John Locke claimed that “the main intention of nature” is “the increase of mankind and the continuation of the species,” the “preservation of all mankind” being a “law of nature.”[1] Centuries later, Locke’s assumption that an increased population necessarily makes the preservation of the species more likely could be challenged in a way that he could hardly have imagined. The human population reached 8.16 billion at the end of 2023, as compared with only 2 billion of our species having been alive in 1900. The exponential increase of energy-consuming organic hominoids has undoubtedly been a cause of the increased carbon emissions arising from human sources, and therefore of climate change in the Anthropocene. The biblical permission to be fruitful and multiply may have come from an eternal source (i.e., Yahweh), but that the divine decree is to be applied regardless of the size of the population as well as the impact that the human imprint is having on the environment, including the climate, is, I submit, a faulty and foolhardy assumption to make in the twenty-first century. The decree in the biblical narrative could be interpreted as a mandate that the Hebrews, freed from slavery in Egypt, follow to fully occupy the promised land. Empirically, it may even be time for humanity to take stock of its increased numbers globally.
By suggesting that the human
population has grown too much, given the finitude of our planet’s resources, I
do not mean that wide swaths of the human population on this planet should be
plagued, starved, or blown up. Such a specious ends-justify-the-means rationale
for harm is the theme of one of the DaVinci Code movies, wherein the
bio-destructive antagonist is clearly crazy. Even the Rev. Thomas Malthus, in
his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), relegated to Nature the
clean-up role of using disease, famine, and increased conflict to get the number
of humans on Earth back within ecologizing constraints, which is to say, to get
human population down to a number that is consistent with the resources on
Earth. In the twenty-first century, we might add, and does not ruin the
planet in the process. Theoretically stated, a population growth rate that
is behaving like a maximizing variable in mathematics, even if the derivative is
negative (i.e., the rate of acceleration is decreasing), is a problem because such
a variable has no problem piercing an ecosystem’s boundaries. Yet this is not
done with impunity from Nature, according to Malthus.
According to one scholar,
Malthus’ main theme is that a species’ population “inevitably grows beyond what
the food supply can sustain.”[2]
I have also read elsewhere that Malthus only claims that a population can grow
beyond what the food supply can sustain. Even this throws a wrench into the deist
assumption that a divine designer can be inferred from the order in Nature, so
Malthus’ claim was controversial in his day.
Mitigating Nature’s devices to
restore a population to good measure, Malthus admits that “the discrepancy
between food and population spurs” industry, which in turn can enhance food
growth and production such that the gap is closed.[3]
But with the population at over 8 billion in 2024, I suspect that Malthus would
have warned of impending natural limits to resources such as land and water (especially
in the midst of climate change) as being something hard that even human enterprise
must accept; the planet’s resources are, after all, finite. Furthermore, even
if scientific advancement can render one resource more efficiently used and
even augment it, another resource could then become a bottleneck, or hard
constraint.
Whether as a divine decree or
a natural, non-deist process, a larger human population is not necessarily
beneficial for the species. Antedating Malthus’s work on population by about a
half-century, however, Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “invokes
the invisible hand in arguing that the earth’s increasing fertility benefits
humanity as a whole, despite [economic] inequality and the monopolization of
land ownership by a few. The landlord can only eat a tiny portion of his land’s
produce, the rest of which feeds the people who provide his luxuries.[4]
The rich, despite their ‘natural selfishness and rapacity,’ are thus ‘led by an
invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities
of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal
portions among all its inhabitants; and thus without intending it, without
knowing it, advance the interest of society, and afford means to the
multiplication of the species.’[5]
The rich man, motivated by ‘luxury and caprice,’ rather than ‘humanity’ or
‘justice,’[6]
thus promotes a salutary ‘end which was no part of his intention.’”[7]
In other words, industriousness has the unintended presumably beneficial
consequences of advancing civilization and increasing the human population. Whereas
a civilizing influence is arguably good under any circumstance, Smith’s assumption
that increasing the size of the population is not in our day as unqualifiably beneficial
as Smith assumed it to be in population growth from prosperity being limited to
being in proportion to its additional
largess.
In Wealth of Nations,
“Smith argues that the accumulation of capital and the increase of national
wealth help ‘the great body of the people’ to ‘thrive,’ and that population
growth is ‘the most decisive mark of prosperity.’”[8]
This result of thriving is constrained rather than unlimited, for Smith maintains
that, “’Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the
means of their subsistence.’”[9]
An increase in population is an unintended beneficial consequence only in some
relation to a period’s economic prosperity. But Smith undercuts Malthus’ claim that
industriousness can catch food production up to a given population level
because the prosperity resulting from the increase in industriousness or
productivity causes the population to increase, albeit proportionately rather
than maximally. Prosperity begets more people, perhaps to such an extent that
the benefits from improved food-production productivity may not be enough to
feed the larger population. Admittedly, Smith’s claim that family planning can
be used to keep the standard of living up during a period of industriousness—rather
than decreasing as the economic benefits of the additional industriousness are
spread thin (i.e., decreasing GNP per capita) as the population increases due
to the prosperity—could also mean that the proportioned population growth does
not outstrip the enhanced food production. Perhaps it can be realistically said,
therefore, that closing the gap between food availability and population can be
expected to be problematic.
