The Dust of Death
So committed are we to our own destruction, that the "integration downwards into the void"(Van Til) continues apace. Proverbs warns us that "all those who hate Me love death", and so we see it made more and more explicit in our culture.

The New Criterion(HERE) provides us with two examples in the January issue (this is a superb cultural journal):-

First a professor at Cape Town University, Prof. David Benatar, has published (OUP!) his magnum opus, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. This book, as the title suggests, woes on the problem of our existence, rather the fact of our existence. This piece of self-loathing carries this publisher's blurb:

"Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. Drawing on the relevant psychological literature, the author shows that there are a number of well-documented features of human psychology that explain why people systematically overestimate the quality of their lives and why they are thus resistant to the suggestion that they were seriously harmed by being brought into existence. The author then argues for the “anti-natal” view—that it is always wrong to have children—and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yields a “pro-death” view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct. "

However, at least for Prof Benatar, there's a residue of meaning left, whereby we can at least muster some enthusiam to beef about our shameful existence. These humanists just can't live out their presuppositions to the full!

So the New Criterion sums it up nicely,

"we believe people are right to take that high road and reject the book without engaging its argument. To quote Nietzsche again, you do not refute a disease: you might cure it, quarantine it, or in some cases ignore it altogether. You don’t argue with it. Reason is profitably employed only among the reasonable. Dr. Johnson had the right idea when he employed the pedal expedient against Bishop Berkeley’s doctrine of universal hallucination. Something similar should be employed in the case of Professor Benatar’s Lemmings First doctrine of human fatuousness."

Secondly, the next piece of self-negation. The same editorial reports the case of Ms. Toni Vernelli, who has taken the reduction of her carbon footprint very seriously,

"Professor Benatar is part of a larger “environmental” movement of like-minded nihilists like Toni Vernelli, an Englishwoman who at twenty-seven had herself sterilized in order to reduce her “carbon footprint” and help “protect the planet.” “Every person who is born,” Ms. Vernelli told a reporter, “uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.” Ms. Vernelli is 35 now, works for an “environmental charity,” and is happily married to Ed, her second husband: “A week before my sterilisation, I went to an animal rights demonstration and met Ed.” Life is good for Ed and Toni. “We feel we can have one long-haul flight a year,” she explained, “as we are vegan and childless, thereby greatly reducing our carbon footprint and combating over-population.” Still, there are frustrations. “A woman like me, who is not having children in order to save the planet, is considered barking mad,” Ms. Vernelli lamented. “What I consider mad are those women who ferry their children short distances in gas-guzzling cars.”

All of this is undisguised selfishness wrapped up in ideology and served up as "environmental concern".

With declining populations, a childless future, we are furthering our own destruction with gusto. Environmentalism, once a concern for the squirrals and the conifers, has morphed into a philosophy of human self-hatred and destruction. Our very existence is the problem, we are told, and a few are rushing out to do something about it. But are they doing enough?