Are these "gurus" who advocate premature death a few random nutters or the norm?
From what I can tell, they are a few random nutters who
are the norm. I am exagerrating but what I mean is that it is the leaders of the ecological movement of the 1960s and 70s -- Paul Ehrlich, for example, or Charles Reich (I can name many other names, and give many relevant quotes, if you're interested) -- consider themselves, whatever
method they prefer, to be part of the reigning elite of the world who should tell everybody else how to act.
Their real goal, as Richard Neuhaus pointed out in
In Defense of People, is the fantasy of having a 'clean' world of people
like us, without all those billions of annoying riff-raff from the third world, whether by starving the riff-raff to death or by gradually breeding them out. The reason why primitivists never consider the 95%+ of humanity that would have to be slaves and servants is that the whole
point of the primitivist fantasy is to imagine a world cleansed of such inferior creatures.
Let us take population control. True,
this nutter -- who says "Saving a starving child today means having more children in thirty years time trying to live off the same or eroded resources" -- is an exception. Naturally he isn't thinking of children of people
like themselves: they also say that "
If you think not having children yourself is the answer PLEASE THINK AGAIN. For the smart people to leave breeding to the stupid, the brainwashed, the ignorant and the indoctrinated would be an even worse disaster." It's only
other people's children
, the children of people not like them, that should starve.
But is Ehrlich's view
that different? In some respects yes, but in many respects no. E.g., he thinks voluntary birth control is good enough for the likes of him -- people in the comfortable, educated west, who surely can be trusted to be responsible about their reproduction. But for "extreme cases of over-population" -- that is, in the third world -- Ehrlich advocated "compulsory birth regulation ... (through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size".
They, the masses, cannot be trusted. Their reproduction must be controled by people like
us, who should govern them. Freedom is for the likes of Ehrlich; coersion is for the rest of us slobs.
(Oh, and what if you're -- say -- a farmer who will now suffer hardship and even starvation because you have no heirs due to Ehrlich's forced steralization? Well, that's just
your bad luck to be born in a poor, populated country, you see.)
The difference between Ehrlich and the nutter is in the details: how much coersion, whether the coersion should be relatively benevolent or heartlessly malevolent. Neither contests the basic fact that people just like them should enjoy special priviledges, and it's the other 95% of the world not like them that should be coerced to do as they're told. And they share just this fantasy with many primitivists, as Neuhaus points out.
