My column in today’s Headline Bistro
Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer, who famously advocates the ethical right of parents to kill their newborn children for any reason, recently has written an article in The New York Times proposing a mass self-extinction of humanity through collective sterilization. (Read it here).
Citing the increasingly discredited global warming/climate change movement, Singer postulates an environmental future filled with senseless suffering for future generations. He then postulates that it is unethical to inflict such suffering on persons not yet born, with the only ethically acceptable solution being nonexistence.
That has been the end-point of the Culture of Death all along. This cultic competitor of Christianity distorts human freedom by enlarging it to the point where the order of creation, both physical and spiritual, is eclipsed. In other words, arrogating to the self the power and authority in determining life and death, while simultaneously rejecting faith in God and a created order beyond that which we can immediately see. Such radicalized autonomy clouds the very human reason necessary to discover that order of creation, creating the implosion that is narcissistic nihilism.
Pan-Gnosticism and animism are the grotesque spiritual distortions remaining, as evidenced by the comments after Singer’s article, affirming a healthy, healing benefit to the earth that would result from humanity’s extinction. It is the return to offering human sacrifice to the gods of nature.
Singer’s latest screed is the final surrender of an intellect bereft of hope or love. It is the logical end toward which the Culture of Death has been lurching ever since the early twentieth century’s eugenics movement and World War II. Singer’s full-throated nihilist roar that it is better to have never existed than to exist and suffer is reflective of a life that has never learned suffering’s role in teaching love.
The greatest of all paradoxes has been the ascendance of this loveless Culture of Death at precisely the moment in humanity when science and technology have been putting to flight humanity’s greatest scourges: famine and disease.
Beginning with the Germ Theory of Disease in the 1870s and the antiseptic/hygienic practices that have followed, the discovery of antibiotics beginning in the 1920s, the explosion of vaccine development since the 1950s, surgery and cancer therapies, we have far exceeded all of the prior hopes and dreams of humanity.
Smallpox, responsible for almost 500 million deaths in the twentieth century alone, has been eradicated from the earth. Not a single case for over thirty years. The same antibiotics in a matter of months cure tuberculosis and leprosy. Polio has been brought closer and closer to eradication by aggressive vaccination.
Advances in genetic engineering of crops and agricultural technology have boosted food production to unprecedented levels. So great has the technology been that our greatest problems are the health issues resulting from the consumption of an overabundance of inexpensive food.
If life is not worth living in this time for fear of suffering, when humans have never had it better, then logically Singer must admit that we never should have existed at all. This assiduous avoidance of suffering is the very heart of neurotic disorder.
Having turned the order of creation on its head through radicalized autonomy, hope also suffers mightily, along with love. There is blindness in Singer from staring into this eclipse, which cannot let him see the progress of the last one hundred years. Nor can he see how utterly impoverished he looks in the eyes of most in the scientific community. Indeed, we are very different people.
The process of becoming a scientist is one that selects for a high degree of optimism. In order to become a Ph.D. one must make a discovery that adds a substantial body of information to one’s chosen field. It is an arduous journey that is neither undertaken nor completed by the faint of heart. From the outset, and through the periodic data droughts, one is sustained by both the example of the mentor and the certain belief that for all our knowledge, we know very little of the world. An abundance of discovery awaits the patient, persistent, prepared mind.
There is simply no room in science for the defeatist, the nihilist. Such a one has no vision, no hope, no soul; the three indispensible qualities of the scientist.
The world has never been advanced so much as a millimeter by nihilists such as Singer. Civilization has been advanced by the theologians, the vitalist philosophers, the scientists, the industrialists, the artists, the poets, and the great mass of humanity who have simply, unremarkably embraced life and shaped it, each in their own small way.
