Chapter 3 : The New Malthusians
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Chapter 3: The new Malthusians
A narrow biologistic mindset that has reduced human beings to gene machines, microbes, and intelligent fleas need make little further effort to view people as the biotic equals of fruit flies, whose high reproductive rates are often adduced by popular writers on demography to warn of the dangers of unlimited human population growth.
A population of fruit flies, however, is very easy to decrease or eliminate. We can swat them, starve diem, or diminish their numbers with pesticides. Such ways of dealing with population problems, as they are called, can give rise to a rather unsavory cast of mind. Viewing human beings as merely another animal species — such as fruit flies — creates an ideal setting for thinking about how their numbers can be reduced by foul means as well as fair.
One does not have to be a sociobiologist, microcosmologist, or a Gaian to think this way — aldiough it does help. The idea of coercively diminishing human numbers has a long pedigree in the history of reactionary ideologies. Antihumanistic demographics begin to seem plausible once we begin to diminish humanity’s uniqueness and evolutionary stature by viewing people merely as animal organisms which can be delivered over to their destiny — the harsh laws of natural selection. We can then claim that the social factors that lead to hunger, famine, and disease are actually biological, in the name of, say, ecological imperatives.
The most impressive success story in fostering this way of thinking over the past two generations has been a small book, The Population Bomb, written by a then-relatively obscure Californian entomologist, Paul Ehrlich, and first published in May 1968.[75] The year of its publication was a climactic one in the history of the New Left. Following the uprising of French students in the famous May—June events of that year and the general strike that swept France, the New Left was beginning to abandon its earlier 1960s populist doctrine of ‘participatory democracy’ by the autumn of 1968 and was veering sharply toward a doctrinaire, largely authoritarian Marxist—Maoist orientation that completely marginalized it on its own campus spawning grounds. Gradually a reaction against radicalism — and ultimately against humanism — set in, making biologistic interpretations of social problems a fairly common viewpoint.
These sectarian maladies notwithstanding, radical sentiments remained fairly strong in the 1970s. Indeed, the possibility of combining the lingering libertarian features of the early New Left with an emerging environmental public consciousness opened the realistic possibility of developing a social ecology movement: one that clearly singled out the profit-oriented, competitive market system as the principal source of environmental degradation and that raised the need for a radical restructuring of society along free and ecologically oriented lines.
Based on my own experience as a very active participant in this momentous period, I can say that if there was any single work that aborted a confluence of radical ideas with public environmental concerns, it was Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. By the early 1970s, Ehrlich’s tract had significandy sidetracked the emerging environmental movement from social critique to a very crude, often odious biologism the impact of which remains with us today.
The shift that Ehrlich’s book produced was eminendy suited to the Cold War ideology and suffocating reactionism of the Nixon administration. Whatever Ehrlich personally thought he was doing, the crudity of the book’s message, indeed its ugly misanthropy and antihumanism, provided an ideological prop for highly regressive political views. For years thereafter, the book served as something of a reactionary manifesto for narrowly biologistic interpretations of demographic and ecological issues.
The one-paragraph-long opening of The Population Bomb, entitled ‘The Problem’, remains, in my view, an offensive set of observations such as is rarely encountered in the unsavory demographic literature of recent times.[76]
Ehrlich describes a taxi trip he, his wife, and daughter made through a New Delhi slum, where, to his shock ‘one stinking night’, his cab’s passage was impeded by throngs of people. ‘People eating, people washing, people sleeping’, Ehrlich exclaims with revulsion. ‘People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to busses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.’
People living in New Delhi’s slums have been known to do many other things, such as carve beautiful artifacts, make love, practice humane religious beliefs’, play, dance, sing, laugh, and socialize with each other with great warmth. Despite the desperate conditions of the India’s poor, an earthy cultural vitality persists among them. Certainly Ehrlich saw what he seems to have wanted to see — people begging, defecating, urinating in the streets of a terribly impoverished area of the city that is notoriously lacking in shelter and means of transportation, and that still suffers from disparities of wealth and status deeply rooted in an ugly history of European colonialism.
