Atticus Finch and the Missing Extraterrestrials

Are We Loathing Ourselves Out of Fertility?

Kepler 705b from NASA website. Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, public domain from Wikimedia Commons.

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Can Atticus Finch, version 2.0, explain the absence of extraterrestrials in the Universe? A few days ago, just a few minutes apart, two musings streamed across the screen of my iPad—one on aliens and one on Atticus—and I espied a common thread.

The first musing was a Substack essay by Glenn Reynolds: “Free Will, Children, and the Great Filter: Thoughts on the Population Implosion.” In it, Reynolds ponders the Fermi Paradox—Enrico Fermi’s 1950 question of why we have never found evidence of extraterrestrial beings in a universe that ought to be jammed full of advanced civilizations. Reynolds examined the present-day collapse of fertility rates and offered reasons why advanced civilizations might die by choice, rather than by violence. In a reply, I suggested that organized self-loathing might by a key factor.

The second musing was a text by a childhood friend—a fellow Southerner who mentioned having just read Harper Lee’s 2015 novel, Go Set a Watchman—a quasi-sequel to Lee’s 1960 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. In the older novel, Atticus Finch defies ferocious public opinion in his Alabama town to defend an African American client accused of rape. In the latter novel, set 20 years later, Finch’s daughter discovers that her father is a racist, cavorting with the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Council. In my friend’s words, ‘[Go Set a Watchman] reveals Atticus to be someone we were led to believe he was not [in To Kill a Mockingbird].” I responded that I was quite familiar with Go Set a Watchman, but had decided back in 2016 not to read it for three intertwined reasons—the third of which accords with my Note on self-loathing and childlessness-by-choice.

The Great Filter

Reynolds’s essay begins with a discussion of the Great Filter—an umbrella term for a set of explanations for the Fermi Paradox. The idea is that once an extraterrestrial civilization is advanced enough to transmit signals to other habitable worlds (including Earth), some inexorable process will silence those signals before inhabitants of those other worlds are technologically capable of listening.

So, imagine that when it is 723 AD on earth, the denizens of Kepler 705b, 903 light-years away from us, construct their first radio tower and begin broadcasting programs of news, music, and religious inspiration. Those transmissions begin flying past earth around 1626 AD but, alas, no one on earth has a radio with which to hear the jaunty theme song for “Good Morning, Kepler 705b.” Broadcasts fly by Earth for the next 250 years, until silenced by the Great Filter—nuclear war, for example. The final broadcasts zoom past Earth in 1876, when electronic communication extends only from Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Watson in the next room.

Over the next half-century or more, Earth’s radio technology develops in stages, but there is nothing but eternal silence from the direction of Kepler 705b. We just missed them. Meanwhile, Earth begins its broadcasts in the 1920s, and our signals fly past Kepler 442b, 1,193 light-years away. But by the time that planet’s radio receivers are up and running, Earth, too, have succumbed to nuclear war, rogue AI, mile-high glaciers, gain-of-function research, or some such catastrophe.

The Great Filter suggests that technologically advanced civilizations are like prairie dogs, popping up one-by-one and then quickly disappearing down again before seeing another prairie dog or being seen by another.

Reynolds, however, posits a more decrescendo terminus. Rather than nuclear holocaust or fatal plague, the civilization simply ceases reproducing in numbers sufficient to sustain the species. “Is the ‘great filter’ simply choice?” he asks. “Choice whether or not to reproduce.” He notes the recent worldwide declines in birthrates. China imposes its one-child policy until its population begins a slow-motion, Wile E. Coyote-style plummet. Elsewhere, careers take priority over childbirth. Reynolds recounts a Chinese tech worker whose will to procreate was desiccated by COVID lockdowns and economic turmoil. But beyond China’s suicidal extinction-by-mandate policy, other countries are voluntarily experiencing similar fertility collapse—perhaps, he said, because families and society-at-large no longer pressure the young toward fecundity. As Reynolds writes:

“In Japan and South Korea, which never had the one-child policy, birth rates are frighteningly small.  South Korea has the world’s lowest birth rate: “The country’s fertility rate, which indicates the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime, sunk to 0.81 in 2021 – 0.03% lower than the previous year, according to government-run Statistics Korea.  To put that into perspective, the 2021 fertility rate was 1.6 in the United States and 1.3 in Japan, which also saw its lowest rate on record last year. . . .  To maintain a stable population, countries need a fertility rate of 2.1 – anything above that indicates population growth. South Korea’s birth rate has been dropping since 2015, and in 2020 the country recorded more deaths than births for the first time – meaning the number of inhabitants shrank, in what’s called a ‘population death cross.’”

It is as if the world has become Trevor and Carol, the feckless high-IQ yuppies in the opening scene of Idiocracy (2006), fussing and fretting for years over whether to have a child until Trevor dies in, well, embarrassing circumstances and Carol grows infertile through years of indecision. (Warning: the dialogue is occasionally off-color.)

At the end of his essay, Reynolds does offer the possibility that population decline might be halted by high fertility rates among specific groups:

“Perhaps in a few generations the world will be disproportionately composed of Amish, Mennonites, Orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Muslims, traditionalist Catholics, and the like.

Such a world might get along fine, at least from the perspective of its inhabitants, but be less disposed to interstellar travel, which suggests that the great filter may not actually be fatal to a species, just to its capacity to be noticed by others.”

To Kill a Civilization

Now comes the transition to Atticus Finch.

