Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population
June 11th, 2008Via: ieet.org:
Connelly decisively confronts the historical baggage of reproductive rights by detailing the confluence of social Darwinists, Malthusians, racist eugenicists, public health advocates and feminists who coalesced around the century-long effort to control world population.
Like Betsy Hartman’s pioneering critique Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, Connelly’s principal narrative is the tension between those who focused on women’s empowerment through birth control and those who wanted to control the fertility of populations with financial incentives and coercion. “The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception,” Connelly says, “was to think that one could know other people’s interests better than they knew it themselves.”
The narrative starts in the 19th century with the rising concern in the UK and US about the higher fertility rates of the developing world, sure to produce a flood of non-Anglos across borders and the decline of Anglo hegemony. Racial eugenicists emerged in many countries, determined to increase the birth rate of worthy whites in the affluent North and to control the fertility of the rest.
Connelly describes the rise of the global population control movement, from Delhi and Beijing to London, Geneva and New York, with astonishing breadth. In his account, population control reached its final act in the 1970s and 1980s when Club of Rome pessimism about the “population bomb” coincided with massive sterilisations in India and the imposition of the one-child regime in China. By the mid-1980s population control had been tarnished politically by these excesses, while dramatic declines of fertility worldwide had demonstrated that government coercion has only a marginal influence on childbearing compared with improving women’s education and employment prospects.
Although the book details the ubiquitous influence of racialism and coercive eugenics, it avoids the conspiratorial mindset often used to tar all family planning. The often-vilified Margaret Sanger is examined as a tragic and heroic figure, a passionate activist using every ally at hand to further the cause of women’s empowerment through birth control, then finding herself in league with racialists and patriarchal authoritarian Malthusians. By structuring the story around central figures such as Sanger, Annie Besant and William Draper, Connelly helps the reader weather a mind-numbing parade of characters, organisations and acronyms.
Research Credit: PD
I had lunch with the guy who wrote that review, he’s the director of the non-profit whose site the review is hosted on. A big topic of conversation was the role of global governance in dealing with the risks of AI, nanotech, ect. I’m a right-leaning libertarian, so I’m not a fan of global governance, but I want to make it clear that while there are those in the transhumanist movement who favor a slow take-off scenario involving some global regulations on technology, they aren’t elitist David Rockerfeller types. For one thing, they don’t have that kind of funding – the closest you get to the Power Elite in that community is Martine Rothblatt (Siruis radio founder) and Peter Thiel. Secondly, those who think global governance could serve as a valuable hedge want it to be transparent and democratic.
We discussed how games could educate and stimulate debate, and I’m kicking around a design called “Technocrat” that I might produce after I finish the Fed game. It’ll deal with this theme, something I’m really afraid of, that global elites will try to monopolize technological development, to the detriment of both freedom and long-term risk marginalization. But you’ll be able to win, so it won’t be a wholly anti-governance ideolog piece – it will however be very difficult to avoid Bang risks like a rogue AI without leading into a Shriek future, like a panopticon.