The Elite’s Fixation with Low Birth Rates

Population DenialGrowthism and Ecological OvershootPronatalism and Patriarchy

Jul 8

Written By Population Balance

From center-left Ezra Klein to right-wing Matt Walsh, the fertility panic is an elite fixation that is rooted in a human supremacist worldview and a deep fear of slowing growth. Samuel Miller McDonald, geographer and author of the book Progress: A History of Humanity's Worst Idea, exposes how our parasitic relationship with Earth lies at the core of ecological overshoot, and why resisting authoritarianism in an age of contraction means embracing a pluralistic and just degrowth vision. Highlights include:

Why our modern relationship to the Earth is fundamentally parasitic - regardless of whether societies are capitalist or socialist;
How media commentators resist degrowth in various stages and how their rejection reveals their lack of maturity in accepting responsibility for the ecological destruction we are causing;
Why degrowth policies and practices should emphasize pluralistic, context-specific approaches rooted in democratic participation, not top-down master plans;
Why many degrowth proponents have been dismissive of population concerns;
Why the political right is more poised to benefit from ongoing economic contraction and why the liberal 'abundance agenda' needs to be resisted;
Why conviviality and class solidarity are key to a successful degrowth transition and how modern societies undermine them;
Why core values like fairness, autonomy, and ecological integrity will be essential in resisting authoritarians' claims to power in the coming challenging decades.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Samuel Miller McDonald (00:00:00):
I think they are not actually interested in human wellbeing, health, happiness, absolutely not interested in the wellbeing of other species. But I think sometimes they try to compensate for that lack of interest in other species by saying, we just want things to be great for human beings. And if the gorillas have to die so that human beings can have more goodies, so be it. But I don't think they actually believe that. They're more interested in the quantity of human life than the quality of human life. And for them, everything is just about pumping up the numbers of people who can go serve as soldiers, serve as workers. And the only group that I think they're interested in the health and happiness and wellbeing of is this very tiny group of ruling elites.
Alan Ware (00:00:46):
That was writer and geographer, Samuel Miller McDonald. We'll speak with Samuel about his work, exposing the fertility panic as an elite fixation that is rooted in our parasitic relationship with the Earth and why resisting authoritarianism in an age of contraction means embracing a pluralistic and just degrowth vision.
Nandita Bajaj (00:01:15):
Welcome to OVERSHOOT where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (00:01:41):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics we examine the forces underlying overshoot, the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest.
Samuel Miller McDonald is the author of Progress: A History of Humanity's Worst Idea and a geographer focusing on human ecology, theory, and history. He holds a doctorate from University of Oxford and degrees from Yale University and College of the Atlantic. He has written essays and analysis for the Guardian, the Nation, the New Republic, Current Affairs and elsewhere, and has contributed interviews to BBC Ideas, Vice News Tonight and various radio and podcast programs. And before we start today's interview, a quick announcement that we will be taking a short break from our publication schedule during the summer. The next episode after this one will be published on Tuesday, August 19th. Thanks for your ongoing support.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:05):
Hi and welcome Samuel. It's really great to have you on the show.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:03:09):
Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:11):
Yes, and we were made aware of your work through your recent article in current affairs titled There Are Many Threats to Humanity. A Low Birth Rate Isn't One of Them. And amid the barrage of pronatalist nonsense that is flooding the daily news cycle, reading your article was a breath of fresh air. And then digging deeper into your work, Alan and I have found so much resonance, as you clearly understand ecological overshoot and the key role human overpopulation plays in it. And then finding out about your latest book, Progress: A History of Humanity's Worst Idea, a great title, it was clear we had to have you back to discuss this book and we plan to publish our episode about your book shortly after this episode. So again, thank you for the great work you are doing and thanks for joining us.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:04:02):
Absolutely. Thanks for having me and appreciating that work.
Nandita Bajaj (00:04:06):
And we can start actually with this recent article that I just mentioned, There Are Many Threats to Humanity. A Low Birth Rate Isn't One of Them. And in that article you make the observation that "ostensibly rational and educated commentators, whether authoritarian, liberal, or egalitarian, are all suffering from the same mass illusion, tricking themselves into thinking there's a scarcity of human beings". You then go on to ask, "Is there a more rational explanation? Could they actually be bound by shared ideological commitments?" Today, much of the mainstream media globally expresses growing concern, bordering on panic about population decline, especially its impact on economic growth and systems of pensions and healthcare. How are you seeing this baby bust alarmism show up across the political spectrum and what are those shared ideological commitments?
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:05:08):
The first thing is that I think this panic is primarily an elite fixation. I think when you look at very broad public opinion polls, it just doesn't come up as an issue. And speaking primarily of the anglosphere, by the way, I think most of what I write about and comment on is that kind of anglophone political community. And there was a recent poll in the UK that found that when you remove party names and you just poll the public on their viewpoints, their values, they tend to be mostly aligned with the Green Party. There was a recent poll in the US suggesting that Bernie Sanders is by far the most popular national politician. And so when I talk about these factional ideological conflicts, I just want to be clear that that's happening in a quite small segment of the population that I don't think is representative of public viewpoints.
(00:06:02):
But unfortunately that segment is very powerful and I think it's consisting of people who are primarily pundits, media commentators, and unfortunately the policymakers who listen to them and follow what they say. I think a lot of these pundits have a lot of influence on the current administration and then the recent administration as well. So when we look at the far right, I think a lot of that panic is coming from a kind of white nationalism value that these far right commentators like Matt Walsh, Elon Musk. They're not concerned about birth rates in Nigeria. They're concerned about these European and North American birth rates. And I think largely that's coming from that racial ideology. I think when you move to the center right, there's maybe a little more of this ostensibly serious concern for it based on like you brought up the pension, aging demographics.
