From Malthus To Thanos: The Problem With ‘Thinning The Herd’
Varkey Parakkal
Infinity War, the nineteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that came out earlier this year was one of the most well-received films of 2018 with a box office collection of $2.047 billion. The film’s chief antagonist Thanos, finally appeared on screen in all his might after eighteen films of existing in the background through post-credit scenes and Easter eggs. The character motivations and the intentions of Thanos that were largely ambiguous in the previous films finally unfolds in Infinity War.
To summarise, Thanos is a Titan, who are beings who lived on Saturn’s Moon, also called Titan. His goal is to get the six Infinity Stones which were made during the creation of the universe each of which control an aspect of the universe, making the wielder of all the stones the most powerful being in the universe.
Midway through the movie it is made clear that Thano’s conquest of the stones is not simply to be the most powerful being in the universe for the sake of it, but to use that power to wood out half of all life to exist. His motivation to do it is explained in the scenes before the much revered fight that goes down between him and some of the Avengers who teamed up with the Guardians of the Galaxy on Titan where he goes into a monologue on how Titan was a prosperous planet that was destroyed due to the pressure that was put on it by its ever-increasing population. He explains how he became an outcast when he proposed a plan to randomly kill half the population of Titan for the sake of the greater good of the planet and the continued survival of the species. After the planet’s destruction, he is shown to be the sole survivor of their species.
A major part of the movie, including the scenes mentioned above, work very hard to portray Thanos as a sympathetic villain whose goals are not your regular one directional “I will take over the entire universe” type.
And that’s where the problem starts. He’s shown as someone who’s going for a well-meaning cause, that being the continued survival of life in the universe, but through misguided means (here, by wiping out half the population of the universe). Although the heroes are shown to be fighting to stop Thanos achieving this, and thereby taking a moral stance on the issue of mass genocide, the question that Thanos raises regarding overpopulation is still not challenged. This aspect of the film is going to be looked at in this analysis.
Malthusianism And The Origins Of The Overpopulation Argument
It won’t come as a surprise that Thanos is not the first sentient being, fictional or otherwise, to raise concerns regarding overpopulation and the sustainability of resources. The idea goes back to the 18th century and a man named Thomas Robert Malthus, who proposed that the exponential growth of the human population cannot be sustained by the not-so-exponentially growing means to extract resources for human survival.
In his 1798 book, titled An Essay on the Principle of Population, (Malthus, 1826) he elaborates on this idea. His argument is as follows:
The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
This contradiction between the geometrically increasing population and the arithmetically increasing food production was called “Malthusian Trap”. And since then the term “Malthusian” is stuck on any crisis that is seemingly caused by overpopulation.
The book was influential enough that it was a part of the reason that led to the Census Act of 1800 which was the first population census to be taken in Kingdom of Great Britain.
Although Malthus’s ideas seem to make logical sense in the context of the data that he’s restricting his analysis to, that being the growth of human population and the production of food, the factoring-in of other variables points to gaping holes in his hypothesis.
Some of the first scientific criticism of Mathias’s ideas on population came from Marx and Engels. The critique came in two parts.
One, that the seeming excess of population, that Malthus claimed was due to the disposition of the poorer sections of the society to have more children than what they could afford and therefore putting pressure on the means of production, was turned on its head. Marx and Engels argued that the pressure was not put on the means of production by the increasing population, but the other way around, by the means of production (capitalism) on the population in its need to have a reserve army of the labour which would drive the wages down and increase profit for the capitalists (R.L Meek, 1953).
