Woke eugenics
I7.7 billion’s a problem — that is, if you’re a climate-change activist with a penchant for Thomas Malthus. Along with wacky protests and vegan cheese, the recent focus on climate change has popularised long-standing concerns about population control. There are “Birth Strikers” — women who would love to have kids, can have kids, but feel they shouldn’t because of impending planetary doom. There are royals who seek praise for pronouncing they’ll only have one child to offset their private jet carbon emissions. There are even “ecofascists”, like the killers in El Paso and New Zealand, who attempt to marry their xenophobia with increasingly acceptable distress about overpopulation.
In fact, discussion of population control has become so normalised it even has its own international holiday — World Population Day — in July. And while people around the world aren’t necessarily encouraged to celebrate by cursing the day they were born or picketing maternity units, there have been some questionable campaigns launched to mark the occasion. Last year, the UN announced its support for Thriving Together, a collaboration of more than 150 organisations committed to the “recognition of the importance of family planning to conservation”.
The campaign aims to increase family planning services in developing countries to help stop “rural” and “low-income” families from having more children. Why? Because population growth inhibits the “conservation of biodiversity, the environment and sustainability”. Birth rates are either stable or dropping in western countries, in contrast with places like Niger, South Sudan or Uganda, where the numbers are rising. To many, this looks like a push for more bugs and fewer black people.
In an age of hypersensitivity about everything to do with race, it’s quite remarkable that a campaign dedicated to stopping predominantly non-white nations from procreating to save the planet has passed without comment. But it’s quite easy to see how we got here. Climate fetishists tell us we have to make sacrifices in relation to our cars, our gas, our showers or our flights abroad. It’s merely the next step in the trend for curtailing your habits to suggest that some people should be encouraged to stop having kids. It’s just that those people are never the town-house-dwelling protesters, and almost always poverty-stricken non-white people in countries far, far away.
This quasi-eugenicist privileging of the environment over human beings is nothing new. David Attenborough, who paraded on stage at Glastonbury last year to cheers from thousands of young progressives, is a long-time supporter of population control in its most Malthusian form. Back in 2011 in an interview with the Wellcome Trust, Attenborough declared that he “couldn’t think of a single problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve if there were less people”. And who are these people he’s talking about? They’re those inhabiting “slums in South America, India, Africa” — places that Attenborough describes as “huge areas occupied by people living, whole families, in tiny little apartments with no sanitation and no future”. Rather than arguing that those people living in poverty in parts of the developing world should be given access to the same resources that we enjoy in the West — clean water, housing and job opportunities — Attenborough and those like him simply think there should be fewer of them.
of resources, population control enthusiasts are often keen to talk about women’s reproductive rights. In the same interview in 2011, Attenborough said that the “only comfort” he found was in the “knowledge that wherever you empower women, wherever they have the vote, education, the free will and are in charge of their own lives and not dictated to by men, the birth rate falls — which is a very good reason for getting rid of slums”. In short, Attenborough’s support for raising the level of education among women outside the Western world is dependent on the promise that they stop having children. Many of us will be familiar with the stereotype of the racist Little Englander, who bemoans the procreation of “them” — usually Muslims or black people — claiming that there’s not enough housing or jobs or space for anyone who isn’t one of “us”. We condemn such views as racist, but why don’t we criticise the “us and them” logic of environmentalists hellbent on bringing down population numbers in other parts of the world?
Is it a coincidence that many of the groups that support Thriving Together — from Greenpeace to Marie Stopes International — focus on the “marginalised communities” of developing countries, while their supporters on the front page of their website are people like Dr Jane Goodall? Of course, some of these institutions have form in the area of controversial support for population control. As Zoe Williams once pointed out in the
Guardian, Marie Stopes herself was a zealous believer in sterilising the great unwashed: “Young married men of the professional classes are today often forced by conditions to remain sterile, though they passionately desire the healthy children they could have if they did not have hordes of defectives to support in one way or the other.”
Some of the population control statements published by supporters of Thriving Together are not a million miles away from Stopes’s misanthropic ideas. Goodall writes on Thriving Together’s website that women “need to be equipped with the knowledge as to how their choice affects the health of the planet and thus the future of their own children”. Never mind the issues that women living in squalor in Nairobi or Mumbai already have to deal with, why not heap some global climate guilt onto their shoulders too? It isn’t big business, corrupt governments or capitalism negatively affecting the planet, it’s these promiscuous slum-dwellers who just can’t figure out how to keep their legs shut.
