I turned out the lights in the sitting room, undressed, took a short,
warm shower, and lay down on the double bed, naked. Usually, about two
minutes after the lights go out, I fall asleep. But I knew it would
take longer that night.
So I piled up the pillows and opened Vogt's _Road to Survival_ at the
page where the jacket was enclosed.
Mr. Vogt's thesis is simple and damning; I had somewhat reflected upon
it earlier that evening.
It is the philosophy of modern man to produce. To industrialize
himself. To learn the techniques and technologies of science
and of applied science. This is progress. Chinese, Soviets,
Americans--everybody strives to speed up production, distribution,
consumption. It is also the object of all nations to increase their
populations.
The earth cannot support either of these two goals.
The topsoil of the planet will not feed the existing numbers of us,
even now--and our method of using it is diminishing it at a gruesome
rate. Faster and faster, we starve; and as we multiply, more of us will
starve. Medicine, which increases the percentage of persons who survive
infancy and extends the life span of all these, is but rapidly adding
to sure victims of starvation.
We are busy breeding mouths to eat our future out of house and home.
Ideas of this sort have been around since Malthus's time.
These days, the facts accumulate.
I often reflect that man's contemporary sexual taboos lead (as they
must, by the law of opposites) to sexual excesses: these are seen in
man's witless overbreeding. His "moral" Catholic couch, his unregulated
Baptist bed, sustains orgy and is the senseless agent of biological
catastrophe. This is the riposte of Nature to man's refusal to use
reason concerning his own nature.
Vogt wants planet-wide birth control, before the teeming hordes locust
up the hope of a human hereafter.
Try and get it!
There are other truths about ourselves of this same order:
_The minerals._ We are digging them up with the reckless violence of
pigs after truffles. Truffles can grow again--but not minerals. We are
converting the earth's elements into forms all but irrecoverable even
by the most immense expenditures of human energy and time.
_Our genes_--and the holy habit we've got into, of inhibiting
birth among our most likely specimens--of proliferating boobs and
nuts--of maintaining the feeble and the dim, abetting their rabbity
bedding together--and of sending the cream of each generation to
war's slaughter. This, alone, will drive us back toward apehood
faster even than our growing physical destitution. Some European
nations are doubtless already floundering in the poverty of residual
blood-lines--bereft of brains and leadership by their religious
devotion and their glorious wars.
Also, of course, there is our _failure to perceive our instinctual
nature_. My own elected department in the category of dooms.
Instinctively, as we must, all of us feel the weight of such colossal
crimes against the meaning of instinct as those above--our cosmic
disavowals (by our acts) of any responsibility toward men to come. That
is why, at bottom, no one is happy in modern society--happy in his
spirit, content, full of a sense of purpose and significance. It is
why we shall have to remake civilization consciously--or to suffer its
self-destruction.
Mr. Vogt, I thought, would feel the power of instinct, as it now
blindly controls us, when he saw how religious men reacted to his
simple indication of the necessity for using reason in our sex
relations. And he would see the inertia of our traditions when he
saw how utterly his warning was disbelieved, ignored, ridiculed, and
forgotten. Others, with the same wild cry of despair, have had such
reception, for the same reason.
It is not that man cannot do for himself.
But that he will not.
And he will not because he is self-flattered into the incredible
illusion that Mr. and Mrs. America are doing very well already, thank
you kindly.
After a long while, grinning over the tremendous sins of those who take
it upon themselves to reject knowledge and yet to say what sin is, I
closed the book.
Hell has one funny aspect.
It is where everybody lives.
I sent a thought to Messrs. Sheen, Niebuhr, and their ilk: The
up-to-date devil, which you so earnestly seek, gentlemen, may readily
be found--wearing the costume of your own minds: unconsciousness.