Secondly, Engels’s in his essay “Outlines of The Critique of Political Economy” predicts that the advancements in science and agricultural technology will compensate for the growing population. Best summed up in his own words:
Where has it been proved that the productivity of the land increases in an arithmetic progression? The extent of land is limited. All right! The labour-power to be employed on this land-surface increases with population. Even if we assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labour does not always rise in proportion to the labour, there still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist – science – whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population. (Engels, 1844)
Malthus In The 20th Century: Poverty, Overpopulation, And Capitalism
The logical extremes of Malthus’s ideas were used to justify Britain’s abstinence from providing aid during the Bengal Famine that wreaked havoc in the Bengal Province in India between 1943-44. Church responded by saying that the famine was “their own fault” for “breeding like rabbits” (Tharoor, 2010).
The famine claimed the lives 2.1-3 million people (Greenough, 1982).
Despite attempts from the British ruling class (as seen in the paragraph above) and certain sections of the academia, the prevailing consensus on the causes that led to the Bengal Famine revolve around the distribution of food rather than the available of food with respect to the population.
In his paper, Starvation and exchange entitlements: A General Approach and Its Application to the Great Bengal Famine, Amartya Sen (1977) observes:
“The … [rice paddy] supply for 1943 was only about 5% lower than the average of the preceding five years. It was, in fact, 13% higher than in 1941, and there was, of course, no famine in 1941”.
This view that the cause of the famine was not shortage of actual food crops but factors such as inflation in the price of food crops caused due to speculative hoarding and the driving down of the real wages of landless agricultural labourers who in turn could not procure the essential food supplies, takes us to another facet of the overpopulation argument and its link to the capitalist mode of production.
This brings us to another scene in the movie where Thanos attempts, rather forcibly to have a conversation with his adopted daughter, Gamora. Gamora was taken in by Thanos from one of the planets during his population conquests where half the population is killed. Gamora tells him that they were happy on her home planet, to which Thanos replies with a description of the stark poverty that the planet was going through (presumably because of its population) and how the planet was on the brink of collapse. Thanos then takes the credit for having stopped it by killing half the planet’s population. To quote him directly:
“You know what’s happened since then? The children born have known nothing but full bellies and clear skies. It’s a paradise… It’s a simple calculus. This universe is finite. Its resources finite. If life is left unchecked life will cease to exist. It needs correction” (Avengers, 2018).
The connection of poverty and overpopulation that he makes isn’t new either. Malthus argues in his ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ (ch. 2, 1824):
“Yet in all societies, even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a virtuous attachment [i.e., marriage] is so strong, that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great permanent amelioration of their condition… The constant effort towards population… increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress”.
His solution, although considered satirical, wasn’t very different either.
Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.
This brings us to the return of Malthus into the mainstream in the 1960s. This time, it came as an extension of the rising awareness on environmental issues, the world’s population hitting 3 billion and the West’s obsession with its former colonies. Overpopulation was therefore seen not just as resulting in poverty and the collapse of human civilization, but of the destabilizing of the ecology and in other environmental concerns as well.
Some of the most influential works of this period were Garrett Hardin’s paper ‘Tragedy of The Commons’ (1968) published in Science Magazine, ‘Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor’ (1974) published in Psychology Today, and Paul R. Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb. This period that witnessed the formation of the ‘Club of Rome’ in 1972. The Club of Rome consisted of an elite group of individuals from across the world who shared common concerns about the impacts of population growth on the ecology. In 1972, the Club published their best-seller “Limits to Growth” which looked at computer simulations of the effects of exponential population growth on finite resources (Meadows, 1972).
It’s distinguished members include individuals such as David Rockefeller and Mikhail Gorbachev (Club of Rome, 2017).
In “The Population Bomb”, Ehrlich (1968) makes a series of apocalyptic predictions about humanity’s future. “I don’t see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980. I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971”.
