his summer, amid fresh reports of terrorist attacks and two volatile presidential conventions, the Huffington Post helpfully offered its readers “Six Things Obama Can Teach Us About Self-Care in Stressful Times”—like “block off time for the people you love” and “keep things in perspective.”
Evidently, in our overly anxious times, one of the obligations of the leader of the free world is to serve as a role model for our culture’s latest therapeutic panacea: “self-care.”
Self-care is less an organized industry than it is an emerging (and maddeningly vague) philosophy of life that is gaining ever larger numbers of devotees, especially online. Tumblr features many posts tagged “self-care” that include advice such as “You are valid” and “Fall deeply in love with yourself.” There are “self-care band-aid tattoos” on offer from a company called Motivational Tattoo that feature uplifting reminders such as “I am enough” and “Calm.”
Online you can also find countless self-care “check-in questionnaires” that encourage participants to pause throughout the day to ask themselves important questions on the order of “Do I need to cry?” and “Am I feeling safe?” A website called The Hairpin has a dedicated self-care column that proffers advice and interviews people about their elaborate self-care rituals. The TED empire has even curated a “playlist” of talks that encourage self-care, such as Guy Winch’s advice on “emotional first aid” and Kelly McGonigal on “How to Make Stress Your Friend.”
Building on the decades-long growth of the happiness industry, which has brought the world corporate “chief happiness officers” and on-site office napping pods, self-care has emerged as the perfectly soothing remedy for our new age of anxiety. It offers a conveniently flattering rationale for our growing feelings of powerlessness and the resulting desire to retreat inward. We’re not entitled, lazy, or merely misguided; we’re “struggling with self-care,” as one online questionnaire described it.
Self-care is not to be confused with that other cultural trend, mindfulness. In theory, mindfulness encourages its practitioners to notice what is happening around them so that they might more fully experience life; such noticing (along with practices such as mindfulness meditation) is also believed to help encourage the development of empathy. By contrast, the self-care ethos says that what matters most isn’t what’s going on around you but you and your feelings. Perhaps this is why self-care is popular on social media. Instagram is rife with #selfcare posts and @selfcaremantras that feature people relaxing in bubble baths and performing other rigorous acts of wellness.
If self-care remained the province of crystal-wielding healers and social-media celebrities, it would, like the craze for matcha tea, soon fade. But the ethos of self-care is finding its way into the broader culture, with disturbing results. Like the word “diversity,” the seemingly innocuous phrase “self-care” is politically freighted both because it is difficult to challenge—for after all, who could be against taking care of yourself?—and because it mistakes self-indulgence for self-reliance.
The self-care message is pernicious because it shifts responsibility away from what you can do for yourself and toward the supposedly terrible things the world is doing to you.Critics from the left view self-care as a hoax perpetrated by neoliberal capitalist employers who offer free shiatsu massage chairs to trick their employees into working longer hours for less pay. Similarly, they see technology companies using self-care as a stalking horse for selling surveillance apps like Sworkit, which lets you design personalized exercise routines you can perform in as little as five minutes (thus making you a more efficient employee). One contributor to an anti-corporate leftist journal called the Baffler went so far as to compare self-care to gas-lighting. The message of corporate-sponsored wellness crusades is “if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you,” she argued. “Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.” The writer, Laurie Penny, went on to lament: “Self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are.”
But the left’s criticism of self-care is as misguided as the philosophy itself. It implies that the ethos of hard work and rugged individualism that has formed the basis for much of America’s success is a con rather than a reality. As one self-care advocate wrote on Lifehacker, “Most of us grew up believing that the more you sacrifice, the bigger the reward.” That was, evidently, a lie. “It’s easy to take the ‘hard work pays off’ adage too far, to the point that it becomes counterproductive.” But “hard work pays off” isn’t an adage, it’s a value statement, and alas, it’s one whose power has faded in recent years.
