Allan Massie: The end is not nigh, unless you’re pushing on a bit

IT WAS quite a long time ago – in 1798 actually – that the Rev Thomas Malthus published his Essay on Population, in which, according to the Concise Dictionary of National Biography, “he laid down that population increases in geometrical, and subsistence in arithmetical proportion only, and argued the necessity of ‘checks’ on population in order to reduce vice and misery”.

Well, it was not long before his argument was discredited. The population rose, and continued to rise, so that there are now more than ten times as many people living in the United Kingdom as there were in 1798, but starvation has not resulted.

On the contrary, even the poorest live better than the poor then, better indeed than the middling folk of that time. Life expectancy has been extended beyond what was imaginable. The vast majority of children live to become adults, as only a minority used to.

This was made possible, first, by the agricultural revolution. In Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift had declared: “Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together”.

This is a truth which is so clear, simple and undeniable that we usually ignore it.

Nevertheless, despite the evidence of man’s ability to expand production to meet the demands of a rising population, Thomas Malthus still raises his gloomy head, and his argument is recycled from generation to generation.

He has never been proved right, but his disciples, prophets of doom, insist that the day of judgment, when his forebodings become reality, has only been postponed. With the arrival this week of the seven hundredth billion human inhabitant of our planet, the Malthusians are again shaking their heads and telling us we are all doomed unless we learn to curb our appetites and restrict our propensity to breed.

“There should,” Professor Sir Ian Wilmut told readers of this newspaper yesterday, “be promotion of the notion that population control is essential and beneficial even in countries like our own.” As far as children are concerned, he suggests that we should all impose a self-restraining ordinance and agree that “two’s plenty”.

Sir Ian is not an out-and-out Malthusian. His article was measured. He isn’t one of those scientists who love to appear on television or in the press wearing an imaginary sandwich-board which proclaims that “The End Is Nigh”. He makes all sorts of sensible qualifications, and admits , for instance, that there is a great deal of evidence which shows that with greater prosperity people do exercise the restraint he is calling for.

“In Europe … it is believed that the population has peaked and may even decline in the future, depending partly on the extent of immigration into Europe.”

He recognises, too, that the same sort of developments which have disproved Malthus to date may continue to do so, and writes, approvingly I think, of “new methods of agricultural production including genetic modification”.

Here he is with Swift and against Malthus.

In general, however, gloom predominates. Even developments desirable in themselves, such as measures to reduce infant mortality in Africa and other parts of the Third World, are storing up trouble in the future: more mouths to feed.

Still, we have been here before, time and again indeed since Malthus published his tract. Back in 1945, that great Scotsman, Sir John Boyd Orr, warned of the threat of world famine; this earned him the nickname of “Dismal Johnny”. His alarmist talk was deliberate, to encourage action.

One response was the establishment of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), Boyd Orr becoming its first director.

Whatever the failure of the UN in other areas, FAO has been a success. The rise in food production in countries like India was the result of the application of the work initiated by Boyd Orr in Scotland and now pursued worldwide. Boyd Orr, too, was with Swift against Malthus.

Sir Ian’s recommendation that we in Scotland and the other parts of the UK should adopt a two-children-and-no-more family policy will seem sensible to many, even if we also think that exercising such restraint here will contribute precious little to curtailing the growth of world population.

Some may worry that fewer children now means that there will be a smaller working population required to support a great number of retired people 20, 30, 40 years down the line, though it takes fewer people to produce a given quantity of food or other goods now than it used to. Others may simply bridle at Sir Ian’s recommendation that we need “government promotion of the fact” (sic) “that having more than two children is imposing unacceptable demands upon he environment”.

Deep down, we may all suspect that Sir Ian and those who think like him have got the problem upside down: it’s not that we have too many children but that we have succeeded in extending our lifespan, often well beyond the point at which we become socially or economically useless; so it is not children who are a burden on our resources, but rather oldies.

This may be a fact (sic again), but it is a decidedly uncomfortable thought, all the more so for one who, like myself, has already lived beyond the 70 years which the Bible declares to be our divinely-allotted span. Nobody – not even a scientist or Friend of the Earth – is proposing a cull of oldies. Not yet anyway. Nevertheless, we who are getting old and grey, and finding that “the weight of the grasshopper has become a burden”, cannot deny that people tend to get more joy from their children than from their ageing parents or grandparents; or indeed that the children will grow up to work productively, while our work is either done or will soon be done.

An unpleasant reflection to take into the winter of our days, but then, as the Epicurean sage said, “why prolong life, save to prolong pleasure?”