Fake Accents?

Like many others, I experienced a major shift in my life when I started at secondary school. This has been analysed by sociologists in some depth, but if you’ve been to secondary school or are at one now, you probably know the kind of thing I mean. I don’t want to dwell on that, but for me there were two new shifts, perhaps self-imposed, which actually it would help to give some context to. Let’s start a bit earlier then.

First of all, in the mid-1970s CE, my educational psychologist Dr Gray suggested I learn French. Although I expressed agreement with her, I found the specific choice of that language disappointing because it didn’t seem exotic enough to be interesting and I had already picked up Classical Greek and Latin to some extent owing to my interest in science. French was boring. It was just what all the tourists spoke and what most people on the immediate other side of the English Channel used, and also that language everyone learned at secondary school. It used the same alphabet as English (superficially, but that’s another story) and it was just kind of humdrum. I paid it no heed.

At the same time I was learning cursive handwriting in the Marion Richardson style, which so far as I can tell is the bog standard way of writing in England. I can still do it although I rarely use it, so I can illustrate it easily instead of bothering to find some royalty-free image of it:

Apologies for the low quality, but you get the idea.

I wasn’t able to write this legibly and my teacher told me to go back to printing, so I did. A couple of years later, I was at another primary school and proceeded to learn italic cursive:

This was done with a ballpoint so it doesn’t look exactly like I wrote it. I used to write with extreme pressure, so I would often split fountain pen nibs and sometimes snap pencils in half with the force I applied to the paper. Later on in that school, a rumour went around that that style of cursive was frowned upon at my prospective secondary school and over the summer of 1978, on one day in fact, I scrapped my italic style of handwriting and invented a more rounded version, which is rather similar, as it turns out, to how Round Hand was invented. This has stayed more or less the same ever since, although it’s been through phases and in particular I now use a lot less pressure when I write. When I got to the school in question, it turned out that the teachers were particularly impressed by the clarity and neatness of the style of cursive we’d been taught at that school, and moreover, many of the signs in the school were written in the rather similar Foundation Hand! Hence that was just one of those ridiculous rumours which spread among schoolchildren and there was no real reason for me to change my writing in the first place. This is quite annoying.

I’m talking about writing because in a way your handwriting style is like your voice. There’s the conscious side of what you say and how you say it, and the side which becomes second nature after a while. Analogous processes took place with oral French and English in the transition between primary and secondary school. Before the age of eleven, I spoke with a near-RP accent all the time, but due to anxiety about “fitting in”, I soon adopted the rather Cockney-sounding register my peers at school spoke with. My mother noted at one point that I’d started saying “twenny” instead of “twenty”, which was completely unconscious. A somewhat similar phenomenon happened later with French, where at first, and again it was my mother who picked up on this, my accent was impeccable and close to Parisian but after a while, partly because I felt French had been imposed upon me without any consultation and partly because the “cool” thing to do was not to use the right accent, I just spoke it with what my French teacher once referred to as a “Maidstone accent”, although that was actually a different pupil called, of all things for someone who wouldn’t speak French properly, Marcel Durier. And in fact I wonder now if his first language wasn’t French, or whether he was at least bilingual, and just deliberately pronounced it badly to fit in.

Those are, then, three examples of language use in a child being influenced socially. In each case it was primarily conscious and intentional on the whole. I was unaware of saying, for example, “twenny”, so it wasn’t completely so, but there was a tendency. Each time it was about pressure to conform, though mistakenly so in one case. Things were very different later in my life. By the time I left home and moved to the English East Midlands, I was very conscious of my accent and of the contrast with those of others at university, who were from all over Britain and beyond, and also with the Leicester and Leicestershire accents, which are not the same. I found myself consciously adopting Midland patterns of intonation and altering some of my long vowels and diphthongs, and for some reason making my accent rhotic, to the extent that when I first spoke to Christine Battersby she thought I was American. But I was doing all this deliberately. In fact I’m so intensely conscious of my speech at all times that almost nothing has changed in my basic English since I was eighteen, and I’ve reverted to near-RP. The one exception is that because I was unaware of the division between the way contractions are used between the North and South of England, I now use Northern constructions like “I’ve not” rather than Southern ones such as “I haven’t”. That one got away from me. I do remember at some point a couple of years after I moved to Leicester noticing my use of a rounded short U (as in “bus”) instead of the usual Home Counties “ah” sound (which incidentally I pronounce differently than most Southerners) on the single occasion it occurred, and I “corrected” it. It’s still habitual for me to use glottal stops for intervocalic T’s although I rarely do so.

