Malthusianism haunts us. We have long since overshot Malthus’s predictions of gloom; and the world remains fed, albeit inadequately. This has been celebrated in some quarters, confirmation of man’s potential, or even “human flourishing”. It is fodder for political polemics against austere ecologists claiming that human population growth is instantly a death sentence for ecology. These polemics are true insofar as some nature can clearly survive population growth, and the limits to feed and house human populations are harder to reach than Malthusians presuppose.
But we aren’t dealing with a mere question of how many we can fit into the earth and expect everyone to be able to dine. The population question is a question of where we put people, the quality of life, and what we, as a civilization, desire for ourselves, in terms of economics, open space, ability to interact with nature, and the design of our cities and urban spaces.
In between the lines of the natalists of the right (and the Engelsian left) declaring victory over the malthusians, is the question of whether fitting eight billion, nine billion, ten billion, and on and on, is actually all that desirable. Rarely does one speculate that it is impossible to survive in a Bolshevist state. An entire. But even more rarely, at least on the same right declaring triumph over malthusians, does anyone speculate that such a state is desirable to live in. The population debate exists in a situation in which only the former question, that of possibility, is debated, and the latter, that of desirability, is ignored.
A better way forwards is needed.
Bangladesh In Missouri, or, Asking a More Serious Question
The American State of Missouri, situated at the confluence of several river systems, blessed with abundant quality soil, and a climate quite hospitable to staple crop production, currently has a population of about 6 million people, in a state about ten thousand square miles larger than Bangladesh, which has nearly 170 million people.
In Missouri, roughly 7-9 percent of the population takes to its open spaces each year to hunt and fish, at least according to relatively recent license data, which is to say, to harvest its abundance. Likely, large portions of the population also heads to its open waters to kayak and boat, and roams its landscape for hiking and camping. While in this modern world biodiversity is never the norm, large tracts of land in Missouri have been set aside by the state for the use of wild plants and animals.
It is, in other words, rather pleasant to live in Missouri, if one is more than a mere worker ant, and values such things as space, life, and recreation.
Let us contrast this with Bangladesh.
Bangladesh has virtually no clean waterways, and virtually no wild landscapes where life thrives, aside from a few southern swamps (soon to be destroyed) and a hill tract region in the Far East of the country that is far more developed than anything one would find in comparable hill tracts in the Midwest’s Driftless Area or the Missouri Ozarks. Rapacious industries take men and turn them from men into textile workers, dump awful ingredients into the rivers, and the primary recreation-if it can be called that-is found not in nature, but at boring and dreary urban recreation centers or mosques or other such places where one is forced to interact with humans relentlessly. It is a nasty place to be, and one finds redeeming qualities for it only if one does not value such things as space, life, and recreation.
Now let us interrogate these: On the one hand, we have a region of the world where life can be enjoyable-a pleasure, a gift. In another, we have the unadulterated misery of living in an open sewer. While we cannot doubt that there are ways Bangladesh could be rendered a nicer nation (development, better plumbing and sanitation, stronger worker protections, and so forth), it is difficult to see how one who values life lived outside, with space and wildlife, can be made into a happy man under such conditions. Perhaps one can shoot sparrows with an air rifle, or fish for whatever can survive the polluted waters, or visit the disappearing and tiny tracts I have mentioned of relatively wild lands, but such seems like artifice, a simulation of what real recreation must be.
But we have not said that life is impossible in Bangladesh. By all means, it appears that hunger is decreasing there, not increasing. Vast tracts of rice are in fact farmed there, despite the fact that it clearly has so many people that said tracts are always under threat of development. No, no, the malthusians are in fact wrong if they say it is impossible for this to be sustained-it can of course be sustained, and will be, and the cornucopians are correct in insisting that Bangladesh can sustain a large population.
But the cornucopians have ignored completely that someone might in fact find living in Bangladesh to be less than satisfactory, a sort of bare life, in which ones surrounding are indistinguishable from an ant-colony, in which life becomes lived entirely on top of other humans, packed like sardines, respite and recreation, freedom from the feeling of being trapped all being elusive.
The Trouble with the Religious Right
Perhaps the biggest barrier to discussing population is the religious right; for one, they are hellbent on self destructive natalist ideals, convinced that nothing could be more “traditional” than living in a blade runner like megacity, if at least people are typically going to have nine kids (or, for that matter, three kids). Insistent on the religious view that all men are equal in the eyes of god, they are content to paint romantic images of the world but be part of its destruction.
