WHAT FUTURE FOR GEN Z, ALPH, BETHA…?
Nico van Oudenhoven

In two related YouTube video clips, Camden, a four-year-old boy with the tiniest stumps for arms and legs, is making his first steps and, even more mind-blowing, is negotiating a flight of stairs that lead to the top of a slide.
In both cases, he succeeds. He radiates pure confidence and optimism.[i] He appears not to be worried about his future as; indeed, he should not at such a young age. One would not like to disabuse him, no other child for that matter.
Before long, though, Camden will find out, as many others of his generation will do, that there is a great deal to worry about. Not only for him, but for all of them, also for those who are so fortunate to have been born better prepared for life.

Children worry a lot these days, disturbing news reaches them directly and hits them hard from all sides. Their plight is made worse by the fact that the traditional mediators in their lives such as parents, teachers and belief systems have lost their long-held, powerful, buffering, and meaning-giving roles.[ii]
Indigenous boys and girls, in particular, are wide open to stress and anxiety as their customary ways of relating to each other, organising and directing their lives are ever more under attack and are being massively eroded while meaningful and healthy alternatives are less available or are not recognised as such. The situation in Canada speaks to this sad reality. The high rates of domestic violence and teenage suicide among First Nation youth are depressing symptoms. Despite all publicity and a plethora of policies and interventions, a “life of hope and promise” continues to escape them.[iii]
Boys and girls also agonise at ever-younger ages. Greta Thurnberg, the Swedish climate activist, started her Skolstrejk för klimatet protests at the age of fifteen[iv]; “water warrior” Autumn Peltier, the Anishinaabe girl from Wikwemikong First Nation, Canada, addressed the United Nations at the age of thirteen.[v] There are numerous others, everywhere, many younger than Autumn and Greta, who are similarly concerned about the future. They have gathered the wisdom, courage, and the means to act. At the other end of the spectrum-in Canada stands a “kid, 5, who brought heroin to…school, now caught with crack” After the kindergarten boy was caught with heroin in his lunch box , his teacher found crack cocaine inside his folder one month later.[vi]
Climate change and more
The worsening of the world’s climate and its long-term, irreversible, and devastating impact on lives on the planet is widely accepted as a fact by all except a few “deniers”, some of whom in influential positions. Information on its causes and outcomes is growing exponentially both in volume and quality and so are the people and entities standing up against it. It also has become the overriding concern of young people.
While it looks sometimes as if global warming and poisoning are the only perils that confront humankind, there are, many other frightening threats. At the time of this writing, one alarming news item went virtually unnoticed as the barrage of reports and bulletins on the rapidly spreading Covid-19 virus eclipsed it. The bye-now forgotten piece was about the ‘Doomsday Clock’ that had moved 30 seconds closer to the total annihilation of the Earth. It is the nearest it has been since the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists introduced the symbolic clock in 1947. There are now only 100 seconds remaining.[vii]

The current outbreak of the Covid-19 virus would not have come as a surprise to science and nature writer David Quammen. In his Spillover, he painstakingly documents the circumstances that make animal-based viruses “spill over” to humans and create havoc [zoonosis]. HIV AIDS, SARS, swine flu, dengue, yellow fever, rabies, Ebola and now also the new corona virus, they all have been caused by an ‘interspecies’ leap. He warns for the next “Big One” and the “next one” which may even turn out to be more unstoppable and devastating than those that have gone before, as ecological stress and damage bring animal pathogens increasingly in contact with humans. At the same time, technology and human behaviour are scattering these zoonotic germs more widely and quickly than ever before. Quammen’s advice is simple: “Don’t board a plane when feeling ill, don’t pen a pig beneath a mango tree, don’t coop your ducks with your chickens, don’t share the needle, don’t eat the chimpanzee”.[i] To this should be added: Halt wildlife trafficking and stop the destruction of tropical forests.[ii] This advice should have been heeded earlier, as the warning signs were for everybody to see a long time ago.[iii]
Over a decade ago, political scientist Bruce Tonn made a short list of “risks of human extinction”; he hoists the red flag on the possibility of these singular threats: nuclear war, climate change, volcanic eruptions, terrorism, energy shortages, pollution, soil erosion, species extinction, flu pandemics, asteroid impacts, species extinction, forest fires out-of-control, nanotechnologies, super computer intelligence, the possible tearing up of the fabric of space-time with new high-energy devices such as being employed at Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA, and CERN, Switzerland. He does not mention the dangers of genetic engineering and CRISPR [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats], he probably would have done so now.
