The Book - The Man!

This reissue of Hardin’s justly famous collection is the first in the "Garrett Hardin Reprint Series" by The Social Contract Press. The second in the series is Mandatory Motherhood, which was reprinted in the fall of 1997. Of course Hardin, while retired as professor emeritus from the University of California at Santa Barbara, is still alive and hard at work on new material. He is currently looking for a suitable publisher for his latest book. In 1993, his Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos was published by Oxford University Press and won the Phi Beta Kappa prize as the best scientific writing for the general public that year. In 1995, the Federation for American Immigration Reform published his The Immigration Dilemma: Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons, a collection of some of his best known essays on immigration and population issues.

Hardin is a magnificent stylist and Stalking the Wild Taboo contains some of his most creative essays. Most of these were originally published in the sixties to mid-seventies; though this edition includes three from 1996 written especially for this reprint. I know of no better text than this collection to test where someone lies on the Cattell tender-minded/tough-minded scale. A number of the essays are only a few pages long, but I suspect that the tender-minded will angrily leave it largely unread.

There are many jewels here, including "Carrying Capacity as an Ethical Concept," which introduced the term "longage" to the world as an aid to clear thinking. Is famine due to a shortage of food or a longage of people? What about the term "pejorism," a process that makes matters worse, as a foil to meliorism, a process that makes matters better? His essay "Pejorism: The Middle Way," published in Science in 1977, introduced that term. One of the most intellectually stimulating pieces is his essay on earthquake prediction, which was rejected by more periodicals (including Science) than anything else he has written. Puzzled by a huge government grant for research leading to earthquake prediction, he compares the prediction of earthquakes over hurricanes, and comes to the conclusion that any attempt to predict would be counterproductive and even dangerous; the necessary delays between predictions and disasters would produce widespread chaos

The book builds from older controversies to newer ones. The first section contains essays on abortion, predominantly published before Roe vs. Wade. Hardin, because of his interest in both population numbers and population quality, was an early leader in the pro-abortion movement, and learned a valuable lesson in his first major talk on the topic. While discussing abortion generally he mentioned the issue of human inequality. This was a mistake. He writes: "As I presented it to the audience, I could feel a wave of coldness wash back over me. No questioner subsequently revived this issue; but it was obvious that I had lost the audience for the moment." The moral that Hardin derives from this: "[n]ever tackle more than one taboo at a time."

The second section deals with religion and again Hardin has some second thoughts on technique. He feels that while his comments in the essays were accurate, some of them may have been injudicious and may have had a negative effect on the debates at the time. "A Second Sermon on the Mount" is classic Hardin and was originally entered in a contest organized by the Vatican which asked for moral and permissible suggestions for population control in underdeveloped areas. It was published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine in 1963 and is a collection of beatitudes paired with comments. Here are a few to give the flavor:

The most recent piece in the religion section is aptly named "Learning to say Nothing."

For this reader his next section, on technology, is the most problematic - though even here much of it is impressively stated. His essays on interstellar travel and space stations (per Gerald O’Neill) as solutions to the world’s population problems are convincingly argued. Incidentally, Hardin wrote a whole book on this topic - part science fiction comedy, part fact - entitled The Voyage of the Beagle.

In the late seventies, Hardin returned to writing essays on competition, a topic which he had addressed in great detail in his 1959 best seller Nature and Man’s Fate. In 1978, he surveyed the handling of 'competition' by twenty sociological textbooks, all published after 1960. "The books averaged 476 pages in length, and of this 2.15 pages, on the average were indexed under ‘competition’…seven of the books had no pages indexed…" He then surveyed twelve ecology textbooks and found that fully fifty percent of their pages were devoted to competition issues, and only five percent to cooperative relations. Hardin argues that "[o]mitting competition from a study of group processes is like leaving gravity out of a treatise on space travel... [w]hat accounts for the sociologist’s reluctance to deal with a process that is surely inescapable [by] societies living in a finite world?"

Hardin deals in this section with an important issue called the "Competitive Exclusive Principle:" the coexistence of species cannot find its explanation in their competitive equality. He maintains that this is a basic axiom of biological sociological and economic theory. Since "species" refers here to separate breeding populations, races and ethnic groups cannot simultaneously maintain their integrity and compete for the same ecological niche in the same geographical area over time. One will always overwhelm the other.

Diving deeper into an assault on convention, Hardin addresses the limits of laissez faire from a biological and cybernetic perspective. He argues that "it is suicidal to seek complete efficiency, waste is essential and necessary," since

Considering that the "Competitive Exclusive Principle" tends to reduce species and breeding populations, why is there such variety and diversity in the world? Hardin argues that this is largely the result of relative geographical isolation and "transportation costs."

Next Hardin addresses the role of tribalism in social systems. There is a double standard of morality - one for the in-group and another for the out-group. The "tribe" could be a race, ethnic group, religious group, a political group, or even an occupational group (the Mafia). Any group that thinks in tribal terms has a great advantage over a group that does not. Government intervention in these areas (affirmative action, rejection of freedom of association) to force ‘integration’ of diverse tribal groups will be an endless task if that goal is insisted on. Hardin argues that the notion of "universal rights" promotes intolerance, while "ethnocentrism" - understood as awareness of, and sensitivity toward, group differences - leads to true tolerance.

The Social Contract Press is to be commended for reprinting this wonderful book.