The hypocrisy of this is rather astounding. For orthodox christians, the most sacred space, the island of Mt. Athos, hosts abundant space-an implicit acknowledgement that open spaces are in fact beautiful, that nature is beautiful, and this is critical to the spiritual life of men. But the very same church demands its followers not use birth control, and that they have essentially unlimited followers. The church preaches the paving of the world, and retreats to the mountains left unpaved. Similar patterns can be found in virtually all faiths: pastoral landscapes have religious and spiritual value, but are ignored in real life when the dogma that child birthing should be unlimited rubs up against them. Orthodox Jews “love the land” of Palestine, but have five or six kids per family, with no regard or seeming common sense for what this will mean for those kids in how they will be able to actually interact with the landscape, that will have to be developed for their habitation (or, alternatively, they will have to be packed on top of each other in mega buildings to accommodate).
All of this has caused problems with how the right can even conceive of itself. On the one hand it is stuck with romantic paintings, on the other, it hates the thought of actualizing them. Like a repressed instinct, they twist their love of space and beauty into a hatred of it, through a commitment to natalist dogma and human equality.
The problem is deeper of course; it is Engelsian dogma, not traditional right wing dogma, that population is not a problem. Libertarians want to be left alone, but want to destroy the circumstances under which being left alone is legitimately accessible. Traditionalists want tradition but neglect what the southern agrarians refer to as the “conditions of authentic religion” that declines under urbanization. Nationalists want the nation, but seem confused at the thought of the natural areas that make the nation able to achieve its own relationship with space that fully actualizes it.
Pro-Population is the Mantra of a Bugman
Let us take a look at the case of Leigh Phillips. A proud leftist, a self proclaimed defender of “stuff” (i.e. consumerism), and someone who believes, unironically, that it is exciting to wait for “Nigeria… to join the global conversation”. Every problem caused by Nigeria going from a hundred million to a billion people in a century, according to him, are worth it, because they might create some pop music like South Korea, if according to Leigh, everybody else ponies up and hands them some money. He then calls this future totalitarian, overpopulation accommodating, command economy “social democratic solutions”.
Like Matt Yglesias, proud proponent of “one billion Americans”, Leigh is lacking any values of his own, aside from some sort of vague commitment to “creativity” and “progress”. He clearly has never seen birds rise above a prairie wetland; nor has he seen a ten point buck come out of the woods; nor has he felt the thrill of catching a native fish. Leigh instead prefers his existence as a Amazon shopper (and wants this to be subsidized by a command economy), pontificating online that the silly environmentalism movement “suffers from an unscientific belief that the current assemblage of species and current set of conditions on Earth must always remain so for their own sake.”
Of course, the idea that the assemblage of species on earth ought to be somewhat diverse, and not adversely effected by human habitation is not a scientific supposition. It is a philosophical one, and a preferential one at that. Unlike Leigh, a sizable chunk of humanity is attracted to biologically active spaces, brimming with mystery, to explore, to hunt, forage, and fish in, to seek peace in. To Leigh, the world of Blade Runner is attractive, so long as it is “socialist”. Anyone who dares question this direction for humanity is being “unscientific”, despite such questioning being borne of preference not “science”. According to him, eight billion people existing is eight billion instances of “the universe becoming conscious of itself”, which implies that the billions of other species that they will be replacing are not conscious, and need to be replaced.
The Right wing that agrees with Leigh, largely says the same things; that “scientifically” population can continue to increase; that each new person is a “miracle”; that the natural world needs to be replaced by “human creativity”. Discussion of preference is ignored, and the simple question of whether it is nicer to live in Bangladesh or Missouri (or, for that matter, Japan, the Netherlands, [insert other overpopulated, but developed country] or Missouri) is ignored.
The imagination of a person like this is a sad place; it is devoid of places to get away, it is devoid of the thrill of the hunt, it is a manufactured place, generated off of the cheap high of commodities and labor. It holds no place for any evaluations of life that aren’t purely based around “science”. It lacks even room for simple preference, and where it claims to do so, it prefers living on top of others to life lived well, on open lands.
A Better Path
Reconsidering the population means asking a simple question: How many people is it ideal to share so much space with? This is what all of this has overtly pointed towards. From here, and of interest to the right, might be an attitude of population pluralism. Waging a worldwide crusade to stop overpopulated nations from breeding so heedlessly is unattractive to say the least, especially among those on the right. However, preventing immigration to western countries with intact ecological landscapes is attractive.
This can also become the main point of discussion on the population question, and be applicable to local issues. Lowering the population of the bird breeding centers of the plains, or the boreal forest, or the arctic, and preventing further population rise there, and reconfiguring the economy in such a way that the nation depends less on the pillage of the resources of these particularly sensitive regions for the more populated regions, perhaps through autarkic economics that lessens the global use of these regions, would be a sound set of policies for a nationalist-environmental movement to adopt.
Most of all, men who love their local forests, wetlands, and plains can keep watch, demanding that local authorities involve themselves in enforcing existing immigration laws, and appear at town hall and state representative meetings demanding that zoning be refigured around providing housing for locals only, and not foreign immigrants. Such a path is possible for the right to adopt, and be actively addressing the population question.