Opinion: Sterilizing Those Pesky Humans: Earth Day with Paul Ehrlich

By Dr. Paul Kengor

Every April 22 is Earth Day. As one who studies Soviet Russia, I can’t help notice that the day coincides with the birthday of Vladimir Lenin. The inaugural Earth Day occurred April 22, 1970, no less than Lenin’s birth centennial.

This is most ironic. Lenin is a decaying symbol of central planning, which, regrettably, is the ideological preference of many of those filling the streets on Earth Day. Although Lenin was a collectivist, not an environmentalist, he is frequently recycled, as mortuary specialists from Russia’s health ministry regularly re-embalm him in his tomb.

Lenin had no respect for life. He declared certain people “harmful insects.” In Lenin’s deadly worldview, pesky humans were not precious, special, unrepeatable; they were disposable.

That brings me to a living symbol of Earth Day: Paul Ehrlich. Dr. Ehrlich’s explosive bestseller,The Population Bomb, inspired the freshman class that first Earth Day, embodying the wildest fears of apocalypse mongers. The great Johnny Carson was, sadly, one of Ehrlich’s dupes, giving him a platform on “The Tonight Show” dozens of times.

Much has been said about Ehrlich’s book. But as author John Berlau reports, one item has been conveniently sunk into a land-fill. “He [Ehrlich] flirted with a proposal to require adding contraceptive material to all food items in the United States,” writes Berlau in Eco-Freaks. “But Ehrlich’s most drastic—and contemptuous—measures were reserved for the third world. Ehrlich advocated that all men in India who had three or more children be forcibly sterilized.”

Really? That was something I needed to see for myself, certainly never learning this in my public education. So, I tracked down a September 1971 edition of The Population Bomb.

What Ehrlich wrote is jaw-dropping. Dealing first with pesky Americans, he wrote (pages 130-31):

"[T]he first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves 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 population size. Those of you who are appalled at such a suggestion can rest easy. The option isn’t even open to us, since no such substance exists. If the choice now is either such additives or catastrophe, we shall have catastrophe. It might be possible to develop such population control tools, although the task would not be simple. Either the additive would have to operate equally well and with minimum side effects against both sexes, or some way would have to be found to direct it only to one sex and shield the other."

As for pesky (non-white) folks in places like India, Ehrlich was less patient. On pages 151-52, he favored “sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children,” and with the direct help of the U.S. government. “We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments,” advised Ehrlich. “We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies.”

Was this “coercion?” asked Ehrlich. Of course, but it was “coercion in a good cause.”

Immediate action was imperative, assessed the professor. It was, after all, 1970, and the human race had precious little time. Ehrlich warned of humans metastasizing all over Mother Earth. He said stoically:

"I wish I could offer you some sugarcoated solutions, but I’m afraid the time for them is long gone. A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells…. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies—often horribly…. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense."

To borrow from other scaremonger imagery of the era, such as the hysterical propaganda filmSoylent Green, it was only a matter of time before the helpless masses started consuming one another. Only government action by anointed elites could save us from Armageddon.

Today, Ehrlich remains an icon, holding a plum spot at Stanford as the Bing Professor of Population Studies. Because he’s a liberal, a “progressive,” the 78-year-old has gotten away with this, much like Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood matron, who ran a “Negro Project,” spoke at a KKK rally, labeled certain pesky people “human weeds” and “imbeciles” and “morons,” and preached “race improvement.”

For icons of the left, there’s no need to say “I’m sorry.” The sins of the fathers and mothers of the progressive left are buried with the trash, never to be recycled, especially at Earth Day.

— Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values. His books include "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism," and the newly released "Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century."

The Roots of Tocqueville’s American Exceptionalism

By Dr. T. David Gordon

Editor’s note: Dr. T. David Gordon will be a participant in an April 7-8 conference hosted by The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College on American exceptionalism: “America: Still the Last Best Hope?”

It is not uncommon for people to suggest that the idea of American exceptionalism first appears in Alexis de Tocqueville’s two-volume classic, Democracy in America, which appeared in 1835 and 1840. Some even cite the following sentence: “The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one” (volume II of the 1972 Reeve translation [Knopf], p. 36). But is this proof?

Contextually, I believe we can find no proof for the idea of American exceptionalism in this sentence, which appears in Chapter IX, titled: “The Example of the Americans Does Not Prove That a Democratic People Can Have No Aptitude and No Taste for Science, Literature, and Art.”

Note what Tocqueville is saying: Although Americans have no aptitude or taste for science, literature, or art, this does not mean that democratic people in other circumstances would suffer from the same liability. That is, he concedes that Americans have no aptitude or taste for science, literature, or art, but argues that this is due to the particular American experience, and is no natural concomitant to democracy. He expressly concedes this in the chapter’s opening paragraphs:

It must be acknowledged that in few of the civilized nations of our time have the higher sciences made less progress than in the United States; and in few have great artists, distinguished poets, or celebrated writers been more rare. Many Europeans, struck by this fact, have looked upon it as a natural and inevitable result of equality; and they have thought that if a democratic state of society and democratic institutions were ever to prevail over the whole earth, the human mind would gradually find its beacon lights grow dim, and men would relapse into a period of darkness.

To reason thus is, I think, to confound several ideas that it is important to divide and examine separately; it is to mingle, unintentionally, what is democratic with what is only American.

This is hardly a ringing endorsement of “exceptional” Americans. That is, far from saying that Americans were “exceptional” in any ordinary or praiseworthy sense of the term, Tocqueville argued that states could operate on democratic principles without becoming the rubes of America. What he argued, in the oft-misquoted sentence, is that the American experience has certain liabilities: mentioning the fierce, austere Calvinism of many of its Puritan forbears; the free land in the west which invited more to agrarian than artistic pursuits; and a growing market for goods that encouraged industrial more than artistic or scientific pursuits.

Having mentioned these peculiarities of the American experience, Tocqueville summarized them in a paragraph that contains the oft-misquoted sentence:

The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven.

What was “exceptional” about the American “position” is its peculiar history that had led it to its present (to Tocqueville) circumstance, in which the American mind was devoted to almost nothing but pragmatic/practical interests. Only his religion, Tocqueville sighs, occasionally relieves the American of his unseemly mundaneness and bids him to a “transient … glance” at more transcendent concerns.

The American is “exceptional,” in other words, in his lack of artistic or intellectual culture. But this is not damning with faint praise; this is damning with vigorous criticism. I might as well refer to a failing student as “exceptional,” because all the other students are passing the course. Or imagine a college advertising itself as an “exceptional” college, where it attempts “to divert minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts.”

Rhetorically, Tocqueville was trying to persuade others that democracy was a good form of government; and his problem, rhetorically, was that the American example appeared to provide counter-evidence. Tocqueville was embarrassed that a free people had employed their freedom for mundane or commercial pursuits; so in order to rescue democracy, Tocqueville argued that it only looks like a bad form of government in America because of America’s peculiar (“exceptional”) history. Freed from this peculiar history, Tocqueville argued, democracy would work fine.

Whether America ever was or is exceptional is a matter for more discussion, but Tocqueville’s own estimate of 19th-century America was mixed at best and negative at worst. He would have preferred that democracy had produced a more learned and refined culture. And that’s a side of Alexis de Tocqueville, and his view of America, we don’t often hear or understand.

— Dr. T. David Gordon is a professor of religion and Greek at Grove City College and a contributing scholar with The Center for Vision & Values.