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

[John W.]

I'm curious, Carl, why you chose the adjective "amusing" rather than, say,
"enlightening" or some other adjective.

John Wason


On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 11:47 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:

"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/
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