By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Les U. Knight has the gentle voice of an old Oregon
hippie, which is what he is, and he cares deeply about alternative
transportation, women’s rights, and exterminating all human life on Earth.
Right now, Knight — not his real name; the nom de plume
is meant to sound like “Let’s Unite” — is very concerned about the need to
follow Covid-19 masking protocols, and he is tweeting a bit about that as well
as the possibility that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being secretly
encouraged by international arms dealers. But as the founder of the Voluntary
Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT, as it styles itself), he is mainly concerned
with speciecide, annihilating Homo sapiens and leaving behind
a planet that would be liberated even from the memory that human beings had
once existed.
He is a lunatic, of course, one of those gray madmen who
haunt college towns and political conventions. But he is not alone in his
crusade, only one of the more colorful and entertaining spokesmen for a view of
the world that goes back at least to the 18th century and Thomas Robert
Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. Like generations
of eugenicists, concentration-camp commandants, and pop scholars such as Population
Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, he describes his project — human extinction
— as “humanitarian.”
“It seems contradictory, right?” he tells me. “Our
unofficial motto is ‘May We Live Long and
Die Out.’ We can go extinct and still have a great life. It’s actually a
humanitarian idea to voluntarily phase out humanity. There would be no more
suffering by anyone.”
Knight specifically disclaims any religious inclination —
“I have no god,” he says, “this isn’t about that” — but he constantly resorts
to religious thinking, religious argument, and religious concepts. At times, he
argues that he is doing God’s work — literally: In what serves as a VHEMT
manifesto, he writes about the failure of “the Middle Eastern god,
Yahweh/Jehovah/Allah.” Knight explains: “Tradition tells how, in prehistoric
times, this creator-god realized his mistake in making humans and was going to
flush us from the system, but in a weak moment he spared one breeding family.
Oops!” He cites the Sumerian version of the great-flood story to reinforce his
point, and laments that the “cedars of Lebanon were sacrificed for temples.”
His religious enthusiasms run quickly to the grotesque and the horrifying:
“Glory to God for abortion providers who catch the zygotes He failed to
miscarry.”
Knight spends a great deal of time in what can only be described
as missionary work, and, of course, he has a conversion story of his own.
“It was a slow process, not an epiphany,” he says. “In
Oregon, we see a lot of trees getting cut down, big old ones, and that makes an
impression on you. After the Army, I went back to college and joined Zero
Population Growth. Their idea was, ‘Let’s stop at two.’ Easy. But I figured it
out real quick that that was not going to be enough, due to momentum. One more
can’t be justified.” VHEMT doesn’t have membership rules per se or an
organization to enforce them, but it does expect one thing of its members: to
forgo having any children after making their profession of faith. An expecting
couple could join, he says, but that child would have to be their last.
Knight says he rejects coercion, but he also calls
China’s former one-child policy a “tremendous success.” He acknowledges
Beijing’s human-rights abuses but also insists: “They have pulled everybody out
of severe poverty, their standard of living has increased tremendously, and
they don’t have famines anymore.” That is true of much of the rest of the
world, too, including the many countries that have not enacted
population-control policies; Knight pronounces himself “suspicious” of
statistics attesting to the radical reduction in worldwide poverty over the
past few decades. Like every true believer, he lives by faith.
But his faith produces some strange conundrums. For
example, he forswears eugenics on the grounds that it invariably has been
allied with racism, which is true, but it is very strange to be bound by
concern for the relative well-being of a subpopulation of a species he proposes
to eliminate entirely. He says that his movement will leave behind a better
world, but never seems to have considered the question: Better for
whom?
He is, in fact, obviously nonplussed when I put the
question to him.
Citing Malthus, he speaks of a concept he calls
“overshoot.” “There are limits to growth and finite resources,” he says. “We
went into overshoot in the 1970s, meaning that every year we
have been using more resources than Earth naturally produces in a year.
Overshoot Day this year is July 29, the date when we will have used up as much
as the planet can regenerate in one year.” This is, from an empirical point of
view, hogwash, a purportedly precise calculation of something that is
practically incalculable. Professor Robert Richardson, an ecological economist
and scholar of sustainability at Michigan State, politely describes this as the
nonsense it is (“conceptually flawed and practically unusable in any science or
policy context”) but concedes that it is a “compelling concept.” A compelling
fiction that illustrates some underlying natural or social phenomenon is
a myth, and the construction and propagation of myths is the
business of religion.
