BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

Our pope's misplaced and misguided priorities...

Last night, I spent some time translating Aldo Maria Valli's most informative commentary on the Vatican decision to enlist Paul Ehrlich as a resource person for its next event aggressively promoting the anti-scientific and anti-Catholic outlook of the reigning pope as expressed in Laudato si. But I lost the translation just as I was saving it because the forum's server interjected itself to tell me I was not entitled to do that because I needed to log in... It will take some time to reconstruct my translation, because it also involved some research I had to do in order to explain or clarify certain statements by Valli that assume familiarity with Ehrlich and his preposterous population catastrophism disseminated worldwide through his 1968 book The Population Bomb.

Fortunately, Fr. Schall's column in the current issue of CWR is about this - even if his argument goes to the underlying philosophical and theological fallacies of Ehrlich and the population-control freaks who have become the reigning pope's secular acolytes-in-chief... That Bergoglio as pope does not seem to see how untenable his alliance is with these people is just as big a Catholic tragedy as his shameless advocacy of moral relativism in AL.


The bomb that never detonated
On the 1970s, Paul Ehrlich, overpopulation, and why poverty is
mostly caused by bad ideas and lack of virtue, not lack of resources
by James V. Schall, S.J.

January 16, 2017

I.
Back in the early 1970s, in the heyday of unceasing rancor over Humanae Vitae, a great number of books were published that prophesied disaster for the human race. Among the most famous was Paul Ehrlich’s widely read The Population Bomb.

At that time, we were given various apocalyptic scenarios about the end of things caused by our own uncontrolled breeding. We were soon to starve to death. The world, then with a population of around three billion, was running out of food, clothing, gas, and just about everything else. Things could only get worse. Resources were “limited”; no more new ones were imaginable.

The Catholic Church was often singled out as contributing to this approaching demise of the human race since she taught that the world was made for man. Her weird stance on human breeding was “irrational”. Her views on marriage and children were said to go against the principles of, you guessed it, “modern science”.


The main group that did not readily buy these forebodings were the economists, or at least the free market ones. (See, for example, John Mueller’s Redeeming Economics and John McNerney’s The Wealth of Persons).

Not a few farmers and agrarian biologists also thought that perhaps increasing populations was not such a bad thing. Increased yields in many grains were shown to be quite feasible and soon put into production. India, once a basket case became a bread basket, an exporter of grain and not just an importer of it.

Children and youth meant new markets and incentives. They also meant more potential workers who would be both producers and consumers. They were also provided some assurance to the elderly, as the Japanese and Europeans were to find out when they had too few of them. Some folks seemed to know how to respond to these so-called scarcities; others did not. It was something that needed to be both learned and encouraged.

World population proceeded to reach four billion, then five, and now approaches eight billion. If anything, we are better prepared to deal with eight billion than the world was prepared to meet its needs when the population of the planet was less than half a billion.

This is counter-intuitive; many would expect the opposite, especially if they do not really think about it. In fact, the whole socialist agenda was largely a thinking about it in a way that never worked and usually made things worse. The solutions based on empowering governments to deal with it always backfired.

Instead of inciting growth and increased quality in things, government control of resources to insure justice invariably produced stagnation and inefficiency. Such a seemingly sensible solution produced something worse; good intentions did not produce good results.

At that time, I wrote two books, Human Dignity & Human Numbers and Welcome Number 4,000,000,000 (more recently, there is On Christianity & Prosperity).

My thesis was that the birth of new human lives was not a disaster. It was something to rejoice about. This welcome was not merely in a family sense, but also in an economic, political, and cultural sense. This approach seemed to be the way things were supposed to work.

Earlier writers such as Locke and Rousseau had understood this value of population long before Malthus came along with his calculus of a world with standing room only. Subsequent writers have often been amused to point out that we could put the whole present eight billion population of the earth into the state of Texas with about as much space between folks as present day New Yorkers enjoy in their neighborhoods.

Increasing populations were in fact good, but this possibility depended on what we thought of the family, of children, and of the human ability to meet its own needs by means that actually work and were not intrinsically immoral. Man was not created with all the answers, but with the capacity to find good answers, and this process required a rejection of what did not work.

II.
At the time, I knew the late Julian Simon, whose books, The Ultimate Resource and The Ultimate Resource 2, proposed (along with George Gilder and Herman Kahn) that wealth was not a matter of supposedly available resources based on contemporary estimates of their quantities. Rather, the human mind was the only real source of wealth in the universe.