Ibetween planetary doom-mongering and women’s reproductive rights has had such an outing at the same time as women’s bodily autonomy is hitting the headlines. You don’t need to travel far to find women who are unable to control when and with whom they have children. Despite recent law changes across Ireland, access to abortion is still limited and conditional for most women. President Donald Trump’s decision to court the pro-life vote has bolstered reactionary legislators across America to bring in anti-abortion bills in Texas, Alabama, Utah, South Dakota, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Missouri and other states. Even in the UK, women do not have comprehensive abortion rights. The recent row over Labour leadership candidate Rebecca Long Bailey’s views on time limits for abortion shows how even politicians who pose as “radical” can still cling to reactionary views when it comes to women’s freedom. For the eco-woke concerned with limiting the population, women’s bodily autonomy seems to be a legitimate price to pay in order to solve the climate crisis.
Population control is often talked about as a “taboo” subject, with a wink and a nod from the commentator who wants you to admit what we’re all secretly thinking: that the world would be better off if there were fewer poor people in it. Environmentalist campaigner Chris Packham recently released a documentary on BBC2 entitled 7.7 Billion People and Counting which was aimed at broaching the “difficult” question of population control. Packham has been known to talk about “organisms”, claiming that all are equal and that even disease plays a role in nature’s plans for population management. It would be interesting to know what organism relativists like him think of the current outbreak of coronavirus, or Ebola or Sars before it. If we’re serious about stopping the influence of human beings on the planet, should we all sit back and let nature take its course when it comes to disease, famine, natural disasters or pandemics?
subject, it’s just plain wrong. The planet — and more importantly, humankind — will be better off when we start believing in human ingenuity. We need more human brainpower — not less — to lift people out of poverty, innovate our way out of environmental challenges and make a case for unfettered and unconditional freedom. Women should be free to access all forms of education and family planning methods, not so that they have fewer children but so that they can enjoy the same kind of lifestyle choices as those who seek to limit their numbers.
David Attenborough is a national sweetheart, Greta Thunberg is hailed as an international inspiration and climate activists across the world have been praised for their brave efforts in fighting for a better planet. But we should not allow the alarmism surrounding climate change to mask the deep-seated prejudices and misanthropic tendencies of population control enthusiasts.
At Davos earlier this year, a packed audience of leaders and economists sat through an exercise in climate self-flagellation by Dr Jane Goodall. While scolding these naughty boys for ruining the planet, Goodall assured them that the current state of the climate “wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago”. Unless we fancy allowing the population of Davos to dictate who lives and who dies in a new climate-friendly world, it’s time to start calling out the elitist, reactionary, small-minded narrative behind today’s climate warriors. Who’s to say that the next kid born in the slums whom the likes of Attenborough finds distateful couldn’t come up with the solution for how to save our planet?
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Jshe was heading into trouble. She also, presumably, believed that she was taking all necessary steps to head that trouble off. Her novel, American Dirt, started 2020 as one of the year’s most talkedabout books. It was anointed a title to look out for by the New York Times, Esquire, Vogue and a litany of others. It was selected for Oprah’s book club, more or less guaranteeing it bestseller status, and justifying the alleged seven-figure advance that Cummins’s publisher paid out. This is all the stuff of unimaginable success for novelists, who generally scrape away below minimum wage, propped up by second jobs (often teaching other aspiring novelists) as they release their work to basic indifference.
But American Dirt was a novel arriving at exactly the right time, a story about migration venturing into a world where migration is one of the most urgent stories going. In it, a Mexican mother and her son — sole survivors of a cartel massacre — must surrender their middle-class lives and make the dangerous journey from Acapulco to the glimmer of sanctuary in the US, riding on the back of the freight train nicknamed La Bestia and dodging robbery, violence and predatory traffickers as they travel.
