By David Harsanyi
Thursday, April 27, 2017
Bill Nye has some detestable ideas about humanity. This
shouldn’t surprise anyone. Many environmental doomsdayers share his
totalitarian impulses (Nye has toyed with the idea of criminalizing speech he
dislikes) and soft spot for eugenics.
In his Netflix series, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” the
former children’s television host supplies viewers with various trendy notions
to adorn his ideological positions with the sheen of science. In the final
episode, Nye and his guests contemplate a thorny “scientific” question: How the
state can stop people from having “extra children.”
Nye: So, should we have policies
that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?
Travis Rieder: I do think that we
should at least consider it.
Nye: Well, ‘at least consider it’
is like ‘Do it.’
Rieder: One of the things that we
could do that’s kind of least policy-ish is we could encourage our culture and
our norms to change, right?
All of this was pretty familiar to me, and not only
because the panel sounded like a ChiCom planning meeting. The Nye segment, it
turns out, was just a repetition of a 2016 NPR article on overpopulation
featuring Rieder that I’d once written about.
“Should we have policies that penalize people for having
extra kids in the developed world?” asked Reider and others who were pondering
the “ethics of procreation.” The article is titled “Should We Be Having Kids in
the Age of Climate Change?” In it, Rieder, a philosopher with the Berman
Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, scaremongers a class of
college students about The End of Days and the immorality of having children.
“The room is quiet,” NPR explains, “No one fidgets. Later, a few students say
they had no idea the situation was so bad.” It’s not.
“Here’s a provocative thought,” Rieder says. “Maybe we
should protect our kids by not having them.” This is provocative in the way a
stoner wondering why airplanes don’t run on hemp is provocative. That’s because
the entire case for capping the number of children rests on assumptions
entirely devoid of scientific or historical basis.
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote that “the power of
population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce
subsistence for man.” At that point, there were maybe a billion humans on the
Earth, so we might forgive him for worrying. In 1800, the life expectancy of
the average British citizen — then the leading light of the world — was 39
years of age. Most humans lived in pitiless poverty that is increasingly rare
in most parts of the contemporary world.
Now, had Nye been around in the early nineteenth century,
he’d almost surely be smearing anyone skeptical of the miasmatic theory of
disease. The problem is he lacks imagination, unable to understand that science
is here to help humanity adapt and overcome, not to constrict it. Anyway,
six-plus billion people later, extreme
poverty has fallen below 10 percent for the first time ever. Most of those
gains have been made in the midst of the world’s largest population explosion.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, according to the World Bank,
because of the spread of trade, technological advances, and plentiful fossil
fuel, not
only are fewer people living in extreme poverty, but fewer
are hungry than ever; fewer die
in conflicts over resources, and deaths due to extreme weather have been dramatically
declining for a century (evidence The Science Guy regularly ignores). Over
the past 40 years, our water and air has become cleaner, despite a huge spike
in population growth. Some of the Earth’s richest people live in some of its
densest cities.
It’s worth remembering that not only was early
progressivism steeped in eugenics, but early ’70s abortion politics was played
out in the shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” theory. Vice President Al
Gore has already broached the idea of “fertility management.” “Frankly,”
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg mentioned a few years ago, “I had
thought that at the time Roe was
decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in
populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
You thought right. Today, abortion is used as a means of
exterminating a class of human deemed unworthy of life.
We live in a world where Ehrlich protégé John Holdren,
who, like his mentor, made a career of offering memorably erroneous predictions
(not out of the ordinary for alarmists), can become a science czar in the Obama
administration. Holdren co-authored a book in late 1970s, called “Ecoscience:
Population, Resources, Environment,” that waded into theoretical talk about
mass sterilizations and forced abortions in an effort to save hundreds of
millions from sure death. Nye is a fellow denier of one of the most irrefutable
facts about mankind: human ingenuity overcomes demand.
Now, just because something hasn’t happened yet doesn’t
mean it can’t happen in the future. But the evidence against Malthusianism is
stronger now than it has ever been. Of course, not everything about human
existence can be quantified. This is the point. Talking about humans as if they
were a malady that needs to be cured is, at its core, immoral. And listening to
a man who has three residences lecture potential parents about their responsibilities
to Mother Earth is particularly galling.
Although many thousands of incredibly smart and talented
people engage in real scientific inquiry and discovery, “science” is often used
as a cudgel to browbeat people into accepting progressive policies. Just look
at the coverage of the March for Science last week. The biggest clue that it
was nothing more than another political event is that Nye was a keynote
speaker.
“We are marching today to remind people everywhere, our
lawmakers especially,” he told the crowd, “of the significance of science for
our health and prosperity.” Fortunately, our health and prosperity has
blossomed, despite the work of Nye and his ideological ancestors.
No comments:
Post a Comment