Member-only story
MORE ‘NOTES FROM THE BUNKER’’…
A fitful serving of personal angst, served up on a steaming plate of ruminative observation concerned with the human tendency to seek immortality through the creation of small biological replicas of one’s self. [Please remember that as a visiting member of an alien life form living in another part of the cosmos, I am merely reporting what I have observed on this planet.]
NOT CELINE’S CHILDREN…
Celine (Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, the French novelist and physician) was very clear on the nature of our human instinct to reproduce (“… we pass on our life to a biped of the next century, with frenzy, at any cost, as if it were the greatest of pleasures to perpetuate ourselves…as if, when all’s said and done, it would make us immortal..”). Despite this savage disparagement, Celine was, however, sanguinely sentimental, although sentimental in a starkly cynical, darkly dismissive vein.
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, there was only one Celine (this depends upon your outlook, for there seem to be plentiful numbers of his progenic clones scattered throughout the world today). Things are certainly different now from the way they were in his time and as the world is drawn ever closer together thanks to the electronic miracle (curse?) of modern communication, those essential differences continue to exert an effect that is monstrously disproportionate to the impact they have on the ethical philosophies that underlie human reproductive tendencies.
Mindful of this, as the world fills up with more and more people, and as inalterable density aspects of contemporary demography continue to exert changes on the quality of our lives, it seems to me that any half intelligent person would have to start questioning the wisdom of bringing still more children into this Skinnerian Box that is the world.
Let me apologise at the onset if this particular set of thoughts comes across as coldly callous or clinically sterile in its tone (perhaps this is the latent Ernst Jünger quality in me), but humanity no longer has much choice in the matter of whether serious discussion along these lines is warranted. In many parts of the world, the population density statistics have already reached a critical mass of sorts. Even a cursory glance at certain parts of China and India (two…
