"Alongside today’s respect for human life there is the increasingly popular idea that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet.
Since the beginning of time, one of the
clearest markers of an enlightened society has been the moral status it
attaches to human life. And outwardly, at least, twenty-first-century
Western societies express an unprecedented degree of respect for human
life.
For example, cultural and political institutions continually talk about
the need to uphold human rights. The human rights narrative now shapes
policymaking, both domestically and internationally. Many even argue
that protecting human rights is a cross-border duty that should override
the principle of national sovereignty. Our societies are also
increasingly health-obsessed. The phenomenal growth in health
expenditure in recent years shows just how much prosperous societies
respect individual life today. Western societies will sometimes go to
extraordinary lengths in their efforts to keep a premature baby alive or
to prolong the life of elderly people or those who are chronically ill.
And yet, alongside the ethos of human rights and the development of
heroic medicine, contemporary society appears estranged from its own
humanity. To put it bluntly: it is difficult to celebrate human life in
any meaningful way when people – or at least the growth of the number of
people – are regarded as the source of the world’s problems. Alongside
today’s respect for human life there is the increasingly popular idea
that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet.
The humanist impulse that once drove the development of the modern world
has been replaced by a tendency to view humanity with suspicion, or
even outright hostility. The vocabulary of our times – ‘human impact on
the environment’; ‘ecological footprint’; ‘human consumption’ – invokes a
sense of dread over the active exercise of human life. Apparently,
there are too many of us doing too much living and breathing. In a world
where humanity is portrayed as a threat to the environment and to the
very survival of the planet, human activity – from birth to consumption
to procreation – is regarded as a mixed blessing. Consequently, our
concern with preserving and improving the quality of life of some people
sits uneasily with an increasingly shrill demand to prevent people from
being born in the first place.
Today, many green-leaning writers and activists argue that population
control is the best solution to the problems we face. This belief that
there are ‘too many people’ inhabiting the globe has reared its ugly
head numerous times over the past 200 years. Since the times of Thomas
Malthus (1766-1834), a catastrophic vision of population growth causing
the collapse of society has formed an important part of the culturally
pessimistic outlook. Back in the eighteenth century it was predicted
that population growth would lead to famine, starvation and death.
Today’s pessimists have raised the stakes further: they denounce
population growth as a threat to biodiversity and to the very existence
of the planet. Twenty-first-century Malthusians are not so much worried
about an impending famine: they’re more concerned that people are
producing and consuming too much food and other commodities.
Where in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Malthusians warned that
population growth threatened people with starvation, today’s
Malthusians denounce people for threatening the planet by consuming too
much. As a result, contemporary Malthusianism has an unusually strident
and misanthrophic streak. In the West, the population-control lobby
castigates those who have large families for being environmentally
irresponsible. Having children, especially lots of children, is now
discussed as an ‘eco-crime’ on a par with pollution. From this
perspective, a new human life is seen as little more than another
producer of carbon; new life is seen as a form of pollution. So it would
be better, the Malthusians argue, if these new human lives did not
exist at all. As one Malthusian crusader notes: ‘A non-existent person
has no environmental footprint; the emission “saving” is instant and
total.’ (1) This preference for the non-existent over the existent
speaks to a powerful anti-humanist sensibility. And it is not only
eccentric and isolated misanthropes who value ‘non-existence’ as being
somehow morally superior to existence – rather, this outlook is
symptomatic of a wider trend for devaluing the status of human life
today.
For contemporary Malthusians, every new child is another pollutant: she
may just be a baby now, but by the time she is 80 she will be
responsible for the emission of 9.3 tonnes of CO2! So why worry about
how much pollution your car causes? Apparently you should be far more
concerned with limiting the size of the population. ‘Population
limitation should…be seen as the most cost-effective carbon offsetting
strategy available to individuals and nations’, argues the dreary
British-based population-control outfit, the Optimum Population Trust
(OPT) (2). Once the emission of greenhouse gases is taken to be the
defining feature of human activity, then it follows that controlling
fertility is the ideal ‘carbon offsetting strategy’. ‘If we had half as
many people, we wouldn’t have much of a climatic warming problem’, says
Ric Oberlink of the US-based group Californians for Population
Stabilization (3). And no doubt if the human species disappeared off the
face of the Earth altogether, then the crisis of global warming would
resolve itself and the planet would be very happy.
