China’s One Child Policy… Pres. Obama’s “science czar”

60 years ago, Communists seized China.

What sort of thing is the management of the Empire State Building celebrating by turning on the red and yellow lights?

Inter alia, the One Child Policy… now being relaxed in some places as a disastrous and dangerous failure.

Here is an interesting note about the One Child Policy from The Western Confucian:

While "[m]ost Westerners attribute the one-child policy to Communist ideology and its top-down authoritarianism," writes Michael Cook, "the single most influential person [in creating this cruel policy] was not a Marxist ideologue, but a brilliant computer expert named Song Jian" — Raining on their parade. The story:  [It doesn’t matter who came up with the idea.  A Communist regime imposed it.]

      Song was a missile expert who had survived the Cultural Revolution because China needed a strong military even during the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. His particular expertise was cybernetics and unlike many of his colleagues, he was able to travel overseas.

      In 1978 he attended the Seventh Triennnial World Congress of the International Federal of Automatic Control in Helsinki. There he met two Dutch control theorists who had contributed to the Club of Rome report, Limits to Growth. This was an influential computer model which forecast catastrophe if world population were not limited. Song found their work compelling and when he returned to China he set to work developing a population model for his own country.

      Unfortunately, Song was completely unaware of the hammering which Limits to Growth was receiving in the West. [Now why would that be?  Could it have something to do with repression?  Something beyond China’s historic xenophobia?] Greenhalgh says that he imported what had been merely a scientific exercise in Europe and transformed it into a concrete policy proposal for use on a real population.

      After the ideological lunacies of the Maoist era, Song’s supporters in the Communist Party were searching for scientific solutions to social problems. What Song offered them confidently was the illusion of precision. In their isolation from the West, these Chinese officials had never even seen computer modelling and graphs. They found ideas like "spaceship earth" and mathematical control of childbearing utterly compelling. Song once confided to a group of American population specialist that because he was a mathematician, anything he said would be believed. His models were real science, not social science or spurious ideology.

      Marxist theorists were actually the most trenchant opponents of Song’s mechanistic approach, but in the wake of the disasters engineered by Mao and the Gang of Four, no one listened.

Mr. Cook concludes that "the real villain of China’s oppressive one-child policy is scientism, the belief that science and technology can solve all human problems."

That’s fine, Mr. Cook.  But someone implemented those theories and then perpetuated them.

And millions suffered and are suffering as a result.

Consider the number of girls who were killed or abandoned and the anguish of couples.

As I read this, I thought of Pres. Obama’s choice for "science czar".

Pres. Obama’s “science czar”: compusory involuntary abortion because of climate change

Pres. Obama’s choice for science is John Holdren.

Why does the President choose people like this to advise him?

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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8 Comments

  1. Luke says:

    I’m for “a revolution from within and from above.” Science driven by idealism tends to regression instead of progression. Yes, even the suffering of untold millions. I can’t find my copy of “Socrates Meets Marx”, but it’s well worth a read. It brings both sanity and joy to a very dismal insanity.

  2. Sedgwick says:

    Why does the President choose people like this to advise him? Simple: because he is also a Marxist and his thinking is fully aligned with the satanic principles of the New World Order. That’s why Wall Street purchased the White House for him.

  3. Why does the President choose people like this to advise him?

    So that John Boehner has plenty of time before November 2010 to measure the drapes in the Speaker’s office.

  4. gloriainexcelsis says:

    As he said during his campaign – look at the people he chooses to have around him. See what they say and believe. By now we should all know the man.

  5. catholicmidwest says:

    Don’t miss the author’s point:

    As the scientific powerhouses of the West crumble, other societies will pick up the technical expertise without understanding of what science consists. It looks like magic to them, and they BELIEVE in it in a way educated scientists in the West don’t because many of us know better. Science is a method; it tells you HOW but never WHY. In the hands of other cultures, it can and probably will become something much more dangerous because it becomes not a method of speculative thought leading to successive improvements in a context, but an imperative, said to be “truth.” This is really the origin of the carnage that has (and will) ensue.

  6. catholicmidwest says:

    Or maybe I can put it in another way: When it comes to understanding the origins and basic ideas of the philosophy of science, other cultures are grossly inferior to Western ones because they have no intracultural experience and history of it.

    Technical people (even their experts) will tend to believe that science can tell them why things happen (and should happen–the dangerous part), rather than just how to get things to happen once it has been decided that they are moral enough to happen by using other means.

    Science can’t tell you why human beings should choose what they choose or who must live and who must die as a programme. That belongs to other disciplines. Science merely tells you how you can accomplish ends already determined. It’s a method, not a rationale.

  7. catholicmidwest says:

    This, of course, is what is wrong with scientific discoveries driving public policy–ie. now that we can do it, we have to. Wrong.

  8. geoff jones says:

    It should be noted that Mr Cook is no friend of Communism. In his article he notes:

    Without the harsh discipline imposed by the Party, implementing it would have been impossible.

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