Our worthy entomologist from the academic groves of California then goes on to declare: ‘As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were, fiankly, Tightened.’ Having negotiated dieir way through the inferno, this middle-class Californian family found itself in the comforts of a fairly modern hotel, after which Ehrlich opined that ‘since that night I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.’[77]
This depiction of extreme poverty is so offensive, so elitist, and so arrogant that any humane reader of the book might well regard it as a moral nightmare. Regrettably, most readers seemingly did not. Although Ehrlich later did suffer reproaches from a small number of critics, their numbers were relatively few, and Ins book became immensely popular, as its long publishing history indicates. Indeed, Ehrlich still figures as an eminent figure in the ecology movement today, and in recent years he has gained favor among the same liberals and radicals whom one would expect to have found his Population Bomb completely repugnant, even as he has lauded reactionaries such as Garrett Hardin.
The remaining pages of The Population Bomb offer us little respite from the antihumanism and arrogance of its opening chapter. ‘Too many cars, we leam, ‘too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide — all can be traced easily to too many people.’[78] The emphasis is Ehrlich’s — and one feels obliged to ask, all? In view of the relatively small number of cars and factories in late 1960s India, is Ehrlich possibly thinking of California, where cars, factories, and excessive pollution were major problems for decades before Ins epiphany in New Delhi?
Leaving aside some of Ehrlich’s science fiction scenarios, we are told that family planning will not suffice to reduce population numbers. It is not enough to offer couples the ‘means’ to control the birth of children, since they may, after all, ‘plan’ to have too many. Stronger measures are required. ‘Everywhere’ in the Third World, ‘people want large families. They want families of a size that will keep the population growing — whereupon Ehrlich regales the reader with statistics that show that Third World women who seek guidance in family planning are mainly those who have already had several children. But then, Ehrlich brightly cautions, ‘remember that planned, well-spaced children will starve, or vaporize in a thermonuclear war, or the of plague just as well as unplanned children.’[79] This statement was egregiously false — family planning has done a great deal to reduce rates of population growth. For all the noxious methods that Indira Gandhi’s government used to force sterilization on India s poor and despite China’s scandalously restrictive measures, in many places women embrace technologies to limit the number of their offspring and recover their humanity as someone who is more than a reproductive factory.
How are Americans to overcome their propensity for large families, in Ehrlich’s view? Aside from bringing their own population numbers and growth-rates down, ‘we are ... going to have to adopt some very tough foreign policy positions relatively to population control, and we must do it from a psychologically strong position.’ Thus: ‘[m]any of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size.’ ‘Rest easy,’ Ehrlich assures the shocked reader; the scientific means for instituting this salutary solution are not even open to us, thanks to the criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area.’[80]
Still, ‘it might be possible to develop such population control tools, although the task would not be simple.’[81] If there is a will, there is a way. But then, Americans would not stand for it. In a breathtaking shift in perspective, we pass from authoritarian solutions (for the Third World?) to financial solutions (for the First World). The US tax structure could be changed to reward citizens for not having children and to punish those who do, Ehrlich proposes. Additionally, we might also consider higher taxes on such perilously dangerous items as ‘layettes, cribs, diapers, diaper services, and expensive toys’, with due allowance that ‘the essentials be available without penalty to the poor (just as free food now is).’[82]
Ultimately, however, we must face up to the fact that these and other such measures ‘would need coordination by a powerful governmental agency. A federal Department of Population and Environment pPE) should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment.’ This agency ‘would promote intensive investigation of new techniques of birth control, possibly leading to the development of mass sterilization agents .’ Indeed, the DPE ‘would encourage more research on human sex determination, for if a simple method could be found to guarantee that first-born children were males, then population control problems in many areas would be somewhat eased’ — since cultural biases usually favor having sons instead of daughters — especially ‘where couples with only female children “keep trying” in hope of a son.’[83] Readers in the 1990s who care to commend Ehrlich for foreseeing current sex-selective technologies are welcome to do so, but the logic of this practice is self-evident, as is revealed by recent sex-ratio figures in China that abnormally favor the birth of male over female babies. I may add that the extent to which outright female infanticide has increased in China as well as gender-detection techniques, has disconcerted some of the most resolute of Western ‘population bombers’.
