#chip smith

Eulalie, NYC, 5/8/26 Eulalie was a small French restaurant in the Tribeca neighborhood of NYC.  Run by Chef Chip Smith in the kitchen and Tina Vaughn doing front of house and wines.  ...

Put it this way: I think that Camus was right to reject political and philosophical appeals; I think he was wrong to make nice with the abyss that remains after such appeals have been filed and cert. denied. Mortality salience is key—“your death and mine,” as Jim Goad puts it. It’s just that I am no longer convinced that the inevitability of death endows a life—or “life itself”—with any special significance. The inarguable fact is that every one of us has been dropkicked into a life we didn’t ask for, that leads to death. And the world ends when you die. Not a metaphor. Zeros don’t multiply. The apple isn’t just rotten; it’s shot through with poison. You say this kind of thing and people respond in predictable ways. I will be enjoined to throw myself off the nearest bridge. I will be advised to man up for the struggle. I will be told that I am a coward or that God is the answer. Don’t think for a second that I haven’t thought it through. There are plenty of shiny distractions to keep my interest for the time being. There are animals to be fed, deadlines to be met, and I want to see how Breaking Bad ends. But deep pessimism is where aesthetics breaks down for me. In particular, it’s what impels me to reject appeals to transcendent “survival” that resound in racialist and environmentalist rhetoric. Pace every zombie movie ever made, I don’t think “survival”—in the literal, generational, tribal, or metaphorical sense—is anything to celebrate. It’s just a Darwinian tic.

Q: Your anti-natalist arguments appear to be based on essentially individualistic assumptions. What if individual suffering really did not matter that much, and the object of concern was the nation, the race, or the welfare of the universe itself? What if one did not regard each human life merely as an end in itself, but as a means to higher ends, such as the unfolding of high culture, grand politics, science, exploration, etc.? That sort of vision would give intelligent and responsible people reasons to reproduce, and also furnish an argument for reducing the reproduction of the selfish, dumb, and happy-go-lucky. A: I’m not blind to the romance of human achievement. If I were, I wouldn’t bother publishing books, and my reading list would start and stop with instruction manuals. But the Greater Good always strikes me as being a cunt-hair shy of the Greater God, and I lack the imagination to believe in either.

Maybe I’m being cryptic. What I mean to consider is simply that the evolutionary trajectory of intelligence can, has, and may yet lead to very bad things. It may one day be possible, for example, to create sentient experience—let’s not be so bold as to call it “life”—not out of gametes but in the deep quick of quibit states, and if this much should come to pass, it isn’t so far a stretch to imagine that such intelligent simulations—okay, they’re alive—will be capable of suffering, or that such will be made to suffer, perhaps for sadistic kicks, perhaps in recursive loops of immeasurable intensity that near enough approximate the eternal torture-state that’s threatened in every fevered vision of Hell to render the distinction moot. What I further mean to consider—again against the hope we assign to intellectual progress, caught up in the story as we are—is that if and when the problem of scarcity is tidily resolved under the reign of nano-bots, that maybe then we’ll be left with basement nukes on the cheap. Or perhaps it’ll be some other smarty-tech-hatched wizardry with which to hasten the final curtain. We haven’t heard from the ETs is all I’m saying, and there’s a reason. Or perhaps no such things will happen, or perhaps they aren’t worth considering in any case. Could be we’ll just march forward a bit longer, getting slightly stupider or slightly smarter or somehow holding onto the present equilibrium, each of us meeting our own private ends—little apocalypses all—as we continue to behold the dumb show of a natural order that seduces us at turns with chimerical notions of progress and myth and meaning. A bit more of the same, let’s say.

Well, high intelligence may very well be an evolutionary dead-end. I’m certainly at a loss to come up with a good reason as to why a once-adaptive trait that you and I happen to value should enjoy special pleading before the blind algorithmic noise that is natural selection.

There is also the fact that antinatalism is spectacularly provocative. I’ve observed first-hand how people who come to the subject convinced that the idea is merely silly often become hostile if not downright vituperative as the discussion progresses. And such hostile reactions aren’t confined to popular forums; there’s a scholarly article by Sami Pihlström that argues, inter alia, that antinatalism falls under this weird category of “ethical unthinkabilities” that should be proactively refused entry into the open court of academe.

A more sophisticated objection rests on something called the “non-identity problem,” or simply “non-identity.” This refers to the notion that qualitative states (pain and pleasure) cannot be meaningfully applied to nonexistent or potential beings and that therefore the absence of pleasure or pain is only relevant when applied to already-existing beings. It sounds impressive at first blush, but people who rest their counterargument on non-identity usually fail to consider how intuitive and commonplace non-identity premised reasoning is in our day-to-day experience. At the front, it’s worth noting that most practical and moral decisions are brokered in consideration of some potential—but presently non-existent—state of affairs. Otherwise no one would take out insurance policies, plan for retirement, save for college, etc., and the entire legal basis for negligence would be nonsensical. The same intuitive orientation is just as common where the future welfare of potential humans goes. Think of the childless couple who chooses to buy a home near a “good school” because they are “planning a family.” Or think of the last baby shower you were dragged to. Or, if such examples seem a mite trivial, consider the case where a husband and wife both carry the gene for Tay Sachs and contemplate having a child. Does anyone really think that the “non-identity problem” obviates the moral dimension of a decision that entails a 25% chance that a child will be fated to live a short life characterized by excruciating pain? The truth is that the non-identity problem is taken seriously only when it is posited in countermand to philanthropic antinatalist reasoning. It’s more of a refuge than a serious philosophical problem.

You might think that a super-duper perfect life is enough to offset the imbalance. It’s not. This is because the special category of absence that applies to those who are never brought into existence entails the absence of deprivation. The person who is never born may never know the pleasure of pizza-eating or the pain of a pinprick, but he is eternally spared the latter and he experiences absolutely no sense of deprivation in missing out on the former. Now, one reflexive response that many people come up with when they first encounter the pleasure/pain asymmetry is some version of the counterclaim that “Pain is NOT bad!” People will say, “I had cancer, and I’m a better person for it!” or “My divorce was terribly painful, but later I met the love of my life, and I’m better for it!” or they might hang their rejection on the textbook case of the a child who naïvely touches an open flame thereby triggering a nerve-sensory response thereby inculcating the useful lesson that, as Phil Hartman’s Frankenstein character would put it, “FIRE BAD!” The problem with this kneejerk response, of course, is that it confuses the instrumental value of (some) pain with the underlying quality of pain itself, which is always, by definition, bad. That’s why it’s pain. If you don’t accept that, you can just as easily tweak the formulation to apply only to “non-instrumental pain,” which invades every human life.