Thomas Robert Malthus is known for the assertion: Population grows geometrically while food production grows arithmetically. Yeah, I know, it just ain’t so. So why bring it up, right?
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Well, the way we remember the Malthusian warning is: Unless we take steps to control the population, we’ll soon face starvation. Malthus has a nice model to support the contention. Are you thinking there are other models that are proving equally as accurate and valuable? Good point but not where we’re going.
Poor misunderstood Malthus, here we are about 220 years later. We have abundant food. Fertility rates are below replacement level. Rates of undernourishment and death from famine are at historic lows. Caloric intake (not population) is growing around the world. He must have been wrong… right?
Well, as it turns out no. Here’s why. Malthus did not predict a population crisis unless population control was put in place. In fact, he did not even advocate for birth control. What Malthus did do is to warn us against the destruction of social institutions to make way for utopian schemes.
So what was Malthus’s work actually about?
So, what did Malthus write and why did he write it? Malthus was a conservative or that’s how he would be described today. His warning concerns the dangers of the denial of the fixed meaning or universal applicability of moral law. That’s not at all what he is known for. The subject matter isn’t even the same.
The full title of his most famous work is “An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers”. The question, you see, was the prospects for future improvements in society. It was not an analysis of a coming population crisis.
The key questions for Godwin, Condorcet, and Malthus were whether man and society are perfectible. Are social institutions the source of defects in man and society? Godwin and Condorcet answered in the affirmative to both questions. Malthus took the opposite view. The argument between these gentlemen is much the same as the argument today about genetic modification.
The French Revolution and America today
The French Revolution was the result of those chasing perfection in man and society. They were in pursuit of a utopia. They asserted man and society can and should seek perfection. The French Revolution tore down many social institutions.
Malthus used the population illustration in rebuttal of such a pure egalitarian society. Most especially if those societies were without institutions such as property rights and marriage. It was his assertion population pressure would lead to vice and misery. In the end, the community would come to rediscover the very institutions they had torn down.
Intellectually and spiritually the French Revolution is not over. It may have come to our shores. It is an ongoing enterprise that seems to be gaining force. The institutions from the American founding connecting the nation with God, nature, community, and family are being abandoned. Institutions are falling prey to corruption and the breakdown or absence of social norms and values. Was Malthus correct? Probably.
Conclusion
The battle lines are being drawn and redrawn in a dynamic political game. We are sorting out oppressors and oppressed. The French Revolution was to bring liberty, equality, and fraternity. It did bring genocide brutal pacification of the conservative and pious. If it is now America’s turn for a political movement of liberation we can expect the land will be soaked in blood.
Intellectuals bred in schools where the pursuit of facts, truth, and justice has been abandoned or denied are leading the Leftist movement. They are full of the ideology of total politics as raw power. The question remains: How much misery and vice will it take for socialism to lose its appeal. Was Malthus correct after all? You make the call, but understanding what he was writing about helps in understanding how to remember him.