The other day I found myself thinking like the Chinese government. “There are too many people in the world,” I said to myself, “we can’t sustain this population. The only way out of this predicament is to enforce a one-child solution. Sure, it will be tough for a generation or two. The first will have to reduce their expectations for family size and the second will have to work extra hard to care for aging parents, but eventually,” I said, thinking like the Chinese government, “the population should shrink to a size where there is enough food to go around”.
Indeed, the more I thought about the world’s problems, the more it became clear that much of it could be solved if there just weren’t so many people wanting electricity, eating grain-based livestock, throwing away plastic, and driving automobiles. Without reducing the sheer size of the human population, it hardly matters whether or not our coffee is organically grown or our vehicle is a Prius or a gas-guzzler. “There is only one way out of this terrible predicament,” I said to myself. “We have to stop having children.”
According to political philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, I was thinking like a hedgehog. Berlin looked at the history of Western thought and saw two types of thinkers. Taking a line from ancient Greek poetry, “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” Berlin used these two categories to explain a crucial difference in the way people interpret history. The fox “pursues many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory. The hedgehog “relates everything to a single central vision.” According to Berlin, Plato was a hedgehog and the essayist Montaigne was a fox. Berlin, a committed pluralist, was himself a bit of a fox.
The ecological crisis has spawned its own version of foxes and hedgehogs, each of whom looks at the other with a good deal of suspicion. Hedgehogs focus on a single central vision, such as over-population or the end of cheap oil, and then tie everything back to that one big thing. Foxes pursue many ends, such as local agriculture and urban density and electric automobiles. When hedgehogs promote a one-child policy, foxes wonder about the impact on family farms. When foxes extol free-range chickens, hedgehogs want to know how much petroleum is necessary to produce the organic grain.
At the Slow Living Summit, held earlier this month, the foxes were out in great number. The panelists at the opening event presented multiple visions of revitalization and resuscitation. Rather than explain why things were going downhill fast, they described the need for “stories that work and don’t work.” We heard about Pete’s Greens and how the community ensured his longevity after his underinsured barn burnt to the ground. We heard about a woman from Chicago who taught ex-offenders how to keep bees and make skin care products from the honey and wax for a high-end market. And we heard about a man from LA who convinced his school district to plant trees rather than spend the money on air-conditioning and asphalt.
The event itself got off to a slow start so there wasn’t much time for questions from the audience. Had there been more time, there might have been hedgehog to disturb the peace. “These stories are all very fine,” a hedgehog might have said, “but what do you think about the problem of overpopulation? Aren’t we kidding ourselves to think that the green economy can sustain seven billion human beings? We need something more than stories to bring these numbers down to a point where sustainability is even an option.”
When Isaiah Berlin died, Steven Marcus noted in The New York Times that Berlin may have started out as a fox but he became a “monumental hedgehog. The one big thing that, like a hedgehog, he knew was that the human world answered to the nature of foxes.” As Marcus explained, “one must know many things even if all that one knows is that this is what one has to know.” The world may answer to the nature of foxes but that doesn’t mean the hedgehog’s one big thing doesn’t need attention. In Isaiah Berlin’s time, a time of world war and brutal colonialism, the one big thing was tolerance for cultural diversity and respect for rule of law. In our time, the one big thing may be protecting the planet from the excesses of human beings.
Rather than promote a one-child policy, then, may I suggest we tell more stories of people who don’t have children. I can think of one story about two women who created a loving family with four Labradors, a couple of cats, and a small flock of Sussex hens. I can think of another story about two men who garden, paint, and study marine biology. I can think of a pair of traveling musicians who populate the bars and coffee houses of both coasts with songs and harmonies. And I can think of the deep love found at the Weston Priory where celibate brothers nurture the world-weary.
We need both foxes and hedgehogs to work on the ecological crisis, the former to run across different pathways and the latter to keep us focused on the things we know for sure. Foxes generate enthusiasm and allow for diversity while hedgehogs steadily pursue their goal. Who knows, maybe this hedgehog is wrong. Maybe the planet can sustain eight billion people. Maybe we’ll change our eating habits and become less devoted to the automobile. Maybe we’ll adapt to a world with less species diversity and more plastic trash. Maybe the foxes can help me find a different path out of this predicament. My sense is that their myriad ways will be more instructive as they consider a few big things.
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