18 August 2004
daddy! buy me a monkey!
'The holiness of the romanticism of gambling, unlike that of asceticism, makes monks and abstainers tepid.' - Georges Bataille, 'On Nietzsche'.
I am a tepid monk...watching these arguments about a massive population explosion by 2050. I think John Gray will not be pleased ('The Inuit and the Bushmen stumbled into ways of life in which their footprint was slight. We cannot tread the Earth so lightly. Homo rapiens has become too numerous.' - Straw Dogs). Homo rapiens! S'clever, no?
I don't understand the argument that people in richer countries have less children because they can't afford to have more. It's about as cogent as the arguments of holocaust deniers (whom, you'd think, if they really were properly anti-semitic, would presumably be pleased with Hitler's actions and liable to celebrate them). Instead, they seem to hold the convoluted position that Jews are the kinds of people predisposed to make up stories about their extinction at the hands of others, and this is why they should be killed in large numbers. It's an argument that mobilises all kinds of reactive forces. If anyone thinks I've got it wrong, please let me know, as I have spent at least ten minutes trying to figure it out.
