The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Selfish Gene Pool

My mother had six live births. The eggs didn’t get any better as they went on. Neither did the quality of family life. I don’t know if she actually wanted all those children or was forced into her situation by religion and a high libido husband. In either case it wore her out and I think she came to regret imposing all these fairly strange people on the world.

It seems to be unacceptable in much polite company to point out that the urge to procreate is as necessary to constrain as any other. I think this is Lessing’s point. The desire for children, for a family life filled with one’s offspring and the emotional satisfaction of their presence is as subject to excess, perversion, and rationalisation as any other.

Let’s face it: there are no good reasons to produce children. They are expensive, emotionally and physically exhausting, destructive of the relationships which produced them, a continuing drain on the world’s (including the grandparents’) limited resources, and they, of course, are likely to contribute to an indefinite extension of this situation into an infinite future.

And all that is the best case scenario. Nature and nurture combine forces not infrequently to produce people who actually don’t contribute an iota to the world’s happiness quotient. The odds are that the more children one has the more likely there will be a genetic, psychological, or behavioural defect in the bunch. There are orders of magnitude more homicidal criminals than potential Nobel laureates in the world. As I said: the eggs don’t get any better. Neither does their care.

Neither happiness, nor any other sort of ‘fulfilment’ is an inalienable right of any human being. The pursuit of happiness may be sanctioned by law and democratic tradition, but this is merely license to invent fantasies which are almost always Ill-conceived and require the sacrifice of others in order to be achieved. They are the stuff of neuroses, economic externalities, and inevitable disappointments. Pursuing happiness - particularly by creating a large family - is a mug’s game. The only winners are psychiatrists, self-help gurus, and divorce lawyers. And, although smug, none of them are likely to be happy either.

I’m betting that if transhumanism ever really becomes a thing, the machines will be savvy enough to eliminate reproduction entirely.

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