This chapter explores the philosophical implications of a slowly ending world -- a place where humanity faces unavoidable and imminent (but not immediate) extinction. Section 1 introduces this new thought experiment. Section 2 asks why we should think about unavoidable, imminent, non-immediate human extinction. I argue that my slowly ending world is both an interesting thought experiment and a credible possible future. Sections 3 to 5 explore three topics in detail from the perspective of this slowly ending world: philosophical pessimism, procreative ethics, and multigenerational optimism. The goal of the chapter is not to defend any particular conclusions about the philosophy of the ending world, but simply to motivate its exploration.

I situate the notion of “natural technology” within the wider view of technology’s relation to human history and values. I offer a brief (original) theory of technology as such, focusing on two themes. First, I take issue with the claim that “technology” has independent causal force. The progress of technology is not inevitable, but each new tool reconfigures our understanding of possibility and necessity. Nor is technology something external to our nature or to who we “really” are. I show how our modern conceptions of equality and human rights rest on and are enabled by industrialization. Second, I show that we nonetheless have the sense that technology is an independent force because of the disparity between technological time (the time it takes for watershed discoveries to be made) and “normal” or moral time (the time it takes for such discoveries to be widely stabilized within settled norms and practices). Anxiety about the effects of “technology” as such is a longstanding feature of modernity, stemming from the continuing acceleration of technological time with respect to normal time. The development of modern technology entails permanent culture wars and a permanent sense of estrangement between us and our new tools.

Chapter 1, “Order and Origin,” begins by asking what we mean when we speak of the “modern novel.” Frequently its origins are traced to Gustave Flaubert, but this assumption deserves more scrutiny than it receives. What was preoccupying Flaubert in the months (indeed the very minutes) when he was formulating his beliefs about the novel, the pronouncements that would go on to become articles of faith for Joyce and other modern novelists? He was terrified that he had fathered a child, and he wrote in great detail about his aversion to the idea of creating new life. This chapter argues that this was not an idle distaste. It was, in fact, evidence of a sensibility (astringent, subtractive, devoted to an ideal of order) that undergirds the very idea of the modern novel that Flaubert inaugurated. This chapter provides close study of the procreative morality of Madame Bovary, L’Éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet to demonstrate how such books, and such attitudes toward the problem of giving life, determined the course of the modern novel.

Chapter 2, “Revenge of the Unborn,” notes the way that creating characters in fiction can resemble giving birth: Dickens, Nabokov, and Flann O’Brien have all played with this idea. In Tristram Shandy the hero even talks about his prenatal existence. But no writer has imagined the dubious zone of preexistence more brilliantly than Samuel Butler. In Erewhon he invented a society where parents appear so guilty about having children that they place all blame on the “unborn.” Infants must sign a document taking responsibility for their existence. This chapter traces the many moral implications of this comic idea. It is part of a long satiric tradition that sees reproduction as one of the essential human follies, but it also looks ahead to contemporary philosophers (Parfit, Benatar, and others) who want to ask how we can impose life on beings (our children) who have not consented to it. Butler’s subsequent book The Way of All Flesh picks up where Erewhon leaves off, depicting in yet starker detail the morally questionable scenario of giving life to creatures who may one day judge their parents for it.