The Arabs sat on pools of oil for centuries with no idea what to do with it. Oil or anything else is only valuable if some use can be found for it. It seemed odd at first sight that people would think that unused raw material was of any value at all. The American Indians, who were said to have had ten square miles of territory for each person when the colonists arrived, actually were not surviving well merely on what they could garner from unimproved nature.

An intimate relation is found between human culture and nature. Contrary to some recent sentiments, the world was not intended just to sit there in order for us to admire it or to leave it alone.

At the time, everyone was amused when Simon made a bet with Ehrlich that in the future more — not fewer — resources of every type would be available than when the bet was made. Ehrlich assumed we were rapidly running out of most everything. As I read later, Ehrlich lost and paid the bet.

Adequate resources become available when we need them — if we are permitted to figure out how to do so and are allowed to sell them in the market at a profit. Simon’s point was that resources are not merely things in the ground, sea, or air. They are products of mind that only come about when we have need of them.

This point is why the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s famous “entrepreneur” is so important. If someone does not know what to do or how to do something, nothing much will happen. Moreover, to understand the world as a place designed for what man is, we need to have a correct philosophy about what nature and man are in themselves and in their relation to each other.

Poverty is mostly caused by bad ideas and lack of virtue, not lack of resources. Many cultures and societies are indeed stagnant because they never learned or never wanted to learn how to be otherwise. This is why cultures ought not simply to remain what they are. They ought to be open to what is the right order of things. Sometimes a little preaching helps.

After the seventies, the population issue seemed to die down. It became clear that resources were not the real problem, nor were babies. Governments, religions, and ideologies were the problem if they did not know or did not want to know how to deal with increasing human numbers. If there is a population problem, it is almost always the result of ideas and government controls that had other purposes than human well-being.

In addition, the countries we thought to be the poorest, China and India, suddenly became richer, though with many dubious anti-human policies still in place. The places where we were told people were starving, were in fact busy coping with smog from their new cars and industries. They had learned how to become rich by imitating enough of those systems that did know how to succeed in improving themselves.

III.
Paul Ehrlich, still around with his theories, was recently invited to a conference on “biological extinction”, to be held at the Vatican on Feb 27-March 1. Several similar advisers, who are well-known advocates of limiting world population, were invited earlier to discuss Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’.

There is no problem in hearing what adversaries hold, provided they are not imitated. For many, such invitations seemed to imply an unholy alliance. People who insist that the world should be limited to two or three billion in population, assuming this is a good idea — which it isn’t — also advocate enthusiastically the means they insist must be accepted to achieve it: birth control, abortion, gay marriage, and sundry other lethal proposals that sound mostly like the narrative in Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World'.

The key to understanding this strange relationship seems to be found in the notion that the earth is our permanent and only home. It needs to be protected at all costs from man’s incursions.

Instead of looking on the earth as itself given to man to accomplish his natural and supernatural purpose, the emphasis is shifted to the notion that the earth is the sole place of man in the universe. The purpose of the human race is to keep itself afloat in space for as long as possible.

This end requires an ethic of complete care rather than an ethic of virtue and abundance. Sin and moral fault are redefined in terms of how we use the earth, not how we stand to one another. The moral absolutes must therefore be reinterpreted in the light of this priority. [Which is the pervasive unconditional argument underlying Laudato si - and Bergoglio's secular anti-Catholic mindset.]

Though not always immediately evident, behind this earth-first perspective is a human control mechanism that usually proposes limiting the number of people present on the planet at any one time.[Bergoglio, of course, plays blind to this inescapable implication in his unconditional support of his secular acolytes in chief like Ban Ki Moon and Jeffrey Sachs, and his public endorsement of the UN's so-called Sustainable Development Goals, which openly provide for universal measures of population control and reproductive 'rights'.
This limitation, said to be based on available science, requires medical and legal procedures to limit these numbers, to license those who can and cannot be born.

Eventually, no doubt, the sun will burn itself out, and human life on this planet will be rendered impossible. But holding out as long as possible is, it is thought, a workable endeavor. Out of this thinking we find frequent proposals to transport at least some human beings to other planets, so that our kind are not “lost in the cosmos”, to cite the title of Walker Percy’s famous book.