In many ways both the self-care worldview and its critics on the left are the logical consequence of the navel-gazing therapy culture Christopher Lasch first identified in 1979’s The Culture of Narcissism. It’s logical that the new self-care industry would co-opt and define down the language of “recovery,” for example, just as the left has commandeered the word “victim.” For advocates of self-care, recovery doesn’t mean bouncing back from a serious drug addiction or major surgery. They’re recovering from having to navigate the realities of adulthood. Experiences that previous generations understood as part of life’s sometimes unpleasant facts, like having to save money, have become the subject of freak-show fascination today; this is why we have a reality television show called “Extreme Couponing.”
As one self-care Tumblr post advised, “Learn to say no to things and people that make you unhappy.” But much of what makes a person a functioning adult in society isn’t going to make anyone happy (such as paying your mortgage or your taxes). Another typical self-care questionnaire asks if you feel “dissociated, depersonalized, derealized” in everyday life, which sounds like a perfect description of the experience of going to the DMV, for example, or dealing with any form of bureaucracy, but hardly a rallying cry for a movement dedicated to strengthening the self.
The real question is why the modern person’s sense of self has become so fragile that it can’t cope with the mundane experience of unhappiness. Self-care doesn’t encourage the development of self in the sense that we have long understood it (such as David Hume’s notion of the self as a kind of commonwealth or David Riesman’s taxonomy of inner-directed and other-directed individuals). It isn’t part of a larger project of self-knowledge intended to make us better people; it just wants us to feel comfortable.
We are uneasy about the seductive quality of these ideas, and our unease is made clear by the allure of popular entertainment about extreme behavior, such as our love of shows like Naked and Afraid and fashionable social-science theories about “grit.” We tend to fetishize things only once they have begun to disappear.
For conservatives, the self-care message is pernicious because it shifts responsibility away from what you can do for yourself (undermining values such as self-reliance, individualism, service, and entrepreneurial spirit) and toward the supposedly terrible things the world is doing to you. Unhealthy? Must be the fault of the industrial food lobby that makes so much bad processed food. Stressed out? Definitely the fault of your employer, who should give you more paid personal days off. The self-care ethos elevates feelings over action and embraces the pursuit of self-satisfaction as an end in itself, encouraging a rather masturbatory approach to civic life. It traffics in the language of retreat rather than resilience; self-care advocates urge you to “protect” your schedule, “defend” your me-time.
Is it surprising that a generation being reared on a message of self-care rather than self-reliance would view “safe spaces” as an entitlement and the offensive, the odd, and the politically incorrect as tangibly threatening to their health? No, but such campaigns against singularity for the purposes of collective “self-care” will leave them unprepared to face reality. A nation of people whose reaction to stress is to self-care by journaling using their “feeling words” isn’t going to be prepared to handle the challenges of what is likely to be a long battle against global terrorism or economic and political upheaval.
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Self-Care and the Disappearance of the Adult
Must-Reads from Magazine
Charles Krauthammer, 1950-2018
A life well lived.
John Podhoretz 2018-06-21
Charles Krauthammer made people understand their own thoughts. It was Charles who collated the various strands of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy and codified them as the Reagan Doctrine in a Time Magazine essay in 1985. He did the same with the Bush Doctrine 16 years later—and his codification played a role in how Bush himself came to formulate his approach to the world following 9/11. And in 2009, Charles codified the Obama Doctrine as well, although not by that name, in a speech he turned into one of the great articles of our time, “Decline Is a Choice.” I was there when he delivered that speech and rushed up to him to ask that he allow me to publish it in COMMENTARY, but I was too late; he had already promised it to The Weekly Standard.
I couldn’t really object because, 14 years earlier, I had been part of the trio (with Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes) who had recruited him to come write for the Standard. I don’t think I was the reason he did so and I’m not sure I conducted myself in a way that helped our case. I was not then and am not now easily intimidated, but I always found Charles particularly intimidating. The early going at the Standard did little to ease that sense of intimidation. At early editorial meetings, he seemed particularly eager to challenge my ideas for articles and to make me defend them; he had come to know me primarily as the brother of his wife Robbie’s best friend Rachel and as the brother-in-law of his close friend Elliott and had no independent reason to think I had any particular business running a magazine or serving as his editor, which I would do.
