We Should Live - Ben Bateman

I try not to link to everything that Mark Steyn writes, but this article is exceptional:

Just for a moment, let us take it as read, as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and the other bestselling atheists insist, that what happened in Bethlehem two millennia is a lot of mumbo-jumbo. As I wrote a year ago, consider it not as an event but as a narrative: You want to launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use?

The birth of a child. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn babe, man is ultimately powerless. For, without new life, there can be no civilization, no society, no nothing. Even if it’s superstitious mumbo-jumbo, the decision to root Christ’s divinity in the miracle of His birth expresses a profound — and rational — truth about “eternal life” here on earth.

From there he makes some points on Europe’s upcoming demographic collapse. It’s familiar territory for Steyn fans, though I was interested to note that British news sources expect the various spellings of ‘Mohammed’ taken together to overtake ‘Jack’ and ‘Thomas’ as the most common name given to baby boys in the United Kingdom in 2008.

Then Steyn pushes on to his main point, which is the Christmas focus on the birth of a baby contrasted with a burgeoning Western culture of self-hatred and death. Two of my points should already be familiar to my regular readers: Last May the UK-based Optimum Population Trust urged Britons to have fewer children for the planet’s sake. And just last month the Daily Mail ran a very positive story about young women choosing abortions and sterilization to help save the planet.

Now an Australian obstetrician has upped the ante by proposing that the government levy a tax on people who have more than two children, and financially reward people who choose sterilization. It won’t be long before someone in the fever swamps of environmentalism declares that mere financial incentives are not enough, and the state needs to start mandatory sterilizations and abortions. That may sound like hyperbole, but consider, the above three news stories appearing in mainstream news publications would have been inconceivable ten years ago.

The trends are similar in environmentalist theology. Steyn points to the recent book A World Without Us, in which the author loving contemplates what would happen to the Earth if all humanity were to suddenly disappear. He might also have mentioned the recent movie I Am Legend, starring Will Smith and doing very well at the box office, has a similar theme of massive human extinction that is—of course—our own fault.

But the real cutting edge of environmental theology is Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, by David Benatar of the University of Cape Town. In what seems to be a bid to become the new Peter Singer, Mr. Benatar’s thesis is that creating a child seriously harms the child by its mere existence, and that human existence itself is bad. Lest you think I exaggerate, consider this passage from page six, which you can read for yourself via Amazon:

Nor is the harm produced by the creation of a child usually restricted to the creation of that child. The child soon finds itself motivated to procreate, producing children who, in turn, develop the same desire. Thus any pair of procreators can view themselves as occupying the tip of a generational iceberg of suffering.

Most people are taken aback when I tell them my blog’s name. We should live? Who would be crazy enough to say that we shouldn’t? Lots of people, as it turns out, and not all of them Muslims.

Steyn closes his article:

It’s hard not to conclude a form of mental illness has gripped the world’s elites. If you’re one of that dwindling band of westerners who’ll be celebrating the birth of a child . . . next week, make the most of it. A year or two on, and the eco-professors will propose banning nativity scenes because they set a bad example.

Somebody spent $200 million to make The Golden Compass, a fantasy epic chock-full of computerized special effects. The movie earned just under $26 million in its first weekend, putting it on track to lose some serious money over its entire run. At least one industry watcher has commented that its poor opening, combined with a crowded roster of opening movies, puts it at risk of being pushed out of theaters entirely before the lucrative Christmas holiday.

The Golden Compass is based on a series of viciously anti-Catholic novels for the Harry Potter audience. Christian groups protested the film on that basis before it was released, but then learned that the filmmakers had anticipated their objections and toned down the anti-religious message. But that message was apparently the heart of the story, and ripping it out left a mangled mess.

At least, that’s one theory. This reviewer for the New York Post thought that the movie still had plenty of anti-religious sentiment and nihilistic atheism that no amount of computer animation could turn into a story:

Sorting all this out yields a clanking allegory (Church bad; secular skepticism good) that sucks all the fun away while much more enticing-looking stuff - fanciful zeppelin docks and mysterious pirate ships - hovers frustratingly in the background, like Christmas toys that go unused while toddlers play with the empty box. Worse, it’s like toddlers ignoring the toys because they’re frowning over Nietzsche and sighing about the will to power and the ascetic ideal.