In his monumental play Our Town, Thornton Wilder took a look at life and concluded differently than Singer. The main character Emily Webb dies in childbirth, and being a restless spirit newly arrived in the town cemetery is permitted to see her life objectively by returning to an ordinary day. The stage manager takes her back to her twelfth birthday. The fullness, the bustle and beauty of daily life, a beauty we fail to capture along the way, proves more than Emily can bear.
Emily: Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama! Fourteen years have gone by! I’m dead! You’re a grandmother, Mama… Wally’s dead, too, Mama! His appendix burst on a camping trip to Crawford Notch. We felt just terrible about it – don’t you remember? But, just for a moment now we’re all together- Mama, just for a moment let’s be happy- Let’s look at one another!
I can’t! I can’t go on! It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed! Take me back – up the hill – to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look! Goodbye! Goodbye world! Goodbye, Grover’s Corners-Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking-and my butternut tree!-and Mama’s sunflowers- and food and coffee- and new ironed dresses and hot baths-and sleeping and waking up! Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you! Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it – every, every minute?
Stage Manager: (Quietly) No – Saints and poets maybe –they do some.
Emily: I’m ready to go back.
Moving beyond Singer, even beyond Wilder, we know that this good earth, this good life with all of its joys, sorrows and suffering, have been given to us by God to teach us love and its demands. It has been given to us in order to ready us for “what eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him,”
Coming Home 
Yet again Peter Singer misses the point but as an atheist I’m no more impressed with his take then yours Gerard. Instead one need only stick to replacement or one child reproduction and drastically reduce population and consumption to a sustainable level, one that acknowledges every human’s basic rights while valuing other life forms as well. Gerard you might want to read ‘Right Relationship- Building a Whole Earth Economy coming from the Quakers to get a better idea of where Saint Francis of Assisi was coming from.
You might also go to http://www.catholicsandclimatechange.org/church_teaching/vatican_messages.html and get with the programme of your Church instead of listening to the discredited wacko fringe who are no better than the Creationists.
It’s exactly this sort of denialist wacko view from US conservative Pro-Lifer’s that shoots down the credibility of the overall Pro-Life message.
“You might also go to http://www.catholicsandclimatechange.org/church_teaching/vatican_messages.html and get with the programme of your Church instead of listening to the discredited wacko fringe who are no better than the Creationists.
“It’s exactly this sort of denialist wacko view from US conservative Pro-Lifer’s that shoots down the credibility of the overall Pro-Life message.”
Simon,
Perhaps you could elaborate on exactly what wacko fringe I’ve been listening to??
Gerard whoever has been telling you
“the increasingly discredited global warming/climate change movement,”
or is this your opinion on the matter?
The Climate Change debate as far as anthropogenic forcing is over and if anything IPCC is very conservative on its range of predictions, so Singer’s take on the likely consequences from Climate change are more than reasonable. Mainstream science is moving on and even your own religious leadership sees this.
Throw in environmental degradation, resource depletion and population and resource overconsumption are we have some serious problems on the near horizon. Something that Pentagon is even now factoring into their security concerns.
Simon,
The debate is far from over within the scientific community. My opinion is from my own reading of the data, and even if the worst case scenario were true, Singer’s answer is absolutely monstrous. As for the Catholic Church, I support the Magisterium in areas of faith and morals. A fair reading of history shows Rome not to have always been on the correct side of scientific and social debate.
31,000 scientists including 9,000 Ph.D.’s signing the Oregon Declaration, which challenges the idea that somehow this debate is over, is hardly what I would call the lunatic fringe.
As for the credibility of the pro-life message, it has its own internal integrity. Those who favor the slaughter of innocents are not moved by reason or faith, tied up as they are in their own narcissistic pathos. They sneer at our faith and fidelity and already denounce us as anti-intellectual. I really am unmoved by whatever the insult du jour is from such one-dimensional hacks.
