Analysis: Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”

     Garrett Hardin’s 1974 Psychology Today essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” plays fast and loose with the facts he presents to back up his argument, and comes across as a petulant diatribe against the poor rather than a coherent discussion. In short, Hardin is just another whack job who enjoys the public attention he gets from his proposal to starve the poor out of existence so that the rest of us can enjoy our luxuries.

     From the first paragraph, Hardin set out to define the terms of his case against the poor. It’s his essay, he can define terms any way he wants, he seemed to say. He took very seriously his metaphor of the lifeboat as the refuge of the wealthy, with hungry swimmers—his metaphor for the poor—trying to usurp his privileged place on the boat. Fortunately for his argument, he did not push the lifeboat image to its logical conclusion: the lifeboat passengers will deplete the boats resources and people will have to go overboard—the order of plank walkers would depend, of course, on the most able and not the wealthiest. Or Hardin will hope to be saved by a passing yacht, at which time he proves himself no better than the miserable swimmers for whom he expresses such contempt.

     Some of his arguments were just silly. He provided his own definition of “safety factor,” one that grants him the greatest amount of space for him and his dinner-party buddies. In fact, safety factors are built into engineered products. If his boat is designed to hold sixty people, any more would violate that margin for safety. But that’s nitpicking, and there are too many major errors in his thesis to dwell on the minor ones.

     He wrote that guilt is the motivating factor behind the urge to aid the poor. I can’t argue that, because I don’t have the statistics on the subject (and he doesn’t provide any). Those people I know who are willing to help, however, operate from an enthusiasm for life that they wish to extend to others, and consider themselves spread proportionately across the self-family-group-nation-humanity spectrum, and not stuck in the “it’s all about me” mode. Sorry, Garrett; we haven’t even turned the page yet, and you’ve been wrong on each point made. Let’s move on.

     On the disparity of population growth between rich and poor countries, he falls back on a Marxist quote: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” From that, he extrapolated the absurd idea that helping the poor amounts to a misinterpretation of the socialist ideal of economic equality. He confused “share” and “help” with “surrender,” as in his assumption that those who do not agree with him want him to give up all his worldly goods to the starving masses. He has not been asked to surrender all his worldly goods to the poor. St. Francis, we are not. A check to a relief agency does not amount to voluntary poverty.

     He introduced an equally ridiculous argument that he called “the tragedy of the commons,” a highly simplistic theory that the poor will ravage the world’s resources if allowed to reproduce at will. To that, I will introduce the “tragedy of the landed gentry.” In pre-Industrial Revolution England, the nobility often owned vast wooded estates. True to the “tragedy of the commons,” the English poor had all but denuded the countryside of woodlands in search of game and fuel, and were forced to poach the enclosed woods owned by the wealthy (and undeserving) nobility. For poaching, the hungry poor faced public torture, imprisonment, or hanging. The world had not run out of resources, but the wealthy and powerful had locked them up for their own use. Picnics in large groups, lavish outdoor parties, and game hunts were popular pastimes among the landed elite.

    Hardin abandons any pretense at reason in his “Tragedy of the Commons.” In those situations in which the “commons” face abuse, they are first abused by the privileged class for commodity resources. In that, the rich and the poor form a symbiotic relationship: the wealthy strip the land to provide products and services to the poor and middle class, who in turn form the source of wealth. Without labor and markets, there is no wealth.

     He confused the depletion of oceanic fisheries with an exhaustion of the commons by the poor, when in fact, the ocean is being over-fished by multi-national corporations owned and operated by… the wealthy elite.

     There’s more.

