Japan’s Birthrate “Problem”

Japan’s health and welfare ministry has released another lugubrious report on the nation’s declining population.  If current trends continue, it will decline by a third in the next 60 years, and 40 percent of the population will be over retirement age by 2060.  Of course, many other industrialized countries face a similar problem, if you can call it that.  I question whether it’s really a problem.

Why, after all, would Japan want to maintain a population of over 100 million?  The ultimate cause of all our environmental problems is, after all, excessive population and Japan certainly has her share.  The overcrowding there is extreme, or certainly seems so to anyone who isn’t used to such a high population density.  Then there’s the question of whether such a large population is really sustainable in the long run.  Go to any graduate library and look up stories about Japan that were printed in the political journals between the wars, and you’ll find that the problem of feeding her people seemed insurmountable at the time, when her population was only about half what it is now.  The modern, high yield rice strains that have given Asia some breathing room had not yet been discovered, and, with her limited agricultural land already fully exploited, it seemed inevitable to many, especially in Japanese ruling circles, that she would gradually starve unless she could secure more territory overseas.  The aggression this fear inspired and the disaster the country suffered as a result of it are familiar to anyone who has read a little history.  Is it really impossible that a problem that seemed so insurmountable within living memory should recur?  What if there is another collapse of world trade as occurred during the Great Depression, and Japan can no longer afford to import sufficient food or the fertilizer to maintain production at home?  What advantage will a large population be then?

What problems will she face if her population declines as expected?  A shrinking economy for a time?  She suffered a far more severe “shrinking” of her economy during World War II, but somehow managed to not only survive that, but thrive in its aftermath.  A reduction in benefits for her retired citizens?  Will their lot be any better if the problem of overpopulation is simply allowed to fester until a major economic crisis comes along, as it eventually will?

Global warming, overfishing, polluted water supplies, and all the other environmental problems we face may appear more or less severe depending on ones ideological predilections.  Regardless, the fact is that the ultimate cause of every one of them is overpopulation.  Instead of panicking over declining birthrates, I suggest it might be better to consider them a boon.  Instead of gambling that the fragile environment of our planet will continue to sustain an ever increasing population, would it not be better to step back for a while and give it time to recover from some of the damage we’ve already done to it?  Given that this is the only planet we have to live on for the time being, does it make sense to take such absolutely unnecessary risks?

As for Japan, she is likely to benefit more than most countries from the “problem” of declining population.  Given her history and culture, it is unlikely that her rulers will be driven to the irrational extreme of importing masses of alien workers to ”solve” it.  Unfortunately, this “solution” is already being tried in several other countries, and is likely to end in disasters far worse than the problem it was intended to cure.

Of course, I do not mean to imply that you, dear reader, should have fewer children.  The fecundity of the readers of this blog is unlikely to contribute substantially to the global population problem one way or the other.  If we get to that point I will let you know.

Remembering Communism

We live in sedate times, at least from an ideological point of view.  Such excrescences of the 20th century as Nazism and fascism have come and gone.  The greatest messianic world view of them all, Communism, if not stone cold dead, is no more than a shadow of its former self.  With its demise, its very memory is passing into oblivion.  That’s unfortunate.  Given the cost of the Communist experiment – 100 million dead and the virtual beheading of at least two countries, Russia and Cambodia – we would do well to at least learn something from it.

It seems to me that one particularly profound lesson is the degree to which vast numbers of intellectuals the world over were capable of deluding themselves about the nature of the Stalinist regime, renowned scientists among them.  Malcolm Muggeridge chronicled the phenomena in his brilliant little snapshot of the time, The Thirties.  For example,

Admiration for the Soviet regime had greatly increased since the introduction of the Five-Year Plan in 1929, though more among Liberals and the professional classes than among trade unionists, who from the beginning showed themselves to be less easily deluded by Soviet propaganda than university professors, writers and clergymen.  Professor Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, ed.), for instance, had no difficulty in believing that ‘while we were in Russia a German town-planning expert was travelling over the huge Siberian spaces in a special train with a staff of assistants, where cities are to arise stopping for a few days, picking out the best site, laying down the broad outlines of the future city, and passing on, leaving the details to be filled in by architects and engineers who remain’ or that ‘Stalin himself sometimes comes down to the Moscow goods sidings to help.’

 

The cost of a tour in the USSR, though moderate, was beyond the means of most manual workers, so that those who availed themselves of the exceedingly competent Intourist organization were predominantly income-tax payers.  Their delight in all they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to this delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of the age.

 

The almost unbelievable credulity of these mostly university-educated tourists astonished even Soviet officials used to handling foreign visitors.

