If we didn’t have people
We wouldn’t have pollution,
Get rid of people
That’s the only solution.

Meanwhile the New York Museum of Natural History orga niz ed an ‘environmental exhibition’ in which schoolchildren were trotted past one case after another that showed wanton environmental damage. The last exhibit (if memory serves) was headed: ‘The Most Dangerous Animal of All’ . It consisted of a full-length mirror, in which visitors could see themselves in the full splendor of their terrifyingly human attributes. When I fingered near this distasteful exhibit, nothing impressed me more than the sight of a middle-class white, teacher explaining to a black child the ‘meaning’ of the mirror and the title that surmounted it. Ehrlich, alas, had done his work only too well.

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By no means was Ehrlich alone in his views in 1968; nor has he been the most chilling and coercive of the ‘population bombers’ in the checkered history of demography. The antihumanistic message of The Population Bomb dates back most notably to the publication of Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, known more briefly today as On Population.[91]

The influence of Malthus’s work lasted much longer than its author’s own life, as he died in 1834. Indeed, it gave rise to a militant credo, Malthusianism, that enjoys a vigorous existence even in the closing decade of the twentieth century. To ignore the influence of On Population would be to ignore its socially malignant ramifications, which have nourished some of the most reactionary ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

On Population remains an unsavory, class-oriented, and often cynical tract, despite some mitigating observations Malthus made over the course of seven revisions. Although its admirers often see it exclusively as a work on population, it is actually an ideological diatribe against the humanistic tradition of the Enlightenment. Aimed against such distinguished Enlightenment theorists as the English anarchist William Godwin and the French progressivist Marquis de Condorcet (Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason is a minor target), Malthus’s tract is not only an expression of concern over population growth; it is a pessimistic attack upon the egalitarian ideals of his two principal targets and their belief in humanity’s capacity to significantly improve itself. Like the theories of many sociobiologists today, Malthus’s views subvert the belief that human beings are anything more than simple brutes. Not only must their numbers be kept under control by fair means or foul; people must be kept severely in tow psychologically by their well-to-do betters and by the harsh constraints of natural law.

Malthus’s attack on William Godwin’s ‘system of equality’ — and on Godwin’s belief that the ‘amelioration of society to be produced merely by reason and conviction — drips with sarcasm. ‘In short,’ Malthus declaims after a tongue-in-cheek devotional to Godwin’s humane and rational society, ‘it is impossible to contemplate the whole of this fair structure, without emotions of delight and admiration, accompanied with ardent longing for the period of its accomplishment.’[92]

Having delivered his breast of ‘delight and admiration’ for Godwin’s vision, Malthus quickly turns to a misanthropic evocation that subjects such reasoned and humane utopianism to withering scorn. ‘Man cannot five in the midst of plenty,’ we are told ex cathedra. ‘All cannot share alike in the bounties of nature. Were there no established administration of property [i.e. the state], every man would be obliged to guard with force his litde store. Selfishness would be triumphant. The subjects of contention would be perpetual. Every individual mind would be under constant anxiety about corporal support, and not a single intellect would be free to expiate in the field of thought.’[93] These are the standard arguments that have been used from Aristotie to Hobbes to justify ruling classes and, in Hobbes’s case, the state.

Condorcet’s belief in ‘the indefinite perfectibility of man’ is treated in much the same way as Godwin’s belief in an egalitarian society based on reason: it is rejected largely on grounds of natural law and its immutability. ‘The constancy of the laws of nature and of effects and causes is the foundation of all human knowledge,’ Malthus writes, ‘though far be it from me to say that the same power [i.e. the deity] which framed and executes the laws of nature, may not change them all “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”’ Following this nod to the deity, Malthus advises his reader:

All that I mean to say is that it is impossible to infer [such a change] from reasoning. If without any previous observable symptoms or indications of a change, we can infer that a change will take place, we may as well make any assertion whatever and think it as unreasonable to be contradicted in affirming that the moon will come in contact with the earth tomorrow, as in saying that the sun will rise at its usual time.’[94]

Accordingly: ‘population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.... By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.’[95] Malthus’s conclusion is not only descriptive, based on assumptions or ‘postulata’, as he puts it; it is also prescriptive, a guide to human action.