You didn’t edit Charles, though. He edited himself. Over and over again. His work would come in from an assistant and be revised continually until the moment of publication. Expressions of frustration about the late hour nearing the time we had to send pieces off to the printer were greeted on the phone with stony silence. Any complaint to one of his assistants (Rich Lowry was one) generated what seemed to a kind of silent terror that crackled through the cables. He was civil, but not necessarily pleasant, in these moments.
Charles existed so apart from his quadraplegic disability in the minds and experiences of those of us who knew him—because of his willed insistence that it be so, a willed insistence that was all the more powerful because it was unspoken—that any anger I might have felt at the imposition of his writerly arrogance seemed entirely permissible … until the moment that I remembered. I would remember he could not put pen to paper. I would remember he wrote by dictating. I would remember it was a goddamned astonishing fact of facts that he could do any of this, let alone do it with such easy brilliance. Think of it. He read widely and paid attention to everything—a man who had some difficulty turning a page. He wrote weekly, this man who could not write.
How did he? He told me once that when he did rounds as a resident at Mass General, the hospital had a primitive voice-control system in which he and his colleagues would phone in their notes on patients. The system would start when they began speaking, but if they paused or said um or got lost in their thoughts, it would shut down and hang up on them. And so they would have to do it again. Charles, of course, couldn’t take notes. He had to dictate off the top of his head. Because this weirdly technical aspect of his medical training taught him how, he became a fluent dictater of words, and the only person I ever knew who could make one of those early computer voice thingies called Dragon work to his advantage.
Anyway, Charles liked the Standard, and he like the work we did, and when I left editing there, he wrote me the nicest letter I have ever received. It was not a necessary gesture. I didn’t expect it and he was in no way obliged to write it, but write it he did. It was the first act of pure kindness he had ever shown me, and it began a friendship—a very distant friendship, but a friendship nonetheless—that would last two decades. Over time he would share bits and pieces of the way he was compelled to live. He told me that the year Ford came out with the van he was able to drive was the greatest liberation of his life. He did love driving that van—and drove it with frightening flourish.
He had been one of the first people I met when I came to Washington looking for a possible job at the tail end of college. Martin Peretz, the editor of The New Republic and the man who had helped turn Charles from a Mondale speechwriter into a magazine writer, had invited me to lunch with the two of them at the Palm. I had been reading him for a while, and had no idea he was wheelchair-bound. The only note taken of it was that Marty occasionally offered to help Charles with his straw, or to cut a piece of gristle off the steak that had already been sliced thin for him.
A grandee of Washington at the time—I don’t remember who, maybe Lee Hamilton or the head of Brookings or some such—stopped by the table to complain about Israel. That day the Jewish state had annexed the Golan Heights, an act that was taken to be very bad by the conventional wisdom of Washington grandees then and now.
“Please tell me even you have no defense for this,” the grandee told Marty Peretz.
“Well, I’m no fan of Begin, and I’m sure he could have done this better,” Marty said, “but there are good strategic reasons for such a move, of course.”
And Charles said, “Israel does what Israel has to do, just like the United States.”
As I said, he made people understand their own thoughts. Every week. For decades. That day, for the first time, he made me understand mine. After hundreds of other such occasions, reading him in print and listening to him during his tenure as the most unexpected of TV stars, I can say I’m not sure anyone in my lifetime has ever done that better. It is a key role of the intellectual explicator, which is what Charles was nonpareil—to help you understand what you think.
He was the most extraordinary person I have ever known, and I have been blessed to know many. We roasted Charles a few years ago at our annual fundraiser. Of course, no one could think of a bad thing to say about him. He said bad things about us. They were hilarious, because that’s the other thing he was—funny. Very, very, very funny. We’ll release video of it over the coming days.
