Page2. Main index.   Detailed index.   This paper appeared in the   BMJ of November 29th  1997. The version here is minimally edited.  King MH, Elliott CM To the point of farce:  a Martian view of the Hardinian taboo - the silence that surrounds population control.  BMJ. 1997;315:1441-1443.

EDUCATION AND DEBATE - (Now mostly of historical interest)

To the point of farce: a Martian view of the Hardinian taboo

 Maurice King, Charles Elliott.

ABSTRACT.   We humans have problems controlling our population. We apply the 'Hardinian taboo' to them, so as to prevent ourselves having to deal with them adequately. Our worst problem is demographic entrapment. If the Hardinian taboo on entrapment is not removed, there will increasing slaughter and starvation throughout much of Africa and elsewhere ('malignant uproar' ), as recently shown in Rwanda. [1] If it is removed, there will be intense discussion ('benign uproar'), followed - we argue - by behaviour change in the North (sustainable lifestyles) and in the South (reduced fertility). Which is it to be? Do we open the dialogue or don't we? The 'foundations' of this taboo include the problems of 1-child families. We suggest that the US State Department has been orchestrating the global population debate to the point that it has corrupted critical aspects of academic demography, to the greatest possible disadvantage of the trapped, presumably lest its own resource consumption be criticized. We follow Hardin [2] in thinking that, with modern communications, the solution to 'the population problem' could come quite quickly. The difficulty is removing the taboo sufficiently to get enough ' benign uproar'.
 

What is demographic entrapment?
 
A community is demographically trapped if its population exceeds (i) the carrying capacity of its ecosystem, and (ii) its opportunities for migration, and (iii) the ability of its economy to produce sufficient goods or services which can be exchanged for food and other necessities from elsewhere in the world  (the deadly triad). A community is also trapped if, because its population is increasing, it is expected to be in this unhappy state before long. A trapped community faces the alternatives of starvation, or slaughter, or both (malignant uproar).

 
 Lady M: "Back home in Mars we have long been interested in you humans. We can measure Earth's rising temperature, and see your disappearing ice-caps and your vanishing forests. We watch your television, and subscribe to The BMJ and The Lancet.. One thing especially mystifies us. Why is it that, when your population is increasing at 10,000 people an hour, and is set to double, you do so little about it, especially when it contributes so largely to your poverty, your hunger, your street children and your slaughter. You seem to have some quite extraordinary 'hang-ups' in controlling your population".
 
 
                  MHK: "We do indeed. There is an ecologist in California called Garrett Hardin [2] who has been describing these hang-ups for many years. He calls them 'taboos'. The other animals have their populations controlled for them by such mechanisms as the competition between species, and predators. We try to avoid thinking about our population growth, or the methods we need to control it, for example there was great 'hype' over world population at the First Earth Day in 1970. Twenty years later when it was nearly 50% larger, the second Earth Day was almost completely ignored.  [2] Interest in population is presently at a very low ebb indeed, funding is even lower, [3]  and 'family planning' is being increasingly subsumed under 'reproductive health'".
 

               MHK. "Let me give you a recent trivial example. I had described the Hardinian taboo to one of the participants at a paediatric conference in Kampala. She saw it in operation the following day. She described how her colleagues had broken up into small groups to discuss the causes of malnutrition in their parts of Africa. After some hesitation, they all had reluctantly put 'overpopulation', at the bottom of their lists. However, when the reports of the small groups were eventually summarized for the plenary session, 'overpopulation' had somehow disappeared. It had been 'Hardinian tabooed out'. This happens not only in our little conferences, but also in our big ones. Our population conference in Cairo in 1994 'failed to adequately address the issue of rapid population growth which many poor countries consider their first priority' [4] - and which should have been its major task. Our food conference in Rome in 1996 failed even to notice that in percentage terms the rate of growth of the grain yield of our fields is now less than that of our population. [5] The result is that the grain available to the average human is now steadily falling".


How 'experts' avoid discussing entrapment

They avoid considering these three  variables of the 'deadly triad'  together: (i) communities exceeding the carrying capacity of their local ecosystems,  (ii) migration out of it, and (iii)  the economy. If they consider these separately, they can assume that whatever they have not considered will solve the problem. For example, they can assume that economic development will provide sufficient exports, and therefore sufficient imports, especially food, when there is no reasonable hope of this happening - in time!

 

Paul Demeny names the 'Hardinian taboo' and applies it to his own discipline in his own journal.
 
                MHK: "Curiously, the taboos that we have in dealing with population have only recently been given an overall name. I sent a paper [6] discussing demographic entrapment to Paul Demeny, the editor of our most respected demographic journal - the Population and Development Review. He replied that "The Hardinian taboo is already well known in the literature". Actually, the term 'Hardinian taboo' is not even listed in the standard demographic database 'POPLINE', so it is not even in the literature! The taboo has been so powerful and so well hidden that we have not even needed a name for it. By actually naming it, Demeny took the critical first step towards finally abolishing it. By rejecting our paper, he was applying the taboo in his own journal. This is remarkable, since the Population and Development  Review is  published by The Population Council, which should be clarifying population issues, not obfuscating them".
 

               Lady M: "That's odd. Demography is the key science for your UN population agency, UNFPA. It seems to me that demography is 'gravely flawed' as one of the sciences upon which your agencies base their population programmes, some would say that it is now grossly corrupt".

