Nancy, are you on the phone? Hi. The University of California, Santa Barbara. At the beginning of this
evening, before everybody came, programs were put on all the seats, which tell you that Professor Harden
will be speaking in the Patent Lecture Series
The next six Wednesdays, same time, same place every Wednesday, Wittenberger Auditorium at
4 PM. Unfortunately, Wittenberger Auditorium at 4 PM was not good in the program. But it's the same
every week. And this does give the subjects of these lectures an introduction to Professor Harden. And
I would urge all of you to attend those.
If at all possible, they are a very noteworthy event happening on campus this semester. Let me give
you a brief introduction to Professor Harden. He was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up in the Midwest,
receiving his undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Chicago in 1936. Until 1946, he
did laboratory work on the culture of algae, the production of alcohol antibiotics, and the cultivation
of algae as a source of food for hungry world.
But he began to see that the objective of feeding humanity by the production of more food was being
defeated by the unlimited increase of human population. He came to believe that the production of more
and more food aggravated, rather than diminish, the multi-dimensional problems of the population explosion
and, ultimately, hunger. During the 1960s, he was one of the more influential spokesmen for the legalization
of abortion. His lectures and writings on the moral need to free women from compulsory pregnancies
contributed to the change in public attitude that was reflected in the decision of the United States
Supreme Court in January, 1973, which struck down rigid anti-abortion laws in the states. His most famous
essay is The Tragedy of the Commons, in which he makes a powerful argument that the human race must
forfeit some of its traditional freedoms in order to control population and pollution. When he was named
faculty research lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 66,
Professor Harden was cited for reinforcing what he has called the humanistic bearings of biology, the
active experimental understanding that one's choice of the subject matter or a method of investigation
or indeed of a hypothesis is rarely without its moral implications and that these implications need
to be faced no matter how difficult the ethical choices may appear to be. On top of that, he's a delightful
man with a very
Thank you very much, Dennis. Are you hearing all right in the back? If you aren't, wave your hands.
Okay? Okay. Well, I'm an old Sierra Clubber myself.
I'm sort of the non-walking variety, but I've been a member of the Sierra Club for many, many years
and have supported it and been delighted with the things that it's done. And I find Sierra Clubbers
much the same every place I go across the country. So I feel that I'm at home here. What I want to talk
to you about tonight is what I see as one of the occupational hazards
of people like you and me who think the world is slightly less than ideal and do what we can to change
it. And as we do this, of course, we run into a lot of opposition, some of it gentlemanly and some not
so gentlemanly. And the occupational hazard I think that is most serious for us is that of becoming paranoid.
feeling after a while that people are persecuting us, as indeed they are in part. But let's no excuse
for being paranoid. You know, what the paranoid says is often quite true, but his mistake isn't saying
it. People are persecuting you, but what the hell? That's life. So enjoy it. If you've got a good enemy,
this is a sort of a blessing. See what you can make out of it.
From the perspective of a number of years of agitating for this or that and being attacked from one
side or the other or both simultaneously, I would like to sort of reminisce a bit and look back and
see what I see as sort of the basic problems, difficulties that people like us face. Now, of course,
first of all, they're just plain factual difficulties, the sort of thing that
is hanging us up right now in the stratosphere, you might say, the problem of the ozone, the problem
of fluorocarbons, and what they do to the ozone, whether this is a serious matter or whether it isn't.
But at the moment, the principal difficulty here is factual. We simply do not for sure know what the
facts are. There's a high level, looks like very competent committee of the National Academy of Sciences
studying it. They're taking their time, as they should,
because they want to be very sure that what they say is true. Originally, the report was supposed to
have been out this last summer, but it's been postponed. I don't know what the date is now. But presumably,
one of these days, we'll get a well-considered report by people who've studied this as thoroughly as
can be done. And then when we have the facts, then we can move to the next stage, trying to do something
about them. But at the moment, this is a factual problem.
There isn't much use spending much of our time on any of the other aspects of it until we get the facts
straight. Then in all of the sorts of things that we deal with, there's the old problem of self-interest.
