A response to the anti-natalists

If the point of life is to be happy, then I can understand why you'd wish you were never born. But is that really the point of life?

“Let’s make the death thing happen sooner rather than later in life” — so said Guy Edward Bartkus in an audio clip he posted online before blowing up his car outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, last weekend.

The explosion that killed Bartkus, and injured four others, also made the public aware of a much larger movement of “anti-natalists” — people who are anti-birth, and even anti-life. Let’s be clear: It’s not that they hate people. What they hate is suffering and, when they look into the world, they see that suffering far outweighs happiness. Open any newspaper, any day of the week, and the proof is right before you — poverty, corruption, misery, and warfare are found on almost every page.

And the anti-natalists are not wrong; they’re just short-sighted. Yes, suffering outweighs happiness — there is more pain than pleasure in the world. But it doesn’t really matter, because pleasure isn’t what we should be striving for; it’s a false idol. I’m not saying that pleasure should be denied, it’s an important part of life, but it shouldn’t be our goal in life.

In reality, the “pursuit of happiness” makes our lives shallow and meaningless — my personal gratification simply has no meaning for the world; it’s only for me.

Not only that, seeking pleasure also makes us unfree: If we only take action because we think it will give us pleasure (if we only work for money, but wouldn’t work if we were rich), then the desire for pleasure is driving us, it’s forcing us to take that action.

Coming back to the anti-natalists. Yes, so far your arguments look good. First, there’s more pain than pleasure in the world, and second, the scant pleasure that does exist is pretty much meaningless and coercive.

But what if the point of life isn’t pleasure or pain, but love? I mean actual love. Not falling in love, but true interest and devotion to the world.

When we start living with this idea, with this reality, then we find the possibility of freedom can again light up in us: to act, not because we want the fruits of the action, but simply because we love the action itself.

This idea is captured beautifully in the Bhagavad Gita, 2.47, where it says, “Action alone is the province, never the fruits thereof.”¹ In commenting on this passage Mohandas Gandhi says,

We should do no work with attachment. Attachment to good work, is that too wrong? Yes, it is. If we are attached to our goal of winning liberty, we shall not hesitate to adopt bad means… Hence, we should not be attached even to a good cause. Only then will our means remain pure and our actions too.²

This sentiment is also found throughout the work of the 19th century artist, scientist, statesman, and philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who said, “The main thing for the active person is that he do what is right; he should not worry about whether the right occurs.”³

And this view finds it’s most profound expression in the work of the 20th century spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner, who wrote:

The view that nothing in the world can fully satisfy us, that pain always outweighs pleasure—that is precisely what I would designate as the good fortune of mankind. [Such ideas are] for me only proof that it is futile to strive for happiness. We must, in fact, entirely give up any such striving and seek our destiny purely in selflessly fulfilling those ideal tasks that our reason prescribes for us. What else does this mean than that we should seek our happiness only in doing, in unflagging activity?

Only the active person, indeed only the selflessly active person who seeks no recompense for his activity, fulfills his destiny. It is foolish to want to be recompensed for one’s activity; there is no true recompense.⁴

Of course, this is no easy path, and many will doubt it’s even possible to walk. At this point the pursuit of happiness has become second nature (and, as the anti-natalists point out, pleasure is always accompanied by pain, and often in greater measure). The point, though, is not to avoid pleasure and pain, but to put them in their right place. They are useful messengers from the outer world, helping us to find our right relationship to it.

But if we wish to become free, then we have to learn to take a deeper interest in the world itself — to fall in love with it, so we can give it our whole heart and serve it selflessly. And to do so, we must learn to really listen to things, to search for the meaning that’s at the heart of them.

This was the path that Goethe forged with his scientific work — a form of “phenomenology” where the scientist gives their full attention to what the phenomenon itself is expressing — and this is the path that Steiner took still farther in his own work.

It is this path of interest — of devotion and love — that can show us the deeper meaning of the world, that can make our life, work, and place in the world meaningful. And it is the lack of such meaning that drives the anti-natalists to wish they were never born. I think many of us can understand this wish, have felt it ourselves at some point. Hopefully their cry of despair will help wake us up to a different path, to a life worth living.

1. Gandhi, Mohandas K. The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi. Berkeley Hills Books, Berkeley, CA (2000). pp. 48-49

2. Ibid.

3. From Goethe’s Aphorisms in Prose

4. Steiner, Rudolf. Goethean Science. Mercury Press. Spring Valley, NY (1988). pp 92-93