The Holocaust was seen as “applied biology,” he said, observing that the Nazi party openly said that it wanted to eliminate those who were unfit and succeeded in committing terrible crimes
“because this ideology was so pervasive.”
In America, the eugenics movement consisted largely of anti-immigration efforts, Zubrin said. Such efforts targeted those deemed inferior, who were considered to be “threatening the complete mental degeneration of the United States.”
More recently, the anti-humanist ideology has appeared in China’s brutal one-child policy, which utilizes forced abortions and sterilizations to prevent couples from having more than one child, he added.
Today, anti-humanism can also be seen in the radical environmental movement, Zubrin said.
He offered multiple examples of efforts to suppress the human population for the sake of the environment, while ignoring the fact that “humans have improved the fertility of the biosphere.”
Opposition to chemicals and procedures that could save millions of human lives because of their effects on the environment shows a deeply anti-humanist viewpoint, he said.
“This isn’t about the environment at all,” he explained. “This is about making the case that humanity needs to be prosecuted.”
In the end, Zubrin said, this is a debate “about the nature of humanity.”
The anti-human point of view sees human beings as fundamentally destroyers whose activity must be limited and controlled, while the pro-human point of view sees human beings as essentially creators, for whom liberty is “a necessity,” he said.
Arguing that an anti-human ideology can quickly become “an incitement to genocide,” Zubrin explained that the choice is ultimately one between “war and peace, death and life, hate and love.”
Michelle La Rosa is deputy editor-in-chief of Catholic News Agency. She has worked for CNA since 2011. She studied political philosophy and journalism at the University of Dallas.