Now this is not something to decry. This is the way the world works. Everybody tries to take care of
himself first. We're descended from a long and unbroken line of egotists. The people who weren't egotistic
weren't our ancestors.
So let's not be surprised if we're a bit egotistical ourselves. And of course, when we find somebody
whose occupation is being attacked by some change we'd like to make, or he thinks it's being attacked,
he thinks he'll have no livelihood if we get our way, we should be very patient and sympathetic. We
should put ourselves in his place and say, what would I do? It's a question of whose ox is being gored.
Well, there's no simple answer to this, but there are a number of things that
eventually help us. I mean one is just a sheer matter of time. If it's perfectly clear that some occupation
does threaten the public welfare, though there'll be a vigorous counter-attack at first, gradually it
becomes less vigorous, partly because it becomes clear that if this is so, when it becomes clear that
it's so, people don't flock into that occupation as much. There's an attrition factor and
those who have the heat put on them, try to look for other ways to do things than the one that's
objectionable and so on. It can't be solved overnight if there's a large bunch of people who have jobs.
But just steady, sympathetic pressure is needed. Sometimes, of course, second thing that we can do about
the self-interest problem, if we can create some countervailing force, the sort of thing that environmental action
is and does, and it's only one of many, including of course the Sierra Club, but the sort of thing that
Environmental Action does every election year with its select list of the dirty dozen. Now this has
had, I think, insofar as one can make any historical statement, I think this has had a definite effect
on the country because not only have they succeeded, now I shouldn't say that, for sure we don't know
what they've done, but let's put it this way,
The dozen people they select as being the dirtiest, environmentally speaking, that is the congressmen
who have, during the past session or so, been most instrumental in putting through acts of the sort
that we personally disapprove of, we and millions of others. They select the ones that they regard as
sort of key people. There's a complex selection process, but they have to be in key positions
They have to have had a conspicuously bad record and they have to be up against an opponent who looks
better than they are. There's no point in trying to throw one man out of office if the guy who's running
against him is at least as bad. Don't waste your money. So they have to have, there has to be an alternative.
Well, the fact is that in the past three congressional elections, more than half of their dirty dozen have
been eliminated in each election. Now, you can't say that they did it, but I think there's pretty good
evidence that they exerted important influence. Now, what does that do? Well, for one thing, it gets
rid of six or seven or eight men that we would like to see gotten rid of out of Congress. But the other
thing is it puts the fear of God into about 50 others.
You see, this is the important thing about targeting very narrowly. I mean, don't fire at everything.
This is like somebody going out quail hunting and just firing blindly into the sky at the whole flock
of them. You know what you get, nothing. Just fire at a few.
The metaphor no longer works, but the point is in Congress, they know when a quail falls. No congressman
falls out of the sky without the rest of them noticing it and wondering why, and am I next? And I think
the environmental action has been very influential in causing congressmen to think twice before they
adopt a strongly anti-environmentalist stance.
Finally, we have one other problem that I'm just going to mention, but this is a key problem. It's an
unsolved problem. It's unsolved in the technical, formal sense, but it's apparently with us forever
and we need some good ideas. And this is what I call the quiscustodiate problem. This is from an old
Latin proverb, quiscustodiate ipsis custodes, who shall watch the watchman themselves.
this old problem that when you set up a watchdog agency it may be very good for five or ten years and
then presently it becomes corrupted. They tend to see like the group that they're supposed to be watchdogging
and pretty soon they're no good. Well, I don't know any general solution to this but I'm mentioning
it because we should never forget it. That is don't think just because we've won
battle and gotten the law passed that we want that we can now sit back and relax. One has to watch the
watchdogs and we need agencies for doing this and we have some public groups to do this but we're not
doing too much and we're not doing too well. It's still a problem looking for good ideas. Now all this
is by way of dealing with the general phenomenon of
self-interest. I want to take up another matter now, which I think is more basic, but not of immediate
consequence, but more basic in that what one does here will have long-term effects. This is where we're
holding out for the long-term effects and trying to see something about this. So many of the things
that we do, so many of the laws that we have, in fact,
I think one could say every major law that we have has, as part of its foundation, what literary people
would call supporting myths, where they use the word myth in a very broad sense, not to mean something
that isn't true, but a whole sort of ideology that makes sense to people and which is at a very deep
level, just like the belief in myths is, and which people don't examine. They don't even know what there
is to examine. And these supporting myths,
create all sorts of trouble at the subconscious level. This is one of the reasons they're so hard to
deal with. You have to drag them out into the open and then pin labels on them so that you can talk
about them before people realize the important role these supporting myths have in their attitude toward
political affairs. And this is a major aspect of the problems it faces.