(00:06:55):
How do you maintain social security if you have this older population outnumbering younger populations who are there to fund it? I think on the center left, you get the kind of Elizabeth Bruenig opinion, and I haven't seen it much beyond her by the way. I don't know how much that's actually representative of any kind of living tendency on the left. And that I think is coming from this kind of an excuse to expand the welfare state, but only for parents unfortunately in that case. And then on the left, the kind of further more marginal left, I don't think it's a very major viewpoint, but I think it's primarily coming from a loud segment of that, mostly a kind of pro-growth Jacobin segment of the left. That's the only place I've really seen it. To me, what is connecting all of these is a human supremacist ethic really.
(00:07:47):
I mean this is very anti-ecological. They can couch it in concerns about social security, but it's clear from all of the other policies that the far right or even the center right isn't concerned about the social safety net. They're trying to erode that in every other realm. And the Bruenig commentary has been very explicit about that human supremacist ethic as well. I think in her most recent pronatalist piece, she just said outright that humans are the best animal. And Matt Walsh as well, the self-proclaimed fascist has said the same thing. I think on the center right there is also a kind of national supremacist ethic and increase in birth rate is a way to compete on a global stage where you have large competitors. And it comes from this idea that you have to essentially out populate your competitors. And I mentioned in the article this was a program of Mussolini's as well, the original fascist.
(00:08:47):
And his idea was that the only way Italy could compete with the other colonial powers was to essentially out-populate them. He tried to implement all of these pronatalist policies to try to increase the birth rate. They didn't really work. They ultimately were mainly about trying to control women's reproductive agency and reestablish these kind of patriarchal cultural values. So when I talk about human supremacist values, this is something that comes up in the book and I wanted to not talk too much about progress here because I think we'll have plenty of time to do that in the next go. But for me, I can't really think about it without using this framework that I put into the book where I talk about these human ecological forms, different modes of having your human system relate to ecological systems. And so for the book, I use this framework that is drawing from ecological relations.
(00:09:47):
So the three modes of these ecological relations being commensalism, mutualism, and parasitism. Mutualism, this is a relation that I think most people are familiar with. This is when two organisms benefit one another. Commensalism is when a organism extracts from another without doing harm. And then parasitism is the relation where one organism harms another by extracting. So in the book, I'm using this to apply it to human systems and how they relate to ecological systems, and I think the central critique of the book is saying that this parasitic mode where human systems extract in a way that harms ecological systems is the dominant form today and is the source of this human supremacist ethic. To me right now, that's really the kind of great political divide and it is more materially consequential and I think even culturally distinct than conflicts between left and right, between capitalism and anti-capitalism, communism, liberal, conservative, all of that. I think this kind of parasitic mode, which is what I'm using as a stand-in for growth and growthism, which has been a more common way to talk about this in the degrowth sphere.
Nandita Bajaj (00:11:05):
Yeah, thank you so much for that framing. Growthism is kind of a nonpartisan ideology. And the parasitism concept is so helpful too because you see how a concept owned by countries as powerful as the US where so much of this rhetoric is coming out of is being pushed onto a lot of other parts of the world where communities of mutualism are being trumped under this kind of ideal and all of the wrongheaded ideas around prosperity that are coming from this. And I also appreciated what you said that the narrative around population decline is mostly coming out of the elitist sphere, because as you found, there have been other surveys that have been conducted, one that was recently conducted by the UN through YouGov a few years ago, and they interviewed people across eight countries and seven out of those eight countries were in the top 25 most populous countries.
(00:12:11):
And they asked them what their views were on population within their countries and the fertility rate and the majority of the people in all of those countries said fertility rate is too high, population is too high. And overpopulation, which has become such a taboo word, it's only taboo really within the elitist sphere that benefits from population growth. And there's been a lot of concerted effort that's gone into creating that taboo from these growthist forces across the political spectrum. But when you talk to people who are crumbling under these pressures - whether it's housing crisis, joblessness, lack of nature, green spaces - you recognize just how much of this narrative has not just come out of it, but it's now starting to spread across the world too, where more and more countries that are actually quite populous are also starting to buy into this population declinism and it's truly concerning.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:13:11):
Absolutely.
Alan Ware (00:13:12):
You've also written about what ecofascism is and isn't, and we appreciated that you've written that it's not ecofascist to acknowledge that we're overpopulated, we're over consuming and in the process depopulating and extincting much of nonhuman life. But you also warn these topics can be weaponized by racists and fascists. How do you think that the ecological realities like overpopulation and overconsumption can be discussed responsibly?
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:13:39):
Yeah, that original article was in the most immediate way a response to some of the discourse that was occurring during the COVID lockdowns where you had this rhetoric that was coming out that was like humans are a virus. Look at how when they're removed from the environment, all these animals start coming back and nature is healing and all of this. And then there was a big response to that that was saying that's ecofascism when you say something like that, a slippery slope to whatever ecofascism is. And I found that frustrating on one level because historical fascism as a political philosophy and as a program that has been practiced, it has nothing to do with any of that. There's nothing about it that is ecological, that celebrates the removal of humans from an area so that ecological systems can rebound. That has nothing to do with fascism.
(00:14:33):
And in fact, all of these historical examples of actually practiced fascism have been all entirely anti-ecological. They're essentially colonial or settler colonial ideologies that are deployed to remove indigenous populations and productivize otherwise healthy ecological systems. If you look at all these new right wing parties that are getting traction in the West like the a AFD in Germany or Reform in the UK or the Republican party in the US, they're all anti-ecological as well. There's nothing about them that's interested in removing human pressures to improve the environment in any way. They're all completely the opposite of that. I think I've gotten a little bit less concerned about what they're going to do with rhetoric because it's the only innovation they know how to do is co-opt and pervert meaningful rhetoric and facts and reality. So I think it's always a little bit of a difficult game to try to preempt that process and skirt around it.
