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Our collapsing civilization has been shedding its core beliefs by the dozens for decades now. Concepts such as civic duty, ethical behavior, the greater good, compassion and selflessness litter our wake through history like discarded snake skins cast off as we swelled up from our relentless pursuit of money, luxury and power. Oddly, while we seem eager to shed these essential qualities — traits that made us prosperous in the first place — we still cling to, and loudly profess, other beliefs that assure our downfall.
These articles of faith cut across party lines, ideological differences, racial and economic strata. Among them the most deeply revered, and increasingly the most problematic, is the notion of the sanctity of life.
Preserving and extending life at all costs makes less and less sense in a world that is increasingly overcrowded and depleted. I make that statement knowing that it is deeply offensive to almost every ideology, and heretical to every religion. I will try to make the argument amid the rising chorus of boos that I imagine coming from just outside my locked and barricaded office door.
First let me tell you where this argument is NOT going. It is NOT headed toward any form of population control by any government entity. I would suggest some changes in government policy, religious edicts, and above all societal norms, not because I think they will save our world — it’s too late for that — but in the name of rationality, harmony, and doing a better job next time.
Okay? Here, breathe into this paper bag for a minute and we’ll continue.
Reverence for life at any cost is knitted into the fabric of every religion. Now, while I am not going to favor the repeal of the commandment against murder — the social and spiritual benefits of that one are undeniable — we would do well to look askance at the imprecations against suicide. Cursing suicide with eternal damnation, forbidding doctors (or anyone else) to ease and assist the process, and using every public relations channel available to rail against it — these things work to assure that people by the thousands who would just as soon end their life, do not get the chance to do so.
It is universally accepted that death is the worst thing that can happen to a person. It is not. Not for the person, and not for the society. It is widely believed that suicides are mentally ill. Not so. The decision often makes perfect sense.
If we were a smart society, we would use our resources to affirm the decision of rational people to end their lives, to make it easy and comfortable for them, and thus lighten not only their burden but the increasingly crushing burdens on our civilization. Instead, we bemoan rising suicide rates — they have increased by 25% in the US in 17 years — and pay for more hotlines and more interventions in what may be sensible personal choices.
As our government, and governments around the world, fight to prevent death even when it is the choice of the person concerned, so they battle to encourage birth, even when it is not the choice of the parents involved. I would just as soon not get into the sulfurous fires of the abortion disputation here, but talk instead about more general policies about family size.
Birth rates are declining everywhere, especially in developed countries, and those countries are panic-stricken by the trend. While ignoring rising seas, spreading deserts, teeming slums and burning forests, governments everywhere are desperate to raise the birth rate, thus increasing the demands that cause all of the above. The reason they give, every time, is that we have to breed enough workers to support the rising number of retired people needing benefits funded by payroll taxes.
Meanwhile society spends billions developing products and medical practices that can claim to increase our life expectancy, thus — if they worked — making sure that more and more of us will spend more and more time sucking benefits from the bloodstream of the nation. Yet despite their efforts, like expectancy in the United States has declined for two years running.
Permaculture teaches us to observe nature closely, to try to understand what nature is doing, before we intervene. Human nature, worldwide and in America, is tending toward lower birth rates and shorter lives — in sum, fewer people. Maybe human nature knows something we have not yet grasped.
Couldn’t have said it any better myself. Thank you!
In nature there are no rights, however, because humans have adopted a anthropocentric philosophy, rights now become natural. Nature through, natural disasters, environmental destruction, resource depletion, species extinction, ecological collapse and overshoot will ultimately expose the disgusting hubris displayed by all of humanity.
This idea of human rights and all of its ideological sub divisions will be laid bare by nature, when the time is right and be revealed for what they really are, just temporary privileges.
History could have been so different, had we adopted a non- anthropocentric philosophy.But as Mr. Lewis points out, its probably too late.
“Non-anthropocentric philosophy” is a tuff nut for me to wrap my head around. I’m not saying it’s an outright oxymoron…but I think it needs work. Philosophy is, by definition, anthropocentric. I could be wrong; I’ve been wrong before.
(QUOTE)***…the disgusting hubris displayed by all of humanity.***
Including you?
No, not all of humanity.
Some of humanity.