Most of the time, even though it’s unlike that of those around me, I still speak with a near-RP accent and feel no pressure to do otherwise, although I tend to mumble. This changes, however, when I go to Scotland. I continue to use my usual accent but feel acutely conscious of its drawly and lax quality, and it feels uncomfortable to talk like that. This is probably due to having recent Scottish ancestry. This, also, introduces a complication.

Scots is a separate Ingvaeonic language than English. The other Ingvaeonic languages are sometimes clearly separate, such as Frisian, and sometimes not, as with Bislama and Tok Pisin. Yola I don’t know about so much because it’s extinct, but it seems to have been written rather like English but spoken very differently. Scots is more complicated because it exists on a continuum from Scottish English to Scots the language itself. If I were to speak French nowadays, I would attempt to do so in a somewhat Parisian accent although I also pronounce the final usually silent E’s because I don’t like the dominance of Parisian French and feel it links it more to other Romance languages and Anglo-Norman if I do that. Nonetheless, it feels incumbent upon me to make an effort out of respect for the speakers of another language at least to try to pronounce it well, although it probably isn’t very good. It also just feels lazy not to do so. Interestingly, I’ve been perceived as speaking French with a German accent and German with a French accent, so presumably I should speak Alsatian.

It’s more complicated when it comes to the indigenous Scottish languages. Two or three of them are long dead, namely the Orkney and Shetland Norns and the disappointingly P-Celtic Pictish, which was previously thought to be non-Indo-European and possibly related to Basque. The other three are yet quick: English, Scots and Gàidhlig. I include English here because there is a Scottish variety of English as well as Scots. The two are distinct. Scots, for example, is not spoken in the Highlands, the Western Isles or the Orkneys or Shetlands, but it is spoken in the Northeast and in the Central Belt and various other places. People often seem to find it hard to accept Scots as a valid language, but are fine with Gàidhlig except that this too forms a continuum with other forms of the language, this time geographically. The Scottish government also seems to promote Gàidhlig much more actively than Scots. I have talked about Scots elsewhere (or possibly here as I seem to have had two goes at it). It’s far more widely spoken than Gàidhlig and is therefore not endangered, but the Scots themselves tend to treat it as a bit of a joke.

I would never say /lɒk/ for “loch”, but I don’t say /ɫɔχ/ either. I do, however, say /lɒχ/, and just as using “er” for the French «eu» would be insulting to the French, saying /lɒk/ sounds insulting and ignorant, rather like the American “nucular” or “kie-odo” (for Kyoto). It shows no respect for the ethnicity or culture involved. But as a Sassenach, there’s a problem, as there is with my use of the word “Sassenach” itself: it also comes across as culturally appropriative, like a White person putting on a Caribbean or African American English accent, or what I imagine that might be. I would never do that of course, as it’s like blackface and deeply insulting, but there are also plenty of White Caribbeans with the former accent. A few words here and there do come naturally to me, such as “amn’t”, which is just logical, “aye” and also, as I recently become aware, I wasn’t originally in the habit of calling a small watercourse a “stream” or “beck”, because by a strange happenstance the Kentish dialect words are “nailbourne” and “bourne”, or at least they were when I was growing up. Hence I could easily authentically uncover my habitual tendency to call a burn a “bourne”. Calling it a “nailbourne” would presumably raise eyebrows. It’s also presumably the case that the glottal stops I picked up from my father’s speech also occurred in his own father’s speech, since he was Glaswegian, though whether they were directly transmitted that way is another question.

