When did the apocalyptic movement, that afflicts our society today via Climate Change campaigning, begin? It started with the Right Reverend Malthus, that walking talking philosophical time bomb. He of the "surplus population". A top christian, he advocated that we CAN have too many of God's children. He did not have Climate Change at hand but he did have Hobbes and his Leviathinite belief that we needed to bow down to some Lord High Executioner if we knew what was good for us: an omnisicient, all-knowing omnipotent state who would steer us away from our natural tendency to self destructive behaviour.
He had a willing accomplice in bourgeoisie like Ebeneezer Scrooge, whose own life was ok. But not if you were, well, surplus to requirements. More of us would lead paradoxically to less of us and we would die after a "short brutish" life as more of us were forced to make do with ever shrinking finite resources and, above all, less and less food. Thank God and our indomitable,inventive spirit that, in every metric respect, he was incorrect. From Malthus' time (early 19th Century) until today, the population of the earth went up but incomes went up. So, too, did the availability of not only staples but many goods that only the richest could afford in his time or that no one could afford because they did not exist.
His immediate intellectual descendants were the Darwinians and the Eugenicists whose earnest, chilling cry was for Survival to be dictated by the Fittest. Their sinister beliefs that "the line of idiots" wretches and cripples had to end (Justice Holmes, Margaret Sanger) helped justify the great totalitarians who crushed tens of millions under the jackboot of ethnic hatred and economic expedience. Mao's Great Leap Forward, Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's endless 5 Year Plans all owed their brutalizing DNA to the Apocalypt's theory of exterminating misery by miserable extermination. Despite the cataclysmic catharses of 1945 and 1989, they still live in Pyongyang and Havana, often celebrated by today's Malthusians. As Shaw said of the USSR ("I have seen the future") so Sean Penn says of Venezuela or Tom Friedman of China.
Malthus' next disciple and prophet was Paul Erlich. Malthus would envy his best selling book title "The Population Bomb". He too predicted apocalypse (all oil gone by 1980 and food in 2000) and prescribed megalomaniacal solutions to be applied by an all-directing and encompassing state. The opposite of what he predicted came true.The World doubled in population, found more reserves of oil than ever and saw hunger and poverty collapse. The genius of human existence, far from being a bane, was a boon. In other words, the more people, the richer. (Still, hundreds of millions were aborted as respectable Malthusians, like Justice Ginsberg, said that Roe v. Wade got rid of a lot of people we did not want).
After a merciful all too brief interlude, we were accosted again by the gloomsters. They had a new weapon that Erlich and Malthus were not smart or imaginative enough to brandish - Climate Change. A phenomenon we cannot possibly control was presented as an excuse for running our lives. "Sure, Marxism is dead but, if the astronauts tell us there's an emergency, who are we to argue?" A lesser prophet of doom came next. Al Gore won an Academy Award and a Nobel Prize for predicting climate change would drown polar bears and sink Manhattan. The happy problem for us was that his "Inconvenient Truth" was that none of it came to pass.
Today, the latest apostle, the Swedish Scoldilocks, who, in accuses us deluded growth junkies of robbing her of a childhood and bringing on her mass extinction in 10 years, wants policies and attitudes that would rob whole generations yet unborn of any chance at a childhood. The only good thing about Malthus and his followers is that they were all proven wrong in detail. The bad thing about them is the misery and destruction they cause, with grotesque -isms like "Carbon Bomb" to refer to a baby in the womb, before we finally do the right thing and ignore them even as we effortlessly prove them wrong and stun all again with our wondrous innovation, creativity and resilience.
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