Writing about real-life trauma is perilous for authors in a literary culture that is consumingly vigilant to concepts such as “cultural appropriation” and “white supremacy”. What right do you have to tell this story? Why should it be you who tells it, rather than somebody else? These are the kinds of questions that writers have to pre-empt if they are to get a hearing at all, but Cummins understood this. In an afterword to the novel, she explains that she initially wished that “someone slightly browner” would write her book, but then she decided that she could be a “bridge” between experi
the triumphant launch of American Dirt, Cummins’s US publisher announced that her tour to promote the novel was cancelled owing to “safety concerns”. Cummins had become a hate figure; there had been specific threats against both her and the venues. The initially positive verdict on the book had been replaced by a new consensus: Cummins was an appropriator, an exploiter, a trafficker in torture porn.
At a launch dinner for the book, the centrepiece — based on the cover of the novel — had incorporated barbed wire. This was ultimate tastelessness. That “undocumented immigrant husband” Cummins referred to? Not Mexican, but Irish. And as for Cummins herself, she was unforgivably, irrevocably, a white woman: any success for her could only be interpreted as a theft from the voices of the oppressed.
All this considered, the defenders of human dignity regarded Cummins as a fair target for violence. One might hope that such open intimidation against an author would at least activate a sense of self-preservation among people who write for a living. It did not, and there is a sour irony in this happening to a book that so insistently refers to the execution of Mexican journalists.
After the cancellation of the tour (to be replaced with a penitentiary-sounding “series of town hall meetings” including “some of the groups who have raised objections to the book”), the condemnatory op-eds continued to accumulate, with the Guardian alone publishing three of them. A depressingly hefty list of writers signed an open letter requesting that Oprah Winfrey rescind American Dirt’s place in the book club.
In the letter, despite lurid claims of the novel’s capacity to cause harm, there are no specific examples from the text: instead, the evidence for the prosecution consists of that centrepiece, the line about the “faceless brown mass” (something which, remember, Cummins intended to rectify, not endorse) and an insinuation of plagiarism despite Cummins’s careful ac
knowledgement of her literary debts in her text (the main character, Lydia, is a bookstore owner before the breach in her life that turns her into a migrant, meaning that Cummins has plenty of excuses to name-drop favourite Latino authors).
In fact, it’s very hard to glimpse Cummins’s novel at all within the ferocity of the reaction to it, or to know what she could have done to forestall the reaction, other than not write the book at all. Bad faith seems to seep into every critique. The New York logic that her critics later brought to bear in trashing the book. All of her assertions about her right to write are founded in exactly the same terms that would later be used against her.
The problem with Cummins’s allusion to her husband being an undocumented migrant is not that, being Irish, his experiences are unrelated to those of Latina migrants: there is, surely, an underlying insecurity held in common. The problem is that she felt she had to obscure his Irishness to make him a convincing part of her defence, because she had accepted that only Mexicans can imagine Mexico. American Dirt even includes a distancing caricature of the well-meaning white woman, which (had more of Cummins’s critics bothered to read the novel) could have been effectively turned back on the author. Lydia and her son are sheltered by a friend of her husband and his American missionary wife, who makes a “proprietary” show of her grief and then objects to giving any practical help. She is the definition of the “drive-by Samaritan” that Cummins so feared being taken for.
American Dirt
D ‘‘according to a familiar quotation usually attributed to Auguste Comte. Familiar it may be, but the implications are often ignored. Demographics matter rather obviously for the future of the world; they will also influence the outcome of post-Brexit Britain. Consider a naive projection. According to the latest data from the World Bank, in 2017 the average Italian woman had 1.3 children. To replace the population from one generation to the next, women need to have 2.1 children. It follows that — if the pattern persists — 25 or so years from now the number of Italians under the age of 25 will be almost 40 per cent lower than today. Indeed, if two generations of Italian women keep on having only 1.3 children, 50 years from now the number of Italians under the age of 25 will be over 60 per cent down from current levels.
It gets worse. People work from about the age of 20 to, typically, some point in their sixties. At the time of writing, the average retirement age in Italy is 61.7. Of course the Italians who are now between the ages of 36.7 and 61.7 will all be over the age of 61.7 when we look ahead 25 years. Inescapably, the overwhelming majority of this age group will not be working or producing. Yet, at that point, the number of young people entering the labour market with the ability to work and produce will be markedly lower than today.
