DEATH BY NUMBERS
46 Over all this obsession with money, this lust for an equal happiness, hangs the black cloud of the world population rate. This is the ultimate horror in our present situation.
47 At current birthrates the population of the world will have doubled in fifty years. Therefore in the lifetimes of many of us every problem caused by overpopulation – big-city neurosis, traffic problems, famine, inflation, foul air, the annihilation of nature, the regimentation of the individual – all these will be at least doubly intense. In this context the human and economic wealth poured into space travel and the nuclear arms race is the most stupendous example of fiddling while civilization burns in the history of man.
48 There are two kinds of objection to the controlled reduction of population; one, that such control is morally bad, and the other, that it is evolutionally wrong.
49 The opposers on moral grounds are of three principal kinds: religious, political and individualist.
50 There were formerly very dubious ecclesiastical reasons for encouraging a high birthrate: more of the faithful were born, and large families created or perpetuated the kind of economic situation in which poverty, ignorance and despair drove the victims into the ‘sanctuary’ of the church. But such policies worked only in priest-dominated environments, and these have largely ceased to exist except in a few backward countries.
51 A much more convincing religious argument is this: birth-control practices encourage private promiscuity and in particular adultery. It is difficult to deny this, but equally difficult to show that the suppression of birth-control practices (the repression of private promiscuity) would bring a stabler society. The flood current of evolution is set for sexual freedom. It is no longer a question of damming it up; but of controlling the flood. And this is a flood of something much more dangerous than water.
52 Some religious people still believe that birth-control practices are contrary to divine will. But the ‘divine will’ is not against life insurance boards, or parapets, or insecticides, or surgery, or computers, or antiseptics, or sea walls, or fire brigades. Why does it allow these forms of scientific control (some abusable) of the hazards of life, and not birth control?
53 Another absurd religious argument is this: prophylaxis is murder, since it prevents the unconceived child from being conceived. But this doctrine, even if one accepts its premise (that we exist before we are conceived), raises considerable problems. There are a thousand ways of preventing a child being conceived without resorting to specific prophylaxis. Should husbands go away on business? Are they murdering every conception-phase night they are away from home? Are all copulatory positions except the most apt for conception murder?
54 We can stop babies being conceived; but we cannot murder unconceived babies. All law requires a body.
55 We are given freedom so that we may control; and there cannot be special fields in which control is totally forbidden; in which, in short, we are condemned not to be free.
56 The opposers on political grounds say this: a powerful state needs a large population, and the higher the birthrate the more soldiers and workers it will have.
57 Since the advent of atomic weapons it is clear that what matters militarily is not number but know-how; this situation was already apparent as soon as the first machine gun was invented. Even from the point of view of conventional military requirements every country in the world today, including those with the most overseas commitments, is overpopulated.
58 Since automation, it is quite apparent that the unskilled workers of the world must become increasingly redundant. A conservative 1967 estimate of the current redundancy in highly industrialized countries was one in every four workers.
59 It is only in unmechanized peasant economies such as those in India that large families can be argued to be a necessity; and even if the argument is granted, clearly they are a necessity only for as long as the world allows such economies to be unmechanized.
60 The opposers on individualist grounds say this: choice of size of family is one of the last free choices left to adults in civilized society. To oblige them to limit the size of their families would be the surrender of the final citadel of the individual. I find such arguments the most attractive; and yet they collapse before the pressure of reality. For this kind of decision, to have or not have a certain number of children, is far more than a merely personal one. If this man and his wife decide to have a family of six, then they are making decisions that affect their society and their world far beyond the furthest scope of their own rights as individuals, and indeed far beyond their own existences.
61 As American sociologists have discovered, an ominous by-product of economic prosperity is that it turns the extra child into a desirable and affordable adjunct of the affluent life. From there it becomes a symbol of affluence, of success in life. The large family has always been encouraged by politicians and priests; the idolatry of those great gods Virility and Fecundity is easily induced. But surely the extra child is, in a world of starving children, the one luxury the already fortunate affluent have no right to offer themselves. For if we claim we are free to breed like rabbits, then evolution will see that we die like them.
62 There remains the second category of opposers: those who claim that it is evolutionally wrong to control population. There is a generational selfishness: let our children look out for themselves. There is a better argument. It is this: our capacity to multiply ourselves goes, and is meant to go, hand in hand with our capacity to feed ourselves. But according to this breed-and-brave-it theory if we are all to remain healthy we must remain in a state of acute crisis. We should build all our boats with a hole in the bottom-then pump.
63 Even if we could feed a population twice the size of the present world population, and feed them better than they are fed now, there is no likelihood that such an overpopulated world would be happier than a properly populated one. People need more than food, and all the other things they need flourish best when the crowd is least; that is, peace, education, space, and individuality.
64 The future will surely see our apathy over population control as the greatest folly of our time. They will see that a vast structure in our societies was totally unnecessary, a mere product of having too many mouths to feed, too many hands to keep occupied. But above all they will see that the state of overpopulation turns progress into regress. How many modern inventions, how many economic theories, are really not progressive, but simply desperate attempts to stop up the leaks in the sinking boat? How much ingenuity and energy is poured into keeping us afloat instead of moving forwards?
CONCLUSION
65 Money-obsessed societies produce dissatisfied men and women because power to buy is as habit-forming, and finally as pernicious, as heroin. One is dead before one has enough. They produce guilty men, because too few have too much, and too many are savagely punished for their innocent poverty and ignorance. Behind each shilling, each franc, each mark, rouble, dollar is the stick-limbed child, the future, the envious and famished world to come.