Considered more generally, using Scots or a Scottish accent a lot of the time would appear to be an affectation for me more than something which is likely to evolve organically without my attention, since I closely scrutinise my speech much of the time. I’m also likely to sound fake even if I tried to do it, and it could also come across as mockery. On the other hand, it seems extremely grating and condescending to refuse to speak Scots, as opposed to Scottish English, without trying to use the phonetics of that language. In general, I do try to pronounce place names as they’re pronounced by the people who live there, so for example there’s a Beaconsfield Road in Leicester which I say with a short E but everyone else says with a long one. Beaconsfield is in Buckinghamshire, where my father’s side of my family lived. It would be weird to call it “Beeconsfield Road”. Why would I do that? On the other hand, it’s been a while since I’ve said “nailbourne” because people in the English Midlands are completely unfamiliar with that word.

For an unknown reason, the vocabulary I’m used to shows divergence from standard British English. I don’t use it at the moment because it sounds American. I don’t know either if it’s inherited from a Scottish origin or something else. I used to refer to meals, in order, as “breakfast”, “dinner” and “tea”, but I think that’s more a class thing than a nationality one. I also called a sofa a “couch” and a living room a “lounge”, and said “mad” when I meant angry. I don’t particularly associate any of these with Scottish English and have never checked. They’re probably all class things actually. Other things have a different history. “Amn’t” happens because “Aren’t I” sounds really ungrammatical and peculiar to me for reasons of consistency. “I’ve not” and the like for “I haven’t” is a rare example of genuine unmonitored drift. I neither know which (whether?) way round that happens in Scotland nor elsewhere in the English-speaking world.

In Scotland, there’s also a difference between the usage of “shall” and “will” and “should” and “ought to”. Among the vowels is the rather perplexing use of an “ah”-type vowel for the short U in the same places as near-RP as opposed to the rounded vowels used in northern England. I find this very strange, but it does mean that certain aspects of my accent are coincidentally more like Scottish accents than the Leicestershire ones. In braid Scots, that vowel has become “I”, as in “mither” as opposed to “mother”. Some of the variations are simply due to the existence of a distinct legal system and government, so for example I am currently in a quandary about whether to call Dumfries a “burgh”. I presume that’s a merely historical detail which has been wiped out by historical changes and everyone calls it something beginning with a T and ending in an N. Getting back to accent, although my impression is that this is almost absent everywhere nowadays, I once distinguished between “w” and “wh” in speech and somewhere deeply buried it’s still natural for me to do this. Recently this led to me calling it “Whitby” rather than “Witby”, which probably a lot of people thought was strange and an affectation, but I can assure you it’s genuinely part of my original accent. They seem to be lost, but for a short period from 26th July 1980 to around April 1982, I kept a spoken diary on cassette which preserves something like my original accent. The big difference is that it’s very clearly enunciated.

It seems that there are two different approaches to accents used by actors. One is the straightforward phonetic technique of simply transposing one’s own phonemes into those used by speakers with that accent, but apparently this is only rarely used, unnecessarily laborious and prone to slippage. The other is to hold the speech organs in a particular set of positions whence the accent emerges as a matter of course. Liverpudlian can be taken as an illustration. If an actor is from London, they can reproduce such an accent by relaxing the soft palate and bringing the back of the tongue closer to it. Likewise, the vowel shift present in New Zealand and Australian accents is generally in the same direction for each vowel, suggesting that holding the tongue in a consistent position compared to a near-RP accent would enable someone with such an accent to sound more Ozzie or Kiwi, and conversely for someone from Australasia to sound like they’re from London. This approach doesn’t work perfectly of course. For instance, the voicing of intervocalic T in Australian English is not likely to result from this.