There is more to say—about Charles as a Jew, about Charles as a brilliant social commentator, and about Charles as a medical miracle. For that he was. He was a quadriplegic who lived to the age of 68—and died not of complications from his condition but from cancer. He told Bill and Fred and me back in 1995 that he did not know how much longer he had to live and he needed to earn as much as he could to ensure Robbie and his son Daniel were provided for if the end came unexpectedly. He lived for 23 years after that. He wrote a book that sold a million copies. People flocked to him at personal appearances as though he were a Beatle.
Has anyone ever done more with the life God handed him, or played a bad hand as astoundingly as Charles did?
He did not believe in God, but if there is a God and there is a heaven, I hope Charles is playing basketball right now and cracking wise with the wisest of men, for he was among the greatest-souled of men. Baruch Dayan Emet. And may Robbie and Danny be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
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Social Justice vs. Human Nature
Downward leveling.
Noah Rothman 2018-06-21
Last Friday, the New York Times revealed that a lawsuit targeting Harvard University claims the school has systematically discriminated against minorities. That is, one particular minority. The school, it was alleged, has handicapped Asian-American students. Otherwise, they’d have to accept too many qualified Asian-Americans. For a peculiar type of activist for social equality, this was the good kind of prejudice–the kind that privileges accidents of birth over individual merit and achievement. Or, in the soft, docile Newspeak that suffices to comfort the enlightened elites charged with keeping the deserving down: “racial balancing.”
Harvard has objected to the allegations and provided statistics that purport to show that no negative racial discrimination exists. But many of those who you might expect to defend this elite institution are, in fact, comfortable with negative discrimination, even if the victims of that process are minorities themselves.
That’s the logic evinced by Minh-Ha T. Pham, a media studies professor at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and, as her bio prominently notes, a parent of a student in New York City’s school system. That note is important—more important than her background as a scholar of Asian-American studies because her argument in the New York Times is that her child deserves to be disadvantaged in the name of social leveling.
You see, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has introduced a plan to depopulate the city’s most prestigious high schools of the disproportionately high number of Asian students in the hopes of privileging more black and Latino students who otherwise cannot compete. Asian-American parents are, quite understandably, outraged by the naked effort to punish their hard work and rob their offspring of all the opportunities their work should, by rights, afford them. Not Professor Pham, though. Her eyes are wide open.
Pham argues that de Blasio’s plan to reserve seats at prestigious high schools for students who score below the threshold for admittance on a standardized test—and, ultimately, to eliminate the test altogether—“isn’t anti-Asian, it’s anti-racist.” But she appears to conflate racism with interclass disparities. Pham even notes that success on standardized testing can be a reflection of the resources some parents are or are not able to devote to their children’s’ study. For some on the left, the distinctions between racism and classism are fairly blurred, so Prof. Pham may not see the confusion her argument inspires among the uninitiated. Nor does she tackle a 2016 mayor’s office report, which found that New York City’s Asian-American population has the city’s highest poverty rate. Whether it’s Harvard University or Stuyvesant High School, these are often first-generation students who have seen what they’ve worked for stolen from them because they were simply too successful in the endeavor.
Pham goes on to preen about how all schools in New York City should be “elite schools,” a fluffy sentiment that, in practice, renders all the institutions she’s disparaging equally bad. She adds that Asian-Americans have not suffered from the kind of racism that black Americans have historically endured and with which they still struggle. “[T]oo many Asians have chosen to preserve the status quo by buying into racism against blacks and the white supremacist system built on it,” Pham laments. Therefore, she concludes, Asian Americans should commit to “fighting” the system, even if that means passively accepting the back seat on the bus.
