We don't owe the past a future

“Nebuchadnezzar”. William Blake.

In this essay, I don't want to demonize historian João Pedro Rangel Diniz and his work on the Operação Barbarussa project, which is present on several social media platforms. In fact, I wouldn't be talking about him here if I didn't follow him and consider his work promoting history-related topics to be excellent. I like what he does. I find the project's lighthearted and sometimes comical approach very effective. In fact, before I begin talking about the video that inspired me to write this text, if you understand Portuguese I recommend the Operação Barbarussa video in which Diniz, in a calm and relaxed manner, completely debunks the pseudo-historical farce that the Sumerian civilization was connected to extraterrestrials called Anunnaki from Nibiru, a supposedly unknown planet in the solar system. Anunnaki is a real historical term, but they were merely gods of the Sumerian pantheon, not extraterrestrials.

Not even the video whose content inspired me to write this essay is bad. I just completely disagree with one specific point. The video I'm talking about is recent. In it, Diniz begins by discussing scientists' realistic reconstruction of human beings who lived thousands of years ago around the world based on their bones. He talks about how all these humans, our ancestors, feared, loved, played, and felt nostalgic when remembering their childhoods, and how they certainly held and defended strong opinions about many things. The oldest human featured in the video was an inhabitant of what is now China and lived over 140,000 years ago. The video is very beautiful, by the way. At one point, he talks about how these things make us realize that we are all part of a vast human lineage and that our goal is not only to survive but also to try to leave a less worse world behind.

As much as I disagree with those who claim that there is a discernible meaning in human history and that this meaning clearly points to the construction of a particular society based on a very specific mode of production and ownership of property, I agree that it is good when we make our lives less worse than they were before, both individually and collectively. I agree, in a completely different way from that defended by those who believe that humanity's history has a discernable meaning, with the idea that our world has much to be improved. Through the lens of cosmic pessimism, which treats our existence as a misfortune, I agree with the Schopenhauerian idea that we should all see ourselves as fellow sufferers. In the chapter Aditional Remarks on the Doctrine of the Suffering of the World, in the second volume of Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer writes:

In fact, the conviction that the world and thus also man is something that really ought not to be, is calculated to fill us with forbearance towards one another; for what can we expect from beings in such a predicament? In fact from this point of view, it might occur to us that the really proper address between one man and another should be, instead of Sir, Monsieur, and so on, Leidensgefährte, socii malorum, compagnon de misères, my fellow sufferer. However strange this may sound, it accords with the facts, puts the other man in the most correct light, and reminds us of that most necessary thing, tolerance, patience, forbearance, and love of one's neighbour, which everyone needs and each of us, therefore, owes to another.

While I completely disagree with the notion that human history is a stage where conflicts inevitably engender more perfect societies, I agree that we should try not to normalize the idea that the right thing to do is to trample on others and let them die in poverty, especially when we are capable of producing such abundance. We live in a world where there are more empty homes than homeless people and enough food produced to ensure that no one goes hungry. So, in other ways, I agree with Diniz's general message that it's good to try to make the world less worse, not because we owe it to the past, but because I recognize my own suffering in the suffering of others. I'm far from a saint, obviously, but I recognize the pain of others as a mirror of my own.

What I don't agree with at all is the implicit — and sometimes not so implicit — idea in the video that we owe it to the past not only to build a better world, but also to leave descendants. Again, Diniz's message, that we should try to make the world less bad, is excellent, and I agree with it. But I disagree with the notion that we owe this to our ancestors, because I disagree with the idea that human history is composed of battles that produce more perfect societies over time, and that we all have an obligation to participate by virtue of having been born. And I completely disagree with the implicit idea that, to honor the past, we must leave descendants who will have better lives in the future.

Of course, if we have to leave descendants, we should try to make the world a little better for them. After all, if I already think it's morally problematic to reproduce, I think it's even more problematic to reproduce believing the world should be even more dysfunctional than it is today. But, that said, I don't think we should reproduce, much less to honor the past, regardless of whether we believe we're honoring our ancestors' struggle for a better, more harmonious world, or whether we're honoring their race, ethnicity, nationality, or any other tribal nonsense.

I'm sorry my grandparents endured the terrible ordeal of poverty. I'm sorry some of them fled political oppression, dictatorship, and even civil war. They may not agree with me, but in my opinion, I think I honor them much more by not making the mistake they did by having children. Weren't they able to see that, just like them, their descendants would also be exposed to all sorts of misfortune in their lives? I don't think so. The will to live is relentless and blinds people. And even if they thought about it, even if they agreed they would be condemning future generations to suffering and death, they couldn't help but assert the will to live within them. And now I'm here. Me and several other descendants, including siblings and cousins ​​of all degrees. Most of them, in fact, are reproducing.

