Voluntary Human Extinction

It is easy to go beyond the parameters of permissible thought when we’re idle and placed under de facto house arrest. Going down an endless rabbit hole of Wikipedia articles whilst procrastinating, and being naturally enthused by marginalised ideas, I wasn’t surprised when I reached yet another questionable website titled ‘The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement’. Hopefully not another suicide cult, I read on...

Engels cites Hegel approvingly in his polemical work Anti-Dühring, that “freedom is the recognition of necessity”. Ecologist Garrett Hardin’s alternative interpretation of this well-known aphorism may be a bastardisation of historical materialism at first sight, but it still bears some remote semblance to its sociological sense; his seminal article The Tragedy of the Commons brought Neo-Malthusianism and the notion of unregulated over-exploitation back into the public spotlight.

First things first, a brief recap on the fundamentals of sociology. Malthus, as some of you readers might already know, considered it “an obvious truth....that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence”, and that whilst food growth would merely increase on an arithmetic scale, population growth would increase exponentially, leading to mass starvation and widespread poverty when the latter outpaces the former (Malthusian catastrophe). It is uncertain whether he ever considered drastic innovations in food production along the free-market principles of satiating increased demand, but I digress.

Moderate supporters of the late 18th-century British economist now advocate controlling population growth via contraceptive measures in fear of its environmental ramifications, since Malthusian catastrophe still happens in another sense if the environment is exploited to a point of no return, even if poverty is reduced by governmental institutions. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the public criticism he received from both ends of the spectrum, Hardin scorns the welfare state for tolerating excessive human reproduction in developed nations and consequently leading to resource depletion.

Dismissing the likes of morals and conscience in regulating the finite commons for fear of favoring the less altruistic members of society, he prefers a laissez-faire approach by which to contain population growth - i.e. sacrificing the children of less financially able parents in a world where surviving childhood is not guaranteed by the welfare state. This leads to a feedback system that automatically penalises overbreeding, whilst an individual child would be able to enjoy the fruits of quality living when resources are not spread amongst several children; in short, quality, not quantity.

Of course, this reminds us of historical eugenics movements (i.e. the Nazis’ Aktion T4 and the notorious Holocaust), wherein individuals mired in poverty and bearing hereditary traits deemed 'undesirable' were forcibly sterilised. Although Hardin proposes a process of natural regulation that is similarly observed in the animal world, there needs to be a more palatable alternative to the “callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth’s ecology.” Enter the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Although it is easy to paint oneself as a martyr for the environment, a further read of their website overturned my initial suspicions.

Before we move on, how can we be certain that the global population will continue its unabating growth? A simple answer is that we like to take advantage of our own fecundity, and by our animalistic drives, bear offspring. Malthus’ interesting response is “that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state”. Of course, that was before widespread contraception, but we can remain assured that greenhouse emissions are rising at unprecedented rates (as the cliché goes), just as the global population rose from two billion in 1927 to seven billion and counting today. Regardless of whether innovations in agriculture (i.e. the Green Revolution of the 1960s) are a result of population growth or the other way round (which implies reasonably high mortality rates before the ‘revolution’), the consequences remain the same, and that is ecological destruction to some extent.

Yet simultaneously, we’re facing a projected trend of slowing population growth, and this is bound to happen if nations currently mired in poverty reach saturated levels of development - following a recognised trend in which developed nations past their prime have a population that reflects the moribund state of their state (i.e. Japan and Russia). Factor into consideration, then, the findings of two researchers at the Oregon State University who embarked on a journey to find the ‘carbon legacy’ of every individual. For every person a woman gives birth to, some of them take part in procreating, and thus appears an unspecified line of offspring. The original parent is responsible for a certain percentage of carbon emissions produced by their progeny; the sum of this is the aforementioned carbon legacy. Using UN population predictions and basing their findings in North America, they found that every person is responsible for nearly six times their own emissions of CO₂ if they decide to bear a child - and that’s not something to be proud of, to say the least.

Neither is the logic of aggressively minimising environmental degradation by abruptly reducing the population tenable: just like how we would not tolerate leaving infants to starve on their own, we wouldn’t praise Genghis Khan for being a great environmentalist by reducing global temperatures through slaughters and producing plenty of nutritious compost. Prioritising the fundamental rights of the human race to survive with dignity, this leads us to a more reasonable solution of simply not choosing to give birth at all. Even if the global population is already declining, there’s no harm in letting it decline at a faster rate, especially when there’s neither a guarantee that further agricultural innovations will come nor that we won’t continue our trail of destruction. As their detailed website states, this is what they call the “humanitarian alternative to human disasters” - voluntary abstention from procreation.

The Movement appears quite humanistic, disavowing the eugenics movement and state enforcement. Their argument against the feasibility of sustainable/ethical consumption is encapsulated in a single cartoon found on their website (see image), and the reader is free to have a look at their numerous other satirical works in their spare time.

Another common argument asserts that developing a more sustainable means of manufacturing would stave off the more deadly of ecological ramifications. Even when we assume this is feasible, the long-standing Jevons paradox says otherwise, where increased production efficiency and therefore reduced costs would simply lead to an even greater rate of consumption due to increased demand, in the case of price elastic goods. In other words, we consume even more in this vicious cycle of ever-increasing consumption, which always has its limits. A quote from Kenneth Boulding emblazons a subpage of their website: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world, is either a madman or an economist.”

Yet another subpage is titled ‘Cornucopian Delusions’, quite an apt description for the fearmongering about demographic disequilibria and an aging population. At the end of the day, we hark back to historical materialism: automation necessarily means reduced jobs, a smaller workforce, and concentrated ownership of the means of production. Accompanying this should be a smaller population that has more to enjoy from the fruits of their labour - of course we don’t want a world of meaningless labour and deliberately stunted productivity in the likes of 1984. Who knows, with reduced population growth, perhaps a stateless, classless world of material superabundance might come after all.

Admittedly, l was quite impressed by the amount of detail the website offered - especially its riveting and thought-provoking content that perfectly counterbalanced its atrocious web design.

As of now, there are four possible alternatives: will we reach an irreversible point of environmental disasters, allow the population to reduce unassisted in accordance with global trends, commit ourselves to abstaining from reproduction (as the VHEMT suggests), or will innovations be able to sustain continued population growth? Their motto is “may we live long and die out”, and that might as well be our own. United in our efforts, our perennial rallying cry reverberates across the verdant distance: may we perish under the green banner of anti-natalism!