Gerard,
With due respect sorry no,
{Simon: The bulk of your comments have been deleted. Pugnacity and downright rude behavior is the coin of the realm with most atheists such as yourself. So perhaps you would be more comfortable commenting elsewhere. Should you decide to conduct yourself respectfully, you are welcome to stay. If not, then goodbye. Consider this a last warning.}
Lastly the abortion debate isn’t done in a social vacuum and from Pro-Choices perspective they see religious conservatives with wacky views on creationism, the environment and then throw in homosexuality and the like and they go for the guilt by association and think all arguments put forward are equally bad.
& I hardly think Singer is a hack just wrong on this as well as saying one can only oppose abortion on religious grounds. He is human after all.
Gerard: well reflected essay. Spot-on.
enjoy this for its thematic worth:
“…one is sustained by both the example of the mentor and the certain belief that for all our knowledge, we know very little of the world. An abundance of discovery awaits the patient, persistent, prepared mind.
There is simply no room in science for the defeatist, the nihilist. Such a one has no vision, no hope, no soul; the three indispensable qualities of the scientist.”
speaking of vacuum –
//Instead one need only stick to replacement or one child reproduction and drastically reduce population and consumption to a sustainable level, one that acknowledges every human’s basic rights while valuing other life forms as well.//
How does this happen in the real world again? sounds like some form of socialism to me
AMC
lets say you have a global natural disaster and the US has trouble feeding itself leading to a serious food shortage and nothing you can do will change that for decades.
What do you do?
Do you say:
Hey guys we have trouble feeding ourselves now but what the heck go ahead and have all the children you want irrespective that it will make the situation worse.
Or
Look while this is unprecedented for the good of the nation limit the number of children you have to what we can support. We aren’t asking that you have no children just for now limit to one.
Now if this was a normal disaster and the nation had to limit food and medicines would you be saying that was ‘socialist’ interference?
Hardly and I would argue the same applies with reproduction and the resources that an unrestrained reproduction would do during a time of extreme scarcity.
let’s say aliens landed on earth…. oh wait….. how about global warming…… oh wait…… how about overpopulation of the earth…..
In theory lots of stuff sounds great on paper……. especially with imagined scenarios of how these theories would make the world a better place…. (socialism…..)
Can I assume that you also believe in abortion to stop starvation, to stop child abuse, to stop poverty or overpopulation – maybe you also believe in forced sterility after one child…….
maybe after forcing one child on everyone – you could start getting rid of all those “people” who don’t or can’t contribute to the greater good of society – why waste food on them…..
just wondering……
I know both Gerard and Simon. I know they are both pro-life, intelligent people. It disappoints me to see their disagreements getting to the point where Simon’s comments are taken down. So let me try to sort this out.
Simon’s point is that population control may become necessary at some point– but if it does, it can be accomplished without abortion, in a way that respects everyone’s right to life. His other point is that a pro-life blog is not a good forum to talk about climate change, and that we should not assume that pro-lifers are all conservative on the issue.
Gerard’s point is that Simon should share his criticisms without name-calling (i.e. “wacko fringe”).
Both agree that Singer is a pro-abortion, pro-infanticide nutcase.
Please correct me if I’m wrong. If I’m right, this shouldn’t be too hard to resolve.
Sounds about right Kelsey, and thanks for sorting it all out. Maintaining a culture of civility on the blog has required that I ban several people of late. I’ve seen too many good blogs become poisoned wells because of the bomb throwers. The good folks stop reading and discussing, leaving a ruined environment behind.
When I began this blog I promised myself that I would strictly enforce a code of civil conduct. Essentially, my blog is a virtual extension of my living room and dining room table. I expect folks to comport themselves appropriately, to “disagree without being disagreeable”.
As for mentioning the science here, this is a pro-life science blog, written by a pro-life Ph.D. in Molecular Biology. Our training requires a year each of the following:
Physics, General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry, Physical Chemistry. That’s just to apply for the program. Many of us go on to study climate and ecology as a part of our disciplines. So I categorically reject the claim by Simon that we are somehow not competent to read the scientific literature outside of our own field of expertise. We are actually trained in a solid, cross-disciplinary manner so that we CAN follow other disciplines competently.
