Children of Men

In another class, I'm studying the novel "Children of Men" by PD James, and it tells the story of the end of humanity, ultimately, due to infertility, and the way that humanity envies the "lesser" species of animal for their continued abilities to reproduce.

It addresses hopelessness (of which even now our modern society feels a great deal of, for a variety of reasons) and even more prominently, hostility and prejudice against other groups.

The film version (starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore, 2006) accurately visualizes some of the scenes in the novel where entire minority groups are treated almost like nonhuman animals are, today in some cases. They are rounded up, deprived of even human status and the belief in their basic intelligence.

This of course brings to mind the concentration camps of the Nazi era. The story is set in England, and any person that is not a native of the country has been dehumanized to the point where any sign of protest on their part for their treatment may very well result in cold-blooded execution because when deprived of human status, they are no better than wild animals, and given less importance even than cows because these immigrants and refugees are not even useful to the rest of humanity either in life or death.
Terrorism is on the rise, with militant groups springing up from even the most unlikely places. Officially, the last child born was, as of the start of the novel, 25 years before, and now that "youngest person alive" has now been killed in a pointless bar brawl.
The main focus of the story revolves around a philosophy professor, actually (at least in the book) who is, partly by chance drawn into a scenerio where he alone is responsible for protecting and getting to safety an inexplicably pregnant African woman. The fear is that the child will be killed for the spiteful sake of proving that only white humans are human at all, and having any children be born to the dehumanized section of the species would be an unacceptable truth.

"Children of Men" is a hard novel to read, with its ugly view of racism
and paranoia. I bring it up in my phlog solely for its parallels with the class discussions on how nonhuman animals are often reduced to merely their value in regards to how we can use them, and if they have no use for us, they cease having value at all, like the non-caucasians in the novel.

The scariest part is, this sort of scenerio is not entirely out of the realm of eventual possibility, for whatever biological reason.