And I think all the progress we can make at uncovering these myths, at labeling them, then discussing
them in public, getting people to think about them consciously, is money in the bank for the future.
It doesn't pay off immediately. But in the long run, this is what one has to do for the next generation
to help them see the myths by which we have lived. And in the case of the ones that we see as destructive
myths, to try to destroy those myths so that they are not hung up in the same way that the past generation has been.
So I want to, during the remainder of the period, talk about a number of these myths, some of which
are well known to you, the first ones will be well known to you, but then later maybe I'll tell you
a little something that you haven't thought about before. First of all, the predominant one that everybody
is aware of now, but believe me, an audience like this wouldn't have been aware of it 20 years ago,
is the myth of progress, the idea of progress. The idea of onward and upward, bigger is better,
Growth, growth, growth. 20 years ago, this was accepted at such a subconscious level that people hardly
knew what you're talking about when you mentioned the idea of progress. This wasn't an idea. This was
just a fact in their mind. Well, this myth is only about 200 years old. Before then, people had different
myths entirely. One of the myths was the myth of the golden age, that things used to be good, but now
they're lousy.
That's the Garden of Eden story. Another myth was that history was cyclical. The more it changed, the
more it was the same thing. Things got better, things got worse, but they didn't ever really change.
And those two really held the minds of most people for most of the 50, 100,000 years that man has been
at all a self-conscious animal on this earth. It's only in the last 200 years that the myth of progress
has grasped men's minds. And of course, there's a lot to be said for it. On the technological side,
there has been fantastic progress in the last 200 years. But the way this idea is developed is that
technological progress is synonymous with real progress, and that this can go on forever without limit.
See, this is really too much. And that's what we're seeing now. We're seeing that not all progress
is synonymous with technological progress, and that certain kinds of change, certain kinds of progress,
certain kinds of growth have to come to a stop. Well, this isn't news to you. You know it. You wouldn't
be here if you didn't. But I just want you to realize that though you know it and understand it in your
bones, many older people of your acquaintance, your parents, certainly your grandparents, don't understand
it in their bones if they understand it at all. This is a new idea for our generation.
So we have to be patient with older people about this. Another thing, notice I use the word myth in
this broad sense because what I'm going to mention now is not exclusively bad certainly. Well neither
is the idea of progress exclusively bad. But the idea of innocent till proven guilty. Now this is an
idea that we regard rightly as a foundation stone of Anglo-Saxon law. Not all systems of the law
abide by this principle, but this isn't a caution comparative law. So I won't mention the others, but
the point is the law that we know that our civilization developed in believes in this not guilty until,
I mean, innocent until proven guilty, innocent until proven guilty. Now I do not want to call for an
examination of this assumption in the area of you might say personal criminal law.
I think it is far better than the contrary assumption. So let's let it go. But the idea that this should
be extended to all realms of human existence has given a great deal of trouble. And it has only been
in the last 15 years roughly that it has been seriously challenged and seriously limited in certain
aspects. This is one of the great bits of progress of the last 15 years. This was
essentially the belief that Rachel Carson challenged when she wrote Silent Spring. She said in effect
that as concerns pesticides and all these other chemicals that we're spewing over the landscape, that
the proper assumption should be guilty until proven innocent. In other words, it has to be tested first
and adequately before you use it at all. Well,
In 1962, that was a very, very radical idea. This is one of the reasons that Rachel Carson's book was
so widely and unfavorably reviewed. It got favorable reviews too, but if you want to have some interesting
reading sometime, just go back to 1962 and read at random all the reviews you can lay your hands on
of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. If you regard the reviewers as the proper population,
And if you say truth is determined by the majority view, you'll come to the conclusion that Rachel Garson
was just all wrong, because for the most part, she was damned. But although they often criticized her
on various factual grounds, if you read the review carefully, you saw that what really affronted them,
the reviewers more than anything else, was the fact that she said, no, guilty until proven innocent.
