Friday 26 November 2010
Our brave new world of Malthusian madmen
Much of the wacky authoritarianism of twentieth-century dystopian literature is now coming to life, from the promotion of homosexuality as a check on population growth to the celebration of childfree women as superior to ‘breeders’.
Brendan O’Neill
Reading an op-ed in an American newspaper last month, which argued that gay marriage should be legalised because it will help reduce overpopulation (homosexuals don’t breed, you see), I knew I had heard a similar sentiment somewhere before.
‘Given the social hardships of our era, the benefits of homosexual marriage could be immeasurable’, the op-ed said. ‘Even America, though its population pales in comparison to that of other nations, is considered overpopulated because the amount of energy each of its citizens expends in a lifetime is enormous. Obviously homosexuals cannot, within the confines of a monogamous relationship, conceive offspring.’ So, legalising gay marriage would ‘indirectly limit population growth’ (1).
Gays celebrated because they don’t have children… homosexual relationships culturally affirmed on the basis that their childlessness could help solve a planetary crisis… gay monogamy bigged up because it doesn’t involve conceiving offspring. Where had I heard such ideas before? Why did this promotion of homosexual relationships as a possible solution to the alleged problem of fertile, fecund heteros cramming the world with too many ankle-nippers sound familiar?
Then it struck me. It’s the storyline of Anthony Burgess’s Malthusian comedy-cum-nightmare, The Wanting Seed. In that 1962 dystopian novel, which I devoured during a Burgess phase in my teens, Burgess imagines a future England in which overpopulation is rife. There’s a Ministry of Infertility that tries desperately to keep a check on the gibbering masses squeezed into skyscraper after skyscraper, and it does so by demonising heterosexuality - it’s too fertile, too full of ‘childbearing lust’ - and actively promoting homosexuality.
It’s a world where straights are discriminated against because there’s nothing more disgusting and destructive than potential fertility, than a ‘full womanly figure’ or a man with ‘paternity lust’; straights are passed over for jobs and promotion in favour of homos, giving rise to a situation where some straights go so far as to pretend they are gay, adopting the ‘public skin of dandified epicene’, as Burgess describes it, in a desperate bid to make it in the world. There’s even a Homosex Institute, which runs night classes that turn people gay, all with the aim of reducing the ‘aura of fertility’ that hangs about society like a rank smell, as one official says. ‘It’s Sapiens to be Homo’ is the slogan of Burgess’s imagined world.
Now, nearly 50 years after Burgess’s novel outraged literary critics (one said it was ‘too offensive to finish’) as well as campaigners for the decriminalisation of homosexual sex (who were disgusted that Burgess could write of a homosexual tyranny while it was still illegal in Britain for one man to have sex with another), some of the sentiments of that weird invented world, of that fertility-demonising futuristic nightmare, are leaking into mainstream public debate - to the extent that a writer can claim, without igniting controversy, that ‘the benefits of homosexual marriage could be immeasurable’ in terms of dealing with the ‘social hardships’ of overpopulation. No, heteros are not discriminated against in favour of gays; there’s no Homosex Institute. But there is a creeping cultural validation of homosexuality in Malthusian terms, where the gay lifestyle is held up by some thinkers and activists as morally superior because it is less likely to produce offspring than the heterosexual lifestyle, in which every sexual encounter involves recklessly pointing a loaded gun of sperm at a willing and waiting target.
And this is not an isolated incident; Burgess is not the only imaginer of mad Malthusian worlds whose ideas have come to some kind of fruition. Such is the Malthusian tenor of our times, so deep-seated is the New Malthusian prejudice against fertility (the f-word of our era), and so widespread is the eco-view of human beings as little more than the hooverers-up of scarce resources, that bit by bit, unwittingly and unnoticed, some of the wackier authoritarian ideas of twentieth-century Malthus-infused literature are finding expression in our real world today.
