THE idea that the world is overpopulated and thus cannot sustain high fertility is one of the most well-funded ideas in the 21st century. Bill and Melinda Gates, for example, are developing new ways to sterilize humanity as we speak — and spending billions on it.

But overpopulation is also a patently false idea when presented as scientific fact, based as it is on subjective standards of what is good. It is a concept propelled into wide circulation by poor thinking and also by misanthropy — a real and true disdain for human beings.

In his book The Death of Christian Culture, John Senior explains why we cannot ever project scientifically that the world will have too many people and why we can confidently say, “The more the merrier:”

The Zero Population Group prefers contraception and abortion because, they say, the world cannot support geometrically increasing numbers of people. They have revived the error of the eighteenth century amateur sociologist, Malthus, who applied the abstract science of geometry to concrete, real, contingent, human — and therefore capricious — beings, which never works. If such and such a trend continues, he said, such and such occurs. But such and such a trend does not continue and surprises undreamt of occur. As it turns out — we know this not by geometric projection but by observation of what has happened — in the first stages of transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, there is a population spurt because medical technology reduces infant deaths. But then fertility falls off as industrialization advances. There are spurts again in times of happiness and hope; a few year’s peace after war, prosperity after depression, freedom from totalitarianism. There have been local jiggles upward when an ice storm breaks the power lines and kills the television set, when husbands and wives discover an unexpected night of happiness and hope away from the latest news.

But the chilling truth is that industrialism brings on paralyzing gluttony and greed in which the quality of life is quantified. Paradoxically, you cannot afford to have children in the affluent society. The world has never been so rich and wretched as in these air-conditioned Edens where another child would sap the payments on the second car. There is no population bomb today. Quite the opposite: the question is whether industrialized society can reproduce itself at all.

Malthus said two hundred years ago that population growth would outrun the food supply in England by 1850. He was wildly wrong. By 1850 England had Birmingham and Manchester, with their “dark Satanic mills” — and scientific agriculture. The Zero Population Growth predicted mass starvation in India by 1972 — wildly wrong. The Indians have socialism and hybrid grain. Malthusian predictions fail for two reasons: 1) in industrial societies fertility falls; and 2) human beings have intelligence.

They say a finite planet cannot sustain an infinite increase of population. Earth, they say, is like a space ship with limited life supports. But man is part of earth and not merely on it and the planet earth therefore is not a finite globe at all, because when man is multiplied, intelligence is multiplied infinitely. The life supports are limited only by the intelligence of man; and intelligence is not limited. Josue de Castro, a founder and director of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and one of the five or six world-renowned men in the field of human population problems, put the argument succinctly in a phrase: “Every time a child is born, not just a mouth to feed is born, but hands and brains.”

There is no population bomb; and even if there were, even if the wildest geometric projections were true, the world would still be pretty much the same — troubled, risky, polluted, challenging, and good, because as men multiply, intelligence and will are multiplied, for better and for worse, richer and poorer. We are always on the razor’s edge of glory and annihilation. The population of the world doubled when Eve had two sons; it was cut a fourth by Cain. Today we have looked at Lake Erie and Los Angeles, at hungry people in India, at desperate, unwed pregnant little girls in suburbs, and panicked. What is the cause of ecological and sociological evil? Men, we say. Men, pollute. If you multiply men, since men are wicked, you multiply malice and destruction.

[…]

Do sane men really think they can lessen wickedness by lessening the number of people? Would greed and lust be satisfied even if only two were left on earth and earth were Paradise?

Imagine a world inhabited only by a small number of Malthusians. What a miserable place that would be! Senior continues:

A cripple, a tiny mongoloid that lives if only for a day, an old toothless crone driveling with death but still alive, respond if only with a flicker in the eyes — and that flicker is infinite in value, worth the universe.

[….]

When brides and grooms make promises til death, they are saying something radically audacious that no geometer can measure, no science can comprehend. Love is an act of generosity, the root of which is “generate,” because intelligent life is the greatest good in nature. We want more children because the good is diffusive and love increases by giving. Come what will, come what may, whatever the risk, it is a risk of certainty that human life is good. The more the merrier.

[The Death of Christian Culture, John Senior, IHS Press, Norfolk, Virginia; 2008, pp 25-26.]

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