In The Rise and Fall of Champagne Malthusians , Spiked’s editor Brendan O’Neill describes a modern “Malthusian Ball” he bravely attended, given his views:
It was in the luxurious crypt of St Pancras Church in Euston [London] . . . . [W]e were invited to drink ‘luxury Belgian beer from champagne flutes’ and to peruse £1,500 paintings depicting ‘teeming crowds’ as we debated the ‘population problem’ . . . .
Sponsored by Deus, ‘the luxury Belgian beer’, and supported by the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), the posh population-control lobby, the Malthusian knees-up kicked off with a ‘debate’ inside St Pancras Church itself. It felt entirely fitting to be plonked in a pew surrounded by Christian paraphernalia while listening to angry men say things like ‘we’re doomed’ (Roger Martin of the OPT) and ‘I am disgusted and sickened’ (Aubrey Manning OBE).
He finds the fault in their understanding of the way the world works. They
can only understand humanity’s problems in biological terms. Lacking any grasp of how society works – or more to the point how it doesn’t work sometimes — they instead see all crises as the fault of individual licentiousness and breeding. And possessed of such a deep pessimism that they can only conceive of mankind as pillager of the Earth rather than creator of things and ideas, they have a childlike view of the planet as a larder of limited resources that we are greedily hoovering up.
He finds it also, provocatively, in the god they choose to worship.
David Goldman has written about this a great deal, in Demographics and Depression in this magazine and his Spengler columns (search “demographics” and “population”).
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