Let billions die, but just not us

In a sunny tea garden in a small Overberg village, four people sat together enjoying each other’s company, the breakfasts in front of them and the prospect of global holocaust.

It hadn’t all been global holocaust, to be fair.

The little group of retirees had also discussed a minor outrage caused by a new arrival in the village who hadn’t yet learnt “his place”.

But when one of them said, “So how’s this virus?”, the effect of the question was so startling that I must admit to you that I wrote down verbatim what followed — because I wasn’t the only one jolted out of my snoozy Sunday morning reverie.

Where the four friends had seemed paradoxically bored and faintly stressed, now they were sitting up, opening their eyes, almost rubbing their palms together, as if someone had just walked up with a tray of festive coronavirus-shaped tartlets.

Finally, it seemed, they had found a topic into which they could throw themselves wholeheartedly.

“About time,” replied one. “Long overdue,” a second agreed enthusiastically.

“Wipe out a few billions,” the third said. “I say go for it.”

“Great for the planet,” the first said.

“Wipe out a few billions,” reiterated the third.

“The sooner the better,” another said.

“Get the population down to more ... to less ... get it down.”

The speaker had been distracted by a group of children from the local township, strolling past beyond the fence.

“Don’t worry, I’m just watching them,” she muttered.

“Some of them have got a real attitude.”

I suppose the irony would have been lost on them, these people who had spent a minute relishing the idea of billions of deaths while believing it was passing children who had the attitude problem.

But to this eavesdropper, it was a reminder of how often what calls itself “polite society” is neither polite nor much of a society.

Last week, this column touched on what happens to us when our fear of a pandemic overwhelms our ability to stay connected to each other.

Since then, however,

I’ve seen that fear almost overshadowed by something that has been floating nastily in the ether for some time: the casual, comfortable monstrousness of believing that the mass death of others is a good thing.

You’ve probably seen or heard a variation of this yourself from that procession of penitents and flagellants that endlessly shuffles past the town walls, denouncing humanity as “the worst” or “a plague on the earth”, and beseeching climate change or some new pandemic to rain down righteous vengeance and end us.

Fashionable despair, after all, is a growth industry that earns very decent livings for many professional doomsayers, whether in academia, the media or on YouTube.

Often, these laments are couched in scientific terms. Appeals are made to ecology or demographics or economics.

But in the most extreme cases, the belief that we are terrible and need to be wiped out is not based in science but in the millenarian gospel — or perhaps something even older and more brutal.

Its nihilistic logic is clear: the world is a terrible place because we are terrible; and for the world to be less terrible, we all have to die.

At this point, however, things get a bit iffish, because it’s never clear who exactly has to die first.

The dogma is very certain that people need to go extinct, but without violating anyone’s human right to be, you know, alive.

So we are left with a vague fantasy in which billions are dying naturally, without being actively killed by anyone, leaving other billions alive in a slightly less crowded, slightly more sustainable world.

In other words, the nasty fantasy of those four people having breakfast.

It’s nasty for two reasons. First, it is based on the pernicious and entirely false belief that what’s killing this planet is overpopulation by the poor rather than overconsumption by the rich.

But second, it presents itself as a rational, even scientific, position, when in fact it is presenting the murderous logic of stone-age human sacrifice, whereby angry gods can be appeased, or a wounded planet healed, if enough strangers from far away die first.

This week, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked for his take on Covid-19.

Being a scientist, he deferred to medical expertise and replied, simply, that he saw it as an experiment to test a simple question: will humanity listen to what science tells it?

Will we obey the basic guidelines set out by people who know more than we do? It’s a sensible question. But before we’ll be able to answer in the affirmative, we’ll first have to abandon the old gods and their bloody altars.

And that will take more than science.

It might just take a miracle. ● Eaton is an Arena group columnist.

So we are left with a vague fantasy in which billions are dying naturally, without being actively killed by anyone