Screeds
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Are We Good For Us, Part One
April 27, 2004
To those Palace readers who've been wondering, "just where do you get all this stuff?" your Curmudgeon will now disclose his secret weapon: yourselves. Readers write to the Palace every day with intriguing ideas for your Curmudgeon to explore. Without that source of stimulus and inspiration, these essays would be far less frequent, and much harder to produce.
Among the most potent items in that arsenal is reader Pascal, who writes frequently with ideas that he's just too busy to address at his own very worthwhile site. Your Curmudgeon has availed himself freely of these ideas, as he's about to do once again.
In a missive on the misanthropy inherent in the campaign to limit human births, Pascal wrote:
I believe that we can tie much of what appears to be illogical to this desire to limit human population by a few, and by the many who are misled into believing that either God or nature -- including human nature's drive to overcome any adversity -- will be insufficient. You know: those who are convinced that Malthus has just got to be eventually correct.
Indeed. More, consideration of the assumptions behind anti-natalism opens the way to a much larger, more sweeping set of assumptions and convictions about Man and his place in the universe. Their implications are staggering.
First, let's flesh out the Malthus reference. Thomas Malthus was an English clergyman of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, who became well known for his writings on population. Malthus believed he had discovered a fundamental principle that prescribed limits to population: the expansion of the food supply. The human population, he asserted, expands geometrically: that is, each generation is the size of the previous one times some factor greater than one. However, he continued, the food supply available to humans can only expand arithmetically: each generation's food supply is the size of the previous one plus some increment.
That pair of assumptions guarantees that, sooner or later, Man will out-breed his food supply, and death by starvation will "level the population with the food of the world." For the complete argument, refer to Malthus's First Essay On The Principle Of Population.
This has been the linchpin argument for the anti-natalists ever since it was first published. On this basis, all sorts of coercive measures, from tax penalties for large families to the involuntary sterilization of those who had reproduced to their "quota," have been advanced as vital to the survival of the human race.
However, Malthus's assumptions are both incorrect. Indeed, it appears not only that he was born too soon -- well before the industrialization of agriculture -- but also that he failed to appreciate human perception, will, and adaptability.
It is now well known -- at any rate, it should be -- that human fecundity declines as human prosperity increases. Birth rates are highest among the poorest peoples of the world, and lowest among the richest. The effect is even observable within national borders. The following statistics tell the tale:
This effect has several causes, all of which are food for thought, but it's the effect itself that matters most. The combination of prosperity-driven declines in human fecundity and Green Revolution agriculture has eliminated the possibility that Man will out-breed his food supply in the foreseeable future.
Malthus was, quite simply, wrong. Moreover, the indications that he was wrong became visible to him in his lifetime, as his later writings show.
There are any number of places in the world where people starve, as hunger activists will tell you. But the problem is not that the food to sustain them is unavailable. The problem is almost always political interference. There was never a better example of this than Ethiopia under the Marxist dictatorship of Haile Mengistu Maryam. Solicited by international relief workers and provided by a compassionate developed world, food aid arrived at Ethiopia's ports of entry in fantastic quantities. The regime then used it as a weapon, to force the resettlement of starving Eritreans and make it more difficult for anti-Marxist resistance forces to hide. Many thousands died of starvation even as the food that could have saved them languished in government warehouses or rotted at the docks. This pattern has been reproduced under many a totalitarian regime.
The Malthusian argument, and its refutation by statistics on population growth and food supply growth, constitutes a case study in what persuasion expert Michael Emerling called "isolating the issue." The anti-natalist argues his case based on Malthus's logic. His opponent replies, "If I could show you through objective data that this is not the case, would you be willing to reconsider your position?" A disheartening percentage of the time, the answer will be NO -- and when his opponent probes for the anti-natalist's real reason for wanting to limit human births, it proves to be something he'd rather not discuss.
There are arguments to the effect that the limitless expansion of Man would perforce eliminate the rest of the natural world, to the detriment of Man as well. These arguments have some substance. Moreover, people in general are sensitive to the idea, which is why they endorse wilderness conservation and open space preservation initiatives. However, the economic forces unleashed by those things automatically act to depress reproduction rates to the required degree; there's no need to penalize human births alongside them. Any country where people are economically secure enough to fund wilderness conservation programs will be in no danger of overbreeding or destroying nature, in any sense of those terms.
But, as with the refutation of the Malthusian argument, this proves not to be enough to change many anti-natalists' minds. One cannot help but wonder whether, to those who are determined to remain unpersuaded, the coercive control of human reproduction is an end in itself.
Assume that, just to see where its implications lead you. Pascal and your Curmudgeon believe they bring us inexorably here. Alternative destinations would certainly be preferable.