(00:15:34):
But I do think there are better and worse ways of talking about it, especially like Nandita what you just said about people in general seem to think that there is a overpopulation crisis and there isn't really a large population of the general public who are concerned about birth rates and just the opposite. There's concern about too high a birth rate. And so I think it's important when engaging with that public not to alienate people who might otherwise be friendly to this message and these values. I think something that you all do is very good way to approach it, which is from a egalitarian solutions perspective, so like increasing women's reproductive agency and access to reproductive healthcare and all of that. I think that's a great way into it when we're talking about this kind of more global version of overpopulation and staying within a carrying capacity.
(00:16:27):
And I think also keeping it as a kind of local, getting away from some of the global rhetoric and global solutions as well can be resonating for people. Just speaking as somebody who has lived in places that have had problems with too many people for the infrastructure, for instance, places that had had lower population densities now seeing this influx of, well, in the case of my hometown, really affluent people coming in, buying up land, building big houses. I was just visiting last summer and the difference from even a few years ago was tremendous. I mean, there's way more traffic. It's a small city that just isn't built for so many people and it's something that community I know is only just kind of starting to talk about and respond to. But I think a lot of times when overpopulation discourse veers toward the like white nationalist racist is when class is removed from it.
(00:17:24):
And I think putting class back into a discussion of overpopulation, as with many other issues, I think is an important way to get people focused on the right thing. I think that's been true as well in the UK. In Edinburgh, I moved there in 2019, just moved away this year and just in that time have seen rents go way up. Every place is full. You want to go out to a restaurant, it's full, you have to book. There's cars constantly all day, all night. There's heavy traffic. And that's a recent thing and that's also a tourism thing. I think it's not just local overpopulation. So I think it's a crisis that can be really viscerally felt at a local level. And so taking that kind of immediate experience and then connecting that to a bigger, more global phenomenon and problem, I think can also be a way, and especially is keeping that to not putting all of the focus on global south populations, but saying that global north populations are also still expanding, still causing this crisis in all of these places.
Alan Ware (00:18:29):
Well, as you were suggesting, the fascists we're definitely about national power and increasing population through pronatalism. And as you were implying too, population decline can lower cost of housing, can lower cost of food, the basics can allow for tighter job markets, so wages go up. There are so many ways in which capitalists are advantage by population growth, keeping wages down and the price of necessities like housing increasing.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:18:58):
Absolutely. And I think, yeah, being able to say, look at all of these people who have this investment in this existing global capitalist system, neoliberal ideology. Look at how all of them have the same attitude toward this population growth and increase in birth rates. And what I tried to argue in the piece as well was just that if your ideology is dependent on having big disposable exploitable populations, it's probably not trying to maximize health and happiness for human beings. It has some other goal that I think needs to be a subject of critique.
Alan Ware (00:19:35):
Right. And it definitely downplays the ecological overshoot, the whole reason to be alarmed or not most of these center left Ezra Klein or Bruenig or Yglesias, a lot of the center left to center right, very rarely mention that we're using 75% more of nature's renewable resources than are being replenished according to ecological footprint or six of nine planetary boundaries, global warming they're aware of, but they don't look at how quickly that process is playing out. Extinction of species is very rarely mentioned, and of course all of it is assumed that technology and markets will be able to solve it, but that lack of alarm over the ecological I think can make them very quickly use the label of ecofascist when you have any concern about human population because they just don't see the problems in the ecological realm to be that severe.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:20:31):
And I think that's another point of tactical rhetoric is to not let them try to even claim the mantle of humanist. I think they are not actually interested in human wellbeing, health, happiness, absolutely not interested in the wellbeing of other species. But I think sometimes they try to compensate for that lack of interest in other species by saying, we just want things to be great for human beings, and if the gorillas have to die so that human beings can have more goodies, so be it. But I don't think that's even true. I don't think they actually believe that. The way I try to frame it sometimes is that they're more interested in the quantity of human life than the quality of human life. And for them, everything is just about pumping up the numbers of people who can go serve as soldiers, serve as workers. And the only group that I think they're interested in the health and happiness and wellbeing of is this very tiny group of ruling elites, the rich. And when people like Liz Bruenig say that the left needs to be pro-human or whatever, just making very clear that her view of the world is not pro-human at all, it has no interest in the wellbeing of humans. And you can't separate the wellbeing of ecological systems and the wellbeing of human beings because humans are animals that are inseparable from the ecological habitats that they get all of the fundamental things that make life from.
Nandita Bajaj (00:21:58):
I think that's why I find it extremely frustrating narratives like Brunes saying, we need to have a progressive tism. If you actually look at the history of pronatalism and the motivations behind pronatalism. The two words never go together. Pronatalism at its very heart is about manipulating people.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:22:18):
Absolutely.
Nandita Bajaj (00:22:19):
And in response to environmental concerns, you recommend building an equitable post-growth economy. And in one of your essays about degrowth, you write that many people go through different stages in their response to degrowth ideas. In fact, even in just doing our research, almost every media outlet has expressed their knee-jerk thoughts about degrowth. We've got some headlines from the CNN: Degrowth, A Dangerous Idea or The Answer to the World's Biggest Crisis. Wired says "Why Degrowth is the Worst Idea on the Planet". And of course, billionaire-funded, effective altruist Vox, "Shrinking the Economy Will Not Save the Planet". So before the ideas can even become popular, a lot of these media commentators who are so driven by the mainstream dominant narratives of growthism will try to delegitimize these ideas. And you've written about these stages. Could you walk us through those stages and give us some context about which media commentators you think are at what stages currently?