This brings me to the remarkable phenomenon of Foreign Accent Syndrome. This is a neuropsychological condition where someone ends up sounding like their accent has changed. What isn’t clear to me here is whether the accent also sounds that way to someone with the purported accent or it just sounds like that to people without it. This can occur as a result of a stroke, a migraine, epilepsy medication or on one occasion a tonsillectomy. I’m going to describe it first naïvely with an imaginary case history. A woman speaks with a Cockney accent, has a stroke and recovers fine, but is then perceived as speaking with a Scottish accent. My naïve understanding of this situation is that the stroke affected the part of her motor cortex, changing how she uses her speech organs in a way which makes her sound Scottish to her Londoner friends. For instance, the way she holds her tongue may be tenser than before and it may not move as much when she attempts to pronounce diphthongs. It’s similar to how a stroke might affect someone’s gait, and presumably handwriting, except that different muscles are involved.

However, this may not be what’s happening. I’ve now carefully listened to two Australians who appear to have acquired an Irish accent, and in both cases the long O began with /o:/ and didn’t seem to be a monophthong, but their accent also became rhotic, which is very hard to explain in this way. Rhotic accents do sometimes have hypercorrection where, for example, an R might be inserted after the A in “china”, but in general this is taken to be a sign of a fake accent and these Australians’ accent went from being non-rhotic to properly rhotic without hypercorrection. For instance, they would pronounce the R in “first” and “mother” but not an R at the end of “dahlia” at the end of a sentence. This is highly perplexing.

People with foreign accent syndrome face many challenges. One is that accent can be an important part of self-identity. Another is that they can be seen as mocking someone with that accent, as might occur if a White English person whose accent has acquired a Caribbean sound to other people of their ethnicity converses with a Black person of Caribbean heritage whose accent has always been like that. Thirdly, it can be seen as fake and an affectation, or as attention-seeking. These particular objections remind me of the prejudice which used to exist against left-handedness, which tended to be given psychoanalytical explanations such as the person in question being anti-conformist or defiant in some way. Finally, it might expose them to prejudice and active racism. The fact that, presumably, any person able to speak fluently could come down with foreign accent syndrome might give actively racist people pause for thought.

Brain scans do in fact show that there are differences in brain activity for people with this issue, and I’m now going to dive into a less naïve approach. The syndrome is rarely diagnosed, averaging cases in single figures per decade, and appears to be connected to the function of the cerebellum, the part of the brain responsible for, among many other things, coördination, timing and smoothness of movement, so it seems clear that this is a factor, although it still seems odd that someone’s accent could become rhotic as a result of this, so I don’t feel this is the whole answer. Two-thirds of diagnoses of foreign accent syndrome are made for females. Less surprisingly, they are made in adults. There is often recovery and musical approaches can be successful. The speaker themselves does perceive the accent as foreign.

This phenomenon sounds to me as if it involves the same kind of foreign accent production as an actor placing their speech organs in a particular state such as tension or relaxation. Hence maybe when an accent rubs off on someone, it occurs in a similar manner, perhaps in the way someone’s posture might come to mirror someone else’s.

This raises a second issue. Effectively, both writing and speech, and also signing, involve the use of a very specific set of finely controlled muscles. Other muscles are involved in other social and other aspects of life, such as dancing, Yoga asanas, sporting activities and generally how people hold themselves. Again there are contrasting approaches to this, one involving conscious training that becomes unconscious, the other involving a kind of suggestion, namely the Alexander Technique. The approach to adopting an accent that involves training on individual phonemes seems less like Alexander Technique than the “acting” approach, where a general Gestalt is adopted. If one small set of movements changes, it can affect the way practically every movement is made. Perhaps the same applies to language and handwriting, on smaller and larger scales. Maybe if my handwriting changes, it reflects other, deeper changes in myself, and likewise if I change the way I speak, I also move differently in other ways. This could also work the other way: grosser changes in movement lead to changes in voice and writing. This is where it impinges on the vexed question of graphology, widely regarded as a pseudoscience. Surely it would be odd for someone’s handwriting not to reflect their personality? Does this also mean that people speaking different languages might also move differently?

