Murray Bookchin
The Population Myth
CONTENTS:
The Population Myth--I
The Population Myth--II
***********
The Population Myth--I
The "population problem" has a Phoenix-like existence: it rises from the
ashes at least every generation and sometimes every decade or so. The prophecies
are usually the same namely, that human beings are populating the earth in
"unprecedented numbers" and "devouring" its resources like a locust plague.
In the days of the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Malthus, a craven English
parson, formulated his notorious "law of population" which asserts that while
food supplies expand only arithmetically, population soars geometrically. Only
by wars, famines, and disease (Malthus essentially argued) can a "balance" be
struck between population and food supplies. Malthus did not mean this to be an
argument to foster human welfare; it was an unfeeling justification for the
inhuman miseries inflicted on the mass of English people by land grabbing
aristocrats and exploitative "industrialists." True to the mean-spirited
atmosphere of the times, Malthus opposed attempts to alleviate poverty because
they would remove the limits imposed on "population growth" by prolonging the
lives of the poor.
Malthus' "law" entered into Darwin's explanation of evolution and
re-emerged from biology as "social-Darwinism." Propounded vigorously in the U.S.
and England a generation later, this theory reduced society to a "jungle,"in
effect, in which a "law of survival of the fittest" justified the wanton
plundering of the world by the wealthy or the "fittest," while the laboring
classes, dispossessed farmers, and Third World "savages" were reduced to penury,
presumably because they were "unfit" to survive. The arrogance of bankers,
industrialists, and colonialists in the "Gilded Age" at the turn of the century
who dined on lavish dishes, while starved bodies were collected regularly in the
city streets of the western world -- all testified to a harsh class system that
invoked "natural law" to justify the opulence enjoyed by the ruling few and the
hunger suffered by the ruled many.
Barely a generation later, Malthusianism acquired an explicitly racist
character. During the early twenties, when"Anglo Saxon" racism peaked in the
U.S. against "darker" peoples like Italians, Jews, and so-called "Eastern
Europeans" the notion of "biological inferiority" led to explicitly exclusionary
im imigration laws that favored "northern Europeans" over other, presumably
"subhuman" peoples. Malthusianism, now prefixed with a "neo" to render it more
contemporary, thoroughly permeated this legislation. Population in the U.S. had
to be "controlled" and American "cultural" (read: racial) purity had to be
rescued -- be it from the "Yellow Peril" of Asia or the "Dark Peril" of the
Latin and Semitic worlds.
Nazism did not have to invent its racial imagery of sturdy "Aryans" who are
beleaguered by "subhuman" dark people, particularly Jews. Hitler saw himself as
the protector of a "northern European culture" from "Hebraic superstitions," to
use the juicy language of a contemporary well-known Arizona writer -- a
"cultural" issue that was riddled by fascist sociobiology. From Hitler's
"northern European" viewpoint, Europe was "over populated" and the continent's
ethnic groups had to be sifted out according to their racial background. Hence
the gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz, the execution squads that
followed the German army into Russia in the summer of 1941, and the systematic
and mechanized slaughter of millions in a span of three or four years.
The Phoenix Rises Again
One would have thought that the Second World War and the ugly traditions
that fed into it might have created a deeper sense of humanity and a more
sensitive regard for life -- nonhuman as well as human.
Judging from the way the "population problem" has surfaced again, however,
we seem even more brutalized than ever. By the late 1940s, before the wartime
dead had fully decayed, the "neo Malthusians" were back at work -- this time
over the use of newly developed pesticides for eradicating malaria and
antibiotics to control killing infections in the Third World. Even eminent
biologists like William Vogt entered the fray with books and articles, directing
their attacks at modern medicine for preserving human life and predicting
famines in Britain between 1948 and 1978 and imminent famine in Germany and
Japan. The debate, which often took an ugly turn, was overshadowed by the Korean
War and the blandly optimistic Eisenhower era, followed by the stormy sixties
period with its message of idealism, public service, and, if you please,
"humanism." But the decade barely came to a close when neo-Malthusianism
surfaced again -- this time with grim books that warned of a "population bomb"
and advocated an "ethics" of "triage" in which the nations that were recommended
for U.S. aid seemed uncannily to fall on the American side of the "Cold War,"
irrespective of their population growth-rates.