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:23:36):
Sure. This was a review and interview that I did that was on the book, The Future is Degrowth, which is I think a very good book. It's a kind of good review of a lot of the literature that's come out in academia from actual research on degrowth, on growth, and contesting growth. And I'm glad you pulled out some of those headlines. I think there've been one or two mainstream analyses that I think have been more open-minded, but it seems most of them are not. And even on the left, Jacobin has been very hostile to degrowth at all without any kind of real engagement with the idea and the liberal pundit sphere, the Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias, and these fellows also just don't engage. It's just like a rhetorical battle that they see that they're fighting, not a phenomenon to examine and study. I think the stages I was talking about, I think I put in there, it's kind of like the stages of grief, being a little facetious, that you have to go through this process of psychologically absorbing the idea of degrowth.
(00:24:42):
I think it's true as well. I can speak to my own process of doing that, and I came from a very environmentalist household, living in a place that has a lot of intact habitat and really loving wilderness and the environment and dedicating my entire career and life to that issue and that cause. And even from that background, the first time that I started to engage with it, I kind of had to fight this immediate knee-jerk reaction of, this sounds negative, this sounds harmful or difficult to implement or deploy in the world. The more I learned about it, of course, the more it came to just make sense. And this is a line of scholarship that is probably more engaged with materialities of politics and with ecological limits than any other strand in academia right now. So for me, the way into it was through this scholarship that I was doing in my PhD program, and I think I started, I saw it to be quite neutral, something that isn't necessarily egalitarian, and so I had to also go through this process of learning about it as an egalitarian ideology itself rather than just a neutral process of reducing growth.
(00:25:56):
It's a confrontation of growth, and growthism I think is a very anti-egalitarian, very authoritarian ideology. I think with people like the pundits sphere of the center right, Noah Smith, you know these guys, I don't think there is a way to kind of bring them through this process because I don't think they're interested in it as a solution to problems. I think they see it as a threat, a weapon, something for them to just destroy. I think for the left it's a more complicated problem because I think the left is more congenitally conducive to these more ecological and more egalitarian policies. I think there is still this kind of faction in the left media of pro-growthists who have been vehemently opposed to degrowth. There might be more of an opening there to have a productive discussion and debate and move some of them through this process of coming to understand it as an egalitarian ecological program.
(00:26:55):
I've seen a lot of those debates play out and I haven't been very encouraged by them. I just think if you have these mainstream ideologies, political coalitions that are invested in growthism, invested in the systems that perpetuate growthism and that are perpetuated by it, I just don't think there's any way in for capturing too many of those people with degrowth. Again, it's important to look at the public. Look at how you can grab, animate, and interest the general public - this big group that is aligned with green party values, is aligned with the kind of at least Keynesian social democratic stream in the US, how you can capture that and deploy those people for something that's critical of growth. And I do think just speaking to the UK example, when Keir Starmer gets up on stage and says that the only thing that matters is growth, everything we do has to be oriented toward growth.
(00:27:52):
I think most people can see through that and understand that that's just an invocation of a mantra that doesn't really mean anything for them and isn't an actual path to solving the problems that they have. I think the challenge is that while they see that as disingenuous, I don't think there's a really ready alternative for them to hold onto and say, this is the path to solving the problems that we have, and whether that's like a degrowthist kind of ideology or ecosocialist or something else, that's something that I'm a bit agnostic on in my book. What I'm talking about toward the end is that there needs to be a multiplicity of responses to growthism and parasitism and that there's not one kind of hegemonic program or party or ideology that has to be deployed. I think what we're aiming for is biodiversity and cultural-political diversity, but that's not necessarily something that is easy to go to the British public and say, we have to defeat Starmer so that we can get this multiplicity of ideologies and results and whatever. So there's this, I think, difficult tension of keeping open these different approaches for defeating destroying growthism and also being able to develop something that is capable of centralizing, organizing, coordinating people to actually do the difficult work that has to be done to achieve that.
Alan Ware (00:29:17):
Yeah, it may take a crisis, ongoing crisis of involuntary degrowth right before people begin to put together any sort of political program of how to share a contracting pie when the expectation has been an expanding pie for the last couple hundred years. Your stages, I like how you go through the four stages of dismissing, which reminds me of the first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they say, well, that's obvious. So that going from dismissing to questioning stage two and then stage three of panicked hedging, okay, growth has all these negative impacts on inequality, climate change, extinction, but what about decoupling? As you mentioned, and we've had guests on that have taken that down. The idea of decoupling that GDP growth is 100% correlated with material use and about 99% with energy. There is no significant decoupling. The stage three of a lot of environmental NGOs, sustainability government technocrats, are very much in that kind of panicked hedging that we can decouple.
(00:30:25):
We have all these technologies. To the extent Silicon Valley can get behind it, it becomes even more powerful. Mark Jacobson at Stanford had that big, we can have a 100% renewable energy economy report. So that panicked hedging we see all around us, although over time, maybe it's not as bright and shiny as 10 years ago. As climate change is continuing apace, I think more of those money makers off of green tech are feeling a little chastened and as the political environment becomes less conducive to their making money from it. And then back to dismissing stage four, like fine, there are limits to growth, but it can never be implemented. The politics are awful, nobody will buy it. I've heard that from Ezra Klein and like you say, not really engaging degrowth in a meaningful way, just saying, well, just politically it's a non-starter and I talk about political things, therefore I'm not going to talk about it.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:31:21):
Absolutely. And to that last point, I think when somebody like Ezra Klein says it's a political non-starter, I think he means with politicians, not with the public. And I think that's a big difference between the left and these kind of center left, center right pundits is they only see things in terms of what's acceptable to this political class. And I think see no avenue for any kind of populist or engagement with independent voters or non-voters. They just don't exist to them. I think when we talk about degrowth, when we take the principles, I think it's definitely something that huge swaths of the public would be friendly to. And I think all of these opinion polls bear that out. When Ezra Klein dismisses it, it's coming from that kind of elite focus and I think it's a bit disingenuous. The degrowth program I think is motivated by a strong sense of necessity, and it's not that we want to take away everybody's treats and toys. It's that this is just how physics works.
