[DEBATE] : The rise and rise of the New Malthusianism

[Russell]

Friday 30 May 2008
The rise and rise of the New Malthusianism

Fatal Misconception is a thorough study of the history of the
population-control lobby - but it fatally underestimates how influential the
new green-leaning Malthusianism has become.
Frank Furedi 

Population is almost always linked to a problem of one kind or another.
Historically, most societies regarded people as the source of economic and
political power - so for them, the 'population problem' was often not having
enough people to work on the land and fight against potential enemies.
Consequently, most cultures were pro-natalist; they encouraged people to
have large families. Since the emergence of modernity, however, such
pro-natalism has been undermined by a new view of population growth as
something we should dread. In the nineteenth century, the anti-natalist
philosophy of Thomas Malthus inspired a powerful movement for curbing
population growth. 
The central preoccupation of the Malthusian movement was not simply growth
itself, but a fear that the wrong kind of people tend to have the highest
fertility rates. The problem, apparently, was one of differential fertility
rates; Malthusians were haunted by anxiety that families of the wrong class
and the wrong colour might overwhelm those who came from the right stock.
Not surprisingly, then, they had a very selective attitude towards
population control. They were principally concerned with controlling the
population growth of 'other people'. At the dawn of the twentieth century,
the Malthusian agenda resonated with elites who were concerned about the
birth rate of the lower classes. The fear that these classes might outbreed
others, and contribute to the degeneration of 'the race', fostered a new
eugenic outlook. Eugenics was seen as a science that could improve the human
stock by promoting superior races over 'less suitable' ones. 
As Matthew Connelly notes in his new book Fatal Misconception: The Struggle
to Control World Population, there where two distinct - if not always
unconnected - strands to eugenics. One strand promoted racially motivated
policies such as forced sterilisation, immigration quotas and, in the case
of Nazi Germany, physical extermination of people deemed to be unfit. The
other strand, which Connelly refers to as 'reform eugenics', did not 'reject
the mainline idea that more privileged socioeconomic and racial groups
tended to display more desirable characteristics'. However, it 'simply did
not emphasise it'. Instead 'reform eugenics' stressed the 'potential for
improved conditions to nurture talent and ability at every social level'. 
After the experience of the Second World War, eugenics in its overtly racial
form stood discredited. Many of those who had been devoted to pursuing
population-growth policies now embraced 'reform eugenics' and rebranded
themselves as family planners. 
Since the end of Second World War, the population-control lobby has
carefully presented itself as a benevolent and technocratic movement. It
understands that it can no longer publicly air racial concerns about 'unfit
people'. In 1952, William Vogt, a leading figure in the postwar Malthusian
movement in America, told his colleagues that 'it is commonly said in the
Orient what we want to cut their population because we are afraid of them'.
Yet he insisted that the programme of population control 'can be sold on the
basis of the mother's health and health of the other children', and 'there
will be no trouble getting into foreign countries on that basis'. Fatal
Misconception provides numerous examples of how the population-control lobby
sought to package its mission as an innocuous public health initiative. 
Connelly's book is an excellent work of reference on the history of the
population-control movement. It is based on a rigorous and scholarly
exploration of key archival sources, and it gives important insights into
the emergence and the workings of the population-control lobby. In essence,
this is a story about a small group of energetic and determined crusaders
who, through their network of contacts, gained significant influence over
governments and international organisations. The Malthusian cause has never
let principle stand in the way of an opportunity; it has continually
redefined its image in order to win favour with the public. In the past 60
years, it has presented population control as a poverty-reduction measure, a
'development policy', an instrument of family planning, a precondition for
improving the position of women, a way of giving more choice to families,
and, more recently, as a necessary measure to save the environment and the
planet. 
Connelly examines in detail how careful population controllers are in their
use of language. In 1968, the population-control movement succeeded in
getting a United Nations conference to proclaim that 'parents have a basic
human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of
their children'. In truth, the Malthusian movement was not interested in the
human right of families to determine freely to have lots of children. As one
American Malthusian told a meeting of officials, 'in this company it is not
necessary to argue that our primary purpose is to reduce the rate of
population growth'; he added that human rights were 'means not ends'. Since
the 1960s, the rhetoric of 'rights' has become an important part of