Knight very strongly resists the suggestion that he is in
the religion business. But he isn’t in the ecology business, the economics
business, or the policy business, and his great enemy is a competing belief system,
which he calls “natalism.” Natalism is his Great Satan, while the world’s
traditional religions (and the modes of life that go along with them) are his
Little Satans.
“We have to fight the natalist or pro-natalist society,
the cultural conditioning that says ‘Baby, good, no baby, bad.’ It’s very deep.
It started perhaps even before we became Homo sapiens, where the
tribe or the troop increased and this was a good thing almost always: Any tribe
that didn’t have more members would be overrun by a tribe that did, to the
point that natalism became an absolute essential for survival. I think that’s
why patriarchy began, to enforce natalism.”
His imagined end state, a world free of human beings,
would represent a return to paradise. Speaking with Alan Weisman, the
like-minded author of The World Without Us (a 2007 best seller
that the New York Times reviewer rightly characterized as
“religious”), Knight prophesied: “The last humans could enjoy their final
sunsets peacefully, knowing they have returned the planet as close as possible
to the Garden of Eden.”
Eden. Of course. What else?
And there you have it: creation myth, a fall from grace,
a pledge to go forth and sin no more, and — always the most popular part — an
apocalypse.
***
The founding text of the modern population-control
cult is Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, a controversial, hastily
written, sloppy, error-filled, ridiculous, racist, eugenicist, and forthrightly
authoritarian 1968 polemic that also had its origins in a conversion
experience. Some Western seekers go to India and find enlightenment; Professor
Ehrlich went there and came away hoping to substantially reduce the number of
Indians.
I have understood the population
explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally
one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago. . . . The streets seemed
alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People
visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi
window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses.
People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly
through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires
gave the scene a hellish aspect. . . . Since that night I’ve known the feel of
overpopulation.
The population density of India in the 1960s, when The
Population Bomb was written, was somewhere around that of modern-day
Switzerland. I lived in Delhi for a period in the 1990s, and it was dirty and
hot. It still is. Delhi has many, many more residents today than it did in the
1960s — and the metropolitan area has about the same population density as
Paris. (Different methodologies will produce different results here; some
estimates have Delhi a little less dense than Paris, some significantly more.
Simply dividing the total metro population by the metro area yields about 21,000
per square kilometer, versus about 20,000 for Paris.) Nobody comes back from
Paris complaining of its “hellish aspect.” Both cities have their hygienic
deficiencies: Paris has a problem with what the French call pipi
sauvage — “wild peeing” — and so does Delhi. The main differences
between Paris and Delhi are that Delhi is a relatively poor city, one that was
desperately poor in the 1960s, and that a lot of Dilliwallahs are poor and
brown, and their cooking smells funny to parochial Stanford professors.
Professor Ehrlich’s revulsion at the poor brown people he
encountered in Delhi helped to launch a worldwide phenomenon that was, at heart
— and remains — a kind of religious hysteria, entirely disconnected from the
facts of worldwide population change and in fact operating in precise
opposition to them. The book sold more than 2 million copies, and population
control, once a relatively obscure hobby for dystopian futurists and race
cranks, became a popular fascination. It is a great testament to the fact that
a smart man can write a stupid book.
Never mind that the world’s population-growth rate began
a steady, decades-long decline just as the book was published (it fell by half between
1968 and 2018) and that many of the advanced nations are today suffering from
crippling population loss, “overpopulation” has become an article
of faith for the progressive and the enlightened: Bernie Sanders talks up
population control, Gloria Steinem insists that “overpopulation is still the
biggest reason for global warming,” George Lakoff dwells on “overpopulation,”
Democratic platforms at the state and local level warn about “overpopulation,”
Democratic politicians such as Representative Ami Bera of California insist
that it is a “national-security issue,” Prince Harry worries about it and
promises to have no more than two children, Jane Goodall insists that
“population growth . . . underlies just about every single one of the problems
that we’ve inflicted on the planet” and concludes: “We should be talking about
somehow curtailing human population growth.”
Those are not long-lost thoughts from the 1960s — this
is contemporary population hysteria.
Professor Ehrlich offered some robust ideas for
curtailing human population growth, including coercion at both the individual
and national levels. He calls for
the conscious regulation of the
number of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but
of society as a whole. . . . We must have population control at home, hopefully
through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary
methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into
programs which combine agricultural development and population control. . . .