(00:32:23):
It's either something that's going to happen on its own, like you say, this kind of unplanned drawdown of growth or it's going to be something that can be coordinated, can be done equitably, stably, fairly, all of this, but it's going to happen. There's not going to be infinite growth. That's just not possible on a bounded planet. And I think this dismissal, it's just delusion, it's just denialism. It's a psychological self-protection. They just don't want to confront the fact that the party's over and we have to start being serious about living on a planet that has been considerably denuded, destabilized and is not the holocene into which civilizations were built. It's a new geological epoch that we don't know how to live in and have to do something different. And I think they just don't want to be serious adults. They just want to be playing this little horse trading game where they get together and talk about how to get some guy elected. And so I think a lot of them are going to stay stuck in that dismissal stage even while their house burns from a wildfire.
Nandita Bajaj (00:33:30):
And like you, we are strong advocates for this pluralistic vision that you have of degrowth, however communities come to it. But we have noticed this real hostility among degrowthers to the role of population on the broader predicament, and part of our analysis shows that there's also a certain level of anthropocentrism at play, even though they might talk about planetary boundaries and ecological boundaries, in a lot their literature, they don't really give biodiversity the attention it deserves and nature as worthy of moral concern. It's much more in passing that they will throw words like that. And I just wonder, we wonder what you make of that blind spot.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:34:21):
I think the academic degrowth community is coming out of this tradition in the social sciences that is very humanist, very anthropocentric. I think academia has kind of always been this ambivalent institution that is the only institution or one of the only ones that's earnestly trying to understand the world, understand phenomena and get to closer models and frameworks of truth, but has also historically been a servant of the state, of empires and imperial expansion and more recently has been totally captured by neoliberal values and ideology and growthists. I mean that's every major university that I'm aware of is run by a management team that is primarily interested in growing the endowment, in making institutional investments that will deliver returns so they can increase their land holdings and invest in buying up more and more of the city that they are based in, and less concerned with that mission of expanding knowledge and building upon this kind of humanistic tradition.
(00:35:29):
So I think anything that's coming from that, which degrowth primarily is, is going to have trouble getting outside of that anthropocentric frame and culture. And I think there's probably also an element of degrowth commentators who are afraid of being canceled because of that association with ecofascism or white nationalism or kind of a eliminationist rhetoric. I think they're afraid of having people who are maybe otherwise allies turning on them, accusing them of things that they're not actually in favor of or advocating for, and that's just the product of a really toxic tools for discourse and rhetoric and primarily social media. But even in a lot of the outlets that they'll be publishing, I think there's backlashes from talking about this and I think growth-critical approaches have been very materialist in their analysis in the sense that they understand ecological limits and understand that every human needs a certain amount of caloric inputs to live. Those are coming from a bounded zero sum system, which means they're coming from other species, so numerically you cannot have an infinite number of human beings. I think a lot of the values and analysis coming out of the center liberal pundit sphere, they're not materialist in their analysis. They don't have a sense of limits or of any of the impacts of ecological realities on politics, but I think because degrowth does, I don't think it's a tendency that's going to be intrinsically hostile to overpopulation concerns.
Nandita Bajaj (00:37:09):
Yeah, I think that's a really good distinction from the proponents of degrowth to the actual concept of degrowth itself. There may be people who are uncomfortable talking about it, but degrowth as a philosophy in and of itself lends itself to a human flourishing with a smaller population and we're grateful for people like you, and we've had Josh Farley and Clive Spash and others who all have kind of expanded the literature on degrowth by including more things to it, including human overpopulation as a concern, which is why I think we feel quite sympathetic to ideas around degrowth but don't necessarily align with some of the thought leaders who are leading the movement of degrowth. Despite many pieces that we've written and exposés that we've done in the blind spots of their thinking, there seems to be a stubborn lack of acknowledgement that this is an issue. We've certainly had many papers that we've submitted as scholars of population and ecology that have been declined purely on ideological grounds where the reviewer peer reviewer will come out and say, but it's not an issue. We're experiencing population decline. And so it's a non-starter even within academia for some people where you cannot even have papers published without having ideological narratives canceling what's scientifically true.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:38:45):
I think there's a similar ideological bias in academia against critiques of progress that I've come up against as well, and critiques of growth and growthism. That's wild to be a scholar and say that population decline is happening. That's just so inverse to reality. I think academia is extremely open and I think has a great tradition of critique and debate and open dialogue, but I think it also absolutely does have these kinds of ideological commitments that are really unfortunate and do prevent good discussions from happening and good research from getting published and disseminated.
Alan Ware (00:39:26):
Yeah, you've written an article about opposing economic growth might not necessarily be a left-wing project, which was interesting to us because we usually think of it as being on the liberal left side of the spectrum, that degrowth is morally and ideologically neutral. So it made us wonder what a right wing degrowth agenda might look like, so we could keep our eyes out for that.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:39:50):
Yeah, I think that was an article I wrote in 2019. I think there's been a lot of degrowth scholarship since then, and my own familiarity with it has increased since then, and I might not call it right wing degrowth in the way that there's a kind of incompatibility between ecological concerns and fascism, for instance. I think this would be a similar kind of situation where I don't think there would be a right wing that would explicitly aim to reduce growth for ecological purposes or for improving human wellbeing. I think there's been a kind of interesting phenomenon on the right lately where on one hand there's the kind of elite right in the US, a willingness by the Trump administration to risk growth for these, the tariff policies for instance. They've been willing to do things that aren't necessarily within this mainstream growthist set of policies, and I think that's obviously not aimed at improving anybody's lives except this tiny elite who are gaming the stock market as part of that.
