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“We Should Prize Human Life…and Count it As Precious, No Matter How Much of It... : 14th Sep 09
Britain’s population has passed 60 million, but people should ignore the doom-mongers, because this is something to celebrate, not to be scared by. So says Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the author of Civilisations and Food: A History. The good news, he says, is that Britain’s population has climbed to a healthy level.
The bad news is that doomsayers will portray triumph as disaster: “History can give us a rational, informed awareness of how and why levels rise and fall and help us to welcome—happily, unequivocally—the new-born and the newly arrived. Population anxiety is usually ill-informed and often ill-intentioned—targeted against the poor who ‘breed like rabbits’ or immigrants who ‘swamp’ natives. When Thomas Malthus provoked Westerners into stressing about population, the results were abominable.
Fears of diminishing lebensraum and resources provoked wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. Misguided do-gooders harassed the poor into birth control, demonising big families that increased earning power and provided care for ageing generations. Events exploded Malthus’s claim that only wars, famines and plagues could keep population and resources in balance. While population surged, resources increased even more.
Yet Malthusian terror still ravages otherwise rational minds. China has only just begun to relax persecution of people who try to have a healthy number of children. Indian women still suffer the effects of compulsory sterilisation. Neo-fascists in Britain still scare voters with images of a ‘small island’ overrun by unwanted people. Apostles of birth control still try to deny joy to mothers and life to unborn children in places cursed not with overpopulation but poverty.
Population increase causes none of the problems commonly ascribed to it. We face crises of biodiversity and resources—but because of our madcap consumption, not our numbers. In the 20th century, world population increased roughly fourfold, while per capita consumption has increased some nineteen-fold—and, of course, that overindulgence was overwhelmingly concentrated in a few Western countries. With reasonable restraints on consumption, we could have experienced a hugely bigger population rise without greater stress.
So the latest figures are a source of hope—showing that relatively fertile immigrants can, at least for a while, replenish the new generation of young people the country needs. In these circumstances, population fear-mongering is a kind of terrorism and the ‘population bomb’ is a hoax. The real danger is that as people multiply, we will value them less. We should prize human life and try to continue to count it as precious, no matter how much of it we have”. The Times. August 28.
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