RUTHFULLY YOURS

At the end of the 18th century, the economist Thomas Malthus predicted that the world’s population would outstrip food supplies unless the increasing number of people was checked by restraints such as war, famine or disease. As a result of his apocalyptic prediction, he thought that most people should die without reproducing.

In fact, although the world’s population has massively increased since then, hunger and the absolute poverty that produces starvation have declined. Science, progress and human ingenuity produced a dynamic which Malthus failed to foresee, along with other flaws in his thinking. So he has been proved spectacularly wrong. Everyone knows that… don’t they?

Well, apparently not. From the readers’ comments thread below my column in this morning’s Times of London (£), it appears that most of them believe Malthus was right! Reader and after reader wrote it was obvious that the world’s resources were finite, and so it was obvious that there were too many people in the world as a result.

The fact that the global catastrophe Malthus had predicted hadn’t happened was brushed aside. All that meant, they said, was that this hadn’t happened yet. But it would in the end!

This absence of reason is alarming; but it explains why so many have fallen for today’s corresponding myth of imminent global apocalypse: catastrophic man-made global warming. “Malthus was right!” tells us something very frightening about public ignorance, gullibility and the persistent grip of religion-substitute beliefs that are a byway to hell.

 

In my Times column, I wrote about the reaction of a leading British demographer, Professor Sarah Harper, to the 20-year low in the birthrate in England and Wales which reflects a long-term trend of falling birth rates across the world.

Professor Harper commented that falling birthrates in the west were “good for . . . our planet”. Declining fertility in rich countries, she said, would help to address the “general over-consumption that we have at the moment”, which was having a negative impact on the world.

If a population is to replace itself, there needs to be a birthrate of 2.1 babies per woman. Britain’s birthrate in 2021 was only 1.55 babies per woman and it seems to have declined further since then. In 183 of the 195 countries in the world, the birthrate is too low to maintain present population levels.

Contrary to Professor Harper’s enthusiasm for below-replacement birth-rates, these are a kind of cultural death-wish. The inverted population pyramid, with a large and increasing number of ageing people having to be supported by a smaller and diminishing number of young people, threatens economic growth, productivity and welfare. It results in the need to import productive people from abroad, which erodes social cohesion and national identity. Moreover, such foreign imports are themselves threatened if other countries are similarly failing to reproduce themselves.

The decline in birthrates is generally put down to factors such as individualism and consumerism, women’s enhanced participation in education and the workforce, lower infant mortality (reducing the need to have a lot of children) and greater use of contraception.

A closer look at the evidence suggests this isn’t the whole story. Birthrates tend to rise and fall based on how optimistic or pessimistic people feel.  People stop having children when they no longer feel they have an investment in the future. Falling below replacement rate is a sign of cultural despair.

Among young people aged 16 to 25, studies have found that around one third say they are reluctant to have children because of their fears about climate change.

The current global warming obsession is rooted in the population control movement which originated with Malthus. This trajectory has not been a wholesome one.

In my 2010 book The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, I wrote that Charles Darwin admitted his own ideas were an extension of Malthusian thought to the natural world; in turn, intellectuals developed the thinking of both Darwin and Malthus into social Darwinism. I wrote:

Applying the theory of evolution to the organisation of human society, social Darwinism represented progress  as a kind of ladder on which humanity could climb towards perfection. This meant that the “unfit,” or lesser breeds of humanity, had to be discarded on the way up. Thus eugenics, the “science of selective breeding,” came into being.

In Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the main targets of eugenic thinking were the poor, whom the intelligentsia regarded as overbreeding throwbacks to an earlier stage of evolution. There was a fear that those higher up the evolutionary ladder would be overwhelmed by lesser forms of human life. The concept of the inherent value of every individual life was therefore seen as a sentimental block to the progress of humanity. In 1880 a German zoologist, Robby Kossman, declared that the “less well-endowed individual” should be destroyed for humanity to reach a higher state of perfection.

Eugenics was therefore seen as a vital tool of social progress. Early socialists were imbued with eugenic thinking. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, Eden and Cedar Paul, Harold Laski, Graham Wallas, Joseph Needham, C. P. Snow and Maynard Keynes were all eugenicists, as were the editors of the New Statesman and the Manchester Guardian. It would not be until the full horror of Nazism became apparent, with its extermination programs against mental defectives and the Jews, that both eugenics and fascism finally became discredited.”