(00:40:57):
But I think that is a kind of interesting digression from this tradition of mainstream growthist policies. And then on the more grassroots, if we can call it that, side of the right I think there's been this increasing interest with traditionalism, the trad lifestyle influencers who I think this is largely like TikTok Instagram phenomenon where people go and try to recreate these frontier homestead sorts of lifestyles and aesthetics - have big families, raise livestock, and have traditional Christian values and all of that and have a kind of localist small scale approach to life and economy. It always then comes out that the husband is a Wall Street trader and has generational wealth and it's totally put on kind of aesthetic, but I think it is an interesting strand running through either traditional right wing or kind of non-orthodox politics, of a focus on not degrowth, but away from growthism as a large scale global goal. And there might be some on the kind of degrowth left as well who I think have been flirting a little bit with that track. Catholicism, let's rebuild the Catholic peasantry and have small scale lifestyles again, which isn't I think leftist. I don't think that's a particularly egalitarian or emancipatory kind of political tendency. So I guess, yeah, I wouldn't say I could imagine a large scale elite right wing agenda that deviates from this kind of expand the population, expand the territory, orient everything toward increasing surpluses.
Alan Ware (00:42:49):
Yeah, it seems to me like Trump and other right wing populists could represent a kind of unconscious right-wing response to an involuntary degrowth, not a chosen degrowth, but just hitting the limits to growth materially and realizing some change has to be needed. And they still talk about economic growth. They still believe in it perhaps, but over time, as the broad middle classes and poor people are seeing stagnation or decline, generational mobility has gone down in the US and Trump and the Republicans are a way for the powerful partly to keep their slices of a now contracting pie and creating a kind of fortress America mentality. And it made me also think of the 1970s stagflation and stagnation and the way that Reagan and neoliberalism comes in as a response there to a potentially stagnating pie that then they grow through globalization and debt, primarily in exploitation through globalization. We may be in another kind of environment of right wing unconscious response to involuntary degrowth, which is scary when the left is still not willing to see the reality that maybe the right is seeing unconsciously and responding to, and the left is still peddling the delusional growth more forcefully than the right which makes the left even less effective.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:44:17):
Yeah, I think that's a great point, and I think it's definitely true that the right is more poised to benefit from and exploit this contraction and economic decline and this is how they're doing it. They're going to keep doing it, and I think they're going to orient everything toward rebuilding labor camps and forced labor. Unfortunately, I think the left is still stuck in this mid-century Keynesian dream of big welfare, big state. We're going to get FDR back and have that all over again without recognizing that maybe was a big historical anomaly that's maybe not going to happen again and focusing on what's actually happening and what's likely to happen with increased climate crises and ecological collapses and a much more mass and energy constrained future. And it is sad and it's frustrating to see that the left is just not confronting that head on, at least the left as it exists in any kind of formal political power. I think there are definitely segments of media or online activist left that is more aware of that and is confronting it with clear eyes, but it's not going to be very effective if it's not coordinated and organized and all kind of moving together on the same basic principles of reality.
Alan Ware (00:45:37):
Yeah, we're seeing more in the US right now, the ascendance of the abundance agenda through Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson of the New York Times and the Atlantic, and I've been hearing some Democrats call themselves abundance liberals. So I think this represents a real frontier of growth in the party of where they're pushing it in terms of deregulating making it so America can build again, getting rid of meddlesome environmental regulations, maybe the Endangered Species Act, which has stopped a lot of development at different times, getting rid of local power to stand in the way of national growth projects, trying to keep growth alive through changing the rules of the game.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:46:22):
And I think part of this problem of the left not really being clear enough is that they don't see the abundance agenda as the enemies that they are. They see them as sort of confused allies or sort of soft opponents that we just have to convince otherwise or whatever, rather than being the front lines of a battle. And they're on the other side of that. And the abundance agenda is just a more palatable version of what I think the right is aiming for, which is a totally denuded world of forced labor and tiny elite. I mean even their own solutions that they put in their book are these shoddy little boxes for people to live in. They're not even pretending that this is good for people, it's just more, it's just quantity. I mean, the abundance just means more, right? It doesn't mean anything else than that. It's been frustrating not to see a more hostile response to that from the left. I think there have been some good exceptions. I think there have been some good responses, but it's unfortunate that the kind of benign looking branding of it is still tricking people into believing it's actually benign.
Nandita Bajaj (00:47:26):
And you've also written about the importance of conviviality in degrowth utopian thinking. Why is conviviality so important and why is it also, as you mentioned, so difficult?
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:47:40):
Just to kind of contextualize conviviality, there's this kind of deep-rooted liberal theory around rational actors, Homo economicus. The atom of the political economy is the self-interested individual economic agent from all the way back, Adam Smith to Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer, Hayek, all of these guys base their theories on this assumption that that's the unit of economic exchange. It's the selfish actor, that progress only occurs if everybody is acting in a selfish self-interested way. If everybody just acts in their own interest, then everybody gets what they want and that's the motor of civilizational progress. Obviously that's a nice little utopia. It's not a hypothesis that economists go out and actually test empirically. It's just a theoretical axiom that they developed before social science even really existed and is rarely interrogated. You saw a kind of intensification of that with the Thatcher's "there's no such thing as society, there's just men and women and families", and this kind of increased atomization coming toward the later 20th century is that kind of reassertion of that idea that everybody is selfish, needs to be selfish, that the best of all worlds will come when everybody is self-interested and acting out of greed.
