Malthus and the Reverse Cassandra Effect
I have always been a little puzzled by overpopulation scares. They were a staple of science fiction in the 1950’s and 1960’s — one of Robert Heinlein’s personal bugbears, for example, showing up in TUNNEL IN THE SKY and FARMER IN THE SKY and it can be seen in Isaac Asimov’s CAVES OF STEEL and in STAND ON ZANZIBAR by Brunner, in the ‘Known Space’ universe of Larry Niven, and in the movie SOYLENT GREEN, and in many places besides.
It was an established staple of the science fiction background, so much so that if you wrote a story set in the future that did not have overpopulation, you had to explain to the readers some reaslistic reason why, in much the same way if you had a future where there was no interplanetary travel, you would have to mention a reason: Otherwise the readers would not find the tale believable.
Why is it so persistent a fear?
That is not hard to see: the writers in the 60’s and 50’s were born and raised in the 30’s and 20’s, and they lived through urbanization, industrialization, and the postwar Baby Boom. It also means that these writers in youth read stories and heard yarns from the previous generation of writers in the 1890’s and 1880’s. This includes the time when the open ranges of the West were still in the process of being fenced in an closed down — the frontier was filled up and closed, the manifest destiny was complete, and the frontier spirit was dying off. They saw highways and factories and parkinglots going up on land that used to be forest where their brothers and fathers had spent time hunting and fishing.
Nothing was more natural but that the science fiction writers would extrapolate from their current circumstances and foretell tales of Malthusian overpopulation.
And, since they were writing fiction, of course they wanted to make their settings as dramatic as possible, and so sought to make the problem as alarming as possible. I suppose one could have written a story about how the population would rise over the next forty years, then taper off, and then not be a problem — but then, if there is no problem, there is no story, and so the author would not mention it. Only bad futures get good press.
The odd part of this was that the muggles, the non-scifi creatures with whom we share our planet, became aware of our daydreams and dramas and decided to become actually frightened by them, or to make political hay out of them. I am reminded of the UFO scare. We science fiction writers speculated about the possibility of life on other planets, and then somehow people began seeing flying saucers and stopped seeing elves. Draw your own conclusions about that.
Why non-scifi people would get into a panic about overpopulation is also relatively easy to see. With the open and notorious failures, the government-sponsored famines, gulags, and monstrous inefficiencies that sprang from every form of planned economy from Stalin’s Russia to Attlee’s England, the excuse of using Caesar’s power to create wealth and abundance had worn a little thin. Another excuse for Cesarean power was needed. Caesar is never needed to solve a problem a man can solve for himself, or a neighborhood; and overpopulation fears, especially when combined with fears about pollution and the weather, offer an almost unbeatable combination of excuses to augment Caesar’s power. Anyone against Caesar was a traitor, not to the state, but to Mother Earth and common sense. You don’t want to end up in the Soylent Green future, eating leftover bits of Edward G. Robinson, do you?
And so a cottage industry of Malthusian Doomsterism was started by Paul Erlich, pretending that Soylent Green was scientific fact rather than science fiction melodrama.
Erlich predicted that by 1980, the Indian subcontinent would be reduced to cannibal massacres of men eating each other merely to bore their way up through the mass of flesh to reach the sunlight. His scientific basis for the prediction had something to do with the rate at which bacteria reproduce, and, like all good scientists, he cannot tell the difference between man and bacteria. Or something. This prediction is what we economists call by the technical term “nuts.”
After non-nuts economist Julian Simon demonstratively and publicly humiliated Erlich by wagering him that the price of certain metals would fall rather than rise over a given decade (since the fall of prices shows the resources are becoming more abundant rather than more scarse) Erlich went on to win even greater renown and popularity.
This allowed Julian Simon to coin what he called the “Reverse Cassandra effect.” In myth, Cassandra was blessed by the gods to give accurate oracles, but cursed that she would never be believed. In life, Erlich has never once given an accurate oracle, but the more inaccurate his predictions are, the more firmly he is believed.
