And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (Yeats)
I think that a number of people, in Europe and America, are feeling a bit of malaise, or something stronger than malaise: despair.
Why? Is the answer political - socialism versus the free market? Or is it concern over things like the environment, overpopulation, too much immigration? Or is it, perhaps, trying to keep all these concerns straight, and lined up with one another?
Deeper than the political struggle may lie questions like "Why am I a Socialist?" or "Why am I a member of PETA?" If it comes to that, is PETA fighting on the side of the angels, or not?
This book is an heroic attempt to answer the question behind all the other questions, and I think the author has done a brilliant job by unmasking the main philosophical villain in all this - a villain which he forthrightly calls "antihumanism." At its worst, this philosophy holds that the human race are vermin polluting the planet, and is capable of producing so-called "ethicists" who proclaim that it is OK to kill babies. (There goes one of the Ten Commandments, just like that.) Like PETA, these merchants of despair hold that a man and a pig and a dog are on the same level: meat machines. Of course, this sort of wooly thinking completely avoids the very interesting question of the huge differences between men and pigs.
The author opens with a hypnotizing chapter on Malthus and his infamous theory that population grows geometrically while food grows arithmetically, thus "proving" that mankind is always too numerous and getting poorer with every child born. The author points out, correctly, that Malthus nowhere offered any proof that food grows arithmetically: that idea was a "Malthus original," and completely false. He follows with detailed charts that show Malthus to be completely wrong. You can accept those charts, or accept the obvious fact that man is not like other animals. As someone put it: "Jay-hawks eat chickens, and men eat chickens. More jay-hawks mean fewer chickens, but more men mean a lot more chickens." That's because men, unlike pigs or dogs, produce the food which they eat. More people translates directly into more food, especially when we take science into account, which typically grows faster than the human population.
To make his demonstration complete, the author concedes that everyone has a right to be wrong when predicting the future. But Malthus even managed to fail at predicting the PAST!! According to him, the England of 1500 should have been much wealthier than the England Malthus knew, but this was totally wrong. It's much like saying that Americans who grew up in the 1960s know that OBVIOUSLY everyone was richer back in the 1930s; it's an absurdity which can be seen by everyone with two eyes.
The book then digs into the horrifying history of this Malthusian absurdity, which resulted in the British government refusing to send aid to the victims of the Irish "potato famine" (while Ireland was exporting literal tons of food to England), and why they refused to aid the victims of two Indian famines: with over 20 million dead, it was clear that Christian charity was dead, at least for the moment, struck down by the potty ideas of a fool.
Next up is Darwin. Not any theory of evolution, which the author treats as established science, but "Darwinism" as it came to be misused and perverted by others, beginning with Galton (Darwin's ultra-conservative cousin.) With Galton, we start seeing "the survival of the fittest" expressed in terms of human race, and we also start seeing the idea that the "best" races must inevitably exterminate the inferior races. The first genocide of the twentieth century was carried out by the British against an African tribe, where the rule was to kill everyone --- man, woman and child. But this was only the beginning.
An extremely influential German, Ernst von Haeckel, became a convert. An eminent scientist and best-selling popularizer, he soon turned "the survival of the fittest" into a movement called Monism. He was one of the people who pushed Germany into World War I.
Another aspect of perverted Darwinism was the "eugenic" movement, which was to have dire consequences in both Europe and America.
Well, I've gone on long enough. Don't miss this book --- it will make you reconsider many things which you thought you had decided long ago. It's brilliant.
Highest possible recommendation!
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