Surely everyone can agree that the most basic ethical, social, economic, and political goal is or should be a high, or at least acceptable, quality of life – one based on peace, freedom, and moderate prosperity – for the whole of humanity over the long term.

2) The three basic policy variables.

Probably most of us also agree that a precondition for achieving this worthy goal is first the attainment, and then the permanent maintenance, of a reasonable balance between the three basic variables: our numbers, resources, and quality of life.

Surely most of us can agree that these are: a) the biological, & b) the ecological:

a) This is superfecundity. All living things can produce, and most do produce, vastly more seeds, eggs, or offspring than can possibly survive. We humans need only just over two surviving children per couple to maintain our numbers, but women not influenced by an effective set of restraints (mainly self-imposed, of course, when free to express themselves fully), will average more than 10. (Some human groups are still averaging six to eight births, tending to double their populations every 20 years or so).

b) This is physical finiteness. The universe as a whole may be infinite and significant space-travel may one day be feasible, but for the foreseeable future our earthly lives – including our fertility – must remain subject to very firm and obvious limits.

 

4) The basic nature of the population/resources balancing process.

After a little thought, perhaps most will agree that this is a problem with no final solution as it is a tracking-task. All societies – as long as they survive – must continue to deal effectively with a wide array of complex, interlinked, and shifting problems.

The Royal Commission on Population [of Britain] put this very clearly:

 Even when things go well for a time, in the absence of informed, rigorous, and continuous group management the key variables tend to slide out of kilter both with each other and with the ecological imperatives enveloping all social systems.

Most will agree that when this balance is missing there must be, at the very least, deprivation and suffering, all too often exacerbated by excessive competition or even open conflict over scarce resources. However, vis-a-vis the quality of life, disagreement tends to arise over the kind of relationship between numbers and resources.

5) The only three basic population/development policies.

Presumably nearly everyone has to agree with the simple logic telling us that only three basic policies for balancing numbers and resources are possible:

a) Ignore population-quantity & concentrate all policy effort on producing enough resource-quantity to cope with whatever numbers come along.

b) Ignore resource-quantity and concentrate all policy effort on ensuring that population-quantity matches the available resource-quantity, whatever that is.

c) Ignore quantity in neither sphere. Adopt an all-embracing policy which judiciously balances both numbers and resources against each other so as to sustain an acceptable quality of life. (Preferably for other threatened species, too?)

 

Numbers don’t create problems for ‘modern’ communities only, as the Royal Com-mission said. They have troubled societies from time immemorial. One of the oldest literary documents extant (impressed on a clay tablet in Babylon nearly 4,000 years ago) is a poem called Atra Hasis. Its themes were overpopulation and environmental damage, plus a plea to the highest gods for swift and drastic population-reduction.

The ancient Egyptians, the authors of the Bible, the Greek philosophers, Indian, Roman and Muslim thinkers (eg Ibn Khaldun) all dealt with population problems, theories, and policies, as have most traditional societies.

Even the late Professor Julian Simon – widely acknowledged as the leader of the modern Cornucopian school of thought – who argued that resources and population can and will grow for ever, readily acknowledged that:

Eg:

Eg: A tribal elder on the island of Tikopia explained to Raymond Firth:

Eg. Before their cultures were disrupted by colonisation, the Australian Aboriginals (partly by means of drastic surgical methods of birth control) maintained approximately zero population growth [ZPG]for some 40,000 years.

8) Proof from thinkers of the Developing World that numbers do matter.

Many distinguished Third World citizens have stressed the relationship between exploding numbers and poverty, pollution, illiteracy, unemployment, and conflict. Eg:

First, the great anti-colonialist Indian statesman, Shri Jawaharlal Nehru, who stated firmly about 1960: ‘We should be a far more advanced nation if our population were about half what it is now.’ (Bertrand Russell in Mudd, ed., 1964)

(India’s numbers were then around 430 million so Mr Nehru was stating a preference for a population of only 215 million. By mid-2002, however, India has reached some 1,045 millions, over 40% of whom, some 420 million (roughly double Mr Nehru’s optimum population figure) suffer from great deprivation.

Another, in 1972, was the Burmese statesman, U Thant, then at the UN:

The Indian scholar, D. Banerji, wrote in The Times of India:

A later UN Secretary-General, Perez de Cuellar, said in a speech in 1984:

Another senior UN figure to speak out was Rafael Salas, Executive Director of the UNFPA and Secretary-General of the 1984 Mexico Conference:

Dr A. Adedegi, Executive Secretary, Economic Commission for Africa argued:

In a speech, Mr Mwai Kibaki, Kenyan Vice-President, was even more forceful:

Dr Martin Luther King, also firmly upheld effective multiracial birth-control:

‘In the need for family planning, Negro and white have a common bond: together we can and should unite our strength for the wise preservation not of races, but of the one race we all constitute, the human race.’ (Suitters, 1973, p. 315)

Sadly, political correctness has all but buried this simple truth. Today, at 6.25 billion – still growing by some 80 million every year – only one world leader combines the requisite ecological awareness with the spiritual and moral stature to speak plainly about the population problem. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, recently declared:

Except in the very short term; all individual societies and humanity as a whole have – one way or another – to make these two basic and inescapable choices:

a) Between quantity and quality. These two variables cannot both be maximised. Consciously or not, choices must be made. The economic law, ‘opportunity-cost’, inexorably ensures that every billion Rupees, Rand, Naira, Dollars – whichever – spent to cope with an increase in the quantity of human life, is inevitably at the cost of the billion now unavailable for improving the quality of human life.

b) Between low birthrates linked to the low death rates typifying high life-expect-ancies, and the high death rates and low life-expectancies which must accompany high birth rates. Joel Cohen (1995) has labelled this ‘Methuselah’s Choice’.

 

a) The inherent difficulties in seeing clearly and thinking hard, straight, and long.

b) The widespread human tendency to prevaricate; to avoid, wherever possible, bad news and awkward decisions.

c) The widespread conviction that concern about numbers is intrinsically coercive. The belief that freedom and control are polar opposites is quite false. Liberty is actually produced by suitable controls: not too many, not too few, but just right.

d) The influence of political correctness, often based on hopelessly unrealistic notions of what is feasible on a finite planet, what has been labelled as ‘pseudo-liberalism’.

Hence, the near-universal taboo on the topic of population planning policies, with zero regard for the likely consequences of a failure to adopt such policies.

Aren’t these the problems Johannesburg should be tackling?

Jack Parsons (25 July 2002)

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