Supporting much of this thinking is also the proposition that earth warming is caused, it is said, primarily by human development, not by recurrent natural causes. This is presented as an unquestionable scientific fact, even though recorded changes and computer projected changes are not the same. The evidence for this man-made cause is, to say the least, ambiguous, if not simply false. It is opinion, not science.

[This, of course, is the other prevailing secular ideology that Bergoglio promotes unquestioningly, without any evidence that he has ever paid any attention to the overwhelming scientific evidence debunking the climate catastrophists' pseudo-science, nor the abundant evidence showing how their side has shamelessly manipulated data to 'prove' their point when the accumulated data has shown otherwise.]

There is danger here, in any case, of what might be called the “Galileo problem” in reverse. Namely, the Church seems to embrace another form of dubious science in the name of its primary mission. This time the danger is in agreeing with 'popular' science, not disagreeing with it.

The so-called “sustainability” principle is premised on a projection of present-day science and technology on what might or might not be available in the future. It would be like proposing, on the same grounds, to leave development as it was in 1800 or 1900 and then to insist that what we have in the 21st century could not be possible on scientific grounds.

The view of the earth as parsimonious instead of abundant under man’s dominion results in very different attitudes towards the earth and our place in it.

Suppose we imagine that things are radically limited, that waste is the biggest problem. The world is basically divided between haves and have-nots. The function of morality is to redistribute existing goods on some abstract equality principle.

With such suppositions (besides making everyone poor), we will usually end up with a total control position. International control of resources and population will be offered as the only “just” solution. We will in practice, if not in our rhetoric, elevate goods over people and their final end.

We estimate what we think is now available in terms of technology and enterprise. Our focus is to take care of the poor, not to enable them to not be poor and hence independent of state control. This control is now justified because of scarcity thinking.

If, however, our operative presuppositions are abundance, we will emphasize our mind and inventiveness. We will suspect that plenty of resources are or can be made available. We do not need to panic and cut ourselves off from those ideas and procedures that can provide for increased population without subjecting everyone to state control.

The dark side of ecology, as Paul Johnson pointed out, is the ease with which its logic justifies the totalitarian state. [A case very much in point: The series of UN 'climate conferences' and their resolutions (the latest being that of Paris) which openly seek to impose universal legislation for draconian anti-climate change measures that are not just 1) simply too costly even for the richest nations on earth but are also 2) largely unnecessary and gross overkill because they are premised on the anti-scientific and preposterous fact that climate change is largely manmade, and 3) inevitably futile because they cannot remotely affect the cosmic factors - especially solar phenomena - that are primarily responsible for global climate in the medium and long term.

Emphasis should not be on a morality that assumes scarcity, but one that presumes abundance and gift. We need a just order that can envision a world prospering with more brains, more freedom, more virtue, and more enterprise.

IV.
Looking back over the whole cast of thinking in this area, we suspect a curious separation of reason and revelation. Reason and what we can learn from it are replaced with a exclusively revelational approach that does not envision any possibility of meeting normal human purposes. Rather it falls back on a keep-things-going vision.

For actual persons, there is an inner worldly instead of an extra worldly approach. Revelation normally presupposed, as in St. Thomas Aquinas, that man could and would learn to take such care of himself. He could, but he need not, lapse into a constant recurrence of worst regimes with different rationales. Revelation rightly did not see any necessity to reveal what the various sciences and arts were all about. It presumed that man could and should be left to figure out these things by himself.

Even with its relation to reason, revelation would always be needed and welcome in any existing society, as Pope Benedict pointed out in Deus Caritas Est. But revelation was not intended to substitute for it. When it did so, we witness a strange overturning of human ends.

The end of man now is said to be keeping the earth in its pristine form down the ages, not the salvation of actual persons within the time and place in which they actually lived. The focus is not on eternal life for each person according to his deeds and faith. [And isn't it the great tragedy of the Church today that the man who was elected to be its supreme leader has happily not just cast his lot with the the secular powers whose priorities are definitely anti-Catholic but has even assumed their leadership de facto? In a Vatican that daily shows itself to be at the service of this pope and his secular priorities and not in the service fof the Church, and therefore of Christ?]

At the end of time, however, we have no reason to suppose that the earth will also be running out of its resources at the same time. This suspicion of a “wasted” abundance should alone be enough to cause us to take another look at what the earth is really “for”.