After population control was driven underground by Nazism, it resurfaced in time among environmentalists and morphed into the climate change obsession.

In 1972, the Club of Rome global think-tank predicted that the inevitable exhaustion of the world’s natural resources would prevent indefinite economic growth. In 1993 it proclaimed that environmental concerns such as pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages and famine all signalled that “the real enemy, then, is humanity itself”.

In 2009 the Optimum Population Trust (now called Population Matters) argued that population growth was a key driver of greenhouse gas emissions and suggested that the UK should cut its population by half if it is to feed itself sustainably. Its patron, Sir David Attenborough, currently says on its website: “All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder — and ultimately impossible — to solve with ever more people.”

Few understand the baleful philosophical roots of the climate change cult. For environmentalism and fascism have been on a continuum. In my book, I wrote:

Perhaps the most striking continuation of fascist ideas under the guise of left-wing progressive thinking lies in the modern environmental movement, with its desire to call a halt to dehumanising modernity and return to an organic harmony with the natural world.

Veneration of nature and the corresponding belief that civilisation corrupts man’s innate capacity for happiness and freedom go back to the eighteenth-century and Jean-Jacques Rousseau — who bridged the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment, the world of reason and the world of emotion, movements of the left and the right. His idealising of a primitive state of nature, along with a theory of human evolution through survival of the fittest that predated Darwin by a hundred years, became a galvanising force in the nineteenth century among those who were sounding a retreat from modernity and reason, into the darkness of obscurantism and prejudice. And one of the principal routes they took was through the natural world.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Darwinism was sowing the seeds of environmentalism, and in doing so it also fed into fascism. The critical figure in making this crossover was Ernst Haeckel, the most famous German Darwinist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Haeckel believed that the theory of evolution would transform human life by dethroning man from the pinnacle of Creation. He and his followers saw Darwinism as far more than just a biological theory; it was the central ingredient of a new world-view that would challenge Christianity. His Darwinist views led him and his followers to espouse scientific racism, the belief that racial competition was a necessary part of the struggle for existence and — even though he opposed militarism — that the extermination of “inferior” races was a step toward progress.

Haeckel also believed that mind and matter were united everywhere, and he ascribed psychic characteristics to single-celled organisms and even to inanimate matter. As the authoritative historian of the ecological movement Anna Bramwell relates, it was Haeckel who in 1867 coined the term “ecology” to denote a scientific discipline focusing on the web that links organisms with their environment. With his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille, Haeckel deeply influenced subsequent generations of environmentalists by binding the study of the natural world into a reactionary political framework.

The twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Klages was firmly in the Haeckel mould. In 1913, he wrote an essay titled “Man and Earth” for a gathering of the Wandervögel or Free German Youth, the prewar movement that rejected materialism for excursions in more basic outdoor living. According to Peter Staudenmaier:

“Man and Earth” anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement. It decried the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global ecosystemic balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats, urban sprawl, and the increasing alienation of people from nature. In emphatic terms it disparaged Christianity, capitalism, economic utilitarianism, hyper-consumption and the ideology of “progress.” It even condemned the environmental destructiveness of rampant tourism and the slaughter of whales, and displayed a clear recognition of the planet as an ecological totality. 

A political reactionary and virulent antisemite, Klages was described as a “Völkish fanatic” and an “intellectual pacemaker for the Third Reich” who “paved the way for fascist philosophy in many important respects”. Denouncing rational thought itself, he believed that the intellect was parasitical on life and that progress merely represented the gradual domination of intellect over life itself.

During the interwar period, most ecological thinkers subscribed to this way of thinking. There was a particularly close association between ecologists and German nationalists, among whom a number subsequently became Nazis. Their thinking was that nature was the life force from which Germany had been cut off, ever since the days of the Roman Empire, by the alien Christian-Judaic civilisation, the source of all the anti-life manifestations of urbanism.

