blame modern medicine, without which some arbitrarily large percentage of us wouldn't have survived into adulthood to take up space and resources. the more lives we save, the more we overpopulate. the more we overpopulate, the farther we stray from any sort of real community. personally, i think medicine should focus more on quality of life for those who are capable (with treatment) of leading productive lives, rather than artificially extending the lives of those who will spend the rest of their existence in a hospital bed hooked up to tubes and monitors. but then, i might not say that if i were one of the people in the hospital beds...
Meh, I wouldn't be here without massive medical intervention, but I still think it would have been kind of a waste to flush me on those grounds. I'm not exactly unproductive, and anyway, since when did "productivity" become the chief metric for the worth of an individual? I can hear Thomas Carlyle screaming from beyond the grave now (and what he's screaming is "That's not what I meant!")...
Empirical evidence seems to suggest that the better people's standards of living are (to within fairly broad tolerances), the less inclined they are to have overly large families. Make sure everyone's got a roof and a full belly and basic medical attention every now and again, and you've gone a long way towards ameliorating the problem. Get rid of fundamentalist religion, and you've gone most of the way towards solving it.
My very superficial readings would seem to indicate that large families are a rather recent phenomenon. They emerged in the 1800s when mechanised agriculture was producing considerable surplus. Earlier, the mortility kept the family size small despite the number of births.
i suspect you're defining 'productive' much more narrowly than i do. if you're able to communicate and add value to lives other than your own, i consider you productive.
i wouldn't have survived into adulthood without modern medicine. and i wouldn't be able to function in any useful way without modern medicine. part of me thinks that people like me are exactly what's wrong with the world -- allowed to survive to perpetuate bad genes (even though i choose not to). other times... well, that depends on whether i'm having a really bad day or not.
(no subject)
Social Darwinism *still* sucks...
Empirical evidence seems to suggest that the better people's standards of living are (to within fairly broad tolerances), the less inclined they are to have overly large families. Make sure everyone's got a roof and a full belly and basic medical attention every now and again, and you've gone a long way towards ameliorating the problem. Get rid of fundamentalist religion, and you've gone most of the way towards solving it.
Yeah, like that's going to happen, eh?
Re: Social Darwinism *still* sucks...
Re: Social Darwinism *still* sucks...
i wouldn't have survived into adulthood without modern medicine. and i wouldn't be able to function in any useful way without modern medicine. part of me thinks that people like me are exactly what's wrong with the world -- allowed to survive to perpetuate bad genes (even though i choose not to). other times... well, that depends on whether i'm having a really bad day or not.