Overpopulation is NOT the problem!

Photo by Şeyhmus Çakırtaş, Pexels

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The Europeans did terrible things in the name of Malthus and Darwin

by Phil Hall

The caste system is inhuman. FGM seems impossibly cruel. Look at the Taliban: Malala got a bullet in the head just for going to school. Look at forced marriage, at child marriage. How can that be tolerated?

These are the persistent systemic failures of whole cultures and systems of values. When religion is patriarchal, it cannot claim to be universal. Societies and cultures are conveniently blind to their own failings, so that the caste system is reinforced. The mother, eager to be respectable in a traditional society, forces her child to be circumcised.

But European civilisation is blind to its systemic moral failings, too. Religion was not the justification for colonisation. It was Kenneth Clark who said that the Victorian ruling class did the terrible, cruel things they did around the world and in the United Kingdom itself in the name of Malthus and Darwin—things that they would never have contemplated doing if they had allowed themselves to be guided by their Christian morals.

The idea of Western racial and cultural superiority was reinforced by the ideologues of empire, who used a bastardised form of Darwinism to justify colonialism. The justifications for racial supremacy did not come from religion. Religion was an ideological weapon of conquest, not the European justification for conquest. European people, society, and culture were considered superior, you understand, and by colonising the British were really just bringing a superior civilization to places that needed it. Kipling called it “the white man’s burden.”

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There are moral, seemingly decent, environmentally aware liberals—who you know… who actually think it would be better for the world if Ebola wiped out hundreds of millions of poor people in Africa. Who argue for Europeans to pile into Brazil and the Congo and save the rainforests from the Brazilians and Congolese. Who argue that ‘humanity is a plague’. And by humanity they really mean people who are not white and privileged as they are.

Malthus argued that populations grew geometrically; he claimed that the Earth could not sustain such a large population. Many seemingly decent Europeans, and the settler descendents of Europeans around the world, scandalously, think that Malthus’s ideas are true—they don’t question them, just as hundreds of millions of Indians accept the caste system.

Malthus taught us misanthropy. I do not exaggerate. Many moral, seemingly decent, environmentally aware liberals have a vile indecent philosophy. They actually believe it would be better for the world if disease, famine and war wiped out billions of the poor. In essence, they share the Malthusian views of the Victorians.

The evil of this outlook is compounded. Its proponents believe in the death of the maladapted poor, in the ‘’natural’’ destruction of “failed states.” More to the right of the political spectrum, many people believe that when poor people die that this is proof of Darwin’s ideas on the mechanisms of adaptive evolution. The minute you hear someone say: ‘The real problem the Earth faces is ‘overpopulation’’ your skin should crawl! It should alert you to danger. In a similar way, as, perhaps, you should be alerted when someone mentions ‘the Rothschilds’ as a prelude to discussing the ‘global Jewish conspiracy’ and the ‘Protocols of Zion’.

The ideas of Darwinism gave birth to scientific racism and eugenics which are alive and well in Europe and its former colonies to this day repackaged as neoconservative monetarism and market economics. Darwinism gave rise to the philosophy that says: if you are rich and successful, then you have greater value as a human than if you are not. This is the philosophy of the advocates of euthanasia, the philosophy of the advocates of genetic manipulation, of the measurers of human intelligence, of the idea that no disabled child should be allowed to be born.

In fact, social Darwinists like Singer reflect precisely the views shared by the Nazis and much of elite European society before WW2. They believe that severely disabled children, like sick animals, should be put out of their misery.

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The Nazis were twisted social Darwinists of the worst sort. Even Darwin himself was something of a social Darwinist—despite the desperate attempts of his defenders to recontextualise his words. He believed that it was inevitable that the “inferior” or “primitive” non-white races would be driven to extinction by the superior, civilised European peoples.

The blind spot of our society is that toxic blend, that cocktail of anthrax and arsenic: the idea that the fittest survive best. These toxic ideas embedded in the culture derive from the influence of Malthusianism and Darwinism; this is the blind spot of many Europeans, the log in our eye. These belief systems are the ideological dregs of post-empire. We look critically at the values of other cultures, and rightly so, but many of us just cannot see the poisonous ideas at the root of the systemic moral failure of European society.

Social Darwinism and Malthusianism have generated philosophies more dangerous than the Aztec idea that the sun rises only because we spill human blood to help it do so. And just like people embedded in the caste system, for whom it is almost invisible, Malthusianism and Darwinism are components of a disgusting invisible ideology that seemingly decent people live and breathe. Call it radical conservatism, call it radical conservationism. Call it what you will.

For the social Darwinists and Malthusians, a sad day today is when infant mortality falls. And people with these ideas are not rare; Scratch a little. Inquire a little, and you’ll find they are all around you. Listen to them say: ‘Overpopulation is the problem’.

The social Darwinists even make their unquestioned truth into a joke. There used to be a snuff channel where the deaths of “stupid” people were celebrated. It was called the Darwin Awards. One “hilarious” video shows a young man, paralysed from the waist down, killing himself. He smashes his wheelchair into an elevator in anger, over and over again, until the door opens and he falls down the shaft.

No Muslim, Hindu, or Christian would laugh at that, would condone that suicide, but there are plenty of misanthropes who found that channel very funny—it had many subscribers. They laugh as the young man kills himself. The subscribers are modern social Darwinists. Someone I know. Someone you know. The neo-Malthusians are still among us.

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