ChnMind 1.10 The Real Risks of Overpopulation

The “Perils” of Overpopulation

In Athens two abiding motivational forces are fear and greed. Both arise as a direct consequence of rejecting the Creator. The Bible confirms what we would expect to be the case—that every citizen of Athens both knows the true God, and yet at the same time suppresses that knowledge and insists that He does not exist. (Romans 1:18ff).

This leads to an underlying, deep seated fear of ultimate retribution and judgement in the heart of every citizen of Athens. Consequently, fear is easily aroused, and it quite naturally can grip the hearts and minds of Athens in a powerful way.

Politicians and governors, media and educators, bureaucrats and social “scientists” intuitively know this to be true. Therefore, one of the most effective ways to get traction with the masses is to make them afraid. When they are afraid, then they will listen and will be far more likely to accept the ever-greater-price which Athenian governments are wanting to exact from their citizens: higher taxes, emergency powers, and greater controls.

In wartime, citizens are quite ready to relinquish civil rights and liberties. Modern governments seek to keep their citizenry in a perpetual war where mankind or the nation is deemed to be under threat. Remember the importance of perpetual war to Big Brother's control in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. It has often been said that tin pot despots love to warmonger so they can keep their populations under control. But the despots and ruling classes of “modern” western democracies effectively do the same, creating a climate of fear through propagandizing pseudo-threats that are said to have the potential to destroy us all.

The modern fear driven fixation with global warming is just the latest manifestation of the malady. It works amongst Athenians because deep down they truly are afraid and they are expecting calamity to fall. Therefore, when their helpful governments present an apparent threat to justify an increase, once again, in state power and control, the citizens are ever credulous, ready to believe it simply because it has the hallmarks of genuineness—that is, it is a threat. In a climate of fear, all threats are presumed genuine. “The wicked flee” says the Scripture, “when no-one pursues.” (Proverbs 28:1)

Historically, the philosophers and intelligensia in Athens have laughed off this cancerous attack upon the body politic, arguing that a free press and objective rational science would prove effective chemotherapy against such scaremongering. How fatuous this has proven to be! Firstly, the free media—that much vaunted fourth estate of government—has rapidly gone over to the “dark side.” Just like the other “estates” of government, the media has found that fear gets attention. Fear sells papers and subscriptions. There are headlines in fear. There is money in fear. As for science—it has turned out exactly as Jerusalem always said it would turn out—to be anything but objective. Scientists, too, need tenure. They need money and research grants. They need the plush government jobs. They need respectability. Science, too, has gone rapidly over to the dark side and has become just another organ of state propaganda—a radically madeover, sequined cheerleader for Athenian powerbrokers.

There were plenty of fears in the sixties and seventies being propounded. The Cold War was a beauty. Then there was the imminent and terrible threat of mankind entering a new Ice Age. We would all freeze to death, we were told, UNLESS . . . Ah, yes, Athens always has its statist “unless.” Another imminent threat and catastrophe facing mankind was declared to be over-population. This was a direct assault upon the God's authority, insofar as the Creator commanded mankind to be fruitful and multiply, yet man was attempting to counter-command the Creator.

In the sixties and seventies, Western experts, loudly supported by the chattering classes, cheered on and funded by governments, proclaimed the doom of planet earth. The earth, and the human race, was facing extinction due to the imminent threat over overpopulation. The world was running out of food. Famine would stalk the land(s). Newsweek, that great trumpeter of the “apocalypse du jour”, warned:

“The current rate of [population] growth, continued in 600 years, would leave every inhabitant of the world with only one square yard to live on. By the year 3500 the weight of human bodies on the earth's surface would equal the weight of the world itself. By the year 6000, the solid mass of humanity would be expanding outward into space at the speed of light. 'The world has a cancer,' a top Rockerfeller Foundation official has said, 'and that cancer cell is man.'” (“How Many Babies is Too Many,” Newsweek, [vol LX, no 4, July 23, 1962] p. 27)

(Notice, incidentally, how the “top Rockerfeller Foundation official” proves to be a true son of Athens. Man is a cancer cell destroying the world—therefore, by implication, to defend the world we must attack and destroy man.)

Doomsday was just around the corner.

“Dr Robert White-Stevens, and American expert on fertilizers and insecticides, predicted here yesterday that, at present growth rates, the world by Nov. 2026 will no longer be able to feed its population and will be stumbling all over itself.

“On that date, he said, the world's population will have reached 50 billion—a point where there are more mouths to feed than food available, and more bodies to house than land. He said there would be 10,000 persons in every square mile of land, including Antarctica and the Sahara Desert” (Oakland Tribune, cited by Rousas J Rushdoony, The Myth of Overpopulation, [Nutley, NJ: The Craig Press, 1971], p.12.)

