Voices in the Wilderness

Why Does the World Still Ignore 2.6M Stillborn Children Every Year?

Posted on | May 20, 2014 

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

Why are the nearly three million children who die on their birth day every year still ignored? This is the question posed by a report released today in the Lancet. And it’s the question that should be on the table at the World Health Assembly  this week in Geneva. The high number of deaths hasn’t changed over the years, and neither it seems have the reasons for the utter failure of the world’s maternal health policy elite–see my blog of three years ago.

Delegates interested in making a real difference through the nascent Sustainable Development Goals now under negotiation will be keen on the report’s findings that what could save millions of maternal and newborn lives in the coming years is straightforward: more skilled birth attendants and better health facilities.

To put the matter baldly, we suggest the reason why these children continue to die is because the United Nations and its agencies want them to.  The Malthusians, the population controllers, the eugenicists, and the Greenists all advocate a smaller population for the world as a solution to its problems. 

Drowning in Oil

Peak Oil, Where Art Thou?

The catastrophists have been warning for the past ten years of mankind approaching “peak oil”–that is, the time when oil consumption exceeds supply, leading to a drastic global shortage of energy.  Peak oil was supposed to have occurred around now.  Except . . . .

North America to Drown in Oil as Mexico Ends Monopoly

By Joe Carroll and Bradley Olson 
Dec 17, 2013 6:54 AM
Bloomberg News


The flood of North American crude oil is set to become a deluge as Mexico dismantles a 75-year-old barrier to foreign investment in its oil fields.
  Plagued by almost a decade of slumping output that has degraded Mexico’s take from a $100-a-barrel oil market, President Enrique Pena Nieto is seeking an end to the state monopoly over one of the biggest crude resources in the Western Hemisphere. The doubling in Mexican oil output that Citigroup Inc. said may result from inviting international explorers to drill would be equivalent to adding another Nigeria to world supply, or about 2.5 million barrels a day. 

Note: the lack of production and supply from Mexico was due to stupid, myopic, misguided protectionist policies in that country.  The shortage was an artificially induced situation, created by bad government. 

That boom would augment a supply surge from U.S. and Canadian wells that Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) predicts will vault North American production ahead of every OPEC member except Saudi Arabia within two years. With U.S. refineries already choking on more oil than they can process, producers from Exxon to ConocoPhillips are clamoring for repeal of the export restrictions that have outlawed most overseas sales of American crude for four decades. 

US oil production has suffered the from the same kind of Malthusian ignorance and misguided protectionism as Mexico.  The US government has systematically locked-up huge oil deposits in no-mining areas.  But developments in new exploration and oil production technologies (such as fracking) has allowed the private sector to boost its production substantially.  The pressure to remove the export restrictions upon oil produced in the US–another stupid, myopic, misguided protectionist policicy–will put the Obama administration in a bind.  Reflexively this is not what the president will like–being a warrior to stop global warming and all.  His best-case-scenario is to have oil priced at $1,000 a barrel so that wind power will become more economic. But that hand can only stop the leaks in the dyke for so long. 

An influx of Mexican oil would contribute to a glut that is expected to lower the price of Brent crude, the benchmark for more than half the world’s crude that has averaged $108.62 a barrel this year, to as low as $88 a barrel in 2017, based on estimates from analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Five of the seven analysts who provided 2017 forecasts said prices would be lower than this year.

The revolution in shale drilling that boosted U.S. oil output to a 25-year high this month will allow North America to join the ranks of the world’s crude-exporting continents by 2040, Exxon said in its annual global energy forecast on Dec. 12. Europe and the Asia-Pacific region will be the sole crude import markets by that date, the Irving, Texas-based energy producer said.

Rats.  Another looming catastrophe bites the dust.  But let’s never forget, this catastrophe was the result of illicit government overreach in both the United States and Mexico.  When governments get involved and meddle in areas in which they have no competence or divine warrant, bad things happen.  The unintended, unexpected consequences are the real catastrophe.

