That the World is "overpopulated" is almost universally believed by the inhabitants of the West.
That this is believed at a time when prosperity has never before been so widely enjoyed and when the technology for the production, processing, storage and transportation of food has never been more advanced seems surprising.
True, the rate of human population growth has been rapid over the last several generations and may, therefore, be closer to the upper limit than before. But the limit is not fixed but is constantly advanced as a consequence of developments on a vast technological frontier.
Thus, whether we have already passed the carrying capacity of the planet or have yet to reach even the 5 or 10% mark would seem a question entirely beyond the capacity of the average person to judge.
One must conclude, therefore, that anxiety about population is attributable to anti-growth propaganda featuring more or less bogus claims about "peak oil" and global warming, the deification of the Environment, and as I have suggested elsewhere, the self-hating racism of those experiencing civilizational collapse, due to a failure, not of the means of physical support, but of will.
But even if it were possible to show, which it is not, that the world is in some sense "overpopulated," there seems no reason for panic.
If the population exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet, nature will take care of a reduction. No need for a tyrannical elite to dictate who can reproduce and who must die, or to turn morality on its head and announce that killing babies is "permissible".
Overpopulation is part of the normal process of evolution. All animal species at some times exceed the carrying capacity of their habitat. Then the population crashes and the cycle repeats.
One evolutionary biologist, Prof Wynne Edwards, at Aberdeen University, had the idea that animals regulate their numbers to prevent overpopulation, but this proved, by empirical research, to be a fallacy.
The reason that no mechanism preventing overpopulation has evolved is that it is beneficial neither to the individual nor the group and thus provides no basis for natural selection.
The strategy all organisms follow is to multiply to the max which insures that when the population crash comes, those with the most progeny have the best chance of being represented in succeeding generations.
In the past, among humans, the wealthy had the best chance of raising a large family. Because wealth was roughly correlated with desirable physical traits and high mental capacity, the reproductive success of the wealthy was good for the species.
In a competitive world, not all the offspring of the wealthy were able to maintain the wealth and status as their parents. This meant that members of the upper classes were constantly being pushed down into the lower strata of society, which ensured that desirable physical, mental and cultural traits were propagated throughout the population.
Now, under the welfare state, the system has gone into reverse. The most educated women have the fewest children and posterity is disproportionately derived from the lowest social classes. This will have catastrophic consequences for Western society.
If you want my opinion, what you have here are clear manifestations, undeniably, of vestiges of the very long and enduring eras of cannibalism which afflicted and enticed humanity during preceding eras of sequential famine and shortage which evidently, since the human genome cannot adjust nearly in real time to the vast alteration of the ecological niche in which it now finds itself, manifest in ways we are now able to discern as manifestly primeval.
ReplyDeleteRegards.
An interesting line of thought.
DeleteKilling babies to eat during a famine, or exposing the deformed or otherwise defective on the mountainside as did the Spartans, seems intelligible, as well as both adaptive, in an evolutionary sense, and capable of ethical justification.
It is the advocacy of killing for convenience that is to me so totally repugnant.
There was more than likely a larger factor of 'killing for convenience' in at least the cases of death by exposure for presumed defect or otherwise than you have yet allowed yourself to perhaps contemplate.
DeleteImagine a Carthaginian official child murder cult as in Flaubert's 'Salammbo' just for the sake of argument, despite all the quite worthy protestations of historians as to Roman state propaganda concerning such.
If such a 'reigious' edifice was intact (as it seems, according to reports, to have been in Greco-Roman culture itself) then you can very well wager advantageously to yourself that many parents took full advantage of such a mechanism to dispose of unwanted children out of nothing more than considerations of their own 'convenience' than true obeisance to the sanctioned rules concerning defect and deformity. And by a very long shot too, mind you, because there is and never has been any end to the corruption of people.
Your reference to Salammbo, overreaches my literary knowledge, though happily, with Google at my command, I am now in a position to say that Flaubert's novel, "famous for its erotic, sadistic, and decadent content, ...is a symbolic work notorious for its atmospheric evocation of a dying civilization and imagery of sensuous and terrifying cruelty," all of which confirms the aptness of your reference.
DeleteWe are, surely, witnessing Western civilization in its final, decadent and dying days.
The Greeks may have had style, aesthetic sensibility and the capacity for logical analysis, but they were still heathens, whose acceptance of slavery, buggery, paederasty, polygyny and infanticide fell far short of Christian virtue. As we increasing revert to heathenism and Greek decadence so also do we acquiesce in the irreversible collapse of Western civilization.
And it seems to me, you don't need to be a believer in the Holy Trinity to accept the value of Christianity. As Charles Murray recounts in "Coming Apart," the authors of the US constitution believed that America could remain a relatively free society only if it was dominated by four characteristics: industriousness, honesty, religiosity, and marriage. He makes a strong case that that view is still applicable today and that America will not remain a free society unless those "virtues" are restored.