A great essay on the human proclivity to proclaim a disaster—based on current statistical projections—then when it doesn’t occur, as a result of current statistical facts, still insist it will.
An excerpt.
“This year marks the fortieth anniversary of an influential yet little known manifesto. In the December 1968 issue of Science magazine, within months of San Francisco’s “summer of love,” University of California biologist Garrett Hardin published his revolutionary essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In barely a dozen pages, cited ever after by countless public-policy articles, Hardin argues the iron necessity of the political regulation of human fertility to avoid “the evils of overpopulation.” His argument has proven a major moment in the ongoing transmogrification of Western civilization from regimes of vaguely Christian citizenship, into autonomous public administrations bearing the sovereign authority of science.
“In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Hardin means to dig out the very roots of modernity and “explicitly exorcize the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography”—which is to say, spontaneous, autonomous parenthood. He argues that there is no “technical solution” to the problem of overpopulation and pollution; the newly invented Pill will not in itself reverse the glowering Malthusian storm. Individualistic rationality inexorably leads to the over-use, over-crowding, and destruction of the “commons,” humanity’s shared resources. This Tragedy of the Commons is never more inevitable than in the case of “the desire for children,” the “commons in breeding.” What Hardin calls a “moral solution” is urgently needed…
“Though even scientists may be tempted to lie in service of good causes, Hardin’s prevarications do not touch the deeper, underlying revolution in thought to which he has contributed: the mutation of a merely theoretical dilemma—with an unspecified time-frame—into an immediate practical necessity, that is, treating a mathematical projection sub specie aeternalis as an immediate crisis sub specie temporalis. The claim to rule may be wisdom, but the regime is not Plato’s paradoxical philosopher-king, contemplating the Whole. The modern scientist sees necessity through a stove-pipe specialization, blithely unaware that other specializations (such as economics) may question his premises (as Hardin’s have been mocked by Colin Clark, Roger Revell, Julian Simon, Nicholas Eberstadt, and others).
“Politicized scientists ignore political reality. Communities are always threatened by a legion of disasters, “not single spies, but in battalions,” unique, unpredictable, but rarely calamitous. To the rationalist hammer, however, all the world seems a mathematical nail. In trying to deduce policy from science, cosmological demagogues sink beneath the level of prudent praxis, the careful weighing of character and opportunity, down to the level of techne, like accountants generating simple answers to easily defined but irrelevant problems. As Hegel also quipped: “Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated.” The Regime of Science is no philosopher-king, but rather an Aztec astronomer-priest, committed to human sacrifices lest the sun fail to rise tomorrow.”
