[Peace-discuss] Most amusing article I read this week

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Since 200 AD, scaremongers have been describing human beings as ‘burdensome to 
the world’. They were wrong then, and they’re still wrong today."

	Thursday 19 November 2009
	Too many people? No, too many Malthusians
	Brendan O’Neill

[Last week, on 12 November, spiked editor Brendan O’Neill debated Roger Martin, 
chairman of the Optimum Population Trust, at the Wellcome Collection in London. 
To kick off spiked’s campaign against neo-Malthusianism and all forms of 
population control, O’Neill’s speech is published below.]

In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180million human beings on the 
planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: 
‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… 
already nature does not sustain us.’ In other words, there were too many people 
for the planet to cope with and we were bleeding Mother Nature dry. [WORTH 
NOTING THAT TERTULLIAN WAS A KNOWN CRANK AMONG THE CHURCH FATHERS --CGE]

Well today, nearly 180million people live in the Eastern Half of the United 
States alone, in the 26 states that lie to the east of the Mississippi River. 
And far from facing hunger or destitution, many of these people – especially the 
1.7million who live on the tiny island of Manhattan – have quite nice lives.

In the early 1800s, there were approximately 980million human beings on the 
planet Earth. One of them was the population scaremonger Thomas Malthus, who 
argued that if too many more people were born then ‘premature death would visit 
mankind’ – there would be food shortages, ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’, 
which would ‘sweep off tens of thousands [of people]’.

Well today, more than the entire world population of Malthus’s era now lives in 
China alone: there are 1.3billion human beings in China. And far from facing 
pestilence, plagues and starvation, the living standards of many Chinese have 
improved immensely over the past few decades. In 1949 life expectancy in China 
was 36.5 years; today it is 73.4 years. In 1978 China had 193 cities; today it 
has 655 cities. Over the past 30 years, China has raised a further 235million of 
its citizens out of absolute poverty – a remarkable historic leap forward for 
humanity.

In 1971 there were approximately 3.6billion human beings on the planet Earth. 
And at that time Paul Ehrlich, a patron of the Optimum Population Trust and 
author of a book called The Population Bomb, wrote about his ‘shocking’ visit to 
New Delhi in India. He said: ‘The streets seemed alive with people. People 
eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, screaming. 
People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating 
and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, 
people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, [we wondered] would we ever 
get to our hotel…?’

You’ll be pleased to know that Paul Ehrlich did make it to his hotel, through 
the mob of strange brown people shitting in the streets, and he later wrote in 
his book that as a result of overpopulation ‘hundreds of millions of people will 
starve to death’. He said India couldn’t possibly feed all its people and would 
experience some kind of collapse around 1980.

Well today, the world population is almost double what it was in 1971 – then it 
was 3.6billion, today it is 6.7billion – and while there are still social 
problems of poverty and malnutrition, hundreds of millions of people are not 
starving to death. As for India, she is doing quite well for herself. When 
Ehrlich was writing in 1971 there were 550million people in India; today there 
are 1.1billion. Yes there’s still poverty, but Indians are not starving; in fact 
India has made some important economic and social leaps forward and both life 
expectancy and living standards have improved in that vast nation.

What this potted history of population scaremongering ought to demonstrate is 
this: Malthusians are always wrong about everything.

The extent of their wrongness cannot be overstated. They have continually 
claimed that too many people will lead to increased hunger and destitution, yet 
the precise opposite has happened: world population has risen exponentially over 
the past 40 years and in the same period a great many people’s living standards 
and life expectancies have improved enormously. Even in the Third World there 
has been improvement – not nearly enough, of course, but improvement 
nonetheless. The lesson of history seems to be that more and more people are a 
good thing; more and more minds to think and hands to create have made new 
cities, more resources, more things, and seem to have given rise to healthier 
and wealthier societies.

