Your Children Are Not Your Ideology

It's crucial that we treat human beings as individuals and not pawns in our own project

You would have seen that bizarre “pronatalist” couple making social media rounds by now. If you haven’t—Malcolm and Simone Collins were profiled in a Guardian article about the so-called pronatalist movement, whose adherents are on a mission to have as many children as possible to save western civilization from extinction through falling birth rates.

I’m fascinated by these people. It’s not enough that they are just people who share a certain principle but otherwise could look or sound like anybody. These guys aren’t reaching their ideology through a theistic path, they’re fundamentalists of the secular religion of pure capitalism, not as an economic system but as idolatry. Their aesthetic is this mix of pre-Medieval classicism and brutalist dieselpunk, like an alternate history where the Industrial Revolution had occurred in Rome.

They give their kids names like Aqueduct Railroad Industry and Aristotle Hellenius Sol Mechanika. Any sharp iron-edged collection of syllables of Fountainhead themed botched Latin and scattered like buckshot with out of place punctuation and the letter Æ. They dress like this:

If it’s confrontational to call it a “racist” movement it can’t be denied that it’s at least a racialist movement. The Collins’ themselves don’t espouse any horrid blatant Klan rally talking points. On racial matters they come across more like the white liberals from Get Out. To take them at their word, they oppose unchecked immigration of non-white people not because they hate people of colour, but because putting the burden on immigrants to bail out an aging, declining population of white people who accidentally birth-controlled themselves into extinction is, in Malcolm’s words, “really horrible optics.”

There aren’t as many of these people walking around as there are, for example, Mormons, but they are working themselves into positions of influence, particularly in sectors like the tech industry. Its most famous and powerful member is, of course, Elon Musk (will I never stop talking about him?) who doesn’t dress like a Batman villain but does share this incomprehensible fondness for hideous art deco and industry brutalism, encapsulated perfectly in the dieselpunk atrocity that is the Cybertruck.

I still can’t get over this being a real thing

These aren’t the only people who subscribe to an ideology that considers having children to be ethically mandatory. Many of them really are in it for explicitly racist reasons. It’s why their irreligious movement collaborates so well with the Christian Nationalists and why Elon Musk’s atheism is so well paired with the most extremist theocratic wing of the Republican Party—for whatever reason it’s deemed necessary, the paramount responsibility of white people is to have as many children as they’re biologically capable of having. All other differences of opinion are secondary, subordinate, and can be worked out later amongst each other once the primary goal of saving the white race has been achieved.

Now, I’m precisely as white as the ace of spades isn’t, and I’ll never have any children. Not through biological incapacity (as far as I know—it would be hilarious to find out at this point I’ve been loaded with blanks my whole life) but for the most heretical of reasons: I choose not to. Whatever the reproductive impulse feels like, I don’t feel it. I’m lucky enough to have found a wife who doesn’t feel it either.

But I don’t have anything whatsoever against kids or people who have kids or people who want kids. I have friends and family with kids, who are deliriously happy about their big, kid-filled families. I don’t know how to talk to kids but then again I don’t really know how to talk to anyone. Kids are fine though, some kids are great, go kids. The point is my reproductive choices are not in any way ideological. And I think they absolutely should not ever be.

Part of my firm stance on this topic comes, I think, from my lack of belief in any kind of afterlife. I could be wrong about it but I think that’s a long shot. Baked into that is a suspicion, that I must treat as an assumption, that we all get just one ride. A single chance to experience, if you’re very lucky, a random sample of about 90 years of the entire span of the human species. I had friends who got 40 or fewer. I lost a friend this week who got 67.

It is a tragedy when those years are wasted. Your years are the most important thing that you own and maybe even the only thing that you can really, truly consider yours in the absolute most visceral sense. And when I say a tragedy, I mean a tragedy, when any individual’s life is taken from them or used by somebody else for their own purposes. People aren’t fungible and lives aren’t currency, every moment wasted is one lost from the universe forever and it cannot ever be retrieved and it cannot be swapped for another of equal or lesser value.

I can’t say I hold firm to the teachings of any one moral philosopher and, if you ask my advice, most of the time I’ll say don’t be a Kant, and only those who know something about German pronunciation will see the double entendre. However, there’s at least one thing that Immanuel put forward that I absolutely one hundred percent agree with, and that is it’s mandatory to treat individual human beings as ends-in-themselves and never means-to-an-end.

