- Zubrin, Robert
Merchants of Despair.
New York: Encounter Books, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-59403-476-3.
-
This is one of the most important paradigm-changing books since
Jonah Goldberg's
Liberal Fascism (January 2008).
Zubrin seeks the common thread which unites radical environmentalism,
eugenics, population control, and opposition to readily available means
of controlling diseases due to hysteria engendered by overwrought
prose in books written by people with no knowledge of the
relevant science.
Zubrin identifies the central thread of all of these malign belief
systems: anti-humanism. In 1974, the Club of Rome, in
Mankind at the Turning Point,
wrote,
“The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”
A foul synthesis of the ignorant speculations of
Malthus
and a misinterpretation of the work of
Darwin led
to a pernicious doctrine which asserted that an increasing human
population would deplete a fixed pool of resources, leading to conflict
and selection among a burgeoning population for those most able to
secure the resources they needed to survive.
But human history since the dawn of civilisation belies this. In fact,
per capita income has grown as population has increased,
demonstrating that the static model is bogus. Those who want to constrain
the human potential are motivated by a quest for power, not a desire
to seek the best outcome for the most people. The human condition has
improved over time, and at an accelerating pace since the Industrial
Revolution in the 19th century, because of human action: the
creativity of humans in devising solutions to problems and ways to
meet needs often unperceived before the inventions which soon
became seen as essentials were made. Further, the effects of human
invention in the modern age are cumulative: any at point
in history humans have access to all the discoveries of the past and,
once they build upon them to create a worthwhile innovation, it is
rapidly diffused around the world—in our days at close to the
speed of light. The result of this is that in advanced technological
societies the poor, measured by income compared to the societal mean,
would have been considered wealthy not just by the standards of the
pre-industrial age, but compared to those same societies in the
memory of people now alive. The truly poor in today's world are those
whose societies, for various reasons, are not connected to the engine
of technological progress and the social restructuring it inevitably
engenders.
And yet the anti-humanists have consistently argued for limiting the
rate of growth of population and in many cases actually reducing
the total population, applying a “precautionary principle”
to investigation of new technologies and their deployment, and
relinquishment of technologies deemed to be “unsustainable”.
In short, what they advocate is reversing the progress since the year
1800 (and in many ways, since the Enlightenment), and returning to an
imagined bucolic existence (except for, one suspects, the masters in
their gated communities, attended to by the serfs as in times of
old).
What Malthus and all of his followers to the present day missed is
that the human population is not at all like the population of
bacteria in a Petri dish or rabbits in the wild. Uniquely, humans
invent things which improve their condition, create new resources
by finding uses for natural materials previously regarded as
“dirt”, and by doing so allow a larger population to
enjoy a standard of living much better than that of previous
generations. Put aside the fanatics who wish to reduce the human
population by 80% or 90% (they exist, they are frighteningly
influential in policy-making circles, and they are called out by
name here). Suppose, for a moment, the author asks, societies in
the 19th century had listened to Malthus and limited the human
population to half of the historical value. Thomas Edison and Louis
Pasteur did work which contributed to the well-being of their
contemporaries around the globe and continue to benefit us today.
In a world with half as many people, perhaps only one would have ever
lived. Which would you choose?
But the influence of the anti-humans did not stop at theory. The book
chronicles the sorry, often deceitful, and tragic consequences when
their policies were put into action by coercive governments. The destruction
wrought by “population control” measures approached, in some
cases, the level of genocide. By 1975, almost one third of Puerto Rican
women of childbearing age had been sterilised by programs funded by
the U.S. federal government, and a similar program on Indian reservations
sterilised one quarter of Native American women of childbearing age,
often without consent. Every purebred woman of the Kaw tribe of
Oklahoma was sterilised in the 1970s: if that isn't genocide, what is?
If you look beneath the hood of radical environmentalism, you'll find
anti-humanism driving much of the agenda. The introduction of
DDT in the 1940s
immediately began to put an end to the age-old scourge of malaria.
Prior to World War II, between one and six million cases of
malaria were reported in the U.S. every year. By 1952, application of
DDT to the interior walls of houses (as well as other uses of the
insecticide) had reduced the total number of confirmed cases of
malaria that year to two. By the early 1960s, use of DDT had
cut malaria rates in Asia and Latin America by 99%. By 1958, Malthusian
anti-humanist
Aldous Huxley
decried this, arguing that “Quick death by malaria has been
abolished; but life made miserable by undernourishment and over-crowding
is now the rule, and slow death by outright starvation threatens
ever greater numbers.”
Huxley did not have long to wait to see his desires fulfilled. After
the publication of Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
in 1962, a masterpiece of pseudoscientific deception and fraud,
politicians around the world moved swiftly to ban DDT. In Sri Lanka,
where malaria cases had been cut from a million or more per year
to 17 in 1963, DDT was banned in 1964, and by 1969 malaria cases had
increased to half a million a year. Today, DDT is banned or effectively
banned in most countries, and the toll of unnecessary death due to
malaria in Africa alone since the DDT ban is estimated as in excess of
100 million. Arguably, Rachel Carson and her followers are the greatest
mass murderers of the 20th century. There is no credible scientific evidence
whatsoever that DDT is harmful to humans and other mammals, birds,
reptiles, or oceanic species. To the anti-humanists, the carnage wrought
by the banning of this substance is a feature, not a bug.
If you thought
Agenda 21 (November 2012)
was over the top, this volume will acquaint you with the real-world
evil wrought by anti-humanists, and their very real agenda to
exterminate a large fraction of the human population and reduce the
rest (except for themselves, of course, they believe) to pre-industrial
serfdom. As the author concludes:
If the idea is accepted that the world's resources are fixed
with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome,
each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is
fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or
nation is the enemy of every other race of nation. The ultimate
outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation,
tyranny, war, and genocide.
This is a book which should have an impact, for the better, as great
as Silent Spring had for the worse. But so deep is the
infiltration of the anti-human ideologues into the cultural
institutions that you'll probably never hear it mentioned except
here and in similar venues which cherish individual liberty and
prosperity.
April 2013 