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Notes -
A note on motivations.
I often see people making arguments of the type of "we need to get fertility rates (across the board, or maybe just for group X) up otherwise human civilization will collapse".
Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it. If human civilization ends after my generation, I'm fine with it. Of course I want living standards to continue to be good during my generation at least, but that doesn't mean that I have any attachment to the idea of wanting to maintain human civilization 100 or 1000 years from now. And if human civilization continues after me, I'm fine with that too. I don't care much one way or the other.
Humanity has been doing this whole reproduction thing for hundreds of thousands of years now. Repetition and quantity is not the same thing as quality.
I get that it feels different if you have kids, which I don't. I might be interested in having kids, but I'm not sure if I want any or not yet.
In any case, if you have kids, I didn't force you to have kids. I hope your kids do well, but it doesn't change my fundamental calculus.
I enjoy being alive, but I see no fundamental deep importance in keeping the human species existing. I'm not a nihilist in the least bit. I love being alive in a very visceral way. I love the smell of flowers, the look of sunshine in the sky. I just see no clear positive advantage to continuing the species. Or to ending it. Like I said, I'm neutral on the matter. If the species continues, cool. If it ends, cool. I don't want to end, and I don't want any currently alive humans to end, but to me the idea of continuing the species beyond that is very abstract and I really don't care about it.
Seeing this written out explicitly, it makes me wish that more people would be open and honest about their view on this like here. Because this comment reminded me of 3 different things.
One was during the aftermath of 9/11 when the PATRIOT ACT and War on Terror were pushed through, with one of the arguments from the Republican/conservative side in favor of these things being that "the US Constitution is not a suicide pact," which was completely ineffective as an argument against most Democrats/liberals/progressives by my observation. The reasoning being that, if adhering to the Constitution would result in the destruction of the country that follows it, then that justifies not adhering to it, so that the country that actually makes the Constitution meaningful beyond some scribbles on paper, can keep on keeping it meaningful. And the most common counterargument was some variant of, "If this means the USA is destroyed, then so be it, at least we followed principles of civil liberty and privacy and etc. along the way."
Another was part of an interview in a documentary called The Red Pill, which was made by a feminist named Cassie Jaye as a way to explore the red pill community/movement/whatever and related man-o-sphere groups like men's rights activists and men going their own way. She interviewed a lot of people, but one of them was a feminist academic, and one of the questions had to do with the idea that, what if the Patriarchy, as feminist academics like herself, understood it, was something that was needed in some form in order to keep human civilization going, since women freed from its shackles empirically keep choosing to have too few children to keep above replacement. Her answer was pretty much "that's a depressing thought," followed by a non-answer in a way that gave the impression that she clearly had thought very little about this possibility, i.e. that this possibility just wasn't something she particularly cared about.
The third is more general throughout the interminable arguments about US immigration, where a common conservative argument against open borders is that allowing anyone in who wants to come in would cause US society to worsen, including, at the limits, just destroying the country altogether. And one common sentiment, though rarely stated explicitly, among progressives who reject this argument, has been something along the lines of, "If open borders would destroy the USA, then so be it; at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way." This happened to explicitly be my own position for a while, before I decided I was selfish enough to want to keep some of the benefits of USA society for myself in the future.
In each of these, one can make some argument based on facts for why the bad thing won't happen: even without the PATRIOT ACT, USA would remain a safe and powerful country; even with maximal female emancipation and sex equality for whatever those mean for any given feminist academic/activist, human society could keep surviving and even thriving; even with open borders, it's possible that USA will be just as prosperous and safe a nation to live in as before, just servicing more and poorer people. There are good and bad arguments for and against all of these positions. But looking from the inside, it seemed to me that these arguments weren't made based on good faith belief in them, but rather based on motivated reasoning, in order to avoid having to make the argument that the benefits are worth the harms, in favor of just denying that harms exist (this is a common pattern you've probably seen in every aspect of life, from the most minute decisions one might make in everyday life all the way to the biggest, most world-altering policies or military actions).
Now, I have little idea if this is a left/progressive thing; I've just observed it in that group because I am part of that group and have spent most of my life surrounded by people in that group. I suspect that conservatives, by their nature of preferring tradition - such as the tradition of keeping civilization going for the next generation - have a greater tendency to want to keep humanity and human civilization going than progressives, who tend to be skeptical of tradition. But either way, I'm quite sure this attitude of "why care about humanity's survival when we have my favorite principles to worry about" is extremely common among progressives. Usually, it's not explicitly spoken or even thought, it gets laundered in, as alluded to above, by motivating oneself to believe that the evidence indicates that one's principles don't actually conflict with other goals such as survival of humanity/human civilization (in fact, I see such motivated reasoning often leading people to believe that their principles are actually synergistic to good goal, such as game devs genuinely believing that putting in characters that conform with their ideology would also lead to more sales due to expanding the market).
Which, to me, is interesting to think about with respect to the concept of a "progressive," which indicates someone who wants to "progress" - but what's the point of progress if there's no one around to enjoy its fruits? One way to think about it might be that we've "progressed" beyond ideologies for the benefit of the comfort and life satisfaction of mere animals such as ourselves and to pure principles that are Good or Bad due to arguments that I found convincing, rather than due to empirical consequences of following them. Which looks a lot like inventing a god or a religion.
