THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

DO YOU REMEMBER THE MOVIE "SOYLENT GREEN?" | 2003-12-13

In the 1960s, at the end of the post-World War II "baby boom," Fashionable Opinion said the white population was growing wildly. The solution to this, said Fashionable Opinion, was for bureaucrats to take over population control. To save the world from overpopulation, we had to let the professors, the "intellectuals," decide how many children each person should have.

Charleton Heston's 1973 movie "Soylent Green" was about the Inevitable Future when America was so packed with people that everybody was desperately poor. We ended up eating each other.

In "Soylent Green" Evil Americans had killed every other form of life and ended up eating each other. "Soylent Green" was made when Charleton Heston was a big Bobby Kennedy supporter -- he says he still is -- and the big liberal demand was to turn birth control over to the bureaucrats.

At the same time that "Soylent Green" came out there was the usual flurry of science fiction books saying exactly the same thing. One of them talked about the Inevitable Future when white people would be jamming Britain so tightly that no one could move.

Shortly after "Soylent Green" was produced, the liberal line changed. It turned out that by the 1960s the world's white population was not expanding, it was dropping. It took quite a while before Fashionable Opinion realized that, once again, its predictions were wrong.

After it sunk in that the post-World War II white "baby boom" was over and the white population was declining, all those books were forgotten.

As usual, the Inevitable Future predicted by liberals turned out to be silly. So they needed a new Inevitable Future.

The next Inevitable Future was typified by a book called "The Population Bomb."