Although in later editions of his essay Malthus imparted some value to the efficacy of ‘moral restraint’ by individuals in controlling their own reproductive behavior, he never retracted the conclusions that logically followed from his earlier steps. Thus, bistory presumably demonstrates that ‘the superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice’. Indeed, charitable behavior by the rich ‘contribute [s] frequendy to prolong a season of distress among the poor, yet no possible form of society could prevent the almost constant action of misery upon a great part of mankind, if in a state of inequality [as existed in Malthus’s time], and upon all, if all were equal’ — as in Godwin’s egalitarian social vision.[96]

Thus: ‘[t]o prevent the recurrence of misery, is, alasi beyond the power of man’, and all parish poor laws meant to alleviate this inexorable destiny of the poor serve only to deceive them.[97] Indeed, we are told with pious concern, ‘Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves.’[98] Between original sin (‘the virus of mankind’) and the workings of the mundane world (the limited ‘bounties of nature’), Malthus manages to leave us no alternative: neither heaven nor earth can come to our aid.

If the ‘preventive checks’ that thinking people deploy cannot inhibit the production of large families, diminish vice, and make for a better life, Malthus holds, then inexorable ‘positive checks’ on population growth come into play. These positive checks

are extremely various, and include every cause, whether arising from vice or misery, which in any degree contributes to shorten the natural duration of human life. Under this head, therefore, may be enumerated all the unwholesome occupations, severe labor and exposure to the seasons, extreme povertybad nursing of children, great towns, excesses of all kinds, the whole train of common diseases and epidemics, wars, plague, and famine.[99]

The poor generally come in for a drubbing at Malthus’s hands:

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labor; has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has not business to be where he is, At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him, She tells him to be gone from his place at her table] and will quickly execute her own orders, if he do not work on the compassion of some of her guests.[100]

This is a compassion that Malthus, often tongue-in-cheek, derides. Indeed:

Hard as it may appear in individual instances, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful . Such a [moral] stimulus seems to be absolutely necessary to promote the happiness of the great mass of mankind; and every general attempt to weaken this stimulus, however benevolent its intention, will always defeat its own purpose. If men be induced to marry from the mere prospect of parish provision, they are not only unjustly tempted to bring unhappiness and dependence upon themselves and children, but they are tempted, without knowing it, to injure all in the same class with themselves.[101]

Malthus’s later disquisitions on humanity’s moral, sense and its capacity to voluntarily control population growth and invent technologies that could increase food production are more than overshadowed by his heartless, class-oriented hunger politics. From the first edition of the essay to the seventh, Malthus mercilessly accepts the ‘positive checks’ that reduce population.

Indeed, in the second edition of On Population, Malthus proposes horrendous ‘positive checks’ that stigmatize his ideas as utterly unfeeling. Nonetheless they had a considerable influence on the antihumanistic demographic and sociobiological literature that has appeared more recently. ‘In all old states,’ Malthus tells us, ‘the marriages and births depend principally upon the deaths, and ... there is no encouragement to early unions so powerful as a great mortality.’[102]

To insure that the poor do not reproduce, Malthus proposes quite concretely that far from

recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of plague, In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome conditions. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.[103]

These prescriptions were written, let me note, by a Christian parson who gained considerable honor not only in his day but also in our own.

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Like a growing rhizome with innumerable offshoots, Malthusianism brought forth demo graphically based and racist social theories that have beleaguered humanity ever since. The ideology, even as Malthus formulated it in 1798, already nourished the mean-spirited egotism, ‘free enterprise’, and a vicious exploitation of the poor that found such vivid expression in the socially critical novels of Dickens and Eliot. England soon became not only the industrial center of the world but its human charnel house, where the bones of grossly exploited men, women, and children were to be deposited in vast numbers to the ever greater glory of profit. Robert Owen, a truly benevolent manufacturer of the period (whom Malthus criticized) showed at his factory in New Lanark that relatively decent working conditions did not conflict with the making of substantial profits. Visitors from different parts of England and abroad readily celebrated this enlightened industrialist for his human and economic successes — only to return home and visit a veritable hell upon their own working class with little regard for Owen’s practices.