At this point, we need to be reminded that the controversy here isn’t over whether American minorities deserve to benefit from positive social leveling but whether qualified Asian-Americans are benefiting too much from meritocracy. Professor Pham has managed to erect an elaborate intellectual construct to convince her of the righteousness of her view, but she will probably find it hard to get support beyond her overeducated peer group. If her problem is that students acculturated in Asian immigrant households are simply better prepared for standardized tests, and that eliminating those tests might help level the playing field, that’s one thing. But Pham’s argument sprawls and contains attacks on all disparities. From racial disparities to economic disparities to qualitative disparities; her problem doesn’t seem to be inequality of opportunity but the fact that tiered and hierarchical societal institutions exist in the first place.
Pham is not just arguing against the ethos at the heart of the American idea; as the outraged Chinatown-based activist Karlin Chan said, de Blasio’s plan “attacks the immigrants’ dream of bettering their children.” She is arguing against human nature itself. “[S]ome Asian-American parents in New York are protesting this proposal,” Pham laments. “They are on the wrong side of this educational fight.” One of biology’s most powerful overriding genetic imperatives is the desire to create the most optimal conditions for one’s offspring. Not everyone can reason themselves into believing that depriving their children of the opportunities that may be their due is a necessary sacrifice to the arbitrary diktats of social justice. Where would this country be if they could?
For the last 300 years or so, the most fundamental distinction among Western political factions has been between those who think that mankind can be perfected and those who do not. Professor Pham believes that reason should trump biology, in this case, even if it leaves her progeny worse off. There is a reason that those who believed in humanity’s perfectibility—from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks—all resorted to the compelling power of the state to impose their dogma. They have rationalized themselves into an entirely irrational position.
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PODCAST: The End of the Crisis, or the Beginning?
Podcast: Battles at the border and in the UN.
Noah Rothman 2018-06-21Is the crisis the Trump administration inaugurated over the separation of children from their border-crossing families over? Or will the press and Democrats pursue this story even after at the risk of exposing the systemic flaws in the country’s immigration system? Also, the U.S. withdraws from the United Nations Human Rights Council, and good riddance.
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The Unsympathetic Opposition
Radicalism and self-injury.
Noah Rothman 2018-06-20
As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to be uncompromising when it came to immigration. For the most part, he has delivered. An executive order that restricted refugee intake and access to temporary visas in the first days of his administration sparked a wave of popular unrest, but the outrage subsided as Trump’s assaults on America’s permissive immigration regime became routinized. Only when Trump began breaking up the families of asylum seekers did the powerful public aversion we saw with the introduction of the “travel ban” again overtake the national consciousness. The abuse was so grotesque, the victims so sympathetic, and the administration’s insecurity so apparent that it broke the routine.
Opponents of this administration’s “zero tolerance policy” for border crossers and some asylum seekers currently have the upper hand. But as the debate over what to do next heads to Congress, where the mundanities of a legislative fix will come to dominate the national conversation, the liberal-activist wing risks sacrificing its sympathy. Such activists have convinced themselves that this is an extreme situation that requires extreme measures in response. Down that road lies marginalization and, ultimately, defeat.
On Tuesday night, Homeland Security Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and it was deemed by activists and reporters to be a galling provocation that could not stand. Activists descended on the restaurant, shouting “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace!” Reporters marveled at Nielsen’s gauche “optics,” and even speculated that her choice of venue was a subtle effort by the White House to bait their opponents into an overreaction (as if baiting were necessary). Nielsen was forced to leave the restaurant.
This is the kind of mania that can only afflict those hysterical enough to disregard the fact that Mexicans no longer make up the majority of the illegal population in America, and that most border crossers travel north from violence-plagued “Northern Triangle,” which consists of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. That kind of reaction from activists in and out of journalism is understandable—a policy that amounts to state-sponsored child abuse is a terrible injustice—but it is also self-defeating.
The logic that led to Nielsen’s ordeal is the same logic that has convinced some on the radical left to endorse the outing of otherwise anonymous U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in public fora. Activists on Tuesday night trolled through the online professional network LinkedIn to identify ICE officers, track where they live, and direct the most aggrieved of protesters to make their lives miserable. Online administrators had the presence of mind to suspend these users and scrub the web of their work, but those who want that information know where to get it. And this may not be a harmless activity. A popular activist Twitter account promoting the defunct leftist protest movement “Occupy Wall Street” posted an infographic on Tuesday glamorizing the murder of ICE agents for its more than 200,000 followers. Anyone of sound mind would ignore these incitements to radicalism, but it only takes one.