Malthusianism. However, it interprets the term 'rights' selectively indeed,
to mean that people should have the smallest family possible. 
Yet despite the reams of evidence he uncovers, Connelly is far too
uncritical of the rhetoric and agenda of the family-planning movement. He
argues that it is 'important to commemorate the struggle for reproductive
rights' while recognising that the leaders of this struggle were complicit
in pursuing a sordid anti-people agenda. He naively assumes that because it
no longer uses the term 'population control', the movement must no longer be
pursuing 'the same hidden agenda'. Maybe. But today's reproductive rights
professionals are no less prescriptive, and no less inhibited about assuming
they have the moral authority to plan other people's family size, than the
old Malthusians were. 
New trends in Malthusianism 
It is important to point out that anxieties about population growth often
emerge independently of real demographic trends. The demographic
consciousness is not just about apparently tangible 'problems'; indeed,
quite often fears that have little to do with demography are expressed
through the prism of population. As one American author has noted: 'What is
called a demographic problem may better be described as a moral and
intellectual problem that takes a demographic form.' (1) At times, racial
and elite anxieties and concern about national security or the environment
have been discussed through the idea of demography. One weakness of Fatal
Misconception is that it isolates the story about the population-control
movement from broader social and historical trends. It observes that 'world
population growth is slowing, and the Heroic Age of population control
appears to be over, at least for now'. And yet, ironically, even though
population growth has slowed, Malthusianism has never been as influential as
it is today. 
Connelly is right to argue that the term 'population control' has been
discredited. However, there has never been a time like now when the
advocates for reducing population levels have been so brazen and strident.
Of course, their arguments are rarely couched in the language of eugenics or
race. The theme of 'competitive fertility rates' is only an aside in the
contemporary Malthusian narrative: for example, there are still occasional
warnings about the rapid growth of Europe's Muslim population and about 'too
many old people' weighing down Western societies. Today, most of the
warnings about population growth are linked to the campaign to 'save the
planet' from a rapidly breeding human species. 
Where in the nineteenth century Malthusians warned that population growth
threatened to cause some people to starve to death, today they denounce
people for threatening the planet by consuming too much. Contemporary
Malthusianism has taken on an openly anti-human form. In the West, the
population control lobby now busily castigates those who have large families
as having committed an 'eco-crime'. Having children, especially lots of
children, is treated as an offence on a par with mass pollution. From this
viewpoint, another human life is treated as just another amount of carbon
emissions. Little wonder that it is seen as preferable for some humans not
to exist at all. 
'Humans are too great a threat to life on earth: they should be phased out.'
That is the message of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. As one more
mainstream Malthusian argues, 'a non-existent person has no environmental
footprint; the emission "saving" is instant and total' (2). This obvious
preference for the 'non-existent' over the 'existent' exposes the powerful
anti-humanist sentiment in contemporary Malthusianism. It is not only
eccentric, isolated misanthropes who celebrate 'non-existence' today:
rather, this outlook is symptomatic of wider cultural trends that devalue
and denigrate human life. 
There is evidence that population scares have steadily been gaining
influence since the turn of the new millennium. The idea that population
growth is the principal threat to the planet is now taken seriously
throughout the mainstream media. Giving the BBC's prestigious Reith Lecture
in 2007, the influential economist Jeffrey Sachs argued: 'Our planet is
crowded to an unprecedented degree. [and this is] creating unprecedented
pressures on human society and on the physical environment.' (3) Such
pessimistic arguments are rarely challenged in mainstream intellectual and
cultural debate today. For most of the twentieth century, Malthusianism was
confined to the margins of Western intellectual life - today, it has gone
mainstream. Contrary to the argument put forward in this powerful but flawed
book, the crusade to control the world's population levels has never been as
influential as it is right now. 
Frank Furedi is the author of many books, including Population and
Development: A Critical Introduction, published by Polity in 1997. (Buy this
book from Amazon(UK).) Visit Furedi's website here. 
Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, by Matthew
Connelly is published by Harvard University Press. (Buy this book from
Amazon(UK).) 
(1) See Eberstadt, 'Population change and national security', Foreign
Affairs, Summer 1991, p.127 
(2) A Population-Based Climate Strategy - An Optimum Population Trust
Briefing, by David Nicholson-Lord, May 2007 
(3) Lecture 1: Bursting at the Seams, Reith Lectures 2007 
reprinted from:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5213/