In his essay “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor”, Garrett Hardin (1974) argues:
“If we divide the world crudely into rich nations and poor nations, two thirds of them are desperately poor, and only one third comparatively rich, with the United States the wealthiest of all. Metaphorically each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people. In the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor of the world, who would like to get in, or at least to share some of the wealth. What should the lifeboat passengers do?…So here we sit, say 50 people in our lifeboat. To be generous, let us assume it has room for 10 more, making a total capacity of 60. Suppose the 50 of us in the lifeboat see 100 others swimming in the water outside, begging for admission to our boat or for handouts. We have several options: we may be tempted to try to live by the Christian ideal of being “our brother’s keeper,” or by the Marxist ideal of “to each according to his needs.” Since the needs of all in the water are the same, and since they can all be seen as “our brothers,” we could take them all into our boat, making a total of 150 in a boat designed for 60. The boat swamps, everyone drowns. Complete justice, complete catastrophe.
Since the boat has an unused excess capacity of 10 more passengers, we could admit just 10 more to it. But which 10 do we let in? How do we choose? Do we pick the best 10, “first come, first served”? And what do we say to the 90 we exclude? If we do let an extra 10 into our lifeboat, we will have lost our “safety factor,” an engineering principle of critical importance. For example, if we don’t leave room for excess capacity as a safety factor in our country’s agriculture, a new plant disease or a bad change in the weather could have disastrous consequences.
Suppose we decide to preserve our small safety factor and admit no more to the lifeboat. Our survival is then possible although we shall have to be constantly on guard against boarding parties…
…The harsh ethics of the lifeboat become harsher when we consider the reproductive differences between rich and poor”.
Hardin was merely echoing the general zeitgeist of the West’s ruling classes at the time.
In the second half of the 1960s, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration started taking a similar line in it’s foreign aid policy. The lobbying done by Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Shell Corporation had a significant role in these changes in policy (Green, 2018).
India was on of the prime targets of these changes. In the years leading up to the Indian Emergency, the United States had started to turn up the heat on Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to institute stricter measures of population control. The foreign aid to India were primarily under threat and saw huge threats unless the Indian government met with President Johnson’s demand (Ibid.).
In 1966, when President Johnson was asked by an advisor regarding promising Prime Minister Indira Gandhi more food aid during her Washington visit he exclaimed: “Are you out of your fucking mind? … I’m not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems” (Ibid.).
During the Indian Emergency under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi all this culminated in the forced mass sterilisation of almost 8.3 million people. A bulk of this campaign was targeted against the Muslims who were vehement to anti-sterilisation due to cultural and religious reasons. The public anger against the sterilisation resulted in a riot in Muzaffarnagar on to which the police open fired, killing 30 (Mehta, 1978).
In 2018, the world’s population hit 7.7 billion, with India being the second most populated country on earth with a population of 1.3 billion people.
The reason why India didn’t dive head first into famine was due to science and technology, as Friedrich Engels had rightly predicted. The combined efforts of geneticists like M.S. Swaminathan and agronomist Norman Borlaug brought forth India’s ‘Green Revolution’ that enabled the country’s food production to catch up with, and surpass the growing population.
Despite the world’s population hitting over 7 billion, net food production globally has surpassed the consumption demands of the existing population. By 2012, food production had hit an all time high, with the annual output being enough to feed 10 billion people (Giménez, 2012). However, since 2015, the total number of people who are undernourished and the prevalence of undernourishment is steadily on the rise (FAO, 2018). The problem here is clearly not due to a lack supply, but inequality of distribution under capitalism. In 2016 alone, the United States of America threw away—some 60 million tons (or $160 billion) worth of produce. That is 50% of the total food produced in the country (Chandler, 2016).
Ecology, Population, and Capitalism: The Fable of Easter Island and the Giant Heads
The “collapse of society” on the Easter Island is often used almost as a fable on how unchecked population led to an over-exploitation of resources and a collapse of civilisation (Bressan, 2011)
This version of the story seems almost like a real life illustration of Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” in near laboratory conditions. According to the thought experiment, unrestricted human access to the “commons”, that are the natural resources such as water bodies and grazing areas that come under common ownership, will be exploited and destroyed collectively by the people due to individual greed (Hardin, 1968).
