A spectre is haunting Asia—the spectre of Malthusianism. It so haunted Professor A. V. Hill, this year’s president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science as to virtually turn his address into a 1952 edition of Malthus’ “Essay on Population.”
Stating that the greatest problem to-day was the unrestricted growth of population—he had in view the Asiatic population—he said better medical services, prolongation of the span of life, lowering infant mortality, are accelerating the rate of population. "There is much discussion,” he went on to say, “of human rights, but do they extend to unlimited reproduction? Might not the consequences of such beliefs lead to soil exhaustion, international tensions and disorders which would threaten civilisation itself? ” He then asked “If ethical principles deny our right to do evil are we justified in doing good when the foreseeable consequences are evil? ” That, said the Professor, constitutes the ethical dilemma of science.
Professor Hill thus shares with Malthus and the Neo Malthusians the belief that population is in itself a potential source of evil which can actualise in overpopulation and result in widespread hunger, destitution and disease.
Malthus, a good Whig, but mostly a bad economist, also believed that. Living in what was perhaps the most pitiless period in English history—the Industrial Revolution—he held that the social misery it engendered was due to the fact that there were too many mouths and too little means with which to feed them. He stated that poverty and vice were due to over-population. Professor Hill switches the picture to Asia and arrives at the same conclusion. Just as Malthus declared that the giving of public charity would only aggravate the problem of over-population, so Professor Hill suggests that medical services and other aids to the peoples of Asia might have the same effect.
The growth of population is not of course governed by exclusive “Natural Laws.” In Western Capitalism, where the nature and tempo of production demands certain nutritional standards, these nutritional standards have not led, as predicted by Malthus and his followers, to accelerating the increase in population. In fact for decades now fertility has shown signs of declining. To the bogey of over-population there has been contrasted the bogey of under-population whose effects the “experts” have proclaimed would be almost as catastrophic.
Undoubtedly the higher nutritional levels and greater leisure of the workers of Western Capitalism as contrasted with the workers and peasants of India and China have made sex a less important emotional factor in their lives. Further, the insecurity of the wage worker in Western Capitalism and such things as unemployment, war, the housing situation, etc., are elements in family limitation. The entry of women into industry and the desire on their part to be relieved of the age-long burden of large families, have exercised a powerful influence on family limitation. The laws of population, as Marx pointed out, are not to be found in natural laws, but in a given historical situation. We may add that the world has never lived on the perilous margin between increasing population and food supplies which Malthusian doctrine would indicate.
A superficial survey might lead to the conclusion that the miserable living standards of the peoples of India and China are due to over-population. Professor Hill notes with dismay the five million yearly increase in the population of India where even with present plans for social aid, pre-war standards will hardly be restored. de Castro in “A Geography of Hunger,” puts the rate of increase at 4 million yearly, which amounts to a 1 per cent. increase, a figure, he adds, not very different from the European rate since 1900.
India, like Western Capitalism, is a place of contrast. It is a place of poverty for the many. It is also a place of vast wealth for the few. When the British ruling class added what was known as the Jewel of the Empire to their glittering colonial collection they did little or nothing during their stay there to improve the lot of the Indian people. When Professor Hill speaks of the impulses of decent humanity which insist that suffering should be relieved, history shows that the pukka Sahib was notoriously deficient in these things. It might also be interesting to note how much British rule was responsible for retarding the economic development of India and thus contributing to the distressing state of affairs that obtain there to-day.
In the past the native rulers of India and the British colonisers have evinced no real desire to raise the level of the masses. Thus Indian agriculture has remained in an intolerably primitive condition. It has been estimated that only 43 per cent, of the country is cultivated. One might think that an attempt to utilise for productive purposes the remaining portion by the application of Western resources and scientific techniques would constitute a challenge to those decent impulses of humanity instead of leading to the ethical dilemma in which Professor Hill finds himself.
Where there is poverty and degradation high birth rates and high death rates will inevitably occur. As Ritchie Calder said in the News Chronicle (4/9/52), “Men who live like animals breed like animals,” and we could add, die like them as well.
To suggest, as many Neo Malthusians do, that birth control is an answer to the problem, ignores the fact that a population could not by the mere act of reducing itself supply the necessary increased muscular energy that would be needed for an increased production of economic resources necessary for higher living standards. It could be held that where productivity is low and the death rate and ill health of people are high, large families are an inevitable and necessary feature of the. situation. It can be shown then, as de Castro emphasises in “ A Geography of Hunger,” that it is not over-population that leads to poverty, but the reverse. No wonder Marx caustically referred to Malthusian doctrines as “a libel on the human race.” We may add also that in a world where the privileged few exploit the unprivileged many, and that includes China and India, there can be no dominant social motive for the betterment of the vast majority by the use of all the economic resources available.
Again the class character of income distribution, inherent in Capitalism, compels it, if profits are threatened, to throw fish back into the sea, burn grain and coffee and generally restrict production no matter how crying the needs of the peoples of the world might be. And if further evidence was needed to show the misdirection of wealth production in Capitalism, a fellow scientist of Professor Hill, Sir Boyd Orr, has told us that soil exhaustion and erosion and the waste of labour and material on armaments threatens the world with famine.
It is perhaps pathetic to witness Professor Hill, a competent scientist in his own field, applying to complex social problems, not the appropriate level of scientific judgment, but a vague and amorphous ethical one.
Because of his lack of understanding of the nature of the world he lives in, the future for him is sinister and uncertain. Like Malthus he propounds a philosophy of social pessimism. We are optimistic enough to believe that economic and social development will falsify his gloomy prognosis as they falsified that of Malthus.
It would seem that fear and uncertainty of the future lead Professor Hill to sec in the “over-populated" a threat to Western ideas and the ordered existence of one’s life. Thus for him the withholding of economic resources from undeveloped countries might be one way of ensuring Western supremacy. The world will then still be the White Man’s World. From that assumption it is only a short step to a belief in a Master Race. Such assumptions, if widely held, help to prepare the ground for its realisation.
Perhaps that is why Professor Hill relegated the atomic bomb to a second place in world problems. It would seem, however, that Professor Hill does not like the idea of killing. He thus raises a dilemma unnoticed by himself. While he is opposed on moral grounds to killing, dying by hunger might be a necessary evil. Apparently, like Pope, he holds—"Thou shall’st not kill but need’st not strive, officiously, to keep alive.”
One might say in conclusion, looking at the ethically minded and their inhuman suggestions for the salvation of man, one sighs for the humanity of the anthropoid ape.
Ted Wilmott
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