     His claim that Public Law 480, “Food for Peace” program, benefitted only wealthy U.S. business amounts to an argument against himself. Did he denounce the wealthy and well-fed along with the hungry poor? Maybe his complaint came from his statement that the U.S. taxpayer paid the cost of PL480. Not true. The middle-class taxpayer—not the wealthy elite—picked up the initial cost, but that cost was recovered in subsequent negotiations called for in the agreements with hungry nations and affluent partners. We gave away our surplus grain, he said. Not true. We entered into financial and foreign relations agreements in which we were to share a portion of our surplus in return for future markets. Tons of wheat sold to the former Soviet Union to help with an approaching famine, added to the tons shipped to markets and to starving masses around the world, still left us with enough surpluses that we risked the danger of spoilage. He wrote that “…international charity frequently inspires distrust and antagonism rather than gratitude….” Not true. Distrust and antagonism directed toward the U.S. comes from Washington’s insistence in propping up friendly foreign governments that are hostile to their own people. Food for Peace occasionally ended up in the hands of tyrants and their cronies who marketed it at pure profits. When it goes to the hungry citizens, it is almost always received with gratitude. I say “almost,” because of a famous incident in Africa, starving stick-figures broke down the barriers to a shipment to break open bags of wheat to consume them on the spot. The wheat needed processing but the people there had been reduced to desperation. The U.S. received a mild rebuke for sending unprocessed food to living skeletons.  We had seriously underestimated the severity of the problem.

     In his harangue against immigration, he blames some of the problem on the wealthy elite’s need for cheap labor; a position that, again, seems to argue against itself. Beyond that, his proposal to hermetically seal the borders amount to the same tired clichéd sloganeering that has haunted the immigration problem since the first European stepped ashore half-a-millennia ago. He craves a static America in which the status quo can be guaranteed. Is that even possible in an ethnically and politically diverse country? Or would Hardin deport all liberals and non-whites along with immigrants?

     I got the impression in reading his essay that Hardin would like for all nine billion of us to just get the hell out of his way so that he can have it all, the only survivor on the boat. “Lifeboat Ethics” is not a serious discussion about ethics, but a mere selfish, petulant, and ego-centered rant, and reads well as such.

Summary: David Cole, "Five Myths About Immigration"

     

Photo by Barth Bailey on Unsplash

David Cole, a Georgetown University professor asserts in his essay, “Five Myths about Immigration,” (The Nation, October 17, 1994) that five of the most commonly held and disseminated beliefs about immigration have no basis in fact. He writes that the “Know Nothings” of the mid-nineteenth century blamed every problem in American society on immigrants. The strongest anti-German, anti-Irish, and anti-Catholic hysteria centered in New York and Massachusetts, where most of the immigrants arrived into the country.
    Fortunately, the Know-Nothing movement died within fifteen years, but anti-immigrant fever is revived whenever the American public feels in need of a scapegoat for their social ills. The German and Irish immigrants--who were the focus of the Know-Nothings--have become “us”; and “they” are now the new wave of immigrants, this time from Latin America and Haiti.
The Five myths that fuel the current distortion regarding immigration:
    America is being overrun with immigrants. Cole argues that we are a nation of immigrants, and, in a sense, have thus always been overrun with immigrants. He offers statistics to demonstrate that first-generation immigrants constitute a lower percentage of the population now than during the German-Irish wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further statistics and assertions indicate that undocumented immigrants make up a low percentage of the total alien population, and of the total American population.

    Immigrants take jobs from U.S. citizens. He dispels this myth with a reliance on a 1994 ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project report that states that immigrants create more jobs than they fill.

    Immigrants are a drain on society’s resources. Most studies have found that immigrants actually benefit the economy. Cole suggests that studies purporting to prove the truth of the third myth focus on taxes and services at the local level and fail when applied to the national level. The short-term costs of immigrants is offset and exceeded by the long-term benefits. Calls to deny public services to illegal immigrants are useless, because those immigrants already have no rights to services beyond basic education and health and safety services.

    Aliens refuse to assimilate, and are depriving us of our cultural and political unity. This accusation was made to exclude Chinese immigrants, and similar claims have been made about almost all immigrant groups.
     
The anti-assimilation “myth” in untrue in most instances, Cole says.
    Noncitizen immigrants are not entitled to constitutional rights. The Constitution’s Bill of Rights extends protection to everyone, with the exception that only citizens can run vote and run for public office.
    An 1893 executive branch defense of a statute that required the testimony of “at least one white witness” resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that the law was constitutional “because it was reasonable for Congress to presume that nonwhite witnesses could not be trusted.” Not much has changed: at the time of the writing of Cole’s essay, the executive office had sought to deny First Amendment rights to permanent resident aliens.
    Today’s generation of “them” might be the future generation of “us,” and they will not view our treatment of immigrants kindly.

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