The Logic of Oblivion

BreakPoint WorldView » May 2009

In February, Jonathan Porritt, the chairman of the United Kingdom’s Sustainable Development Commission and a member of that country’s Optimum Population Trust (OPT), made headlines when he said that couples with more than two children were placing an “‘irresponsible’ burden of the environment.”

In Porritt’s own words, his comments landed him in the “population doghouse.” The criticism, far from causing him to reconsider his comments, only strengthened his belief that “logic and sound evidence” were on his side and that he and the folks at the Optimum Population Trust were courageous truth-tellers.

Thus, it shouldn’t comes as a surprise that less than two months later Porritt went even further—a lot further. In comments at the Trust’s annual conference, he said that the U.K. must cut its population from its current 61 million to 30 million “if it is to build a sustainable society.”

According to Porritt, “population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure.” What’s more, “each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries.” Therefore, “cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”

In other words, what the “world” needs is a lot fewer affluent Britons (and, by logical extension, French, Germans, Dutch and especially, Americans) to help offset the “pressure” created by all of those Africans, Asians and Latin Americans.

To put Porritt’s proposal into perspective, we need to recall the last time Britain’s population was cut in half: not World Wars I and II. Not even close. (Even the horrendous losses suffered by the USSR during World War II only amounted to a fraction of what Porritt is calling for.) The Napoleonic Wars? Fuhgedaboudit.

The only precedent in British (or any other) history for the kind of population decline Porritt has in mind was during the 14th century as a result of the Black Death. Then, between one-third and one-half of Europe, along with similar numbers in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, died from what is believed to have been an especially virulent strain of bubonic plague.

Needless to say, Porritt and his fellow truth-tellers leave out this bit of history when they address the unconverted about the need to achieve what they envision as a “sustainable population” for Britain and the rest of the world.

This discretion shouldn’t be mistaken for good will towards one’s fellow creatures, at least not the kind that walk upright—a fact that was driven home to British journalist Brendan O’Neill when he attended the Trust’s annual conference.

O’Neill, whose work includes a satire of the environmental movement entitled “Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-dilemmas,” wrote that “there’s something unavoidably spooky about people who spend their waking hours fretting about overpopulation, “

For instance, one speaker lamented the fact that “there are no Nobel Prizes for preventing births, only for preventing deaths.” That prompted O’Neill to reply (hopefully on all our behalves) “Yes, that is because, call us crazy, mankind has traditionally valued the creation of life over the destruction of it.”

What made this complaint and the rest of the goings-on “spooky” was that, one, the speaker wasn’t some fringe wacko but a former leader of Britain’s Green Party, and, two, that no one seemed to take exception to her comments. The rightness of her words and the beliefs that produced them seemed obvious to everyone in attendance.

In the midst of all the “block graphs” and other visual aids that forecast the coming population-induced catastrophe, there was no acknowledgment of what a recent Nobel Laureate might call an “inconvenient truth”: virtually every Malthusian prediction, from “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” to Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” and beyond, has been proven wrong.

While there have been catastrophic famines in that time, their cause, as Mike Davis documented in his magisterial “Late Victorian Holocausts,” hasn’t been so much the lack of food but human incompetence, ideological blindness, and even malevolence. For instance, between 1877 and 1914, tens of millions of Indians died from starvation and starvation-related illnesses. Despite some of the worst droughts in recorded Indian history, there was still enough food to at least avert widespread famine—what turned bad harvests and local shortages into humanitarian catastrophes were British policies, often inspired by the writings of Malthus himself.

Just as human actions and the ideas that inspire those actions can turn plenty, or at least sufficiency, into catastrophe, human creativity and the ideas that spark it can overcome the dreary “zero-sum” world of Porritt and his fellow Malthusians. This creativity, in the form the “Green Revolution,” the name applied to technologies that transformed agriculture after World War II, made countries like India and China self-sufficient in food-production within a few decades.

That’s part of the reason why “Malthusian,” the adjective O’Neill used to describe Porritt, et al., isn’t quite the right word. While Malthus’ ideas hold sway over these folks, what’s at work here goes far beyond bad math. And it isn’t concern for the suffering represented by the block graphs at the conference—on the contrary, as O’Neill tells us, the idea that real people lay behind the numbers thrown about during discussions never came up at the conference.