 

The climax came, perhaps, with the visit to the USSR of Mr. Bernard Shaw, Lady Astor and Lord Lothian, which provided, as Mr. Eugene Lyons has put it, ‘a fortnight of clowning… The lengthening obscenity of ignorant or indifferent tourists disporting themselves cheerily on the aching body of Russia, seemed summed up in this cavorting old man, in his blanket endorsement of what he would not understand.  He was so taken up with demonstrating how youthful and agile he was that he had no attention to spare for the revolution in practice.

 

Despite such episodes the Soviet regime continued to be held in ever greater esteem by writers like Shaw and Andre Gide and Romain Rolland:  clergymen like the Reverend Hewlett Johnson, journalists like Walter Duranty and Maurice Hindus, economists like G. D. H. Cole and the Webbs (Sidney and Beatrice, Fabian socialists, ed.) scientists like Professor Julian Huxley.  How could all these, so learned and to righteous, be wrong?

 

…like vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut-cutlets.

 

All this is doubly astounding in light of the fact that it was so obvious at the time all this was going on that the Soviet Union had become a vast charnel house.  Indeed, Muggeridge himself had sympathized with the new regime.  The scales fell from his eyes when he took an unauthorized trip to the Ukraine while visiting the Soviet Union, and saw the starvation and misery there first hand, even as Walter Duranty was denying it in the New York Times.  The Eugene Lyons Muggeridge refers to above was a journalist who spent six years in the Soviet Union and was not as easily duped as Duranty.  He wrote a damning indictment of the regime in his book, Moscow Carrousel.  In a synopsis of his findings written for the American Mercury in 1936 in the context of a review of the Webb’s ecstatic praise of the regime in their book, Soviet Communism:  A New Civilization?, he wrote,

The material out of which the Webbs have fashioned their Utopia is that theoretical USSR of governmental forms, paper freedoms, poster proletarians, stage kulaks, decrees, and charts – the immense make-believe of externals under which all governments, especially all-powerful, all-knowing and infallible super-states, function.

 

One is tempted to quote endlessly from the curious mixture of misinformation, half-truths, and naive credulity which fill these volumes.  The liquidation of the kulaks, for instance, becomes under the busy pens of the Webbs almost an act of benevolence.  These poor people, it appears, would have starved to death had not the authorities come along mercifully and transferred them free of charge to the lumber camps and canal diggings.

 

The discussion of other aspects of the terror is in the same key.  Everything that might reflect on the institution of the OGPU (secret police, ed.) is dismissed with a sneer… The whole complex of forced and convict labor involving millions of persons (hundreds of thousands are building canals and railroads at this very moment); the mass executions without public trial; the teeming concentration camps; all of this the Webbs judge on the basis of official statements, official silences, and the mendacities of ill-informed foreign parrots.

 

Lyons’ article is interesting in that it documents the fact that the truth about the mass slaughter underway in the Soviet Union was perfectly obvious to anyone who didn’t deliberately delude themselves, even in 1936, before the climax of the Great Purge Trials in 1937 and 1938.  Which begs the question, why were so many seemingly intelligent people so delusional for so long?  The question was answered by Julius Caesar over 2000 years ago:  “People willingly believe what they want to believe.”  And many intellectuals of the time dearly wanted to believe in socialism, if not Communism.  Many of them shared Maxim Gorky’s belief that democracy was impossible without it.  Ironically, they included George Orwell, certainly no Stalinist or Communist, but a lifelong socialist, who never realized his work would deal such a telling blow to socialism until it was too late.  In his essays before the war, he actually claimed that there was no moral distinction between the Nazi and British versions of capitalism.  For example, in an essay entitled “Spilling the Spanish Beans,” that appeared in the New English Weekly in 1937, he wrote,

You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois “democracy”, meaning capitalism.  But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois “democracy” are Tweedledum and Tweedledee… If the British public had been given a truthful account of the Spanish war (in which Orwell was a combatant, ed.) they would have had an opportunity of learning what Fascism is and how it can be combated.  As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps (British icon of reaction, ed.) bombinating in the economic void has been established more firmly than ever.  And thus we are one step nearer to the great war “against Fascism” (cf 1914, “against militarism”) which will allow Fascism, British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.

