[Peace-discuss] Most amusing article I read this week
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Thu Nov 26 13:22:33 CST 2009
Because of the summary I just quoted in another post:
"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..."!
John W. wrote:
> 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
> <mailto: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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