Responding to Reynolds’s piece in a Substack Note, I suggested that an epidemic of acculturated self-loathing may be a strong contributor to the worldwide decline in fertility:  

“Another contributing factor is that we live in an era of officially mandated, retroactive, highly granular oikophobia. Educators incessantly tell you that, not only is the country bad, but that you and your family specifically are bad—and always have been and likely always will be. You have been intractably racist since birth, with no pathway to redemption. You despoil the environment. And whatever you have was stolen. Your own people's history is irredeemably negative, and things will only get worse. Those so indoctrinated naturally ask, ‘Why would I want to bring someone as awful as I am into the world, especially in a country as terrible as mine, just when things are about to spiral downward?’ The ‘Amish, Mennonites, Orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Muslims, traditionalist Catholics’ that you mention are those who have not bought into this narrative.”

Minutes after reading Reynolds’s speculation on doom, my friend’s text on Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (2015) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) arrived. In my friend’s words,

“[Go Set a Watchman] reveals Atticus to be someone we were led to believe he was not [in To Kill a Mockingbird].”

In my response, I cited three reasons why I had no intention of reading the second book:

[1] Go Set a Watchman violates basic rules of literary structure by telling readers, “Everything you’ve been told about Atticus Finch for the past 55 years is BS.” The Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird is a strong competitor for the noblest character in all of American literature. His legal defense of Tom Robinson accentuates the highest aspirations for American jurisprudence and puts himself and his children in the cross-hairs of a violent mob. His closing argument can bring chills to anyone with an impulse toward justice and humanity. Here’s the pivotal scene from the 1962 film version, largely taken word-for-word from the novel.

Go Set a Watchman, set 20 years after To Kill a Mockingbird, portrays Finch as a racist who speaks condescendingly about African Americans, avidly opposes integration, and cavorts with Klansmen. In this it violates a sort of Inverse of Chekhov’s Gun. Chekhov postulated that if a pistol is seen in the first act of a play, it must be fired during the second act—otherwise, there’s no pointing having the gun in the first place. The inverse of that proposition would be that if a pistol is fired in the second act, the writer must have made its presence clear in first act, lest its presence seem contrived. Yes, some scholars have long argued that the Finch of Mockingbird was less than perfect on race and other things. For me, their criticism accords with the logic of social media mobs—any peccadillo, no matter how small and how long ago, is an indelible stain on a person. (I reiterate that I’ve read Mockingbird, but have no intention of reading Watchman.)

[2] Harper Lee’s role in producing and publishing Go Set a Watchman is and shall likely remain problematic. The book was published when Lee was 89 and had suffered a major stroke. Friends and heirs bickered over whether she was mentally competent to agree to publication. The state of Alabama investigated whether coercion was involved. Go Set a Watchman appears to have been an early draft of what would eventually become To Kill a Mockingbird. My guess is that in the 1950s, her publisher suggested that a courageous 1930s defender of decency would be a more interesting and saleable character than a run-of-the-mill 1950s bigot, and Lee reinvented the character along those lines. For over half a century, she declined to do anything with the Watchman manuscript and swore for years that she would never publish another novel. Maybe with full use of her faculties, she had a change of heart at 89 and decided to trash the reputation of her life’s greatest creation. I doubt it.

[3] But my real objection to Go Set a Watchman brings me back to the decline in fertility. Redefining Atticus Finch as a racist was an act of our era’s penchant for self-loathing. It was simply unacceptable to have a decent, honorable character whom people could look to for inspiration. Even a fictional character must be sullied and prepped for re-education camp.

Ours is a period of iconoclasm, defined as—“the action of attacking or assertively rejecting cherished beliefs and institutions or established values and practices.” Literary classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn are ejected from the curriculum. Roald Dahl is bowdlerized. New York’s Museum of Natural History removes its statue of Theodore Roosevelt. Western Civilization is denigrated. Freedom of speech is reviled. Abraham Lincoln was, above all, a racist. Dead European composers are to be scorned. The American Revolution was primarily a fight to preserve slavery. Intersectional theory declares broad categories of humanity to be guilty, guilty, guilty—not for doing something unacceptable, but rather for being something unacceptable.

Having been there, myself, I can attest that the decision to become a parent demands a considerable measure of optimism. If educators tell you that you are an oppressor, that your parents and grandparents were oppressors, that you and they will always be oppressors, why would you want children? If educators tell you from early childhood that your ethnicity is marked by avarice, your history is exploitative, and your presence on earth is a burden to the other species, would you really want to augment the problem? If you think your children will live in a dying world, that there are no heroes worth emulating, that there is no goodness and decency, that speech is dangerous and possessions larcenous, then what positive good would come of adding one more burden to the planet?

And if they’ve hidden the awful truth about Atticus Finch from us since 1960, what other deceptions are they hiding from us? Why subject an extra child to such an existence?

Lagniappe

“Deteriorata”

In the 1960s and 1970s, the words to “Desiderata,” an inspirational prose poem, seemed to hang on half the walls in America. Posters erroneously ascribed it to a 17th century carving on the walls of Old St. Paul’s Church in Baltimore, but it was actually written in the early 1920s by Max Ehrmann, an Indiana attorney, poet, and author. It became the basis for a spoken-word hit recording by Les Crane in 1971. The words are quietly upbeat, urging cautious optimism, civility, with a central message of:

“You are a child of the universe
No less than the trees and the stars;
You have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

In 1972, a year after Crane’s recording hit the charts, National Lampoon issued a parody, titled, “Deteriorata,” spoken by Norman Rose, whose words included:

“You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back.
… …
With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal,
The world continues to deteriorate.
Give up!”

What was, 50 years ago, a party record for laughs, is now the deadly serious central message of the American education system, from kindergarten through graduate school.

(FWIW: Rose also narrated the famous Juan Valdez Colombian coffee commercials. Crane said he preferred Rose’s parody to his own recording.)

Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. He publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack-based journal of economics, science, and culture. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos

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