For Oberlink and his associates, global warming is a symptom of the far
greater menace of population growth. ‘Global warming is a very serious
problem, but it is a subset of the overpopulation problem’, claims
Oberlink. John Seager, president of Population Connection, the American
campaign group that was formerly known as Zero Population Growth, also
believes that the ‘underlying cause of global warming’ is ‘human
population growth’ (4). The idea that population growth is the principal
threat to the planet is widely disseminated through the mainstream
media. While giving the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures earlier this
year, the economist Jeffrey Sachs argued that ‘our planet is crowded to
an unprecedented degree’, and such overcrowding is
‘creating….unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical
environment’ (5). This pessimistic view of population growth is so taken
for granted that it is very rarely challenged in mainstream
intellectual and cultural circles.
The catastrophic imagination in contemporary Western culture has
encouraged the Malthusian lobby to target the very aspiration for
procreation. Controlling fertility is now described as a duty rather
than a matter of choice. ‘Couples making decisions about family size do
so in the belief that it is a matter for them and their personal
preferences alone’, says the OPT, with incredulity (6). The idea that
people should have the right to make choices about their family size is
dismissed as an indefensible outrage against common sense.
This assault on the right to procreate is often intrusive, even
coercive. Take the example of Rwanda. The world was horrified by the
mass slaughter in Rwanda in 1994, during which an estimated 800,000
Rwandans were killed. Yet it appears that, so far as the
population-control lobby is concerned, there are still too many
people living in Rwanda. As one headline earlier this year put it:
‘After so many deaths, too many births.’ Apparently, ‘After the 1994
genocide, in which more than 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered, it
seemed difficult to believe that overpopulation would ever be a problem.
Yet Rwanda has long had more people than its meagre resources and small
area can support.’ Now, with the guidance of Western non-governmental
organisations (NGOs), the Rwandan government is planning a sweeping
population-control programme. From now on, everyone who visits a medical
centre will be ‘counselled’ about family planning (7). Experience shows
that such ‘counselling’ in reality means putting pressure on women to
use contraception.
It is in poverty-stricken, insecure countries like Rwanda, where people
lack the resources to assume even a modicum of control over their lives,
that the truly inhumane nature of population-control policies becomes
clear.
A cause in search of an argument
The distinctive feature of Malthusianism is its profound consciousness
of limits. The fatalistic Malthusian outlook looks upon people as
parasitic consumers whose appetites are limited only by the obstacles
thrown up by nature. Malthus’ Essay, which was written in 1798,
was a reaction against the optimistic visions of humanity put forward by
Enlightenment thinkers. For Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet
and Godwin, people were not simply consumers – they were are also
creative actors, innovators, producers. Thankfully, in the centuries
since he wrote Essay and other works, Malthus’ alarmist warnings
have proven to be unfounded: food production has generally increased in
line with population growth and there has not been a global famine.
However, the fact that Malthus’ predictions did not come true has not
discouraged anti-humanists from pursuing the population-control project.
They simply invent new reasons for why we must control population
growth.
Over the past two centuries, a bewildering array of problems has been
blamed on population growth. At various times, famine, poverty, the
failure of Third World economies, instability, revolution, the spread of
communism and the subordinate position of women have been linked to
population growth (8). The approach of the population growth lobby is
devastatingly simple: they take a problem and argue that it would
diminish in intensity if there were fewer people. Such simplistic
methodology is even used to account for the emergence of new forms of
terrorism today.
The Malthusian fantasy about a ‘ticking population bomb’ has been
recycled in a new form – now rising population is said to give rise to
real bombs in the form of Islamist terrorism. Apparently overpopulation
creates a lot of poor, unemployed, discontented men; and many of them
turn into troublemakers, which means that they can become canon fodder
for terrorist networks; thus they end up on the wrong side of the ‘war
on terror’. In the Seventies Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb,
argued that population growth in the South inexorably led to the
triumph of communism. Today he has recycled this simplistic diagnosis to
argue that population growth has led to the rise of international
terrorism. Demographic factors are ‘likely contributors’ to terrorism,
he claims. Why? Because the ‘vast majority of terrorists are young
males’ and there are ‘huge numbers of boys under 15’ in Muslim nations.