Such Victorian hypocrisies were not the product of Malthus’s demographic views, but the Essay on Population provided an ideological patina for the notorious brutality of English orphanages and poorhouses, and. the execution of poor people for what we today would regard as relatively minor offenses. Above all, it justified the ruthless exploitation of the industrial working class in the decades that followed. Malthusian ideology was employed very effectively to buttress the mean-spiritedness of the time and support the crass exploitation of factory and farm labor, often with a zealotry that was devoid of feeling for human welfare and the simplest of moral decencies.

Charles Darwin’s use of Malthus’s theory of population in The Origin of Species was added an even more chilling tenet to what could, by then, be called social Darwinism. By no means was Darwin responsible for the ideological transformation that his theory of natural selection underwent. But with acolytes like Herbert Spencer et al., natural selection became a ruling-class social ideology of enormous influence. Dissolute scions of British noble houses, predatory bankers and industrialists, even small proprietors and manufacturers with ‘expectations’, and various strata of the labor aristocracy could now conceive of themselves as ‘nature’s elect’, the product of natural selection and the ‘survival of the fittest’ transposed to the social realm.

Accordingly, the ‘failures’ in the competitive game of British capitalism — notably the working classes and the poor — were seen disdainfully as the inevitable victims of evolution’s onward march toward selecting more ‘fit’ individuals. Natural law itself dictated their exploitation for the glory of enterprise and profit — or their disposal on the scrap heap of humanity once they could no longer fulfill their responsibility to the naturally endowed elite, selected for survival and success.

Moreover, social Darwinism was transposed from the domain of domestic affairs to world affairs, providing the rationale par excellence for imperialism — the ‘improvement’ of the dark races of the world who lived in demonic ‘barbarism’. There seems to be an infinite capacity, deeply rooted in tribal dependencies and a darkly primitivist sense of parochialism, to regard outsiders or strangers as non-human and thus as potential enemies. Starting as early as the fifteenth century, Europeans and later Americans had engaged in a genocidal frenzy against native peoples on both continents of the New World and the enslavement of African tribal people. Now, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, armies marched forth from Europe to ‘tame’ the ‘uncivilized’ continents of the planet, presumably a ‘noble’ calling for which the conqueror, colonizer, and missionary deserved a ‘just reward’. The barbarities that Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany inflicted on the territories they claimed and conquered in Africa and Asia read like the horrors Dante described in the lower depths of hell. Even after the slave trade was abolished, imperialist practices were greatly reinforced by social Darwinist ideologies. Profoundly influenced by Malthusian doctrines, almost no restraint was placed on the cruelties that the so-called Age of Imperialism inflicted on the dark regions of the earth, as the literature and vernacular of the time called today’s Third World.

The sense of imperial destiny that social Darwinism imparted served this Euro-American barbarism very effectively. The French transformed the homebred British version into a vulgarized mission to spread the Enlightenment, even the ideals of their great Revolution, to the ‘less endowed’ peoples of the world. The German version took on a specifically racial form, celebrating the virtues of Teutonic Man over all other ethnic groups, particularly people of color. Empire, dressed up as the ‘white man’s burden’, became in all its various nationalistic mutations specific forms of social Darwinism, each with its barely concealed roots in Malthus’s notion of‘fitness’ — namely the ability of the ‘able’ to survive and ‘feast’ at the table of nature.

That the number of places at Nature’s table on which to feast were limited, as Malthus had opined, inexorably raised the question of who was most fit from a eugenical standpoint to find a seat. It was asked which racial traits were worth fostering through breeding techniques and which were not. Flat or hooked noses were apparently not, especially if they were attached to people with the brown or black skin so common in the ‘dark lands’ of the world. Eugenics, whatever its scientific value, was quickly socialized into insidious racial ideologies. Concepts of ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ races came so much into vogue that at the turn of the century, even a Socialist like Jack London celebrated his sturdy Anglo-Saxon lineage. Nietzsche’s ‘blond beast’ became a metaphor for Germanic virtues that many of the Kaiser’s troops carried in their minds as they marched into the trenches of the Western front in 1914.

