A Cosmic Battle Between Faith and Chance

On pessimism, hope, and Alfonso Cuarón's "Children of Men".

“A child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.”
~ Wordsworth

I was young, and naive, and full of the callous materialism and crude utilitarianism of our times when I first saw the film A Quiet Place. The product of those conditions was a hyper-rationalism that couldn’t understand why the couple in the film would choose to bring a baby into their post-apocalypse world, rather than abort it with cold and calculated efficiency.

That pessimism about bringing a child into a degraded world has become the norm with eco-doomers, for whom the future is a wasteland, brought on by the “overabundance” of people today, unfit for the babies of tomorrow. And that’s bled out into the wider culture: a quarter of voluntarily childless Americans cite climate change as a reason not to have kids, while more than a third point to anxiety over “the state of the world”.¹

I needed a lot of growing up to see, on my next viewing of A Quiet …