In a comment that I took down, Simon said, “I may have a tendency to be undiplomatic and abrasive.” I agree, and see that as arising from an arrogant presumptuousness, though I do accept the apology that followed.
As for population control and the pressures being placed on the planet, the issue really comes down to sound universal ecological practices administered with equanimity. The minute we start down the road that says people are bad for the planet, we add fuel to the fire of people like Singer and Sanger. Such discussion of the pillars undergirding the culture of death need to be discussed by pro-lifers, and Simon’s statements notwithstanding, by this Ph.D. who is more than competent to critically evaluate the data.
Thanks again Kelsey.
Pt1
Thanks Kelsey you are pretty well on the money and in itself this encapsulates a larger problem. Now while I can be undiplomatic and abrasive -which can cause offence- I acknowledge that when seen from another perspective. But I also find Gerard’s Nihilism and Culture of Death remarks not only simply wrong, but equally offensive.
So what is one to do?
If I owed you Gerard and apology, and offer one in the spirit of reconciliation yet you or others of similar mind -in the wider debate- feel no need to do the same for something that I and others find equally inflammatory, then you will find any inclination from the other side to be more diplomatic or apologise for their statements to be withdrawn.
It’s your blog Gerard and your home ground but one hardly claim to “disagree without being disagreeable” and maintain civility if you aren’t prepared to see you can be equally offensive to others, even if it was –just like me- unintentional.
Regarding the larger debate if one doesn’t take that view we will get nowhere, so I suppose even if there is some truth behind what we believe, it might be better to be diplomatic and at least be prepared to accept that one can be unintentionally offensive.
For instance I do believe Singer and many Pro-Choice are sincere moral people who just happen to be wrong. Singer has a coherent sounding account that justifies his stance.
The other point to note that many Pro-Choicer’s are passionate about female rights –which is a good thing- and have erred due to cultural/historical precedents combined with identity biases that cloud their reasoning. They aren’t bad people just wrong.
Py 2
For the record while I don’t deny I think many of the more vocal Climate Change Denialists are wacko or on the scientific fringe, that isn’t to say all people who have problems with the science are wacko. & while in principle one can cross disciplines when one has a good scientific grounding, it doesn’t in itself guarantee objectivity.
After all I’ll bet there are plenty of scientists in the US who have your or similar scientific training Gerard, but still believe Creationism and that the Earth is only 10 000 years old.
BTW where do you stand on Creationism Gerard?
Nor change the practical matter when dealing with complicated science, the ones who specialise in an expertise are the ones called onto by governments to advise them on scientific matters especially when it is of vital national security.
The US and all other leading developed countries have asked their premier scientific institutions and top scientists to vet the work of the IPPC, and while minor errors have popped up it has been signed off on.
Lastly there is nothing anti-human or nihilist about saying humans can cause environmental damage the global environment. Just a simple fact.
As you say Gerard we should look to universal ecological practices administered with equanimity, but whether it is a lifeboat, an island or the whole Earth, there are definite carrying capacity limitations and population cannot avoid being a contributing factor in that.
So these are valid concerns and it detracts nothing from them that someone like Singer goes off on a ‘weird’ tangent with it.
I suppose in the end we can always agree to disagree. 🙂
Simon,
I fail to see what could have been offensive about the article. You are reading a blog written by a faithful Roman Catholic, with all that such entails, who is also a scientist who has come to a very different conclusion about the data, the same conclusion shared by well over 31,000 other scientists. What is your background in science?
One needn’t be a person of faith to see where Singer is a nihilist. If calling for the mass self-extinction of one’s own species doesn’t qualify one as a nihilist, then perhaps you might proffer a more substantial operational definition.