Yet despite this evidence, the population scaremongers always draw exactly the 
opposite conclusion. Never has there been a political movement that has got 
things so spectacularly wrong time and time again yet which keeps on rearing its 
ugly head and saying: ‘This time it’s definitely going to happen! This time 
overpopulation is definitely going to cause social and political breakdown!’

There is a reason Malthusians are always wrong. It isn’t because they’re stupid… 
well, it might be a little bit because they’re stupid. But more fundamentally it 
is because, while they present their views as fact-based and scientific, in 
reality they are driven by a deeply held misanthropy that continually overlooks 
mankind’s ability to overcome problems and create new worlds.

The language used to justify population scaremongering has changed dramatically 
over the centuries. In the time of Malthus in the eighteenth century the main 
concern was with the fecundity of poor people. In the early twentieth century 
there was a racial and eugenic streak to population-reduction arguments. Today 
they have adopted environmentalist language to justify their demands for 
population reduction.

The fact that the presentational arguments can change so fundamentally over 
time, while the core belief in ‘too many people’ remains the same, really shows 
that this is a prejudicial outlook in search of a social or scientific 
justification; it is prejudice looking around for the latest trendy ideas to 
clothe itself in. And that is why the population scaremongers have been wrong 
over and over again: because behind the new language they adopt every few 
decades, they are really driven by narrow-mindedness, by disdain for mankind’s 
breakthroughs, by wilful ignorance of humanity’s ability to shape its 
surroundings and its future.

The first mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate how society can 
change to embrace more and more people. They make the schoolboy scientific error 
of imagining that population is the only variable, the only thing that grows and 
grows, while everything else – including society, progress and discovery – stays 
roughly the same. That is why Malthus was wrong: he thought an overpopulated 
planet would run out of food because he could not foresee how the industrial 
revolution would massively transform society and have an historic impact on how 
we produce and transport food and many other things. Population is not the only 
variable – mankind’s vision, growth, his ability to rethink and tackle problems: 
they are variables, too.

The second mistake Malthusians always make is to imagine that resources are 
fixed, finite things that will inevitably run out. They don’t recognise that 
what we consider to be a resource changes over time, depending on how advanced 
society is. That is why the Christian Tertullian was wrong in 200 AD when he 
said ‘the resources are scarcely adequate for us’. Because back then pretty much 
the only resources were animals, plants and various metals. Tertullian could not 
imagine that, in the future, the oceans, oil and uranium would become resources, 
too. The nature of resources changes as society changes – what we consider to be 
a resource today might not be one in the future, because other, better, more 
easily-exploited resources will hopefully be discovered or created. Today’s cult 
of the finite, the discussion of the planet as a larder of scarce resources that 
human beings are using up, really speaks to finite thinking, to a lack of 
future-oriented imagination.

And the third and main mistake Malthusians always make is to underestimate the 
genius of mankind. Population scaremongering springs from a fundamentally warped 
view of human beings as simply consumers, simply the users of resources, simply 
the destroyers of things, as a kind of ‘plague’ on poor Mother Nature, when in 
fact human beings are first and foremost producers, the discoverers and creators 
of resources, the makers of things and the makers of history. Malthusians 
insultingly refer to newborn babies as ‘another mouth to feed’, when in the real 
world another human being is another mind that can think, another pair of hands 
that can work, and another person who has needs and desires that ought to be met.

We don’t merely use up finite resources; we create infinite ideas and 
possibilities. The 6.7billion people on Earth have not raped and destroyed this 
planet, we have humanised it. And given half a chance – given a serious 
commitment to overcoming poverty and to pursuing progress – we would humanise it 
even further. Just as you wouldn’t listen to that guy who wears a placard saying 
‘The End of the World is Nigh’ if he walked up to you and said ‘this time it 
really is nigh’, so you shouldn’t listen to the always-wrong Malthusians. 
Instead, join spiked in opposing the population panickers.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. His satire on the green movement - Can I 
Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas - is published by Hodder & 
Stoughton. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) The above is an edited extract of a 
speech given at the Wellcome Collection in London on Thursday 12 November.

reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7723/