Review: Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population

Most observers of social movements, even their participants, underestimate their diversity and complexity. Every social movement is a constantly roiling mass of uneasy fractions, tendencies and subtendencies, tenuously and temporarily allying, with shifting meanings for core terms and goals, from “the Enlightenment”, to “anarchism” to “conservatism” to “environmentalism”. This is the problem that Columbia historian Matthew Connelly seeks to correct in Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population.

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Posted by Rüdiger Koch  on  06/11  at  03:10 PM

I wish I could share your optimism about accountable international orgs. While global democracy is certainly possible in principle we certainly don't want any of the current organisations to be the seed of one.

No need to comment much on the UN I guess. They have no power which is why they generally behave nicely. But they are about as undemocratic as it can get. And accountable to who?

Look at the EU. There is a caricature of a parliament, but the commission is running the show. Commissioners are appointed in an opaque and completely non-democratic way. The commission is doing a decent job right now but I guess this is IMO only because their position is not yet unchallengable.

Slowly the EU is morphing itself to a bureaucracy monster. If we citizens can't stop it we'll have an oligarchy on top of it within a few decades that is as detached from the people as it can get. And we won't stop it - most EU citizens aren't even aware of the problem. At the end, the national parliaments might follow suit with the EU parliament an be just be what Kaiser Wilhelm II called the Reichstag in 1900: Schwatzbude.

-Rüdiger

Posted by Christopher Padley  on  07/27  at  11:43 AM

Both the author and J. Hughes in his review, fail to mention how closely the modern manifestations of concern over world population levels stems from, and are connected to, the other main environmental concerns of today: global warming, and "peak oil". These concerns have very little baggage connnecting them to the history of the organisations covered in A Fatal Misconception, but Matthew Connelly appears to take it as a given that they do, without further need to enquire.

The oft repeated argument that innovation and new technology has, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, kept pace with population growth loses its power when science is predicting the need to reduce by 80% the use of the fuel that has powered that revolution. Whether one thinks this is true or not, it is a very different concern, and has resulted in a very different analysis of population growth as a problem, from that covered by the book. It is rather as if a history of transport had stopped at the point the steam locomotive was scrapped, without mentioning what replaced it.

Chris Padley

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