Table of Contents
Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
Paul Ehrlich died a fortnight ago.
His death passed largely unnoticed here but the influence of this American biologist on the psyche of the West cannot be underestimated.
Ehrlich was the author of the 1968 runaway best-seller The Population Bomb. For a time this book and his predictions made him a kind of apocalyptic rock star with repeat appearances on television talk shows to spread his warning that far too many humans were exhausting planet Earth.
His work contributed to the broader 1960s–1970s push for population control, influencing family-planning programs funded by organisations like the UN Population Fund, World Bank, and US aid efforts.
Ehrlich’s predictions carried the ring of truth following the post-war baby boom. The swelling of humanity over the years appeared to confirm his thesis. At the time he began sounding the alarm the population of the globe was just over three billion. By 1980 it had grown to about 4.5 billion, rising all the way to over eight billion in 2025.
His influence could be felt across the globe and lead to widespread anxiety about poor nations with rampant fertility. I had a German friend who would regularly round on any woman she met with more than two offspring. “Why did you have so many children when the planet already has too many people?” she would accuse the hapless fecund female.
She was simply echoing the doomsday scenario painted by Ehrlich. One of the front covers of his book blared in all-caps, that humanity faced a choice between “POPULATION CONTROL OR RACE TO OBLIVION.” Another had this quote –
While you are reading these words four people will have died from starvation. Most of them children.
There were times when this appeared to be true. Think famines in Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Actual rock stars got involved. Think Live Aid.
Ehrlich was right - until he was wrong. While the ever-rising birthrates appeared to support Ehrlich’s predictions, he was, in fact, colossally mistaken in one crucial aspect – the impact of this burgeoning population. He imagined that the increased numbers would put so much strain on the planet, it would lead to widespread and brutal famine and societal collapse.
Instead, global food production has risen dramatically (thanks to technological advances and CO₂ fertilisation contributing to planetary greening), life expectancy increased, and per capita resources improved in many ways – allowing the population to more than double without the predicted widespread catastrophe.
As well, current population models now predict a rapid decline in populations across the globe. Demographers tell us that historically societies have never recovered from such a downward spiral once it starts.
Ehrlich underestimated human ingenuity and he also relied on faulty models. He says in this interview that the pie is finite: the more mice nibbling on it, less pie for everyone. He failed to recognise humans can grow the pie.
The Ehrlich big idea lives on in philosophies such as those promoted by anti-growth proponents and in certain corners of the environmental movement. My German friend is still accosting fertile mothers, still adamant that there needs to be fewer people on the planet and still believes we are wearing out the Earth.
I think of Ehrlich when I hear doomers banging the drum of climate change. I’m not a scientist and I’m not interested in assessing the value of the models advocated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They may well be right.
But this is also right: nothing New Zealand does can affect the climate of the planet at all. Nothing. So why are we bothering to pursue policies that cannot reduce the impact of climate change one iota, and, in all probability, just make us poorer? All we can do about climate change is adapt to the changing conditions.
There is also the possibility that the IPCC models may be missing something crucial, just as Ehrlich’s models did. Perhaps the greening of the planet as the result of increased CO2 will lead to human flourishing, as it has in the past. Perhaps not. As I say, I’m no scientist.
What the Ehrlich and IPCC models tell us is that there is something about humans that draws us to apocalyptic visions of the future. None have come to pass.
Here’s another idea I’ve been thinking about lately. How much are autists currently influencing the zeitgeist? The digital world and social media are tailor made for socially isolated, black-and-white thought processing autists with poor theory of mind. We know they are over-represented amongst young people who believe that they are trans and, of course, there’s the most famous global autist of them all, formerly champion of the climate change movement, now turned pro-Palestine activist, Greta Thunberg.
Also what big false ideas are underpinning current trends? Or maybe just good ideas at the time they were first promoted that have since outlived their usefulness?
My hunch is the virtue of the open society as espoused by Karl Popper (who lived in New Zealand for a time). There is something thin and unsatisfying about a philosophy that downplays the human need for certainty, tradition and shared identity as fostered by closed societies. I predict a longing for such societies once more and a wholesale rejection of treating people like movable units on a global economic chessboard.
But the most stupid ideas of this century have to be everything that flows from gender ideology. The idea that sex is mutable, that gender is real, that you can be ‘born in the wrong body’, that drugs and mutilation will fix that and that it is possible to change sex – the whole gender ideology shooting box is a dumpster fire of idiocy.
Its heyday was short-lived and it is coming undone all over the world at this very moment. Last week we saw the beginning of the return to sanity with the UK Girl Guides declaring boys had no place in their organisation and the International Olympic Committee deciding that women’s sport was for females only and a cheek swab would determine sex.
Gender ideology may well be the flimsiest set of ideas that have ever been foisted on the modern public. Unlike Ehrlich’s population bomb prediction, which did at least ring true for a while, this one will not even have a half-life.
In the marketplace of ideas, it was bankrupt from the start.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