As for American foreign policy cast in the form of ‘population control’, Ehrlich urges his readers to accept ‘the concept of “triage” borrowed from military medicine. The idea is briefly this: When casualties crowd a dressing station to the point where all cannot be cared for by the limited medical staff, some decisions must be made on who will be treated.’ Accordingly, ‘all incoming casualties are placed in one of three classes’: those who are mortally wounded and should be left to die; those who can survive irrespective of how quickly treatment is given; and those for whom immediate treatment may be a matter of life or death.[84]
Even though we are far from any immediate demographic apocalypse, American aid to famine-stricken or destitute countries, Ehrlich suggests, should be guided by the principle of triage. Indeed, what seems to determine whether a country should be denied food and medicine is its fertility rate. Following William and Paul Paddock, two cold warriors whose 1967 book Famine — 1975! never lived up to its predictive title, Ehrlich perhaps unwittingly casts population control policies along the Cold War alignments of the day. We might give food aid to Pakistan, he suggests, under ‘the tough-minded leadership of President Ayub Khan’, who, Ehrlich neglects to tell us, was the notoriously authioritarian General Muhammed Ayub Khan, who came to power in a military coup against a constitutional government and ruled by decree, despite the facade of democratic ‘elections’.[85] Pakistan, not coincidentally, was on the American side of the Cold War — in contrast to nonaligned India, which Ehrlich suggests (in agreement with the Paddocks) should be denied American food under the triage system.
In Ehrlich’s dazzling view of social and political reality, ‘there is no rational choice except to adopt some form of the Paddocks’ strategy as far as food distribution is concerned.... The Paddocks deserve immense credit for their courage and foresight in publishing Famine — 1975!, which may be remembered as one of the most important books of our age’ — nothing less![86] Doubtless such architects of the Cold War as John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles would have heartily agreed, albeit for reasons that have nothing to do with demographic considerations.
More or less anticipating the authoritarian measures of Indira Gandhi in India and the Communist totalitarians in China, Ehrlich reproves the American government for opposing the suggestion of an Indian official, Dr S. Chandrasekar, that all Indian males who fathered three or more children should face compulsory sterilization. Verily, he declares: ‘we should have applied pressure on the Indian government to go ahead with the plan. We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause’ — at which point Ehrlich expresses astonishment at ‘the attitudes of Americans who are horrified at the prospect of our government insisting on population control as the price of food aid.’[87]
Forced sterilization in the name of a good cause may look uncomfortably like authoritarian measures taken by some of the more reactionary regimes in recent history. If his good cause entails the forcible sterilization of a Third World people — or any people, for that matter, who happen not to accept the demographic apocalypse that explodes on the pages of The Population Bomb — such authoritarian measures would produce immeasurably worse problems in the social and political spheres than the ones they were intended to solve. Coercive measures here or harsh demographic policies there do not usually come in bits and pieces, like candy bars from a slot machine. They are adopted in a general authoritarian context whose logic leads to more encompassing social controls in ever more spheres of life, with a growing state apparatus to enforce them.
As it turned out, Ehrlich’s predictive abilities were imprecise at best. Extrapolating from a number of his premises and forebodings some twenty-five years ago, we should now be wracked worldwide by famines, shortages of raw materials, and rising prices. The planet’s basic resources should be largely depleted, and demo graphically induced starvation should be haunting wealthy and poor regions alike. During my lecture tours in the late 1960s, members of Zero Population Growth (ZPG) would raise dire warnings that the immediate future was terribly portentous.’Not only would there be famines, civil wars induced by hunger, and intolerable congestion, but fortunate would be the Americans who found some living space on man-made islands in the world’s oceans.