Those who are attracted to these tactics justify them as a necessarily extreme response to extremism. That might be explicable if the same tactics were not used to make Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s life miserable when the left became convinced that a two-year-old supervisory regulation allowing Internet service providers to privilege content providers was a blow to the foundations of the republic.
In January, when the FCC approved a plan to phase out “Net Neutrality” regulations, the left determined that the only reasonable response was unreasonableness. HBO’s John Oliver mobilized his viewers to bombard the FCC’s website with comments. Some of those commenting took it upon themselves to threaten the murder of the chairman’s family. “Resistance” groups began putting literature up around Pai’s neighborhood accusing him of criminal abuses. They held vigils in his driveway, held up signs invoking his children by name, bombarded his house with pizza deliveries he never ordered, and phoned in bomb threats that cleared out the FCC’s offices. They “come up to our front windows and take photographs of the inside of the house,” Pai told the Wall Street Journal last May. “My kids are 5 and 3. It’s not pleasant.”
It seems as if conflating the conduct of public and private life holds greater and greater appeal for a certain segment of the left. The attention it generates ensures that it will become a regular feature of protest movements in the Trump era. What’s more, the targets of this tactic suggest that the left will make no distinction between irritants that offend liberal sensibilities and those things that are truly obscene. That’s a slippery slope, and traveling down it sap the left of the sympathy it needs from the general public. In making Trump appointees and their families the targets of personal harassment, Trump’s opponents are discrediting themselves more than they are shaming anyone in the White House.
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Over-Population: The Malthusian Myth That Refuses to Die
A dangerous idea makes a comeback.
Noah Rothman 2018-06-20
The word “ethics” appears prominently in the biographies of the authors who co-wrote a recent Washington Post op-ed lamenting the “taboo” associated with “talking about overpopulation.” Frances Kissling is the president of the Center for Health, Ethics, and Social Policy. Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. Only Jotham Musinguzi, the “director general of Uganda’s National Population Council,” doesn’t mention “ethics” in the bio. That’s good because the Malthusian views promulgated in the piece are anything but ethical.
Inauspiciously, the authors begin by applying a coat of gloss over Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, which they note had a “major impact” on public policy but that “spurred a backlash” rendering the discussion of its thesis “radioactive.” Indeed, that’s only just. Ehrlich’s claims were dead wrong.
Ehrlich claimed that the Earth had a finite “carrying capacity,” and its limits were about to be tested. He claimed that mass starvation was imminent; hundreds of millions would die. Neither the first nor the third world would be spared; the average American lifespan would decline to just 42 by 1980. Ehrlich continued to make apocalyptic predictions after his book became a sensation. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” he wrote in 1969. A year later: “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” Between 1980 and 1989, most of the Earth’s population, including over one-third of all Americans, would die or be murdered what he grimly dubbed “the Great Die-Off.” As recently as this year, Ehrlich—who still teaches at Stanford University—said that civilizational collapse remains a likely prospect and the chief shortcoming of his most famous book was that it failed to invoke the modern progressive Trinity: feminism, anti-racism, and inequality.
Our WaPo ethicists don’t tackle any of this. Indeed, they favorably observe that Ehrlich’s warnings render family planning in the developed world a necessity to stave off the unfortunate circumstances that would force wealthy nations to withhold food aid from the developing world to induce “necessary and justifiable” chaos and starvation. Seriously.