This story too, akin to Thanos’ reasoning, does not take into account several major variables that played a part in whatever went down on the Island. Contrary to commonly held belief, the civilisational collapse of the Eastern Islanders coincides with its European contact and subsequent introduction of disease from Afro-Eurasia that led to the wiping out of the population on the island (Lipi, 2014).
Garrett Hardin’s work is often criticised for being an argument for pushing privatisation of the commons and the tragedy of the commons was thoroughly debunked by political economist Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning work. She argues “When local users of a forest have a long-term perspective, they are more likely to monitor each other’s use of the land, developing rules for behavior” (Walljasper, 2009).
It is best put into perspective by economist Joseph Stiglitz: “Conservatives used the Tragedy of the Commons to argue for property rights, and that efficiency was achieved as people were thrown off the commons… What Ostrom has demonstrated is the existence of social control mechanisms that regulate the use of the commons without having to resort to property rights” (Ibid.).
The link between overpopulation and ecological damage has become more significant over the years. All the evidence from the last fifty years of research into climate science and geology has pointed towards man-made climate change being a reality. Human activity is definitely causing unprecedented damage to ecological balance. Neo-Malthusians are pointing it’s fingers at the global south and it’s population growth for this damage, but the facts and figures couldn’t be further from the truth.
Looking at per capita carbon footprint by countries, the West dominates the majority of the first twenty highest countries in the list. The United States, ranking fifth on the list, with 14.95 metric tons of CO2 emissions per capita per annum, is almost double that of China, which emits 6.57 metric tons. It is also ten times higher than that of India, which emits 1.57 metric tons of CO2 per capita (Statista, 2016).
In terms of cumulative emissions the United States ranks first, contributing to 27% of the world’s CO2 emissions from 1850-2011 (Ge, 2014).
As it is often done, the prominence of the United States and the other Western countries on this list cannot be attributed simply to it’s higher standards of living. Although it seems logical to assume that with higher living standards there is bound to be a higher consumption of resources per capita, it does not necessarily have to be on the colossal scale of wastage of natural resources that the West often exhibits.
This point is best illustrated through the opening paragraphs of anthropologist Bill McKibben’s (1996) essay “The Enigma of Kerala: One state in India is proving development experts wrong”:
Kerala (pronounced ker’uh luh), a state of 29 million people in southern India, is poor–even for India–with a per capita income estimated by various surveys to be between $298 and $350 a year, about one-seventieth the American average. When the American anthropologist Richard Franke surveyed the typical Keralite village of Nadur in the late 1980s, he found that nearly half the 170 families had only cooking utensils, a wooden bench, and a few stools in their homes. No beds–that was the sum of their possessions. Thirty-six percent also had some chairs and cots, and 19 percent owned a table. In five households he discovered cushioned seats.
But here is the odd part:
The life expectancy for a North American male, with all his chairs and cushions, is 72 years, while the life expectancy for a Keralite male is 70. After the latest in a long series of literacy campaigns, the United Nations in 1991 certified Kerala as 100 percent literate. Your chances of having an informed conversation are at least as high in Kerala as in Kansas. Kerala’s birth rate hovers near 18 per thousand, compared with 16 per thousand in the United States–and is falling faster.
Development experts use an index they call PQLI, for ‘physical quality of life index,’ a composite that runs on a scale from zero to a hundred and combines most of the basic indicators of a decent human life. In 1981, Kerala’s score of 82 far exceeded all of Africa’s, and in Asia only the incomparably richer South Korea (85), Taiwan (87), and Japan (98) ranked higher. And Kerala kept improving. By 1989, its score had risen to 88, compared with a total of 60 for the rest of India. It has managed all this even though it’s among the most densely crowded places on earth–the population of California squeezed into a state the size of Switzerland”.