It’s Not Fair

Economic Ignorance and Moral Turpitude

In his book, Fairness and Freedom, David Fischer makes some observations which represent a touchstone for truth and error in economics.  Fischer has written a historical comparison of New Zealand and the United States.  The latter nation has focused over time upon political and social freedom (from government rules, regulations, and controls) whilst New Zealand has been shaped by notions of fairness (which implies egalitarian distribution at least of opportunity, if not actual goods). 

We will endeavour to critique Fischer’s book in a future post, but for the moment consider this partly insightful, yet misguided quotation:

Where [economic] growth is positive, and material limits are less constraining, it seems reasonable to believe that one person can become rich and prosperous without impoverishing another.  On that assumption, American ideas of liberty and freedom, especially freedom of opportunity, became plausible ways of achieving fairness and natural justice.  Not all Americans share that way of thinking, but many do so–especially those who have been successful in their own lives. 

The great majority of Americans strongly oppose policies of wealth distribution.  When the Democratic Party nominated Senator George McGovern for president in 1972, he campaigned in part for the redistribution of wealth in the United States.  Most Americans–white collar and blue collar, rich and poor–rejected the idea out of hand.  Even people of very modest means condemned it as unjust to hard workers. . . . Americans don’t dream of equality.  They dream of wealth.  They don’t want to get even; they want to get ahead.  And they deeply believe that in this dynamic society one person can become a millionaire without beggaring another. 

In New Zealand, attitudes are very different.  The land was taken long ago.  Within two generations of settlement, a growing nation began to run up against its physical limits.  In such a setting, most ideals of social justice could not be realised simply by freedom of opportunity.  They required intervention, planning, and even the redistribution of limited resources and material possession such as land.  New Zealanders began to act on this assumption as early as 1890.  [David Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 149f.]

Fischer’s description of New Zealand physical limitations is laughable.  What on earth does he mean when he says, “the land was taken long ago” and that “within two generations of settlement, a growing nation began to run up against its physical limits”?  New Zealand is a small geographical landmass to be sure.  Yet its population is only four and a half million people today.  Agricultural pasture comprises just 40 percent of the land area; urban areas comprise less than 1 percent!  If New Zealand were to have the population density of Java, it would support over eighty million people.   [Ministry for the Environment Report]  What Fischer ought to have said is that by 1860 New Zealand reached its physical limits, given the economic paradigm of the time–a very different, but more accurate and meaningful proposition.Yet we also suspect that Fischer is right on the nose insofar as people in New Zealand thought back then they had reached the physical limits of resources, as they do to this day.  Malthus was alive and well back then, as he is today.  But this is a very different proposition to what Fischer is espousing.

In New Zealand it is actually widely believed that one can only get ahead economically by beggaring one’s neighbour.  In the United States it is still believed (though not now by the majority of the population, one ventures to suggest) that one can get wealthy and benefit one’s neighbour at the same time.   Further, the even more insightful have pointed out that in a free society one most likely becomes wealthy because of the benefit provided to one’s neighbour.  Why would people purchase or desire what we manufacture or provide?  Only if we put their interests above our own and serve them by offering them what they consider to be appropriate, desirable, and needed goods and services at affordable prices. 

Secondly, a suppressed premise of the physical limits theory of economic development is actually false.  We now know that all created material existence is actually nothing more than tiny swirling balls of energy in empty space. (Recall that an atom–and thus, all material reality–consists of 99.999 percent empty space).  All of it.  Energy, not matter, is the staff of material existence and to all practical matters without limit.  It is in practice infinite, although not in absolute reality.  Thus, the economic future and growth of New Zealand is not limited because we are a small country at the bottom of the world.  The economic future is wide open, as the potentialities of limitless energy are discovered and harnessed and exploited.  There are no final limits to economic growth and development. 

New Zealand’s penchant for socialism without doctrines, for restrictions upon economic growth, for government intervention and planning, and the systemic forced redistribution of  property is built on a fallacy–a mistake.  But, worse, it is built upon ethical evils and immoral foundations.  Covetousness and theft–the twin motivations of “fairness” when seen as economic and material equalisation–are as evil as murder and rape.  That’s why they both appear in the Ten Commandments. 

