A Deadly Man Has Died, But His Views Live On⤒🔗

In his death, as in his life, Dr. Garrett Hardin did things his way. Apparently on September 14, 2003 this 88-year-old envi­ronmentalist, along with his wife, commit­ted suicide. The event was no great surprise, since the couple had long been members of the End-of-Life Choices group formerly known as the Hemlock Society. Our interest lies in the fact that this was a man who, far more than most, impacted American values during the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Dr. Hardin and like thinkers, clearly demon­strated that secular individuals promote standards of conduct which are diametri­cally opposed to those of the Christian.

Garrett Hardin came prominently to public attention with the publication of his seminal paper "The Tragedy of the Com­mons" in the journal Science in 1968. He had not set out to write a paper which would become required reading for more than a generation of students and teachers. His limited objective was merely to present a suitable address to the Pacific division of the American Association for the Advance­ment of Science. By his own account, he rewrote the paper several times, finally set­tling on a much stronger statement than he had initially envisaged. But the paper struck a responsive chord with his audience and Dr. Hardin went on to become one of the most influential spokesmen for the fledgling environmental movement.

Trained as a microbiologist, Dr. Hardin initially undertook to develop mass cultures of algae suitable to feed the "starving mil­lions." That was during World War II. Even later, during the 1960s and 70s, many re­searchers sought to develop "single cell pro­tein" or SCP. Today, the very expensive preparations of the blue green alga Spir­ulina, are a product of that kind of research. However the cultures with which Dr. Hardin worked were not that appealing. At any rate he abandoned the whole project because he realized he was not interested in feeding starving people. As far as he was concerned, feeding hungry people would simply allow them to breed so that the end result would be even more hungry people. Thus in 1946 he went to University of Cali­fornia at Santa Barbara. He remained there as professor of biological sciences and of the environmental studies program until 1978. Even after that, until very recently, Dr. Hardin continued an ambitious program of writing and speaking.

The Tragedy of the Commons←⤒🔗

Dr. Hardin was only ten years from re­tirement when he published his seminal paper "The Tragedy of the Commons" in Science (13 December 1968 pp. 1243-1248). In order to reflect on the possible effects of human population growth on nature, D Hardin considered the example of common pastures in England. Apparently it happened all too often that surrounding farmers would load more and more of their own cattle onto this "common" public pas­ture. At first this would give a farmer an ad­vantage over his colleagues, but eventually the land would be drastically overgrazed and the resource ruined for everybody. Then nobody could make a living.

The point of this analogy was, said Dr. Hardin, that our globe too can potentially be over exploited. If each family, religion, race or class insists on adding more and more of their own offspring into the world, eventually the whole ecosystem will crash. In response to this danger, Dr. Hardin sug­gested that society must take stringent measures. Asking people to behave respon­sibly, he said, would not work as people are basically selfish. We need force, he said. His actual words were "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of people affected" (p. 1247). In other words, the interests of the majority must take precedence over individuals or minorities. If there are sad cases of people unfairly vic­timized by such policies, he said, that is just too bad. After all he insisted: "Injus­tice is preferable to total ruin" (p. 1247). The end justifies the means.

Blaming Babies←⤒🔗

Idealists might be aghast, but many in the academic community were only too prepared to applaud Garrett Hardin's sen­timents. Some might wonder what kind of force this man was talking about. He meant population control; not family planning, but blatantly authoritarian policies. At the time that he wrote, birth control was very controversial largely because many Roman Catholics followed their church's teaching against it. There was however no room for dissenting views in Garrett Hardin's world. This was part of the injustice which he thought was to be preferred.

Suddenly around 1970, everyone was talking about the "environmental crisis." Garrett Hardin and Paul Ehrlich were par­ticularly outspoken about blaming our en­vironmental ills on high levels of human population. Today, even some authors writ­ing in the Christian tradition, have agreed that population levels are a major con­tributing factor to environmental problems. For example, Hans Schwaarz in his 2002 book Creation, remarks: "Burdening cre­ation, however, through mindless procre­ation and pushing it beyond its carrying capacity (Gen. 1:28 says we should merely fill the earth, not overpopulate it!), and ex­ploiting its natural resources so that subse­quent generations are surrounded by garbage dumps, have nothing to do with representation but with egotism" (p. 183).

Dr. Hardin himself was an atheist and an evolutionist. In an article written in 1966 and entitled "The Ghost of Authority," Dr. Hardin insisted that scientists base their work on the premise that God (an author­ity external to mankind), does not exist. Thus he declared: "the conclusion authority does not exist comes as no surprise to sci­entists whose working life is built on this premise" (Population, Evolution and Birth Control. Second Edition p. 261). He further maintained that society's ability to solve ethical problems would improve if people would only forget about God. Thus he re­marked: "Progress would occur much faster if we could persuade mankind that author­ity is a ghost" (p. 262).

Ethics by calculator

One might wonder upon what an atheist would base his system of ethics. Dr. Hardin asserted that there are basically two competing systems of ethics: religious or absolutist and secular or consequentialist. He described these differences in a 1981 article on abortion:

"The deontological (absolutist) system assumes that duties are handed down to us by some unques­tionable authority, duties that are indepen­dent of the consequences of actions ... (alternatively there is) the consequentialist approach (also called situation ethics or rel­ativistic ethics).

