'Alternative' Lifestyles
Michael Nield, 25th October 2010
This article follows on from Epigenetic Engineering.In 1967 Kingsley Davis argued that family planning was inconsistent with the goal of population control.[1] If human numbers were the concern of society, reproduction must be made a legitimate target of government policy and not left to the whims of would-be parents. This was a repetition of the view espoused by Sir Charles Galton Darwin and Harrison Brown: the procreative instinct would have to be tamed along with the sexual instinct.
Davis was a senior Stanford sociologist and his article was published in Science, one of the world's most prestigious academic journals. He concluded that research into contraception 'must be supplemented with equal or greater investments in research and experimentation to determine the required socioeconomic measures' needed to discourage women from having children.
He doubted that economic measures would be sufficient, or in many cases practical, in a democratic society. In hindsight, however, his ideas were strangely prescient:
…. a realistic proposal for a government policy of lowering the birth rate reads like a catalogue of horrors: squeeze consumers through taxation and inflation; making housing very scarce by limiting construction; forcing wives and mothers to work outside the home to offset the inadequacy of male wages, yet provide few childcare facilities; encourage migration to the city by paying low wages in the country and providing few rural jobs; increase congestion in cities by starving the transit system; increase personal insecurity by encouraging conditions that produce unemployment and by haphazard political arrests. No government will institute such hardships simply for the purpose of controlling population growth. Clearly, therefore, the task of contemporary population policy is to develop attractive substitutes for family interests,[emphasis added] so as to avoid having to turn to hardship as a corrective.
Substitutes for family interests would be developed through education:
Since the female reproductive span is short and generally more fecund in its first than in its second half, postponement of marriage to ages beyond 20 tends biologically to reduce births. Sociologically, it gives women time to get a better education, acquire interests unrelated to the family, and develop a cautious attitude toward pregnancy. Individuals who have not married by the time they are in their late twenties often do not marry at all. For these reasons, for the world as a whole, the average age at marriage is a frequent cause of declining fertility during the middle phase of the demographic transition...
Family life would be deemphasized in schools and universities:
The schools define family roles and develop vocational and recreational interests; they could if it were desired, redefine the sex roles, develop interests that transcend the home, and transmit realistic (as opposed to moralistic) knowledge concerning marriage, sexual behavior, and population problems.[emphasis added]
This would naturally lead to women entering the workforce, with the desired results:
To change this situation women could be required to work outside the home, or compelled by circumstances to do so. If, at the same time, women were paid as well as men and given equal educational and occupational opportunities, and if social life were organized around the place of work rather than the home or neighborhood, many women would develop interests that would compete with family interests. Approximately this policy is now followed in several Communist countries, and even the less developed of these countries, have extremely low birth rates.
Kingsley Davis (1908-1997) was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He was a leading authority on demography and sociology. He served as president of the Population Association of America and the American Sociological Association and represented the United States on the United Nations Population Commission. He was a member of the Advisory Council of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Advisory Committee on Population for the U.S. Bureau of the Census. He was the first sociologist in the nation to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1966).
In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote an article for the same journal which went much further.[2] The Garrett Hardin Society proclaims:Trained as an ecologist and microbiologist he is best known for his 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 162, now reprinted in over 100 anthologies and widely accepted as a fundamental contribution to ecology, population theory, economics and political science.
He quoted Sir Charles Galton Darwin on the problem of contraception and the procreative instinct:
It may well be that it would take hundreds of generations for the progenitive instinct to develop in this way, but if it should do so, nature would have taken her revenge, and the variety Homo contraceptiens would become extinct and would be replaced by the variety Homo progenitivus.
He disagreed with Kingsley Davis that governments should use underhand methods of population control. His stark conclusion was this:
The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity”- and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.
In practice such extreme suggestions were encouragement and perhaps justification for the 'authorities' and their agents to carry on with their underhand methods.
Garrett Hardin Ph.D. obtained a scholarship to the University of Chicago in 1932. He was a staff member of the Carnegie Institute 1942-6 and became the Ford Fellow at Caltech 1952-3. In 1963 he became Professor of Human Ecology, University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1973 he won the Environmental Hall of Fame Award, Friends of the Earth ("The single author who had the most different titles mentioned by voters"). He was a leading commentator on bioethics, abortion, population control and foreign aid.
Endnotes
1. Population Policy: Will Current Programs Succeed?: Grounds for skepticism concerning the demographic effectiveness of family planning are considered, Kingsley Davis. Science, 10 November 1967, Vol 158. no. 3802 pp730-739.
2. The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin. Science, 13 December 1968: Vol. 162. no. 3859, pp. 1243 – 1248. Full text available at http://www.sciencemag.org