Moreover, we do not generally criticise people for attempting to improve their posture or perhaps surrendering themselves to suggestion in this area, so why would we criticise someone as such for attempting to change their accent. Granted, there are issues such as why someone would adopt “Mockney” or pretend to be posher than they are, and there’s the question of appropriation, but what’s the issue about faking it until you make it in that particular area? Maybe there is one, and I mean that. It could really be that I’m missing something here, and I’d be very interested in hearing your views on this.

Let The Bodies Pile Up In Their Billions

It’s been mentioned that They might just be planning our extinction. That is, it may be that the ruling class, having realised that the planet is in trouble and that automation makes most workers unnecessary, might just have quietly decided that if the majority of the human race gets wiped out by various disasters it might be no bad thing for them. I’m going to call this Their Extinction. Although they might have miscalculated and believe themselves to be invulnerable when they aren’t, in which case it will literally be their extinction, I don’t actually mean that they will themselves die out but that the scenario they have in mind is their solution to their problems, which are not our problems. But there’s also Our Extinction: the extinction that we can own. This is what’s been referred to as voluntary human extinction, or anti-natalism. It’s been summed up, perhaps inaccurately, as “Live Long And Die Out”, and is also called anti-natalism because it’s against the idea of having any more babies.

On the one hand, then, there’s the STARK Conspiracy, a fictionalised version of the first plan written up by Ben Elton in his I assume well-known novel and later TV series ‘STARK’. On the other is VHEMT, pronounced ‘Vehement’ – the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. It must be borne in mind that the former is fictional, and therefore probably doesn’t reflect reality. We have to be very cautious at this point about conspiracy theories, and in fact that should probably be addressed first.

Conspiracy theories give the illusion of explanation when in reality they only serve a psychological purpose of giving people a sense of certainty and a superficial hypothesis to account for perceived situations. Most of the time they have no basis in reality, although occasionally they have. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, for example, did turn out to be real. In the unlikely event that you don’t know what this was, the CDC deliberatedly infected Black men with syphilis spirochaetes and refrained from treating them to study the progress of the disease without treatment. Not only were they infected, but of course they passed it on to their sexual partners and children. There was no informed consent. This took place between 1932 and 1972. That, then, is a real conspiracy. They do happen. They may not be the point though. The point is really that we live in a situation where large-scale conspiracies are possible and can be influential. In other words, this world with this system, antisocial people controlling society, the ability to wield large scale power, corruption and so forth. Conspiracies, which are in any case probably not as widespread as they seem to be, are a symptom, not the disease. Whether the disease is endemic to the population or not amounts to a political stance. But exposing conspiracies may be pointless because clearing one up leaves space for another. That’s all assuming that major conspiracies exist of course.

There’s also the question of how much a conspiracy “theory” is even a theory. It’s usually more a hypothesis with strong confirmation bias. We think there’s a conspiracy and go on to perceive positive signs of one everywhere. They don’t seem to be testable or falsifiable propositions so much as belief systems which cause one to seek confirmatory evidence. Hence it might be better to call them “conspiracy hypotheses” just to encourage one to bear in mind that they are not rigorously arrived at on the whole.

The next step is to bear in mind the superficiality of their explanatory power. There are ideologies and social and political theories about economics, politics and the social realm which one may agree or disagree with but have sophisticated approaches to society. For instance, there’s the trickle-down theory, which I’ve chosen because I disagree with it but it’s considered respectable. This is the idea that the rich should be taxed less because their wealth will enable them to provide greater employment opportunities for the poor, whose income will therefore increase. And it is true that money doesn’t generally just sit in banks doing nothing, but is often invested and used elsewhere. My point being that I appreciate the reasoning behind this and have a limited amount of respect for it, but I do have some. It makes more sense than the idea that the Illuminati are running the world right now. Incidentally, even if they were it wouldn’t make it any worse than it already is, and might even make it better (but read the blog post if you like).