He concludes his essay thus:
Kerala suggests a way out of two problems simultaneously–not only the classic development goal of more food in bellies and more shoes on feet, but also the emerging, equally essential task of living lightly on the earth, using fewer resources, creating less waste. Kerala demonstrates that a low-level economy can create a decent life, abundant in the things–health, education, community–that are most necessary for us all. Gross national product is often used as a synonym for achievement, but it is also an eloquent shorthand for gallons of gasoline burned, stacks of garbage tossed out, quantities of timber sawn into boards. One recent calculation showed that for every American dollar or its equivalent spent anywhere on earth, half a liter of oil was consumed in producing, packaging, and shipping the goods. One-seventieth the income means one-seventieth the damage to the planet. So, on balance, if Kerala and the United States manage to achieve the same physical quality of life, Kerala is the vastly more successful society.
Conclusion
All the data presented above points to a certain trend in which the ruling classes and capitalist forces in the West tend to blame overpopulation on poverty, famine and the ecological crisis while diverting the conversation from more systemic issues of the capitalist modes of production. This tendency to blame the “overpopulation” in the Global South on the bulk of the world’s problems is based more off of racist and imperialist attitudes of the West than actual facts and figures.
Everything from the media coverage on “overpopulation” to popular culture reflects these attitudes. Avengers: Infinity War is just one in a long series of popular fiction in the likes of movies like Soylent Green (1973) and novels like Dan Brown’s Inferno to misconstrue the facts.
References:
- Avenger: Infinity War, 2018.
- Box Office Mojo, 2018, Avengers: Infinity War, Retrieved September 24, 2018
- Malthus, Thomas Robert, 1826, An Essay on the Principle of Population: A View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which It Occasions (Sixth ed.), London: John Murray
- R. L. Meek, ed. 1953, Marx and Engels on Malthus, London: Lawrence & Wishart
- Engels, Friedrich, 1844, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy original in DEUTSCHFRANZÖSISCHE JAHRBÜCHER, First (and only) Issue, February 1844, reprinted in Meek (1971), (transl. not specified)
- Tharoor, Shashi, 2010, The Ugly Briton, Time Magazine
- Greenough, Paul R, 1982, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–1944, Oxford University Press
- Sen, Amartya, 1977, Starvation and exchange entitlements: a general approach and its application to the Great Bengal Famine, Cambridge Journal of Economics
- Meadows, Donella H; Meadows, Dennis L; Randers, Jørgen; Behrens III, William W, 1972, The Limits to Growth; A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Universe Books
- Club of Rome, Membership, Retrieved 29 November 2017
- Ehrlich, Paul R. 1968, The Population Bomb, Ballantine Books
- Hardin, Garrett. 1974, Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor, Psychology Today
- Green, Hannah Harris, 2018, The legacy of India’s quest to sterilise millions of men, Quartz India
- Mehta, Vinod, 1978, The Sanjay Story, Harper Collins Publishers India
- Chandler, Adam, 2016, Why Americans Lead the World in Food Waste, The Atlantic
- Giménez, Eric Holt, 2012, We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People… and Still Can’t End Hunger, Journal of Sustainable Agriculture Food and Agriculture Organisation of The United Nations, 2018, The State of Food Security and Nutrition In The World
- Bressan, David, 2011, Climate, Overpopulation & Environment – The Rapa Nui Debate, Scientific American
- Lipi, Carl, 2014, Lessons From Easter Island, TEDxBermuda
- Hardin, G, 1968, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science
- Walljasper, Jay, 2009, The Victory of the Commons, Yes Magazine
- Statista, 2016, Per Capita CO2 emissions worldwide in 2016, by select country (in metric tons)
- Ge Mengpin, Johannes Friedrich, Thomas Damassa, 2014, 6 Graphs Explain the World’s Top 10 Emitters, World Resource Institute
- McKibben, Bill. 1996, The Enigma of Kerala, UTNE Reader
Varkey Parakkal is a Masters student of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE), New Delhi and a State Committee Member at SFI-Delhi.
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