Of course, as anything dealing with demographics or statistics, the matter is open for debate: but it certainly looks as if we now live in a day and age when we are suffering underpopulation, at least in the West: but the East may soon follow.
We are not reproducing at replacement rates, and the more left-of-center element of the population is doing even less reproducing than the more traditional: not to simplify a complex issue, but the fertile Muslim lass pressed into an arranged marriage, or the anti-contraception and anti-abortion young Catholic wife is more likely to reproduce than the me-first feminist, who is still dating at 30 and bearing her first child at 40.
The likelihood of having a large family is remarkably less when you factor in a high divorce rate, a large number of what are euphemistically called single-parent families, and a society that does not encourage (or sets up perverse incentives to discourage) the virtues needed to help young males of child-fathering age to start acting like fathers and breadwinners.
The combination of no-fault divorce laws and deadbeat dad laws means that any mother at any time can take her child and boot the man out of the house, even when there is no intimation of wrongdoing on his part, and he will have to pay for the child-rearing of his child, but not be allowed to rear the child. Legal and moral questions aside, the uncertainty created by these laws makes this an unwise cost-effective proposition, and not one to encourage fatherhood.
The sexual revolution, no matter what other effects it had or was suppose to have, will also act as a dis-incentive to fatherhood, since it is now no longer required, even in theory, that a man establish a household and vow eternal fidelity to his bride before enjoying the pleasures of sexual congress. The sex drive, the strongest drive in the human soul, had been, before the sexual revolution, tied by law and custom directly into “nest-building” behaviors.
Under the old custom, a man with no job and no prospects was unlikely to convince the father of his intended to grant her hand in marriage.
Under the new customs, it is expected for a woman to be sterile artificially, and to copulate on the first or second date with the young man, and he is not supposed to express devotion or even affection until after the sex act is consummated, and this expression is not a vow, it is merely his mood at the moment.
The girl is expected to have her first abortion by sixteen (the age when an older generation was first allowing the girl to wear lipstick) and to celebrate the slaying of her innocent and unborn infant by dancing skyclad in groves sacred to Moloch, waving the bloody knife and chanting “junior is just a mass of cells!” or “mine is the power of life and death!” or something like that.
What the father of the child is supposed to do I am not clear on. Perhaps he is supposed to be impregnating a second teenager while the first one is in the abortion house, recovering, crying, shivering. In order to make the path clear for the young man to impregnate without forethought or remorse, polite society pretends that all unwed underage mothers are as hard-hearted as Bluebeard or Mengele, and able to commit prenatal infanticide on her own child with indifference, or even delight. We should not be shocked that polite society requires the sacrifice of truth on the altar of silent hypocrisy. As worship of Moloch tells us, sacrifices have to be made.
Victory as this might be for human liberty, or license, or degeneracy, but looked at just as an economic model, it does not make for stable households in which to raise children.
Are we likely to see stories of underpopulation terror? Perhaps Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE could be seen to be an underpopulation scare story, or THE CHILDREN OF MEN, but both of these involved (if I understand the plot) non-deliberate sterility, due to environmental catastrophe.
Underpopulation is just not as dramatic as overpopulation. You cannot write a story where someone staggers out into a half-empty street shouting, “Soylent Green is made of Soy and Lentils!” — not as scary.
There also is not much political hay to be made from peddling underpopulation scare stories to the muggles, or, I should say, it happens to be scare-mongering of that kind would tend to favor conservative values, things like femininity in women, motherhood in mothers, non-infanticide, pro-family, men acting like fathers and breadwinners rather than overgrown schoolboys or chumps in the no-fault-divorce lottery — but all these are values and virtues that do not find favor in the eyes of the Brahmins, and so the topic is not broached in polite society. No, the self-anointed Opinion Makers have already made up their Opinions, no matter what reality, demographics, or God Almighty has to say about it.
And no one needs to read a science fiction book for that view of life, one can read any number of historical fictions. Or talk to your Grand-Dad.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
