Charles Cooke of National Review Online assesses the negative impact of one of the 20th century’s most influential voices on the political left. The man’s views inspired multiple bad ideas for addressing the world’s ills, including movements that treated human beings as liabilities.
Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, has died, and Charlie, on today’s edition of The Editors, reflects on the absurdity of the man’s views.
“The guy who thought that more people should die, or at least fewer people should be born, lived to 93,” says Charlie. “It’s one thing for Paul Ehrlich to have spent his life worrying about this and trying to persuade governments to use their authority, their force, to limit the size of the population. But for an American to have done it I think is remarkable.”
Ehrlich wasn’t forming his opinions after coming from some “really backward” country, Charlie notes. “Ultimately, Paul Ehrlich was a man who saw people as a problem or worse.”
Charlie reminds listeners, “There are outspoken types, usually on the left, who think humans are effectively a virus. They have this Rousseauian notion of human beings in the modern world as having destroyed something, as being the problem with the world. And I just reject that in every way possible.
“Not only do I think that although we should be kind in the way that we do it, the world is here for us, whether that was by design or not,” says Charlie. “We should use resources, we should use land to make life easier for people to live on, to grow food on, and so forth. But I think that individuals are worthy of praise and respect.
“I don’t think that there’s some undifferentiated mass out there that we ought to look down upon, and Paul Ehrlich did.”
