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Exploring New Ethics for Survival:
The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle
By Garrett Hardin
New York, Viking, 1972. 273 pp. $8.95
Garrett Hardin of the University of California at Santa Barbara has, together with Paul Ehrlich, been one of the chief architects of the continuing debate about population growth and the prospects for human survival on our imperiled planet. The "shape of the question' was constructed in his oft reprinted essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," in which he contended that the almost exhausted resources of the ecosystem can be saved only by imposing "harsh but realistic" controls on individual freedom. There and elsewhere he has advocated "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon." Hardin offers the present book as a more thorough exploration of the ethics of survival. "Reason inexorably led me to conclude that the population problem could not possibly be solved without repudiating certain ethical beliefs and altering some of the political and economic arrangements of contemporary society. . . . I hope that my efforts will help evoke the courage, and wisdom, needed for this revolutionary step."
Whether Hardin in fact explores the implications of his previous proposals or merely restates them at much greater length must be judged by the reader who has the patience to work through this convoluted and frequently confusing volume. Interspersed through the pages is the narrative of the Spaceship Beagle. It appears that sometime in the 1970's, human beings tired of the unpleasant truths surfaced by the environmental movement and engaged in a pogrom in which all the ecologists were wiped out. Following their naive belief in technological Progress, they then launched a huge spaceship to go off in search of other planets fit for human habitation. On the spaceship were superior types, called Argotes, who were asexual and, by processes too complicated to explain here, de facto immortal. Also on the spaceship were the much more numerous Quotions who lived on the plains (the spaceship being many square miles in size) completely isolated from the Argotes. After thousands of years of futile search for a livable environment, the Beagle turns back toward earth. By this time the Argotes have, by freak circumstance, rediscovered sex and are, as a consequence, undergoing severe social instability. The Quotions, meanwhile, have
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been breeding in a horrendously undisciplined fashion, and there are now a million of them crowded together like a "skillet of worms." Since space in the reentry ship back to earth is limited, it is necessary to kill off the Quotions, a necessity recognized by all but one "haughty" and "self-righteous" Argote who has qualms about "playing God." So much for the story. The ending is left in doubt, but it is clearly intended as a parable illuminating the present dilemma created by the population explosion on our very real Spaceship Earth.
The book unfolds the above story between chapters that restate at great length the well-known arguments against the SST, the effects of detergents poured into our water systems, the diminishing "doubling time" in exponential population growth, and other perils by now familiar to anyone with only passing interest in the doomsday scenarios favored by certain sectors of the environmental movement. In view of the need for serious ethical analysis of the legitimate questions raised by environmentalists, it is disappointing that Hardin shows neither capacity nor inclination to examine critically the dogmas of ecological apocalypticism. It is as though the discussion of these questions had stood still since Paul Ehrlich released his essay, The Population Bomb, more than five years ago.
The result is a sadly misleading and simplistic treatment of an important subject. Every problem afflicting the planet-from war, to bureaucracy, to automobile accidents-is attributed to population growth. Hardin blithely repeats the dogma that population growth plus affluence means pollution. At the back of the book, hidden in a lengthy note, be casually mentions that Barry Commoner has raised questions about the population/pollution equation, but Commoner's caviling is apparently not worth discussing. In fact, in The Closing Circle, Commoner carefully and, in the opinion of many experts, devastatingly analyzed the Ehrlich/ Hardin doctrine of a mechanistic connection between population and pollution. Commoner, although he is perhaps best known and possesses the most unimpeachable credentials in terms of concern for environmental protection, is hardly alone in his opposition to the admittedly Malthusian views advanced by Hardin. Harold Barnett, Ben Wattenberg, R. W. Behan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Elvis Holt, and Phillip Kunz are only a few of the many experts who have written at length against the Malthusian determinism which is the conventional wisdom among those who place population control at the top of humanity's agenda for survival. None of them rate a mention by Hardin. Hardin writes that his views represent "the all but universal belief of those who have studied population deeply." The kindest comment one can make is that Hardin is less than entirely candid.
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As I have pointed out in my In Defense of People, the demographers, who are presumably the experts on population matters, are usually quite modest in predicting the future; they know how capricious are the factors influencing population growth and decline. The alarums typically are sounded by microbiologists, such as Hardin, who project inexorable and exponential growth on the basis of their experience with cells and insects, an experience untouched by the vagaries of human history. Their logic will tolerate no interference from the world of historical fact. Thus, for example, Hardin's argument that Zero Population Growth in the United States can be achieved only by coercive measures (sterilization, genetic manipulation to reduce the number of girl babies, etc.) is advanced in marvelous oblivion to the actual and dramatic downturn in American population growth in recent years. We are told that every country in the world, without exception, is plagued by burgeoning population growth. Perhaps Hardin has mentally excluded Rumania, Poland, and the Soviet Union (to name but a few) from Spaceship Earth, all of which are desperately striving to reverse their declining birth rates. The "undisciplined" and "conscienceless" breeders of the Third World are the real threat, according to Hardin. Nowhere does Hardin indicate that he is even aware of the extensive Third World literature challenging his simplistic analysis of the connection between population growth and development. Especially after the highly publicized debates surrounding preparations for the U.N. Stockholm conference on the environment, such as omission is inexplicable; inexplicable, that is, in any honest effort to deal with the questions raised by population growth. Anyone who believes, with Hardin, that the poor countries are made up of "mindless" and "animalistic" Quotions whose breeding habits must be controlled by us superior types is directed to, for example, Mahmood, Mamdani's The Myth of Population Control, which offers an incisive critique of the misperceptions involved in a sixteen year population control project conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation and Harvard University in India.
Exploring New Ethics is, in short, a profoundly disappointing book. In spite of his opening promise to do so, Hardin does not explore his formula regarding "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon." He repeats it, very much like an incantation, and one is left with the suspicion that it really means coercion imposed by the powerful (he would say "the enlightened.") upon the powerless. His quoting of chilling passages from Malthus and Nietzsche, his derision for the impotence of democracy to deal with real problems, and his disdain for "government by the Pee-pul" do little to relieve the suspicion. Except for a couple of approving references to
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Joseph Fletcher and "situation ethics," Hardin indicates not even an elementary familiarity with the discipline of ethical thought.
The importance of the book is that theologians and ethicists, especially those who are unaware of the massive literature and evidence ignored by Hardin, may be tempted to accept "the shape of the question" as it is here presented. For various reasons, perhaps related to their operating in a discipline commonly viewed as "soft," theologians and ethicists are attracted to the "hard-nosed," "realistic," "uncompromising analysis of a problem. How marvelously important one feels when working through (with seemly anguish, of course) the rights and wrongs of eliminating a few million people in order to secure the "quality of life on our imperiled planet." Whether such are the real options is quite another matter. A little more than ten years ago, some theologians and ethicists gained a new lease on a sense of professional importance, and, not so incidentally, garnered impressive press clippings, as they rose to the debate about the ethics of the shotgun at the door of the private bomb shelter. More serious minds challenged the shape of the question presented. Unfortunately, the discussion in religious circles about population and environment has not yet reached that level of maturity. Were I to venture a prediction about the exponential growth of nonsense, it would be that within the year religiously motivated Argotes will stage several theological conferences and produce several books on the "ethical crisis" posed by the Quotion explosion. It may have little to do with the facts but, compared with the tedious business of feeding the poor and with the seemingly endless quest for economic and political justice, it is ever so titillating.
Richard J. Neuhaus
Lutheran Church of St. John the Evangelist
Brooklyn, New York