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Nearly all social Darwinist, eugenicist, and nationalistic racism, as well as myths of the ‘white man’s burden’, are deeply rooted in Malthus’s writings, reaching their apogee in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.

Ideologically, this medley of views provided the rationale for the terrible slaughter that occurred in Europe between 1914 and 1918, initiating what Axno J. Mayer has called the ‘thirty years war’ of the twentieth century — the three decades that immersed a suffering humanity in blood until 1945.[104] Prior to 1914, only one institution seemed capable of countervailing Europe’s drive toward self-annihilation: the Socialist or Second International. Its anthem, ‘The Internationale’, called upon the working classes of the world to maintain a steadfast class solidarity in the interests of humanity as a whole. In ringing prose, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto declared that the proletariat had no country, and it closed with with the slogan: ‘Workingmen of all countries, unite!’

The collapse of the Second International in August 1914, when the French and German socialist parties voted in favor of war credits for their respective countries, provided tragic evidence of the power of nationalist sentiments, even within the working class itself. A primal tribalism had reasserted itself, and for more than four years of terrible slaughter it retained a vigorous hold upon the armies of the Allies and Central Powers.

This tribalism was shaken to its foundations by the promise of a new socialist future which the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 seemed to initiate. In proclamation after proclamation, the new Soviet regime upheld, to its lasting credit, an unwavering internationalism in the face of Euro-American national chauvinism. The years that immediately followed the Bolshevik Revolution were heady with hopes for achieving a new worldwide solidarity between the working classes of the belligerent countries and a revolutionary restructuring of society along rational and humanistic lines.

Indeed, seldom had history been imbued by so striking a sense of universality, of the ‘fraternity’ heralded by the Great French Revolution in 1789, and of a cooperative dispensation of human affairs. In the span between the First and Second World Wars — one of the most decisive periods in the history of humanity — repeated social upheavals posed the crucial question of whether the Enlightenment and its humanistic ideals could be embodied in a rational society. The radical political hopes of the 1920s and 1930s reached their climax in the Spanish Civil War of 1936, the most ideologically charged class struggle of the twentieth century. This conflict, virtually ignored in history textbooks today, placed upon the agenda of the modern era all the ideals that various socialisms had spawned, from the closing years of the French Revolution up to the Second World War. The crushing of the revolution in Spain — in a struggle that lasted nearly three years — marked the end of an era of classical socialism and, above all, internationalist universalism.

The Second World War, its claim to support the Tour Freedoms’ in the Atlantic Charter of 1940 notwithstanding, was fought out along largely chauvinistic and nationalistic lines. Still, never before in history had a bloc of Allied powers — the Western democracies — confronted so radically antihumanist a foe as German National Socialism. There is no historical precedent for the systematic extermination of European Jews.

I refer not only to the immense number of lives that were claimed by the Nazi camp system and the special execution squads in German-occupied Poland and Russia; the past had seen numerically comparable massacres in, say, the Mongol invasions of Eurasia. Nor was the Nazi attempt to exterminate an entire people entirely without precedent in the ancient world. But National Socialism conducted its genocidal policy against the Jews on an industrial basis, in which millions of people were ‘processed’ to their deaths through a camp system that was essentially an abattoir more ruthless and inhumane than a typical slaughterhouse.

Malthusianism, eugenics, social Darwinism, and racial nationalism contributed profoundly to producing the reality of Auschwitz by creating an outlook that made it possible to regard human beings as pestiferous animals. Denied all personality, individuality, recognition, and subjectivity, European Jews in particular were beaten, shot, and gassed as though they were bothersome fruit flies or fleas. National Socialism, ideologically similar to the sociobiological images of human beings so widespread today, can be regarded as the practical culmination of Malthus’s view that the poor are merely objects to be systematically starved, afflicted with disease, and driven to death wholesale.

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Barely had the Second World War come to an end and its dreadful genocidal tallies had been made, when neo-Malthusianism, eugenics, and ‘scientific’ racism emerged with all the ferocity that had marked its existence in the decades that preceded the war.

