Photo by Bravadi Malangjoedo on Unsplash
While decluttering my apartment, I came across a yellowing and brittle
copy of a 1974 issue of Psychology Today which contained ecologist
Garrett Hardin’s essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.”
His diatribe plays fast and loose with the facts he presents to back up his
argument and comes across as a petulant rant 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 an NGO
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.
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