Bio-Science 32 #9 p. 723

While people operating in a religious tradition (usually Christian in the United States) object to abortion and decrees about permissible family size, consequentialists, on the other hand, look at the conse­quences of rising population levels. Dr. Hardin, for his part, insisted that numbers meant everything. Before making policy choices we should first calculate the opti­mum human population for a region. To do that we should take into account the capacity of the arable land, the present pop­ulation and rate of increase, as well as av­erage life expectancy. Any program which encourages population growth above the optimum level, says Garrett Hardin, would be unethical.

The Chrysalids Come to Life?←⤒🔗

Such an unsympathetic approach to human misery (for example hunger) raises several questions. For a start, is an individ­ual person worth considering at all? Not altogether surprisingly, Dr. Hardin was not very concerned about individuals. He ob­jected, for example to the sentiment in the American Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. That state­ment meant presumably that all people, whatever their characteristics, were to be considered of equal worth in the eyes of the law. Dr. Hardin however preferred to emphasize differences between people. From a scientific view, he said:

Of course the difference between two individuals may, or may not, be significant for some purpose. The biological knowledge accu­mulated in the twentieth century has changed the policy question from one of equality to one of the significance of differ­ences.

Population and Development Review 23 #3 emphasis his

Such a view would allow for policies formerly not possible according to Christian based values, but now defen­sible on more pragmatic grounds. The con­sequence of this would be that society could set stringent conditions for social selection — you would have to meet these standards to be allowed membership in the commu­nity. Suddenly John Wyndham's story The Chrysalids, in which babies are killed and people ostracized because of abnormal characteristics, does not seem so fictitious any more.

In the 1960s and 70s, a major war was waged in the public forum over abortion. Apparently in the 1960s Dr. Hardin joined an underground network that helped women obtain abortions in Japan and Mexico. He wrote and spoke on the issue too. And he wondered what all the fuss was about on this issue. One should not mourn what has been lost in abortion, he said, be­cause nothing of value is gone. Thus he declared in his 1981 article on the topic: "whatever is lost in abortion ... is (on the average) of very little value as value is reck­oned by men and women of common sense" (p. 726). He declared moreover in this article that human life is merely a mat­ter of definition. In other words, only those individuals are considered human whom society is prepared to admit into her ranks. Since in matters of definition there is no right or wrong, he declared, abortion and even infanticide were permissible if the in­dividual was not yet recognized as human p. 724). This was exactly what happened in John Wyndham's story The Chrysalids.

Immigration of individuals from Third World countries became an issue in the United States during the 1970s. Here again, Garrett Hardin adopted an unsympathetic position. For example, in an article pub­lished in 1988, he declared that he particu­larly objected to a poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the base of the State of Lib­erty in New York harbor. The poem reads in part:

Give me your tired, your poor
 Your huddled masses yearning to be free...  
Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me.

Concerning these sentiments Garrett Hardin remarked: "...we need to blast Lazarus's pornography off the Statue of Liberty. Maybe we can run a prize contest to find a new Lazarus to write a wiser poem for the 21st century; a poem that praises other people for staying home and solving their problems on their own turf."

Whole Earth Review. Winter issue no. 61 p. 56

Hardin's attitudes came in large part from his evolutionary views. He believed that human populations were formerly kept small by disease and disaster, but that modem medicine had allowed the number of people to expand enormously. As a result, he said, the new agent of natural selection would have to be man competing with his fellow man. As early as 1959, Dr. Hardin declared:

Man, freed of the population con­trolling factors of predators and disease organisms, must willy-nilly, like it or not — control his own numbers by competition with his own kind.

Population, Evolution and Birth Control p. 170

The alternative to mankind's not controlling his own num­bers would be ecological disaster. Thus Hardin pictured Earth as a lifeboat with limited capacity. Too many people would sink the whole thing and everyone would be lost. It would be much better, Dr. Hardin said, to allow the starving to die before they have a chance to reproduce. Thus in 1974 Dr. Hardin wrote a controversial piece entitled "Lifeboat Ethics: the case against helping the poor" published in Psychology Today in which he argued specifically against sending any food aid to starving people in Ethiopia. The agenda he recom­mended, in short was to end legal immi­gration from Third World countries, discourage economic growth and development in these countries and deny food aid to re­gions with famines.

Our Response←⤒🔗

Dr. Hardin was a complex individual. He apparently was a fiscal conservative and a lifelong Republican. Most environ­mentalists are democrats, but not Dr. Hardin. Apparently he believed that an ideal world population would be about 100 million people, according to an article about him in Skeptic magazine in 1996. That would be like killing off everybody in the world except for half the population in the United States. Observers who think that the objective of environmentalists is to allow our children to lead safe, healthy lives, clearly should think again. It is therefore a little chilling to read in the New York Times obituary that

His commons theory is frequently cited to support the notion of sustainable development, mesh­ing economic growth and environmental protection, and has had an effect on nu­merous current issues, including the de­bate over global warming.

printed in National Post October 30 B4

Do we really want a society which bases its policies on Dr. Hardin's views?

Christians do not need a detailed list of ways in which Dr. Hardin's objectives are the antithesis of our faith and values. The passage in Matthew chapter 25 tells it all. In verses 41-46 Christ consigns evil doers to perdition with these words:

For I was hun­gry, and you gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink. I was a stranger, and you took me not in: naked, and you clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and you visited me not ... Inasmuch as you did not do it to the least of these (people), you did not do it to me.

Our ethic, as Christians is to treat our neighbor as we ourselves would like to be treated. We want nothing to do with lifeboat calculations. Dr. Hardin may have died, but his views unfortunately have not.