Turning on Children

“Soylent Green is made out of people!” shouts the hero, Detective Robert Thorn, to the crowds in sweaty, grimy, overpopulated New York City, in the faraway year 2022, after the oceans have mostly died and the world has become a sink of filth, inhumanity, and ignorance. The Soylent Corporation had been advertising its new and tastier product, Soylent Green, which they say is made out of plankton from the ocean. They are lying. Thorn has found that out from his friend Sol Roth, an elderly man who used to be a college professor a long time ago and who is one of the few people around who can read books.

Roth can no longer bear the horror, so he goes to a government-operated suicide center. There, as he lies dying, he sees a short and beautiful film, with green meadows, trees, running streams, and animals—such as the two does browsing the wild flowers and the grass of my backyard as I write these words today, in 2024. Thorn reaches the center too late to save his friend but not too late to see things he has never seen before.

The full truth that Thorn will discover is that the Soylent Corporation has been recycling human corpses to make into food for human beings. The anti-society has ravaged the world and is now cannibalizing itself.

In 1973, when the film Soylent Green was made, people hadn’t fully gotten the message that they should quit their thoughtless pollution of the land, the air, and the water. Old coal mines leached their acids into the river in the town where I grew up, so that the few fish I ever saw from the bridge were belly-up. To this day, the largest point-source of pollution for Chesapeake Bay is a network of mines fifteen miles downstream from us, just where our river joins the Susquehanna, over 200 miles from the bay. People still littered with a numb conscience. Los Angeles was notorious for its smog. Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, was basically dead, killed off by chemical runoff from factories in the industrial cities along its south shore, from Toledo to Buffalo.

It is now 2024. Lake Erie has returned to life. There are fish in my hometown’s river. There are more trees in the United States now than then, and far more than there were in 1800. The area of New Hampshire where I now live is crisscrossed with stone walls in the middle of the woods, acre after acre; what had been farmland is now covered with old-growth maples, oaks, and pines. People no longer toss garbage out of their windows as they drive. World population is leveling, and the threat is now that many nations are shrinking because they are not replacing themselves with children. Food shortages are local and a matter of logistics, not of absolute lack; even India now is no longer a net importer of food.

I will not here enter into the question of global warming because I am not a meteorologist, a physical chemist, an astronomer, a geologist, or an archaeologist. There is another reason why I am thinking about Soylent Green and its terrible ending.

The deer I was watching have moved on into the woods. A few days ago, one of them lay down in the grass for hours; perhaps it was a fawn waiting for its mother. They are elegant, with large child-like eyes, strange and beautiful. Yet they are not so beautiful as a human child. The child’s beauty is of an entirely superior order—breathtaking, if we would but consider it. A little girl, talking to her doll, or a little boy, tracing shapes in the mud with a stick, wholly given up to the act, with that peculiarly unselfconscious gravity that you see in small children quietly at play, is a more beautiful creature than any you will ever meet in this world. 

Compared with the child, the Grand Canyon is a crease in a rock. Compared with the child, the stars are so much powder. The child may be fascinated by the doe, and he may imagine what it might be like to be a deer; the deer cannot return the favor. In the child’s eyes we can see the great metaphysical truth, that the human man is greater than the universe, because even a child can go out to meet that universe, while the universe knows nothing of the child. Compared with the child, the Grand Canyon is a crease in a rock. Compared with the child, the stars are so much powder.Tweet This

Yet the nations of the West have turned against that child. They are committing suicide. We have a new Soylent Green, and it is made out of people: soul and body.  Especially is it made out of children.

Here is what I mean. Take the child in the womb, at twelve weeks. Its beauty is now apparent even to the dullest understanding. You see the shape of the face, the shut eyes, the boy body or girl body, the delicate fingers, the thumb he may be sucking. To intend, deliberately and directly, to kill that child for any reason whatsoever is like grinding him up to butter your bread. If you kill him to build a career, you are mortaring your stones with his marrow. If you kill him to preserve your liberty of motion—whether you are the mother or the father makes no difference to the fact—you are greasing your engine with his blood.

Or here. Take that child at eight or nine years old. It is the time of sexual latency, mercifully provided by our Creator so that the child will have plenty of breathing space, many years for growing up and for learning about the world and who he is, without the distraction or the fever of sexual desire. 

If you intrude upon that time, if you put the child in the way of lewdness, corruption, and the cynicism that quickly follows, you are worse than a polluter of rivers. You are a polluter of children and their souls. If you do so as part of a plan, or if you are committed to doing so because your own sexual sins demand company, then you are building up an edifice of license and grinding up children’s souls to make bricks of. Your Soylent Green is made out of children.

Or here. Charles Péguy once wrote that nobody works except for children. He had in mind a farmer in Brittany. He could not imagine that people would begin to work instead of having children, in a political arrangement that discourages marriage, and thus discourages the forming of homes where children may thrive. It is one thing to determine that you are not called to marriage and family life because God is asking of you a greater sacrifice: He has important work for you to do that cannot be done as well by a married person. 

It is one thing, too, when you are not married because, unfortunately, no one suitable has come your way—a terrible trouble in our time, after so many years of our doing absolutely nothing to help make young men and women marriageable. It is quite another when as many as a third of the population are not married, and when being unmarried and being childless are looked on as liberty, to be celebrated. Considering such a society as a whole, it is the liberty of freefall, of suicide.  

“You can have a house and kids,” said someone the other day, “or you can fly first class. I choose to fly first class.” Such people, defiantly childless, get the Soylent Green of a salary, a name plate, and creature comforts that grow stale with the years; insipid, but a lot less daunting than the adventure of love and marriage.

Soylent Green, then, is made out of you: your own soul; and you are your own cannibal, gnawing away.That is the direst environmental problem we face.