Because population control is not a problem in the developed world, where birthrates are declining below even replacement rates, population controllers tend to fixate on sexual habits in the developing world. The authors of this op-ed are no exception. They draw an almost always fallacious straight-line projection to conclude that—in the unlikely event that nothing changes between today and 2100—a population crisis should afflict a variety of Sub-Saharan African nations. To avert this crisis, they advocate promoting and supporting proper sexual hygiene, to which almost no one would object. But their authors’ core agenda isn’t the distribution of prophylactics. They seek to de-stigmatize abortion in the equatorial world, which is controversial for reasons that have nothing to do with faith. After all, it was The Population Bomb and its progenitors that lent renewed legitimacy to old arguments that inevitably result in targeting black and brown populations with sterilization and eugenics.
The title of Ehrlich’s book was lifted from a 1954 pamphlet issued by Gen. William Draper’s Population Crisis Committee, and it arguably inaugurated the overpopulation fad toward which pop intellectuals were drawn in the 20th Century. The effects this mania had on public policy were terrible. In the United States, population control hysteria led, in part, to the sterilization of “up to one-quarter” of the Native American women of childbearing age by 1977, according to Angela Franks’ 2005 book, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy. “The large number of sterilizations began in earnest in 1966, when Medicaid came into existence and funded the operation for low-income people.” Thousands of Native American women in the early to mid-1970s were sterilized after signing consent forms that failed to comply with regulations.
With the assistance of the U.S. government and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Puerto Rican government operated a program of voluntary female sterilization for decades, but it was “voluntary” in the most perverse sense. Pressure from employers and public incentives united to “liberate” women from the drudgery of childbearing, leaving many women without much of a choice in the matter. A 1965 survey of Puerto Rican women found that one-third of women in prime child-bearing years admitted to undergoing sterilization.
America’s minority populations were, however, a secondary concern to population controllers. It was, as ever, the so-called underdeveloped world that preoccupies the technocrats. Toward supposedly enlightened ends, the World Bank, working in quiet concert with the U.S. government, helped to advance Washington’s unstated goal of keeping population levels in the developing world down. “In some cases, strong direction has involved incentives such as payment to acceptors for sterilization, or disincentives such as giving low priorities in the allocation of housing or schooling to those with larger families,” a triumphant 1974 National Security Council memorandum read. As part of this campaign, American philanthropic institutions working with USAID reportedly distributed unsafe and untested contraceptive devices in the developing world. “USAID has been able to put some distance between itself and many of the more objectionable elements of its population agenda,” Population Research Institute’s James A. Miller wrote in a 1996 exposé.
For decades, a pseudoscientific religion that justified coercion and eugenics to achieve “optimal” population ratios quietly guided the development of Western public policy. In a comprehensive 2012 essay in The New Atlantis, Robert Zubrin demonstrated conclusively that 20th Century population control programs were “dictatorial,” “dishonest,” “coercive,” “medically irresponsible and negligent,” “cruel, callous, and abusive of human dignity and human rights,” and, perhaps most of all, “racist.” It was, in fact, their “neocolonial” aspects that led to a left-wing revolt against population controllers in the 1970s. But the left will never be able to entirely divorce itself from the logic that led to population control because they are Malthusians at heart. From peak Earth to peak oil, the left is possessed of a boundless pessimism. Theirs is an ideology that is founded upon the belief that life is a zero-sum game; all commodities are finite and can only be distributed fairly by enlightened elites. They will always underestimate humanity’s capacity to engineer itself out of a jam.
So, yes, overpopulation is a “taboo” subject because it has justified one of the most grotesque campaigns of industrialized human rights abuses the world has ever seen. In making a veiled argument in favor of abortion, our ethicists have inadvertently made their opponents’ case for them: reproductive controls targeting women in the developing world inevitably legitimize condescension, imperialism, and dehumanization. “The conversation about ethics, population and reproduction needs to shift from the perspective of white donor countries,” the authors conclude. And yet, as was ever the case, the “perspective of white donor countries” seems always to be the place from which dangerous ideas about the undesirable procreative habits of women in the equatorial world spring. Fifty years after the publication of a book that helped to legitimize the sterilization of millions in the developing world, that kind of noxious chauvinism remains a prominent feature of the population control movement.
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