But why is it that New Zealand rightly perceives murder and child abuse as grossly evil, whilst shrugging shoulders at institutionalised, legally sanctioned, covetousness and theft?  Because of the prevailing Malthusian falsehoods that the economic pie is fixed, finite, and limited and that when one eats at the pie, others go hungry.  That’s why most New Zealanders think that forced redistribution of property is justifiable.  It is a small evil to combat a bigger evil.  That’s why the country is besotted with who is eating what from the pie, rather than upon the ethical ways to make the pie bigger. 

The geographic smallness of the country provides an illusory corroboration to the myth of a small, limited pie.  Fundamental ignorance of the nature of material existence is another.  But the root cause lies in the rejection of God and His holy law.  If we were a nation that predominantly lived in the fear of God, covetousness and institutionalised theft would be as odious to us as the grossest crimes.   Instead, we view it as a crowning glory.  We give it euphemistic names, like fairness. 

Impeccable Ignorance

Population Control Goes Out With a Whimper

Posted on September 6, 2013
by Stefano Gennarini, J.D.
Turtle Bay and Beyond

 Here are three articles from the past week that address the slow hard fall from grace of population control…

1. Jonathan Last’s Review of a book that exposes Paul Ehrlich for the fraud he was. Ehrlich, an entomologist, not a demographer or economist, wrote the all-famous “Population Bomb” in the 1960s and became a world celebrity by prophesying that resource scarcity would drive up commodity prices causing humanitarian disasters of biblical proportions. Needless to say, his poor science helped the world turn a blind eye to brutal population control programs for the past five decades. He was exposed repeatedly by Julian Simon, an economist, who rightly predicted that with population increases, production would also increase and commodity prices would go down. Simon believed human ingenuity could resolve resource scarcity, and he was right. He also insisted that what populations need are robust civil and political rights regimes to enable individuals and enterprises to flourish.
Simon perhaps never gained popularity among conservatives because his science led him to be in favor of a liberal U.S. immigration regime.

2. The Daily Beast has a piece about Obama’s “science diplomat”, John Holdren, people say he is a genius, but they find it hard to explain why he espouses Ehrlich’s bad science, even after it has been repeatedly disproven. So much for making decisions based on scientific evidence. The U.S. is still funding population control programs, and is still advocating that other countries do it. We are currently involved in re-educating women in the developing world, and especially Africa, to have fewer children. Apparently, they have been living for millennia with the false belief that having many children will ensure a comfortable retirement for their future. We are informing them instead that having fewer children (2 children max) will ensure a better future for them because the few children they have will love them all the more when in their old age they have to support them by themselves without the help of other siblings.

3. In this week’s Friday Fax, Susan Yoshihara looks at the profound instability created in China by the one-child policy. According to Yoshihara the changes to the one child policy that are in the works are too little too late. Not only is an economic and humanitarian disaster already unfolding, the one-child policy has actually become a cultural norm so engrained in the chinese way of life, that few chinese couples are even interested in having more than one child, preferably male. This is the kind of social engineering that U.S. family planning policies want to achieve in Africa. It is also the kind of norm that European countries are actively trying to fight, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, with little success.

After decades of population control programs to avert a seemingly inevitable population Armageddon, the people and institutions that are primarily responsible for the false alarmism are on their way out. While some at the United Nations, UNFPA, USAID and the Obama administration still cling to their condoms and bad science under the pseudonym “family planning program” or the oxymoron “reproductive rights” ( it never has to do with women choosing how many children to have and always with USAID telling women not to have any more children), economists and demographers are all agreed that the problem the world is facing is population aging and population decline – caused by human beings. Unfortunately, it will takes  decades, and maybe centuries to re-trace the trail of misery and ignorance they have left.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

No Bureaucratic Shadow 

Culture and Politics – Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 20 February 2013

All the early returns indicate that the available supply of energy in North America is virtually inexhaustible. Using words like inexhaustible is problematic to Malthusians, but it looks to be a good description. Energy, it appears, is about as abundant as salt water. With the discovery of new reserves and the development of new technologies of extraction, it has become apparent that if we had an unregulated energy economy, we could drive back and forth across the country for pocket change on the gallon, and do so without getting permission from a single federal official. And that, at least to them, presents a problem.