               MHK: "Exactly! The head of one 'centre for population studies' told me that he could not investigate demographic entrapment because all he had was demographers. The head of one 'institute of development studies' told me that he could not investigate it because he had no demographers!

               Lady M. In that case both disciplines have reached the point of farce!"

 
'Disentrapment'
 
                Lady M: "If this is the 'demographic trap' (see box), how does a community get out of it? What might be 'disentrapment'?

               MHK: Theoretically, it would be possible for a population to escape the demographic trap by: (i) Increasing the carrying capacity of its ecosystem sufficiently - making its fields grow more. (ii) Providing enough opportunity for migration. (iii) Developing an economy which would produce sufficient exports which could then be exchanged for the necessary imports. (iv) Reducing fertility, if necessary to one child only. In practice, although everything possible should be done to make the most of the first three of these, it seems that the reduction of fertility has to be the major one".

 
'2-child demographic momentum'
 
                Lady M. "Surely, if every female were to have only two children from now on, one to replace herself and one to replace her husband, this would immediately stop the population growing?"

               MHK. "Yes - but only if there are the same number of people in each age group. If a population is young, with many people in the younger age groups, even instant 2-child families would allow the population to continue growing for several generations, although at a progressively slower rate. This is 'demographic momentum' - the motion you give a ball when you kick it. African communities are very young indeed with about half the population under 15. African mothers still have about 6 children. The unhappy fact is that, on average, as much population growth occurs after fertility has fallen to 2 (strictly 2.2) as took place before it. [7] There is thus a huge amount of population growth to come. If communities really want to disentrap themselves, mothers need have to have 1 child only, for a generation or more, until the population stabilizes".

               Lady M: "You humans aren't half screwed up by this `Hardinian taboo thing'. What interests me is just why the Hardinian taboo should be so tight with you people?"

               MHK: "On earth, as I expect on Mars, everything is linked to everything else. We suggest that the reason for the Hardinian taboo is that it is linked to at least a dozen other factors which we have called its 'foundations'".


The 'foundations' of the Hardinian taboo    See also (This was an early list of the Demons)
  • The fear of   uproar - both kinds.
  • The economic foundations of the global society - its materialist, consumerist, market economy, driven as this is by the diabolical processes of advertising and marketing to promote ever more luxurious and unsustainable lifestyles.
  • The means of employment that the Northern lifestyle provides, in that to alter it, unless other radical and difficult changes are also implemented at the same time, is likely to increase unemployment.
  • Northern food habits, which are integral to this economy and lifestyle.
  • Current notions of human rights, particularly as they relate to human reproduction.
  • The Holy See's attitude to abortion.
  • Its attitude to most methods of family planning.
  • The cultural attitudes of the South that favour high fertility.
  • The 'starting line taboo'.
  • The high status of 'the child' in western liberalism.
  • The metaphysical position of late capitalist man ('What are we here for anyway?').
  • A dread of 'the future' in that abolishing the taboo acknowledges that 'the population future' now approaching us at nearly a billion a decade, is already upon us.
  • Self interest, peer-group disapproval, inertia, hopelessness, and 'loss of face'.
  • The political interests of the US State Department. 
    •                 Lady M. "Wait a moment, let me be sure I have got it straight. Do you mean that these 'foundations' have got to change, or at least be under great stress if the taboo is lifted?"

                   MHK. "Yes. Our unwillingness to think through changes in the necessary foundations, and our reluctance to introduce those changes, is what holds the Hardinian taboo in place. Let me discuss one of them".

    China's 1-child families
     
                    MHK. "In the 1970s China's population was rising so fast that it became worried about its 'grain problem' - its population looked like exceeding the carrying capacity of the country. It had realized that it was demographically trapped, although it did not use this term. To slow its population growth it started its 1-child family programme. It provided various 'incentives and disincentives' to encourage mothers to have one child only. The choice before China was either 1-child families - or starvation and slaughter. China could only do this because Chinese culture is largely independent of the rest of the world, so that the Hardinian taboo does not operate there. Unfortunately, the world has many more trapped communities, which do not have the cultural independence from the Hardinian taboo that China has - or the courage. Few people in these countries know they are trapped, and the demographers dare not tell them so".

                   Lady M. "It seems to me that you humans now have a choice. Either you can lift the Hardinian taboo and face up to the heated argument that will certainly follow as you adapt to 1-child families and changed Northern lifestyles. Or, you can continue to close your eyes to reality, hold the Hardinian taboo tightly in place, and allow a continent (Africa), and more, to continue its drift into starvation and slaughter, while a minority of you enjoy unbelievable luxury. Inequity is now such that 500 of you now own as much wealth as half of humanity. Are you going to make this choice or aren't you?"

                   Lady M. "Orthodoxy really does seem to be 'out on a limb'. It  really does seem to be 'in for a fall'. Have we reached the very bottom of entrapment?"

                   MHK. "Not quite. In the end it seems to us that the choice between benign and malignant uproar is quite simply whether one cares - about the world and its people, and about Africa and India in particular, and about the other creatures in this marvellous Creation, in short whether one loves them - or whether one doesn't?"

                   Lady M. "So in the end it is either love - or tragedy - and farce! Tell me, are you and Charles hopeful?

                   MHK. Yes - abundantly- provided there is enough benign uproar, and provided we get down to it quickly! See you at our website"

    REFERENCES