(00:49:06):
So in degrowth thinking, conviviality I think is a reaction against that idea and is saying, well, you don't get the best of all worlds when everybody acts in the worst possible behavior. You need to care about each other. You need to create communities in which there's mutual support, convivialism is from convivere, living together, literally the Latin term. There've been a couple of manifestos that have been put out on convivialism. The first one defines it as "a mode of living together that values human relationships and cooperation enables us to challenge one another without resorting to mutual slaughter and in a way that ensures consideration for others and for nature." Maybe the most vivid depiction of this kind of thing is like a Tolkien's shire or hobbiton, especially in that opening in the Lord of the Rings movies where they just show a bunch of hobbits hanging out and drinking ale and eating nice food.
(00:50:06):
I think that's a nice little depiction of the convivialist utopia. And I just want to preface the critique by saying that I think it's a very nice utopia. I've experienced something very much like this sort of convivialist community. I went to a tiny college in Maine, had about 300 students on an island, quite isolated geographically surrounded by National Park, and there was this really kind of warm solidarity, intimacy, and a process for dealing with conflict resolution, but it was very limited. It was an undergraduate institution. You were paying to be there. You were there for a few years and then you were exiled by necessity to bring in the next generation. And I think outside of institutions like that, there aren't many examples today, I think in the anglosphere of these kinds of convivialist communities. And part of that is due to this long tradition and history of social atomization, of emphasizing the social agent as being the self-interested individual who goes out and scams other people to the greatest extent of the law and is only interested in his own plot of land and enrichment and of course a material culture that isolates people as well in single family housing or big anonymous apartment buildings or car-dependent communities.
(00:51:31):
But I think there are also just challenges that are intrinsic to these kinds of convivial, small communal living that are kind of hard. I think if you're advocating for that, if you're in a kind of degrowth or ecosocialist or in a mode that's advocating for that, I think it's hard to confront some of these intrinsic challenges. And some of those are just that it's hard to live with people without conflict and it's hard to resolve conflict and do so in a way that's effective. One of the models that I think these advocates often turn to are this kind of idea of indigenous communities. I think the problem though in trying to emulate those is that the most successful ones develop these strategies for conflict resolution over many, many generations, and they're cultivating members of their groups from birth to be able to engage with each other in a way that's egalitarian, in a way that's generous and convivial.
(00:53:00):
And we don't have that. We're not starting with that, right? We're starting with a bunch of imperial subjects who have been trained to be suspicious of people, to try to grab whatever they can. Or if they have a kind of loyalty, it's a loyalty to a company, a corporation, something that is itself just a kind of psychopathic entity that's trying to extract and isn't operating on any kind of convivial principles. So to me, I think there's this real kind of hurdle that it's not clear how you get from that material that people who are trained to act a certain way and engaging conflict resolution in a certain way to this kind of convivial ideal. And that's on the cultural side. I think on the material side, there's also this kind of intrinsic challenge of you need to be able to, one, have living space that's communal, shared, not prone to producing conflict, and two, it's capable of being left essentially, and there needs to be a world where you can go and find an alternative community that is more aligned with whatever it is that made you leave the other one. You need to be able to go find an alternative, which I think has been a very common condition of human societies for many tens of thousands of years. So to me, convivialism is a good idea. It's a good kind of attitude to have when you approach policies or trying to reform groups, societies, but it has these really difficult intrinsic challenges that I haven't seen a clear way to kind of get through.
Alan Ware (00:54:06):
Yeah, it makes me think of political scientist, Albert Hirschman's trio of actions you can take with any group that you're having conflict with - exit, voice, or loyalty. You just leave it, which the indigenous people could. You know, I'm getting tired of my uncle or I'll go with a different band for a little while. The interpersonal friction's too great. Or before states and empires had taken the indigenous ecologies - and I think all three of us at one point, we had indigenous ancestors that were defeated by some empire and we became, like you said, kind of acclimated to empire thinking. We've had thousands of years of our ancestors being acclimated to it. Or you could have the voice that he talks about, and that seems to be getting harder in the sense of our informational landscape, how we make sense of what is evidence-based, what isn't. A lot of that is great that we're exposed to more viewpoints and we can create our little informational tribes, but it does definitely, voice becomes harder, and of course the oligarchs to the extent that your voice is so small and ineffectual, that becomes a problem in democratic capitalism when the capitalism takes over the democracy. And then the loyalty you mentioned, that's loyalty to your corporation or consumer product or kind of toxic nationalism.
(00:55:28):
But over time, to build that conviviality in a situation where we have gotten so much more individualistic, and I think money to a large extent can allow people, as long as you have a functioning enough society, you can pay somebody to do anything, and you don't have to be very nice to get your needs satisfied if you have money. As we go through the degrowth involuntary or voluntary, we'll have to become more convivial. You just will not be able to afford to be a disconnected jerk using money to lubricate all of your interactions. You'll have to actually be respectful of other people and bring some value to some relationship.
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:56:11):
Yeah, absolutely. That's a great point, and I think in addition to having to be willing to be generous, have this generosity of spirit and willing to sacrifice for the group and all of this, well you can only maintain these kinds of groups if you're willing to treat certain people who are trying to overrule the group harshly and either through exile, banishment, or killing them. You have to be willing to do that, and I think that's something that this tendency also doesn't like to confront - that fact that there are going to be these kinds of power-hungry psychopaths, selfish people who are willing to harm everybody else to benefit themselves. At a certain point that just has to be eliminated, and I think we have that as well on a global scale. We have this kind of pathocracy where there are all these really just kind of some of the most evil people who are in charge of these powerful institutions, and you're not going to shame them into better behavior or get the council together to reprimand them or whatever. You have to have these traditions of punishment and exile and removal when people violate certain norms of respect for others, autonomy and agency and respect for the group.
