Spencer Heath Archive

Item 549

This Item, written in Santa Ana, California, was published posthumously in Libertarian Papers Vol.9 No.1, 2017

No date

 

 

/MALTHUS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT/

 

     About a century and a half ago a scholarly English divine, Thomas Malthus by name, so far descended from his spiritual estate as to become preoccupied with the exclus­ively animal nature of men. He thus conceived of mankind as being on all fours, so to speak, with the quadrupedal forms of life, especially with respect to their tendency to increase their numbers beyond the limits of their sub­sistence. On this basis, namely, that the life of mankind is wholly biological and parasitical he propounded his famous and perhaps too long respected theory of population. And in the narrow premise that he chose, in which he equated the life of man with that of his humbler kin, he was, of course, entirely correct. For it was not given to them as it was to man that they should indefinitely rebuild and re­create the conditions of their lives. The consequence is that all the animals that multiply within a given area are rivals for the limited subsistence it affords, and are thus subject to what Malthus called the “positive checks” of starvation and disease by which the “balance of nature” in any terrain is preserved.

And it is the contention of many today that despite any possible or conceivable increase in the production of food the Malthusian “positive checks” must soon or late take dire effect for mankind — unless there be quickly a high perfec­tion and almost world-wide voluntary employment of artifi­cial control. It is indeed the common Malthusian belief that fertility is correlated to subsistence so that any increase in the per capita supply of food is a direct stimulus to increase in the reproductive rate and thus worsens the very condition it might be thought to relieve, Yet this correlation of fecundity and supply of food in the case of animals, including primitive, unregenerate and unproductive men, may not always hold good. For these (with the possible exception of beavers) do not, as do voluntarily interacting and exchanging men, progressively and cumulatively improve and rebuild the natural conditions of their lives. Lacking the capacity to produce and create, their vital energy has no outlet but to multiply their kind.

In high contrast with the inorganic, it is a charac­teristic of all living things that, consciously or uncon­sciously, they look to the future and to change; their primordial instinct is to perpetuate the reproductive rhythm of the race or kind. A generation of adult animals or of primitive and parasitic men are impelled to, and only to, reproduce and perpetuate their kind — and this up to the full extent that the environment can sustain. Here the correlation between numbers and subsistence is direct and complete and the ecological balance is drastically maintained.

But so far as men enter into reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationships with one another, so far as they practice this vital interfunctioning, and thus emerge out of the limitations of their merely animal nature they con­stitute a new and higher form of life, an organic unity that through specialization and “division of labor” among its members and parts acquires its higher and distinguishing function of modifying and re-creating its environment in accordance with its vital needs. And this transformation, this humanizing of the environment, engages for societal needs and ends as increasing length of days the vital energy that else perforce had only gone to multiply the kind. Here is a marvelous condition indeed: implicit in the vital energy of populations of men is the same principle of balance and conservation in higher forms that marks the total order of the cosmic world. Abundance no longer stimulates to reproduction because in the societal interfunctioning the vital energy of reproduction is transformed into fewer richer and thereby more enduring lives.

The animals and the like parasitic and uncreative men live by their feelings alone; only in their societal life do men find themselves rationally endowed. Even then the part of human belief and behavior is exceedingly small.

Consider a constant million population of wholly unproductive and parasitic primitive men occupying a terrain in which they can subsist to an average life span of only twenty life-years per individual or twenty thousand life years per generation as a whole.

Consider further that the reproductivity exceeds the subsistence to some extent. Obviously then all those born in excess of 100 million per generation must die. The circumstance that the natural terrain affords subsistence for only twenty millions of life-years illustrates the operation of the Malthusian “positive checks” in the drastic elimination of the twenty-million life-years that are in excess of what the natural environment can sustain. Thus a population whose units are insufficiently organized among themselves to function favorably upon its environment, as are all merely animal populations, can only maintain itself at a given level and the Malthusian “balance of nature” is maintained.

Consider now the million population as having developed such reciprocal relationships among themselves and thus to have so improved their environment that it will now sustain them to average ages of twenty-five instead of only twenty years. Each generation now represents twenty-five instead of twenty million life years, only twenty million of which is required for replacement of their predecessors, the addi­tional five million adult life-years having gone into func­tioning upon the environment and thus bringing about the self-creation of five-millions of life years without any increase of numbers and simply by the lengthening of the span. Thus one fifth of the total life energy has been employed not in mere maintenance of numbers but in the temporal extension of their individual lives. Such was the approxi­mate condition of mankind in the days of the Rev. Thomas Malthus when the human life span was about 25 years. And in Asia today. Supposing now that the total human life energy remains constant at twenty-five million life years and that with increasing cooperation

 

 

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/The following earlier version contains some material of interest not carried over into the above later draft./

 

Santa Ana, California 

About a century and a half ago a scholarly English divine, Thomas Malthus by name, so far descended from his spiritual estate as to become preoccupied with the exclus­ively animal nature of man. He thus conceived of mankind as being on all fours, so to speak, with the quadrupedal forms of life, especially with respect to their tendency towards increasing their numbers. From his wholly animal­istic premises, his famous Malthusian Theory was and is obviously correct and true. For all animal life, including the merely animal life of men, has evolved out of and is the creature of an environment not of its own making and over which it has no dominion or control. And, still worse, the animal life is not only limited to what sustenance the environment affords, but by the very fact of increasing its numbers it must increasingly diminish its store. The conse­quence is that all the animals within a given terrain press­ing against their limited subsistence are subject to what Malthus called the “positive checks” of starvation and dis­ease and the cannibalism and war among nations by which the “balance of nature” in any terrain is preserved.

Furthermore, and beyond all this the unregenerate animal man is singularly perverse. With his superior physical brain he develops a “moral” sense under which he invents a thing called depravity and sin. This he imputes to the generality of his kind and thus claims for himself a “moral” authority over the behavior and the beliefs of other men. He forfeits his potential dominion over all lesser things by his lust, either singly or in concert with others, to govern and enslave his fellow men, and all mankind are divided into armed, alien nations always poten­tially if not actively at war. They have turned away from the Tree of Life to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil whose penalty is death. Thus so far as their relationships are political and coercive there is, for the governing, and for the governed as well, no escape from the bondage of death. Through all the annals of man no sovereign power, whether absolute or democratic, has ever risen but to fall.

 

Up to this point man has been viewed in respect to that alone which he has and does in common with the lower animals, in those limited modes of action and life in which he is, in fact, no more than an animal. And, further, he has been viewed in those modes of behavior in which he has des­cended from his lowly animal estate so far as to become predatory upon his own kind — a unique kind of depravity that is practiced very little if to any extent by any other of the myriad forms of life. We have seen how man fell into the sin of…