For the most part, though—don’t be a Kant

Strict, uncomplicated utilitarianism (that is, considering only the greatest good for the greatest number, even if you harm people to achieve that) might sound like the most logical way to go about ethics on a grand scale, but I can’t bring myself to be a utilitarian now that I’ve red-pilled myself about the non-interchangeability of human lives. Human happiness just is not a big bucket full of the same stuff that you fill up and it all looks the same so it’s inconsequential on the grand scheme of things to ladle some of it out.

What’s this got to do with the weird bespectacled turbo-breeders? Simple: Your kids are not your god damn ideology.

There are few things I find so offensive as parents who conceive and raise children as some sort of their own project. And to be clear, I don’t mean parents who raise their kids as protégés and I’m not talking about instilling them with your own values or family traditions or any of that, as long as you’re not a piece of shit trying to raise another of the same, and as long as you let education into their lives, have at it.

It's the people who create children to treat like accessories or statements or virtue signals or drones or really anything other than full separate human beings in and of themselves.

I don’t care how many children you have as long as you ensure each of those human beings you’ve created is going to have every single opportunity you’re able to provide them, because you’ve undertaken the greatest individual responsibility that you will ever undertake, and its importance can only be matched by the next time you do it. You’ve started the timer on the only sliver of years (hopefully 90 but possibly much fewer) that particular consciousness will ever experience of the greater human story. Your job, your immense responsibility especially in their first years, is to try as hard as you can not to fuck them up and fuck up the rest of the time they get to have.

Oh look, here’s a newsworthy family

People do produce children casually, even accidentally, and unless it’s totally reckless and irresponsible, there’s nothing really wrong with that either. We’re all stories in this grand, amazing omnibus of diverse human experience.

But if you’re spamming children into the world simply because your whole ideology is a line on a population growth chart then you’re sure as hell not doing the diligence for every one of those children that the responsibility demands of you, even if we’re going by sheer physical possibility. If your decision to create a human being is to prove a point or win a contest or to further some cause, whether it’s some kind of techno-optimism nonsense or simply to further the White Race, whatever that means, then to me that really just sounds like a form of indentured servitude.

I can’t talk too much smack about the Collins’ parenting unless by “smack” you mean the one that became the general media’s main focus after the Guardian article came out. The way that Malcolm, in a flippant and instinctual manner that betrayed it wasn’t a rarity, struck one of his botched-Latin kids in the face during the interview was the single overshadowing gaffe of the piece that might otherwise not have been widely read. It’s a red flag that invokes visions of kids being churned out industrially on an assembly line and subject to rote, un-nuanced, factory floor discipline.

One thing that really gets my goat and is another huge red flag for this sort of thing is bizarre or themed names. Don’t get me wrong on this—you absolutely do not need to name every single child John, David, Timothy, Matthew, or Sarah. Personally I love Gaelic names like Aoife or Tadhg although you know those kids are doomed to a life of having to explain their pronunciation. But come on, when someone names their kid Zeus Triumvirate Constitution Liberty, or throws in an unpronounceable symbol or a fucking digit, it’s just kind of cruel.

I’m a huge fan of David Bowie, but there’s a reason his son Zowie Bowie now goes by Duncan Jones. There is no good reason to burden your kid with having to sigh before introducing themselves and prepare for further questions. There’s no reason to demand their teachers try to imitate the sound of a 1996 dial up modem during class roll call.

Elon Musk has at least 11 children—that we know about. The world at large isn’t really aware of them until they just kind of keep tumbling out from behind the bookshelves or under the couch cushions like loose forgotten change. On the one hand, it’s probably a good thing that most of them are able to spend their lives outside of public scrutiny, but it’s also a red flag that, as his number of children increases, the newer ones just have serial numbers for names and literally the only one he’s ever seen spending time with is the one he named after his company.

I know that I am never going to set foot on Mars. I do wish that for future human beings. Maybe someone alive today will either do that or see it happen. But I will never know—the Earth could cease to exist, get hit by a comet or swallowed by a black hole a week after I die, and it will be all the same to me. Even if humanity lasts well into the future, the sun will one day explode and erase every human life. If we manage to spread to other star systems, the heat death of the universe will ultimately do us in even if we become like gods. Time enslaves us all. That’s fuckin’ bleak, I know, but only if you look at it from a certain perspective.

The future of our existence after we die stretches ahead in our awareness as far as the history before we were born stretches in our memory.

We can’t force people to live and die for a hypothetical future purpose they will never see realised. Before I’m accused of short-termism; Of course we need to be responsible, protect the planet, fight climate change, try as hard as we can to not leave a Wall-E planet for our descendants, but don’t burden them with the project of helping make life more interesting for people a thousand years after they’re dead. They have so much of the world to experience themselves, on their own terms, right now, and they only have so many years of it. 90, if they’re really lucky.