One conspiracy which did turn out to be true, and was on a larger scale than some, was the one involving Cambridge Analytica. It’s tough to make a case for that being irrelevant although it remains so that a different form of democracy and media and social media ownership and influence would have made it harder for it to succeed, so it is still symptomatic.

We’re left, then, with cock-ups. That’s rather flippant, but to be more serious about it, there are concerted attempts to do things surreptitiously, and there’s the general inability and incompetence of muddling through and hoping things will be okay. It isn’t at all clear what’s happening with Their human extinction. Science strongly supports the existence of various issues whose confluence could be expected to wipe out the species, such as anthropogenic climate change, plastic pollution, oceanic acidification and the appearance of new pandemics among humans. There’s a remarkable response to this among governments which either involves complete silence and failure to address the problems or denial, and it isn’t clear if this is disingenuous or not. It’s possible that they are psychologically speaking in denial about it, and of course that’s an early stage of grieving. Alternatively, it might just be propaganda and they know the score, and given the fossil fuel lobby’s successful decades-long obfuscation, that seems more likely.

The question then arises, if they know, what does it mean that the general public is unable to perceive a response to the crisis? Does it mean they’re doing nothing, or are they doing something so unpopular that the public would find it unacceptable? The problem is that silence is hard to interpret. We do know that the majority of the human race is in mortal danger. That much is undeniable. A clue as to what might be happening could be found in the current mass murder of the poor which is taking place in the UK.

In the past, undesirables have of course been rounded up and put in concentration camps, which are a British invention. This is a fairly expensive solution, although it does allow for the spread of lethal infections fairly easily, for which treatment would be counterproductive. In a move reminiscent of care in the community, it’s now possible for people to be killed in their own homes or on the streets through benefit sanctions or by encouraging assault against them, and this resembles the idea of privatisation – “individuals and their families” – quite closely. Therefore I imagine the plan is to encourage the degradation and habitability of the planet until it becomes impossible for poor people to survive. Perhaps “encourage” is the wrong word, as it suggests agency. It’s more a question of the problem of potentially uncoöperative poor people whose services are no longer required due to automation by allowing them to die. This is a fairly straightforward, not really conspiratorial scenario which resembles other policies in its laissez faire quality. In fact it isn’t so much a policy as the absence of one.

Ben Elton had a somewhat different idea of what was planned, and although his novel had a humorous purpose he’s known for his axe-grinding. ‘Stark’ has been described as “their solution”, and it’s only a very limited one although it kind of is. Elton envisaged the rich engineering an economic crash which rendered the resources more affordable, followed by the construction of a self-sustaining orbital habitat to which the super-rich would escape, but also envisaged them killing themselves after a few years due to something like boredom and disillusionment. I can’t remember the plot that well, but if it did involve going into orbit, the question is, what happens next? How should we feel about their descendants, assuming there are any? Is there another social struggle after most of us have died? Would their children be responsible for the ecocide committed on this planet and the extinction of the vast majority of the human race?

Something I keep meaning to get round to talking about here is the concept of “Up Wing”. The concept has changed over the past few decades, but there are suggestions that Left and Right be replaced by Down and Up. Brian Stableford calls these “Green” and “Grey”, but that isn’t quite what I mean. Up wing politics supports the idea of technological progress and Down wing believes that technological innovation has become detrimental to the human race. In the context of human extinction, the idea that technological innovation is harmful to us is not simple because in a way, some people would prefer us to die out as that could promote the recovery of the biosphere. This is still not the place, unfortunately, to go into too much depth on this issue, but I often feel it’s a major thing I’m not mentioning with big flappy ears, wrinkles and a proboscis. I’ll get round to it someday. But I will say, in spite of my endless invective against capitalism, this is not the whole story.

