On grips Gripes

[Steelhead]

grip gives me my comuppence for slandering that great eugenicist Garrett Hardin:

>My, my. I don't think Steely likes him. Didn't know he'd moved up here
>from Santa Barbara.

Last time I ran into Hardin he was living in Palo Alto. This is circa 1993.
We were on a debate panel together at Berkeley. He had retired from
teaching at UC SB several years earlier to work in some cushy position with
the Pacific Freedom Foundation.

>tsk - tsk, name calling. Guilt by association. A Nazi sympathizer. Well
>you never know about population biologists, or scientists in general.
>No doubt Hardin secretly admired Hitler...

Hitler's just a person. Its the science of eugenics that gives Garrett a
hard-on, though I'm sure he's safely snipped. Hardin's self-professed
mentors were Fairfield Osborn (founder of the American Museum of Natural
History and the many who brought the Second International Congress of
Eugenics to NYC), his (ie., Osborn's) nephew Henry, economist Stephen Enke,
and William Vogt. Here comes a Pynchon connection. Both Osborn and Vogt,
like Hardin, worked on and off for the Rockefeller's various
environmental/population control groups.

Here's Osborn: "The moral tendency to the hereditary interpretation of
history is in strong accord with the true spirit of the modern eugenics
movement in relation to patriotism, namely, the conservation and
multiplication for our country of the best spiritual, moral, intellectual
and physical forces of heredity. These divine forces are more or less
sporadically distributed in all races. But they are certainly more widely
and uniformly distributed in some races than others. From my studies of
population it is highly necessary for 'privileged' individuals to produce
more children." Gives an entirely new twist to preterite and elect doesn't
it?

Here is William Vogt, ornithologist, former president of Planned
Parenthood, and director of the Rockefeller's Conservation Foundation, on
the topic of sterilization bonuses: "Since such a bonus would appeal
primarily to the world's shiftless, it would probably have a favorable
selective influence. From the point of view of society, it would certainly
be preferable to pay permanently indigent individuals many of whom would be
physically and psychologically marginal, $50 or $100 rather than support
their hordes of off-spring that both by genetic and social inheritance
would tend to perpetuate their fecklessness."

Again, it's not a matter of guilt by association. These guys were on the
same team. They were ensconced on the same boards, writing articles
together, being funded by the same foundations and philantropists: mainly
the Rockefellers, who financed the Population Council, the Conservation
Foundation, Planned Parenthood, Zero Population Growth, and the Population
Reference Bureau. Hardin, Vogt, Freddie Osborn and Enke all contributed to
a Rockefeller Fund report called "Population: an international dilemma."
This shocking paper concluded:"Excessive fertility by families with meager
resources must be recognized as one of the potent forces in the
perpetuation of slums, ill-health, inadequate education, and even
deliquency." Their solution is not to increase wealth or provide better
health care or schools, but, you guessed it, reduce the birth rates of the
poor (ie., the blacks and Latinos). "We must equalize births among the
socially handicapped." There's some delicate syntax. And this was their
proposal for Harlem and Detroit. The recommendations for Nigeria and Haiti
are even more callous. And, of course, the US government was only too happy
to fund hundreds of population control projects in Third World countries,
such as Zaire or Honduras, that might be trending toward nasty uprisings of
the poor, which would make things difficult for our oil and mining
companies. These programs were largely run by AID (Agency for International
Development), a notorious front for the CIA. Hardin received research
grants from AID.

>Now I see part of the problem. Steely thinks zero is the same as dozens.
>Looking carefully at the 13 pages of the essay, I could find no equations
>whatsoever. But then maybe my synapses were so numbed I just missed them.

You're right there. My copy of ToC is in a book Hardin edited with John
Baden published in 1977 by the Freeman Company titled Managing the Commons.
It includes the original essay and 26 follow ups. There are more than 120
equations in this volume, including the amusing "An Algebraic Theory of the
Commons" which edifies with equations such as the following R - C =
pAx(x-_x) - AB(x-_x).

>This was coded???? I thought he spelled it out in plain English.

The longing for eugenic solutions was coded in a lot of talk about ecology,
when as any ecologist worth his/her degree knows: its the overconsumption
of the developed nations and the extreme poverty of the third world that's
wrecking the environment, not over-population.  Eugenics for its own pure
sake had fallen out of public favor since the 1940s--for some obscure
reason.

>Must have been another book. Couldn't find any reference to "the
>enclosure movement" although he does argue thusly about a
>hypothetical common pasture. A herdsman (A sexist to boot!!!) looks
>at the value of adding another animal to the pasture. A plus for him.
>(Harden used the + sign, perhaps this is the source of one of the dozens
>of equations in Steely's mind.) The plus is only for him and his family.
>There is a minus, each animal does use up part of the resource. But that
>part is spread out over all the herdsmen using the pasture so his part of
>the minus is fractional. Clearly it's to his advantage to add another cow.
>Thus the pasture becomes grazed out and will support only a fraction of
>the animals it would before.

You're right again. I should have re-read the piece (its been at least 15
years) before I went on about it. All the chatter about the enclosure
movement in England is in Managing the Commons.

>> Hardin's
>> solutions: enforced sterilization, mandatory abortions, and infanticide.
>
>I've not read all that Hardin has written, but the above is not in his essay.
>But there is no doubt that he would seriously consider such things. One
>needs to read the essay to see why.

Yeah, well, check out Population, Evolution and Birth Control.

>> The modern environmental movement and leading feminists (ie, the
>> single-issue, abortion obsessed wing) made Hardin a hero. Ironically,
>> Hardin also became a shining star of the right wing free market types. The
>> marketeers argue--with Hardin's endorsement--
>
>I doubt this. The idea of the commons extends much further than
>resources. And Hardin is not so stupid or naive to believe that a young
>CEO, out to make big bucks for himself, (that old + again) regardless of
>the minuses spread out all over the world, would behave any differently
>from the herdsman. Guilt by association again. Someone misuses Hardin's
>>carefully argued points in an essay and now it becomes Hardin's fault.
>>Nonsense.

Hardin sits on the board of directors of the Foundation for Resource
Economics and Environment, based in Seattle. This is the leading "think
tank" for free market based solutions to environmental problems. Hardin's
friend and frequent co-author, John Baden directs FREE, and has advocated
privatizing every common pool resource imaginable, including air, water,
forests, highways, libraries, and even endangered species. Hardin speaks
frequently at FREE events and foundraisers. Two years ago, FREE held an
event for 20 federal judges outside beautiful Bozeman, Montana. We were
faxed an agenda for the weekend session, which included an introductory
speech by my favorite failed nominee for the Supremes, the pot-smoking
Douglas Ginsburg. Hardin's speech was titled "Privatizing the Commons."

>Interesting. News to me. I wonder who "forced" him to renounce the
>funding?

Public obloquy. Though there's some question how much money he actually
returned. And, he does thank the Laurel Foundation in his latest book for
their "generous support."

>> What does all this have to do with the VV, which has recently been handed
>> out for free in the NYC area? Simple. Since the paper is now free, it has
>> became a kind of literary commons that will--if you follow Hardinian
>> logic--ultimately degenerate into a smear of meaningless utterances.

>Hmmm. Isn't that exactly what people were saying????

I disagree that this is true. But to each his own. I still prefer the Voice
over say LA Weekly or the Bay Guardian, even when they don't print my
stuff. The original post on the degeneration of the VV was mainly a joke.
But two or three former writers for the rag did tell me that they believed
giving the paper away would wreck the quality of the Voice. Funny to hear
Leftists subscribing to a chillingly fascist argument. That's why I brought
it up.

Steely