So it will be important to watch how the Left, the avowed enemies of you staying warm and dry without their permission, will easily pivot away from all the old arguments in order to keep cheap and clean energy out of your house and car. It used to be “no blood for oil,” but when entrepreneurs said, “okay, we found plenty for us here,” the argument suddenly shifts, and we are talking about a bunch of other stuff. But the upshot of their objections is always against obtaining cheap energy.

They are against drilling in the Middle East — there are impoverished Third World nations affected. They are against drilling in Oklahoma — there are non-impoverished residents of Tulsa affected. And they are against drilling in the far reaches of the north — there are entertained and bemused caribou affected.

Charles Krauthammer recently said that liberals don’t care what you do, so long as it is mandatory. This is the real issue. A wealthy middle class (and energy costs are a big part of this) is a middle class that will be much harder for them to manipulate and control. Suppose for a moment that the vast majority of the populace had food, clothing, warmth, and so on, and it was all affordable and within reach. The first and most obvious fact about this state of affairs is that such a people would not need a bunch of government mongers hovering around them. Obviously intolerable.

So these people would rather us be poor and dependent upon them than well-off and independent of them. The government-johnnies want to offer everyone goodies . . . with conditions. But their conditions involve us becoming craven in various ways. That is a lot harder for them  to do when the free market offers a bunch of goodies . . .  with different conditions, things like enterprise, courage, hard work, and no hassles afterwards.

The thing to pray for is for energy innovators to outrun the regulators. This is comparable to the development of the Internet — which was long gone down the road before the graspers woke up to what was happening.

Another way of putting this is that advocates of free markets, which all consistent Christians ought to be, should be looking for entirely new areas for human freedom to operate in. This is a planet filled with opportunities, and most of them have never had a bureaucratic shadow fall on them yet. Why? Because no one has thought of them.

Mass Liquidation Project

Facing the Facts

We posted recently on Malthusian Cassandras who are predicting the end of civilization and humanity as we know them. The only solution (we are told) is twofold: reduce population growth and globally redistribute property.

Now The Onion has got in on the act, “reporting” on a recent scientific convention in the US.  Here are some excerpts.  (Warning: contains advocacy of extreme justifiable violence.)

WASHINGTON—Saying there’s no way around it at this point, a coalition of scientists announced Thursday that one-third of the world population must die to prevent wide-scale depletion of the planet’s resources—and that humankind needs to figure out immediately how it wants to go about killing off more than 2 billion members of its species.

Representing multiple fields of study, including ecology, agriculture, biology, and economics, the researchers told reporters that facts are facts: Humanity has far exceeded its sustainable population size, so either one in three humans can choose how they want to die themselves, or there can be some sort of government-mandated liquidation program—but either way, people have to start dying.

And soon, the scientists confirmed.

“I’m just going to level with you—the earth’s carrying capacity will no longer be able to keep up with population growth, and civilization will end unless large swaths of human beings are killed, so the question is: How do we want to do this?” Cambridge University ecologist Dr. Edwin Peters said. “Do we want to give everyone a number and implement a death lottery system? Incinerate the nation’s children? Kill off an entire race of people? Give everyone a shotgun and let them sort it out themselves?”

“Completely up to you,” he added, explaining he and his colleagues were “open to whatever.” . . .

“The longer we wait, the higher the number of people who will have to die, so we might as well just get it over with,” said Dr. Chelsea Klepper, head of agricultural studies at Purdue Univer­sity, and the leading proponent of a worldwide death day in which 2.3 billion people would kill themselves en masse at the exact same time. . . .

Sources confirmed that if a death solution is not in place by Mar. 31, the U.N., in the interest of preserving the human race, will mobilize its peacekeeping forces and gun down as many people as necessary.
“I don’t care how it happens, but a ton of Africans have to go, because by 2025, there’s no way that continent will be able to feed itself,” said Dr. Henry Craig of the Population Research Institute. . . .

Malthusian Cassandras

Purblind Arrogance and Invincible Ignorance

Malthusian despair grips the Western world in a vicious vice.  It is a puzzling phenomenon if one considers that the economic theories of Thomas Malthus were discredited centuries ago.  But the puzzlement exists only if one also believes in a false, objective rationalism, ignoring the blind foolishness attenuating the human heart.  Did not the prophet say, “the heart is deceitful above all things and is desperately sick; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

We are sonorously told by modern sages that over-population threatens the continued existence of the planet.  Assuming that the world is one vast fixed, zero-sum game, our oh-so-wise cassandras insist that more mouths to feed means less food for everyone.  If one eats more, everyone else is condemned to eat less.  If a country expends more energy, there is less energy for every other nation. 

