Good Hazlitt quote! Really like him – was drafted in to teach him this year, hadn’t even read before, excellent stuff though…

I think you’re right with all of this. I find myself very resistant to the energy use argument vs. kids (which seems to keep coming up elsewhere) as, like with so many other things, it seems a lot more effective to work towards personal / social improvement on this front than worry all that much about the n+1 that you’ve added. I want to say more about this, but it’s all still processing.

Giovanni,

There’s two things I regret in this post. One was coming at IT a bit hard and unfairly (I know that she doesn’t really think these things – gonna fix all of that in a minute) and the other is the bit about non-parents not being able to understand the film.

The latter said, I do think that there is something of a split that generally obtains in discussions like this, and it’s a discussion that goes like this. Both sides are saying “child,” but the childless side tends to think “reproductive decision” when that work is used, whereas those of us with kids at home tend to think “my living breathing child.” Both sides, I suppose, go do with a more rounded sense of the word.

IT,

We’ve probably said our peace about this for a bit, haven’t we. I guess I’m still wondering about contraception itself, whether it might fall under the “natural” side of the ledger too. Likewise, “not following impulses” is also assuredly a facet of “natural” being as well. Anyway, I’m sure we’ll keep talking about this….

Correction:

1) Is reason not “biological”?

Human beings are animals, but they are capable of occasionally making decisions that don’t merely …drift off into insomniac distraction. I mean that don’t merely follow the whim of whatever we want to call instinct or impulse.

Agree that not enough positive things are written about adoption and fostering; not so sure that it should be the pillar of a family policy – surely that ought to be helping families to remain functional, especially with regard to fostering, and it’s amazing how far lifting some of them out of poverty can achieve. Transfering the care of the children of the unemployed and the working poor to the relatively better off is not the kind of pillar I’d feel too comfortable to lean on.

1) Is reason not “biological”?

Human beings are animals, but they are capable of occasionally making decisions that don’t merely

2) Is biology not reasonable? (Sure, sometimes, vernacularly, sure it’s not. But at root?)

It’s a ruse, like reason. The joke about philosophers is that it’s very easy to make a list of pros and cons re children – but fortunately for the continued survival of humanity, people rarely listen to philosophers. David Benatar has an interesting point to make, though he concedes that he is likely to get little agreement: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/EthicsMoralPhilosophy/?view=usa&ci=9780199296422

3) Most of all, of course: what does reason have to tell us about all this? What are you about to say?

That we can think rationally about having more children without immediately becoming emotional or defensive. That other considerations can play a part of our decisions about biology – they already do. Most women in the developed world use some form of contraception. A truly ‘natural’ approach would see them having up to 13 or so children each. And virtually no one wants that these days. People are already rational about children – I’m merely suggesting they could be more so.

We didn’t disagree on that: Ads went too far by suggesting that I was nostalgic for high infant mortality! I got an interesting note from somebody:

‘I agree with everything you said. It’s one of those topics about which it’s difficult to have a normal conversation with otherwise-rational people. Which is one of the reasons I go out with a demographer. They know the score! There are still quite a lot of academics in population studies who would be equally sceptical that having a child is automatically good, and would strongly contend that while family planning has become unfashionable in policy circles, it remains one of the surest routes to the attainment of development goals and women’s empowerment in the developing world. Closer to home there’s nowhere near enough positive stuff written about adoption or fostering. It must become the pillar of your republic’s family policy.’

As you were.

As for why should we even have children, fair cop, it’ll be hard to argue that what the world needs is more people. The decision to have our own rather than adopt was a complicated one, and I’m sure that reasons of selfishness and not wanting to put ourselves through those particular ringers had something to do with it. Fostering is a whole other thing – that, yes, I’d be tempted to say, qualitatively better – and we haven’t ruled out doing it later in life, but we wanted a family first, and here we are, recoiling a lot more than we used to when a child gets hurt in a film.

The Malthusians have always worried that the people were having babies in spite of the reason they shouldn’t have them – that reason being the collective effect of them on the land. The Malthusian case has never gone over well – Hazlitt, memorably, said that “his name hangs suspended over their [the poor's] heads, in terrorem, like some baleful meteor.” On the other hand, Hazlitt himself was a rather careless father, the very image of an intellectual – he let his only sun play by the banks of river while he was discussing some metaphysical matter with a pal, and got so interested that he didn’t hear the cries of the boy when he fell in the water and was starting to drift with the current. Luckily, a passerby rescued the child.

Myself, I think the should and shouldn’t of having children is mired in various superstitions. Really, if you are worried about overpopulation, you are worried about energy use. We each of us, in the developed world, use about as much energy per year as a blue whale – and you can eliminate the equivalent of a child just by radically cutting down on that energy use. I doubt that anybody is going to do so, however, outside of those in hippiedom. The energy use is a framework for the shoulds and shouldn’ts, I think, in a way that biology jsut isn’t.

Lucky you to have been there at the Chocolate Box in the youthful savage glory days of Carlitos the Apache.

But I will admit to being an Estudantes aficionado and further add that the most stirring spectacle I have witnessed in some 60 insane years of following various sweaty agons in various arenas was Estudiantes’ astonishing fightback in the 2006 Apertura to overcome “insurmountable” odds and finally defeat Boca (en casa, yet) to become campéon. The celebrations in La Plata are worth memorializing:

El Pincha: Campéon

(BTW: Estudiantes are called El Pincha, short for Pincharata: the ratcatchers.)

As to your neighbourhood turf issues, I got caught up in those in virtual reality–in fact it’s a good thing one can be boiled in oil only virtually in these strange domains–back here. Trivia stuff perhaps but it will give you a line on the Sol Campbell reference, and if you pick up that thread it will lead you directly into the black little heart that pumps in the breast of the Spurs XII at White Hart Lane:

Winter Sports 1.5: History and Football, Part II

That bit in turn came out of something even blacker: Gaza:

Winter Sports I: Football and History

But I stay out of those things now, I only want to be

Here