Exactly how Italy will sort out these very predictable problems is uncertain. Of course its demographic malaise and the consequent public policy issues are not new. The decline in fertility goes back several decades and has already caused a significant fall in the working-age population. That fall, combined with a mediocre productivity performance, has meant that national output will this year be about 4 per cent lower than it was before the Great Recession hit in 2008.
When alerted to the issue raised by a falling population, young people in Italy might decide their prospects are better in other countries, and pack up their bags and emigrate. But this entirely rational response of individuals aggravates the difficulties for the community as a whole, because emigration of the young reduces further the ratio of the working-age population to its elderly dependents.
relevant to Brexit? The answer is that Italy represents in an extreme form a problem that is common across the European Union. The average fertility rate of women in the EU is 1.6, with notably low levels in Spain (1.3), and Portugal and Greece (1.4), as well as in Italy. Despite the heavy immigration from Eastern Europe and the Middle East which has contributed to a populist backlash in European politics, and despite the tendency for young immigrant families to have more children than their native-born counterparts, women in most European countries are still not having enough children to stabilise the population.
Numerous assumptions are possible in demographic projections. Extrapolation of current fertility behaviour — with the often big differences between nations — can generate disruptive and mind-blowing conclusions three or four generations away. It may have encouraged the research teams responsible for the United Nations figures to bias central estimates against alarmism. In its “medium-variant” exercises out to 2100, the UN equalises future fertility across the globe at the replacement figure, even though fertility rates diverge enormously between nations and continents. The medium-variant numbers are therefore likely to understate the European problem, since no strong evidence has yet emerged which suggests that families in Italy, Spain and so on are having more babies.
In the absence of mass immigration, it is now inevitable that the EU’s working age population will fall over the next few decades. According to the UN’s medium variant, the number of people between the ages of 15 and 64 in the continuing 27 EU member states is 285 million this year, but it will drop to 270 million in 2030, 251 million in 2040 and 234 million in 2050.
The average rate of decline may not sound like much, at just over 0.6 per cent a year. But the decline has to be set in the context of weak productivity growth in the past decade and the damage from the looming increase in the dependency ratio (that is, the ratio of the elderly plus children to the working-age population).
Statistics from the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that eurozone productivity, as
measured by output per hour, increased by 0.9 per cent a year in the decade from the Great Recession. Let us make the neutral conjecture that performance on this front in the next three decades will be just the same as in the last one. Then the rate of productivity growth is barely higher than the rate of contraction in the working age population.
and remarkable happens, the outlook has to be a long period of economic stagnation. Britain’s EU neighbours will experience a virtual halt in output growth, with living standards going sideways at best.
Scarier stories are easy to put together. Remember that the dependency ratio is rising in this period and that rises in the dependency ratio tend to be associated with a higher tax burden, because of increased public expenditure on health and pensions. At present the working age population in the EU27 is almost 66 per cent of the total population; in 2050 — again relying on the UN’s medium variant — the figure will have fallen to 57 per cent.
Suppose that higher taxation discourages people from working and tempts them to seek earlier retirement or to emigrate to lower-tax nations outside the EU, say, the United States of America, Australia or Canada. Again, the rational response of individual citizens worsens the adjustment problems for societies towards which they might be expected to have some loyalty.
Tmay have sounded over-thetop and a bit shrill. But it must be emphasised that some of the EU27 confront more difficult demographic strains than others. Little media attention has so far been paid in the UK to Germany’s travails, perhaps because all too frequently it is tagged as “Europe’s economic powerhouse” or something of the sort. But in coming decades it will suffer a particularly severe demographic reverse. In the 2020s its working age population will fall
by 0.9 per cent a year. In the 2010s output per hour advanced by roughly the same figure. On the face of it, the risk has to be a decade of zero growth. What do the UN demographic projections say about the UK? Crucially, does it face the same sort of challenges as its EU neighbours?
The answer is that it does face challenges of the same sort but they are milder and more manageable. The working-age population is estimated to be 43.2 million in 2020, and then to rise to 43.6 million in 2030 and to be stable at about the same level for the subsequent few decades. As in the rest of Europe, the number of old people will rise faster than the working-age population, but the increase in the burden will be less sharp and its costs will therefore be easier to absorb.
