Merchants of Despair
Robert Zubrin ©2012
A short Book Report by Ron Housley
Robert Zubrin, a Ph.D. nuclear engineer, offers us a fascinating account of how the anti-humanist philosophy of Thomas Malthus (1798) marked the beginning of organized, establishment backlash against the very principles which the American Founding Fathers attempted to codify and pass down to future generations.
It is a story that flies beneath the radar of most citizens today; but it is a story which continues to work its black magic in every realm — from destroying historical Civil War statues to appeasing and emboldening terrorists intent on imposing their beliefs on the entire world.
The 19th century saw academia set the stage for a Malthusian force to solidify into a culture-wide revolt against science, against reason, against political liberty. The philosophic and moral undermining of America was set in motion almost from the moment of its founding.
Zubrin makes it sound like the decline of Western values was spearheaded by Malthus and Darwin; and then implemented over the decades by a litany of powerful figures, most recently Rockefeller; James McNamara; Gen. Westmoreland; even LBJ himself who was persuaded to withhold emergency food from a starving India (1966) until that nation agreed to impose forced sterilizations on its rural peasantry; Rachel Carson; Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger; and entire United Nations agencies whose goal was to reduce world population.
But the real culprits behind what Zubrin calls “Merchants of Despair” were the 19th century philosophers who began a vast rebellion against reason and freedom: Kant, Hegel, Comte, Mill, Marx. Sadly, Zubrin does not highlight this crucial aspect of his own thesis. What turned Malthusian and Darwinian assessments into a mass cultural movement was the philosophers’ organized attack on man’s ability to reason, calling for a return to “faith” and “feeling” as the basis for knowledge.
Among the late 20th century Malthusians is Paul Ehrlich, whose “The Population Bomb” I read back when I was in school; millions of free copies were distributed to college students all over the country.
Little did I realize what a Malthusian even was; little did I realize that Ehrlich was part of a long history of activists promoting population control and the dismantling of human liberty; little did I realize how essentially aligned he was with the burgeoning statist agenda that was gaining a foothold in our culture.
Ehrlich’s falsehoods, like those of Rachel Carson, offered a launching pad for the junk science behind so much of today’s regulatory establishment — regulations purposed with limiting and controlling our formerly free choices. When Ehrlich’s predictions of mass starvation proved false over and over again, it was never apparent why Stanford University wasn’t embarrassed to have him on its faculty.
The big lesson for me in Zubrin’s book is that Malthusianism is still pervasive in our culture, responsible for anti-humanist decisions impacting all of us today; who knew?!
There is even a Malthusian, “let’s reduce the population” meme behind nuclear energy politics. Without abundant, affordable energy, billions (1.2 billion) in the third-world are still without electricity today. But raising up third-world populations is contrary to the anti-humanist objectives of the Malthusians (“better dead than fed”). And so it naturally follows that the Malthusians would be against nuclear energy, just as they are against any other pro-human technology.
Zubrin offers a new sense of perspective on Malthusianism’s goal to control the population: its effects on our energy industry; its effects on our cultural sense of morality; its effects on the vibrancy of our economy; its effects on public policy, where government gets to replace reason with force in dealing with us.
We all remember the first “Earth Day,” right? The day deliberately chosen for “Earth Day” was Lenin’s birthday; after all, “Earth Day” activists and Lenin both wanted the same thing: state control of all our lives. But now with “Earth Day,” the agitators could pretend that the “good of mankind” was the goal we all had in common(!). Lenin, indeed.
The common thread amongst all the various Malthusian movements (think: deliberately starving millions in India in the 1800’s; eugenics and racial cleansing killing millions in the mid-1900’s; Earth Day and the call to destroy industrial civilization) is a basic anti-humanism. And today we have the majority of Americans under 30 years old calling for outright socialism (think: Bernie Sanders), as if socialism hadn’t failed everywhere it was implemented — killing over 100-million innocents in the 20th century.
There are scores of Malthusian-inspired movements, each with different names attached.
They want us to turn the lights off; to turn our air-conditioners off; to abandon our internal combustion engines; to leave a smaller carbon footprint; to embrace zero growth; to acknowledge that humans are pollutants; to adopt Malthusian environmentalism; to stop impacting the climate; to condemn GMO foods, even as GMOs saved billions from starvation; to slow down or even stop industrial civilization. Since Nixon, the Malthusian environmentalism has been solidly embraced not only by the “progressives,” but by the “conservatives.”
Conservatives were never able to figure out what principles were at play --- so they were never able to offer up a rational alternative to the anti-humanist fervor on the Left.
It’s truly horrifying to discover in story after story how entire populations have been forced into starvation, malnutrition, and disease merely because fashionable Malthusian elites (throughout a 200 year history) have implemented the political power to outlaw life-saving innovations, one after the other, right up to the present day.
Global Warming
Just at the moment (1971) when Ice Age doomsayer, John Holdren (later to become Obama’s science advisor), was being sidelined by slight temperature increases, the anti-humanist Malthusians stumbled upon their next pretext to stifle worldwide economic growth, and thus to suppress population growth: carbon dioxide.
Their new movement (which they would call AGW) did not select water vapor as its target greenhouse gas even though it is thousands of times more impactful --- because they couldn’t figure out a way to control it using political coercion; not so with the far more insignificant carbon dioxide, which they saw as an ideal target to regulate, in their quest to control industrial civilization.
This is the type of work which has tones of “conspiracy theory” behind it. But there is conspiracy here only insofar as it is conspiratorial to contend that ideas drive history — for this is a tale of cultural decline driven by bad ideas.
What Zubrin hints at but never says directly is that the Malthusian anti-humanist agenda to limit population is all made possible by the mystical, anti-reason resurgence of collectivism which was the product of 19th century German philosophers; and that the Malthusians are just one component of the 200 year decline of Western civilization.
So if you are unclear about why today’s college graduates are sympathetic to tyrannical socialism; if you are unclear about the moral perversion of nationalizing health care; if you are unclear about the origins of today’s hate America movement; if you suspect that something has gone wrong with an entire generation willing to turn a blind eye to mass killings in the name of equality (or in the name of population control), then you might invest a little time to explore Zubrin’s book.
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