Similar to the idea that a tax
cut can “pay for itself” by stimulating economic activity (GNP) and thus
generating more tax revenue going into government coffers—a theory that has
been empirically disproved since Reagan’s tax cuts in the U.S. in 1981—growing
ourselves economically out of a gap between food production and the global
population is too idealistic. Once that population reaches a certain level,
“hard” constraints in terms of resources, which were not something that Malthus
would have considered given the low population of humans on Earth in 1798
relative to the planet’s abundance, can become relevant in functioning like a “brick
wall” that even scientific and technological advancement cannot penetrate. Yet
Smith had written of an upper-bound, or “full complement,” of “riches” that is “allowed”
in a geographical area by “nature,” such as in the soil, there, but this is
geographically limited whereas in the twenty-first century, the human impact on
the worsening conditions of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans could
essentially move that brick wall closer in, hence narrowing the distance that human
industriousness can go.[10]
There is a big difference, in other words, between the limits to industry given
the nature of a local ecosystem and running up against the limits of resources
globally, such as in having drilled up all of the deposits of oil in the earth.
Unfortunately, reducing the
extent, or depth, of the human imprint on the planet, whether in terms of the
population or its offshoots such as pollution, warmer oceans (and air), and
soil erosion, is an externality as far as markets, whether competitive,
oligarchical, or monopolistic, are concerned. The political muscle of large
concentrations of private wealth, whether of billionaires or large
corporations, can styme government regulatory action to protect the overall
good. Plato and Aristotle claimed that a passionate crowd is the downside of a
demos (i.e., democracy), but perhaps today plutocracy, or the rule of (privately
held) wealth, is the downside or even the inexorable eventual result of representative
democracy.
So, where are we as a species
if even the unintended beneficial consequence in the efficient allocation of
resources, goods, and services in a competitive market is not enough to
outweigh the baleful consequences of self-interest not only in terms of
maximizing the chances of self-preservation, but also the preservation of one’s
genes in offspring? Even in their 80s, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, two famous
Hollywood actors, became fathers yet again. Lest it be contended that they were
selfish in knowingly fathering children that could not be expected to know
their respective fathers for many years, the obverse possibility, namely, that
science may one day extend the human lifespan even possibly indefinitely, could
mean that population size could jump like the burst of new acceleration of a
rocket from its second state igniting and adding a jolt of added thrust. No one
would seriously contend that economic industriousness could close the gap
between such a population size and the natural limits of the planet’s
resources.
I submit that countries with
low or even declining birth-rates should not feel the need economically or
normatively to promote population growth by public policy. Furthermore, China,
much of Africa, and especially India should take more seriously the interest of
the species in prudently getting its population size down to size while
doing so is still possible, and, absent these regions taking an interest in the
good of the species, multilateral global governance should be strengthened
particularly in terms of enforcement powers in the interest of the species. In
this regard, the United Nations is a bad joke—an embarrassment, actually. For the
species cannot rely on Smith’s unintended benefits of competitive markets to
redress externalities; even Smith recognized the need for government, and he even
warned of the likely collusion between business and government at the expense
of labor, and, I might add, of the species itself. For short-term economic prosperity to be more
pressing than the longer-term interests of the species can be reckoned as a
vulnerability in the very constitution of the human mind itself, and of course corporations
like to invest in elected representatives and people tend to vote, both with
their wallets and purses in mind.
This writing draws on my multidisciplinary studies that unfortunately kept me out of the much-siloed ivory towers of American provincialism that have been so populated by epistemological and administrative pedestrians of incrementalism. To be sure, seeing connections between seemingly far-ranging academic areas is not much valued by folks whose eyesight has been trained on minute analytical distinctions that fail the “so what” question yet satisfy Adam Smith’s claim that specialization of labor boosts productivity in business. Even so, I have been writing publicly to apply my eighteen years of formal university education and four more of post-doctoral study under a scholar of historical moral, political, and religious thought for the good of humanity in spite of our species’ narrowness and yet paradoxical arrogance that functions as if on stilts during a flood. Why the inclusion of benevolentia universalis in addition to my interest in connecting seemingly unrelatable ideas or theories and making societal (and global) blind-spots transparent is a question that I have not so far been able to answer. From my multidisciplinary perspective, from theology to political economy, I am struck by how interrelated human phenomena are, and by how much flies under the proverbial radar screen at least in societal public discourse. Both the interrelatedness and the societal and global “blind spots” pertain to population and climate change, as well as to ethics and political economy; Smith’s field, after all, was moral philosophy rather than economics, the latter of which, as a field, subsequently materialized in large part because of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Why does anyone seek to contribute to the species in spite of its stubborn, selfish refusal to change—to develop—even for its own good? Entrenched ignorance on stilts during a flood is not a very attractive beneficiary of charitable benevolence, and yet perhaps instinctually we feel the urge to help the human gene pool to persevere. Perhaps my judgment is overly negative or pessimistic. Nietzsche wrote that no philosopher is a person of one’s own time. Such creatures tend to dig and travel cognitively, whereas most people remain in their hometowns. Perhaps I have been writing for another and you are along for the ride. Nevertheless, I do hope that my thinking stimulates your own, because I believe our species very much needs new thoughts this century.
1. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett, ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1963), First Treatise, sec. 59 and Second
Treatise, sec. 7.
2. Peter
Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics
from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 291n31.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 124. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
5. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
6. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1976), IV. I.10.
7. Ibid. Minowitz quotes from Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), IV.
I.9.
8. Ibid., p. 127. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H.
Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976), I.viii.21-23, 43.
9. Ibid. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H.
Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976), I.viii.39-40.
10. Ibid., pp.
126-27. The passages that Minowitz quotes are from Adam Smith, An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ed. R. H. Campbell, A.
S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.ix.14.