(QUOTE)***If we were a smart society, we would use our resources to affirm the decision of rational people to end their lives, to make it easy and comfortable for them, and thus lighten not only their burden but the increasingly crushing burdens on our civilization.***
If we were a smart society, we would have dropped the whole godforsaken ideology of endless growth like a hot potato long ago (as in, during the 1970s).
(QUOTE)***Reverence for life at any cost is knitted into the fabric of every religion.***
I don’t mean to be difficult, but I’m actually not too sure about that. In certain religions human life is revered only when it meets certain conditions. Such as believing in Allah.
You’re not being difficult, you’re being precise, and that’s really difficult. I didn’t mean to suggest that religionists practice reverence for life, merely that they espouse it, for themselves and all who look and talk and believe as they do.
No link to Facebook? How does one share your stuff?
Here’s the ink to the Facebook page.
Thanks Tom. Now following and sharing.
A fundamental problem is that most people do not understand the basic principles that always have and always and always will govern physical operations. Energy flow doing positive work is common knowledge but the inevitably associated friction doing negative work is not. Two deleterious consequences of this lack of understanding is climate change and vast amounts of material wastes.
Another shot that hits the center ring. Couldn’t agree more
Good post; I feel its central idea has begun to be accepted more broadly.
One minor gripe: [“Reverence for life at any cost is knitted into the fabric of every religion.”]
I always observed life considered cheap seen through the lens religion.
For some reason, I suspect this has rather been knitted into the fabric of our brain ever since the post WWII indoctrination machine sought to psychically “heal” the mass with warm and fuzzy “idealism” and massage their intellect into accepting the great paradox of capitalism.
To paraphrase Carlin, every fetus is sacred …but once you’re out, you’re on your own…
Good enough, Tom. You are digging well below the surface of where most people want to go, because it gives them a headache, but since you brought it up, for the sake of those who read your stuff, we should take this notion of the sanctity of life a bit further. That man sees himself as being important in the overall scheme of things, much less indispensable would be humorous if it was not so pitiful. Nature, if she were a sentient being would be very amused at the presumption. As I see it, the presence of Homo sapiens is of no more importance than a colony of bacteria in a vat of grape juice. The best than can be said of us as we exit stage left is that we might have assisted in the production of a few casks of wine. I hope the gods enjoy the product.
So, though you are right about suicide, it will shortly not matter, since the other methods of population control will certainly be on the ascendancy.
This issue of the ageing population presents a complex dilemma. Self-preservation is the strongest instinct. A human will generally live as long as he can. What’s more, humans, unlike most creatures, have the ability to live far beyond there active productive and reproductive years. There is a reason for this, and it has to do with a rather intricate dance between culture and evolution:
For countless millennia the elders of the more successful tribes were supported by their ostensibly productive members, because the old ones had deep memories and an abundance of stored knowledge. They carried the tribal technologies (primarily tool use and manufacture, and how to deal with mother nature’) histories, law and myth in their heads. The elders transmitted this knowledge formally, but also thru vivid accounts told around the campfire during times of repose. Story-telling served a survival purpose; tribes with older sages, shamans and story tellers had more intel at their command, and thus fared better than those tribes that lacked such. Preservation of the elderly in tandem with advanced language abilities became an evolutionary priority.
Then came the written word…Elders were no longer needed. But the instinctual motivation to preserve them, along with the human tendency to live extend lives carried on. It does to this day. And medical science has only exacerbated the problem.
There isn’t much we can do. Forget about Emil Durkheim’s* ‘altruistic suicide’. And Soylent Green’s ‘going-home crematoriums’ will remain the stuff of science fiction. Evolution is a cold master. It has no agenda beyond the next generation. We will likely choke on our ageing population. Neither can the zebra change its stripes to spots by an act of will.
*Don’t get me wrong, Durkheim’s work in this area is quite profound.
A religion that does nothing to quell the fear of death isn’t a religion at all, only perhaps a (not very) social club. A deep religious practice, like a deep study of philosophy, is about learning how to die. About how to let go of all the ideas we cling to and accept reality as it is with equinamity, and ideally, a smile.
Our culture used technology to race ahead of it’s wisdom. We wanted to forget about ecological cycles, and remain in the dawn of young life for all time.
This only means that the reaping will be very, very deep! Balance will be restored.
