The world is facing a serious problem. It is over populated. Mostly with imbeciles. There are billions of people walking around, living their insignificant little lives, stressing over their jobs, or their girlfriends and boyfriends, or their cars. We are two years away from twenty twelve, having dodged that Y2K bullet a decade ago. Most countries are close to falling apart, and the economy already has. We are fighting wars on more fronts than we can handle, and unemployment is at an all time high.
This is obviously not a world worth being born in. I was born in the “Ninties”. Even the sound of it is so much less scary than saying “twenty ten”. Tom hanks, Jim Carey, and Micheal Jordan were gods. Bill Clinton got into office. It was a good time to be born. We had everything. Plenty of fossil fuels, the economic backbone (Mexicans and other minorities) were never harassed as they are today. Not counting the gulf war, where we got our oil, or the Rawandan Genocide, first and second Chechen wars, the first world trade center bombing and the Oklahoma city bombing, which brought terrorism to the nations attention as a serious threat, and the Somalian disaster further instills in America a fear of skinny brown people, then our leader, the man who is meant to make the important decisions regarding all of these things, gets impeached over a blowjob.
Living in a confusing world torn by war, poverty, and stupidity is not ideal, but people born today will grow up seeing a lot of the same problems I had to see. i am sure they will grow up stressed about their jobs and cars and boyfriends or girlfriends too. But to as the question “ is it better not to be born today?” begs another question that we can answer much better than that one. Namely, is it better to be born today than to be born two hundred years ago? Thousands? I feel kids back then had it a lot worse. Were they born during early civilization, say, the kids would not grow up playing with iphones and xbox, but would have spent their early life toiling in harsh conditions, making clay statues of people in misery appealing to the gods for death, and then they would die. At age thirty or so.
It seems silly to ask if the world would be better without humans or sentient life. Taking that this is a non-secular question, that all there is right now is one little rock with a bunch of animals on it, and one kind in particular that is really good at killing all of the rest, it seems like a no brainer that the world would be better off without humans. But without life on earth, then what is the point of earth? Mars had frozen bacteria on it. Scientists conjecture that counts as life. But human life is so unique in its arts, social complexity, and our air of superiority and stewardship, earth without the creatures that inhabit it today is utterly insignificant.
Okay, the 3rd line did make me laugh. Might not be the most delicate phrasing, but funny.
ReplyDeleteGreat voice in first two paragraphs.
Good move to examine the past. I don't think it's as bad as you make it out to be (bit of hyperbole), and it's only good now among the higher class (very few can afford iphones and xbox). So you're comparing two unlike things -- compare upper class now with upper class back then, or lower class now with lower class back then.
I think you meant secular question.
Good move to question what the the point of earth would be. You're really undermining his notion that the earth is more important than humans -- it'd be good to make this more explicit and dwell on it longer.
Even as good as the first two paragraphs sound, I think you need that space to make arguments, not just perform verbal acrobatics.