Eugenics, whose abuse accounts for the racist American immigration laws of 1924 that privileged, supposedly ‘northern’ European immigrants over eastern and southern Europeans, created a new basis for the Malthusian literature of the interwar period and resurfaced in the late 1940s in the United States. Barely two years after the Second World War came to an end, Guy Irving Burch and Elmer Pendell published Human Breeding and Survival; Population Roads to Peace and War.[105] Even while trials for crimes against humanity — the mass murder of millions of Jews and Gypsies — were still going on, this book discoursed on ‘social bases’ of using sterilization to attain ‘peace goals’.

Burch and Pendell repeated an old Malthusian class orientation:

Looking toward a possibly economic test, are persons who are on relief to be encouraged to reproduce while they are on relief, as they have been? ... Are their children more likely to be social burdens than are the children of those who are in better control of their own environment? ...Is it reasonable to ask other citizens to pay more taxes in order that relief recipients may reproduce?[106]

The passage shares a very close linguistic kinship to the reactionary verbiage of the right-wing groups that had gained so much prominence during the years directly preceding the Second World War. That it has persisted for over half a century and is gaining an extraordinary prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, not only among right-wingers but among some liberals, is evidence of its tenacious hold on the public mind.

It is hard to regard the ‘economic test’ to which Burch and Pendell allude as strictly economic. The mid-1940s were a time of sweeping social and cultural dislocation in the United States. Millions of people had been demobilized from the military, and many rural southern blacks were migrating to northern cities. To prepare for the postwar era, all of them required a host of welfare measures, from direct material assistance to government-subsidized educational programs.

The reader of their 1947 book would be justified in feeling uneasy that the authors quote approvingly from the writings of H. L. Mencken, who had achieved considerable notoriety for his misanthropy, elitism, and cynicism.

In basing sterilization on social criteria such as criminality, low earnings, poor health, and lack of education, H. L, Mencken has probably gone farther than anyone before him, in suggesting a large-scale use of the economic test for the right to have children].

In the American Mercury for August, 1937, he observes that in general the sterilization laws apply only to persons who are defective in some gross and melodramatic way. Said he: ( Let a resolute attack be made upon the fecundity of all the males on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, and there will be a gradual and permanent improvement.’[107]

Whereupon the authors coolly discourse on the practicability, as advanced by Mencken, of offering a financial reward to ‘prospective steriles’ that would doubtless ‘result in a stampede to the sterilizing physicians’. Owing to their shiftlesness and infirmity, we are to suppose, the poor and uneducated would be only too eager to make a hundred or even twenty-five dollars to be sterilized (the remuneration suggested by Mencken).

Mencken had belonged to the generation of the ‘roaring twenties’, one of the most racist and nativist decades in the United States. The generation that fought the Second World War, it might be supposed, had outgrown the influence of the Menckens and their kind. But by the closing years of the 1940s, a public debate arose on the need to control world fertility rates by almost any means. Scarcely a year after the Burch and Pendell book appeared, William A. Vogt, chief of the Conservation Section of the Pan-American Union, attracted considerable public attention with his particularly acerbic Malthusian tract, Road to Survival, [108] a postwar precursor of Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. This book was graced by an introduction by Bernard Baruch, whose reputation as a confrere of American presidents seemed to give the book a semiofficial imprimatur.

‘It is certain that, for all practical purposes,’ Vogt wrote, ‘large areas of the earth now occupied by backward populations will have to be written off the credit side of the ledger’ — that is, left to die of starvation.[109] ‘Perhaps the greatest asset’ of Chili, Vogt wrote, ‘is its high death rate’, while ‘the greatest tragedy that China could suffer, at the present time, would be a reduction in her death rate.’ Since China ‘quite literally cannot feed more people’, Chinese ‘men and women, boys and girls, must starve as tragic sacrifices on the twin altars of human reproduction and uncontrolled abuse of the land’s resources.’[110]Thus, Vogt argued, it was incumbent upon the newly established United Nations not to ‘ship food to keep alive ten million Indians and Chinese this year, so that fifty million may die five years hence.’[111]

As if to anticipate the pollution exhibition at the Museum of Natural History of ‘The Most Dangerous Animal’, Vogt directed his harshest criticisms against ‘The Dangerous Doctor’:

