Thomas Malthus
In 1798 a man named Thomas Malthus gave us "Malthusianism". We have him to thank for some of the most heartless, paternalistic tough-love policies of the 19th and 20th century all the way up to the present day. Malthus' theory was that population growth was exponential while food production was linear. He believed that humanity would overbreed and outstrip their resources, like the proverbial deer on an island with no predators overbreeding and subsequently starving because they've stripped the island of food.
Malthus' theory's main weakness is that he assumes human beings to be like deer, unaware and unthinkingly breeding away out of control. Because he believed that, he believed that humans could not be prevailed upon to curtail their own populations and had to be made to do it through paternalistic laws. He believed that charity and social assistance programs only encouraged people to have bigger families because it would enable them to support more children. He believed that by withholding help that the poor and dependent (read as "unfit", according to him) would quietly crawl away and die and leave more resources for the deserving.
Previous to this the source of heartlessness was the result of the religious reformation in England during which they adopted very strict forms of Protestantism which emphasized the impossibility of redemption and the importance of work. They believed that God had put us here not to have fun, but to work. If you weren't working, God and everybody else disapproved. All fun and pleasure was sin. That was their excuse for stinginess then. Malthus simply gave them another excuse, a scientific sounding one to go along with the "Enlightenment". They divided people up into "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, "deserving" meaning that you were working. They dispensed charity selectively based on this assessment.
Tough Love
His ideas were immediately applied across England beginning in the early 1800's. Parishes started being stingy with charity and rationalized it by saying that they didn't want to encourage the poor to breed more poor by helping them. They applied it especially cruelly during the Irish potato famine, and gave it a religious twist by sending in Protestant charities to provide aid, which they did, but only to Protestants. They'd help starving Catholic children too, but only if the family converted to Protestantism and attended services. They'd serve meat during lent in order to test the new converts, a test of conversion not unlike the tactics of the Spanish Inquisition in which Jewish converts to Catholicism were made to eat pork to prove they meant it. The potato famine itself was an engineered famine caused by the fact that all agricultural production in Ireland was for export, and the people themselves were left to subsist mainly on potatoes. When the potatoes failed, they had nothing else to eat. The English landlords had taken it all for export. Some would say that the potato blight caused the famine, but it might be more honest to say that the landlords and their greed caused it instead. They did it on purpose, according to the principles laid out by Malthus which had been adopted by the nobility. They sought to conquer Ireland, which they viewed as full of Catholics breeding out of control who needed to be thinned out a bit. A famine was just perfect for this purpose.
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| Victorian Orphans |
Victorians
The social conditions described in the works of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens were also the result of Malthusian policy, the idea that they were only being cruel to be kind. Instead of stingy social policy reducing the population and leading to prosperity for all, it increased poverty and the things that come with poverty like crime and disease and degradation of the human beings forced to live in it. They died, but not as fast as they had children in spite of the enforced poverty. It led to orphanages and workhouses, and debtor's prison. Not only did they not have access to birth control, they were completely ignorant of how their bodies worked, and the religious authorities at the time took a dim view of sex, especially non-reproductive sex, in general. The poor at the time were caught between two competing agendas, a rock and a hard place. They suffered for it tremendously. Instead of blaming bad policy and giving the poor the benefit of the doubt, the leading voices at the time blamed the poor for their own situation.
Social Darwinism
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| 20th Century Social Darwinism |
It was also during this time that Malthus' ideas were accepted and promoted by Charles Darwin. "Survival of the fittest" was also meant to apply to people, according to this melding of ideas. The ideas metastasized into eugenics, which enjoyed huge popularity in the United States and elsewhere by the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The popularity of eugenic theory and policy in America was only slowed down by WWII and the devastating effects of it in practice were shown by the Holocaust. America wanted to be the good guys, and to do that they had to distance themselves as much as possible from the things that had been done in the name of eugenics by Hitler. America no longer openly practiced eugenics, but they continued to apply Malthus' ideas to policy. They were still involuntarily sterilizing people according to things like medical diagnoses and race until the late 1970's, but they no longer made it public knowledge.
Social Darwinism was the idea that like animals, humans competed among themselves for resources. "Survival of the fittest", also known as "The law of the jungle". The leadership at the time were believers in this concept and they were determined not to leave evolution of the human species to chance. Since Europeans had come up with the idea, then naturally Europeans were superior and deserved to win in the competition for resources. They strategically made access to things like birth control and abortion available or not available depending on the demographics of an area, often along racial lines. Abortion was easily available in cities and places with a large immigrant or non-white population. In rural areas and areas with a majority white Protestant population, access to birth control and abortion was largely non-existent. They wanted to decide who was fit and unfit while not appearing to be manipulating access. Eugenics, but done quietly so as not to attract attention to the fact that the ruling class was playing God with our lives.
Malthusianism and Foreign Aid
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| First World = Western Countries, Second World = Communist Countries, Third World = Former Colonies |
When WWII was over and western countries had to decolonize, they labeled the former colonies "Third World" instead, or "developing nations". Never mind that they had been the ones who reduced those countries to destitution and destroyed their economies. They then turned their attention to the population differential between the West and the former colonies. Places like Africa and India and South America. Western nations had stripped much of the resources from their former colonies and much of the value. Now, they felt, the people in those countries were responsible for overpopulation and they were threatening to overtake the western countries in population. This was seen as taking up resources that would sustain future generations of Europeans and Americans and Australians. White people. The western nations began attaching caveats about population control to their foreign aid. They'd help these nations, but only if they got their population growth in check.
Where they opposed birth control and abortion in their own countries, they positively encouraged it in the southern hemisphere among the former colonies. A 1968 book called "The Population Bomb" by Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich. laid out a nightmare scenario in which unchecked population growth would lead to starvation and war as nations fought over resources. It turns out that we may still have to fight over resources, but not because of population growth. Instead it is because unchecked capitalism and industry have caused climate change and limited things like arable land and potable water. Instead of maximizing and protecting our resources, we focused on population in the "third world" and blame that for the situation. What it was really about was maintaining a controlling demographic over the world. Malthusianism is prevalent in national policy, but more so in international policy.
Why Malthus Was Wrong
Malthus was wrong because we're not animals. We're human beings, capable of reason and conscious change. We're also inventive and resourceful. It also turns out that human population moves in more of an arc. It reached a peak and now it is on a downward trend, which no doubt the Malthusians will take credit for, saying that the draconian policies they instituted have worked. Or they might not, because if they did that they wouldn't be able to continue saying that people south of the equator are breeding out of control and threaten to starve us all. Their experiment in controlling human reproduction on a grand scale cannot be successful because if it ever were, they would have to stop because they had achieved their goal.
The global birthrate is falling, and we haven't got Malthusian policies to thank for it. Instead, what shows the most success in limiting family size is to give women a choice. Giving them education and some other option besides motherhood has seen women deciding to limit their own families and give more resources to fewer children. Education and birth control made it possible for them to give their families a better life. They didn't have to have more children to support them in their old age or to work to contribute to the family resources. It's raising the quality of living and lowering the birth rate. There are only a couple of countries in the world where the birthrate exceeds replacement rate and in all of the others the birthrate is below replacement rate. It turns out that when women are given the choice instead of being strong-armed into family planning decisions, they choose wisely. We are not rabbits or deer. We are human beings and we can think. We are also making headway in creating more resources more sustainably to feed ourselves.
If we'd been left to our own devices, the problem was going to solve itself for the most part. It was unchecked capitalism and industry that created the problems we have now in terms of limited resources, not overpopulation.
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