Culture Of Life 101 . . . “Population Control And Self-Hatred”
By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 18 of The Facts of Life, “The International Abortion Situation,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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“Human beings are a virus . . . you are a cancer on the earth” — “Agent Smith” in the movie The Matrix.
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As we have already seen, three of the five primary motivations of the population control movement are greed, racism, and environmentalism. The fourth motivation behind population control is a hatred of the human race. This is often an underlying cause of racism because, if a person consciously or subconsciously despises himself, it is much easier to transfer that hatred to other groups of people who are different from him.
Those who embrace the various practices of the Culture of Death claim that guilt is a bad thing, ignoring the fact that it is the “nerves of the soul,” warning us when we are straying into sin. Many believe that guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion, and they will do anything they can to avoid it.
For example, everyone from abortionists to news anchors says that laws requiring women to see an ultrasound before having an abortion should be banned because they “increase guilt.” It never occurs to them to ask the question: “Why does abortion induce guilt in the first place?”
Acts against God’s plan and against nature (contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and so on) naturally bother our consciences because we know instinctively that they are wrong. A person who suppresses this guilt can easily end up simmering in unacknowledged self-hatred. Since many people tend to think that other people have the same negative characteristics as they do, it becomes easier to hate the human race in general through a process psychologists call “projection.”
If a person hates humanity in general, it is easy for him to adopt the extremist environmental belief that man is a cancer on the earth and must be eradicated or suppressed. Those with no religious values often claim that Man is either just a thinking animal or, because of his destructive nature, is equal to or less than animals in moral stature.
Professor Kenneth Watt said: “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.”
And Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) claims that “the smallest form of life, even an ant or a clam, is equal to a human being.”
As Peter Singer says, “Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.”
Newkirk echoed Singer’s opinion with her famous quotation: “When it comes to feelings, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They are all mammals. They all feel pain. There is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. . . . Six million people died in concentration camps, but 6 billion chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.”
These activists believe that people and animals have the same value. This results in a depraved indifference to human suffering in general and to suffering among the developing peoples of the world in particular.
David Foreman, founder of Earth First!, said in 1990 that the Ethiopian famines that were killing hundreds of thousands should be allowed to run their course in order to reduce the human population.
Edward Abbey, modern-day eugenicist and author of the ecotage novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, complained of the wilderness degradation caused by “millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-genetically impoverished people.”
And Chris Manes, author of Green Rage, believes that AIDS in Africa could assist in population control, thus lessening the “ecological load” caused by human beings on this planet.
Many anti-people artists have composed ballads against humanity and have even made films seemingly designed to depress people and make them hate the human race. One such classic anti-humanity film was produced by Nina Paley in 2001. It is entitled The Stork, and is set to the music of the beautiful Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 by Edvard Grieg.
This short film, which can be found on YouTube, begins with one stork peacefully flying through the clouds. Soon he is joined by others, and eventually the sky is filled with battalions of storks, each carrying a little baby in a bundle. As each stork drops his bundle over a peaceful forest, it results in a huge explosion that leaves in its place a typical suburban home, SUV, baby carrier and baby. Deer, elk, and fish are all skeletonized and crushed by falling SUVs, and vast swaths of verdant green forest are replaced by giant brown, smoky industrial parks.
Soon the entire landscape is nothing but identical houses, identical babies, and identical mounds of Huggies diapers, as yet more stork squadrons fly overhead. Eventually, the observer’s point of view zooms out until we see a large city and then an entire continent. Finally, we see the beautiful blue Earth hanging in space, but then it gradually turns red and vanishes in a huge explosion, leaving a baby face in its place.
The film ends with the screech of a raptor and the words: “The Stork . . . is the Bird of War.”
Tragically, when this attitude is translated into action, it can lead to untold human suffering. As described previously, a ban enacted on DDT resulted in a huge increase in the incidence of malaria, typhus, and dysentery in developing countries, resulting in tens of millions of additional deaths, mostly among Africans.
Unfortunately, many decision makers holding such beliefs are in positions to make laws that actually treat animals better than humans. In 1982, Baby Doe of Bloomington, Ind., was born with Down syndrome and a breathing defect that could have been corrected easily with surgery. The Supreme Court of Indiana ruled that Baby Doe’s parents’ right to privacy was more important than his right to live, and so he was starved to death. He died in agony eight days later, despite the fact that over 100 couples begged to adopt him. Meanwhile, a Maryland veterinarian was fined $3,000 and had his license suspended for the crime of doing exactly the same thing to a sick dog.
California bans experimentation on laboratory animals unless they are properly anesthetized. But lawmakers from the state rejected a bill that would merely require an abortionist to offer the mother anesthesia to spare the near-term unborn child pain as it is dismembered. California also requires that abortions on animals be done by a certified and board-qualified veterinary surgeon — but recently passed into law AB 154, which allows nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and physician assistants to do abortions on human women. In other words, abortionists for house cats require a higher level of education and qualification than abortionists for women in California.
There are even several humanity-hating groups whose purpose is to attempt to induce the human race into exterminating itself. The Gaia Liberation Front (GLF) believes in the divinity of the Earth itself and says: “The Humans come into full view, then, as a hostile alien species, programmed to kill the planet. Because of the uncertainties involved, we can ensure Gaia’s survival only through the extinction of the Humans as a species.”
The Highest Creation
This depressing worldview is in stark contrast with the Christian view of Man, who is made in the image and likeness of God.
St. Paul wrote in his Letter to the Hebrews: “What is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him? You did make him for a little while lower than the angels, you have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet” (2:6-8).
So we have the depressing view of Man as a cancer, a ruthless predator intent on destroying the earth — or Man as the paramount and highest creation of God.
Treating man as equivalent to animals does not enhance the dignity of the human race. It only leads to human rights abuses on a gigantic scale.
The only way to alleviate man’s physical suffering is through authentic economic development, and the only way to raise his eyes from current concerns to higher things is through evangelization.
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Next article: “Population Control and the Fear of Famine.”
