07.+What+is+Intelligence+(February+2006) - Get a Free Blog

What is Intelligence? 22
why have children? Why inflict this misery upon them for no purpose?
Why cause them to exist knowing they must age, suffer and die?
And that view is of course, utterly rational, given their “beliefs” – i.e.
there is no god or “spiritual dimension” or “afterlife.” There is merely the
here and now, and a lot of this here and now is pretty scary stuff right
now, and has been throughout most of history also.
Even in the relatively peaceful and privileged Western Nations, we might
catch AIDS or the recently developing “bird flu” and be dead in months
or hours respectively, or maybe have our limbs blown off by a terrorist
bomb.
As Marlon Brando says at the end of Apocalypse Now before he is
slaughtered by his military sponsored “terminator”, Martin Sheen:
The horror…the horror…
So note – the scientist and rationalist have actually got themselves a
scientific “belief system”, or at the very least we could call it “a nonbelief
system” which is liable to cause them not to carry out, or at the
very least to seriously curtail, their evolutionary mission of reproducing.
In a late 1960s and early 1970s in at least one issue of esteemed British
science journal New Scientist, an article pointed out this adherence
amongst the modern educated intellectual adults to the philosophy of “2.2
children and a Ford Concertina” (a Ford Cortina car), and urged the
scientific elite to breed more, so that they wouldn’t be swamped further
by the plebeian classes, who quite happily rattled out huge families,
whether they believe in a god or not.
But history shows it didn’t happen.
“Civilised intellectuals” just don’t want ten or twenty kids in their tidy,
ordered, rational lives, and some of them are so “tidy and ordered” there’s
no place whatsoever in their lives for smelly, screaming and demanding
babies at all.
It is an interesting and currently statistically unanswered question as to
how many modern men, who of course all want sex, would want children
also, were it not the more or less inevitable price in most cases for getting
their wife or girlfriend’s cooperation in the conjugal bed.