipotent deity have created in its own image - an exceedingly obscure, almost taunting notion - a being too feeble to escape affliction, misery, temptation? What sadistic experiment is being played? May the Almighty be cursed for his pains, in all senses of that word... We did not ask to be born." (George Steiner: Poetry of Thought).
George Steiner is on target here. Inherent in this passage is Steiner's not being a fan of God, even if the polymath somewhat nods in 'his' general direction in many of his books. However, Steiner's problem-of-evil gibe is not my concern here. I am as bored of that grammatical expletive called 'God' as I am of the debates about 'his' omni-ness or lack of it. The gist of this quote is not so much the anti-God rehash, not so much the old-testamental execration, as the antinatalist final sentence. Steiner's 'We Did Not Ask to Be Born' clincher piques my ideological fancy.
Antinatalism: It is better never to have been born—or anti-procreation. Antinatalism is another way of putting the better-never-to-have-been-born postulate—or position. Antinatalists believe that it is not only perverse for humans to subsist in an imperfectible world of suffering and loss, but it is also thoughtless, unnecessary and utterly self-indulgent to procreate when you find yourself in this 'vale of tears.' Antinatalists are convinced that this only world we know is nothing if not the repository of harm, hazards and hurt.
Bar a few desultory interludes of joy, existence is nothing but a cacotopia of pain, suffering and decay - a cacatopia, or to vulgarise that neology, a massive ball of turd, a cosmic shithole, an existential cesspool. Antinatalism stands in opposition to the contents of many conditioned assumptions and settled reflexes which include religion and its often shallow unphilosophical dictates, particularly those of the family of Semitic religions. Go ye and multiply, they all command. But one does not need religion or the say-so of any god to be natalist, to desire the flesh, to have sex, have children, although these same religions repeat doctrinal downers like 'original sin' and 'generational curse.' Biblical books of Jeremiah and Job resonate with antinatalist laments and regrets, with these two luckless eponyms 'cursing' the day they were born. Even the 'vale of tears' I wrote above is from the Bible.
Anyway, antinatalists have no time for religion. The crux of their argument is simple, if ramifying. In as far as we did not 'ask to be born' and were born just the same, we should not make the mistake our procreaters made and spawn other suffering-prone littluns...
Antinatalism is neither prescriptive nor life-affirming, nor is it anti-life - it is only a philosophy, a tough-minded, even fair-minded, philosophy. Ask any parent who has seen their child suffer, I mean unspeakably acute, bone-deep torture, you would begin to understand antinatalists... Then just ask parents: the sheer burden of parenthood, the conscious and semiconscious everlasting worry, the nagging, niggling apprehensions... What hand would the Fates deal this colic-wracked tot? a thoughtful parent might wonder. She might also ponder, if she was not unrealistically Pollyannaish, how much would her child's bed of roses be interspersed with spiny brambles and stinging nettles? conveniently forgetting that for many the only bed there is is a bed of nails and spikes?
And speaking of colic, I would ask, along the lines of Steiner's thinking: How would a so-called benevolent and perfect god create such a torturous affliction as colic, why would 'he' subject a few-days-old child to such sleepless torment?
Of course, I am an antinatalist might-have-been, which nullifies the question of whether I am an antinatalist or not, or even whether I ever possessed that cast of mind. Only the consciously—even joyously—childless is the authentic antinatalist. The thoughtful parent of a child can only mull these things over, impersonally, if sensibly, which is what I am trying to do here.
I'll conclude with Steiner (from Grammars of Creation).
"Crippled by congenital disease, made blind or limbless by hereditary infirmity, begot in drunken rage or uncaring tedium, children have been known to ask their parents: 'Why did you force existence on me?' In times of massacre, of wilful torture and deprivation, such as the Shoah (Holocaust), the questions pressed on children's lips. And there were indeed those who asked out loud... By what legitimacy do we procreate, do we sentence to a lifetime of pain and victimisation, beings who have not asked to be?" Needless to say, Steiner, like me, is an antinatalist manqué.
