Back on the wagon
I promise to do better
Last week's newsletter warrants an apology to anyone who signed up to Rarely Certain for alternative, more self-aware perspectives. You can get 'woke' or 'anti-woke' essays anywhere and I regret contributing to what's becoming a dull discussion from which little new ever emerges from either side.
This week I will do better.1
First, what I noticed about the piece. Things that I warn everyone else about, but overlooked in myself.
Don't write when you're tired/irritated/having strong feelings.
Don’t write from the hip unless it’s going to be brilliant.
Don't write when you have nothing to add to what everyone else is saying.
Don't write from fashionable standpoints. There's enough of that in every corner of independent and legacy media.2
Do stick to the theme you established.
The theme of this newsletter is (supposed to be) broadly what's really going on when we think things about contentious issues. Where personal responsibility fits into our fraught efforts to navigate a frantic and often skewed information environment. Bits and bobs I wonder about that no one else I'm aware of discusses.
So last week's piece then. I wrote it while tired, irritated and having strong feelings about what I see as bloated but misplaced moral righteousness among a sub-set of people who default to casually passing judgement and labelling or smearing those who aren't fully in line with their opinions. That breathless sentence captures how I was feeling, ok?
It was a polemic that revealed nothing that might help us to navigate this problem. But regretting it led to some interesting insights that might.
This started with a real-life conversation this week in which I was casually told that a question I've pondered is racist.
As usual, when casually smeared in passing like this, I still had the feelings of irritation. But, instead of reacting, I wondered about how this person found it so easy to state this so casually. As casually as, say, 'it's raining'. As if you must be stupid not to see something obvious. And I think I've found out.
It seems to be about the structure of our information environment. Which is a long-winded way of saying (mostly) Google.
The question, in the context of COP26 and daily headlines about melting ice caps, the collapse in biodiversity and children reporting mental health problems due to anxiety about climate change was 'why is there never any discussion of overpopulation at the moment'.
My interlocutor (who wasn't the first to describe this to me as a racist question) said: "overpopulation is a racist idea because it's about reducing the number of people in the southern hemisphere who are poorer".
This was news to me. My bad, it seems. I haven't kept up with the thinking in this area since I last looked into it.
As a non-expert I default to the intuitive notion that it must be possible to have too many humans on Earth, given that land and non-renewable resources are no longer being made. And that if overpopulation cannot be a problem it must therefore be fine to have, say, a trillion humans. Which I struggle to accept.
Not being a complete moron I'm also aware that overconsumption is a more pressing problem than overpopulation and that the richest people (like me and mine) are consuming the most. But (again intuitively and however simplistically) it seems to me that more and more people are going to need more and more stuff, more food, more heat/air con, more entertainment, more everything.
So, how was I now being casually smeared as a racist for wondering about overpopulation. Why was my interlocutor not saying 'well, it's really about overconsumption rather than too many people'. And then taking me through the reasoning that must inevitably lead to some point where the concept of overpopulation becomes non-racist. Maybe a trillion white people? Who knows.
Like most people, I asked Google. Specifically I asked 'is population control racist'.
Well that was a quick education.
It's the 3rd entry on page 2 before you get a result (from New Scientist) that acknowledges that population control has become a taboo subject, but that overpopulation is harming the planet.
The actual issue isn't for me to adjudicate. It's about 8 years since I looked at the question and found that education seemed to hold the key. That educated girls in particular were having fewer children, everywhere in the world, and that this seemed to be a welcome development for communities in poverty and an increasingly hard-pressed planet. Increasingly smart humans. What's not to love. My knowledge around this topic is next to non-existent and I was interested in taking today's temperature on the issue, since it seemed to have disappeared. And to discern what might account for me being labelled as a racist for wondering about it.
What was interesting to discover was the dominance of Google's results by academic commentary from the humanities sphere, rather than science. And where the scientific papers I surfaced were peppered with non-scientific language like 'neo-colonialism' and 'white supremacy'.
So that settled it. That seems to be the consensus. Something that had passed me by but which somehow I was expected to just know. And why would I not know this when Google proves it.
And yet, if you dig deep enough there are apparently good faith (and apparently brave) people actually in the field of research into population and its impacts on the Earth asking this question too. But, due to the dominance of our favourite search engine, I imagine they are lost beneath all the articles and papers which seem bent on dismissing global population size as a topic even worthy of investigation. Fascist-adjacent, as it were.
I've mentioned several times before the seeming cultural and intellectual homogeneity of Google as a supposedly independent and comprehensive information source. And I wonder if this may be a problem for us all. The way we interact with Google suggests that it may be.
Here are a few reasons why Google might be shaping us, not just being the world's biggest library.
