Excerpts from Reviews

Examining the Cult of Antihumanism

BOOK REVIEW: Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism

   The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates. By the same token, the unexamined political position is not worth holding.
   Robert Zubrin’s book examines the philosophy that underlies one side of the struggle to value human life and dignity. It is not a “Catholic” book. If the author holds any religious convictions, the reader is given no hint.
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Review : Merchants of Despair

Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists,
and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism by Robert Zubrin

   ...
   Zubrin, a nuclear engineer and an amateur historian, writes in clear, nontechnical language—often eloquently, and sometimes passionately—and he has done his research: eighty of the book’s three hundred pages are devoted to references and notes.
   ...
   I’ll focus on Zubrin’s discussions of population control and eugenics because these movements are central to his argument and less familiar to most people. I’ll then touch on the other topics he covers.
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People Matter

Robert Zubrin’s powerful critique of antihumanism

   A ruling idea of the last two centuries has been materialism: the notion, as arch-materialist Daniel Dennett asserts, that “there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon.” One consequence of this belief has been the rise of antihumanism—the stripping from people of their transcendent value and a reduction of them to mere things in the world to be studied, understood, reshaped—and ultimately controlled.
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Explaining the Myths and Dangers of Anti-Humanism

   There have been many excellent books recounting how environmental zealots have worsened human welfare and the environment alike through wrongheaded thinking. Few, however, meticulously present the philosophical inner workings of such wrongheadedness. In his new book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, Robert Zubrin presents a must-read that explains why environmental activists believe and push such an anti-human agenda.
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Early Praise for Merchants of Despair

“Robert Zubrin’s masterful study...makes for riveting reading. Merchants of Despair is a cautionary tale of what happens when powerful, unprincipled elites are not only alienated from the mass of their fellow men, but come to see them as a barrier to imagined social, evolutionary, or environmental progress.”

Steven W. Mosher

President, Population Research Institute

“Merchants of Despair is an extraordinary and important book....This fascinating volume carefully traces developments of the Malthusian hypothesis right up to the present: through eugenics to population control and genocide; through the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and extreme environmentalism to climate change and the myth of global warming apocalypse. It is a shocking exposé of a movement whose deadly history has remained hidden far too long. Robert Zubrin has my nomination for a Pulitzer Prize.”

S. Fred Singer

Chairman, Science and Environmental Policy Project
Author of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years

“I believe no one to date has so clearly explained the thread of the antihuman movement throughout history. To read this book is to become a warrior in the battle against it.”

Jay Lehr

Heartland Institute
[further comments here]

“The most devastating account and refutation of antihuman environmentalism ever written.”

Gregory Benford

Professor of Physics, University of California, Irvine
Contributing Editor, Reason magazine

“Such ‘humans-are-the-problem’ pessimism has a long pedigree, of course, and it’s outlined in a book just out.... Zubrin recounts shocking examples of European officials washing their hands of famine in India, Ireland and elsewhere in the name of eliminating surplus population. He describes the ugly eugenics fad that swept the U.S. in the early 20th century and the forcible sterilizations and other abominations that resulted, the rise of a population control movement in the postwar years whose leaders were eager to support, or unwilling to denounce, coercive and even violent policies in the Third World so long as they allegedly dampened population growth.”

Vincent Carroll

Denver Post columnist

“A terrific read!”

Glenn H. Reynolds

Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Tennessee
Instapundit.com

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