This idea that large numbers of young males equals a potential terrorist
threat is systematically promoted by the supporters of population
control. ‘It is impossible to ignore the link between rapid population
growth and terrorism’, says the director of the Population Coalition, a
collection of population-control groups. In truth, it is the logic of
the simpleton that sees a link between large numbers of young men and
terrorism: population-control activists believe that because population
is growing at the same time that new forms of terrorism are emerging,
then they must be linked! If we took this view to its logical
conclusion, then anything that coincides with current demographic
patterns – whether it’s Hurricane Katrina, the boom in property prices
in London or the popularity of iPods – could be linked to population
growth.
Prominent Malthusian organisations such as the Worldwatch Institute and
the Population Institute have set out to repose population control as an
effective counter-terrorist measure. Consider the Population
Institute’s study Breeding Insecurity: Global Security Implications Of Rapid Population Growth.
It argues that ‘rapid population growth in developing countries creates
national security problems, including civil unrest and terrorism’. The
report cites a study by another Malthusian group, Population Action
International, which claims that ‘youth bulges create instability and
increase the likelihood for terrorism and civil unrest by as much as 50
per cent’. Fifty per cent might sound like a big number – but this is an
entirely made-up figure, a figment of the Malthusian imagination which
is obsessed with constructing a relationship between demographic growth
and terrorism.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from the ‘50 per cent’ claim is that
the threat of terrorism could be halved if only we implemented a
vigorous programme of population control. Apparently the solution to the
problem of terrorism is to stop ‘them’ breeding. As the Population
Institute’s report concludes: ‘While family-planning programs will not
create a more secure world on their own, they will go a long way toward
reducing pressures on societies that lead to instability, unrest, and
terrorism.’
Losing faith in the human
You don’t have to be a sophisticated student of global politics to see
through the simplistic and opportunistic arguments on security put
forward by the new Malthusians. But then, the success of Malthusianism
has never been down to the rigour or eloquence of its ideas. Rather, the
success of Malthusian ideas depends on the strength of cultural
pessimism at any given time. And today it is the loss of faith in the
human potential, a fatalistic view of the future, which has rejuvenated
the population-control crusade.
So powerful is cultural pessimism today that even the special quality of
human life is now called into question. Today, pollution is seen as the
principal feature and consequence of human existence. Indeed, today’s
neo-Malthusian thinking is far more dismal and misanthropic than the
original version. For all his intellectual pessimism and lack of
imagination, Thomas Malthus possessed a far more robust belief in
humanity than do his contemporary followers. Although he shared today’s
cultural obsession with the limits of nature, he nonetheless expressed a
conviction that humanity had a positive role to play. He argued that
although ‘our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils
arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we
could wish…they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no
means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human
society, which before the late wild speculations on this subject, was
the object of rational expectation’ (9).
Malthus’ reservations about the human potential were a product of his
deep-seated hostility to the optimistic humanism of his intellectual
opponents: Condorcet, Godwin and others. And yet, he made it clear that
despite his pessimistic view of population growth ‘it is hoped that the
general result of [my] inquiry is not such as to make us give up the
improvement of human society in despair’ (10).
In contrast to today’s singularly pessimistic neo-Malthusians, Malthus’ On The Principle of Population
managed to convey a belief in humanity. Over the past two centuries,
his followers have often tried to discourage people from the ‘wrong’
classes and the ‘wrong races’ from procreating – yet despite their
prejudices they continued to affirm the special status of the human
species (or at least certain sections of it). In some instances – for
example, during the rise of the eugenic movement – rabid prejudice
against so-called racial inferiors was combined with a belief in human
progress.
By contrast, today’s Malthusians share all the old prejudices and in
addition they harbour a powerful sense of loathing against the human
species itself. Is it any surprise, then, that some of them actually
celebrate non-existence? The obsession with natural limits
distracts society from the far more creative search for solutions to
hunger or poverty or lack of resources. Worse still, by calling into
question the special quality of the human, the population-control lobby
seeks to corrode people’s confidence in their ability to tackle the
problems of the future. Human life should always be treated as precious
and special. How can there possibly be too many of us?
Frank Furedi is author of Population And Development; A Critical Introduction (Buy this book from Amazon(UK)).
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