The Wanting Seed was described as ‘perverse’ when it first appeared in the 1960s. Well, what could be more perverse than a world in which homosexuality is ruthlessly elevated over heterosexuality in the name of combating mass fecundity? Yet today, a columnist for theGuardian, the newspaper of choice of Britain’s chattering class, can argue that ‘in a world of diminishing assets, being gay is arguably more moral than being straight’, since ‘reproduction has a demonstrable impact on the welfare of others [through its] depletion of resources’ (2). This is precisely what the psychos running Burgess’s future England say - we’re facing a ‘planetary crisis’ in which ‘resources are running out’, and so men must be encouraged to ‘Love Your Fellow-Men… anything to divert sex from its natural end’. Yesterday’s mischievous imaginings of an author determined to shock and to stir are now the normal ideas of the liberal elite, consumed by Guardian readers alongside their muesli.
Burgess’s novel tells the story of Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna Foxe, husband and wife who live in a depressing world governed by the Population Police, where the rule is that you are allowed ‘one birth per family’ - ‘Alive or dead. Singleton, twins, triplets. It makes no difference.’ The Bible is banned (it’s an ‘old religious book full of smut’) and there are pro-contraception posters everywhere, advising people ‘Take a tablet instead of a risk’ (pre-empting today’s government propaganda warning of the risks of so-called unsafe sex).
The product of the Foxes’ ‘one birth’, a boy, dies, and they have to take his carcass to the Ministry of Agriculture (Phosphorus Reclamation Department) so that he can be buried in open ground for the benefit of Mother Earth. ‘Think of this in national terms, in global terms’, an agricultural apparatchik tells the grieving Beatrice-Joanna. ‘One mouth less to feed. One more half-kilo of phosphorus pentoxide to nourish the earth.’ (Today, green-minded people are increasingly opting to be buried coffinless in the ground, likewise in order to ‘nourish the earth’.)
Tristram is a schoolteacher constantly passed over for promotion because he’s straight and has, as his boss tells him, that unfortunate ‘aura of fertility’ that the Malthusian rulers so hate. A succession of ‘power-struck little Nancys’ (as Tristram calls them during an unwise outburst) are promoted before him. Tristram’s brother Derek is also straight, though he successfully masquerades as gay, carrying out a ‘superb mime of orthodox homosexual behaviour’, and is promoted to the top of the Population Police as a result. Yet he’s having a secret, very straight affair with Tristram’s wife, Beatrice-Joanna, and she ends up pregnant by Derek - her secondbirth - just as society is spinning further out of control and just as Derek’s Population Police decide to take more decisive and deranged action against anyone who breaks the fertility laws. Most of the pop police are gay, of course, but don’t be fooled by their effete violence - which is ‘swift, balletic, laughing… more tickling than hitting’: it still leaves any transgressors of the rules of this topsy-turvy world, such as a priest who yells ‘unnatural lot of bastards!’ at a gang of camp coppers, injured and bloodied.
Of course, in 2010, we don’t have a gay police force that beats up priests; heterosexuality is not outlawed; we don’t have a situation where ‘the homos virtually run this country’, as a character in Burgess’s novel says. But we do increasingly see an intellectual celebration of homosexuality not on the basis that men and women should be absolutely free to choose who they have sex and cohabit with, not on the basis of personal autonomy; but rather on the basis that homosexuality, being a generally infertile relationship, could be a useful tool for tackling the alleged overpopulation that is so feverishly imagined and fretted over by elite elements. So alongside the respectable American and British commentators arguing that being gay is more moral than being straight, others now call for the legalisation of homosexuality in African countries on the grounds that ‘those who decide not to breed become valuable members of society because they reduce the pressure on population’ (3).
Such is the mean-spiritedness of our age, such is the anti-breeding outlook amongst our moral betters who, like Malthus, erroneously believe that we have created too many people for nature to be able to sustain, that some of today’s supposedly liberal and tolerant celebrations of homosexuality make Burgess’s invented gay Malthusians seem almost level-headed by comparison. Psychology Today, the bible of the head-investigating medical elite, can now publish a piece arguing that ‘in an overpopulated world, it would be a good thing if there were more homosexuality’ (4). An American pyschologist has even said that we should try to ‘mass-produce homosexuality in a world overpopulated by breeding couples’ (5). Sociobiologists seek to counter anti-gay religious fundamentalists by arguing that ‘under some circumstances, such as overpopulation, homosexuality can contribute to overall species enhancement’ (6).
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