This has to be the rule in the environmental area.
a radical idea. Well, um, this idea got an unusual assist from an unexpected quarter, uh, two or three
years later when the tragedy of the thalidomide babies hit the country. This was a case, uh,
where a drug, I suppose by now, many of you haven't heard of it, but, uh, thalidomide was a drug that
was, uh, in many respects,
a fine tranquilizer. It had been developed in Europe. It was widely used there. It had not yet been
approved for this country, I think principally because of the slowness of the FDA just to get through
anything. I'm not sure they should be given much credit for this, but
Only a few people in this country use the drug, people who had happened to have picked it up in Europe
on a trip or a friend had and they used it and they liked it very much as a tranquilizer is fine. But
it turned out that if a woman took it during the first three months of her pregnancy, there was a very
high chance that her child would be very seriously deformed. The typical deformity being one of having
no arms, just little flipper-like hands at the shoulders where the arms should be.
defects could be worse than that. Well, it was a dreadful thing. Over 10,000 babies in Europe were affected
by it, only a few in this country because of our luck in not having approved of the drug. But Senator
Kefauver had tried to get through a bill, get a bill through in Congress for many years covering the
drug area, those drugs for human beings, in which
the gist of the bill was guilty until proven innocent. In other words, it has to be thoroughly tested
before it can be marketed at all. And he had no luck at all. Long came with the litemite tragedy and
his bill just went zipping through Congress like that. You see this great tragic event in public affairs
was the impetus that needed to get this through Congress. We see that not only got that bill through
Congress, but it also got
many thinking people to realizing that maybe the old Anglo-Saxon principle, innocent until proven guilty,
was wrong in this area. Maybe we should reverse it. And the country did reverse it in this particular
area. So this set the stage for the events of 1970, which was a great year of awakening on the environmental
in the environmental area for various reasons. And in this year, NEPA, the National Environmental Protection
Act was passed. And the gist of that is guilty until proven innocent. You have to have an environmental
impact study before you can do whatever it is that you're thinking of doing, building a dam, channelizing
a river, whatever it is. So what I'm trying to get across to you is that this is a revolutionary change
in the law.
In Anglo-Saxon law, there'd never been anything even remotely approaching it. And all of this took place
in less than 10 years. Now, just passing a law doesn't make everything hunky-dory. I'm sure many of
you in this room are involved in vigorous battles to try to get this new principle operational. And
the battles will continue. It isn't going to be easy.
You can't just pass a law, you have to ride herd on it for a long time. Well, forever in a way, but
for many years at first at a very high intensity before you get it effective. But the point is we do
have this revolutionary change that has taken place. Now, what I want to mention now is what seems to
me an even more basic myth
more basic way of looking at things that hasn't yet been adequately signalized. It hasn't been adequately
labeled, but which I think if we label it, if we talk about it, we can begin to make fundamental changes
in people's way of initially approaching the world that eventually will put us in a much better position
to live a sane and productive life in this crowded world. And this concerns our
first approach to any problem whatever. Now, in the past and at the present time, many people like to
subdivide the world into optimists and pessimists. I think this is a very bad subdivision. I don't think
it does any particular good. About all it does is that
usually turns out that I'm an optimist, my enemy is a pessimist. It's just that sort of pejorative term
that you use. Or my enemy is a pessimist, I'm a realist. Very subtle things, you see, you have to have
the right label. Well, I don't think any of these are very useful because they tend to get people thinking
about a situation and I'm not sure the situation is so important. What is important is the processes
that are in
intact and that are taking place. And these are the ones that we want to identify. And I think it's
more useful to have as a contrasting terms some rather fancy words derived from Latin, but which have
a perfectly good background, Meliorism and Pagerism. Now Meliorism you may have heard of. This comes
from Meliorari, which means to become better or to make better. And a Meliorist is one who
thinks things are becoming better or thinks he can make them become better. A pagerist by contrast is
one who thinks things are becoming worse. I don't know anybody who wants them to become worse, so we
don't need to talk about that aspect. The point is the pagerist says things just naturally tend to be
worse. Now, for contrast, substantive contrast between these two ideas, I would offer you these two.