I just can’t get my head around the magnitude of loss that this film will suffer. Maybe it’ll do better in foreign markets, but the loss looks to be at least several tens of millions of dollars.

Whose dollars were those? I don’t understand how movies are financed, but logically they must have been somebody’s dollars. Somebody put all that money in, and now most of it is likely gone forever.

Who made that decision? Who greenlighted this thing? Some living, breathing human being (probably several) recommended investing $200 million (probably of somebody else’s money) into a movie based on a series of viciously anti-Catholic and aggressively atheistic books. And presumably they did so with the idea that throngs of Americans would pay more than $200 million for the pleasure of watching that story on screen.

I struggle to imagine their thought process. Do they imagine that somewhere in America, hordes of fecund nihilistic atheists yearn to take their many children to a movie that reflects their values? Do these people have any grasp of demographics? Do they somehow believe that the theaters are already saturated with so many pro-Christian, family-values movies that Middle America is exhausted from going to the movies all the time, and so the fresh movie dollars are to be found in the burgeoning fecund atheist audience?

It sounds silly, but remember that this is a $200 million decision. You would think that somebody would have pointed out that the successful fantasy epics of late have been either expressly traditional (Narnia, Lord of the Rings), or neutral on the grand moral issues of our time. Before putting $200 million behind nihilistic atheism, you would think that they could spend a few thousand to run some polls or focus groups and get some reactions from the target children and their parents.

But apparently none of that happened. The money was spent, the movie was made, and now the basic facts of American ideology and demographics have crushed it into the dirt. And still Hollywood resists the lesson. Many of the reviewers featured on Rotten Tomatoes insist that it flopped because it was a bad movie, not because people rejected its message. What those reviewers don’t consider is that it’s a bad movie because the original story was so obviously unpalatable to American audiences that the director and writers had to perform massive emergency surgery on an already-dying patient.

Let’s look on the bright side: They can’t lose money forever. Through whatever bizarre history, decisionmakers in Hollywood are in love with far-left ideas and control hundreds of millions of moviemaking dollars. Remember, somebody owns those dollars that they’re pissing away, even if indirectly as shareholders, just as some poor fools own stock in the New York Times. Some day those people will get tired of being played for suckers to finance “message” movies that Americans will obviously hate. (See also the recent spate of anti-American movies about Iraq and the War on Terror.) Some day the dollars will dry up, and then watch how the moviemakers will wail and gnash their teeth at the unfairness of it all.

Via Ace of Spades and Newsbusters.  And if you don’t believe my summary, then watch the video for yourself on Newsbusters.  The pull quote, from MSNBC correspondent David Shuster on Morning Joe:

We all must believe in football, and I suppose if we all go to Pensacola, we’ll have a sidetrip where we’ll go to a revival and then go to Guantanamo Bay and torture some people just for fun.

Then co-host Mika Brzezinski immediately agrees with him.

I’m old enough to remember when most people responded with incredulity to accusations of liberal media bias.  But now the word is apparently out: Morning Joe’s audience is less than quarter of the audience for the Fox News show in the same time slot.

Dennis Prager on JWR offers a group apology from the Baby Boomers to the younger generations:

We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list:

. . .

Our generation came up with two truly foolish slogans that also ended up robbing you of childhood.

One was, “Never trust anyone over 30.” Our infantile attitude toward adult authority has inflicted great harm on you. Because of it, many baby boomers decided not to become adults, and this has had disastrous consequences in your lives. It deprived you of one of the greatest needs in your life — adults. . . .

The other slogan whose awful consequences we baby boomers bequeathed to you was, “Make love, not war.” Our parents had liberated the world from immeasurably cruel and murderous regimes in Germany and Japan — solely thanks to waging war. But instead of concluding that war could do great moral good, we sang ourselves silly with such inane lyrics as “Give peace a chance,” as if that deals in any way with the world’s most monstrous evils. So we taught you to make love and not war. And we succeeded.