The Ends of Science

Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, died last week at the age of 93.

His career and reputation were controversial, to say the least. At the time of its publication The Population Bomb was hailed as an urgent and prophetic warning of a coming age of overpopulation and famine. Since then, and in light of so many of its predictions not coming true, the text has been criticized for its “sky-is-falling rhetoric” (as this New York Times article puts it) and its claims being based in shortsighted data and ideological baggage.

And indeed, the way Ehrlich’s work gripped the world is a testament to the force of certain ideologies in our culture. As is true for much progressive utopianism, his research claimed to be forthrightly scientific: the result of a hard look at hard data. But the real story is probably not quite so straightforward, nor so gallant. Even when Ehrlich’s claims were disproven, for example (Ehrlich predicted for instance that mankind would enter a “genuine age of scarcity” before 1985, and that England would not exist by the year 2000), he has stood by his convictions. The Times piece notes that he told The Guardian in 2018 that the collapse of civilization was “a near certainty in the next few decades,” and in 2015 he said that he thinks his 1960s predictions had actually been conservative, adding that “My language would be even more apocalyptic today.”

It makes a person scratch their head. How could a scientist retain confidence in a position that has been so fundamentally invalidated? This is, though, precisely the power of ideology: it uses (and sometimes manipulates) data for the sake of its preconceived theories, rather than adjusting theories based on data. Ehrlich’s work was and has been championed by climate change activists and environmentalists (among others), whose cause has stood to be buoyed by a little “sky-is-falling” rhetoric. Such activists’ goal is to get people to move in their direction. So, data that is likely to move them rightly gets leveraged; data that isn’t, is cast aside. And this doesn’t always happen for malicious or consciously manipulative reasons, of course. But it is a byproduct of human beings’ natural and inevitable need to swear allegiance to some sort of project, ideal, or goal, one that governs the interpretation of “hard data,” rather than being (as it purports to be) governed by it.

This is worth noting because even if the intentions really haven’t been bad, many of the fruits of Ehrlich’s work have been very troubling indeed. One thinks, for instance, of China’s “one-child policy,” which was in effect for more than two decades and has harmed the lives of untold numbers of people. One thinks also of the broader demographic collapse plaguing most Western nations, with population experts now panicking not about overpopulation but about an increasingly aging one, with not enough young people being born to support the old. Then, too, there’s a broader cultural instinct not to rejoice in human life at all, but to be wary of it, to be anxious about the careful balance that need be held in check when it comes to human expansion and the safety of the planet.

…All of which makes for good cause to abide by a higher standard – ethically, but also intellectually. At places like universities, or at any institution sympathetic to the cause of truth, we should be really clear about precisely that mission: pursuing and defending the truth. Science in its realm is always good, always loved, always a worthy pursuit, and never a threat to the cause of truth. But we are living in a time when science tends to be manipulated for ends that go way beyond the science itself – and that is a threat to truth. So, we should learn to see well, to recognize where different kinds of knowledge may be reaching outside of their domain; and we should learn to call for a higher standard – precisely for the sake of the integrity of science itself.