Alan Ware (00:57:29):
Right? Yeah, and that's another critical element in addition to conviviality that you've talked about is the need for solidarity, which social movements have needed to have to challenge unjust power in a society, and solidarity can be essential in challenging the power structures necessary to carry out voluntary degrowth. What would you say in a country like the US have been some of the factors preventing solidarity?
Samuel Miller McDonald (00:57:57):
Well, I think we've talked about some of them. I think this tradition of atomization, this kind of intellectual lineage that justifies and reinforces the selfishness and isolation of people has been a massive part of that. I mean, I think most of the architecture of the state, of the authoritarian strand in anglophone politics has been oriented toward this divide and conquer strategy of preventing solidarity between mostly working classes, people who can coordinate in a way that has material impact on the economy, coordinating to stop production or stop distribution. And I think they do that in a lot of ways. I think one way recently has been this kind of focus on identitarianism and culture war conflict, trying to separate people who might otherwise have built left wing working class solidarity movements, dividing them along these kind of cultural conflicts. I think immigration has been one useful way of doing that as well, and instead of focusing on actual ways of addressing immigration issues, making it into this sort of fixation that drowns out all other issues and all other possibilities of forming alliances with people with whom you have common material interests.
(00:59:23):
I think there's been a physical change as well to the economy. I mean, the original labor movements were built in occupations where there was a high degree of people working together, of doing physical labor together, working on one goal, whether it's digging a mine or running a factory. Privacy from management, which I think allowed workers to collude and plan together, plan strikes and actions together and more consolidated industries. I think that's where the original kind of working class labor class movement came from. I think the economy today is just much more diverse, has in the global north, if we're talking about the anglosphere, still has been fragmented so much that I think it's harder for people to just get together to build those relationships that you need to build to have meaningful solidarity. Corollary to that, if that's occurring in the workplace, is in public space.
(01:00:24):
I think there's been a reduction in ways for people in the public to congregate and get together and build relationships. So I think having these very material conditions along with these many generations of social engineering and ideological refinement are working together to make it very hard to maintain good solidarity, and I think there's a real kind of lack of class consciousness in the sense that because of that fragmentation and diversification of economies, I think there's been less clarity around how classes are organized in society and less clarity to people how their class membership affects their lives and affects their relations with other people. There's less a sense of being in the same class, being in a shared identity, and instead identity is displaced to race or nation or gender or some other category that's maybe doesn't have the same kind of mutual material interest that class has. I think those would be the main factors that I would point to.
Nandita Bajaj (01:01:33):
As you've written, the modern left arose with industrialization, with the exponential increase in fossil fuel energy and the resulting exponential rise in human population and consumption, but now in an increasingly resource-depleted, nature-ravaged, and polluted world, the opportunity for economic growth that made it easier for the upper classes to share the wealth is going into reverse, something we talked about briefly earlier today, and climate change effects will deepen in coming decades. How do you think the left needs to adapt?
Samuel Miller McDonald (01:02:11):
I think as those things happen, as the climate gets worse, as growth slows or reverses, we have these civil conflicts that result from that. I think food shocks are likely. I think more pandemics are likely. I think it's going to be very easy to capitulate to the very brutal dictators, political leaders who will arise to try to capitalize on those conditions. One of the first articles I wrote was "Climate Kings for the New Republic" was what it was called, and it was just looking out some of the political leaders who are currently using climate emergencies to try to consolidate their power or exploit their people. I think that's likely to intensify, and I think it will be very difficult to maintain the motivation to stand up to that, not just all of these sort of environmental and physical crises, but to stand up to these people who are going to be putting their own kinds of violent pressures on that process.
(01:03:14):
I think what's critical above any kind of program or ideology is just maintain three values I think above everything else. And one of those is equality and fairness. One of those is respecting individual autonomy, and the other is biodiversity and respecting ecological integrity. I think maintaining those values, trying to hold them personally, but also deploy them in the world, I think will be essential in trying to slow and even reverse this process of everything kind of dying and disintegrating and the worst people imaginable, seizing all of the power and resources. I think if those values can just be steadfast in people and shared, that's kind of maybe all we've got. And I think there have been a lot of times where those values have been forgotten or have gone underground and long stretches of time when people have just sort of acquiesced to their own oppression.
(01:04:14):
And I think just trying to keep those alive, trying to keep those above ground is going to be very difficult and it's going to be essential for any kind of good, egalitarian, ecological, political tendency or movement to stay alive. And then just part of that also is, as we spoke a little earlier about just being clear-eyed about these problems, not getting lost in the glories of past revolutions or trying to replicate something that worked in the early 20th century, but probably isn't going to work in the early 21st and looking to the future with the courage and the clear sightedness to confront what's probably there and what we're going to have to do to maintain a free, equal, and ecologically healthy society.
Nandita Bajaj (01:05:06):
Yeah. Thank you so much for wrapping so many of these different issues that you've written over the years and wrapping all of them so nicely into this interview and clarifying so many of these ideas that are flashpoints in culture, especially among progressives. And it's really nice having you kind of debunking a lot of these myths around these taboo subjects, and we're very excited about our next conversation with you as well. Yeah, we're really grateful for your incredible work and for joining us today.
Alan Ware (01:05:43):
Thank you.
Samuel Miller McDonald (01:05:44):
Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, and I appreciate what you do and very happy to be here and excited about the next talk as well.
Alan Ware (01:05:51):
That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (01:06:18):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.