The classic piece on the threat of overpopulation, arising out of the primordial slime of the environmentalist movement, was Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb. (New York, Ballantine Books, 1968). Ehrlich predicted that there would be world-wide famines in the 70's and 80's as a result of over population. When these things failed to materialise, Ehrlich equivocated, and argued that many of the things predictions in Population Bomb were not predictions at all—they were just scenarios! However, statements he made in 1968 such as “The battle to feed all of humanity is over [that is, lost],” and “. . . The world will experience starvation of tragic proportions — hundreds of millions of people will starve to death,” sound like predictions to me.

(Don't you get a sense of deja-vu as we are daily confronted by the current apocalypse du jour—anthropogenic global warming. When that too will fail to produce its doomsday, I predict that the “experts” will wriggle away, evincing the syndrome of selective memory, claiming that they were not making predictions back in 2002—8, they were only presenting scenarios. Precisely. Flights of fanciful imagination. An Inconvenient Truth, indeed. But it will not stop the chattering classes, the powerbrokers, the media, and the scientific communities of Athens continuing to lionise them. The unbelieving world is ever the city of the Great Lie)

In the conflict between Jerusalem and Athens the myth of a world threat due to overpopulation was important insofar as Athens was implying that Jerusalem, which holds to the responsibility to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth exceedingly, is itself a malediction to the human race. It turns out of course that the glory and complexity of creation is far greater than simplistic naïve statistical models being used to prescribe the future and proscribe the present. The explosion of technology has meant that food production has increased hugely. Also, it has become abundantly clear to all except the willfully ignorant that social and legal structures control the production rates of food more than anything else. So the Soviet Union could not feed its own population for over seventy years under communal property ownership structures, despite the fact that prior to the communist revolution in 1917, the Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe. It was the Soviets that experienced widespread starvation under Lenin and Stalin.

Zimbabwe is a further illustration. Food used to be plentiful. Zimbabwe exported food throughout Africa. But under Mugabe's expropriation of land and nationalisation to distribute to political allies, it now depends upon grain imports to survive. It has been successfully argued that the single most important factor in food production is property rights. China, India, South Korea and Botswana were able to eliminate famine and hunger by establishing and protecting private property rights. Ethiopia, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and Zimbabwe caused famines when property rights were abolished. North Korea is a telling case study, insofar as South Korea is able to feed its own population abundantly, while in the North the people starve. The key difference between the two is that north of the 38 Parallel the state owns all land and private property rights do not exist. In the South, where private property rights to exist, the land flowers with plentiful crops and a rich abundance.

The command to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth abundantly is as beneficent today as it was in the beginning—provided the laws and commands of Jerusalem's God are respected and followed. But, in those places, societies and countries where Athens has gained sway for a time it is likely to be that while two may be company, three is definitely overcrowding.

One of the reasons why citizens of Athens get hopelessly wound up about this is the trap of thinking of the world's resources as finite. To be sure, all created reality is finite, and the natural resources of the world are no exception. There are only so many carbon atoms in existence. The number is finite. But the utility arising from the application of finite resources is virtually limitless. That is why Julian Simon postulated that “operationally”—to all intents and purposes, there is no such thing as scarcity of resources. Two examples illustrate the point. Copper is a limited, scarce, finite resource. Since electricity is conducted via copper wire, it had been argued that soon all the copper stocks in the world would be exhausted, leaving the majority of people without access to electricity. Once all the copper had been used up there was no more. Then technological advancement “discovered” that electricity could be conducted even more effectively via silicon fibres—and sand, the core ingredient of which is silica—is abundant and replenishing.

Secondly, and again with reference to copper wire, as long as telephony depended upon copper wire for transmission, the limitations of global copper inventory meant that third world countries would never be able to be wired for telephony. Now they will never need so, as wireless, mobile, and microwave technologies replace the outdated and outmoded copper wire networks.

These two examples also illustrate the vital importance of the human contribution in the equation. They are apt illustrations of mankind subduing the earth, and making it bring forth more and more abundance, riches, and utility. Economic history is replete with similar examples. As man subdues the earth, he escapes the limitation of scarce resources, as new skills are earned, intellectual capital generated, and technologies discovered. In principle, nothing is impossible. Only that which is evil and immoral must be proscribed and prevented—but, apart from that, as they say, “The sky's the limit.”

Athens, however, remains fundamentally ambivalent towards human progress. It is gnawed with doubt. Firstly, it has no clear doctrine of humanity. It cannot say with any certainty what a human being is, and how man is distinct from the rest of the world. Secondly, it has no clear doctrine of dominion over the earth; it wonders whether men should exercise dominion in the first place. Its doubts and confusion on this point lead Athens repeatedly to subject and enslave man to the rest of the creation (always transmitted through the involuntary exactitudes of the State). In Athens, nature always tends to rule man, not the reverse. Thirdly, Athens is a city racked with fear. It constantly sees apocalyptic calamities threatening on the horizon as a result of human progress, technological advance, and man's exercise of dominion over the world. It believes that progress will only generate envy amongst the gods and hasten the vengeance of the gods, or blind fate, or capricious chance. Athens, in the end, is a city of death, fit only for the dead in heart.