A Close Call

There is a long history of  unreasonable  things  being said and written about evolution.  Most have come from people who believed the Biblical story of creation was true.  These days such people are often called young earth creationists, because of their beliefs that the earth and the cosmos are only about six thousand years old and that present day humans and animals have lived on the earth since its creation. Lately there have been examples of a different sort from a different source -  “progressive”   people who deny the evolutionary bifurcation into  two sexes and claim that gender is a social construct rather than a  genetically determined fact.  It is interesting to speculate on which group is behaving more irrationally. On the surface it would seem to be  the new earthers,  since they deny that evolution happened at all while the advocates of gender fluidity deny only that it turned out as it really did.  However the things the young earthers are denying are not immediately obvious and require study and reflection  to understand,  while the things the  gender fluid people denying  are  plainly observable in the ordinary course of life.  It would be a close call as to which bunch is being less rational, and one would hate to have to live on the difference.

Conservatives and Overpopulation

A few days ago I read an article by a conservative writer criticizing Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation for writing  that Africa would be better off  if Africans had fewer children, and the population grew slower.  The piece itself was unimportant. It was odd and unconvincing. (It is hard to sell  the idea that people who are too poor to support children should have a bunch of them, or that women are deprived by being offered the means to have only the children they want and can care for and are  unethically selfish if they take advantage of those means.)

However it illustrates attitudes on a topic about which many conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, are importantly or even dangerously wrong – overpopulation.  It should be obvious that human populations cannot grow exponentially forever, that life is better for most people when there is a healthy relationship between the number of people and the means for taking care of them, and that gross imbalances between populations and means get corrected one way or another. It should be obvious that societies with  primitive and failing economies, bad governments,  and nothing like the liberal order cannot support large, dense, growing populations well.  It  should be obvious that birth control and family planning are better ways of managing  populations than famine, epidemics, childhood diseases, and war. Yet it obviously is not obvious to many conservatives.

They  also fret over the stable  or slowly decreasing populations in Europe and Japan.  However there is nothing necessarily wrong with that in itself. (Reasonable worries for Europe over too much immigration from non-Western societies should be considered separately since such immigration is not the only way to deal with internal changes in demographics.)  Europe and Japan are pretty crowded already. In the long run Asia, the Americas, and definitely  Africa would benefit from following their trend.   

There is  a political side to overpopulation  that conservatives who care about freedom should consider.  People’s  having enough elbow room is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a free society, but it helps. A person in this country can live a freer life in Wyoming or West Texas than in Manhattan or San Francisco.  Some of that probably has to do with things not being too crowded. People may be less likely to butt forcibly into their neighbor’s business if their neighbor is not right on top of them.

Remember Not to Vote

Not all the foolish statements and wrongheaded thinking during political campaigns come from candidates and their supporters. As the time for an election approaches,  one usually can count on getting pious exhortations from people in the media for everyone  to do his duty and get out and vote.  That is not merely  not right. It is the opposite of right. People who do not think  about political principles or who have not  taken time to learn where the candidates and parties stand on the issues  or who  make their decisions on feelings and emotion have a responsibility not to vote. They should stay home and leave the voting to those among their fellow citizens who know what they are doing. If they have to say anything about it, journalists and talking heads on TV should be urging people to be sure to think and learn before voting, rather than extolling voting itself as a requirement for civic virtue. For people who have not done the thinking and studying to enable them to cast the “informed ballot” are best fulfilling the duties of citizenship by refraining from voting and should be complemented rather than fussed at for doing so

Happy Columbus Day

We should wish each other a happy Columbus Day, and gives the leftists’ “indigenous people’s day” the derisive horse laugh it deserves.  It does not matter that there were other explorers such as Cabot and Hudson who did important things, or that the Vikings found the New World centuries before 1492. It does not matter that the Spaniards’ behavior in the areas of Latin America they conquered and colonized was at best bad and often utterly barbarous (though still  usually  some  improvement over savagery of the Aztecs and others).  It does not matter that the English and Dutch settlements  in  what would become the United States  came over a century after Columbus’s voyages and were made  by people who were enemies of Spanish empire Columbus served.

For in the context of the  American holiday, Columbus is a symbol of daring, bold exploration,  the value of Western Civilization, and the chain of events leading to the creation of the United States. That is what Columbus Day honors. That explains why the leftists despise it, and why the rest of us can celebrate it happily.