Actually, between 1950 and 1990, worldwide grain production nearly tripled, increasing from 631 million tons to 1,780 million tons, at an average rate of some 29 million tons annually. Beef and mutton production rose 2.6 times, from 24 million tons to 62 million. The supply offish rose nearly five times, from 22 million to 100 million tons. Nearly all the major mineral resources rose at comparable or higher rates. All of these increases by far outstripped population growth and — potentially, in a more rational society — might have amply met the needs of the wodd population. The famines that swept over areas of Africa were induced more by political conflicts and World Bank policies than by desertification and lack of land. Today, as new agricultural and industrial technologies emerge, it would be naive to make the inflexible predictions that many Malthusians have advanced over the past twenty-five years, just as it would be naive for so-called ‘Cornucopians’, who see population growth as a desideratum — to claim that the larger the number of the people on the planet, the better.[88]
E hrli ch’s assertion in The Population Bomb that ‘population is far outstripping food production’ proved, in fact, to be grossly erroneous.[89] Nor was the harshness of his recipes for India matched in the advice he offered his American readers. ‘There are some very distinguished economists who do not feel that our capitalist system must be fueled by an ever-growing population or ever-continuing depletion of resources (both of which are impossible anyway),’ he prudently noted. ‘There, in fact, seems to be no reason why the GNP [gross national product] cannot be kept growing for a very long time without population growth’ — which indeed would be entirely possible if the business community could induce consumers to buy several motor vehicles, television sets, computers, and so on, per family.[90] Which would, of course, raise serious problems about the waste of resources, despite the multitude of recycling centers that have sprung up in recent years. In short, the GNP could grow and grow — but what, alas, would be the fate of the planet as industry turns soil into sand, oceans into sewers, forests into timber, and devastates the planet in the process? The social myopia that marks The Population Bomb is nothing less than appalling: a rising GNP is yearned for, amid panic that population growth will deplete planetary resources!
The book found readers across political, social and cultural fines with the carelessness of an infant scrawling on a blank page. It educated people to regard the causes of hunger as resource depletion rather than exploitation, civil war, political instability, and economic greed; imminent resource depletion, in turn, was grossly exaggerated and projected into the near future. Where Ehrlich could even remotely or indirecdy ‘biologize’ a social cause that was producing a deterioration in the human condition, he seemed to do so with gusto, as have his admirers among the quasi-mystical tendencies in the environmental movement. Ehrlich has since retreated from the crassly coercive positions he advanced in The Population Bomb (and How to Be a Survivor, written more than a decade later), yet biological reductionism still pervades his writings. The social conditions that make for population growth and stabilization generally take a back seat to a zoological outlook that nuzzles closely to some extremely unsavory political views.
Not only did The Population Bomb sell some two million copies in numerous reprintings, but Ehrlich personally became a cause celebre, appearing on television shows, at widely heralded conferences, and on the lecture circuit. He addressed thousands of adoring listeners and either directly or indirectly aided in the formation of a particularly rancorous organization, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), of which he became chairman. In sidetracking public discussion of the social sources of environmental deterioration — notably, global corporate capitalism, with its plundering of forests, natural resources, and, significantly, the labor force of underprivileged countries — it set the narrowly biological agenda that increasingly marked the environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s. ZPG zealots and neo-Malthusians dismissed criticism of the social and economic irrationalities of the decade as leftist dogma’ or ‘radical sectarianism’ .
The slogan that came to forefront of the 1970s — one that by no means has faded — was ‘People are Pollution’, a theme that pervaded an appreciable part of the educational curriculum in American elementary and high schools. Two sixth-graders in Kensington, Maryland, for example, composed a poem that drew approval from the growing ‘population bombers’ and budding misanthropes of the time:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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:
The world hath need for thee: getting and begetting,
We soil fair Nature’s bounty.[118]
Around the time these tender lines were penned, Malthusians, in fact, were flourishing all over the place, but the literary abandon Hardin exhibited in a collection of readings, presumably for university students, makes his tribute to Malthus unique, at the very least.
