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

[C. G. Estabrook]

I'll ignore the gratuitous insult -- I'm in favor of women's freedom -- and 
reply that the article is quite serious and worthwhile as (among other things) a 
condemnation of the American enthusiasm for eugenics (where the Nazis learnt it).

And I love the description of it on Arts & Letters Daily: "The world has too 
many Malthusians, and what’s worse, they are multiplying like rabbits, becoming 
a burden to clear thinking about human population growth..."!

Recent history shows that population advance slows with development. People 
(typically in the third World) aren't poor because they have too many children: 
they have too many children because they're poor.  An extended family is the 
only social security for the poor in much of the world.

See now the important new book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, "The 
Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better."  The argument 
is summarized in the subtitle:

"among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every 
quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer 
overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for 
general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 
per cent of the population ... The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to 
make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant 
mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of 
rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the 
performance invariably is."  --CGE


Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> Most intelligent and educated people, not necessarily including "people of
> faith", realize that the earth and its resources for life and humanity are
> finite, and see evidence all around them that a limiting of population will
> be ultimately necessary, willy-nilly. Wars and/or pestilence, climate change,
> etc. may do the trick. The Chinese leaders and now even those in India know
> this, and are trying to act on it. They do not need, or want, more people. We
> are worrying about where our next kilowatt may be coming from—and at what
> price, what is happening to living species—aquatic, wildlife, how we are
> affecting the climate, you name it.
> 
> Should we contemplate an earth of 50 billion people? How about a USA of 2
> billion people? How will those people feed themselves, care for themselves,
> from farms on Mars? From voyages to outer space? The problems we have now, in
> almost all domains, will only worsen with increasing population; from the
> evidence we have, that seems obvious, but unfortunately not to some.
> 
> We know a lot more now then we knew in Malthus' times, and Ehrlich may have
> been wrong in his specifics, but not in his understanding.
> 
> Obviously, the lower economic strata will suffer the most. Those in the upper
> strata may survive, but will find their isolated and private vacation spots
> increasingly hard to locate.
> 
> In effect, this article is crap, and hardly amusing. It goes along with the
> campaign to limit women's freedom, as for example in our current debate about
> health care for all. Carl, of course, is an exponent of this point of view.
> 
> --mkb
> 
> 
> On Nov 23, 2009, at 11:47 PM, C. G. Estabrook 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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