By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
At least Bernie Sanders is an equal-opportunity
misanthrope. He doesn’t like rich people, and it turns out he doesn’t
necessarily like poor people, either.
At the CNN town hall on climate change, a questioner
asked the socialist senator if he’d be “courageous” enough to endorse
population control to save the planet. Sanders answered “yes,” and then, after
referring to abortion rights, endorsed curtailing population growth,
“especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily
want to have large numbers of babies.”
He’s looking at you, sub-Saharan Africa.
The Sanders riff is the latest instance of a rising
anti-natalism on the left, which has gone from arguing that carbon emissions
are a problem to arguing that human beings are a problem. They release carbon
emissions, don’t they? Q.E.D.
When a proposition has the support of Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, who questions the morality of having children, and Bill Nye the
Science Guy, who has discussed punishing people for having children, it’s on
the way to universal assent among a certain segment of soi-disant thoughtful
progressives.
A headline in the New York Times even asked,
“Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?” Thus proving that, whatever our other
virtues, we are at times the most ridiculous and self-loathing species.
Undergirding the anti-natalist position is the belief
that we are facing a global catastrophe, such that additional babies will tip
the planet into uninhabitability for everyone. This goes beyond the best
evidence, and discounts the human capacity for adaptation that is one of our
chief attributes.
The view that human beings are an unsustainable drain on
limited resources goes back to the 18th-century thinker Thomas Malthus and,
more recently, the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. In his 1968 book
The Population Bomb, Ehrlich thunderously pronounced, “The battle to
feed all of humanity is over.”
In the event, we figured out how to make agriculture more
efficient and have been feeding people just fine (when not prevented from doing
so by wars and other man-made calamities). Nonetheless, Ehrlich hasn’t stopped
predicting the explosion of his population bomb ever since, telling The
Guardian recently that the collapse of civilization is “a near certainty.”
In his original work, Ehrlich put an emphasis on overly
fertile Third World countries, just as Bernie Sanders did the other night. But
if consumption and carbon emissions are the concern, it’s rich people in
developed countries who are the bigger problem and should be dealt with
accordingly (a task for which Sanders is dismayingly well-suited).
What are we to make of an agenda that seeks to diminish
the number of human beings overall and to make those who enjoy material
prosperity less wealthy?
Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute
notes how rising incomes — considered an unalloyed good by anyone who
experiences them — invariably increase energy consumption. Insofar as a
sweeping anti-development, anti-consumption program like the Green New Deal is
“diametrically opposed to the aspirations of nearly all individuals,” he
writes, it is “antihuman.”
At a more fundamental level, the anti-natalists have a
gross materialistic view of humanity. For them, we are a series of inputs and
outputs, and if one particular output is considered undesirable (in this case,
carbon emissions), it reduces the value of human beings altogether. No one who
isn’t a cracked ideological extremist or perversely blinkered economist
actually looks at people this way. It doesn’t account for relationships or for
joy, for the wondrous distinctiveness of every person, no matter how poor or
humble.
People aren’t a burden; they are a resource and a gift.
Any movement that regards them any other way is profoundly misguided and deeply
anti-humane. Build windmills if you must, but don’t try to scare people out of
having children — or much worse, facilitate abortions — in your zeal to shave
some fraction of a degree off the global temperature 80 years from now.
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