First of all, the
Adam Smith's view of the invisible hand, and secondly, an even older view known as Gresham's law. I
want to spend some time on these to explain what these ideas are, how they work, and how they sort of
fix our minds in the way we look at the world. Well, Adam Smith's invisible hand comes to us from Smith's
book, The Wealth of Nations, which was published just 200 years ago.
A very famous passage in that, which I'm not going to quote exactly because I can't, but what he says
in effect is this, that if we have a free market in which the forces of the marketplace are free to
act out without government interference, we don't need to set prices for goods because they
will automatically set themselves at the most advantageous level for the consumer because if somebody
If some enterpriser is charging too much for his goods, some other enterpriser will see a way of making
a profit by undercutting him. And so he'll sell at a lower price and he'll get the business. So this
competition between producers automatically leads to the best price and the highest productivity. It
is as though, Smith said, as though things were governed by an invisible hand.
I don't want to go into the details of how true this is. We know now 200 years later of many exceptions
to Smith's view, many conditions under which it doesn't work well and so on. That's a technical matter
for economics. All I want to point out to you is that there's something in this idea, there's quite
a bit in it, that if you don't fix prices, they will gravitate down to a pretty low level. Whereas if
you fix them, then you're stuck because all sorts of vested interests become tied to those fixed prices
and they'll fight like fury.
to ever get them unfixed. Whereas if they aren't fixed, they have nothing to fight against. The enterprises
have principally nobody fight against, except themselves. And that drives prices down. So there's a
good deal in it. But my point is, this is a mellioristic view. It says that leave things alone and things
will automatically become better. This is mellioristic. And this has become the predominant guiding
myth of our civilization, particularly in the United States. It's the idea of laissez-faire, leave them alone,
and they'll adjust themselves all right. Don't interfere. Now for a clear-cut example that works the
other way, I cited Gratiam's Law. Gratiam's Law is two or three hundred years earlier, depending on
when you want to start it, and simply stated it is this, that bad money drives out good. It says that
if you have two sorts of, say,
$10 bills circulating and one of them are genuine $10 bills and the other are counterfeits. If you don't
do anything about it, pretty soon you'll have nothing but counterfeits because whenever a person finds
he has both a real bill in his pocket and a counterfeit bill and he wants to buy something at the store,
he will, if he can, pay for it with a counterfeit, saving the real one in his pocket.
for hard times, but getting rid of the counterfeit as fast as he can. And this is the way everybody
behaves. Well, maybe not quite everybody. Not everybody has to, but most people do. And that's enough
so that as a result of this process of free competition between real and counterfeit bills, finally
the counterfeit bills replace the real ones completely and there are no real bills in circulation. Bad
money drives out good. Nobody has ever questioned the truth
of Ration's law. Everybody knows it's true. It comes up time after time in many different situations
and always works out in the same way. So what does this mean? This means if things work out for the
worse, then this is a pejoristic situation, pejorary to make worse. It automatically becomes worse if
you don't do anything about it. This is quite different from Adam Smith's invisible hand. It is, as
one economist said, an invisible foot that kicks you.
Now, what do we have facing us in the future? Well, I'm going to give you a very peculiar sort of argument,
sort of a logical argument, and I think it's true. And that is, if you imagine at any particular time
that there are many facts of nature, most of which we don't know, but many facts of nature, some of
these facts are melioristic and some are pejoristic. If we have a melioristic myth guiding us,
We will find the melioristic situations first. And during the past 200 years, we found all sorts of
self-adjusting mechanisms that work nicely if you just leave them alone and don't interfere. So we found
most of the melioristic situations already. But because we don't like to think of pejoristic situations,
we haven't become aware of them. It's something we hope isn't true, and we tend to close our eyes to
the possibility.
