1.
The Birth of Progress.
The modern theory of progress originated in the late 1700’s, also known as
“The Enlightenment,” a period of social upheaval in the West.
Monarchy ultimately gave way to democracy, feudalism to capitalism
and socialism, fundamentalism to free thought, tradition to science.
These transformations did not come without a price in violence. A
Revolution in the Thirteen Colonies soon helped inspire the still
more bloody Revolution in France, where the philosophical debate over
the possibility of utopia would achieve unprecedented heights of
brutality.
Living
in exile, hiding from a death sentence pronounced by his political
opponents (soon to be carried out) the Marquis de Condorcet, a
brilliant polymath whose radical notion of progress had made him many
enemies, penned perhaps the most influential argument for progress
written so far, Outlines of an Historical view of the
Progress of the Human Mind.
He
wrote, somewhat prophetically, that “truths appertaining to the
sciences of observation, calculation and experiment, may be
perpetually augmented” so that “instruments, machines, looms,
will add every day to the capabilities and skill of man” and “the
same manufactured or artificial commodity will be produced at a
smaller expence of raw materials.” This was already happening with
steam engines and textile factories in England and France, and the
increases in standards of living seemed to promise a brighter, more
prosperous future.
But
objections to progress based on population growth were already common
currency, and Condorcet seemed to consider this a troubling challenge
for his theory of progress:
[I]t
may, I say, be demanded [...] [w]hether the number of inhabitants in
the universe at length exceeding the means of existence, there will
not result a continual decay of happiness and population, and a
progress towards barbarism, or at least a sort of oscillation between
good and evil? Will not this oscillation, in societies arrived at
this epoch, be a perennial source of periodical calamity and
distress? In a word, do not these considerations point out the limit
at which all farther improvement will become impossible, and
consequently the perfectibility of man arrive at a period which in
the immensity of ages it may attain, but which it can never pass?
Reverend
Thomas Malthus would later take these doubts to heart. He would not
be consoled reading Condorcet’s two-sentence dismissal:
There
is, doubtless, no individual that does not perceive how very remote
from us will be this period: but must it one day arrive? It is
equally impossible to pronounce on either side respecting an event,
which can only be realized at an epoch when the human species will
necessarily have acquired a degree of knowledge, of which our
short-sighted understandings can scarcely form an idea.
Few
writers felt this “question of population” to be important enough
to face directly. William Godwin called the debate “considerably
curious.” In his own book on the future social progress of
Europe, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, he
wrote:
Several
writers upon these topics have treated it in a way calculated to
produce a very gloomy impression, [but] [t]here is a principle in the
nature of human society, by means of which everything seems to tend
to its level. [...] There are various methods by the practice of
which population may be checked; by the exposing of children, as
among the ancients, and, at this day, in China; by the art of
procuring abortion, as it is said to subsist in the island of Ceylon;
by a promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, which is found extremely
hostile to the multiplication of the species; or, lastly, by a
systematical abstinence, such as must be supposed, in some degree, to
prevail in monasteries of either sex. But, without any express
institution of this kind, the encouragement or discouragement that
arises from the general state of a community, will probably be found
to be all-powerful in its operation.
Like
Condorcet, Godwin didn’t find population doubts particularly
troubling. He concluded his brief chapter on population by saying,
“however [...] to reason thus, is to foresee difficulties at a
great distance.”
As
Malthus would come to see it, these “difficulties” were not
remote at all, but ever-present in all nations throughout history,
for all animals, plants, and humans. For him there was a mathematical
principle involved, which he would call the Principle of Population,
that he believed absolutely barred the way to progress and utopia.
2.
Malthus’s Principle.
In
Chapter 1 of his Essay on the Principle of Population,
Malthus laments: “The really good arguments on each side of the
question are not allowed to have their proper weight. Each pursues
his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an
attention to what is advanced by his opponents.” His goal was to
finally put the question on solid ground:
I
think I may fairly make two postulata.
First,
That food is necessary to the existence of man.
Secondly,
That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain
nearly in its present state. (Malthus, 1798)
Malthus
chose these “postulata” or “assumptions” to be as simple and
self-evident as possible. From the standpoint of physics, they do
lack mathematical formulation. For example, “passion between the
sexes” is not an obviously measurable quantity. But from what
follows it becomes clear enough what he means, and his theories on
population growth are still widely cited by biologists, sociologists,
and other scientists:
Population,
when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence
increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with
numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of
the second.
By
that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man,
the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
This
implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from
the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere
and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.
(Malthus, 1798)
Population
has a tendency to grow exponentially. If every couple has four
children, for example, and this trend continues, you’re doubling
the population every generation. Exponential growth means your rate
of increase is itself increasing. The more people you
have the more people you add each generation. Two grows by two, four
grows by four, eight grows by eight.
