All the intellectual and spiritual foundations of our culture were laid by people who believed absolutely that we are humanity itself. Thucydides believed it. Socrates believed it. Plato believed it. Aristotle believed it. Ssu-ma Ch’ien believed it. Gautama Buddha believed it. Confucius believed it. Moses believed it. Jesus believed it. St. Paul believed it. Muhammad believed it. Avicenna believed it. Thomas Aquinas believed it. Copernicus believed it. Galileo and Descartes believed it, though they could easily have known better. Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Kant, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus—they all took it for granted, though they certainly didn’t lack the requisite information to know better.
But you’re bound to be wondering why it would be such bad news if we were humanity? I’ll try to explain. If we were humanity itself, then all the terrible things we say about humanity would be true—and that would be very bad news. If we were humanity itself, then all our destructiveness would belong not to one misguided culture but to humanity itself—and that would be very bad news. If we were humanity itself, then the fact that our culture is doomed would mean that humanity itself is doomed—and that would be very bad news. If we were humanity itself, then the fact that our culture is the enemy of life on this planet would mean that humanity itself is the enemy of life on this planet—and that would be very bad news. If we were humanity itself, then the fact that our culture is hideous and misshapen would mean that humanity itself is hideous and misshapen—very bad news indeed.
Oh, groan, humanity, if we are humanity! Oh, groan in horror and despair, if the miserable and misguided creatures of our culture are humanity itself!
But we’re not humanity, we’re just one culture—one culture out of hundreds of thousands that have lived their vision on this planet and sung their song—and that’s wonderful news, even for us!
If it were humanity that needed changing, then we’d be out of luck. But it isn’t humanity that needs changing, it’s just … us.
And that’s very good news.
Stick with me, friends. We’ll get there, step by step by step.
Population: A Systems Approach
21 May, Stuttgart
Because the ideas I’m going to be presenting here have proved to be so unsettling for people, I’ve learned to approach them cautiously, from a good, safe distance—a good, safe distance being in this case about two hundred thousand years. Two hundred thousand years ago is when a new species called Homo sapiens first began to be seen on this planet.
As with any young species, there were not many members of it to begin with. Since our subject is population, I’d better clarify what I mean by that. We have an approximate date for the emergence of Homo sapiens because we have fossil remains—and we have fossil remains because a sufficient number of this species lived around this time to provide those fossil remains. In other words, when I say that Homo sapiens appeared about two hundred thousand years ago, I’m not talking about the first two of them or the first hundred of them. But neither am I talking about the first million of them.
Two hundred thousand years ago, there was a bunch. Let’s say ten thousand. Over the next hundred ninety thousand years, Homo sapiens grew in numbers and migrated to every continent of the world.
The passage of these hundred ninety thousand years brings us to the opening of the historical era on this planet. It brings us to the beginning of the agricultural revolution that stands at the foundation of our civilization. This is about ten thousand years ago, and the human population at that time is estimated to have been around ten million.
I want to spend a couple minutes now just looking at that period of growth from ten thousand people to ten million people. As it happens, what this period of growth represents is ten doublings. From ten thousand to twenty thousand, from twenty thousand to forty thousand, from forty thousand to eighty thousand, and so on. Start with ten thousand, double it ten times, and you wind up with about ten million.
So: Our population doubled ten times in a hundred ninety thousand years. Went from about ten thousand to ten million. That’s growth. Undeniable growth, definite growth, even substantial growth … but growth at an infinitesimal rate. Here’s how infinitesimal it was: On the average, our population was doubling every nineteen thousand years. That’s slow—glacially slow.
At the end of this period, which is to say ten thousand years ago, this began to change very dramatically. Growth at an infinitesimal rate became growth at a rapid rate. Starting at ten million, our population doubled not in nineteen thousand years but in five thousand years, bringing it to twenty million. The next doubling—doubling and a bit—took only two thousand years, bringing us to fifty million. The next doubling took only sixteen hundred years, bringing us to one hundred million. The next doubling took only fourteen hundred years—bringing us to two hundred million at the zero point of our calendar. The next doubling took only twelve hundred years, bringing us to four hundred million. The year was 1200 A.D. The next doubling took only five hundred years, bringing us to eight hundred million in 1700. The next doubling took only two hundred years, bringing us to a billion and a half in 1900. The next doubling took only sixty years, bringing us to three billion in 1960. The next doubling will take only thirty-seven years or so. Within ten or twenty months we’ll reach six billion, and if this growth trend continues unchecked, many of us in this room will live long enough to see us reach twelve billion. I won’t attempt to imagine for you what that will mean. At a rough guess, my personal guess, take everything bad that you see going on now—environmental destruction, terrorism, crime, drugs, corruption, suicide, mental illness—violence of every kind—and multiply by four … at least. But, believe it or not, I’m not here to depress you with gloomy pictures of the future.