The latest voice is the respected and revered Royal Society.  Its purblind stupidity belies its reputation.
  But its “official”, don’t you know.  And we are sure that The Guardian gets thrills from contemplating the terrible plight in which we poor humans find ourselves.  Horror fascinates, after all.  Besides warning the world of impending doom like a brazen klaxon does give one a sense of moral self-righteousness and elitist raison d’etre. Someone has to be smart enough to sound the siren, after all.

As we review the Royal Society’s latest stupidity, let’s be mindful that from the time of Malthus onward, such ignorant speculations of the coming destruction of the planet and of humankind as we know it have always been a pre-occupation of elites and the relatively wealthy.  Scratch the scrofula and underneath you will discover a paternalistic disdain of others–particularly those peoples who are living in relative poverty.  The rumoured extinction of the British snob is greatly exaggerated, it would seem.

World population needs to be stabilised quickly and high consumption in rich countries rapidly reduced to avoid “a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills”, warns a major report from the Royal Society.

Contraception must be offered to all women who want it and consumption cut to reduce inequality, says the study published on Thursday, which was chaired by Nobel prize-winning biologist Sir John Sulston.  The assessment of humanity’s prospects in the next 100 years, which has taken 21 months to complete, argues strongly that to achieve long and healthy lives for all 9 billion people expected to be living in 2050, the twin issues of population and consumption must be pushed to the top of political and economic agendas. Both issues have been largely ignored by politicians and played down by environment and development groups for 20 years, the report says.

Before we turn to the needs of poorer, developing nations, let’s pause to inquire how reducing consumption in the developed countries could possibly help poorer countries?  After all, if the West stops consuming all those goods and services, the markets for export in poorer countries collapse, consigning them to continuing poverty and degradation.  Only if you have swallowed discredited Malthusian theories could you seriously make such an argument.  It represents a modern equivalent of the Flat Earth Society. 

But the sheer number of people on earth is not as important as their inequality and how much they consume, said Jules Pretty, one of the working group of 22 who produced the report. “In material terms it will be necessary for most developed countries to abstain from certain sorts of consumption, such as CO2. You do not need to be consuming so much to have a long and healthy life. We cannot conceive of a world that is going to be as unequal as it is now. We must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than a $1.25 a day out of absolute poverty. It’s critical to slow population growth in those countries which cannot keep up with services.”

Last time we checked the elements of carbon and oxygen were pretty plentiful.  And CO2 is the life-gas, the greenest gas of all.  The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the better the growth of all plants and trees.  But beside that, note the attendant sub-theme: population growth must be controlled in poor countries.  The more people you have, the less everyone gets.  Economics is the art of distributing a fixed, finite pie.  Therefore, the less mouths, the better for all.  And it’s your mouths, over there, that must be shut down.  (We in the West are a dying civilization.  We appear to be in terminal population decline.  Demographically, it is impossible now to reverse the declining population growth unless there is a rapid change of mind towards childbearing and raising large families.  We want the rest of the world to follow our ignoble example.)
    

Most of the global population growth in the next century will come from the 48 least developed countries, of which 32 are in Africa, said Ekliya Zulu, one of the authors and president of the Union for African Population studies. “Taking Africa alone, the population will increase by 2 billion this century. If we fail and fertility levels do not go down to 2.1, (from 4.7 now) the population [there] may reach 5.3 billion. When we slow down population growth we empower women and provide more money for least developed countries to invest in education. The majority of women want fewer children. The demand to reduce fertility is there”, he said.

Get this, slower population growth means more money for less developed countries.  How on earth does that causality work?  We have no idea, unless . . . unless the economic theory which is a step-child of Malthus’s ideas is coming into play.  And the step child is socialism. You guessed it.  Limited resources.  Need to be fairly distributed (“from each, according to his ability, to each according to his need”). The State must so regulate and thus re-distribute. 