The modern medical profession, still framing its ethics on the dubious statements of an ignorant physician [Hippocrates] who lived more than two thousand years ago — ignorant, that is, in terms of the modern world — continues to believe it has a duty to keep alive as many people as possible. In many parts of the ivorld doctors apply their intelligence to one aspect of man’s welfare — survival — and deny their moral right to apply it to the problem as a whole. Through medical care and improved sanitation they are responsible for more millions living more years in increasing misery. Their refusal to consider their responsibility in these matters does not seem to them to compromise their intellectual integrity.[112]

Vogt’s attack on medical attempts to save lives is all the more callous when it is placed in the context of the Second World War period. To a world traumatized by Nazi genocide, it seemed more than ever that the value of human life had to be esteemed and honored as a moral recompense for the sixty or seventy million people whose lives had been brutally claimed by warring powers over a span of some five years. Much of Europe and Asia had been reduced to a cemetery — a devastating consequence that had to be countervailed psychologically by a new respect for human life.

What made Vogt’s book particularly repellent was its revival of the antihumanistic mindset, advancing a moral cost-accounting principle in dealing with matters of life and death — a principle that was to be raised repeatedly in the postwar Malthusian literature. Survival issues, for all practical purposes, were translated into a social ledger of debits and credits, as though human beings were mere commodities whose value was to be inscribed or erased by virtue of their usefulness to American self-interest in world affairs. Starvation, famine, disease, and poverty were seen primarily in amoral numerical terms, with complete disregard for the uniqueness, creativity, and personality of the individual.

Yet nearly every specific prediction Vogt advanced in his book proved to be wrong. The newly established Socialist [Labor] government of Britain did not, as Vogt predicted, plunge the country into famine between 1948 and 1978. Nor did the Japanese and Germans outbreed the ‘carrying capacity’ of their lands and succumb to famine, as Vogt suggested. Preceding Ehrlich by some two decades, Vogt, his nose highly sensitized to various demographic odors, argued: ‘Anything we do to fortify the stench — to increase the population [of Europe] — is a disservice both to Europe and ourselves.’[113]

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Around the same time, Garrett Hardin of the University of California at Santa Barbara entered the demographic debate with his own eugenic recipes. In his Biology: Its Human Implications, published in 1949,[114] Hardin was vexed by the lack of concern over the hereditary nature of individual IQ. To allow environmental factors an influence on human intelligence, in Hardin’s view, was to disallow the results of animal experimentation altogether and espouse for humans a ‘doctrine of exceptionalism that is repugnant to scientists’.[115]

A strong dehumanizing thrust runs through even the seemingly neutral observations in Hardin’s writings, resonating as they do with an elitist bias that is distinctly unsavory. Consider, for example, the way Hardin treats the matter of ‘charity’ in a later (1951) edition of Biology: ‘When one saves a starving man, one may thereby help him to breed more children. This may be a good or a bad thing, depending upon the facts.’ Precisely what the ‘facts’ are that distinguish ‘a starving man’ from one who is affluent and well-fed — his class status, social misfortunes, and lack of privilege — remains unstated.

Some people maintain that very poor people are, on the average, less able and intelligent than the rich, and that their deficiencies are, in part, due to hereditary factors. Others maintain that pauperism [sic] is exclusively a matter of bad luck; or that paupers are better genetic material than millionaires . There is a need here for indisputable facts; but whatever the facts, aid to paupers undoubtedly has genetic consequences.[116]

Amazingly, Hardin may not know what the facts are, but he seems to know without doubt that assistance to paupers c has genetic consequences’.

To readers in the early 1950s, a statement of this kind, however equivocal, would have left a strong impression that poverty is the result of genetic failings. As the recent publication of Charles Murray and Richard Hernnstein’s The Bell Curve shows,[117] a genetic explanation is now settling into racially oriented studies of IQ as well as material deprivation. Given the very complex social, political, and cultural factors that interact to produce economic disparities for different sectors of a given population, any genetic relationship between poverty and wealth can be justly dismissed as specious.

As might be expected, Hardin’s view of Malthus is cloyingly reverential. The parson and the professor are cheek-to-jowl on most of the basic tenets of Malthus’s famous essay. Hardin’s reverence for the parson is not merely declarative but poetic. Thus he declaims: