I
Overpopulation
In
1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there
was still plenty of time. The completely
organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by
methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of
chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of
sleep-teaching - these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not
even in the time of my grandchildren. I
forget the exact date of the events recorded in Brave New World; but it was
somewhere in the sixth or seventh century A.F. (after Ford). We who were living in the second quarter of
the twentieth century A.D. were the inhabitants, admittedly, of a gruesome kind
of universe; but the nightmare of those depression years was radically
different from the nightmare of the future, described in Brave New World. Ours was a nightmare of too little order;
theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much. In the process of passing from one extreme to
the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more
fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds - the
disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World where
perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative.
Twenty-seven years later, in this third
quarter of the twentieth century AD, and long before the end of the first
century AF, I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave
New World. The prophecies made in 1931
are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. The blessed interval between two little order
and the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of
beginning. In the West, it is true,
individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those countries that have a
tradition of democratic government, this freedom and even the desire for this
freedom seems to be on the wane. In the rest
of the world freedom for individuals has already gone, or is manifestly about
to go. The nightmare of total
organization, which I had situated in the seventh century after Ford, has
emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the
next corner.
George Orwell's 1984 was a
magnified projection into the future of a present that contained Stalinism and
an immediate past that had witnessed the flowering of Nazism. Brave New World was written before the
rise of Hitler to supreme power in Germany and when the Russian tyrant had not
yet got into his stride. In 1931
systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contemporary fact which it had
become in 1948, and the future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good
deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by
Orwell. In the context of 1948, 1984
seemed dreadfully convincing. But
tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia, and recent
advances in science and technology, have robbed Orwell's book of some of its
gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war
will, of course, make nonsense of everybody's predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great
Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as
though the odds were more in favour of something like Brave New World
than of something like 1984.
In the light of what we have recently
learned about animal behaviour in general, and human behaviour in particular,
it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable
behaviour is less effective, in the long run, than control through the
reinforcement of desirable behaviour by rewards, and that government through
terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent
manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of the
individual men, women and children.
Punishment temporarily puts a stop to undesirable behaviour, but does
not permanently reduce the victim's tendency to indulge in it. Moreover, the psycho-physical by-products of
punishment may be just as undesirable as the behaviour for which an individual
has been punished. Psychotherapy is
largely concerned with the debilitating or anti-social consequences of past
punishments.
The society described in 1984 is a
society controlled almost exclusively by punishment and the fear of
punishment. In the imaginary world of my
own fables, punishment is infrequent and generally mild. The nearly perfect control exercised by the
government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable behaviour, by
many kinds of nearly non-violent manipulation, both physical and psychological,
and by genetic standardization. Babies
in bottles and the centralized control of reproduction are not perhaps
impossible; but it is quite clear that for a long time to come we shall remain
a viviparous species breeding at random.
For practical purposes genetic standardization may be ruled out. Societies will continue to be controlled
post-natally - by punishment, as in the past, and to
an ever-increasing extent by the more effective methods of reward and
scientific manipulation.
In Russia the old-fashioned, 1984-style
dictatorship of Stalin has begun to give way to a more up-to-date form of
tyranny. In the upper levels of the
Soviets' hierarchical society the reinforcement of desirable behaviour has
begun to replace the older methods of control through the punishment of
undesirable behaviour. Engineers and
scientists, teachers and administrators, are handsomely paid for good work and
so moderately taxed that they are under constant incentive to do better and so
be more highly rewarded. In certain
areas they are at liberty to think and do more or less what they like. Punishment awaits them only when they stray
beyond their prescribed limits into the realms of ideology and politics. It is because they have been granted a
measure of professional freedom that Russian teachers, scientists and
technicians have achieved such remarkable successes. Those who live near the base of the Soviet
pyramid enjoy none of the privileges accorded to the lucky or specially gifted
minority. Their wages are meagre and
they pay, in the form of high prices, a disproportionately large share of the
taxes. The area in which they can do as
they please is extremely restricted, and their rulers control them more by
punishment and the threat of punishment than through non-violent manipulation
or the reinforcement of desirable behaviour by reward. The Soviet system combines elements of 1984
with elements that are prophetic of what went on among the higher castes in Brave
New World.
Meanwhile impersonal forces over which we
have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave
New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing
is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political
organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating,
in the interests of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the
masses. The techniques of manipulation
will be discussed in later chapters. For
the moment let us confine our attentions to those impersonal forces which are
now making the world so extremely unsafe for democracy, so very inhospitable to
individual freedom. What are these
forces? And why has the nightmare which
I had projected into the seventh century A.F., made so swift an advance in our
direction? The answer to these questions
must begin where the life of even the most highly civilized society has its
beginnings - on the level of biology.
On
the first Christmas Day the population of our planet was about two hundred and
fifty million - less than half the population of modern China. Sixteen centuries later, when the Pilgrim
Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, human numbers had climbed to a little more than
five hundred million. By the time of the
signing of the Declaration of Independence, world population had passed the
seven hundred million mark. In 1931,
when I was writing Brave New World, it stood at just under two
billion. Today, only twenty-seven years
later, there are two thousand eight hundred million of us. And tomorrow - what? Penicillin, DDT and clean water are cheap
commodities, whose effects on public health are out of all proportion to their
cost. Even the poorest government is
rich enough to provide its subjects with a substantial measure of death
control. Birth control is a very
different matter. Death control is
something which can be provided for a whole people by a few technicians working
in the pay of a benevolent government.
Birth control depends on the cooperation of an entire people. It must be practised by countless
individuals, from whom it demands more intelligence and willpower than most of
the world's teeming illiterates possess, and (where chemical or mechanical
methods of contraception are used) an expenditure of more money than most of
these millions can now afford. Moreover,
there are nowhere any religious traditions in favour of unrestricted death,
whereas religious and social traditions in favour of unrestricted reproduction
are widespread. For all these reasons,
death control is achieved very easily, birth control
is achieved with great difficulty. Death
rates have therefore fallen in recent years with startling suddenness. But birth rates have either remained at their
old high level or, if they have fallen, have fallen very little and at a very
slow rate. In consequence, human numbers
are now increasing more rapidly than at any time in the history of the species.
Moreover, the yearly increases are
themselves increasing. They increase
regularly, according to the rules of compound interest; and they also increase
irregularly with every application, by a technologically backward society, of
the principles of Public Health. At the
present time the annual increase in the world population runs to about forty-three
millions. This means that every four
years mankind adds to its numbers the equivalent of the present population of
the United States, every eight and a half years the equivalent of the present
population of India. At the rate of
increase prevailing between the birth of Christ and the death of Queen
Elizabeth I it took sixteen centuries for the population of the earth to
double. At the present rate it will
double in less than half a century. And
this fantastically rapid doubling of our numbers will be taking place on a
planet whose most desirable and productive areas are already densely populated,
whose soils are being eroded by the frantic efforts of bad farmers to raise
more food, and whose easily available mineral capital is being squandered with
the reckless extravagance of a drunken sailor getting rid of his accumulated
pay.
In the Brave New World of my fable, the
problem of human numbers in their relation to natural resources had been
effectively solved. An optimum figure
for world population had been calculated and numbers were maintained at this
figure (a little under two billions, if I remember rightly) generation after
generation. In the real contemporary
world, the population problem has not been solved. On the contrary it is becoming graver and
more formidable with every passing year.
It is against this grim biological background that all the political,
economic, cultural and psychological dramas of our time are being played out. At the twentieth century wears on, as the new
billions are added to the existing billions (there will be more than five and a
half billion of us by the time my granddaughter is fifty), this biological
background will advance, ever more insistently, ever more menacingly, towards
the front and centre of the historical stage.
The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural
resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals - this is
now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain the central problem
certainly for another century, and perhaps for several centuries
thereafter. A new age is supposed to
have begun on October 4th, 1957. But
actually, in the present context, all our exuberant post-Sputnik talk is
irrelevant and even nonsensical. So far
as the masses of mankind are concerned, the coming time will not be the Space
Age; it will be the Age of Overpopulation.
We can parody the words of the old song and ask,
Will
the space that you're so rich in
Light
a fire in the kitchen,
Or
the little god of space turn the spit, spit, spit?
The
answer, it is obvious, is in the negative.
A settlement on the moon may be of some military advantage to the nation
that does the settling. But it will do
nothing whatever to make life more tolerable, during the fifty years that it
will take our present population to double, for the earth's undernourished and
proliferating billions. And even if, at
some future date, emigration to Mars should become feasible, even if any
considerable number of men and women were desperate enough to choose a new life
under conditions comparable to those prevailing on a mountain twice as high as
Mount Everest, what difference would that make?
In the course of the last four centuries quite a number of people sailed
from the Old World to the New. But
neither their departure nor the returning flow of food and raw materials could
solve the problems of the Old World.
Similarly the shipping of a few surplus humans to Mars (at a cost, for
transportation and development, of several million dollars a head) will do
nothing to solve the problem of mounting population pressures on our own
planet. Unsolved, that problem will
render insoluble all our other problems.
Worse still, it will create conditions in which individual freedom and
the social decencies of the democratic way of life will become impossible,
almost unthinkable.
Not all dictatorships arise the same
way. There are many roads to Brave New
World; but perhaps the straightest and the broadest of them is the road we are
travelling today, the road that leads through gigantic numbers and accelerating
increases. Let us briefly review the
reasons for this close correlation between too many people, too rapidly
multiplying, and the formulation of authoritarian philosophies, the rise of
totalitarian systems of government.
As large and increasing numbers press more
heavily upon available resources, the economic position of the society
undergoing this ordeal becomes ever more precarious. This is especially true of those
underdeveloped regions, where a sudden lowering of the death rate by means of
DTT, penicillin and clean water has not been accompanied by a corresponding
fall in the birth rate. In parts of Asia
and in most of Central and South America populations are increasing so fast
that they will double themselves in little more than twenty years. If the production of food and manufactured
articles, of houses, schools and teachers, could be increased at a greater rate
than human numbers, it would be possible to improve the wretched lot of those
who live in these underdeveloped and overpopulated countries. But unfortunately these countries lack not
merely agricultural machinery and an industrial plant capable of turning out
this machinery, but also the capital required to create such a plant. Capital is what is left over after the
primary needs of a population have been satisfied. But the primary needs of most of the people
in underdeveloped countries are never fully satisfied. At the end of each year almost nothing is
left over, and there is almost no capital available for creating the industrial
and agricultural plants, by means of which the people's needs might be
satisfied. Moreover, there is, in all
these underdeveloped countries, a serious shortage of the trained manpower
without which a modern industrial and agricultural plant cannot be
operated. The present educational
facilities are inadequate; so are the resources, financial and cultural, for
improving the existing facilities as fast as the situation demands. Meanwhile the population of some of these
underdeveloped countries is increasing at the rate of three per cent per annum.
Their tragic situation is discussed in an
important book, published in 1957 - The Next Hundred Years, by
Professors Harrison Brown, James Bonner and John Weir of the California
Institute of Technology. How is mankind
coping with the problem of rapidly increasing numbers? Not very successfully. 'The evidence suggests rather strongly that
in most underdeveloped countries the lot of the average individual has worsened
appreciably in the last half-century.
People have become more poorly fed.
There are fewer available goods per person. And practically every attempt to improve the
situation has been nullified by the relentless pressure of continued population
growth.'
Whenever the economic life of a nation
becomes precarious, the central government is forced to assume additional
responsibilities for the general welfare.
It must work out elaborate plans for dealing with a critical situation;
it must impose ever greater restrictions upon the activities of its subjects;
and if, as is very likely, worsening economic conditions result in political
unrest, or open rebellion, the central government must intervene to preserve
public order and its own authority. More
and more power is thus concentrated in the hands of the executives and their
bureaucratic managers. But the nature of
power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced
upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more. 'Lead us not into temptation,' we pray - and
with good reason; for when human beings are tempted too enticingly or too long,
they generally yield. A democratic
constitution is a device for preventing the local rulers from yielding to those
particularly dangerous temptations that arise when too much power is
concentrated in too few hands. Such a
constitution works pretty well where, as in Britain or the United States, there
is a traditional respect for constitutional procedures. Where the republican or limited monarchical
tradition is weak, the best of constitutions will not prevent ambitious
politicians from succumbing with glee and gusto to the temptations of
power. And in any country where numbers
have begun to press heavily upon available resources, these temptations cannot
fail to arise. Overpopulation leads to
economic insecurity and social unrest.
Unrest and insecurity lead to more control by central governments and an
increase of their power. In the absence
of a constitutional tradition, this increased power will probably be exercised
in a dictatorial fashion. Even if
Communism had never been invented, this would be likely to happen. But Communism has been invented. Given this fact, the probability of
overpopulation leading through unrest to dictatorship becomes a virtual
certainty. It is a pretty safe bet that,
twenty years from now, all the world's overpopulated
and underdeveloped countries will be under some form of totalitarian rule -
probably by the Communist Party.
How will this development affect the
overpopulated, but highly industrialized and still democratic countries of
Europe? If the newly formed
dictatorships were hostile to them, and if the normal flow of raw materials
from the underdeveloped countries were deliberately interrupted, the nations of
the West would find themselves in a very bad way indeed. Their industrial system would break down, and
the highly developed technology, which up till now has permitted them to
sustain a population much greater than that which could be supported by locally
available resources, would no longer protect them against the consequences of
having too many people in too small a territory. If this should happen, the enormous powers
forced by unfavourable conditions upon central governments may come to be used
in the spirit of totalitarian dictatorship.
The United States is not at present an
overpopulated country. If, however, the
population continues to increase at the present rate (which is higher than that
of India's increase, though happily a good deal lower than the rate now current
in Mexico or Guatemala), the problem of numbers in relation to available
resources might well become troublesome by the beginning of the twenty-first
century. For the moment overpopulation
is not a direct threat to the personal freedom of Americans. It, remains, however, an indirect threat, a
menace at one remove. If overpopulation
should drive the underdeveloped countries into totalitarianism, and if these
new dictatorships should ally themselves with