So that as time goes on, because of this winnowing process of selective attention, more and more of
the yet undiscovered facts are pageristic ones. More and more of the yet undiscovered processes are
pageristic processes. So that if my argument is correct, I would say that during all of your lifetime,
you're going to see more and more pageristic processes uncovered for what they are.
you're going to have to learn how to deal with them because that's where the pay dirt is, so to speak,
in the undiscovered facts of the world. This is what we've got to look for. I don't think there are
many more maliouristic facts to be found, many more pleasant things to be found. From now on, I think
it's mostly unpleasant and we'd better get at it. And the reason we do this is not because we're masochist,
not because we like to torture ourselves, but
Because we realize, well, if the facts are there, if the processes exist, we'd better find out about
them. If Gration's law is true, we'd better find out that it is true and act accordingly. What do we
do? Well, you know what we do in the case of money. We simply pass laws that say money is not to be
governed by laissez-faire. You are not free to pass on counterfeit coins. You pass on a counterfeit
bill, and if we catch you, we'll throw you in the jug.
No laissez-faire, no invisible hand, but instead the very visible and unpleasant hand of the law will
reach out and grab you. And we say, that's that. No freedom. You're not free to do what you want to.
And in general, with the paid juristic facts, we have to interfere. We have to create state agencies,
state laws, and so on to prevent people from acting as they want to. Because if we allow them to act
as they want to,
By the very definition of a patriotic situation, things will get worse. Well, if you'll stop and think
about it, I think you'll realize that there are many things you already know that are patriotic processes.
And we're already dealing with them or trying to deal with them as they should be dealt with or at any
rate you see what has to be done. Many of the things that we want to do as individuals, we now realize
we just cannot
do as individuals, but we have to have some sort of a group consensus. Each one of us individually wants
to have his own private car and drive around. And we're doing it. And what's the result? The result
is that we're all suffering from a surfeit of cars. At the present time, I guess there's only about
one private car for every two people in the United States. But if we succeed in getting still wealthier,
I guess finally we'll have one car for every one person.
let's hope over the age of 16, driving around, and by that time then things are really going to be bad.
Well, the point is, this is a pejoristic process. It's one which you let everybody do exactly as he
wants to, even though his own desire is looked at in the absence of the others, perfectly innocent.
But if you aggregate them, the result is not innocent.
The result is too much. So we have to do something else. And you know the many possibilities and the
mass transportation, so on, the many problems that arise here. But difficult as these are, we realize
we've got to do something else. We simply cannot have complete laissez-faire in the transportation area
in a rich country, in a country rich enough to have potentially one car for every person. Something
has to give.
The pollution area, of course, is another one in which we've realized we've got to abandon laissez-faire.
We cannot let people just throw their waste into the air, into the stream, or wherever they want to.
We've done this for 200 years. And for maybe the first 150 years, it didn't do much harm. But finally,
there got to be too many of us for the absorptive capacity of the air and the water. And we finally
realized, well, we have to restrict people's freedom here. We have to find some way to ration them,
some way to tax them, some way to license them.
on the substantive level, some way to decrease the amount of pollution. And so on. Well, I don't want
to go over more of these. I think you can fill in many yourself. But what I'm trying to get across here
is that here is an area in which we need more originality in the education area. We need ways of getting
some of these new ideas into the whole education system much earlier.
stories, poems, Lord knows what, in the grammar schools and so on. So that as children grow up, they
do not automatically grow up with the idea that more is better, that growth is good, that laissez-faire,
they won't use that fancy term, but freedom. Freedom is always good. Just let people do whatever they
want to and it'll work out for the best. Don't interfere with people's freedom and so on. They have
to grow up with the idea much closer to the original sin that
religious people used to believe in, but I think no longer do very much, much closer to the idea that
if you let people do what they want to, things won't turn out well. Now this is not because people are
originally sinful as we see it now, but in the aggregate. The aggregate of many innocent actions may
in fact be a rather wicked or sinful one. You simply cannot allow complete freedom in these areas. And if
young people go up with the idea of these group effects, of these community effects, of the way the
community has to enter in in some way in restricting individual decisions. If they take this for granted,
then they'll be far more open-minded in weighing the pros and cons of any particular measure that's
proposed. Now, I'm not giving you any overall answer.
that'll fit all cases, that's a thing we continually have to debate on. But I'm saying that if we have
a pejoristic view of the world, if we realize that many innocent-looking processes, long-continued or
multiplied many-fold, become anything but innocent and do a lot of harm, then we'll be far more sensitive
to the harms that we're doing the environment and far more receptive to the idea that we have to take positive
a positive stance in making ourselves guardians of the environment. Thank you. Are there any questions
for Dr. Hart?