Orwell’s comment throws a great deal of light on the phenomenon of mass self-delusion noted above.  By the 1930′s more than a century of socialist philosophers and propagandists, of whom Marx, Engels and Lenin were some of the more prominent examples, had elevated socialism to a quasi-religion.  The brilliant Scotchman, Sir James MacKintosh, had already noticed the trend in the early 1800′s, long before Marx appeared on the scene, observing that the new religion was bound to fail eventually, because it promised an unachievable paradise on earth, where it could be fact-checked, instead of in heaven, where it could not.  The new religion came complete with its own morality and its own good, the proletariat, and evil, the bourgeoisie.  Speaking in terms of human nature, the bourgeoisie became an outgroup, and the system associated with it, capitalism, anathema.  Thus, it was possible, even for a man as brilliant as Orwell, to seriously maintain that the British democracy and Nazism were really just manifestations of the same evil, capitalism, and therefore as equivalent to each other as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.   This explains another remarkable phenomenon of the time; the willingness of so many seemingly sober economists, politicians, and other miscellaneous intellectuals to liquidate an entire economic system in favor of the gaudy, pie-in-the-sky theories of socialism.  By so doing, one was not merely conducting a somewhat risky economic experiment.  One was fighting evil incarnate.  Self-delusion has always been a prominent characteristic of religious zealots, and the secular religious zealots of the 1930′s were no different.

Well, the experiment has been done, the facts have been checked, and, just as Sir James MacKintosh predicted over 150 years ago, the great Communist myth evaporated like a soap bubble.  Islam, a more traditional religion, rushed in to fill the vacuum left by its demise, inspiring a grotesque love affair between the obscurantist zealots of the old faith and the former “progressive” zealots of the secular faith that had just died.  Meanwhile, these “progressives” have begun assiduously cobbling on the outlines of a new secular faith.  The most recent versions come with a new, if somewhat hackneyed and moth-eaten, morality, including a new ”good” (the 99 percent), and a new “evil” (the corporations).  We would do well to step back and consider whether we really want to go there again, before another country kills off the lion’s share of the intellectual cream of its population by way of eliminating the evil one percent.

The New York Times Discovers Human Nature

While wandering to and fro on the Internet, and surfing up and down in it, I recently ran across an article that appeared in the New York Times a while back touching on the subject of human nature entitled, “Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive.”  Of course, “all the news that’s fit to print” comes with a leftist slant in the Grey Lady, and the ideological left has stubbornly rejected the very idea that there is such a thing as human nature until quite recently.  Indeed, until little more than a decade ago, such notions were not only rejected, but associated with any number of nefarious outgroups on the political right.  As this article documents, times have changed.  At some point, the mounting evidence that there not only is such a thing as human nature, but that it has a profound effect on our behavior, a fact that has always been obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense who happened not to be encumbered with the quasi-religious ideological baggage of the Blank Slate, became to weighty to deny, even for the most casuistic dwellers in academia.  A paradigm shift happened.  The whole, tawdry intellectual facade that had been propping up the Blank Slate finally collapsed in a heap, human nature was embraced, albeit with a wry lack of enthusiasm, and a whole, largely mythical “history” of its passing was invented, as set forth, for example, in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.  This article provides some interesting insight into how the “news” about human nature is currently being assimilated on the ideological left.

It turns out that there was nothing to be afraid of all along.  For example, we read with a sigh of relief that “To be fair is human:  Our instinct is to limit hierarchy.”  A nice touch, that.  There was a time when the very use of the word “instinct” would set the “experts” in human behavior to huffing and puffing about the precise definition of the word and its use in such a context.  In these post-paradigm shift times, its value as a bludgeon for such point scoring has evaporated.  Thus, a word that once inspired the striking of some of the most extravagant intellectual poses now raises nary an eyebrow, and has resumed its humble place in the vernacular.  Elsewhere in the article we read that, according to one Dr. Katarina Gospic, “…the act of treating people fairly and implementing justice in society has evolutionary roots.  It increases our survival.”  Citing another expert, the author opines, “Our rise to global dominance began, paradoxically enough, when we set rigid dominance hierarchies aside.”