Tonn is, needless to say, not alone. Many people, with similar messages, have been there before and will come after him. One of the more outstanding scientists among them is cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who became increasingly pessimistic towards the end of his life. In his posthumously published Brief Answers to Big Questions he catalogues a range of looming perils among which are a collision with asteroids, climate change and political instability – he also mentions US president Donald Trump. Hawking’s verdict: “The Earth is under threat from so many areas that it is difficult for me to be positive. The threats are too big and too numerous”. He would have been even more worried now that the arms race is accelerating more rapidly than during his days. Currently supersonic ballistic missiles are under construction which cannot be detected before impact[iv] as well as autonomous weapon systems that will be controlled by algorithms rather than humans – a sensor glitch could trigger a new world war.[v]
On Saturday morning, 13 January 2018 at 8:07, a state employee in Hawaii accidentally triggered the Emergency Alert System sending the islands’ residents this message on their cell phones and television screens: “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill”. It took some common sense and 38 minutes, counter to standard procedures, to wait with the prescribed response. Similar near-nuclear war accidents have happened before.[vi]
Hawking believed that humanity does not have a future if they do not go into space. Rather Euro-centrically, he compares space travel with Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, almost as if there were no other people at the time.[vii] Referring to European colonialism, political scientist, Jarius Grove, described iti as being at the root of “the advancing collapse” of the world as it is known, this in combination with current Western geopolitics.[viii] Philosopher/political activist Noam Chomsky supports Grove’s view in his Optimism over Despair, even though he paints USA as the main culprit of the current global malaise.[ix]

Science writer Bryan Walsh, in his ominously titled End Times, is yet another major thinker who seeks to understand -as well as make a wider public recognise- the menaces that emerge both from nature’s and from humans’ making. His list includes asteroids, super volcanoes, nuclear war, climate change, disease pandemics, weaponised “super viruses”, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and extra-terrestrial intelligence. In distressing detail he calculates the probability of these potentially world-ending catastrophes. He describes the impact they may have on our lives were they to happen, as well as, what the best strategies are for saving humankind. The book reads like a field guide to mass homicide, or the self-induced extinction of our own species. Walsh’s views are not unique and have been voiced earlier by a wide and knowledgeable body of specialists.[x] Even when taking into account natural extinction events such as asteroids and super volcanoes, Walsh stresses that humanity’s responses to these existential risks will determine our future on this planet. In fact, Walsh is conscious about the need to payi it forward as he argues that “the most salient fact about existential risk [is that] it’s not about us [but rather] about our sons, daughters…all those unnamed billions, even trillions, who might come after them—but won’t, if our human story ends now.”[xi]
Another dark vision of the future is given by biologists Francisco Sánchez-Bayoa and Kris Wyckhuys. They document that the biodiversity of insects is threatened worldwide. Their work reveals dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world’s insect species over the next few decades. The main drivers of these species’ declines are habitat loss and conversion to intensive agriculture and urbanisation, synthetic pesticides, fertilisers and climate change.[xii]
Doomsday prophets are also in abundance today; the threats listed here do not have their roots in a magical universe in neither apocryphal nor revelatory texts – they are based on firm and verifiable data.[xiii]
Physicist/cosmologist Michio Kaku is far more exuberant and provocative than Hawking, Tonn and Walsh in his views about the future. In The Future of Humanity he postulates that inter-stellar travelling will become feasible in the next century, that technologies will allow for ‘terraforming’ of Mars for the mining of asteroids for rare earths, for genetically transforming people, even for sending frozen embryos, their DNA codes, or digital copies of their minds by laser beaming to outer space. He reckons that to survive long periods in deep space travelling will become a means of transport faster than the speed of light. Artificial intelligence and self-replicating robots will build and sustain outer-space settlements, and humans, or what remains of them, will become the gods people once venerated, as they, “trillions of years from now…outgrown the confines of matter…visit the far reaches of the galaxy as pure consciousness”.
The dangers that the world now faces are the result of “our humankind’s own stupidity”. He also believes that already after a generation or two robots will surpass human intelligence and reach the point of ‘singularity’. Robots may then “know” that they are robots. A period of “transhumanism” will start. Kaku quotes Stephen Hawking on the last and concluding page of Future: “ …If we can avoid disaster for the two next centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread out into space. Once we establish independent colonies, our entire future should be safe”.[xiv]
His colleague cosmologist Martin Rees seems to share at least part of Kaku’s vision of the future. He, too, speaks about humans morphing into another species, or “post humans” by “secular intelligent design” and “non-biological brain intelligence spread through space via self-reproducing machines”.[xv] Now, Kaku and Rees are not sci-fi writers, but highly regarded scientists. Unlike Hawking and Kaku, Rees feels that escaping from Earth is not an option. He believes that the problems facing humanity should be solved here.

Post-humanism?