I think I can do this fairly simply in ways that he would approve too. His view is, as I understand
it, first with respect to pollution, that this is largely a technical matter and is largely a matter
of the malfeasance of the people in control of the technology using improper technology.
And I agree with him that this is a very important matter. In other words, we can do better without
changing the fundamental system at all. We can and we should do better, but it'll be a hard battle as
he knows to and as he is admitting. Where we differ is a thing that puzzles me a little bit. I have
the feeling that he minimizes the population component of it. And it seemed to me that in this debate
that took place between him
sort of running debate between him and Paul Ehrlich a number of years ago, that Ehrlich was in the right
and he wasn't. Ehrlich said that the amount of pollution is a function of the number of people times
the amount of pollution produced per person. I don't see how one can argue with this. Commoner never
exactly contradicted that, but he always focused only on one factor in that equation, namely the amount
of pollution produced per person, implying that the other
would solve itself. I don't know just what he implied, but that at any rate is the difference as I see
it. He simply does not seriously want to consider the population angle, I think principally because
he sees that any measures that might be proposed for dealing with it would violate what he regards as
human rights. Yes.
Yeah, there's a funny puzzle here. It's sort of a lifting yourself by your bootstraps kind of puzzle.
Look at the Gresham's Law thing. Self-interest dictates that I should pass on the counterfeit and keep
the good bill, right? But if I do that, see, I want to be free to do that. No question about that. But
if I have no way of doing that, of having that freedom without letting all the rest of you have the
same freedom,
then I very quickly perceive that all of you behaving in exactly the same way I'm behaving will absolutely
make shambles of the economic system. Yeah, once that's in shambles, then we're all lost, including me.
So at that point, I say, well, I've got to look at my self-interest from a second level. The first level
is I want to pass the coin. Now the second level is, if everybody has this, we're all one. Therefore,
I say now it is in my self-interest to combine with other people and to write a law that restricts all
of us. No, no, no. Do it only on whatever level exists politically. You cannot write laws in a non-existent
legislature. There is no world legislature. So don't try to write laws there.
But there is a national legislature. So we can prevent counterfeit, counterfeiting money in the United
States. Now we cannot prevent somebody in Brazil from counterfeiting United States money. We'll try
to prevent the, we'll try to prevent the entrance of them. Yeah. Yeah. So that's it. But we have to,
it's self, in other words, I restrict my, my own freedom in the, in my self-interest in a larger sense.
And it is a kind of a paradox, but we already recognize that we have to do this. Yes? Well, I spoke
without sufficient knowledge.
I think what one should do first would be to look at the readers and things in the elementary school,
look at them with an alert and sensitive psychiatric eye and ask, well, what is this story telling the
children? And I haven't done this work. I've seen a little bit, but I really haven't done my homework.
I think that what they're telling for the most part
is pretty innocuous and not very useful for something I think they ought to be told. But the thing to
do first would be to look at it. And then the second would be to see if you could write something better
that would form their minds in a better way. And the third more difficult job is how could you get it
accepted into the textbooks? If you write a story, for example, that builds the moral that nobody should
buy another car until he's driven the present one for 10 years, immediately all the car dealers in your
town, when they get wind of this story in the textbooks, are going to scream bloody murder. You say,
this is un-American. So you've got to be subtle. I don't know how you're going to do it, but I think
there's a marvelous field here. This is one of the most important areas there is. For the most part,
it's ignored by almost everybody. A bunch of professional textbook writers write it, and what they use
for ideas, I don't know. Mostly, they just try to
divert the children, I think, what little I've seen without forming their minds at all. It's an important
area. I can't see very well until, there's one, yeah. The yellow shirt.