Moving on, there’s “our extinction”. The meaning of “our” here is quite limited because I’m not personally convinced by this position, although it might be better to orchestrate it rather than having it thrust upon us. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, also known as VHEMT, espouses what’s known as “anti-natalism”, in this case with a Green tendency. I first came across VHEMT in the early 1990s in connection with Earth First!, a group with which I have major issues, but I can see the point of VHEMT itself. The movement takes a humorous approach to the issue of environmental devastation, although the underlying message is serious. The thesis is basically that the existence of human beings on this planet, in their current state at least, is harmful to all life on Earth and therefore that we should stop having children and deliberately die out, as peacefully as possible. In fact I get the impression that they believe that no manifestation of human life and culture on this planet or off it is positive for the biosphere. Right now, it does appear that if we were all to disappear tomorrow, the planet would quickly bounce back from the damage we’ve done, and this chimes with James Lovelock’s earlier opinion on the Gaia Hypothesis that human arrogance alone makes us believe that we can have a long-term impact on the survival of life on this planet, and that we metaphorically amount to a case of the common cold, which Gaia could easily shake off. Rather disturbingly, Lovelock has now changed his mind and now believes that the Singularity will save the planet but that if we continue in the same vein life will indeed become impossible here. In any event, VHEMT are not misanthropic, but actually want to spare us all from the disasters which will ensue if we continue as we have been. They also acknowledge that the chances of everyone deciding to stop breeding are effectively zero, but that it’s still worth trying, presumably because good will is the only moral impulse (this is Kant’s idea incidentally – I didn’t get this from them). This is reminiscent of my attitude towards veganism, or rather a plant-based diet, in that although I believe it’s essential for human survival given current conditions, that doesn’t mean I think most of the human race will ever adopt such a diet. Nonetheless it isn’t about that for me. It’s just about not being part of the problem in that respect. In other ways I am part of the problem. Likewise with VHEMT. Interestingly, they also have a concept of THEM – Terrorist Human Extinction Movement – which is the military-industrial complex and amounts to the tendency I described in the first part of this post.

They also want to clear up some misconceptions. They are pro-parent, pro-child, voluntary and life-affirming. They believe that children who already exist deserve a good life, which is in fact one motivation for them advocating this view – the starving children cliché. Given that children exist, they also need good parenting. They are not imposing the idea on anyone, i.e. they don’t believe in enforcing anything like abortions, sterilisations or contraception. Finally, they are life-affirming: they don’t want more people to die than are dying already or for people to kill themselves.

I hope I’ve given them a fair press there. It’s also quite persuasive to argue that if a person in a rich country, particularly a middle-class person, has children, those children will then probably go on to consume and cause more damage to the planet over their many decades of life, as would further descendants and so forth up until the point where human life on this planet becomes unsustainable. I do not, however, agree with them.

VHEMT abuts onto several other issues in an interesting way. One of these is the GSM community. If the idea of sex for physical reproduction is abandoned, it makes it harder to argue for heterosexuality being better than homosexuality, and of course if the infliction of existence is seen as a negative, it could even make sex for the purposes of procreation morally inferior to sex where procreation is impossible. However, I wouldn’t entirely agree with that portrayal of queerness as many lesbians, gay men and trans people do in fact want children, and gender dysphoria can even include the negative perception of one’s own barrenness or sterility, because one may be technically fertile but is unable to procreate in the manner which is congruent with one’s gender identity. There’s also the concept of freedom from children. Patriarchy often means that initially similar circumstances gradually drift towards more rigidly circumscribed gender rôles because of such factors as potential employers’ expectation of the nature of one’s parental responsibilities and the biological clock.

Antinatalism generally is often motivated by other reasons than simply hastening the demise of the species. Although I personally consider the coming into existence of a sentient being as morally neutral, it’s undeniable that into every life a little rain must fall. There are claims that our memory is selective and that we rationalise our suffering to minimalise it, partly because we are instinctively driven to stay alive, reproduce and raise children.