In 1932, the proto-fascist intellectual Oswald Spengler wrote about the deadening effect of “machine technology” on the natural world and humanity:

The mechanisation of the world has entered on a phase of highly dangerous over-extension. . . . In a few decades most of the great forest will have gone, to be turned into news-print, and climatic changes have been thereby set afoot which imperil the land-economy of whole populations. Innumerable animal species have been extinguished. . . . Whole races of humanity have been brought almost to vanishing point. . . . This machine technology will end the Faustian civilisation and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten—our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman Roads and the Chinese Wall.

Such ecological fixations were further developed in German Nazism. According to Ernst Lehmann, a leading Nazi biologist, “separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations”. The Nazis thus fixated on organic food, personal health and animal welfare. Heinrich Himmler was a certified animal rights activist and an aggressive promoter of “natural healing”; Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, championed homeopathy and herbal remedies; Hitler wanted to turn the entire nation vegetarian as a response to the unhealthiness promoted by capitalism.

There was top-level Nazi support for ecological ideas at both ministerial and administrative levels. Alwin Seifert, for example, was a motorway architect who specialised in “embedding motorways organically into the landscape”. Following Rudolf Steiner, he argued against land reclamation and drainage; said that “classical scientific farming” was a nineteenth-century practice unsuited to the new era and that artificial fertilisers, fodder and insecticides were poisonous; and called for an agricultural revolution towards “a more peasant-like, natural, simple” method of farming “independent of capital”. Himmler established experimental organic farms including one at Dachau that grew herbs for SS medicines; a complete list of homeopathic doctors in Germany was compiled for him; and antivivisection laws were passed on his insistence. As Anna Bramwell observes: “SS training included a respect for animal life of near Buddhist proportions.”

They did not show such respect, of course, for the human race. Neither does the ecological movement, for which, echoing Malthus, the planet’s biggest problem is the people living on it. Even though our contemporary era has been forged in a determination that fascism must never rise again, certain völkish ideas that were central to fascism — about the organic harmony of the earth, the elevation of animal “rights” and the denigration of humans as enemies of nature — are today presented as the acme of progressive thinking.

This astounding repackaging was accomplished during the 1970s. While western politicians were committed to growth and consumer society was taking off, the dread of overpopulation also grew. It is probably no coincidence that the fear of global immiseration coincided with the end of empire and the west’s loss of control over the developing world. Reports by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos presented to the UN World Conference on Human Environment in 1972 preached imminent doom as a result of rising technological capacity and argued that man had to replace family or national loyalties with allegiance to the planet. The Club of Rome, which was founded also in 1972, prophesied imminent global catastrophe unless resource use was curbed, a view that the oil shock of 1973 served to validate and embed in western consciousness.

If ecology was to take off, however, it had to shed altogether its unhappy links with fascism, racial extermination and ultranationalism. It took a number of different opportunities to do so. During the 1960s in both Europe and North America it identified itself with radical left-wing causes, latching onto “alternative” politics such as feminism and, in Britain, Celtic nationalism. In the 1970s, the “small is beautiful” idea of the anti-Nazi émigré Fritz Schumacher took hold.

In 1971, Schumacher became president of the Soil Association in Britain, which was critical in both promoting deeply antirational ecological ideas and laundering them as fashionably progressive. Rudolf Steiner was the arch-proponent of “biodynamic” agriculture, which eschewed artificial fertilisers and promoted self-sufficient farms as preserving the spirit of the soil. When the Soil Association was created in 1946, it embodied this “organic farming” ideal. But Steiner was the also the founder of a movement called anthroposophy, which was based on the development of a non-sensory or so-called super-sensory consciousness. It held that early stages of human evolution possessed an intuitive perception of reality, including the power of clairvoyance, which had been lost under the increasing reliance on intellect. It promoted the belief that the human being passed between stages of existence, incarnating into an earthly body, living on earth, leaving the body behind and entering into the spiritual domain before returning to be born again into a new life on earth.

These essentially pagan and irrational ideas were, as we shall see later, intrinsic to ecological thinking. But they were also to surface in a remarkable new alliance between neo-Nazi doctrines and radical left-wing, anticapitalist and New Age ideas. Towards the end of the 1960s, finding itself criticised for espousing reactionary views, the Soil Association turned sharply leftwards and developed an egalitarian socioeconomic perspective instead. It published articles admiring Mao’s communes in China and suggested that plots of land a few acres in size should be distributed similarly among the British population.