Food
production, on the other hand, depends on the availability of land.
The more land is used, the less land is available. At best, in
Malthus’s view, your food resources will grow “arithmetically,”
that is, by adding a constant value. Two grows by two, four grows by
two, eight grows by two.
Since
population grows faster, Malthus’s theory says that there will be a
“strong and constantly operating check on population.”
For
Malthus, this dilemma determines whether you can create a utopian
society without any misery. As long as the dilemma stands, progress
toward utopia is impossible. He wrote, “All other arguments are of
slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this.”
Malthus
notes that this process of population checking is seen throughout
nature:
Through
the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of
life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been
comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to
rear them. The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth,
with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of
worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that
imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the
prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink
under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any
efforts of reason, escape from it.
Trees
produce thousands of seeds at time, every garden plant produces
several seeds, if not dozens upon dozens. Cats and dogs breed in
litters. Every animal wild or domesticated, left to breed freely,
will over time produce more than two offspring per mother. We know
that if these populations were not checked by resource limits, they
would grow out of control. What we have, then, is a law that applies
to all of animate nature, including humankind.
Malthus
estimated that the human population, without any checks, would double
every 25 years. That meant that no matter how fast your food supplies
grew initially, eventually your doubling population would catch up.
3.
Proof by Contradiction, not Prophesy.
Malthus’s
argument may seem clear enough, but it is widely misunderstood.
He introduced his principle to refute the
idea of progress, to debunk “the perfectibility of man.” But
charts like Illustration 1 above
have led to the popular belief that he was predicting a future
calamity, where the population will become so great that everyone
must starve. This “prophetic” reading has been encouraged by
pseudo-Malthusian works with titles like The
Population Bomb (Ehrlich, 1968).
This might explain why over the last century his relevance to the
question of progress has been neglected. For instance, Nobel-prizing
winning economist Amartya Sen (1999) writes:
Is
the world food output falling behind world population in what is seen
as a “race” between the two? The fear that this is precisely what
is happening, or that it will soon happen, has had remarkable staying
power despite relatively little evidence in its favor. Malthus, for
example, anticipated two centuries ago that food production was
losing the race and that terrible disasters would result from the
consequent imbalance in “the proportion between the natural
increase of population and food.” He was quite convinced, in his
late-eighteenth-century world, that “the period when the number of
men surpass their means of subsistence has long since arrived”
(Sen, 1999, p. 205).
Ironically,
his quotation—“the period when the number of men surpass their
means of subsistence has long since arrived”—is actually taken
from a context where Malthus is arguing against Condorcet’s
tendency to treat population arguments as prophetic:
Mr.
Condorcet’s picture of what may be expected to happen when the
number of men shall surpass the means of their subsistence is justly
drawn. The oscillation which he describes will certainly take place
and will without doubt be a constantly subsisting cause of periodical
misery. The only point in which I differ from Mr. Condorcet with
regard to this picture is the period when it may be applied to the
human race. Mr. Condorcet thinks that it cannot possibly be
applicable but at an era extremely distant. If the
proportion between the natural increase of population and food which
I have given be in any degree near the truth, it will appear, on the
contrary, that the period when the
number of men surpass their means of subsistence has long since
arrived, and that this necessary
oscillation, this constantly subsisting cause of periodical misery,
has existed ever since we have had any histories of mankind, does
exist at present, and will for ever continue to exist, unless some
decided change take place in the physical constitution of our nature.
(Malthus, 1798)
In
other words, the human population is already subject to continual and
powerful Malthusian checks, and unless we somehow overcame these
checks there would be no progress. A graph better illustrative of his
view would look like this:
Illustration
2: How population is checked by food shortage, according to Malthus.
(Hypothetical scenario.)
What,
then, is the point of passages like this in Malthus’s Essay:
[T]he
human species would increase in the ratio of—1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,
64, 128, 256, 512, etc. and subsistence as— 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9, 10, etc. In two centuries and a quarter, the population would be
to the means of subsistence as 512 to 10: in three centuries as 4096
to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost
incalculable.
What
is being mistaken for a prophecy here, is really what logicians call
a reductio ad absurdum, (Latin for “reduction to
absurdity”) against his opponents’ view. He is saying that
there must be checks of some sort operating on the
human population, because if there were not there would already be
far more people than you could feed. His conclusion to the above
argument is that “the increase of the human species can only be
kept commensurate to the increase of the means of subsistence by the
constant operation of the strong law of necessity acting as a check.”
He’s referring to existing poverty, hunger, disease and
vice—obstacles to survival and successful child-rearing. He wasn’t
speaking of the increase of such things in the future, but rather
their constant quantity throughout history up to the present,
representing what is imperfect in humankind that cannot ever be
eliminated.
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