Viewed from a distance of two decades later, the predictions made by many
neo-Malthusians seem almost insanely ridiculous. We were warned, often in the
mass media, that by the 1980s, for example, artificial islands in the oceans
would be needed to accomodate the growing population densities on the
continents. Our oil supplies, we were told with supreme certainty, would be
completely depleted by the end of the century. Wars between starving peoples
would ravage the planet, each nation seeking to plunder the hidden food stores
of the others. By the late seventies, this "debate" took a welcome breather --
but it has returned again in full bloom in the biological verbiage of ecology.
Given the hysteria and the exaggerated "predictions" of earlier such "debates,"
the tone today is a little calmer. But in some respects it is even more
sinister. We have not been forced to turn our oceans into real estate, nor have
we run out of oil, food, material resources -- or neo-Malthusian prophets. But
we are acquiring certain bad intellectual habits and we are being rendered more
gullible by a new kind of religiosity that goes under the name of "spirituality"
with a new-styled paganism and primitivism.
First of all, we are thinking more quantitatively than qualitatively -- all
talk about "wholeness," "oneness," and "interconectedness" to the contrary
notwithstanding. For example, when we are told that the "population issue" is
merely a "matter of numbers," as one Zero Population Growth writer put it, then
the vast complexity of population growth and diminution is reduced to a mere
numbers game, like the fluctuations of Dow stock-market averages. Human beings,
turned into digits, can thus be equated to fruitflies and their numbers narrowly
correlated with food supply. This is "following the Dow" with a vengeance.
Social research, as distinguished from the Voodoo ecology that passes under the
name of "deep ecology" these days, reveals that human beings are highly social
beings, not simply a species of mammals. Their behavior is profoundly
conditioned by their social status, as people who belong to a particular gender,
hierarchy, class group, ethnic tradition, community, historical era, or adhere
to a variety of ideologies. They also have at their disposable powerful
technologies, material resources, science, and a naturally endowed capacity for
conceptual thought that provides them with a flexibility that few, if any,
nonhuman beings possess, not to speak of evolving institutions and capacities
for systematic group cooperation. Nothing, here, is more illusory than to
"follow the Dow." The bad intellectual habits of thinking out demographic -- or
even "resource" -- issues in a linear, asocial, and ahistorical manner tends to
enter into all ecological problems, thanks very much to the neo- Malthusians and
to a "biocentrism" that equates people to nonhuman life-forms.
Secondly, by reducing us to studies of line graphs, bar graphs, and
statistical tables, the neo-Malthusians literally freeze reality as it is. Their
numerical extrapolations do not construct any reality that is new; they mere
extend, statistic by statistic, what is basically old and given. They are
"futurists" in the most shallow sense of the word, not "utopians" in the best
sense. We are taught to accept society, behavior, and values as they are, not as
they should be or even could be. This procedure places us under the tyranny of
the status quo and divests us of any ability to think about radically changing
the world. I have encountered very few books or articles written by
neo-Malthusians that question whether we should live under any kind of money
economy at all, any statist system of society, or be guided by profit oriented
behavior. There are books and articles aplenty that explain "how to" become a
"morally responsible" banker, entrepreneur, landowner, "developer," or, for all
I know, arms merchant. But whether the whole system called capitalism (forgive
me!), be it corporate in the west or bureaucratic in the east, must be abandoned
if we are to achieve an ecological society is rarely discussed. Thousands may
rally around "Earth First!"'s idiotic slogan -- "Back to the Pleistocene!" --
but few, if they are conditioned by neo-MaIalthusian thinking, will rally around
the cry of the Left Greens -- "Forward to an Ecological Society!"
Lastly, neo-Malthusian thinking is the most backward ...
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