And who was that expert?  Why, none other than Dr. David Sloan Wilson.  I had to smile at that, although the joke would be somewhat obscure to anyone who hasn’t been paying close attention to the human nature controversy.  You see, Wilson is one of the foremost proponents of the theory of group selection.  It happens that this very theory was mentioned favorably in The Social Contract one of Robert Ardrey’s lesser known books.  Now, Robert Ardrey was almost universally recognized by the Blank Slaters themselves in their heyday as their most formidable intellectual opponent, as documented, for example, in a collection of their essays entitled Man and Aggression.  Edited by Ashley Montagu, the book can still be found on Amazon for a mere penny.  However, it wouldn’t do for Ardrey, a mere playwright, to have been right about human nature when virtually the entire academic and professional community of experts in psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc., had been dead wrong.  It was just too embarrassing to admit.  It was necessary to revise history, relegating Ardrey to the role of an unperson, in the process elevating the far more academically palatable E. O. Wilson, who did nothing more than parrot Ardrey’s ideas in such books as On Human Nature and Sociobiology more than a decade later, to the role of the gallant knight who had actually defeated the Blank Slaters.  Of course, some excuse was needed for sweeping Ardrey under the rug, and one was duly found – group selection!  No matter that group selection played a minor role at best in Ardrey’s thought, it would have to serve.  Richard Dawkins did the actual dirty work, writing in The Selfish Gene, that Ardrey was “totally and utterly wrong” about group selection.  Pinker seized on this in The Blank Slate, treating Dawkins’ pronouncement as if it were a divine revelation to dismiss Ardrey’s entire legacy in a single sentence.  It would seem, in retrospect, that Ardrey wasn’t quite as “totally and utterly wrong” about group selection as Dawkins suggested, or at least not in the opinion of David Sloan Wilson, now cited as an expert in the NYT.  But wait, there’s more!  A certain well known scientist has joined David Wilson in publishing papers in support of group selection.  And who may that be?  Why, none other than E. O. Wilson!  Now, if Dawkins and Pinker were justified in dismissing all Ardrey’s work on account of group selection, can we expect another pronunciamento from them throwing E. O. Wilson under the bus as well, for the same reason?  I’m not holding my breath.

But I digress.  Let us turn to the article in question, and examine it for more broad insights into the topic of human nature.  So far we have learned that our species is happily endowed with an “instinct” for fairness and equality.  The author helpfully spoon feeds us regarding the relevance of this insight to current social arrangements concerning the distribution of wealth in the United States.  We are unsurprised to learn that from a purely scientific and evolutionary standpoint, such arrangements are decidedly maladaptive.  However, one looks in vain for any mention of such things as the hunting and raiding behavior of chimpanzees and its possible relevance to the suggestion that “human nature” might have something to do with our unrelieved history of warfare and slaughter of outgroups, or any other of the less politically correct elements of our behavioral repertoire.  Of course, it’s only one data point, but I think it’s still a fairly accurate representation of the “progress” of the ideological left as it relates to innate human behavioral traits.  In brief, it amounts to abandonment of the Blank Slate and acceptance of innate human behavior as glibly as if it had never been the subject of the slightest controversy.  It also tends to take the form of seizing at any straw to “prove” that our innate predispositions are benign and politically correct, and studiously ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

And who are we to cavil at this “progress?”  Surely it is a great leap forward from the blind “not in our genes” obscurantism that prevailed during the long reign of the Blank Slate.  Research in the broad field of evolutionary psychology can now proceed, if not without controversy, at least without the distraction of thunderous anathemas hurled down by the high priests of a secular religion posing as scientists.  So long as that research can proceed unhindered, we will gradually gain a deeper and more realistic understanding of our innate behavioral traits, revealing them as they really are, rather than as we want them to be.  That, it seems to me, is real progress.

The Other Side of Morality

There are inevitably two sides to human morality.  One side applies to the ingroup and one to the outgroup.  The choice of one implies the other.  Evil comes with every good.  That is our nature, and we cannot change our nature by merely modifying education, culture, experience, or “nurture,” if you will.  It is the reason that we should finally refrain from projecting new “universally valid” moral systems, and begin dismantling the old ones, at least to the extent that we value life and liberty.

George Orwell left an anecdote that nicely illustrates the above in one of his journals.  It was written in 1936 while he was collecting experiences he would later describe in his novel, The Road to Wigan Pier.  In this case, the “universally valid” moral system in question was Communism, which was a great deal more plausible to the intellectuals of the day as a path to “human flourishing” than it is now.  Orwell had just met a true believer in the future worker’s paradise, and describes him as follows:

…Is terribly embittered and declares that feeling of actual hatred for the bourgeoisie, even personal hatred of individuals, is necessary to any genuine Socialist…  But he is a tiresome person to be with, being definitely disgruntled and too conscious of his Communist convictions.  In Rotherham we had to have lunch at a slightly expensive restaurant because there didn’t seem to be any others except pubs, and when in there he was sweating and groaning about the “bourgeois atmosphere” and saying he could not eat this kind of food.

This hatred of the outgroup and the feeling of physical defilement induced by contact with it or, as in this case, with its food, should be familiar to anyone who’s taken the time to read one of the many books about morality and human nature that have been published recently.  It is a hatred that, when systematized into the “scientific” philosophy of Communism, resulted in the deaths of 100 million people.  Other moral systems have had other outgroups, but the result has always been the same.  The Christians hated and butchered heretics and witches.  The Moslems hated and butchered infidels.  The Nazis hated and butchered Jews.  So it has always been, through countless centuries of senseless warfare and brutality, and so it will continue into the future, until we finally realize that it is unreasonable to expect that behavioral traits that promoted the survival of small groups of primitive hunter gatherers will continue to promote our survival in a radically different world.