Latin American politicians have accused the United States of attempting to
pressure them into population control programs. If only it were true!
Maintaining the religious theme found elsewhere in the
population-control discourse, he notes that his views were once considered
“heretical” and cites the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as supporting
evidence. He blames overpopulation for “rising crime” and, while he advises his
acolytes to avoid discussion of eugenics in the interest of making propaganda
more effective, he offers a frankly eugenic vision, including a “proper
breeding program” to maintain IQ levels if necessary. And then there is this:
“Most geneticists feel that if the genetic component of human intelligence is
to be manipulated in the future, it is likely to be dealt with biochemically by
treating individuals.”
He explicitly rejects voluntary family-planning programs
as insufficient to the task at hand, comparing them to the “rhythm method” of
birth control: “As Vatican roulette is to family planning, so family planning
is to population control.” He sneers at those who hesitated to endorse his
program as “pussyfooting about methodology.”
The Population Bomb is full of hilariously
off-base predictions, some of which were memorialized in Ehrlich’s famous wager
with Julian Simon of the Cato Institute, but many more of which have been
forgotten. His predictions interact in an amusing way with his crackpot
obsessions, which include pesticides, supersonic air travel, and the Catholic
Church. “The day may come when the obese people of the world must give up
diets, since metabolizing their fat deposits will lead to DDT poisoning. But,
on the bright side, it is clear that fewer and fewer people in the world will
be obese!”
In both India and China, obesity is at epidemic levels
by medical reckoning. Everybody gets it wrong from time to time, but one
wonders if Professor Ehrlich — who is as of this writing the Bing Professor
of Population Studies, Emeritus, in the department of biology
at Stanford University — has ever got it right.
Because every religion hates its competitor religions
more than it hates practically anything else, Ehrlich treats the reader to his
dim view of various popes (he includes a crude hand-drawn caricature of a man
in a mitre) and the Catholic Church at large, meditates on the Second Vatican
Council, and offers strategies for recruiting apostate Catholics to his cause
and using them to bring around the Vatican. “The Church must” — must,
he writes, in a sample letter for his acolytes — “affirm that the birth rate
must soon be brought into line with the death rate. . . . The Church must
recognize and state that all means of birth control are licit.” And the Church
must put population control above “doctrine, dogma, and canon law.”
If Catholics are a hard sell, he expects that
schoolteachers will be easier, their natural affection for their students
having been tampered by their grim experience with “ghetto children.”
The last section of his book might as well be titled “How
to Start a Cult,” and in it he offers advice for “proselytizing” — his word —
“friends and associates.” The strategies are amusingly cynical: “Target Is Extreme Conservative: Point
out that overpopulation breeds conditions in which communism and ‘big
government’ thrive. . . . Target Is
Extreme Liberal: Emphasize that the rich are getting richer and the poor
poorer. . . . Declare that as long as population continues to grow, this
disparity will worsen. Target Is a
Deeply Religious Catholic: Quote to target from Dr. M. H. Mothersill’s
book Birth Control and Conscience.” One feels for his poor friends
and associates. What else? “Put together a blacklist” — a blacklist —
“of people, companies, and organizations impeding population control.” Call up
magazine and newspaper editors and “complain bitterly about any positive
treatment of large families. Attack the publicizing of ‘mothers of the year’
unless they have no more than two children. Request that publications stop
carrying any advertising implying by statement or inference that it is socially
acceptable to have more than two children. . . . [Television] series featuring
large families should be assailed. . . . [Companies] advertising during
offensive television programs should be threatened with a boycott.”
Professor Ehrlich made a rookie cult-leader move by
placing a specific date on his predictions, which now look ridiculous: “The
battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines
— hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any
crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can be done to
prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
What’s strange is that Professor Ehrlich had his “Paul on
the road to Damascus” moment in India, which hadn’t had a real famine since
1943, a generation before he wrote The Population Bomb. A
severe drought in the state of Maharashtra from 1970 to 1973 provided precisely
the sort of test case that might have borne out Professor Ehrlich’s dire
prophecy, but there was no famine — emergency food-aid programs proved
sufficient to the task.
There still is no famine in India. The country remains
relatively poor and has had persistent challenges related to hunger,
particularly in rural areas. The most recent one came with the country’s
Covid-19 lockdowns, which put millions of poor people out of work while
disrupting the Public Distribution System, the major food-support program,
which also has been beset by crippling bureaucracy and maladministration, like
much of the rest of Indian official life.