The contrast between the UK and its EU counterparts can be shown in a chart. If Russia is put to one side as no longer a mainstream European nation, the UK working age population is at present the second-highest in Europe behind Germany. It is quite a long way behind Germany and so also is its national output. But by 2060 the UK will start to overtake Germany, and it will also on this metric be well ahead of France and Italy.
Whether UK national output becomes the largest in the European orbit is uncertain but entirely possible. Although British productivity growth has been feeble since the Great Recession, and less indeed than in the rest of Europe, the longer-term record is more favourable to the UK. Through the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century the UK’s supply-side efficiency benefited from the Thatcher reforms of the 1980s.
It is hardly startling to suggest that, if fewer people are available to work, less output will be produced
— certainly for the next generation, and probably for the generation after that — ought to be associated with some growth in output and living standards in the UK, whereas nations like Germany and Italy will be held back by falls in working-age population and employment. The UK joined the Common Market in 1973 largely because of its self-image as an economic slowcoach relative to dynamic, fastgrowth European neighbours and rivals. British policy-makers may in the twenty-first century make mistakes on the financial and economic front, as did their predecessors in the 1960s and early 1970s.
But more plausible is that policies relevant to output growth will be much the same in the UK and EU27, while there is at least a chance that post-Brexit UK will move closer to a low-tax, free-trade, light-regulation “Singapore on Thames” model. If so, people in the UK will regard their nation as an economic success story, at least in relative terms. Poor economic performance will not support the case for rejoining the EU.
One of the puzzles here is the failure of the European intellectual and political elite to anticipate the demographic trials that lie ahead. Members of the elite have undoubtedly become aware of the issues. Andrej Plenkovic is the prime minister of Croatia, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency. In an interview with the Financial Times at the end of last year he described depopulation as “a structural, almost an existential problem for some nations”. A few days later he warned that freedom of movement across the continent was “killing” small nations. Plenkovic was worried not because freedom of movement allowed in too many immigrants, but because it gave talented young people in medium-income small nations (on the Baltic Sea and in the Balkans) the opportunity to emigrate to larger and richer nations like Germany and France (and also to the UK before Brexit).
so-called “demographic time-bomb” have been acknowledged and understood for over 30 years. The slide in the fertility rate began in the 1960s and is clearly related to the rise in female participation in the workforce. Steps could have been taken in the 1990s, by putting the appropriate incentives in the various nations’ systems of taxes and social security, to check the fall in fertility and to ensure that successive generations replace each other.
But nowhere did that theme gain any traction in the political debate. Did it echo too much the horrid “master race” strands of inter-war fascism? Can it be overlooked that Nazi Germany blessed Lebensborn (“Fount of Life”) homes, which had the deliberate aim of raising the birthrate of “racially pure” Aryan children?
But, if fascism was one kind of madness in the twentieth century, demographic suicide will be another in the twenty-first. It is not complicated to work out that — if no migration occurs, and four generations of women have a fertility rate of 1.3 and thereafter the fertility rate returns to the 2.1 replacement level — the population of a nation drops from one century to the next by 85 per cent.
Common sense demands that these questions be raised in public debate, although they fringe controversially on gender politics, the role of the family in modern societies and the meaning of “national identity”. As Burke warned in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, no one generation has the right to think selfishly only about itself. “Society is . . . a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born.”
At any rate, in a demographically challenged continent the UK is relatively well placed for the next few decades. The stability of its working age population does not guarantee that post-Brexit Britain will have a better economic performance than the EU27, but it does make that outcome more likely.
Population trends are far from being the only determinant of economic success, but they do influence the growth of output and living standards. It is hardly startling to suggest that, if fewer people are available to work, less output will be produced or that, if the number of dependants rises relative to the number actively producing goods and services, the pie is smaller and less of it can be enjoyed by both dependants and producers.
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a church without god? Who would bother? For years the answer has been the dear old C of E. Even Yes, Prime Minister couldn’t resist a dig: the Church of England as primarily a social organisation is one which, while still live in the public imagination, simply does not match reality.
The current Archbishop of Canterbury is an Evangelical — one who draws every sermon back to Jesus and but now it isn’t even really respectable. There is simply no market for a church which doesn’t really believe in God. If you’re going to take the social hit of admitting to being a Christian, you might as well actually be a Christian. Religion in America has taken longer to collapse and so, perhaps, it has taken longer for the temptation to offer a church without God to collapse with it.