There are strong parallels between futuristic views of these physicists and those of philosopher Yuval Harari. In his Homo Deus Harari predicts that having entered the scientific revolution, humankind will be transformed into, or rather be replaced, by immortal, self-rejuvenating, inorganic entities driven by intelligent algorithms. They will be able to create species; they become gods. His is a gloomy vision in which algorithms determine what is good for each and everybody and deprives humans from giving depth, direction and meaning to their lives. He finishes his book with the rhetorical question: “What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves”?[i]
Harari’s and Kaku’s thoughts about reaching a divine status by humans differ from the Old Egyptians in road map rather than in destination. Some four thousand years ago they assumed that, among other perils, the soul of the deceased had to embark on a perilous journey. It had to be theologically schooled and to know how to use spells and incantations in order to cope with demons to achieve a godlike status. In fact, the Old Egyptians needed a guidebook.[ii]
In Japan, severely impaired persons are taught to manipulate a robot with very human features often using only their voices or a few fingers. From their wheelchairs or beds they ‘tell’ these devices to mingle and socialise with more abled persons. They identify with and seem to ‘become’ these robots.[iii]
There are perceptions that are more upbeat. Physicist Deutsch, in his voluminous The Beginning of Infinity, argues that people are getting increasingly better at formulating understandings that allow for correcting errors and misconceptions and as such will vastly contribute to the rapid creation of knowledge with ever wider and deeper reach. He believes that homo sapiens has entered an era of unlimited creativity and knowledge with the result that humans are not only thinking better, but will be behaving better as well. Although problems are inevitable, solutions will always exist provided the right knowledge is sought out and acquired.[iv]
A special place in these reflections on the future scenarios is taken up by Craig Venter. Perhaps this has to do with him being both a noted scientist [biotechnology] and a successful businessman. He pioneered the first draft sequence of the human genome and the “transfection” of a cell with a synthetic chromosome. He claims that with DNA structures being decoded, the information can be sent to any computer “at the speed of light” and be used to programme life cells. He believes that “in the fullness of time”, synthetic biology will lead to the creation of “life”. He also sees that these techniques can become easily available and lead to “bioterrorists”, or just junks.[v]
A major voice in the ongoing discussion as to whether the world is becoming a healthier place to live in is psychologist Steve Pinker. Using data going back deep into human history he seeks to demonstrate that recent times witness a decline in violence and that this holds for families, neighbourhoods, tribes, and nations. The frequent and ubiquitous horrible cruelties, brutalities and torture inflicted on criminals, slaves, servants, underlings, racialised persons, women, and children are becoming less prevalent. Worldwide poverty is on the decline, more children go to school and marry later, racism is going down, women fare better, consumption is being dematerialised and energy de-carbonised.[vi] His optimistic look at the world is echoed by human-rights journalist Nicholas Kristof, as he writes about “good news, despite what you’ve heard”. He lists such things as improvement in combating leprosy, access to education, health services, water and electricity, reduction in poverty, and in infant and child mortality rates.
Kristof wrote this in July 2017, exact three years later he seems more wary as he asks his readers, “Will our great-grandchildren scorn us?” He also provides the answer, “I think our descendants will find our passivity on climate change unforgivable. They will be staggered by our indifference to human suffering. And I think they’ll be baffled by our systematic cruelty to animals, especially poultry and livestock.”[vii] A few days after he wrote this and speaking about the situation in the US, he offers ‘hope’, his main argument being that as things cannot get worse, they only can get better. Unlike Kristof, who often is the carrier of depressing news, Deutsch and Pinker put trust in humankind’s widening and deepening capacity to be guided by reason and growing acceptance of their universal rights. Hence the imperative title of Pinker’s recent book Enlightenment Now.[viii]
Although he emphasised in earlier publications that the future is unpredictable, futurist Patrick Dixon, in his recent The Future of Almost Everything, looks ahead for the coming one hundred years, pronounces forecasts on, indeed, almost everything and with confidence. His projections are, somewhat artificially grouped under the headings of FUTURE: Fast, Urban, Tribal, Universal, Radical and Ethics.
Everything will be in a flux: greater number of older people, no privacy, fewer but larger and more powerful companies, stop to fossil fuels, threat of viruses, e-commerce, robots, lower Infant Mortality Rates, changing relationships, cure for cancer, cyber crime, growth of tertiary education, erosion of democracy, space colonies. The list is virtually endless: name it, and Dixon comments on it. It is an extensive summary about things that are liable to happen. In essence, they are all outcomes of a shrinking-digitally interconnected world driven and informed, on the one side, by technology and related advances in medical science and, on the other, by emotions, attitudes and ambitions.
In this context, two of Dixon’s predictions stand out: he foresees a massive trend among people to be optimistic and wishing to make the world better, this despite all the threats facing Earth and what lives and grows on it. He writes, “The truth, as we will see, is that our world is far more resilient than many fear. Humankind has an astonishing and accelerating capacity for genius and innovation, and this will solve many of the world’s greatest challenges in ways that are hard to imagine today”.[ix] In addition, he claims that there are many natural balancing forces within global systems, including the oceans and the global economy.
Jeremy Rifkin, another authoritative futurist/economist and prolific social scientist, consistently outlines avenues for a brighter future. In his work The Empathic Civilization he sees a global surge in awareness and adoption of such basic social values as respect for human rights, compassion, humility, gratitude, responsibility, and solidarity. However, he also points at a catch: this strong trend towards, what he calls, the emergence of “Homo Empathicus” – the product of a worldwide lifestyle that is the result of over-consumption of the Earth’s energy and resources. A drastic turn-around is required; it is a “race to global consciousness in a world in crisis”. He offers hope and guidelines, but does not guarantee positive outcomes.[x]
Rifkin follows through and offers a partial solution in his, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, in which he sketches a new economic paradigm of a future of global interconnectedness and of an “internet of things” –driven by a “collaborative commons”, in which goods and service are near free of costs. Capitalism will be eclipsed.[xi] In his latest major work, The Green New Deal, he foresees a merging of interests between climate activists and the business community as both will seek and succeed in decoupling the economy from the use of fossil fuels.
