The Many and the Few: Reflections on the Control of Population

My grandparents had a grandmother clock.  When my mother was ill, I remember the comforting sound of it.  It was a proper clock.  For sure, a child’s eye view, but I can clearly recall my dad’s face when he told us mum had lost the baby.   Nan said there were fields across the road, where I had only known a housing estate.  As Bury expanded, the suburban tide seemed relentless.  Since the world of the early 20^th Century, when my grandmother was a child, there have been so many changes.   Conflict, rumours of wars, technical transformation and so many more people; everything is new.  Sometime between now and that pure town, before the world went mad and went to war, we have lost our demographic innocence.

Why the issue of population growth has remained politically toxic in liberal democracies is obvious enough.  The statistics are sobering, though.  In 1900, the year before my grandmother was born, global population stood at 1.7 billion.  It is now 6.8 billion.  According to some predictions that figure could rise to 9.2 billion by 2050.  On the 12^th July Steve Connor reported in the Independent on a new two-year study by the Royal Society into global population levels.   John Sulston, joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the human genome, will head the research.  He said, “We will be examining the extent to which population is a significant factor in the momentous international challenge of securing global sustainable development, considering not just the scientific elements but encompassing the wider issues including culture, gender, economics and law.” 

Sulston might have added ‘religion’ to that list.  The professor may not read the Mennonite Weekly Review but Sheldon Good’s piece, ‘Amish Population Continues to Grow, Especially in New York’, raises some troublesome questions.   Whilst American families work out at 2.5 children, Amish households typically average 7.  As Donald Kraybill points out, there are ‘push’ as well as ‘pull’ factors at work in the New York growth.  The availability of relatively affordable land and opportunities for small businesses are important.  Good summarises: “The Amish population doubled from 1991 to 2010, growing 5 percent on average every year”.     Demographics matter to the Amish.   In a community which does not proselitize growth is maintained through large family sizes and a high retention rate of around 85%.  The Amish may shun the world but can the world ignore the Amish? 

In one of my favourite Star Trek movies, ‘The Wrath of Khan (1982)’ Spock has sacrificed himself for the crew, receiving a fatal dose of radiation in the process.   Tugging down his jacket he summons his remaining strength to say goodbye. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, he says.   Well, do they?  How shall we weigh the needs of the global many against the few?  Indeed, the many are the few.  We are all daughters, sons, families and communities.  This is the reason why the politicians find population control ‘toxic’ unless they are too autocratic to care.

Population control has never been attempted on a worldwide scale but it already carries the baggage of eugenics and coercive Statist social engineering.  Citizens of the global south are rightly suspicious that when over-consuming northerners mean ‘population control’ it isn’t our own populations we have in mind.  The world cannot go on like this.  But neither is coercion peaceable or sustainable.  To remain human the many need the few, more than ever.