'Cause He's Making Me Feel Like I've Never Been Born
Urbanism is a deeply human cause, set against "degrowth"
Paul Ehrlich, the deeply misguided author of The Population Bomb, died last March at the age of 93. It is not right to speak ill of the dead, and Ehrlich certainly posed no threat in his old age, his monstrous ideas having already been thoroughly discredited. (Not to the satisfaction of the New York Times, however, which editorialized in its obituary subhead that his predictions merely “proved premature.”)
Yet, to neutrally describe Ehrlich’s ideas sounds like speaking ill of him. Ehrlich spoke ill of the living and the yet to be born; billions of them. Of the world’s poorest and most desperate people, he wrote with breezy and dismissive invective.
On the question of possible interstellar travel and the settlement of other planets, he wrote, “We would have to export our responsible people [those who use birth control], leaving the irresponsible at home on Earth to breed.” He suggested that countries without population-control measures, up to and including coercive sterilization programs, should not receive food aid, because, as the infamous opening line of his book claims, the battle to feed those countries had already been lost. Many other commentators and scholars have critiqued his book at more length.
Ehrlich, who died peacefully at an old age, did not die by the sword he wielded against his fellow men, for whom he seemed to believe the only possibilities were dying of starvation, or never being born. Ehrlich has now gone on to whatever awaits such a man.
But his misanthropic neo-Malthusian thesis—that there are “too many people,” and that the problems of land or resource overuse, to the extent that they exist, are down to people and not to patterns of consumption, is eerily reminiscent of NIMBYism, and not, it turns out, entirely unrelated to it.
In a new piece at The Freeman, I wrote about the partially neo-Malthusian origins of NIMBYism, and how anti-population-growth activists had a hand in much local anti-growth activism and anti-development sentiment in the 1960s and 1970s.
NIMBYism, of course, is in some ways a very natural human sentiment. And it did not take The Population Bomb for people, sometimes informed by racial and class disdain, to feel that there were “too many people”—usually of a certain sort. And it isn’t true, either, that cars are responsible for NIMBYism, though they are in large part because of how much space they take up, and how quickly car-dependent landscapes come to feel “full.”
But the way that an explicitly anti-people, anti-growth ideology influenced late-midcentury NIMBYism is striking and should give any person pause who thinks that people are good. Because if people are good, then land-use policy has to be oriented towards accommodating them. One of the reasons I consider myself a YIMBY is that YIMBYism is an explicit disavowal of degrowth or population control. It affirms that people are good, and that if it comes down to welcoming new people by changing things in ways we might not always like, then we have to welcome new people.
This central tension, largely on the political right, is what I’m getting at with this piece: the people most likely to say that people are good, that human dignity is paramount, that they’re pro-life and pro-family, are also likely to look askance at cities, at density, at apartments and renting, at public transit—at the physical ways in which “more people” and “more babies” and “more families” can actually live somewhere, near things they need to thrive, at a price point they can afford.
In short: everyone who is pro-people, pro-family, pro-babies, and pro-freedom should also be pro-density and pro-city.
I suppose I understand where some of this comes from. Urban problems, like crime, school quality, and a dearth of family-sized apartments, are real, and are obvious disincentives for families to live in cities, and for a “pro-family” political bloc to align itself with urbanism. The idea that cities are playgrounds for single people, a kind of phase of life you graduate from, is deeply embedded in our culture. Urbanism presents itself mostly as a left-inflected special interest, which can cause conservatives of various stripes to look at it with suspicion. And on the flip side of all this, the quiet, space, and greenery of suburbia certainly looks family-friendly. And it is in many ways. If you can afford it.
And that’s the rub. Detached houses on a spot of land are inherently limited, in how many you can build, and how many you can fit in a proximate area—in proximity to other things. There’s a limit to how far you can sprawl before commutes become unmanageable.
Contra the abstract idea that there’s something vaguely collectivist about urban living or public transit, is the idea that communities need to grow alongside their populations. And that their populations should grow—or at least not be suppressed—because people are good. And that any certain frustrations of exposure to other people should be dealt with as the cost of actually welcoming real people in the real world. In other words, urbanism is the moral answer to the “population” question.
Many of today’s pronatalists and other generally “pro-people” right-leaning folks understand one half of this, but, I think, not the other half. They have taken the conservative/Christian tendency to see the inherent worth of every human life, but have also too often absorbed the anti-urban mindset that suppresses the homes and the places in which tomorrow’s couples will meet, tomorrow’s families will form, and tomorrow’s children will be born.
Check out my full piece over at The Freeman!
Related Reading:
Talk Notes: Traffic and Crowding
I'm curious as to whether Paul Ehrlich only became a misanthrope _after_ moving to California.
I do think we have too many people, which is one reason I limited myself to two children. The world population doubled in my lifetime. We needn’t grow and a slow, moderate, natural decrease would be ideal.
People who think we can fill every nook and cranny with humans must not see how we are encroaching upon animal habitats. The deer have no choice but to enter our developed spaces. We can see the deer; we don’t see what’s happening to the smaller animals. And people shrug off the population drop of birds and insects, but that is NOT a good sign.
Why on earth does anyone want MORE people?
Btw, there’s plenty of cheap housing in many smaller towns. People mostly overlook that, but it’s how I manage to own a house in a safe, quiet, walkable neighborhood.