I disagree with the idea that I honor the hardships my ancestors endured by creating new human consciousnesses that will be exposed to the trials of life. It doesn't matter if these trials are exceptional or if they are the kind of trials considered normal by everyone who has children, trials they seem to be happy to expose their descendants to. Even if I had children, I would have to have them fully aware that I would be condemning them to an existence filled with pain and unpleasant surprises, and whose only certainty is death for all. However ignorant they might be in believing to passionately love the punishment I subjected them to, it would remain a fact that I would be condemning them to life. As Schopenhauer writes in the same work cited above:

For to the man who knows, the children may at times appear to be like innocent delinquents who are condemned not to death, it is true, but to life and have not yet grasped the purport of their sentence.

For this reason, just like Brás Cubas in Machado de Assis's novel, I believe that the best thing to say at the end of a life is the following:

I had no children, I haven’t transmitted the legacy of our misery to any creature.

Cioran expresses the same sentiment in his Notebooks 1957–1972, published posthumously after the death of his life partner, Simone Boué. These writings were found in the apartment they shared for decades in Paris after Boué's death, which occurred two years after Cioran's own. In them, Cioran writes about creating new consciousnesses through reproduction:

With what I know, with what I feel, I could not have given life to someone without falling into total contradiction with myself, without being intellectually dishonest and without committing a moral crime.

The idea of ​​refusing reproduction as a way to break the cycle of birth and death, a cycle filled with suffering, is not new, something I address in several of my texts. It is present in ancient philosophy, Greek tragedy, and some ancient religions, more specifically in Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jainism, and also Christianity. On this point, I think it's important to remember that I agree with Schopenhauer when he states that the most important way to classify different religions is according to whether their doctrines are optimistic — that is, they affirm the world, life, and sentient existence — or pessimistic — that is, they reject the world, life, and sentient existence. In The World as Will and as Representation, he writes:

I cannot, as is generally done, put the fundamental difference of all religions in the question whether they are monotheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic, or atheistic, but only in the question whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, in other words, whether they present the existence of this world as justified by itself, and consequently praise and commend it, or consider it as something which can be conceived only as the consequence of our guilt, and thus really ought not to be, in that they recognize that pain and death cannot lie in the eternal, original, and immutable order of things, that which in every respect ought to be.

None of this means that, for Schopenhauer, or for me, there is any need for truth in the metaphysical and doctrinal assertions made by any of these religions. They express philosophical truths through the doctrine of faith, that is, they are embellished with myths and stories that, frankly, are not real in a historical or scientific sense. As Hari Singh Gour writes in The Spirit of Buddhism:

Buddha states his propositions in the pedantic style of his age. He throws them into a form of Sorites; but, as such, it is logically faulty and all he wishes to convey is this: “Oblivious of the suffering to which life is subject, man begets children, and is thus the cause of old age and death. If he would only realize what suffering he would add to by his act, he would desist from the procreation of children; and so stop the operation of old age and death.

This isn't the first time I've brought up the age-old nature of antinatalist philosophy in my writings, nor will it be the last. It's ancient, even though the term “antinatalism” is from this century. It's not even the first time I've cited the quotes I use here. But I think it's one of the first times, if not the first time, that the focus is on the issue of our duty to leave descendants because of the history that precedes us. We have no duty whatsoever to have children, grandchildren, etc. Zero. Yes, most of us will continue to willingly bow to the will of life, seeking to generate consciousness from our own genetic material while ignoring the tens of millions of orphans already alive in the world. My writings and my protests will do little or nothing to change this scenario. No problem. What I'm doing here is simply noting my dissent.

Of course, this can generate discomfort, especially when we observe that certain struggles for liberation are intergenerational, as is the case with the conflict in Palestine, for example. The prevailing idea in situations like these seems to be: “If I don't achieve liberation, my children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren will.” This implies recruiting people who don't yet exist and who didn't ask to be born to take part in a bloody war and become victims of genocide. But, as a friend of mine stated during a conversation a few years ago: although it may seem that the oppressed would be handing victory to their oppressors if they stopped reproducing, the reality is the opposite: victory would be theirs, for they would be giving up a malevolent existence, while their oppressors, stupid and driven by optimistic mythologies that affirm the will to live, would continue to multiply and suffer throughout the generations.

We don't owe the past a future. It sounds like a joke, an internet meme, but it's true. We shouldn't give our ancestors, the overwhelming majority of whom no longer exist, the illusion of continuity through the perpetuation of our genes. There's a huge price that the universe, as it is, exacts from sentience. There's an even higher price to be paid when sentience is extrapolated to the point of acquiring deep consciousness. Consciousness — those things full of dreams, aspirations, doubts, desires, and the whole shebang — elevates the horror of sentience to the nth degree. While animals suffer in the present, the only time they inhabit, humans suffer because of the present, the past, and the future. So, no, we shouldn't perpetuate our condition because we are part of a vast chain of humans who lived, loved, and suffered in the past. There is nothing in human history, much less in natural history, that is redeemable. It is a bloodbath full of anguish punctuated by illusory moments of beauty and joy.

by Fernando Olszewski