I like the proposal in this article. As I get somewhere north of 60, I would do this. In fact, I’ve had a great life and don’t need to extend it at all — I’m on borrowed time and am grateful.
I happen to agree with you that people should be able to make their own end of life and birth control (beginning life) decisions, but I have some difficulty with some of the arguments you use to get there.
First off, I’m not aware of any religion that advocates “Reverence for life at any cost.” The Catholic Church proscribes suicide, true, but it is the medical profession that often leaves people chained to life support for months or years after when a natural death would have occurred. The policies and politics of individual countries share a big part of the responsibility. They often force people to suffer on in agony with debilitating and/or terminal diseases that have no effective treatments. I’m not sure you can blame the Buddha for that. Taoism advocates living in accordance with nature.
The sanctity of life is part of world religions for sure, but that sanctity is based on the awareness that life is transient and precious. And that it has a natural end. It is people’s fear of death, fear of a natural end (which religion espouses against) that has created the system that won’t let people die. (I recommend Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul.)
The idea that allowing suicide is relevant, or a useful discussion, in relation to the birth/death ratio is pretty laughable. 353,000 babies are born every day (and accelerating). About 42% that number die each day. That means you have to entice an additional 200,000+ people each and every day to top themselves, by making suicide legal, just to flatline population growth. Dignity in death is its own merit but not as a means to an end. No pun intended.
Globally birth rates are increasing despite going down in many developed countries. Population growth is accelerating. I think you are intimating the opposite. Your arguments to develop women’s rights, education and access to birth control are more on the money. Equality has done more to stabilize populations many times over in recent history (Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth by Alan Weisman).
You falsely began your argument with this: “Among them the most deeply revered, and increasingly the most problematic, is the notion of the sanctity of life.”
This assumption is historically factually false. It’s not even a modern false assumption, but one that goes back millennia. Life is not sacred. Life is always sacrificed, even human life, for the sake and pleasure and demands of whatever is stronger.
The pretense that life is sacred is simply false. To do this is to ignore reality. We take life whenever we want it. We wholesale mass murder, manufacture enormous amounts of weapons, and justify killing at every opportunity. But this is nothing new, it’s always been this way.
Now, we PRETEND that life is sacred, but that isn’t what our actions truly reveal. You’re also pretending that life is sacred, but it’s just all in your head. Your very existence requires the exploitation of all kinds of life forms, including humans – and you think nothing of it most of the time. You certainly don’t stop doing what you’re doing, do you?
Our civilization is built upon death, murder, exploitation and predatory practices – and we all benefit from it, pretending to wring our hands when one group or another or a particular species is revealed to suffer. But this is all just mental anguish that does not change our behavior at all. We keep doing what we do – manufacturing murder every day by our contributions, our purchases, our apathy, our appetites, our consumption.
Life is SUPPOSED to be sacred (allegedly), but it really isn’t. It is however, exploited, used, abused and consumed all of the time. It’s a biological imperative that this occurs because it is how all things that live and have life exist.
It is our institutions that claim life is supposed to be sacred, but they have utterly failed to convey a better way to exist. We prey upon everything, even each other, and then pretend that we’re “good” if we temporarily stop or turn to another set of victims. But the truth is we never stop preying. Ever.
These institutions are very adept at playing upon emotional fears and hysteria. And we allow ourselves to be manipulated, very easily. But nobody alive today can claim they are not a predator, preying upon the life of this world in order to benefit themselves and take their own sustenance, income, or personal wealth (“stuff”) from being a predator.
For this reason – how we make our existence – how we actually do live – life is not sacred. There is no such thing as “sanctity of life”. This is a false claim of moral superiority and it is patently false.
Humans are predators and they do not respect or honor life anywhere. They PRETEND to, but go on doing what they do, which is kill life.
Suicide isn’t immoral for this reason either. And sometimes it is the best decision, which I won’t bother to go into right now. Our false emotional response to suicide that it is “wrong” is actually very selfish.
Humans are a very evil species. While we have the the capacity to not be evil, and have at times exhibited this capacity, we choose to remain evil almost exclusively. We are very adept at self-deception and convincing ourselves that we are not evil, manufacturing religious cults to pave over our deeds, but they don’t hide the real truth of our constant predatory and selfish nature and our capacity for never ending destruction.
