Another symptom of sick culture.

There was a time when people who measured the value of human life through sombre calculations based on cost-benefit analyses were regarded with suspicion and contempt. Throughout most of history human life has been valued in and of itself; it has been seen as possessing a special quality that could not be reduced to quantities to be measured by misanthropic accountants. Yes, the human body also has a physical dimension, and it can be reduced to its chemical constituents. But isn’t there also something very special about life?

Sadly we live in a world where, for many climate crusaders, a photo of 12 beaming babies is somehow a bad thing, a symbol of the problems we face. Why? Because the OPT has discovered that ‘every £4 spent on contraception’ saves ‘one tonne of CO2 being added to global warming’. It claims that the most effective way to fight climate change is to get rich Western people to offset their own carbon emissions by paying for birth control programmes in poor nations.

What is truly disturbing about this, from a humanist perspective, is not simply that there is a silent crusade against the unique quality of human life, but that there is an almost complete absence of anger about it, a lack of any critical reaction against it. In modern times, there have always been small coteries of Malthusians, eugenic fantasists and bitter misanthropists who were estranged from children and who regarded babies as an imposition on their existences. Thankfully, these people tended to be consigned to the margins of society. Not any more.

Well, this doesn't seem recent to me. Such Ehrlichian misanthropy and millennial angst is many decades old and linked to the scientistic nonsense that spawned many of the socialist authoritarian ideas that infected the "intelligentsia" after WWII.

A world that can place an equal sign between a baby and carbon is one that has lost its faith in humanity. This profound sense of malaise about the human condition is most systematically expressed around the extravagant, quasi-religious, time-is-running-out rhetoric that surrounds the Copenhagen conference on climate change, which started this morning. But it is important to recognise that the current anxiety about the destructive potential of human life is not a direct consequence of the issue of climate change. The campaign against climate change merely provides a vehicle through which a pre-existing sense of human self-loathing can be articulated. If climate change did not exist, the very same misanthropic sentiment would find expression through other issues.

The good news, however, is that the attempt to blame population growth for environmental degradation and for potentially harming future generations is a Malthusian fantasy that has been constantly discredited by real-world experiences.

That's not news, at least to serious thinkers and observers, and won't have any effect on society. It's weak medicine for the sickness that has reduced human society to such a degraded state.