The America Syndrome by Betsy Hartmann

Author:Betsy Hartmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: us politics, American politics, apocalyptic thinking, political theory, social theory, political non-fiction, capitalism studies, capitalism, anti-capitalism, american dream, racial inequality, gender inequality, income inequality, economic inequality, resource scarcity, exploitation, climate change, american empire, american imperialism, resource exploitation, natural resources, american ethos, puritans, doomsday, apocalypse, american war, anthropology, iraq war, desert storm, american invasion
ISBN: 9781609807412
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2017-04-20T18:00:00+00:00

SCIENTISTS AND SAVIORS

Like any fundamentalist religion, the “Church of Malthus” has its high priests. Some of them resemble TV evangelists who warn of Armageddon while raking in the bucks. There is the same browbeating and chest-thumping; the same scare tactics, doctrinaire absolutism, overblown egos, and savior complexes; the same compulsive craving for a following. Preaching the population apocalypse can be both seductive and lucrative.

The first time I came face to face with a population prophet was in February 1993, when I was invited to Stanford University to debate biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. Ehrlich’s book made him a media star, and he appeared on Johnny Carson’s popular TV talk show 20 times. Like the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, Ehrlich skillfully deployed the jeremiad formula to recruit a following of true believers. He was also one of the first, but hardly the last, environmentalist to tap directly into the Book of Revelation, associating the threat of overpopulation with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death.289 In a favorable review of his book, Natural History magazine noted that, while most scientists don’t go around “roaring like Old Testament prophets,” it was OK for Ehrlich to do so, since “the world is in worse trouble than we thought.”290

Worse trouble indeed! The Population Bomb warned that the battle to feed all mankind was over—over and lost—and that, in the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people around the world would inevitably starve to death. Famines in poor countries would ignite wars. In one of Ehrlich’s scenarios, 100 million Americans would die from Chinese dirty bombs; in another, years of famine would strengthen Soviet influence in Mexico and Latin America, and nuclear war between the superpowers would destroy the northern two-thirds of the planet.291 Ehrlich advocated coercive population control. When a new edition of the book came out in 1983, he argued that the US government should have supported an Indian government proposal in the 1970s to sterilize compulsorily all men with three or more children: “We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors . . . Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause.”292

When I met Ehrlich in 1993, he seemed to have mellowed somewhat—he no longer explicitly advocated compulsion—but his Malthusian faith remained solidly intact, despite the failure of his previous predictions to materialize. In his own eyes, he hadn’t been wrong, just prematurely right. Moreover, he maintained that his doomsday predictions had helped galvanize the kinds of action that prevented them from occurring.293 Even now, Ehrlich is still in the business of prophesying doom. In 2015 he told the New York Times that what he wrote in the 1960s was relatively mild. “My language would be even more apocalyptic today,” he said. He likened letting women have as many babies as they want to allowing everyone to “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”294

The debate

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