Exhibit B
In my essay on Sophomoronology, I offered that the ideals, or the view of life, or the sophistry collage (I cannot call it a philosophy) I there called ‘Intellectualism’ included an emotional allure or intellectual addiction to death and images of death.
Here, as an exhibit in my argument, let me present this article by animal-rights advocate and pro-infanticide Carthegenian anti-ethics Ethicist Peter Singer, entitled Should This Be the Last Generation? In which he asks the question that only seems a conundrum worth pondering to sensitive, pallid, sickly, and trembling minds which must have some intellectual equivalent to addiction to laudanum:
Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?
Wow! What an interesting question! Oh, wait, no, excuse me. I mean stupid. What a stupid question. The question is stupid both on a logical and a emotional level.
Logically, it is a paradox to ask about the rights of the non-existent. To analyze life in terms of who has the right, or the power, to do something rather than whether that something is good and healthy is a leitmotif of the Intellectual, who despises notions of objective good, and is fascinated by power, and demands ever more rights to command ever more of the time and effort of the rightless.
On an intellectual level, it is like asking, “If you had never been born, could you sue your mother to enjoin her to bear you? Would you have standing to sue?”
On an emotional level, it is the same as asking whether you hate babies, hate your mother, hate life and happiness and twittering birds, and curse the day you first saw sunlight. It is a topic only of interest to the morbid.
The Intellectuals are morally retarded. Not mentally, morally. They must strain and groan and pull and push to make a moral calculation that to a sane man is rapid, obvious, and painless. Their consciences function either in reverse or not at all. What a healthy person calls good, the intellectual calls evil; and what repels a healthy person, the intellectual is drawn by perverse fascination. Once of these perversions is an appetite for death rather than life.
I say again, I was not discussing the psychology of Intellectuals, I was discussing the logical relation of the ideas one to another. Obviously whether an Intellectual wishes to go whole hog, and adopt all the ideas logically implied by nihilistic materialistic irrationalistic anti-human Christophobic anti-Semitic death-worship is up to him. There is no requirement when your brain is ruled by a collage of sentimental slogans rather than by a philosophy to organize your beliefs with an eye to consistency rather than comfort.
An Intellectual, by the specific and limited definition I am using only during these essays, is defined as a man who studies philosophy in order to arm himself against the complaints of his conscience, who uses airy abstractions to justify his sins rather than some other ploy.
Because the conscience is a pragmatic faculty to distinguish moral truth from moral error, the Intellectual must silence it.
This creates an incentive to regard all truth as relative and ergo illegitimate and non-binding. This in turn creates an incentive to regard all reality as optional. This in turn creates an incentive to be concerned, perhaps fascinated, with the ultimate enforcement of reality, i.e. the death that would visit the intellectual if he ever actually took his ideas seriously and tried to carry them out.
One type of Intellectual is a student of Hedonism. Now, how could Hedonism lead to a desire for death and self-destruction? Since there is neither wine nor women nor song in the grave, one would assume a Hedonist to wish to avoid it at all cost. That assumption is correct for philosophical Hedonism, but not for sophistical Hedonism. All depends on the honesty of the Hedonist.
A hedonist philosopher, an honest hedonist, reasons that the good consists of the pursuit of long-term pleasure rightly understood. Since to seek pleasure requires knowledge and wisdom, the hedonist philosopher values the pleasure of reading, reasoning, thinking and speculating. He seeks a life of contentment.
On the other hand, a hedonist intellectual, a dishonest hedonist, reasons that in order to justify his whoring and drinking and drug-use, he must preach that the pursuit of pleasure is the only known good in life. Since life begins in the pain of a baby’s wail and ends in the silence of the grave, with much unpleasantness inbetween, the dishonest hedonist wonders why life is worth living at all, since not every waking hour is a transport of ecstatic volcanoes of joy.
The dishonest hedonist is playing a game of ‘Chicken’ with death, trying to see how much self-destructive behavior he can indulge in before he destroys himself. Maybe he hopes the hollow eyesocket of the Grim Reaper will blink. Since the hedonist lives for this life alone, his mental effort is spent trying to avoid thinking about the Four Last Things. Trying to avoid thought is not good for your psychology or your philosophy. Far better to be an honest hedonist lost in bookish if melancholy meditation than a Peter Singer toying with notions of worldwide mass-suicide.
No logic can reach the dishonest Hedonist, since his interest is not discovering the truth or falsehood of the relation between pleasure and the good; his interest is in erect a convenient excuse. Perhaps the outrageous Innocence Smith from G.K. Chesterton’s MANALIVE could snap the dishonest Hedonist out of his death-obsession by shooting a revolver near his head, but I doubt a syllogism could do it.
Added Later:
I should have read the comments. Here is Exhibit C:
Unfortunately, we still need enough humans to take care of the cats, dogs, horses, etc. Other than that, humans are nuisances. Recommended by 164 Readers
And Exhibit D:
. . by not having a child, or children, I am not only reducing the ‘resource footprint’ of my family by the children I am not having, but also by all of the children that my own potential children might have had, and so on.
It just really annoys me when a friend with 1, or 2, or 4 children tells me I should eat less beef and less seafood, and more vegetables, as doing so would be better for the environment. Reducing my own personal choices is certainly going to be less important than generating entirely new consumers of resources. If you have even one child, please stop sermonizing about conservation to your child-free friends. They have just conserved a full person’s share of resources, by not having a child.
Ironically, a favored darling of the Intellectuals happens to be Darwin who might opine, if asked, that an inheritable trait which created set of beliefs which created an incentive toward self-sterility was not a trait likely to be favored by natural selection. If Intellectualism were an inheritable trait rather than a spiritual sickness, it would expunge itself through evolution.
I submit to my atheist friends that even if Catholicism happens to be utterly false, monstrous, and absurd, it would be in your long term pragmatic self-interest to promote the faith, on the grounds that Catholics hold it to be a God-given duty to increase and multiply and fill the earth, and therefore Catholics are more likely to maintain the population base needed to sustain civilization, not to mention sustaining the tax base of productive citizens needed to pay into Social Security; moreover families with babies are more fun to be around than an equal number of self-centered, prunishly selfish, childless and death-worshippers.
The prunes (see above) hold human life (including yours, my dear atheists) to be of no account, except perhaps as a stable hand to feet the pets.
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In case you are wondering, Exhibit A, meant to show that my analysis of Intellectuals as condescending, smug, and arrogant gasbags was correct is here.