Population and Freedom

Why has the “population bomb” been a bust? Largely because of freedom, individualism, and capitalism says Timothy Burke:

The population-explosion club was one part of a larger tendency that carried over the faith in centralization and statism that was characteristic of one lineage of high modernist thought and practice. I see that lineage today in scholars like Juliet Schor, whose work essentially proceeds from the position that most people don’t know what’s good for them, and that we would all be a lot better off if we consumed less, worked less, and lived lives that closely reflected Schor’s sense of what is good and valuable and meaningful–lives which turn out to be the usual kind of potted faux-gemeinschaft communalism that invariably pops up in these kinds of arguments. It’s the same sensibility that infects Neil Postman’s work, an essentially mystical belief that we were all much happier when we lived in small lineage-based village communities and that we need big authoritarian states to force us back to that future. (The mirror of the same desire is the social or religious conservative impulse to restrict the rights of women and de-emphasize individual rights and materialist pleasures.)

For the population control fanatics, there has been nothing more irksome and unexpected than to see that the thing they thought most crucial (the rapid reduction of rates of population increase) largely did not require the authoritarian intervention of the state (China being the very complicated exception here) but instead has derived significantly from consumerism, individualism and arguably even selfishness.

More here.