The authors declined to put a figure on sustainable population, saying it depended on lifestyle choices and consumption. But they warned that without urgent action humanity would be in deep trouble. “The pressure on a finite planet will make us radically change human activity”, said Pretty.

“The planet has sufficient resources to sustain 9 billion, but we can only ensure a sustainable future for all if we address grossly unequal levels of consumption. Fairly redistributing the lion’s share of the earth’s resources consumed by the richest 10% would bring development so that infant mortality rates are reduced, many more people are educated and women are empowered to determine their family size – all of which will bring down birth rates”, said an Oxfam spokeswoman.

There we have it.

Malthusianism is discredited.  Socialism is discredited.  But the purblind foolishness of Unbelief keeps clinging to these exploded nostrums because it has nothing else.  These “experts” insist on playing god.  Their own arrogance demands it.  Their foolish speculations stroke their arrogant egos, as they tell themselves they are making  a real contribution towards being the Saviour of the human race.  Yet what they have advocated will bring unimaginable suffering and degradation to millions.  But that’s ok.  They, themselves, at least will be protected.  Their moral superiority knows no bounds. 

The heart is deceitful above all things and is desperately sick; who can know it? 

Western Civilisation

The Age of Vaunting Pride and Gnawing Doubt

The title of Dickens novel “Great Expectations” aptly summarizes a dominant theme in Victorian England (and the West in general at that time, for that matter).  There was a widespread, burgeoning belief that nirvana was just ahead.  Much of the optimism was due to advances in technology and science. 

To our jaded eyes, technological advances have become the norm.  Another “breakthrough” has become decidedly deja-vu.  But in the late eighteenth century this was not the case.  Consider Sebastien Mercier’s account of the first balloon flight in November 21, 1783:

A memorable date.  On this day, before the eyes of an enormous gathering two men rose in the air.  So great was the crowd that the Tuileries Gardens were full as they could hold; there were men climbing over the railings; the gates were forced.  This swarm of people was in itself an incomparable sight, so varied it was, so vast and so changing.  Two hundred thousand men, lifting their hands in wonder, admiring, glad, astonished; some in tears for fear the intrepid physicists should come to harm, some on their knees overcome with emotion, but all following the aeronauts in spirit, while these latter, unmoved, saluted, dipping their flags above our heads.

What with the novelty, the dignity of the experiment, the unclouded sky, welcoming as it were the travellers to hsi own element, the attitude of the two men sailing into the blue, while below their fellow-citizens prayed and feared for the safety, and lastly the balloon itself, superb in the sunlight, whirling aloft like a planet or the chariot of some weather-god–it was a moment which never can be repeated, the most astounding achievement the science of physics has yet given to the world.  [Cited in I. F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation 1644–2001 (London: Book Club Associates, 1979), p.29f)

Very quickly, in the popular mind, arose the general belief that nothing was impossible from this point onwards.  Man could conquer every dimension, every limitation.  He would be as God.  He would become his own redeemer.

The poet, Robert Southey, reflecting on Jenner’s discovery of the healing powers of vaccination, called him the “liberator of mankind”.  Here is Southey’s picture of the glorious future about to dawn:

Fair promise be this triumph of an age,
When Man, with vain desires no longer blind,
And wise though late, his only war shall wage
Against the miseries which afflict  mankind,
Striving with virtuous heart and strenuous mind
Till evil from the earth shall pass away.
Lo, this his glorious destiny assign’d!
For that blest consummation let us pray,
And trust in fervent faith, and labour as we may.
Ibid., p.42

But, at the same time,  there arose a deeply pessimistic view of the future.  Thomas Malthus and his followers, arguing from the limit of finite resources, painting a picture of development and growth to the point of causing calamity.  Malthus raised the question of whether the human race would survive.  One vivid presentation of the forthcoming calamity was penned by Frenchman, Cousin De Grainville in Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man).  So distressed did de Grainville eventually become, he took his own life on February 1, 1805.  He had penned that, due to rapid human advances, the end of human life was very close.  Here is his vision of mankind’s future:

