March 22 2018
Rationale: I want to make some shred notes because this topic is hot on my mind and I'd like us to be able to pick up where we left off next time. Feel free not to read this 'til then, but (reviewing this after writing it) I find writing allows some thoughts to crystalize from the swirling liquids of emotion.
During our conversation March 21, you - startlingly, almost entertainingly - went all the way to the Godwin's Law card by saying that my view that 7 Billion was "too many people" was morally equivalent to saying "I want to blow away X Billion people 'til we get to a number I find more acceptable".
Your refusal or inability to accept that this is not what I mean pointed to, I guess, a deep difference in dealing with hypothetical and counter-factual. Those people are here, now, for real, God love 'em, and to the extent I wish they were not, it's not that I would wish them away or, God forbid, support any program to kill people who are there now. Nor would I support involuntary birth control. So the only method I can get behind is things that seem inclined to raise prosperity in a more or less universal way, where the laws of economics wil do the heavy lifting for us, and where people with wealth and birth control access will choose to have fewer kids.
So writing this out in the cool light of morning vs the boozy dark of Joshua Tree, I can see and think more clearly about some of your likely objections (in fact I'm surprised we didn't get to that eugenics / involuntary birth control part - it would certainly seem like a less patently absurd accusation than me supporting a proactive holocaust.)
My sponge man description of your view is it's all about tribe, tribe, tribe, and yet I'm struggling with how much of a universalist you are, since on the one hand, you'd say "Yup 11 Billion People would be better, reprsenting a counter-factual history where we didn't have Spanish Influenza, the Holocaust" but on the other hand we ended our conversation with you staking a position that a shared common humanity didn't exist except in a merely biological way (which I presume reflects your it's all tribe tribe tribe, us vs them outlook)
--again my slowly growing understanding about what you're so reticent to put into words, about meaning you derive from continuing a great chain of human life extending into the past and reaching into the future, is-- well... like do you support your chain merely because it's yours, and would urge people of different cultures to support their own chains because it's theirs, or is there somethng potential objectively realizably superior and uniqely unique about the Western culture you find yourself born into?
(A while ago I read a book "Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids" - the one essay I think you would like in it was Lionel Shriver's 'Be Here Now Means Be Gone Later', where the author seems to almost recant her earlier kid-free choices, and says that most Western baby-boomers or whoever are probably too slow to acknowledge how their birthrate depressing choices may put the culture they prefer on the losing side of a clash of civilizations numbers game.)
Two bits of fiction provide an interesting frame, or point to slippery slopes or reducto ad abdurdems, so I'd like you to indulge me: (I don't think either represent logical extensions of your view, but they still throw interesting light on the fundamentals of the issues at hand)
One was a Onion-like article I wish I could reloacate, but the jist was, some entreupeners, having heard of a change in position of the church that fertilized embryos that were destroyed would represent a soul in heaven (and not stuck in limbo) were proposing a business model where religious people could pay them to create and destroy billions of embryos, who would then become eternally happy denizens of heaven. (When asked about the fate of their own eternal souls after performing such a monsterous holocaust, they said they were leaning heavily on the power of deathbed confession)
Again, it's a joke, but it does point out to some of the problems I have with "more is better" in terms of number of people, without resorting just to the termites/biomass model.
The other model was from George R R Martin's book "Tuf Voyaging" - the title character is forced to bring his ship of the ancient lost Earth fleet to "S'uthlam" (anagram for Malthus) which is the only post-collapse civilization with high enough tech to hack up repairs - this planet features a pro-reproduction cult with the idea that they must breed more and more in order to produce a transendental genius or messiah or whatever that will bring the Universe to the next level. Again I see some parallels in people who are kind of hoping that somewhere in our multiple billions we'll develop techno-based solutions to any climate woes.
(Incidentally, one argument I was at my weaker point last night was "would you prefer 2 billion happy people and 9 billion miserable folks, or 4 billion happy folks and 1 billion miserable people." Given human psychology and the hedonic treadmill, it's not likely that happiness is a kind of either/or option that the question implies, so overall, there'd probably be more aggregate happiness in nearly any 11 billiion people than any 5 billion.)
So to conclude, I'll layout my view as clearly as I can, and thank you forcing me to define it a bit more. I think the human project, and what distinguishes us from the termites, is giving the universe a chance to create more interesting stuff, and new categories of stuff - meme spaces that a universe without conscious minds would lack. And I will throw support to programs that foster that and civilizations long term survival , but only to the extent that it is support by locally morally defensibile decisions. (i.e. rejecting your acussation that I'm pro-holocaust, beause even IF that would seem to support for my long term goals for humanity (and not saying it would) the suffering that kind of death would put on people who ACTUALLY exist is unacceptable and evil to wish for! (contrast the PURELY hypothetical bummed-out-ness of the billions who don't get the pleasure of existing in my smaller population counter-factuals where a stronger amount of middle class distributed wealth has led to a current day with fewer people overall)
So counter-factuals of "we'd be in a better place now if X had happened then" are not useful in a "so how do we force some crude facisimile of that better place, i.e. kill billions to get a number we thing is more sustainable", but in a "what policies shall we support in order to get a future that's more like the better now we wish we had". Get it?
And I don't have an easy answer. And I'm aware of your concern that, were my "well lets just make everyone we have access to in the west as prosperous as we can, which would lead to a lower birthrate, a more sustainable number of people and increase humanity's long term prospects of getting off this rock, or at least keep this rock a healthy place" would increase the risk of being out-populated by folks of different philosophies - many of which would have cultural impact I would strongly dislike in terms of human rights and creative freedoms, and your feeling is that this kind of clash of civilizations view is the only salient point, and so you'll always begrudge lazy civilization mooches like me who enjoy the fruits without digging in much into the hard labor of immediate family raising.
Thanks for reading.
PS the other topic we touched was me observing your joy in disliking things - for example, the design of Apple airPods (a trememdously successful product, FWIW, even though their design is not my favorite either). I find that same kind of arrogrant schaudenfraude when you point out how I can't name as many philosophers who "have had your ideas, but better". I feel that most of my opinions, if not universally agreed upon, are at least objectively realizable from first principles. I'm reasonably well read, albeit with a type of functional memory that if Russeau or whoever didn't leave a big impact on my in one of the "surveys of philosophy" (like the book "Sophie's World" or one of those populist "cartoon guides to philosophy") and didn't happen to be the focal point, by name, of an essay that struck home with me, then I'm not likely to grasp the name or main points of his outlook. I know an essentialist, latin-lover like you is inclined to feel you have insider track knoweldge by command of your classical education (even when I accept your terms of elitest prescriptivism vs my egalitarian descriptivism, and then call you out, fairly, on some latin you screw the pooch on) but I think this kind kind of private-school elitism is unattractive.
PPS Decided then to edumacate myself on Rousseau; I don't share Rousseau's interest in the "natural state" of humans; we're all humans stuck in various societies, and that's the most useful way of analyzing things. (https://www.iep.utm.edu/rousseau/ informs me my view might be more like the classical, pre-enlightmnent view, "which claims that the state of civil society is the natural human state") I certainly don't share Rousseau's distrust of science and the arts as getting in the way of morals and society as a corruptive process. I guess I could get behind some of his "general will" in terms of politics. Overall I'd be interested in hearing how you think "So You're Going to Die" reflects his thinking.