THE MALTHUSIAN MISANTHROPY OF THE LEFT

For more than 200 years, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, based on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale.

It centers on the question of how to control human population growth and it answers that question by saying we must be cruel to be kind, that ends justify means. It is still around today; and it could not be more wrong. It is the continuing misuse of Malthus.

According to his epitaph in Bath Abbey, the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), was noted for “his sweetness of temper, urbanity of manners and tenderness of heart, his benevolence and his piety.” Yet his ideas have justified some of the greatest crimes in  history.

By saying that, if people could not be persuaded to delay marriage, we would have to encourage famine and “reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases,” he inadvertently gave birth to a series of heartless policies — social Darwinism, eugenics, the Holocaust, India’s forced sterilizations, China’s one-child policy – and remains a hero to the environmental movement to this day.

To this day if you write or speak about falling child mortality in Africa, you can be sure of getting the following Malthusian response: but surely it’s a bad thing if you stop poor people’s babies from dying? Better to be cruel to be kind. Call it Malthusian misanthropy.

Yet actually we now know, this argument is wrong. The way to get population growth to slow, it turns out, is to keep babies alive so people plan smaller families: to bring health, prosperity and education to all.

Charles Darwin, in an explicitly Malthusian passage in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, noted that the “imbecile, the maimed and the sick” are saved by asylums and doctors; and that the weak are kept alive by vaccination. “Thus the weak members of civilized species propagate their kind,” something that any cattle breeder knows is “injurious to the race”.

It was a hint that was enthusiastically embraced by several of Darwin’s followers, notably his cousin Francis Galton and his German translator, Ernst Haeckel. Galton wanted people to choose their marriage partners more carefully, so that the fit would breed and the unfit would not. “What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly,” he argued, “man may do providently, quickly and kindly.”

Galton’s followers were soon outdoing each other in their prescriptive rush to nationalize marriage, license reproduction and sterilize the unfit. Many of the most enthusiastic eugenicists, such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells, were socialists, who thought the power of the state would be necessary to implement this program of selective human breeding.

It became politically incorrect in elite circles in Britain, France and the United States not to urge eugenic policies. To be against eugenics was to be uncaring about the future of the human race.

In Germany, followers of Ernst Haeckel founded in 1905 the German Society for Racial Hygiene, a step that would lead pretty well directly to the gas chambers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he appointed Ernst Rudin of the Racial Hygiene Society Reichskommissar for eugenics.

By 1934, Germany was sterilizing more than 5,000 people per month, and it soon moved on to killing them instead. By the thousands, then tens of thousands, then mass extermination by the millions.

In the United States, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood in 1916, created her “Negro Project” in 1939. Her purpose was unabashed racism. In her words: “Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes is in that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.”

After the Second World War, with the revelation of the horrendous results of these policies taken to extremes in Auschwitz, eugenics fell from fashion. Or did it? The very same arguments resurfaced in the movement to control world population.

In 1948, Henry Fairfield Osborn, founder of the Conservation Foundation that spawned the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Wildlife Fund, wrote an enormous best-seller, Our Plundered Planet – a Malthusian jeremiad against population growth, technology, and “the profit motive.”

Also in 1948 another huge bestselling book by the American biologist William Vogt, Road to Survival, praised the “clear-sighted clergyman” Malthus and lamented that “unfortunately” – unfortunately! – despite World War II and the Nazi Holocaust the population of Europe increased by 11 million people between 1936 and 1946.

By the 1960s, Osborn and Vogt disciples were coming into power and influence, such as Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. Gore could be a poster child for Malthusian misanthropy – witness his recent call for “fertility management.”

Ehrlich shot to fame in 1968 with his gloomy Malthusian book The Population Bomb, where he compared humanity to cancer and recommended radical surgery:

“The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions; the pain may be intense.”

Ehrlich persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to make food aid to India conditional on forcible sterilization of all those who had three or more children: “coercion in a good cause,” he called it.

In 1978, Ehrlich co-authored a book with President Obama’s current science adviser John Holdren, “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment” advocating that “a planetary regime be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world, and for each region for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits.”

Other followers of Osborn and Vogt created The Club of Rome in the late 1960s, devoted to the worship of Malthus. Its first book, Limits to Growth declaring that “the real enemy is humanity itself,” sold over ten million copies. Its second, Blueprint for Survival, exposed the myth that the environmental movement was a grassroots event as it oozed the wealthy elite’s snobbish disdain for consumerism supposedly improving ordinary people’s lives.

Echoing Malthus, the Blueprint declared:

“It is unrealistic to suppose that there will be increases in agricultural production adequate to meet forecast demands for food.”

Both books were published in China providing the blueprint for the Communist government’s infamous one-child policy, as documented by Harvard anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh in her book, Just One Child.

Beijing ordered the sterilization of all women with two or more children, the insertion of IUDs into all women with one child (removal of the device being a crime), the banning of births to women younger than 23, and the mandatory abortion of all unauthorized pregnancies up to the eighth month.

What was the international reaction to this holocaust? United Nations Secretary General Javier Pèrez de Cuèllar awarded a prize to the one child policy’s director General Qian Xing Zhong in 1983, and recorded his “deep appreciation” for the way in which the Chinese government had “marshaled the resources necessary to implement population policies on a massive scale.”

Eight years later, even though the horrors of the policy were becoming ever more clear, the head of the United Nations Family Planning Agency said that “China has every reason to feel proud of its remarkable achievements” in population control, before offering to help China teach other countries how to do it.

A benign view of this authoritarian atrocity continues to this day. Media tycoon and husband of Jane Fonda, Ted Turner, told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time.

We now know that Malthusian misanthropy — the notion that you should harden your heart, approve of famine and disease, feel ashamed of pity and compassion, for the good of “the people” or “the planet” — was and is wrong pragmatically as well as morally.

Indeed, it was known years ago. Earl Parker Hanson thoroughly refuted Vogt and Osborn in his 1949 book, New Worlds Emerging, showing that the solution to both food shortage and too many babies was free market prosperity, not Malthusian starvation.

Brazilian diplomat Josué de Castro, in his 1977 book The Geopolitics of Hunger did the same:

“The road to survival, therefore, does not lie in the neo-Malthusian prescriptions to eliminate surplus people, nor in birth control, but in the effort to make everybody on the face of the earth productive.”

The right thing to do about poor, hungry and fecund people always was, and still is, to give them hope, opportunity, and freedom. Yet that is exactly what the Malthusian Left has always denied them. Instead, the Left’s mantra remains as it has always been: Coercion in a good cause. In that lies the essence of their misanthropy.

Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist, and as 5^th Viscount Ridley is a Member of the British House of Lords. His new book is The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, from which this essay is largely excerpted.