
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. (more…)