🚀 go-pugleaf

In article uupcb@pcb.batpad.lgb.ca.us, mike.batchelor@pcb.batpad.lgb.ca.us (Mike Batchelor) writes:
> jdr@starflight.Corp.Sun.COM (Jon Roland) blurts:
> ->
> -> We need to make a major push on the media and politicians that there
> -> is a third position distinct from pro-life and pro-choice, which
> -> holds that:
> -> (1) The state has a natural right to regulate the reproductive
> -> behavior of its citizens, and may, under certain circumstances, need
> -> to either compel women to bear children or to refrain from doing so.
> -> Therefore, women must not be accorde a constitutional right to choose
> -> whether or not to bear children.
> 
> Over my dead body, and, I suspect, a quite large number of other bodies,
> including yours.
> 
> If the course of action you suggest ever becomes a real threat, I
> believe that the population will be reduced somewhat, although not by
> the Orwellian means you propose.  Fortunately, these ideas are so
> ill-conceived that no one who can do anything to implement them will
> ever take them seriously - at least, I hope that this is the case.
> 
> I'd rather be dead, and take the planet with me, than live under a
> society such as you propose.
> 
> mIkE
> ----
> alternate: mike@batpad.lgb.ca.us
>        
Nowhere in my postings on this subject do I call for totalitarian methods. You
are reading that into them. Totalitarian methods wouldn't work.

As for how it would be to live in such a society, you should try it before
you knock it. For the last 100,000 years or so, until about 6,000 years ago
in a few places that have since become widespread, so-called "primitive"
peoples managed to impose some very strict controls on the reproduction of
their members, so much so that it affected the course of our evolutionary
development. We are, in a very important sense, "self-bred", the result in
large part of social selection. Those controls were sometimes imposed by
totalitarian methods, but more often they were the result of a prevailing
consensus based on an understanding of the necessities of their situation.

In the 1950s in the United States, one could still find social mechanisms of
population control operating in important ways. Among the middle class, at
least, parents were remarkably effective in preventing their children from
engaging in pre-marital sex, and in guiding their choices for dating and
marriage. A license to marry was still sometimes withheld on the grounds of
public health. Parents could say to their sons, "Don't even think about
getting married until you can support a wife and children", and most of them
did in fact wait until after they had completed their educations and begun
a career. That's population control, although a mild form of it.

In Ireland following the potato famine of 1845-48, the population dropped 
from about 8 million to about 1.5 million, with about half the drop the result
of emigration. In the ensuing conditions, pressure from church and community
combined to prevent most persons from marrying, and the average age of men
who did went up to about 45. That's population control.

In Japan following WWII, when housing was short, social pressure mounted to
discourage couples from having more than two children. In China today, the
one-child program continues with a remarkably degree of success, not so much
through the operation of criminal prosecution as through the establishment
of pervasive institutions of local social pressure. That's population control.

In some primitive tribes, a few as a fourth of the women of the village might
bear all the children, but the rest didn't perceive this as a terrible
imposition. They all shared in the upbringing of the children of the village,
just as childless Chinese adults sometimes share in the upbringing of their
neighbors' children.

The main loss to dwellers in such cities would be the inablity of most
to visit the outdoors whenever they might want, but how many city dwellers
take advantage of opportunities to visit the country now? The occupations of
such city dwellers would tend to be more like the work done in universities
than like that done in cities today, but unless you can't live without
weekends tearing up the desert on your dune buggy, and are averse to mainly
intellectual pursuits, you could probably learn to like it.

---

jdr@starflight.corp.sun.com, starflt@uunet.uu.net
Jon Roland
Starflight Corporation, 1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A,
Redwood City, CA 94063-4142, 415/361-8141