CTR. Aka click-through-rates. Proportionally very few people making a query to Google will ever reach a page 2 result (see why here - a study on CTR) so anything turning up on page 3 of search results is guaranteed to be a perspective that receives low exposure to the casual Google user.
Anchoring Bias.3 We are likely to accept and hold onto the first information we find on a topic we don't already know much about. In this case the novice in this subject is going to learn about 'neocolonialism' as the racist roots of concerns about global population size. Wherever on the first page of results they decide to investigate further. In my case I am evidently still anchored to the first information I'd gleaned a few years ago. I’m certainly finding it hard to dismiss at this point, however morally questionable it seems to have become. But today anyone using Google to find out about this is likely to become anchored to a different perspective.
It’s a taboo subject in 2021. Which makes it risky for any journalistic figure with a high profile and reputation to protect (who isn't a rabid right winger) to investigate it in good faith. And perhaps conclude that concern about population growth can actually be disentangled from racism.
The algorithm. The more I follow the early links...oh you get the picture.
So you end up with a feedback loop. We see one (early) version of 'the truth', stick to it and are very unlikely to hear anything different from our go-to commentators.
Part of the bind we're in is that we feel pressure to be certain about where the truth lies. So when much of our information comes from a place that most people believe is a neutral presenter, but actually (whether or not by design) shapes our information flow, what hope is there of forming rounded views of controversial things.
This is also one of the reasons for my scepticism about focusing solely on the evils of Facebook and other social platforms. We all nod sagely about confirmation bias and echo chambers then toddle off to our favourite search engine in good faith only to find that some of the perspectives we might like to explore are increasingly difficult to find.
No wonder the 'culture wars' are so bitter. And no wonder several people have smeared me as a racist for failing to keep up with what Google says.
I still don't think that asking why overpopulation is rarely mentioned is 'being racist'. But I do now know why people might think it is. And, along the way, I learned a lot more about the racists who gave the idea of limiting population growth a bad name. So that's good.
But something is still lost, it seems to me. And maybe our reliance on Google for information isn't helping.
Hard recommend.
I’d originally planned to expand on previous themes around why we believe what we do by developing an idea about us being the heroes in an imagined story we internalise about ourselves. But the idea is already brilliantly articulated by the writer Will Storr. So I recommend listening to this discussion he recently had about it with David Fuller of Rebel Wisdom.
Something I self-caution about.
There’s a phenomenon you might notice among independent content providers, which is known as ‘audience capture’. People start skewing their podcasts, vlogs and blogs increasingly toward one issue that really provokes violent agreement from certain people. So they keep doing more of the same. I keep seeing this especially among heterodox thinkers. The usually interesting intellectual outsider Bret Weinstein seems to have tanked his general reputation by going all-in on Ivermectin as the Covid wonder drug. But he’s ended up with an even more massive following. And I’m seeing it with others. They’ll dip into fringe climate stuff and it’s popular, so they just keep doing more of it.
I noticed extra people signing up on the basis of the free extract of last week’s Rarely Certain. It went through my mind that being shouty about ‘wokeism’ is tempting if you want to build an audience. That’s audience capture.
I request shares because the more the Rarely Certain audience grows, the more rewarding it is to write it. It’s doing OK and the ratio of paid to free sign-ups is apparently better than the average newsletter on Substack. So, thank you to everyone who has helped to make this worth my time.
As ever, a reminder that replies to these emails do come straight to my inbox so don’t hesitate to get in touch for whatever reason.
Footnotes
If you don't get this reference, it's a fashionable thing to say to people who have done terrible things like asking why overpopulation is never discussed.
Incidentally, you might have noticed attempts to distance myself from labelling certain people or perspectives in a fashionably pejorative way by writing 'woke' in single quotes. This is because I don't know what to call that mindset but I want to resist insulting labels. This week Freddie DeBoer wrote a good piece making this very point and I recommend it, as I do DeBoer's writing in general Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand
Read more about Anchoring Bias here.
Header image: Alexas_Fotos
Hi Mike. This weeks thoughts from me. Firstly I sensed that something was amiss with you last week and was concerned about your wellbeing, but you have cleared that up now. Secondly apologizing can be, for some, a very difficult thing to do. How many MP's say sorry for things or Heads of large Organisations. Saying sorry can help to maintain communications and facilitate a better dialogue, which can only be a good thing.
Secondly Google is full of misinformation and should have its content considered in detail and in an objective way. Health conditions tend to be one of the most noticeable. Also when I am doing a search for a particular product why does it always direct me to Amazon first and I may have to go through several pages to find what I am actually looking for.