The end of the earth is a function of the end of man. Perhaps a hundred billion human beings have already lived on this planet. They did not exist so that some future society be kept going down the ages. They existed to save their souls in the places they were.

There is nothing wrong with seeking a better regime in our time. But whatever regime we find ourselves in, even in the worst, we can achieve or reject the purpose for which we were created, that is, to achieve the eternal life that Jesus Christ, in a nasty political trial in one of the better ancient regimes, promised to us.

1/18/17
Here is my translation of Aldo Maria Valli's commentary on the Ehrlich issue:

Dr. Strangelove at the Vatican
by Aldo Maria Valli
Translated from his blog

January 14, 2017

You remember the contemporary prototype of the mad scientist, Dr. Strangelove, in Stanley Kubrick’s film which was subtitled “Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”. Well, sometimes, reality goes beyond fiction.

And that is so in the case of Professor Paul R. Ehrlich, entomologist (specialist on insect life) at Stanford University, who became famous in 1968 after publishing a book called The Population Bomb, in which, on the basis of ‘careful’ calculations, he made the catastrophic prediction that in the decade 1973-1983, as much as one-fourth of the world’s population would die of hunger.

And to avoid such a disaster, he wrote that draconian measures were necessary, starting with imposing laws, without regard to individual rights, for obligatory and indiscriminate birth control. How to administer the necessary drugs to do this? Simple: place contraceptive drugs in drinking water and in the most common foods.

[Says something of the general insanity of the time – this was 1968, remember? – that the book became an international best-seller despite proposing something as preposterous! Surely, those whou bought it didn’t do so because they thought they were reading satire!]

Obviously, the professor’s predictions, like those of all catastrophists, did not come to pass. [How could anyone in his right mind write a book in 1968 to say that starting in 5 years, mass deaths drom hunger would decimate the world’s population in the space of 10 years, and how could all the supposedly intelligent people who then turned Ehrlich into a celebrity, who was a fixture on talk shows and interviewed right and left, fall for such nonsense?]

But that didn’t stop him from continuing to insist on his hypothesis and to propose his solutions. Because one of the characteristics of inveterate catastrophists is never to take reality as it is, but to only consider selected partial aspects of it that they can use as a pretext to support their otherwise unfounded ideas. [Does that not apply so well to a pope we all know, and not just when he is being a catastrophist!]

Perhaps some may recall Ehrlich’s bet with economist Julian Simon, one who never allowed himself to be influenced by ecologistic and neo-Malthusian ideologies. Convinced that the world, despite inevitable population growth, would improve its available resources thanks to new knowledge, technology and globalization (already much-maligned at the time), Simon opposed population control, and above all, mass abortions. In 1980, he challenged his far more famous colleague: “Choose five primary resources, and I will bet you that within 10 years, they will cost much more than they do today” [and will still be abundant].

Those were the years when the famed Club of Rome was widely considered an oracle for its hypotheses on ‘the limits to growth’ and the necessity of reducing the mouths that have to be fed. Ehrlich, supremely confident he would win hands down, chose five metals: copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten, commenting arrogantly: “I and my colleagues John Holdren and John Harte accept Simon’s astounding bet before greedy persons take him up”.

With the presumptuousness typical of ideologues, Ehrlich thought he would win easily. Instead, as Simon predicted, the prices for those prime metals did go down, and Ehrlich had to pay the bet. Not that it led him to any self-criticism at all!

So why bring this all back to mind? Because from Feb 27-March 1, at the initiative of two pontifical academies – of sciences, and of social sciences – the Vatican will host an international symposium on the subject of “Biological extinction: How to save the natural environment on which we depend”, and among the resource persons invited to address the symposium will be the ineffable Ehrlich, now 85, whose assigned topic is “How to save the natural world”.

Obviously, the Vatican is free to organize any event they wish and to invite anyone they please, but it is difficult not to ask: Of all the scientists in the world, why would the Vatican offer a platform to someone like Ehrlich, who has not just been the paladin of mass abortions but has also been completely wrong on his predictions?

What can he teach us, this Dr. Strangelove who said in 1969 that by the year 2000, England would have ceased to exist unless it immediately legislated mass abortions and forced sterilizations? [Valli appears to forget that for the past almost four years, Bergoglio has been the leading sponsor of the UN and persons like Ban Ki Moon and Jeffrey Sachs who may not be as radical in their ideas of population control as Ehrlich but certainly advocate it in order to have what they call ‘sustainable development’? Or that in their climate catastrophist ideology, Ban Ki Moon and Jeffrey Sachs are early 21st century editions of Ehrlich’s madness?]