Your essay wanders around, perhaps because you haven’t really grasped our true nature. We do not honor life – we profit from it. THAT’S why we engage in trying to increase life expectancy. Profits are what drives us to do everything – and we really do not care how we gain these profits.
If humans were really good – the concept of profits, wealth, “stuff”, control, ownership, etc., would have long since been abandoned, and we would have had (all of us) worked towards actually doing good on this planet. But the reality is we don’t, because we are a greedy, selfish, evil species that only does what it does so that we ourselves may gain some advantage.
We’ve always been this way. And we’ve always tried to pretend that it’s not true, conflicted within (when we are honest) that we are “better then this”. But we’re not. Not yet, and probably, not ever. There will always be an endless supply of victims, exploited people, places, things, even life itself that we prey upon for more then just our “sustenance”. It’s what we do.
JR: On the face of it your points are well taken. But, on a different level, things get a little murkier. We are, after all, talking about humans – a most complex and disturbing mammal.
The instinctive reaction called ‘gene-pool protection’ plays a part in this ‘sanctity of life’ business. This instinct is very strong within a family, and also works well within the clan and even the tribe….but much less so where civilizations are concerned. So, in order to call up the familial spirits within its populations, nation-states formulate what John Michael Greer calls ‘civic religions’. These are manifested by wordy constitutions, flags and other regalia, anthems, ostentatious military establishments, myths (often blended into histories) and a pantheon of mythic heroes. Elaborate paintings, sculptures and pretentious architecture often play a part, as do various printed and dramatic forms of propaganda…the results have been mixed.
Nations are able to sponsor mass murder (war, pogroms, etc…) by dehumanizing those persons – both foreign and domestic – who do not adhere to its peculiar faith. Only thru dehumanization can nations accomplish this feat. This is because the ‘gene-pool protection’ instinct remains strong within us. This instinct is why we keep profoundly deformed infants alive, very old people fed and housed, abortions legally difficult, and suicide prevention programs staffed and funded.
Hey, thanks for the reply!
The abundance (and over-production) of resources permits concepts such as fairness, justice, democracy, retirement homes and so on. So the “source” for these “ethical” efforts and programs today is actually profits. When profits fall or disappear, we find out very quickly what we really are – ruthless predators that will turn against each other instantly.
We have however, also devised religions to exploit our capacity for compassion, but this is yet another for-profit scheme in reality, even if one is very poor or the religion itself is very poor (gaining credits in heaven work just as well).
Ultimately, we do what we do out of selfish reason and always have. Ultimately the question becomes, “what’s in it for me?” in love, in family, in relationships, work, war, etc., etc. There have been a number of studies that depict this basic human characteristic. Our motives are selfish.
The great irony is this: Our self-destructive nature to over-exploit, destroy and wreck the only habitable planet we have – is what permits our compassion to exist at the level it does today. We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t in other words. But that is because the species is fatally corrupt. Evolution has generated a conflict that is anathema to life.
We did not have to build this type of civilization and (probably) could have changed it if we had wanted to. But this corrupt nature has been thoroughly exploited by the very institutions that we have designed and built, and why not? They are the offspring of what we actually are.
These “mixed results” have always ended the same by the way (I’m sure you’ve read Collapse of Civilizations) and will undoubtedly end the same way again.
But it is then, and in the interim, when the competition (and profits) are fierce, that we learn the real meaning of what we truly are, but only because we prefer to remain dishonest in the meanwhile about our true nature and devise endless explanations to appease ourselves so that we can accept what life actually “is” and that happens.
We are not the compassionate caring creatures that we pretend to be, we only do that when we can, when it serves our ends and when there is an abundance of resources that permits this excess. But we are ultimately selfish predators. Every single one of us.
I understand your points, but it is not just nations that dehumanize. We do it too – individuals, all of the time, and not just because of the propaganda and programming we are subjected to. Very young children exhibit the same competition, selfish behavior as adults – this is an innate characteristic of our species.
Cooperation, compassion, caring, sharing – these things arise from abundance, opportunity and need. Take away any of these latter three – or change the balance of any of these three – and all the former behaviors start to disappear. The “sanctity of life” really never factors in.
Sometimes this is called survival of the fittest, but that’s just a euphemism to try to describe what we are. Selfish predators is far more accurate.
We don’t have the foresight and wisdom that our intelligence should enable.