No, the correct term is “misanthropy,” a “hatred or distrust of humankind.” Like “Agent Smith” in The Matrix, Porritt and company see humans as a kind of virus that, if left unchecked, would destroy their environment. Since the machines aren’t around to check our spread, courageous truth-tellers like themselves must lead the way.

This becomes especially apparent when you consider what is driving the increases in population that prompts all that fretting. As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out, that increase wasn’t the result of more people being born but, instead, of fewer people dying.

To be more precise, the “population explosion” didn’t come about because the average woman had more children—it came about because more of those children survived and then lived long enough to have children of their own, yadda, yadda yadda . . .

Behind the decrease in child mortality and the increase in life expectancy were the kinds of things that none of us, including the members of the Optimum Population Trust, would dream of living without: antibiotics, better medical care, improved nutrition, etc. Instead of seeing these gains in human flourishing as something to be celebrated, the truth-tellers see a herd in need of “culling,” as James Lovelock, the father of the “Gaia Hypothesis,” put it, for the sake of the planet.

It takes a profound dislike of your fellow man to begrudge him food and medical care which, after all, is what those lamented Nobel Prizes were awarded for. Looking back with fondness on the not-so-distant past when expectant mothers feared childbirth (with good reason), expected at least some of the children to die and fifty was a ripe old age isn’t the stuff of a successful political campaign. That’s why the emphasis is on preventing births.

But as the experience of the one country that may meet Porritt’s goals, Russia, demonstrates, reducing the number of births (at least absent draconian measures such as China’s “one child” policy) isn’t enough. Russia’s population is projected to decline from approximately 148 million today to half that by the end of the century.

This kind of decline requires more than a precipitous drop in fertility rates, although Russia certainly has experienced that: since the Gorbachev era, the number of children born to the average Russian woman has gone from 2.2 to 1.3.

What’s also needed is for premature death to make a comeback and that’s exactly what has happened in post-Soviet Russia. Since the fall of the USSR, the life expectancy of Russian males has dropped from approximately 69 years to about 59. As Eberstadt noted in a recent AEI magazine article, Russia now ranks 164th out of 226 nations in life expectancy, behind nations like Bolivia, Iraq and India. Russian males’ life expectancy is comparable to those of men in Cambodia, Ghana, and Eritrea.

For this to happen, all four horsemen had to do more than visit Russia—they had to move there. Illness, substance abuse, accidents, etc., you name the way of dying prematurely and Russia, in Eberstadt’s words, exhibits “impossibly high levels of death in a society that otherwise does not exhibit signs of backwardness.”

No doubt Porritt and company would strenuously object to any suggestion that they advocated “impossibly high levels of death.” In that case they would either be impossibly disingenuous or unconscionably uninformed because there are only two ways to get to what they see as a “sustainable” population: you coerce people into having fewer, i.e. one, child or hope for an increase in mortality.

Population controllers have tried the first, especially in the developing world. Not surprisingly, the people there didn’t take kindly to it. And given the reaction to Porritt’s comments about families with more than two children, I don’t think that those of us in the West would respond any more positively. As for the second, as I said earlier, it’s not the stuff of successful political campaigns.

Thus, we aren’t likely to see any government implementing policies designed to cut their populations in half. And more respectable environmental groups have taken care to distance themselves from Porritt’s comments.

But what’s not being repudiated is the misanthropy that sees human flourishing as a problem. This contempt for human well-being continues to spread, especially among our bien pensants, which gives folks like Porritt hope that their brand of “logic and sound evidence” may yet prevail.

Roberto Rivera joined Prison Fellowship in 1991, first serving as director of research and development for Justice Fellowship. Today, in addition to his work writing for BreakPoint radio and BreakPoint Online, he is a frequent contributor to Christianity Today, Books & Culture, Touchstone, and Citizen magazine, as well as other online outlets including Boundless and Beliefnet. Roberto currently lives in Virginia with the light of his life, his son David.