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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   21611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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this logically implies that just about every European parent in the fourteenth century was unimaginably sadistic, like some kind of unholy offspring of Jeffrey Dahmer, Josef Mengele and Simon Cowell.

I think the general thinking is more that they were morally incompetent - multiplying because the Catholic Church told them it was virtuous to do so, and they couldn't even conceive of a consequentialist utilitarian argument about whether or not to have a child.

And if you insist on pretending that you’re not having children because of climate change, at least respect our intelligence enough to commit to the bit. Sell your car, travel everywhere by bike, stop using air travel, give up eating meat. Otherwise, you’re fooling no one, not even yourself.

This only addresses the "having a child would be unethical because they'd contribute to climate change" line of argument, not the "having a child would be unethical because the world is going to burn and they'd die of thirst in their teens" line of argument. If you genuinely believe the world is going to end in fifteen years, I think it's intellectually consistent to be spending your remaining years in comfort and even hedonistic decadence, even as you say that the world is going to get so bad in a short enough time-frame that any child would curse you for bringing them into the world by the time they were old enough to do so. It's… convenient, but it's consistent.

On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.

On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.

They weren't and the two existing moder Gnostic religions aren't

On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.

The Gnostics were anti-sex, in the sense that they believed that a celibate lifestyle was morally superior to the alternatives for everyone, with marriage being a second-best compromise. If taken seriously, this becomes anti-natalist in practice.

Paul spends a lot of effort in the Epistles trying to convince the early Church that marriage (and marital sex) were okay, suggesting that the uncorrected early Church tended to agree with the Gnostics on this point.

"Marital sex is part of a second-best compromise and it would be better if married couples had the bare minimum amount of sex for reproduction, like the Protestant couple in the Every Sperm is Sacred sketch" is a very common error that crops up in Christian thought over the centuries, to the point where I am not sure if it is an error.

The Gnostics were anti-sex, in the sense that they believed that a celibate lifestyle was morally superior to the alternatives for everyone, with marriage being a second-best compromise. If taken seriously, this becomes anti-natalist in practice.

The currently existing Gnostics the Yazidis and the Mandaeans are not particularly anit-natilist.

Paul spends a lot of effort in the Epistles trying to convince the early Church that marriage (and marital sex) were okay, suggesting that the uncorrected early Church tended to agree with the Gnostics on this point.

Paul's views were pretty complicated on marriage, he says this in Corinthians 1 chapter 7

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: ‘It is well for a man not to touch a woman Verse 2 I wish that all were as I myself am. (That is unmarried and childless) Verse 6 To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion. Verses 8 and 9.

Now while he does exhort the married to stay married this is hardly a full throated endorsement given than he says the unmarried should not become married and he wishes everyone be unmarried and childless. There have been plenty of anti-natalist Christian movements based on versus like this just as there have been plenty of anti-natalist gnostic movements. The Gnostic concept isn't inherently anymore anti-natalist then verses like this and the idea of original sin. All Abrahamic religions value the spirit over the flesh.

The currently existing Gnostics the Yazidis and the Mandaeans are not particularly anit-natilist.

For anthropic reasons, they wouldn't be. I hope you can see why that doesn't disprove the historical argument.

Yes I do. But a lot of people are then arguing that Gnosticism inherently trends to anti-natalism which I don' think it needs to philosophically and I think the fact that we have incredibly ancient extant Gnostic religions prove it.

I think the general thinking is more that they were morally incompetent

Yeah, I was considering including a paragraph saying that the people claiming that they aren't having children because it would be cruel to bring a child into a world like this would presumably claim that people in the past were ignorant and foolish, but Now We Know Better. But the post was already too long as it stood.

On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.

From reading Montaillou and The Perfect Heresy, my understanding is that the ordained men of the church were forbidden from having children, but not ordinary parishioners. But I think the theological position of the church was that conceiving a child is evil, even if it's a necessary evil.

Humans are tougher than cockroaches. Literally, we conquered the high arctic and the depths of the sahara where they can't go. The belief that humans won't persist through some postapocalyptic wasteland, perhaps your children conquering this mad max world, is... well I guess about as unreasonable as believing it's going to happen.

I mean, sure, Homo sapiens might not go extinct, but I think it's reasonable to have qualms about having a child if you believe they've got a 90% chance of dying in the apocalypse, even if you grant that 10% of humanity might survive and eventually rebuild something civilization-shaped.

One of the only things I know about my children's future is that they will die, and that it will probably be ugly. I'm a lot more concerned with the meaningfulness of their lives.

Sure, the Reaper comes for us all, but I wouldn't have a child if I knew, eg through embryo screening, that it would almost certainly die of a horribly painful disease before turning fourteen. I don't think most people would. If you grant the assumption "civilization will almost certainly collapse with bodies piling up in the streets within fifteen years", the prospects of a child conceived today would look an awful lot like our screened embryo with the horrible genetic malformation. Needless to say I don't grant the assumption, but it seems, on its own terms, to add up.

If you grant the assumption "civilization will almost certainly collapse with bodies piling up in the streets within fifteen years"

Glad we agree that it would be an absolutely insane thing to assume, but if I actually had reason to believe that I'd plan accordingly, and still have children. It's happened many times before and probably will many times again.

I'd also have the kid who's (allegedly) going to die within fifteen years, though that gets back to moral foundations that I don't expect to share in common with most here.

To get me to shy away from having kids, I'd need to be convinced, and I mean really convinced, that there is little chance of saving them from fates worse than death. Getting hoovered up by Cthulhu for example, or forced into some kind of AI-run entertainment/nutrition pods where they have no opportunity to learn about nature or real history and instead have their minds' semiotic webs wrecked by bombardment with false impressions.

If an asteroid were definitely going to hit the earth in 18 months we'd still have another kid and cherish our time with him or her.

An asteroid hitting the Earth has the benefit of being instantaneous; I had in mind a slow, painful death from gradual organ failure or similar (which seems similar to the possibility of a slow death from malnutrition and dehydration in the event of social collapse from runaway climate change). I agree it's more defensible to have the child if your only consideration is an early cutoff, the suffering was an active ingredient in my reasoning. Though with a child whose projected death is at a somewhat older age than 18 months you'd run into the dilemma of whether to tell your six-year-old kid that they're for sure going to die before they grow up, which seems like a very cruel choice for any parent to have to make either way.

That's a severe lack of confidence in your kids. Are these people marrying the weakest partner they can find? Is this more blue tribe weakness-as-status-symbol, like ARFID and long covid?

Most apocalyptic scenarios don't select on any meaningful definition of "strength" - nuclear war certainly doesn't and nor does the kind of pandemic with a 50+% fatality rate.

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