Re: pop

 Richard Hutchinson replies:

"James M. Blaut wrote:> 'They start
> out from the premise that certain categories of people can't control
their
> sexual urges and this is why they have too many babies.' 

Noone has made this sort of claim."

Excuse me, but the claim is made with dreary regularity by conservative and
Eurocentric historians, modernization theorists, pop bombers, and their
like. Here are examples from four influential world history books*: 

E. L. Jones, THE EUROPEAN MIRACLE:

Europeans "were prepared to trade off...children for
goods...[Unlike Asian males] European males did
not practice this immediate division of the
spoils of love. By that restraint they [held
down] population...[In Asia] population was
permitted to grow without such deliberate
restraint. Seemingly, COPULATION WAS PREFERRED ABOVE COMMODITIES"
p. 15), emphasis added)

"Europe did not spend the gifts of its
environment `as rapidly as it got them in a mere
INSENSATE MULTIPLICATION OF THE COMMON LIFE"(p.3, emphasis added) 

E. L. Jones, GROWTH RECURRING:

"Only for Japan and Europe is it usually claimed
that peasants controlled family size, implicitly
choosing income rather than an additional child
....Deliberate population restraint is not
reported from the societies of mainland
Asia...perhaps, then, peasant demography was the
spring of the trap in which most of the pre-
modern world was willingly caught."(p. 127) 

"[Demographic] restraint was...conspicuously
absent from India and other parts of Asia. " (p.
212) 

David Landes, THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS: WHY SOME ARE SO RICH AND
SOME SO POOR

Asia had "early and almost universal marriage,
without regard to material resources...In contrast, Christian and
especially western Europe accepted celibacy, late marriage (not
until one could afford it) and more widely spaced births" [The]
"long-standing reproductive strategy" [of the Chinese was ]"early,
universal marriage and lots of children. That takes food, and
food in turn takes people. Treadmill. This strategy went back
thousands of years" (p. 23). 

"[African] women do as they are told....AIDS? Forget condoms; the men don't
like them" (p. 501).

John A. Hall, POWERS AND LIBERTIES: THE CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE RISE
OF THE WEST

"The expansion of the European economy did not occur
[through expansion of cultivated acreage], as in late
traditional China, because improvements in output were
not eaten up by a massive growth in population. The
ratio between population and [cultivated] acreage in
Europe remained favourable ultimately because of THE RELATIVE CONTINENCE OF
THE EUROPEAN FAMILY. (131, emphasis added)

**********

RH "Sounds to me like another great example of ideology kicking in, and
seeing "racists" instead of reasoning about the issue on its merits."

Anything not straight-down-the middle conservative  Eurocentric thinking
has to be, by definition, mere "ideology."

**************

RH: "However, choices that may be, or seem to be, rational at the
individual or
family level are definitely not always rational at the societal,
ecosystem, or global level."

I've been hearing this litany from population bombers for decades. The
family does what is rational for the family but  bad for the larger
society. The flaw here is very simple. If one is talking about different
social groups within a society, then, yes, decisions made by people from
one social group may not  be positive for other groups. But in the bomber
business, it is usually "family" vs, "society." Stereotypically: Indian
peasant vs. India. And implicitly: Indian peasant families,  or maybe adult
male peasants, want bigger families but that is bad for India which becomes
overpopulated as a result.

You have to be a super-holistic  metaphysical organicist to believe that
"society" is something different from "people." I haven't yet heard an
empoirical argument that shows how, what is good for "society" is not good
for "people", or vice versa.

If you try to avoid that metaphysical trap, you end up arguing  (with
Malthus)that ordinary people in some societies, e.g.,  Third World
peasants, are just stupid -- rational decisions are made by elites -- and
can't be sexually "continent," like elite people. But not, of course, OUR
sort of  people, in OUR society. Thus the racism.

Jim Blaut

*This is taken from my forthcoming book, "Eight Eurocentric Historians"
(Guilford, July '00).