In these difficult and uncertain times, I am drawn to thinking of Thomas Robert Malthus and Charles Darwin – two 19th century scholars whose legacies pose a particular threat today.
Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population was a provocative exploration of the idea that population growth potentially is exponential, while the increase of food supply or other resources is linear.
Over-population dooms the world therefore, except that war, disease or famine culls human numbers and redistributes economic space on a finite earth. Celibacy, late marriage and family planning help as well. Either way, however, the greater availability of food, produced by reduced demand, reactivates the impetus for higher population levels eventually, triggering the Malthusian population trap.
Darwin’s scientific insights are legion, chief of which is his assertion of evolution by natural selection, formulated in his book, On the Origin of Species, in 1859.
There indeed is a life process which enables organisms to change because of alterations in their physical or behavioural environment.
However, the subtitle of his book ties natural selection to the “Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. The danger of Darwinism lies in natural selection becoming social selection and rationalising the fiction that humans are fated to compete as a biologically selfish species, not cooperate as socialised individuals.
The concept of the struggle for existence, which comes from Malthus, and that of the survival of the fittest, derived from the sociologist Herbert Spencer, have woven themselves into the Darwinian legacy.
Social Darwinism has been used to justify morally repugnant ideas and systems such as imperialism, racism, eugenics and social inequality. In perhaps the most abhorrent display of Social Darwinism in contemporary history, Nazis deployed the idea of superior races, supposedly chosen biologically, against Jews, gypsies, leftists, people with disabilities, and others.
The Holocaust marked the culmination of an era of poisonous biological thought. Six million innocent Jews lost their lives in the Nazi pursuit of a pure Germany cleansed of the biological infiltration of so-called inferior races.
Yet, Malthus’ biological pessimism has been resisted by social advances in agricultural productivity, public health and education. High female literacy rates in the south Indian state of Kerala, for example, underpin the role of the reproductive rights of women in family planning that reduces population growth without restarting the Malthusian cycle.
The issue is the equitable distribution of ecological resources among humans who, once born, have an equal right to life, liberty and freedom from want.
The denial of that right is where Malthusian determinism meets Charles Darwin’s assertion of evolution by natural selection.
Unfortunately, regressive biological thinking has resurfaced. On a foreign website, which discusses Malthus, has appeared a posting which says that Covid-19 has hit “deadwood” such as the elderly and even the young made vulnerable by their underlying health conditions. The term “deadwood” would appear to tie Malthusian fears of overpopulation to Darwinian ideas of the right to survival.
The “deadwood” posting would have us believe that a pandemic, which was not caused by the dispensable elderly or even the vulnerable young, legitimately should take them out of the wrinkled calculus of Malthusian Darwinism.
There is hope, however. The forensic moral intelligence of Hannah Arendt provides an antidote to the reduction of society to biology. Sent by The New Yorker magazine to cover the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Arendt coined the term, “the banality of evil”, to argue that evil is not an exceptional outlier of human existence but that it can be normalised by everyday structures of power and belief.
Even the economic destructiveness of Covid-19 may not recreate the material conditions that led to the rise of Nazism. However, there is a need to guard against nascent expressions of demographic fatalism (Malthusianism) combined with biological elitism (Social Darwinism). Once that combination is taken to reflect the natural state of human affairs, the banality of evil can develop social momentum in small but incremental ways.
Intellectual arrogance is a disease in a banal world. In a touching reminder of the need to look at life as a shared human good, Arendt rejects the intellectual elitism that celebrates Albert Einstein’s escape from Nazi Germany to a life of freedom and achievement in the West “without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius”. Einstein lived to become great: The little boy died.
In the Covidean age, the message remains: Remember Hans Cohn while celebrating Albert Einstein. Beware Malthus and Darwin.
Asad Latif is a Co-General Editor of the Singapore Chronicles series published by IPS and The Straits Times Press.
Top photo from iStock.