Well, I would put it this way that I think catastrophes are great learning opportunities and we can
hardly do without them. A person like me making propaganda, what I see myself doing is preparing people
to deduce the correct moral from the catastrophe when it occurs.
But I really can't move people's minds enough to move legislatures, but I may be able to sensitize them
so when a catastrophe occurs, they say, oh, yeah, that's what that crook meant. You see, that's it.
But you cannot plan a catastrophe. You have to plan for it. Be prepared to take advantage of it.
In the back, yellow.
That's a large question, as you know. Of course, a part of my objection, I did not make it clear in
that article written there. A part of my objection is substantive. I think people have simply underestimated
the costs of doing this, the costs of moving out into space vessels and so forth and so on.
It's fantastically expensive. And this is important because the only way you can
pay for that cost, so that's a capital cost, the initial cost is capital, the only place to get capital
from is income deferred. If you're talking about not having enough income, and then you start converting
a lot of that income into capital for some distant goal, that means you're going to have even less income
until you get that final thing thoroughly capitalized. And I think the capital that's required here
is absolutely fantastic.
Another thing that's involved here, and this is a matter of temperament, I view this as an escapist
proposal. I think it is so outrageous, practically speaking, that I think it's just running away from
the problems. See, in any case where you have a problem of an imbalance between supply and demand, there
are two ways to bring about balance. One is to increase the supply, the other is to reduce the demand.
For the past 200 years, we've always assumed we could always increase the supply. I think now each additional
increment of the supply comes harder, requires more capital investment. So maybe we better look at the
other arm of this and see how to reduce demand. I think that's where the pay dirt lies from now on.
I think we're still going too long on this old idea of trying to increase the supply. I think we're
close to the end. In other words, I think the idea of limits to growth is fundamentally a sound idea
and that we're
closer than you think to those limits. Louder. Well, you have to look at each individual process and
see what it tends to produce. I think the attempt to increase the supply all along is
now, at our level, is now a patriotic process. Every time we increase the supply, we also have a whole
bunch of side effects, as we like to call them, of increased pollution and so forth. So that each,
you see, if we go down to Brazil, if Western man, so to speak, is lumping us all together, clear the
tropical forests of Brazil to plant crops, I think the result will be
disastrous at least for Brazil and maybe even for the whole world. The effect this may have on the climate
and so on, about which we know all too little. I think this is so risky a thing to do that there has
nothing to recommend it. I don't, I think that's a poor way to increase the supply. Leave the rainforest
alone. They may be more valuable untouched than they are quote developed unquote. Yes?
this whole need supply thing, we can cut down on our demand if that's another way to do it. And I cannot
believe that, well, for one thing, it's certainly possible to have a civilization that uses no fossil
fuels. Coal was not used on anything except a play scale until about 1600. And I disagree with you if
you say there was no civilization before 1600 AD. There were some very fine civilizations with no coal at all.
And no oil, no atomic energy, none of these. Well, how many people do you have in mind? We could live
on nothing but solar energy, but not probably 225 million people in the United States, but I suspect
that 50 million could live very well on solar energy, have a rich, blooming civilization, plenty of
technology and everything. It's a question of how many people.
And why are 225 million better than 50 million? Or why are 500 million better than 50 million? I'm not
belittling the difficulty of moving backward in population, but I'm just saying there is nothing inherently
incompatible between the use of simple forms of energy, solar energy, wood, fuel, and so on,
with civilization, even with a technological civilization. They are completely compatible, provided
the population isn't too great.
No needed reform ever happens quickly enough. But as they say, better late than never. You see, we should
have passed a Kefauver-Harris type amendment to the Pure Food and Drug Act, not in 1964. We should have
passed it in 1864. Okay, we were a century late. That's better than waiting until 2064.
You see, you do what you can when you can, and you're not going to get much done until there's a catastrophe.
So relax. But prepare people. Make yourself unpleasant. Make yourself unpopular by preparing them for
the worst. And then when the worst happens, be as irritating as you can. Say, I told you so.