It was not until 1968, however, that Hardin’s views reached a wider public with his ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’.[119] Published in a distinguished scientific journal, the paper became one of the most widely reproduced works in the Malthusian environmental movement of the late 1960s and is still regarded as a classic among antihumanist spokes-people and movements in the EngHsh-speaking world. Hardin’s basic contention was that ‘a finite world can support only a finite population; therefore population growth must eventually equal zero.’ In a common pasture that several herdsmen share, ‘it is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons’. Wars, disease, and poaching keep the number of catde down for some time, but ultimately, ‘each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain’. Although all the herdsmen doing this will lead to overgrazing and the destruction of the commons, ‘each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited’, which must lead to ruin for all, indeed to widespread pollution as well as resource exhaustion. Judging from this scenario, one would suppose that Hardin would put capitalism in the dock because of its drive for endless accumulation and expansion.
Alas, this was not the case. In Hardin’s view, it is not corporate interests and the market economy that are devouring the commons; it is people, more precisely, ‘population density’, winch ‘overloads natural chemical and biological recycling processes’. Since ‘freedom to breed will bring ruin to a11’, so ‘the only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon.’
By the summer of 1987, Hardin’s genteel poetry had mutated still further into bitterly antihumanistic verbiage, comparable to that of Vogt and Ehrlich. In The New York Times in 1987, Hardin declaimed, ‘There’s nothing more dangerous than a shallow-thinking, compassionate person. God, he can cause a lot of trouble.’[120] Shallow thought and compassion, in this case, meant the desire to aid starving children in Ethiopia. ‘Since Ethiopia has far too many people for its resources,’ Hardin declared, ‘if you give food and save fives and thus increase the number of people, you increase suffering and ultimately increase the loss of life.’
Hardin was echoing a theme from the hunger politics of Malthusianism that had been resonating for decades in antihumanism generally: a species that has exceeded the ‘carrying capacity’ of its ecosystem should in fact be permitted to starve — partly to ‘strike a balance with Nature’; partly, too, to weed the fit from the unfit in the struggle for survival. Sometimes it was adorned with genteel qualifications, but not so with Hardin.
Finally, Hardin coined what he calls the ‘lifeboat ethic’. The biosphere in Hardin’s view is akin to a lifeboat of survivors from a sinking ship — perhaps one whose more privileged passengers have secure places in the lifeboat. Those who are flailing in the water must be kept out if the lifeboat is not to sink. This ‘ethic’ rests on undisguised self-interest. Far from constituting a description of the human condition as we know it today, it is a prescription of what the human condition should be, as Hardin seems to see it, in the biosphere.
I have focused on Malthus, Vogt, Ehrlich, and Hardin because of their wide influence: views akin to theirs are all too frequently found in anti-humanist literature. That their demographic predictions have been nearly consistendy erroneous has not dampened the conviction of contemporary Malthusians and antihumanists that their explanations for the ills of the modern human condition are sound Yet to allow ourselves to be guided by triage and the lifeboat ethic is to open our thinking to the potentially genocidal and immoral mentality that has made the twentieth century one of the bloodiest in human history.
What are the facts about population growth? Recent demographic data (1990—92) do not support the thesis that population growth is ‘out of control’, although the constant revisions in population statistics and projections make it far from clear which demographic data are credible. A widely distributed brochure prepared by Zero Population Growth in February 1993, for example, assures the reader with much bombast that the present world population of 5.5,billion will ‘double in approximately 39 years’, presumably to 11 billion by 2032, assuming ‘the current growth rate continues’. This reckless and apocalyptic assumption tends to panic rather than to clarify.
