Word: malthusian
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...century of intermittent haunting, the ghost of a gloomy British clergyman, Thomas Robert Malthus, was on the rampage last week. Cresting a wave of postwar pessimism, it flashed through the air on the radio, rode through the mails in magazines. Publishers opened their arms and presses to "Neo-Malthusian" manuscripts prophesying worldwide overpopulation and hunger. Two "scarce books"-Our Plundered Planet, by Fairfield Osborn, and Road to Survival (a Book-of-the-Month selection), by William Vogt-were glowingly reviewed and selling like hot cakes. Their influence has already reached around the world...
...Malthusian propaganda has, on the face of it, a high and beneficent purpose: to favor good farming practices. A similar erosion scare in the 19305 did result in widespread adoption of erosion-control practices. Some of the clear implications of the present scare, however, give unintended comfort to political and social policies that are anything but beneficent. If even rich nations like the U.S. have, too little land to keep their people passably well fed (as some of the doom-criers try to prove), then what should they do? The answer, for any vigorous people, is obvious...
...Malthusians want to warn man of danger; but their alarm is so loud that it may have the effect of deafening the world to its opportunities. To the real agricultural scientists, close to the soil and its sciences, such pessimism sounds silly or worse. Every main article of the Neo-Malthusian creed, they say, is either false or distorted or unprovable. They are sure that the modern world has both the soil and the scientific knowledge to feed, and feed well, twice as many people as are living today. By the time population has increased that much...
...indecent to suggest that there is some sort of Malthusian justice in the millions of famine deaths checking excessive growth of population. It is true that Indians are multiplying too fast. But it is sheer perversity to expect people who cannot afford an elementary education and a handful of rice to buy contraceptives. Everywhere in the world slums breed human beings too fast, and India is one vast slum. The remedy is not to lecture the Indians . . . but to abolish the slummy conditions of life...
...made a shocking discovery about Darwinism. He discovered that Fascists, Communists and rugged individualists all claim direct descent from Darwin's theory of the Survival of the Fittest. What these monstrous descendants ignore, decided Author West, is that Darwin got his Survival theory from the now obsolete Malthusian theory. More important, he decided, they ignore the fact that Darwin's conclusions were apt to be unconscious alibis for a now equally obsolete stage of capitalism...