Critical population

Are we the right survivors? It is almost the end of the year. Feasts of all kinds have been back. Christmas is sure to be with us when that day comes. When was it that even the most important rituals and processions were canceled and, in their place, some kind of prayers were imposed? The cynics were right to declare that plagues, though always seen as a curse from heaven, could stop traditions even if these practices were originally meant to appease the gods or some such beings.

Now that we are seemingly out of the woods, and we have counted those who were not lucky enough to live through the two or three years of the pandemic, we look around us. The wonderment is there as we ask if this is the population that will see through the world in the next century or even less than that.

In the late ’60s and ’70s, when government and resource experts were into population control, diseases and wars were viewed with such morbid expectations. Are there natural causes that could bring down population with optimal results? But when everyone was dying in 2020 and well into 2021, was there a voice to thank the virus for providing a “solution?”

In the book Islands of Abandonment (a book that is intriguing me no less for its prose as well as its predictions), its author, Cal Flyn, cites a “grassroots campaign group” called Extinction Rebellion. The group, according to Flyn, saw itself distancing from one of its regional chapters that put out a view “celebrating the deaths of coronavirus victims.” On social media, their flyers read, “Corona is the cure” and “Humans are the disease.”

Contrary to said positions, what really happened during the pandemic was the rebirth of care

for others, a deep concern for the neighbors. If we go back to those years, human beings in all parts of the globe wore humanity on their sleeves. We were sterling people. “Be kind to one another.” “We only have each other.” These and more statements bannered what we felt amidst deaths coming easy to families; and with no solutions readily in sight.

This view, however, of the bleak future for the human group, has always been there, long before the coronavirus pandemic.

Flyn mentions under the chapter on The Deluge and the Desert an academic, Professor Jem Bendell of the University of Cumbria, and his “darkly prophetic writings’’ about “climate-induced societal collapse.”

Bendell, following Flyn, speaks of a near future where we will witness “mass starvation, disease, flooding, storm destruction, forced migration and war.” These are all in our country at present, except, perhaps, widespread hunger.

The question is not whether this collapse of civilization as we know it will happen. The question, as Flyn quotes Bendell, is “Where and when will the collapse or catastrophe begin?” For Flyn, she says, “I too cannot help but imagine a rapture sweeping the globe; starting perhaps from the low-lying land and washing inward; settlements collapsing in its wake, survivors clinging to the ruins, to the shallow facsimiles of contemporary culture.”

Referring to the recent pandemic, Cal Flyn in her book, Island of Abandonment, states how “the appeal of disanthropic thinking…lies in the notion that a crash in the number of humans might present an opportunity akin to pressing a reset button.”

Can we start again? Or restart again as humanity?

There is a film showing now in cinemas (my review of the said film appears on the same date as this column, under Life). It is called Plan 75. The title refers to the age, 75, that will allow any old Japanese man or woman to enroll in this project. There are orientations and flyers from the government to induce the population to join the program, which is really a government-sponsored way to die. A $1,000 allowance is offered to those willing to “die properly” and, though this is not expressed directly, to sacrifice once more so that the nation lives on.

Cinematic may be the presentation of the problem of old age but the piece speaks about how societies deal with this aspect of our population. Who needs old people? In Japan, there has been a pressing concern that the young workers in corporations as well as in government organizations are supporting the aged in caregiving facilities, or health benefits. Absent already in this discourse is the fact that the old men and women at present composed the generations that selflessly supported the growth of Japan in its industrialization.

Philippine society has not reached this extreme point in delineating survival by directly addressing generations. Our program has been clear about birth control but never about old people control.

Bendell, from the same book, Island of Abandonment, has a term called “deep adaptation,” which is the need to accept the collapse of human civilization. From our end, especially through discourse influenced by the Christian, i.e., Catholic, religion, there is no need to call for this acceptance. We do not have what Flyn terms the “terror of the eschaton,” or the anxiety about the literal “dawning of a new day,” of that moment before the end of the world. We look forward to that because the Bible has taught us about that day as salvation.

Or, maybe I am wrong. Postscript. In the debate about population control, economists come up with models about survival and carrying capacity of the world. In the ’70s, caught up in this discourse, I came across a document succinctly posing this question: when you decide what to control, have you ever thought that maybe you are the one not needed to live in this world?