Traditional religions make this kind of argument all the time, of course, under the justification of God, who is said to be intrinsically good and beyond understanding and judgment by mere mortals such as ourselves. And He might also punish/reward us in the afterlife, which means even from a completely selfish cynical perspective, following His principles is in my interest. Convincing if you already believe in Him, not so much if you don't. But progressive ideology largely rejects religion and associated supernatural beliefs, and so there is no Heaven or Hell to reward the souls of extinct humans; we just stop existing. And there's no God or faith in God to use as a compass for figuring out what principles are good, we just have academics at our local Critical Theory-related college departments to instruct us what's good. I'm reminded of the criticism often thrown at "wokes," that they copied the original sin of Christianity without copying the forgiveness and redemption.
There's also the reality of a group like "Extinction Rebellion," which is explicitly against the extinction of humanity and what most people would agree is a "progressive" group. However, the fact that the group's mission has to do with stopping global warming, something I don't think I've seen anyone seriously argue has a meaningful chance at making humanity go extinct or even destroying human civilization to enough of an extent to be close enough, makes me think it's more motivated reasoning with an intentionally eyebrow-raising name than genuine motivation.
In any case, I doubt that more than a handful of particularly honest and self-aware progressives explicitly believe this notion, but I commonly see this attitude of "human civilization is a small price to pay for achieving our principles" at virtually every level of analysis and rhetoric put forth by people belonging to this cluster of ideologies. I just wish everyone was more honest and open about this. A progressive who thinks like this and a conservative who wants human society both to stay alive and stay just as good, if not become better, are actually, fundamentally, at odds with each other in terms of goals, not just the methods. If people actually have honest, true, correct beliefs about the goals and principles of others, a lot less time and effort can be wasted in making arguments that falsely presume a common ground.
I'm also reminded of the commonly known "thrive/survive" dichotomy, where progressives are characterized as focusing on how we can thrive, which is only possible in times of plenty, and conservatives are characterized as focusing on how we can survive, which is most relevant in times of not plenty. Sacrificing thriving too much for the sake of survival seems like a likely failure mode of the latter, while sacrificing surviving too much for the sake of thriving seems like a likely failure mode of the former.
Speaking briefly on ultimata.
The primary purpose of an ultimatum is to force the listener to accept the form of the argument: A or B. The argument then splits out along lines of A-support, B-support, A-opposition, B-opposition... etc. It begs the question on whether A and B are in fact linked.
Take your PATRIOT example. The post-9/11 question is: how can we protect ourselves from future attacks? Supporters of the PATRIOT Act alleged that the only effective method was curtailing the rights of Americans. But this is not obviously the only way to protect ourselves from these kinds of attacks. Suicide terror attacks are, and were, overwhelmingly favored by a certain type of extreme Muslim on the world stage. Governments and mafia (i.e. small governments) don't really like them, as they expend valuable trained human resources on frankly trivial strategic goals. (Unless they can convince a third-party stooge to do it, like Iran.) The only time people favor suicide terror attacks is when they kinda want to die (or have their people killed) as a side effect. Consider Japan's suicide bombers. They were very clearly a statement more than a strategy. So, taking this all into account, you could theoretically solve the problem by tightening the visas you give to foreign Arabs substantially, or some other form of discrimination against the highest-risk group. In practice, I think this is what we did. There were lots of racism complaints during the Bush admin. But as far as the PATRIOT debate went, it was about the ability to spy. It's not obvious that this had any bearing on the real problem, and was instead about the ability to spy itself. Call me cynical, but I think that if there were more guys in the White House with strong prejudices against Islam, we'd have been having a different Constitutional debate, one about outlawing a certain religion.
OK. Taking a look at the feminism/fertility debate, or the environmentalism/survival debate, and so on, I believe the not-so-subtle move is that the two are necessarily linked and we must "choose." I call bullshit. Around the world, patriarchal societies still have cratering birthrates. This is easy to find information. Similarly, a ruined environment has explicit costs to human survival, as we undermine our own productive capacity through poisoning ourselves, wrecking good farmland, denuding the seas, etc etc. The existence of those binaries can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to link these unrelated topics for the purpose of controlling the debate, steering it towards one's desired outcomes.
For feminism/fertility, I think the real move is getting attention off of fertility itself. Lots and lots of women want to have kids, and yet they don't, or put it off until the numbers just go down. Why? The feminist (or anti-feminist) answer is to hide it behind the "right to choose," but it's pretty obvious in context that it's only a (colloquially) feminist choice in one direction. (Not all feminists believe this, but it's what dominates the conversation.) I suspect the real reason is a confluence of factors, mostly cultural (lower respect or understanding for the importance of reproduction) and partially material (increased life expectancy screwing with wealth movement and life stages relative to fertile windows). But as long as it's about feminism, which everyone has already made up their minds on as a matter of principle, we don't have to think about maybe changing our individual values and cultural practices to reflect this new reality. Almost the same description can be applied to environmentalism with some mad-libs substitutions.
That's why I'm so skeptical of simply accepting the frame on these things. OP, for his part, didn't actually frame any of this as an ultimatum. He was actually just negating the antecedent, showing that (for him) the presented argument was insufficient. Sure, I happen to disagree with his stance quite fervently, but reading him closely - he doesn't say that he values certain things above the survival of the species, he says he does not value the survival of the species at all, one way or another. There's no ultimatum there, Therefore, one had to be provided for him.
(As far as the OP is concerned, all I can make is a value statement: that it is ugly and sad to have nothing to recommend one's time on Earth to posterity, be one's contributions ever so humble. We are all destined to die, and pleasures are fleeting, and the march of old age makes the immediate world increasingly bitter, it behooves one to seek value in something a little more distant and external. Say, the future in which one is invested. People who do this seem in my experience to die more comfortably.)
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