In Germany, the Green movement that emerged from the student protests of 1968 bitterly attacked the “biodynamic” organic farmers for their perceived authoritarianism and social Darwinist beliefs. Thus German Greens of the 1970s, with a considerable communist element, had less to do with ecology than with participatory democracy, egalitarianism and women’s rights.

Among radicals in America, there was a split after 1968 between those favouring organised terrorism and alternative groups. Young radicals in the latter camp, galvanised by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1966), claimed that multi-national capitalism was responsible for pollution. Environmental concerns offered up a radicalism for the middle classes. The anarcho-communist Murray Bookchin wrote of a utopian future in communes when scarcity would disappear and man would return to living close to the land. American feminists in particular took up ecology, drawing upon its foundational belief in a primitive matriarchal paradise to support their attacks on patriarchal oppression.

The result of all this ferment was that the green movement became not just radical but radically incoherent. It became the umbrella for a range of alternative, anti-western causes and lifestyles. But its constant factor was a strongly primitive, pagan and irrational element. As Anna Bramwell caustically comments, “The new paganism, often based on Atlantean theories of a lost golden age and theories of cultural diffusion via a vanished super race, is open to all and especially attractive to the semi-educated, semi-rational product of today’s de-naturing educational process, stripped of religion, reason, tradition and even history.”

Despite a veneer of fashionable progressivism, the fact is that environmentalism’s fundamental opposition to modernity propels it straight into the arms of neo-fascism. For just like their precursors in the twenties and thirties, today’s ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi groups chime with many of the ideas that also march under the green banner.

In France, Italy and Belgium, the Nouvelle Droite combined Hellenic paganism with support for the dissolution of national boundaries; it was anticapitalist and anti-American, adopting sociobiological arguments to stress the uniqueness of each race and culture within national boundaries and to oppose colonisation and empire. In Germany, the radical-right journal Mut was pacifist and ecological. Such groups met the left on the common ground of New Age paganism, expressed in particular through the religions and cultures of the East.

From the 1970s onwards, neofascist extremists began to repackage the old ideology of Aryan racism, elitism and force in new cultic guises involving esotericism and Eastern religions. Some groups mixed racism with Nordic pagan religions, celebrating magical signs of ancestral heritage and mystical blood loyalty. In the United States, Britain, Germany and Scandinavia, racial pagan groups today ponder runes, magic and the sinister mythology of the Norse gods Wotan, Loki and Fenriswolf. Like the Nazis, these groups resort to the pagan world to express their antipathy to any extraneous organisms that disturb their idea of racial or national purity. As Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes, “The racial interpretation of these esoteric ideas, cosmology and prophecies betrays these groups’ overwhelming anxiety about the future of white identity in multiracial societies.”

In Italy, Julius Evola, who inspired a whole generation of postwar neo-fascists, embraced Hinduism and Tantrism, a radical Hindu cult focusing on women, goddesses and sexual energy, and revolving around the notion of breaking all bonds. By means of taboo and spiritually dangerous practices such as orgies and intoxication, the superior adept can raise his consciousness to supreme levels of unity with the divine female power of “Shakti,” which animates and inspires the whole universe, thereby acquiring exceptional knowledge and power. Tantrism’s secrecy and elitism, writes Goodrick-Clarke, negates the modern world of rationalism and democracy.

In Chile, the diplomat, explorer and poet Miguel Serrano adopted the mystical doctrines of Savitri Devi, the French-born Nazi-Hindu prophetess who described Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu and likened Nazism to the cult of Shiva because of its emphasis on destruction and new creation. Tracing semi-divine Aryans to extraterrestrial origins, Serrano recommended kundalini yoga to repurify “mystical Aryan blood” to its former divine light. He also proposed a gnostic war against the Jews, promoted the idea of the “Black Sun” as a mystical source of energy capable of regenerating the Aryan race, and believed that the Nazis built UFOs in Antarctica. In the United States, Nazi satanic cults from the 1970s onwards linked anti-Christian paganism to transgressive praise of Hitler. As in Europe and Australia also, “dark side” lodges promoted the worship of force backed by anti-Christian, elitist and social Darwinist doctrines.

Having sown this toxic environmental wind, the world is now reaping the whirlwind.