We have a population problem. There are a few people around who think that everything is fine, and we don’t have a population problem at all, but I’m not here to change their minds. I’m here to suggest that the angle of attack we’ve traditionally taken on this problem is ineffective and can never be anything but ineffective. After that, I want to show you a more promising angle of attack. But right now I’d like to read you a fable that I think you’ll find relevant. It’s about some people with a population problem of their own and the way they go about attacking it. It’s called “Blessing: A Fable About Population.”
Blessing: A Fable About Population
It happened once, on a planet not much different from our own, that researchers at a drug company got lucky with a substance they were testing as a pain reliever. Ingesting this substance, called D3346, pain-ridden mice began to exhibit signs of relief: They were friskier, they mated more often, their appetites improved, and so on. Human tests made company officials ecstatic. D3346 outperformed much more powerful drugs and had no deleterious side effects (aside from imparting to the subject an objectionable odor that soon disappeared when the drug was discontinued).
The new drug worked so well that the marketing departmen
t knew they had more than a mere painkiller on their hands. People put up with a host of small aches and pains more or less all the time, and simply by getting rid of them, D3346 gave users a feeling of well-being so intense that it almost amounted to a “high.” The name Blessing was adopted for the new product without discussion, as was its slogan: “Works on pain you didn’t even know you had!”
The drug was initially marketed in pill and liquid forms, but in less than a year someone had the bright idea of packaging it as a powder in disposable shakers designed to take their place beside the salt and pepper on the dining-room table. Within months, all “medicinal” forms had disappeared from store shelves, and Blessing was no longer “taken for pain.” It had become just another beneficial food additive, like a vitamin.
No one was surprised when, nine months after the introduction of the drug, the birth rate began to climb. This had been predicted, and everyone understood the reasons for it. Blessing didn’t increase fertility or sexual appetite; it wasn’t an aphrodisiac. People using it just felt better—more playful, more affectionate, more outgoing. It was predicted that the birth rate would soon level off—and it did … at about ten percent above the old rate.
On this planet, the people I’ve been talking about did not constitute a dominant world culture, as we do—but they soon began to be noticed globally. In the first place, they swelled bad, which earned them the name by which they became known all across the world: the Stinkards. In the second place, responding to internal population pressures, they were incorrigible trespassers and encroachers. Nonetheless, the Stinkards usually managed to do their encroaching without violence … by sending Blessing ahead of them.
It didn’t matter that no one wanted to end up smelling like the Stinkards. The Blessing was there, and few could resist taking just an occasional dose for a sore back or a headache, and before long they were using it like table salt. People began by loathing the Stinkards and passionately resisting their encroachments, but ended up becoming Stinkards themselves. After a few hundred years the Stinkard expansion came to an end—because there were no new lands to expand into. The entire planet was Stinkard.
Farsighted leaders realized that population was soon going to be an urgent problem, but a century passed without significant action being taken. The human population, having no reason to do anything else, continued to grow. Famine became a familiar feature of life in certain parts of the world, and in some quarters the problem came to be understood not as one of curbing growth but as one of increasing food production. Another century passed, and the human population continued to expand.
In informed circles, people began to practice and advocate various population-control strategies, ranging from birth control in one form or another to school programs designed to reduce teenage pregnancies, but none of these initiatives had any measurable effect. As more and more people became aware of the crisis, sociologists and economists began to probe more deeply for its causes. They noted, for example, that in many parts of the world, having children was a means of financial success; lacking other economic opportunities, especially for women, people brought children into the world to serve as unpaid workers and guarantors of old-age security.
One biohistorian by the name of Spry tried to draw people’s attention to the fact that, before the appearance of Blessing, the human population of the planet had been virtually stable, but his listeners had a hard time seeing the connection between the two things.
Dr. Spry tried to explain. “If you introduce Blessing into the diet of any species,” he said, “the result will be the same: The birth rate will increase. Without any offsetting increase in the death rate, the species’ overall population will inevitably increase as well.”
The professor’s listeners really had no notion of what he was getting at, since Blessing had been a constant feature of the human diet for a thousand years, and they couldn’t begin to imagine how it felt to live without it. He had to explain very patiently that, without a constant intake of Blessing, everyone would experience a whole host of minor aches and pains, and experiencing these minor aches and pains, they would be slightly less frisky, slightly less playful, slightly less affectionate, slightly less outgoing—and slightly less inclined to mate. As a result, the birth rate would go down, and the population would soon become stable once again.