There is a sense in which I am myself antinatalist, though not usually about humans. I would far rather not be infested with parasites than have to debate myself over the moral quandary of killing them, and I would definitely prefer houseflies not to breed in my home. I’m also pro-choice, so to that extent it does apply to my own species. In a sense, anti-natalism could be seen as assessing the quality of human life sufficiently negatively that it means that it is usually or always better not to be born. That said, we do have children, although we limited it to two because that amounts to zero population growth if universalised. I should point out that I only really believe in zero population growth for the developed world because of our greater potential for environmental damage, the lower need for support from one’s children and the easy availability of contraception. I wouldn’t impose that on others in the majority of the world, and I wouldn’t even impose it on anyone else. It probably goes without saying that most vegans are probably antinatalist with regard to farm animals, and I’m no exception. I don’t believe that farm animals should continue to be bred and a lot of the time the breeds themselves have been modified with purely human benefit in mind. I do, however, believe in animal sanctuaries if livestock (horrible word) farming has ended.

There are a few issues with human extinction being a positive thing. We don’t appear to be moving towards a managed or planned extinction for a start, and this is problematic because if we leave our machines running, as it were, the risks to various localities become considerable. We have stored toxic chemicals, biological weapons and nuclear facilities, and if any of these fail without human supervision, the environment in the vicinity at least will be severely damaged and at best take a long time to recover. On the other hand, mass extinctions can be increase biodiversity. The problem with this view, though, is that it focusses on proliferation of variety rather than the suffering and death of the creatures going extinct or otherwise being harmed.

There’s a long history of communities which decide not to have children and die out. Entire religious sects have done so. The Shakers, for example, founded in the eighteenth century, were celibate after admission, although they allowed people to join when they were pregnant and they adopted children. The sect found it difficult to support itself economically because mass production was bringing the price of the kind of goods they made by hand and sold down, and there was a constant decline in membership, which peaked at six thousand in the early nineteenth century. There appear to be only two left although they hope others will join them. This is the reason I don’t think movements like VHEMT will succeed: they won’t pass their ideas on to new generations of their own and belief systems acquired during childhood are the most durable for adults. Therefore they would have to rely on converting people, and I just don’t think this is going to happen, so for me it isn’t a question of whether it’s desirable but how likely a planned extinction is by this method.

One of the arguments the founder of the movement, Les Knight, made for human extinction was that even if we were able to achieve harmony with the planet in the short term, this could later change. This seems erroneous to me because the forces of oppression need to win every battle but the forces of liberation only need to be victorious once, provided they’ve truly won, and a sustainable society is only possible if society is liberated.

There’s also the Medea Hypothesis, the “evil twin” of the Gaia Hypothesis. This is the claim that life tends towards self-destruction of its environment. For instance, a few æons ago microörganisms began to produce oxygen via photosynthesis, which poisoned most of the other organisms alive at that point and it took the planet many millions of years to adjust. In general, microbes are seen as responsible for the catastrophes associated with this, and therefore the idea of stewardship by humans could make sense. Maybe we could monitor the biosphere for threats and prevent them. Believers in this hypothesis would attribute the current crisis to it, although this time it isn’t instigated by microörganisms. However, we technically have a choice. Given that some time in the next æon there will be another Medean event, when the Sun wipes out all complex life on this planet leaving only microbes, the presence of intelligent tool users at that point, even if not human, or in fact any successful establishment of biodiverse settlements elsewhere in the Cosmos could have led to the survival of the kind of complex life which originated here. So maybe we owe it to the Universe to continue to survive.

Boris Johnson has recently been criticised for his alleged statement, “let the bodies pile up in their thousands” in response to lockdown measures. He may well not have said this. However, it is the case that the policies his and other governments pursue guarantee that the bodies will in fact pile up in their billions unless something is done. It seems there are three options: their extinction, in the sense that we all drift into a situation where almost everyone dies; our extinction, where VHEMT’s idea catches on universally, and the scenario where we survive. That last scenario is incompatible with capitalism of course, which makes it improbable, but if we did, stewardship to prevent future non-human caused disasters would seem to be morally incumbent upon us.