The inhabitants of the ancient world, after having exhausted their soil, inundated America like torrents, cut down forests coeval with creation, cultivated the mountains to their summits, and even exhausted that happy soil. They then descended to the shores of the ocean where fishing, that last resource of man, promised them an easy and abundant supply of sustenance.  Hence, from Mexico to Paraguay, these shores of the Atlantic Ocean and the South Seas are lined with cities inhabited by the last remains of the human race.
[Cited by Clarke, ibid., p. 44f]

These two contradictory themes were a distinct product of the Enlightenment: firstly, man builds Paradise upon earth through reason, discovery, and technological prowess; secondly, and conversely, man destroys the planet.  Both themes dominate discourse in the West to this day, with the balance currently in favour of the pessimistic option. The destructive power of technology so evident in two world wars and the bloodshed of the twentieth century has caused the optimistic belief in inevitable progress to wither.  Climate changers have become the modern-day manifestations of de Grainville and Malthus. 

T. S. Eliot told us the world would end, not with a bang, but a whimper.  When men proclaim their liberation from the Living God and replace Him with Mankind as the self-saviour, a paralyzing scourge of fear and doubt begins to gnaw at the edges of the mind.  It is inevitable.  Man was made to serve God, and therein lies his glory.  When he casts God out and seeks to take His place in the Garden, dread stalks his imagination.  His self-proclaimed glory is eventually overtaken by an insipid sterile whimpering and whining in the dark.

Byron has already written the obituary of Western Unbelief:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went–and came, and brought no day

Cheering for the Seventh Billion

Beware Malthusians posing as progressives
 
Don’t be fooled by the fashionable new crowd of Malthus-bashing greens: they’re as misanthropic as old-style population scaremongers.
Brendan O’Neill
Wednesday 12 October 2011

As we approach the Day of Seven Billion, when the seven billionth human being will be born, a debate is raging. On one side, population scaremongers are fretting about the arrival of Child No.7,000,000,000, claiming that he or she will add to a growing human swarm that is heaping pressure on the environment. On the other side, liberal observers slam these Malthusians, claiming that their lament about overpopulation is ‘a mask for misanthropy’. As one headline put it: ‘Welcome baby seven billion – we’ve room for you on Earth.’

Well, that is what it looks like through a casual glance – that a fiery debate is taking place between followers of the Reverend Thomas Malthus on one side and hip questioners of the Malthusian thesis on the other. But this is deceptive.
Dig a little deeper, and you’ll see that what’s really unfolding in the countdown to the Day of Seven Billion is a clash of alternative Malthusianisms, an unseemly spat between two sides that are as miserabilist as each other and which both cleave to the notion that humanity’s problems are demographic in nature rather than social.

Of course, with yawn-inducing predictability, the old guard of the population scaremongering lobby is out in force in the run-up to 31 October, the day when the UN predicts that humanity will number seven billion. Those rather fusty adherents to the Malthusian outlook – as first posited by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) – may have adopted PC-sounding lingo in recent years, using phrases like ‘climate change’ in place of ‘apocalypse’, but they’re still motored by a misanthropic view of speedily breeding human beings as the authors of society’s downfall.

Population Matters (PM), formerly the Optimum Population Trust, is marking 31 October by sticking ads all over the London Underground – ‘in an environment that itself highlights the problem of overpopulation: the overcrowded transport system’.

PM’s belief that overcrowding on the Tube is a result of overpopulation gives a brilliant insight into the narrow-minded, ahistoric thinking of old-world Malthusians. They seem incapable of understanding that squeezed conditions on rush-hour trains are actually down to a failure of infrastructure, a failure to expand and innovate, rather a result of Londoners having too many babies or immigrants coming over here and stealing all our seats. And so it is above ground, too, where global problems like poverty and hunger are a product, not of too many black babies demanding grub we don’t have, but of a social failure to develop all human societies and liberate all human beings from need.

The problem with Malthusian thinking is that it misunderstands social problems as demographic ones. It reinterprets social limits as natural limits, repackaging problems of social development as problems of nature’s shrinking bounty. Malthus fans make the dunderheaded error of imagining that human population is a scary variable, always going up, while everything else, including the amount of natural resources and the level of human ingenuity, remains constant. This profoundly anti-social outlook means they constantly fret about there being too many mouths to feed, when even just a cursory glance at our history will show that we have continually come up with ingenious ways to get more and more from nature in order to feed and clothe more and more people.