On the issue of overpopulation and whether comments on this are racist. It took me several days of contemplation to work out what I thought. To me there is a glaring hole and I would say it should be more of a debate/discussion even if no definitive answer can be found. I note that this week's post does begin to go into the debate that I would enjoy. So I'll start the bidding. Let's start with the end of the Georgian era and the Victorian era in the UK. People has much larger families and extended families. During this time of great inequality there was the beginning of some social reforms which have been built on over time. If we ask the question of why families were so large then some of the answers lie within public health and the Public Health Act began to address this. We also have some improvements in health care so perinatal mortality rates decreased, maternal death rates began to fall. The introduction of Factory Acts and Educational Acts began improvements allowing a basic education for all children even though there were age limits built in. it was a start and things continued to improve. Larger families were probably a necessity for the poor as any contribution to the household income was a essential even if it meant children having to work in inhumane conditions. Fast forward now and we see that the demographics have changed significantly. There are fewer perinatal deaths, people are better educated, families generally have fewer children. There has been the development of contraception. Its crazy to think that abortion only became legal under certain circumstances in 1968, but women previously only had the option of illegal abortion which placed health risks at significant levels. With the advent of the NHS UK lives could be improved even further. I am not suggesting that things are perfect here but at least we are streets ahead of third world counties.
However if we look at third world countries they don't enjoy many of the benefits we currently have. Let me use Togo as a case example. When my daughter went to Togo for 3 months aged 18 on a government sponsored programme (we did have to put up some of the money ourselves). Her experience was very interesting and what she learned invaluable. She went to one of the towns that hadn't had volunteers before and was placed with a family who were paid to take care of her. They failed in that I'm afraid. Her volunteer work involved working long hours but one day they had a day off and some of the Togalese families took these 5 volunteers to the mountains my daughter was very sick that day and really suffering so one of the expectant mothers looked after her for the day. Her health deteriorated greatly overnight but the family responsible for her care did nothing and as she was unable to get to work the supervisor visited and she was admitted to the nearest hospital. She was diagnosed with severe malaria despite having her jabs. She got better after a couple of days but when she described the hospital the facilities were terrible, for example there was no indoor toilet for the patients they had to go out of the building and use a hole in the ground. The staff had a dilapidated loo which they said she could use. They were intrigued by this white woman as many in the town had never seen a white person. On discharge she was moved to a different family who treated her as one of the very close knit family members that they were. The mum is is still referred to as her other mother. Projects she was primarily engaged with was building water facilities and going to a women's prison. Here she discovered all the women bar one were there because they had stolen food, to feed their children so she taught them some skills, dress making for example, so they could be in a position to find employment upon release. Another thing of concern to her was that the majority of children's births were not recorded and without this they wouldn't be eligible for a state education. It cost £5 to register a birth and the only place this could be done was in the capital. The amount of money would seem insignificant to most of us but bearing in mind average earnings there, it was a lot of money, so she financially cleaned herself out getting as many children officially registered. A couple of months after she returned the expectant mother who had been so kind to her when she was unwell died during her labor. She had a son. So we raised funds to be send to him to secure his future and to have an education. £700 was what was all that was required to do this, to set him up for life. This can arguably become a contentious issue as could be viewed as voluntourism or being a white savior as many white people go to the Africa's for a short period of time so they can feel good about themselves. My daughter has a slightly cynical view on those who do this but we know she worked long hours, it wasn't a holiday and hopefully she achieved something good. The government under Theresa May stopped this scheme.
Moving on the discussion if the poorest countries could enjoy the same benefits as us then perhaps they might have smaller families, perinatal deaths could go down and life expectancy levels might increase.
Of course much of this is affected by the attitudes of those who hold the power in these respective countries and there willingness to develop and serve their populations. Finally I was appalled by our Tory government cutting International Aid. It was only a small amount offered in the first place but could make a difference to developing nations. How smug Sunak looked when announcing that International aid would be reinstated in 2023 during his last budget.
These were just a few thoughts and it doesn't necessarily end the debate and I am hungry to learn more or discover other arguments. I don't think I've really touched the surface on this one.
Finally, climate change which you mention. I attended a meeting recently on this subject. I'm afraid unless drastic action takes place throughout the world then we become ever closer to Armageddon. Perhaps we need a carrot and stick approach to this. I know I do the little I can and fully realise it's all a bit Tesco(but every little helps)! This week I met a very engaging man who is so into green matters and sustainability and through his enquiries and analysis of my behavior's in relation to this topic, he viewed that I did significantly better than most people and my green credential and carbon footprint were Ok. Sadly I had to get home and so I ended the conversation but I'm looking forward to seeing him again. I could have talked for hours. As for COP 26 who knows what it might achieve possibly more empty promises. However the world can't afford this.
Better stop now as I have gone on a bit!