Thereupon the brochure pits jobs against the environment and an open immigration policy against a restrictive one, with minimal evidence of why such an opposition is inherently necessary. Indeed, a strong argument could be made that increased population can give rise to more jobs. Still, ZPG warns ominously: ‘The Population Bomb Is Still Ticking’, indeed with each tick of a metronome (‘at 176 ticks per minute’), ‘the world’s population grows by another person (i.e. net growth, not just births)’. Returning to the fruit fly image of demographic projections, the ZPG brochure warns that ‘if current population growth rates continue, the world will become so densely populated that by the year 2537’ — a truly dazzling sprint into the future — ‘there will be only one square meter per person’.
We have heard similar ‘projections’ before — for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, if not for the year 2537 (the exactitude of this date is truly marvelous!). Not only have most of them proven wrong, but the most recent data contradict ZPG’s predictions. According to a report released in March 1993 by the European Population Conference in Geneva, birth rates in the most populous areas of the continent have declined so precipitously that there will be 100 million fewer Europeans by 2043 than there are today. Italy’s population is expected to shrink from 54 million to 40 million; in the northern part of the peninsula, despite high marriage rates and low divorce rates, the fertility rate is already less than 1.0 per cent. (It requires 2.1 per cent simply to reproduce a given population without a decline.)
Greece’s fertility rate has dropped from 2.2 per cent to 1.4 per cent — a rate that will lead to an absolute decline in the population if it continues. Such negative fertility rates are occurring in Germany, Denmark, Norway, France, Spain, and most dramatically, in many Eastern European countries, especially, Russia, where the decline is precipitous. Only in Poland, Turkey, Sweden, Iceland, and Ireland ‘is the population expected to increase naturally’, observes an article in The European of 1 April 1993, ‘and even among these, there are signs of moves toward smaller families ’.
What of the ‘Third World’ — that is, Ehrlich’s UDCs, or industrially underdeveloped countries? The soaring predictions of growth advanced by antinatal demographers has not been substantiated. In Egypt, the average number of children for each woman has declined from 5.3 to 4.6 (1980—88); Morocco, from 5.8 to 4.0 (1979–92); Kenya, 8.3 to 6.5 (1977—89); Cameroon, 6.4 to 5.9 (1978—91); and Sudan, 6.0 to 4.8 (1978–89). In impoverished Bangladesh, the average number of children for each woman has dropped from 6.1 to 5.5 (1975—91); Colombia, 4.7 to 2.8 (1975–90); El Salvador, 6.3 to 4.6 (1978–88); Indonesia, 3.2 to 3.0 (1987–91); and Thailand, 4.6 to 2.3 (1975–87).[121]
Unlike Western Europe, where demographic declines are usually a product of economic and educational advances, declines in the Third World have been correlated with ‘vigorous’ efforts to encourage family planning and the use of contraceptive devices like condoms — precisely the measures Ehrlich deprecated as insignificant thirty years ago in The Population Bomb. In what Steven W. Sinding, director for population sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, and Sheldon J. Segal, a staff member at the Population Council, call a ‘contraceptive revolution’, women in Third World countries ‘are averaging 3.9 children ... a stunning change’ from the more than six children they had a decade and more ago. ‘The global population’s growth rate has declined faster than many experts thought possible in the late 1960’s. This decline has come mainly as a result of the voluntary use of public and private family planning services, not through coercive measures some advocates once thought necessary.’[122] Ironically, India’s birth rate declined from 5.3 in 1980 to 3.9 in 1991, while Pakistan, so often favored at India’s expense by the triage and ‘population bombers’ of the Cold War era, retains its traditionally high birth rate owing to Islamic religious scruples.
The impact that such marked declines in Third World fertility figures may have on the grim predictions of ZPG, the United Nations, and the ‘population bombers’ is unclear. But only a generation ago few if any neo-Malthusians seemed to think that Western Europe was capable of reaching zero or negative fertility rates. As it turns out, Europe vindicated the demographic principle that improved living standards and education did lead to population diminution. The demographic declines registered in the Third World have very different sources.