Which is to say, India’s remaining hunger problems are
almost entirely man-made and do not result from an inability to produce
food. The same is true in almost every hungry corner of the world.
Professor Ehrlich was entirely confident that India would
never be able to produce enough food to feed itself and called the proposition
a “fantasy.” He cited the American economist Louis Bean, who calculated that
India would never be able to produce more than 95 million tons of grain per
year. In fact, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization put India’s
food-grain production at 275 million tons in 2018. More than self-sufficient,
India is today the world’s largest rice exporter. It is the world’s largest
milk producer, too. It is a major food exporter, expected to send $50 billion
worth of farm goods into world markets this year.
The Malthusian math never works out. India’s population
was 530 million when The Population Bomb was published. Its
population today is 1.4 billion, and it is considerably better fed. The country
that once was the go-to cautionary tale for the overpopulation cult has a new
set of problems: “India May Face a Population Implosion,” warns the Wall
Street Journal.
India is not alone.
***
Last year, India’s fertility rate — the average
number of children born to a woman in her lifetime — fell to 2.0, below the
replacement rate of 2.1. India is a young country, and so its population likely
will continue to grow for another few decades, peaking at 1.6 billion and then
falling into decline. China, where population control was implemented with
precisely the compulsion Professor Ehrlich suggested, has been
below-replacement since 1992. Japan has been there since 1957. The papacy may
have spooked Professor Ehrlich, but Italy has been there since 1976. Catholic
Spain went below replacement by 1985 and saw its population shrink by more than
100,000 in 2020. Catholic Portugal also went negative in 1985 and has seen its
population decline by 2 percent in the past decade. Mexico just went negative
and its fertility rate is falling by about 1 percent a year. Brazil is well
below replacement and has been for years.
The population of Earth is expected to continue growing
for about another 40 years and then begin shrinking. Children born today are
going to live in a world in which the problem is not overpopulation — which was
never as much of a genuine economic problem as it was white intellectuals’
visceral revulsion at the teeming poor of the global south — but destabilizing
population decline.
Longer lifespans and a declining birth rate means aging
populations. By 2035, the United States will have more people over 65 than
people under 18 — more retirees than children. Many European countries are in
the same situation. The graying West looks fearfully to Japan — itself a byword
for overpopulation in the early 20th century — where crashing fertility
threatens government finances, the economy, and the social order at large.
Japan’s population is expected to shrink by 40 million by 2065. And the robots
upon which it is pinning hopes for its “silver economy” — robots that are
expected to care for the elderly and replace workers who were never born —
highlight one of the many shortcomings of the Malthusian analysis: Upwardly
mobile societies may consume more corn and gasoline and other physical goods,
but mature wealthy societies consume more labor in the form of
services. All of those people whom the overpopulation cultists considered
nothing more than mouths to feed are also hands to work — people, as it turns
out, are assets, not liabilities.
Nowhere in the world today is that more obvious than in
Japan, where the aging workforce has undercut both output and innovation. The
manufacturing exports that once were Japan’s economic engine are in decline as
a share of global exports. Its gross domestic savings are in decline.
Investment as a share of GDP is in decline. So is return on investment, thanks
to the declining workforce. The International Monetary Fund estimates that
Japan’s economic growth rate will decline by almost 1 percent a year for the
foreseeable future exclusively as a result of its demographic
situation. “A rapidly shrinking and ageing population and labor force constitute
severe demographic headwinds to future productivity and growth,” the IMF
reports, “with official projections anticipating that Japan’s population will
decline by just over 25 percent in the next 40 years. Weak growth and inflation
prospects, together with growing age-related government spending, pose serious
challenges to fiscal prospects as well.”
The European Union is looking at much the same situation
in its near future. U.S. population growth flatlined in the past decade, the
Census Bureau reports. The Social Security Office of Policy already is talking
about being forced to reduce benefits because of demographic pressure. The
story is the same across practically all of the high-income nations and many of
the middle- and low-income nations. Two-thirds of the world’s people live in
countries with below-replacement fertility rates.
It is a testament to the power of mythmaking — and the
power of apocalyptic hysteria — that we have spent the better part of a century
feverishly working to solve a problem that not only isn’t a problem but that
is, in fact, the opposite of the problem we actually have. All the best minds,
professional intellectuals, and enlightened do-gooders have, for decades, been
in the grip of pseudoscience and superstition.
There is a population bomb on the way, but it is not the
one they promised.
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