As for Creationism, I do not begrudge my fellow Christians their belief in a literal understanding of the scriptures. For myself, my Church maintains that Darwinian Evolution is not incompatible with Sacred Scripture, and I accept Darwinian Evolution by means of natural selections as not only Scientific Theory, but having arrived at the status of Scientific Law, as suggested by Edward O. Wilson, Ph.D. Emeritus of Harvard.
Darwinian Evolution, contrary to popular misperception, does not speak to the issue of life’s origins, but tells of the mechanism by which it changes. The mountain of evidence is the size of Mt. Everest. As a Catholic, I maintain that the Sacred Scriptures tell the story of God’s interventions throughout the course of human history. There is no reason to believe that He wasn’t deeply and personally involved with His creation from the start.
As for global warming, it is now the catch-all ‘climate change’, as the earth is once again cooling. At first it was posited that the 3/4 degree F cooling of the earth from the 1930’s to the late 70’s was a function of ever-increasing CO2 levels. Then the earth warmed by 3/4 degree F by the early 2000’s, against an ever-increasing atmospheric CO2. It has since leveled off and started to cool, again, against ever-increasing CO2 levels.
In other words, there is no correlation between temperature cycling and CO2 levels. It also doesn’t help that researchers, such as those at East Anglia have conveniently thrown away their primary data, which support global warming, that NASA and NOAA also seem to have misplaced their evidence.
Not that any of that matters. The individual human being is of incalculable worth, and the human family is the prefigurement of the inner life of the Blessed Trinity. There is simply no room in that equation for nihilism, for anti-love, for sacrificing humans at the altar of the earth-goddess.
Peter Singer is a sick SOB. Were he not a professor at Princeton, he would have been committed to an asylum years ago. What he does isn’t academic freedom. It’s the perversion of freedom: academic license. Licentiousness necessarily involves the abdication and perversion of freedom’s responsibilities.
In the case of the ethicist, the responsibility attendant to freedom is the maintenance of human dignity as the gravitational center of his/her scholarship.
Metastasizing from his earlier screeds against the handicapped, it would seem that Singer can find no one worthy of perpetuation. He has broken with reality. Clearly playing God leads to insanity, as it has for all of history’s tyrants. Mortals are just not up to the job and its rigors.
Love is easier than judgement.
It all matters Simon. It matters to me as both a Christian and a scientist. Darwin has been invoked by every satanic slug with a cultic preoccupation with death as a means of projecting their own delusory power and control over humanity.
The reason? Because death is the ultimate power trip.
In the twentieth century alone, abortion has claimed over 2 Billion humans. Wars, dictators and man-made famines have claimed about a half-billion more. Most of the perpetrators have claimed, falsely, a Darwinian mantle of justification.
Peter Singer stands at the head of the line of these tyrants’ march with his cheerleader’s megaphone proposing to outdo them all by pushing for the complete extinction of the species.
The perversity of it all is that Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Margaret Sanger, all would have thought him mad.
It might interest Simon to know that two professions do not support the “theory” of global warming – they are geologists and meteorologists.
My brother is a meteorologist and he has told me most of his peers believe it is a load of crap, unsubstantiated by any sort of empirical evidence.
It is climatologists (who generally have a geography degree and NOT a science degree) who support global warming.
“Throw in environmental degradation, resource depletion and population and resource overconsumption are we have some serious problems on the near horizon.”
environmental degradation is mainly the fault of corrupt corporations and governments who are willing to do anything for profits.
resource depletion once again is done mainly by the excessive lifestyles of those living primarily in the West, as is over consumption…
Just take the example of the modern house to see how much we overconsume.
Families are generally much smaller than they were a generation ago. Most people live in homes that would be considered mansions only a generation ago, some with as many as 3 bathrooms. My parents were lucky to have a bathroom preWW II.
as for overpopulation, ever heard of the demographic winter…
And Peter Singer is a hack who hasn’t a clue as to what he’s talking about. He will be lumped in with Paul Ehlrich and the population bomb which went out of fashion 30 years ago…..