Certainly some Third World countries have used very ugly techniques to ‘persuade’ families to reduce the number of children they have. China has not been alone in imposing involuntary methods that require each couple to have only one child. The principal victims of these methods have been women, particularly in agrarian areas and among the poorest classes of society. For a while, getting Third World women — and men — to allow themselves to be sterilized was a lucrative business that provided a fairly good bonus for so-called ‘agents’ of family planning organizations and governmental institutions. In still other countries, such as Brazil, where the average number of children for each woman dropped from 5.75 in 1970 to 3.2 in 1990, it was desperate poverty, neglect, and often illness that led to this sharp decline. In Russia, economic destitution and disease threaten to literally depopulate entire areas of the country — this, I may add, in a land that has already suffered the terrible afflictions of Stalinist and Nazi genocide.
But there are other signs that women in the Third World are taking their reproductive destiny into their own hands, due in great part to their growing desire to carve out lives of their own rather than allow men and archaic traditions to determine their behavior and future. At least half of all Third World women in the early 1990s are using contraception, an immense increase from the one in ten who used contraception during the mid-1960s. This drop, it is generally believed, is the result not simply of improved living conditions — which are ultimately of decisive importance — but of improved education, as Kenya’s dramatic efforts to improve literacy among both sexes suggest. To an extent almost unknown in sub-Saharan Africa, about half of Kenyan women and three-quarters of Kenyan men are literate. Nor is it possible to ignore the growing urbanization of the world, particularly the Third World. City dwellers in Thailand, for example, have only 1.6 children per couple, compared with 2.4 in rural areas.
I am not trying to argue that urbanization on the massive scale it is occurring today is desirable or ecologically sound. My own books on this subject have long argued that we need new types of communities — towns and cities — that are scaled to human and ecological dimensions.[123] What I am emphasizing is that many dismal population projections and images of demographic apocalypse are not only highly uncertain; they are often very flawed. They have been used to create an antihumamstic ambiance among environmentally concerned people that is worse, in terms of its moral effect, than the most outlandish and direst predictions advanced by the Ehrlichs, Hardins, and ZPG acolytes.
Still another compelling issue has not been confronted in the debate around population. Given a market-oriented society that professes to identify economic expansion and profit with progress, would an appreciable reduction of population yield a corresponding decline in production, in the waste of natural resources, or in the consumerism on which the modern economy depends? Can we blame the ecological despoliation of North America, large parts of Europe, and particularly the former Soviet Union on population increases when, in fact, population in these areas has been relatively stable over the past few decades? Indeed, let me put the issue as bluntly as possible: If the American population were halved from what it is today, would American corporations halve their output, their destructive ecological impacts, and their appetite for ever-larger profits?
This question, I submit, can be answered only in a context much broader than extrapolations of the fertility rates of fruit flies and other bugs. Human beings, let me reiterate, are not simply insects, rabbits, or deer; their potentiality for conscious agency makes them unique in the biosphere. Far more relevant to models of human demography is the social milieu in which population issues arise, specifically, the compatibility between a growth-oriented market economy and a viable and sound environment.
That Ehrlich waxed over the possibility that the gross national product (GNP) could merrily continue to grow ‘for a long time without population growth’ reveals, in its own way, the social mypoia that characterizes antihumanists who are prepared to reduce population by any means with little concern about the disastrous ecological impacts of capital expansion.
‘Population bombers’ have addressed demographic issues in narrowly statistical terms, based on a highly simplistic, indeed static, ecological notion — the ‘carrying capacity’ of a region or country. This seemingly fixed capacity, so far as human beings are concerned, is actually very much a function of technological development and social relationships that, in turn, involve such searing issues as the material security, productivity, creativity, and the status of people — women no less than men — not of the crude biologism fostered by Ehrlich, Hardin, and their admirers.
Ecology would be ill-served as a cause as well as a discipline (social as well as natural) if it became a mere justification for a pseudo-naturalism that takes litde or no account of human agency and the social factors that profoundly determine the environment in which we live.
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