Instead, ever cheaper solar and wind energies will drive the economies of the world providing new business opportunities and employment. A collapse of the “fossil fuel civilisation” is on the horizon. It looks like that the utopian ‘trilemma’ -good, cheap, and fast- being resolved. As in all Rifkin’s publications, his subtitles summarise his extensive and detailed accounts. This one reads: “Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization will collapse by 2028 and the bold economic plan to save life on Earth”.[xii]
Noteworthy: Millennials and younger generations constitute the main actors in his vision.
Permanent surveillance
A different track and a far more pessimistic position are taken by economist Shohana Zuboff. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, she carefully records the growing power of the business model that is based on a non-stop tracking and selling of personal data collected on social platforms. She extensively documents how social media companies “suck up” all the details of people’s lives and use these to modify their behaviour and to steer them to their products or to internalise their messages. She sees no way to break up or undo those forces.[xiii]
Barrister Jamie Susskind addresses the same issues. He describes how digital devices and technological advances are pulling apart the fundamental concepts of political life and assembling these in new political constellations. As he sets out in Future Politics, political power will be fragmented, life-changing decisions will be made by artificial intelligence and its related algorithms.
Everybody who has sent in an application for a new job would agree with Susskind as computers, not HR specialists, screened their letters. Conducting surgeries, robots will increasingly “make life-or-death” decisions rather than surgeons. Basic concepts, on which political life rests -democracy, equity, justice, liberty, civic spaces, even poverty – will be torn apart.[xiv] His findings confirm and describe in finer detail the observations by the prominent whistle blower Edward Snowden who worked for XKEYSCORE, the ultimate surveillance tool of the USA National Security Agency. He showed how the Agency could trace every person who had a phone or touched a computer to the point as to whether the individual was watching family pictures or porn videos. Snowden made those claims already in 2013.[xv] As he writes in his autobiography Permanent Record, “In a way people, or at least what is known about them, will last forever” and “…it [the Agency] has a memory that never sleeps”. It keeps a permanent record of everybody’s life.[xvi]
Cryptographer Bruce Schneier tells a similar story in his Data and Goliath. “All of us are being watched, all the time, and the data are being stored forever”. He reviews studies that show that the perception of constant surveillance causes feelings of low-self esteem, depression, and anxiety. It strips people of their dignity and sense of individuality. All ephemeral expressions and actions stay; everything remains recorded over which people do not have control. Massive data surveillance is not meant to find criminals, but to identify people with certain beliefs, memberships, actions.
He gives a thorough overview about how far digital surveillance has progressed and how easy it is to know everything about everybody, especially by combining data streams. Nothing is safe, each digital action is recorded and leads to more information on the person. In addition, the stuff gets cheaper and more powerful. There is an intergovernmental agreement called ‘International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communication Surveillance’[xvii]. However, Schneier sees little point in this as enforcement mechanisms are poorly developed and hardly in place. Most techniques for anonymising data do not work, and the data can be de-anonymised with surprisingly little information. “If something is free, you’re not the customer; you’re the product…we are constantly under the risk of being judged or criticized; there is value in dissent”.
Snowden’s “colleague in arms” Brittany Kaiser, who opened the lid off the cesspit of the disgraced consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, concurs. She reveals how the firm’s services were used by many of the global greats and writes how easily people can be manipulated by using data readily available at search engines and social media.[xviii] It has now also become public knowledge that the Swiss company, Crypto AG, a world-leading maker of encryption devices during the 1970-2008 era – with customers in some 120 countries – was owned by the CIA, in partnership with West Germany’s Intelligence Service. Many governments trusted this company for keeping their messages secret.[xix]
“Imperfection is the core dimension of freedom”
Yochai Benkler, professor of Law[xx]
“The inability to process data protects societies from authoritarianism”
Yuval Harari, philosopher[xxi]
Andrew Keen, technical entrepreneur and initiator of a series of successful start-ups, investigated also the far-reaching consequences of the digitalisation of the world. He looked at the increased inter-connectedness and role of the “Frightful Five” [Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft] and their off-shoots, often referring to Thomas More’s Utopia for inspiration. According to him, the ideals of the early days of the Internet -openness, innovation, and democracy- are rapidly and inevitably being replaced by social divisiveness, mistrust and uncertainty. Keen seems less pessimistic than Kaiser, Snowden and Zuboff as he still offers, albeit hesitantly, some counsel, or as he writes: “How to fix it”. To turn the tide, he pleads for an “ethical tech” movement which should address such things as open technology platforms, antitrust regulation, responsible human-centric design, the need for fact checkers, “gate keepers” and editors to check “fake news” and “controlled news”.[xxii] It may turn out a too trusting scenario that he painted.
Both Keen and Zuboff seem to underestimate the surveillance and stifling power held by ordinary persons and which can be used in everyday situations. Parents now have the technical wherewithal to trace every single step their children make, and vice versa; drones equipped with cameras are within the reach of almost anybody, children included, as they are getting easier to handle and cheaper by the day. These too invade and do away with individual privacy – or what is left of it. HelloSpy is an app, among many similar ones, than can be placed in one’s child’s or spouse’s smartphone to track their whereabouts.[xxiii] German parents have been told to destroy their children’s Cayla dolls as hackers could use a Bluetooth device in the toy to listen and talk to the child playing with it.[xxiv]
Independent activists in Hong Kong are strictly surveyed by State-supported media, using face-recognition tools that virtually get to know everything about them. They broadcast this information and incite people to act against them.[xxv]
It is distressing to listen to Tim Berners-Lee who created the World Wide Web:
“I had hoped that…we would be using the Web foremost for the purpose of serving humanity. Projects like Wikipedia… and the world of open source software… are the kinds of constructive tools that I hoped would flow from the Web…Communities are being ripped apart as prejudice; hate and disinformation are peddled online. The use of targeted political ads in the United States’ 2020 presidential campaign …threatens …undermine voters’ understanding and choices… How we respond to this abuse… will determine whether the Web lives up to a global force for good or… digital dystopia. Academics, companies, governments and citizens … need to make sure our online world is safe, empowering and genuinely for everyone…we have a right to know and take action.”[xxvi]
Getting better; getting worse
This all is set against a backdrop of a growing number of populist and xenophobic upheavals in many parts of the world where virtually everybody has access to and can be reached by everything and everybody and where things cannot be hidden anymore. This goes especially for news and events that stir up emotions, scare, surprise and shock. No surprise then, that many people think the world is on fire and only gets worse; maybe worse than it really is? The 2019 Social Progress Indicator aims at presenting facts and provides this picture for the world:
- Overall, social progress is advancing across the world. Since 2014, the world average
increased from 62.16 to 64.47, and there has been improvement on eight of 12 social progress components;
- Despite this overall progress, ‘Personal Rights’ have regressed since 2014, and there has been stagnation in the areas of ‘Personal Safety’, ‘Access to Basic Knowledge’ and ‘Inclusiveness’;
- 137 out of 149 countries register an improved social progress score since 2014, with several countries, including The Gambia, Nepal, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia demonstrating particularly notable improvements;
- There are important negative outliers. Most markedly, the United States which has dropped from 84.74 to 83.62, experiencing both an absolute and relative decline.[xxvii]
These social progress indicators highlight a small part of human existence as they leave out trends that impact on people’s well being such as climate change, arms race, terrorism, pandemics, volcanic activities…
Getting better, getting worse
The ways young Dutch teenagers [12-14 years old] behave in the Netherlands show how the positive and negative trends may relate to each other. While the number of “peaceful” children increases steadily, a shrinking group gets more aggressive and violent and are becoming a danger onto themselves and others.[xxviii] It seems that the dynamics that are effective in making teenagers more socially minded -improved education and health care, more inclusive leisure time openings, better housing, genuine opportunities for participation…- do not reach all with the unintended but noticeable effect of radicalising those who remain excluded.
Philosopher and neuroscientist Steven Quartz cautions against the overwhelming never-ending and ever-increasing array of negative narratives. He signals that these trigger low-level threat-detecting circuits of our brain, which may lead to impulsive and wrong actions as it weakens cognitive control, inhibition of emotional impulses, and the rational appraisal of situations.[xxix] The latter, the rational appraisal of situations, found a strong advocate in physician/statistician Hans Rosling. In his Factfulness, published shortly after his productive life had ended, he spells out the “reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think”. He concedes that much is wrong and mentions the risks of a global pandemic, a financial collapse, a world war, climate change, and extreme poverty as the most serious. He recommends to “consume the news and spot the drama without becoming stressed or hopeless” and not to adhere to “religious and cultural stereotypes [as they] are useless in understanding the world”.
Rosling points out what the past really looked like and calls it a mistake to think that no progress has been made. He writes, “People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I’m a very serious ‘possibilist’. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”
Anthony Gottlieb, a former Executive Editor of The Economist reviewed the works of both Pinker and Rosling and a host of other writers using the suggestive title of “Accentuate the positive”. The conclusion, not his, which cannot be drawn otherwise, is that indeed the world is getting a better place for many, certainly not for all, but also that the risks of colossal disasters are rapidly increasing, and may be running out of control.[xxx]
Complete with or without children?
Deutsch, Dixon, Harari, Hawking, Kaku, Keen, Pinker, Rees, Rosling, Rifkin, Snowden, Tonn, Walsh and Zuboff…: they just form a small and a select group of best-selling authors whose writings are accessible in English. They also are part of a large and ever widening global collective of people with similar concerns and whose observations should also be heard and validated. Although they may differ in nuances and emphases, they have in common that they are not blind to the risks humankind continues to be exposed to. Also in some manner they all search for ways forward.
There is also little mystique in their forecasts and prognoses. The signs that they highlight are all around us and visible to everyone who refuses to bury their heads in the sand. Each of these writers sketches a scenario of the future; taken together, these constitute an ever growing base of knowledge and experience on which new generations are made to enter the world. Does it also inform loving parents who would like to see their children live and grow up in it? Why is it that people still would like to give birth to children and put these tender, trusting, and eager little ones into a world that looks increasingly demanding, risky, and perilous? When acting in the “best interest of their future child”, what could they expect or wish for them? Undoubtedly, parents hope that their young ones will live long, healthy, contented and meaningful lives. Are these prospects realistic?
The times that people needed children as an old-age insurance are largely over. In fact, the vast amount of emotions, energy and expenditures that raising children entails is making a growing number of potential parents choose for postponing having children, having fewer or none at all. During discussions on the Planet’s future, the question often arises if having children is legitimate or whether having children is a matter of individual choice, of political principle or a decision that should be made by an authority.[xxxi] Similarly, opinions such as “complete without kids” are gaining currency. Research data often being quoted show that childless couples are better off than those with children.[xxxii] In the industrialised world, women seem to be happier without children.[xxxiii] Historian Rachel Gillet summarises her findings as follows: having a child contributes to global warming; especially mothers face bias in the workplace; they may earn less money; friendships inevitably change after the birth of a child; often for the worse, marriages tend to suffer; and parents tend to be less healthy than non-parents.[xxxiv] Arguments and their associated emotions that militated against having children that were regarded as rather self-centred are now being replaced by those that have a ring of social concern: having few or no children is “good for the environment…for humankind”.

In the popular press as well as in scientific literature, the discussion on “childless” and “childfree” continues unabatedly. In early 2020, columnist Meehan Crist held a discussion to a sold-out audience on the topic of “Is it OK to have children?” in the British Museum in London.[i] A few years ago, much-quoted sociologist Amy Blackstone reported that most couples who voluntarily choose fewer or not having children at all had higher education levels, held professional or managerial positions, were less religious and more urban. In deciding to forego children, women give more priority to career prospects, while men mention financial flexibility.[ii]
An extreme advocate of the “no children” position is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement [VHEMT] that calls for a complete, but voluntary, halt to human reproduction with the goal to stopping the decay of and restoring the environment. Their battle cry, not likely to be heeded by everybody, is “May we live long and die out”. The group states that a decrease in the human population would prevent a significant amount of human-caused suffering. The extinctions of non-human species and the scarcity of resources required by humans are frequently cited by the group as evidence of the harm caused by human overpopulation.[iii]
These views do not seem to have a bearing on the twenty countries with the largest number of children per family that, except for Afghanistan, are all in Africa. Niger tops the list with an average of 6.49 children in 2017.[iv] They seem more pertinent to contexts at the other side of the spectrum, mostly highly -technologically-advanced societies with Singapore up in front with .03 child per family, followed by Macau, Taiwan and Hong Kong and, surprisingly, Puerto Rico.[v]
The case of Medias and William, a young couple in Uganda, is instructive. Although married for a few years, Medias could not conceive, how hard they tried. People around them told her “she was not a woman as she did not have a child”, and that “she was of no importance”. William was urged to “look outside” to obtain descendants. Here, they, and the community may not have the future wellbeing of children in mind, but their own respectful place in society [fortunately for Medias and William, IVF worked].[vi] Aicha Macky, a filmmaker in Niger, who tells her story in a short documentary, shows how she, being childless, was less fortunate; as a result, people insulted, ignored, and looked down at her.[vii] Writing about unfulfilled child wishes among women in the Netherlands, psychologist Yvonne Prinsen tells of comparable sentiments.[viii] Talking about the US, free lance writer Nina Jervis counsels her audience: “beware the curse of the middle-aged non-mother”.[ix]
In Nagoro, a remote rural village in Japan, no children have been born since 2000. The schools are empty. To change this, Tsukimi Ayano and her friends made some 350 dolls and put them in the benches. They feel that this is a way to make the community look alive.[x]
At the end of 2017, a survey conducted in Japan showed that 47.2 per cent of married men and women were in sexless marriages, up 2.6 per cent from data obtained in 2014.[xi]
During 2019-20, the authors approached a score of people from all continents, all educated and belonging to the ‘middle class’ in their respective countries and who had recently become parents. They had been reached directly or indirectly via their own personal networks, with questions like: “You are adults, you know the world around you, but when you were thinking about having a baby, did you think if it was ‘wise’ to place a person in this world? One could say that there are quite a few uncertainties and threats: Climate change, the risk of nuclear war, growing inequality, of increased violence and terrorism, of asteroids crashing into the earth, harmful viruses and bacteria that can no longer be controlled, overpopulation, the erosion of private life…Of course, you have stood still and reflected on this? And if so, what were your reasons for going through with it?” Their replies were very much similar and were variations on statements like these: “Yes, we have thought about it, but we have faith in ourselves and in the future” and, foremost “we’d like to have [another] baby”.
“…but then he shakes his head slowly. ‘It’s one of the greatest sadness of my life, really’, he admits. ‘To have children … it is one of the greatest privileges that life holds.’”
Frédérick Leboyer, obstetrician, aged 90+[xii]
Still, as if guided by an invisible hand, the world’s fertility rate is already experiencing a “’jaw-dropping’ crash in children being born” as some 20 nations will be seeing their populations halve by 2100 with others following in their wake.[xiii]
Central to the discussion on “save the environment” and “complete without kids” ought to be the understanding of the ‘best interest of the child’, the crucial tenet of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. It reads, “In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”[xiv] This principle has progressively become a universal guideline for all people and entities dealing with children, de facto for everybody. In this light, the question that becomes loaded is as to whether it is in the best interest of the child to be born. This is, of course, an impossible query, as people who do not exist, cannot possibly have rights. The question could, and should of course, be turned around and be posed as: what future world would be in the “best interest of the child”? Here, their prospects are, as said above, not only uncertain but also fraught with many possible, if not most probable, lethal threats and perils.
The impact by humans on the Planet, since the 1950s turbo charged by a “great acceleration” of population, economic growth, and natural resource consumption, has become so great that an entirely new geological age has been defined— the Anthropocene. So, what will the world be like for our children, their children, and their children’s children in this new epoch ? Can the next generations capture the benefits of growth without the ills? Will technology allow decoupling growth from natural resource consumption? Can human ingenuity, rationality, and values still be relied upon?
If the preceding chapters carry any weight, then the question arises how well equipped are the young generations to engage in activities that will benefit those who come after them? Many of them cannot count on or lean back anymore on belief systems that earlier ‘innately’ connected them to the past and future [Chapter Two]. The disconnect between the still powerful Baby Boomers and the Millennials cum Generation Z hampers smooth and fertile interactions among them, leaving the newest one to define the meaning and purpose of their existence largely by themselves. These will be even more of a challenge for Generation Alpha [Chapter Three]. They will find themselves in a world that constantly demands, without any let-up, all their attention and energy. They are literally “locked up in the now” with hardly any escape routes, if any [Chapter Four]. Scenarios, even for their immediate future, are filled with hazards and threats. [this chapter]. The next and final section will explore possible vistas that hold still some promise and hope.
[1] www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_zRk3lVxtw; www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdG32JQjZyw.
[2] Van Oudenhoven, Nico and Rekha Wazir, 2006, Newly Emerging Needs of Children, Antwerp: Garant.
[3] Horwarth, Andrea and Sol Makakwa, 2020, ‘Indigenous suicides getting worse, not better’, Toronto Star, 7 January.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg.
[5] www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg60sr38oic
[6] Avilucea, Isaac, 2016, ‘Kid, 5, who brought heroin to Trenton school, now caught with crack’, The Trentonian, 27 October. In our Navigating Childish Times, 2018, Turnhout: we show that children get street wise at ever earlier ages but reach mature adulthood much later that earlier cohorts.
[7] Lee, Alicia, 2020, ‘The Doomsday Clock is closer than ever to midnight. Here’s why that matters’, CNN, 23 January.
[8] Quammen, David, 2012, Spillover, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
[10] Andrew P. Dobson and fifteen co-authors, 2020, ‘Ecology and economics for pandemic prevention’, Science, 24 July.
[11] See, for example: Petranek, Stephen, 2014, ‘8 Ways the world could suddenly end’, TEDxMidwest, 11 March.
[13] Dupuy, Lisa, 2020, ‘De wedloop om de hypersone raket’, NRC, 10 February.
[14] Sharkey, Noel, 2020, ‘Autonomous warfare’, Scientific American, February.
[15] Panda, Ankit, 2018, ‘False alarms of the Apocalypse’, The Atlantic, 13 January.
[16] Hawking, Stephen, 2018, Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York: Bantam Books.
[17] Grove, Jarius Victor, 2019, Savage Ecology, Durham: Duke University Press.
[18] Chomsky, Noam and J. Polychroniou, 2017, Optimism over Despair. New York: Penguin.
[19] See, for example: Petranek, Stephen, 2014, ‘8 Ways the world could suddenly end’, TEDxMidwest, 11 March.
[20] Walsh, Bryan, 2019, End Times, New York: Hachette Books.
[21] Sánchez-Bayoa, Francisco and Kris A.G. Wyckhuys,2019, ‘Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers’, Biological Conservation, Volume 232, April, Pages 8-27.
[22] Tonn, Bruce E., 2009, ‘Obligations to future generations and acceptable risks of human extinction’, Future, 5 February.
[23] Kaku, Michio, 2018, The Future of Humanity, New York: Doubleday.
[24] Rees, Martin, 2019, ‘A second grand step’, New Scientist, 21/28 December.
[26] Harari, Yuval Noah, 2017, Homo Deus, London: Vintage.
[27] Lidz, Franz, 2019, ‘An afterlife so perilous, you needed a guidebook’, The New York Times, 30 December.