But the new Malthusian-bashers aren’t much better. In fact, if anything they’re worse, since they pose as progressives who want to protect Africans and Asians from the hectoring of white population scaremongers yet at the same time they promote the central tenets of the Malthusian outlook. Their rallying cry is effectively, ‘Ignore the right-wing Malthus-loving lobby – the problem today is not overpopulation over there but overconsumption over here’. How blissful is their ignorance – they seem oblivious to the fact that their fashionable fretting about fat whiteys hoovering up scarce resources is every bit as Malthusian as that guy in tweed who worries about Nigerians popping out too many ankle-biters.

So at the Guardian, Lynsey Hanley lays into old-style Malthusians, criticising their ‘moral crusade’ against the poor and the foreign. Yet she then argues that the real crisis facing the world today is overconsumption, calling on Western governments to implore people to ‘reduce their consumption’, especially of ‘petrol, meat, imported fruit and other adoptive “necessities”’. (Yeah, who needs meat?) Revealing that she isn’t on principle opposed to population control, she says that ‘for there to be any significant impact on the environment, [population] decline would have to take place in countries that already consume a far more than sustainable share of the world’s resources’.

This echoes other post-Malthus Malthusians, who likewise imagine that bigging up the ‘real’ problem of overconsumption distinguishes them from those saddos obsessed with human numbers in the Third World. So in his book Peoplequake, Fred Pearce is scathing about Malthus and his modern-day disciples, because ‘rising consumption is now a much bigger cause of our growing impact on the planet [than population]’.

Yet this panic about humanity’s overuse of allegedly scarce resources is entirely in tune with the Malthusian mindset. Trendy thinkers keen to disassociate themselves from the chequered history of Malthusianism may have jettisoned explicit talk about ‘too many babies’, but their concern about ‘too few resources’ is just a different way of saying the same thing: that nature’s bounty is under threat and thus we must be careful how we approach it. Right from its origins in the 1790s through to its rebirth as a green idea in the 1970s, Malthusianism has been fuelled by this very notion of ‘overconsumption’.

The original Malthusian idea of ‘too many people’ was based on a concern that these people would deplete resources, which were apparently naturally limited, thus giving rise to scarcity and destitution. Fred Pearce might say that overconsumption has led to a situation where we have ‘overshot the planet’s carrying capacity’, where Malthus was far less PC and claimed that poor people having too many babies threatened to unleash famine, but behind their very divergent lingo the idea promoted by these two thinkers is the same: that mankind’s lifestyles and aspirations should be straitjacketed by so-called natural limits.

The Malthus-haters demanding that we focus on consumption rather than population are rehabilitating the underlying theme of Malthusianism and of the broader conservative, traditionalist, environmentalist outlook of the past 200 years: the notion that the problems facing mankind are natural rather than social. And when you take that view, when you accept the fundamental premise of Malthusianism, your ‘solution’ will always be to shrink human horizons, whether by hectoring African women to stop having babies or mocking American men for eating too much meat, rather than to expand human society. It is this across-the-board naturalisation of social problems, this repackaging of today’s dearth of social imagination as a crisis of natural limits, which must be shot down as we give three cheers for the seven billionth human being. And that is what spiked intends to do.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here.
reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/11159/

Salute the Beckhams

Choosing Life, Not Death

When a culture turns away from the Lord and giver of Life, it ends up championing death.  The transformation is normally not immediate, but gradual.  Nevertheless, it is ineluctable.  The particular manifestation of death-devotion can vary.  As Germany transformed from a Christian nation to a champion of Enlightenment rationalism and idealism, it eventually elected a government which went on to exterminate six million Jews and millions of Gentiles–all in the name of the Volk and its superior “life”.

The West generally has championed death through a perverse celebration of human rights.

>We are From The Elite Commentariate . . .

>Here to Help

There is an old saw about treating people like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them lots of dung. This is precisely what a recent report by Oxfam is proposing as the solution to rising food prices and possible famine in the world. That, and oh, of course, world government.

Matt Ridley critiques the elitist Oxfam report