https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-humanity/
The hallmark of modernity is metaphysical materialism: the notion, as atheist Daniel Dennett put it, that “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter––the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology––and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” The consequences of proclaiming that immaterial reality––mind, soul, God––doesn’t exist has been the rise of antihumanism, the stripping from people of their transcendent worth, and the reduction of them to a “sort of stuff” in the world, to be studied, understood, reshaped, and ultimately controlled like any other bit of matter.
Our world increasingly over the last two centuries has seen not just man’s eternal inhumanity to man, the result of our destructive, immutable passions and impulses that have made history, as Edward Gibbon put it, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Now there’s antihumanism, a much more subtle danger, always cloaked in claims of progress and improvement in human affairs that are brought on by science, a pretension that has made it much more destructive.
Robert Zubrin writes in Merchants of Despair that “the founding prophet of modern antihumanism,” is Thomas Malthus and his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus claimed that any population always grows geometrically larger than its food supply, a hypothesis which ignored the creative ingenuity of people. Worse were the consequences of his theories when applied to the real world.
For example, falsely believing that Ireland was overpopulated, the British government allowed this food-exporting island to spiral downward into famine partly because, as Malthus himself said, many agreed that “a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” Over a million Irish died of starvation and diseases caused by malnutrition.
Thirty years later, the same policy of neglect in India contributed to a famine that killed as many as 10 million people, again because of the Malthusian fallacy that, as Sir Evelyn Baring told Parliament, “Every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.”
The same antihuman sentiments and amoral logic characterized the work of neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted hundreds of millions dead from mass starvation by the 1970s, and the disappearance of England by the year 2000. And like Malthus, Ehrlich proposed illiberal and inhumane interventions like involuntary sterilization, which China later imposed on millions of its people with its “one-child” policy. In 1977, Ehrlich co-authored a book, Chelsea Follet writes, that proposed “a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child,” and discussed “adding sterilants to drinking water or staple foods.”