[28] Goldman, Brian, 2018, The Power of Kindness, Toronto: HarperCollins.
[29] Deutsch, David, 2011, The Beginning of Infinity, London: Allen Lane.
[30] Venter, J. Craig, 2013, Life at the Speed of Light, New York: Viking.
[31] Pinker, Stephen, 2011, The Better Angels of our Nature, New York: Viking.
[32] Kristof, Nicholas, 2020, ‘Will our great-grandchildren scorn us?’, The New York Times, 11 July.
[34] Pinker, Stephen, 2018, Enlightenment Now, New York: Viking.
[36] Dixon, Patrick, 2016, The future of Almost Everything. London: Profile Books.
[37] Rifkin, Jeremy, 2008, Empathic Civilization, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher.
[38] Rifkin, Jeremy, 2014, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
[39] Rifkin, Jeremy, 2019, The Green New Deal, New York: St. Martin’s Press.
[40] Zuboff, Shoshana, 2019, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, New York: Public Affairs.
[41]Susskind, Jamie, 2018, Future Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[42] Snowden, Edward, 2019, Permanent Record, New York: Henry Holt & Company.
[43] Snowden, Edward, 2019, Permanent Record, New York: Metropolitan Books.
[44] www.eff.org/files/necessaryandproportionatefinal.pdf; accesses 14 June 2015.
[45] Kaiser, Brittany, Targeted, New York: Harper.
[46] Miller, Greg, 2020, ‘The intelligence coup of the century’, The Washington Post, 11 February.
[47] Quoted in: Schneier, Bruce (2015), Data and Goliath. New York: W.W. Norton & Cy.
[48] As quoted in Parker, Ian, 2020, ‘The really big picture’, The New Yorker, 17 February.
[49] Keen, Andrew, 2018, How to Fix the Future. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
[50]https://blog.mspy.com; accessed 1 April 2019.
[51] BBCNews, 2017. ‘German parents told to destroy Cayla dolls over hacking fears’, BBC News, 17 February.
[52] VanderKlippe, Nathan, 2019, ‘In Hong Kong a ‘weaponised’ free press becomes China’s tool of surveillance’, Globe and Mail, 27 February.
[53] Berners-Lee, Tim, 2019,’ I invented the Web. We Can Fix It.’, The New York Times, 25 November.
[55] Social Progress Indicator,www.socialprogress.org, accessed 21 February 2020.
[56] Boom, Joeri, 2020, ‘Steken voor status’, De Groene Amsterdammer, 13 February.
[57] Quartz, Steven, 2017, ‘The state of the world isn’t as bad as you think’, in Brockman, 2017.
[58] Gottlieb, Anthony, 2019, ‘Accentuate the positive’, New York Review of Books, 7 February.
[59] Crist, Meehan, 2020. ‘Is it OK to have children?’. Discussion session, British Museum, 14 February.
[60] Walker, Ellen, 2011. Complete without Kids, Austin: Greenleaf; Walker, Ellen, 2011, ‘Fact or fiction: childfree couples are happier than couples with kids’, Psychology Today, 31 March.
[61] Dolan, Paul, 2019, Happy Ever After, London: Penguin Books.
[62] Gillet, Rachel, 2017, ‘Having a child could negatively impact a parent’s happiness’, Independent, 27 November.
[63] www.straitstimes.com, accessed 2 November 2018.
[64] 2018 www.lepoint.fr; accessed 17 July 2019
[65] United Nations Human Development Report, 2019, New York: United Nations Development Program.
[66] Crist, Meehan, 2020. ‘Is it OK to have children’. Discussion session, British Museum, 14 February.
[67] Blackstone, Amy, 2014, ‘Childless…childfree’, trends in social life matters, American Sociologists Association, 20 November.
[68] www.vhemt.org; accessed 2 March 2018.
[71] www.statista.com; accessed 17 July 2019.
[72] www.indexmundi.com; accessed 17 July 2019.
[73] Szymol, Paul, 2010, ‘People say, ‘she’s not a woman’’. Video clip, The Atlantic, 13 February.
[74] Macky, Aicha, 2020, ‘The fruitless tree’, BBC News, 24 February.
[75] Prinsen, Yvonne, 2012, En, waar zijn de kinderen? Schiedam: Scriptum.
[76] Jervis, Nina, 2018, ‘Beware the curse of the middle-aged non-mother’, Medium.com, 18 August.
[77] Rich, Motoko, 2019, ‘There are no children here. Just lots of life-size dolls’, The New York Times, 17 December.
[78] McCurry, Justin 2017, ‘Record numbers of couples living in sexless marriages in Japan, says report’, The Guardian, 14 February.
[79] Moorhead, Joanna, 2011, ‘Frederick Leboyer: ‘Babies are overlooked in labour’, The Guardian, 25 June.
[80] Gallagher, James, 2020, ‘Fertility rate: ‘Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born’, BBC News, 15 July.
[81] United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child [Art. 3, para. 1].
Nico van Oudenhoven is the Senior Associate International Child Development Initiatives [ICDI]; and Correspondent Netherlands, MAHABAHU
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