Today, in the year of grace 2017, the global scientific community has belied the gloomiest predictions of the ctastrophists. Of course, there is still hunger in the world [perhaps there will always be, just as there will always be ‘the poor’, though the United Nations aims to eliminate both hunger and poverty in the world by 2030!], and yet despite population growth, the planet has never fed so many people nor has the quality of life improved for so many in the past half century alone.

If today there are still too many people who are hungry*, it is not for lack of resources but because there is too much waste [Which is only one factor, but not the most significant – which is a lack of proper distribution to the needy even if the richer nations do give enough for hunger relief].
*[In 2016, the World Food Program said "Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth. " (Down from 1 billion in 1990). At the same time, the Global Hunger Index, which annually measures progress and failures in the global fight against hunger, showed in 2015 that hunger levels have dropped 27% since 2000, though in 52 countries it remained at serious or alarming levels. (From Wikipedia, appropriately sourced figures)]

The problem for governments and aid institutions is not how to keep people from having more children but to guarantee adequate health and educational services for everyone.

Commenting on the Vatican’s invitation to Ehrlich, the president of the Population Research Institute, Stephen Mosher, an American scholar who opposes abortionist policies, said: “Ehrlich’s opinions on the rate of biological extinction are as exaggerated as his predictions were on a demographc explosion which all proved wrong. It is beyond my understanding why the Vatican would provide a platform for this secular prophet of doom. [But under Bergoglio, the Vatican has preferentially chosen to provide the platform for leading prophets of demographic doom and climate catastrophism to the exclusion of those who hold contrary views!] There are very many Catholic scientists whose opinions are based on facts whom the Church should recognize. What will the Vatican do next? Invite Raul Castro to speak on human rights?”

[One can allow for the fact that Jorge Bergoglio is not, by nature, an intellectual, or at least, not an openminded one, but he appears to have a talent for singling out the most dubious and unqualified of frontline advisers – Mons. Fernandez on theology, for instance, or Fr. Spadaro on the media, Cardinal Turkson on the economy, Leonardo Boff on the environment, and on scientific matters as in this case, his fellow Argentine Mons. Sanchez Sorondo, whom he appointed Chancellor of both the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences – to provide him with whatever information he uses upon which to make his decisions and his public pronouncements. Which is most unfortunate in someone who considers all his statements and actions omnisciently unchallengeable and who is now the de facto leader of the world's secular left.]

The postulate at the center of the coming symposium at the Vatican is that global climate changes are threatening ‘biodiversity’, 40 percent of which, the catastrophists say, will be extinct by the end of this century. [In other words, that 40 percent of all the known plant and animal species on earth will die off and never regenerate.] Defeated by facts insofar as world population is concerned, catastrophists are now riding another battle horse: from the population bomb to the climate bomb, with all the accompanying doomsday figures.

It is a question of ‘social justice’ and ‘morality’, the symposium organizers said to present the event, but even of ‘survival’ itself. And since, according to them, the cause of all climate change is man, we are back at the same hypothesis: Let us ‘eliminate’ man, because if we reduce human presence on earth, then every problem will be solved!

Recently, in the article «Biophysical limits, women’s rights and the climate encyclical» published in Nature Climate Change, Ehrlich and his friend Harte, commenting on the papal encyclical Laudato si, remarked that “the pope has extended a strong invitation for action against climate change but fails to confront the link between development and population growth”. Therefore, they claim, Bergoglio is laboring under ‘a senseless delirium’ until and unless he lays his hands on population control. [He already has, through the UN, but he cannot do it openly as pope, because he still needs to pay lip service to abortion, even as he warns Catholics to stop harping too much on abortion, contraception, euthanasia and the like.]

“It is crystal-clear,” Ehrlich wrote, “that no one who is truly interested in the state of the planet and of the global economy can avoid dealing with the population problem. It is the elephant that will always be in the room”.

Ehrlich, at 85, has lost all his hair, but not his vice of pontificating as he did in his 1968 book bomb. The surprising thing is that now he will pontificate to the pope himself. At the Vatican’s own invitation.