The Population Explosion, Aldous Huxley
The Population Explosion
Today I want to pass on to what is happening to the human species and to think a little about what our philosophy and our ethical outlook on the subject should be. This lecture is essentially about human numbers and their relation to human well-being and human values in general.
Needless to say, any accurate estimation of human numbers is very recent, but we can extrapolate into the past and come to what seem to be fairly good conclusions. Although there are some fairly wide margins of difference among the experts, the numbers they come to are roughly in agreement. They agree that in pre-agricultural days, for example in the lower Palaeolithic times, when man was a food-gathering creature, there were probably not more than twenty million humans on this whole planet. In later Palaeolithic times, after organized hunting had been invented, the number probably doubled. We can make a rough estimate of what an organized hunting people could do because we know how many Indians were present in North America when the white man arrived—not more than one million in the entire North American continent east of the Rockies—and this gives one an indication of the extremely low density of population possible in a hunting economy.
The Great Revolution came about 6000 b.c. with the invention of agriculture, and the creation of cities in the next millennia. By about 1000 b.c., after five thousand years of agriculture, there were probably about one hundred million people in the world. By the beginning of the Christian era, this figure had a little more than doubled: it was somewhere between two hundred million and two hundred and fifty million—less than half the present population of China. The population increased very gradually in the following years; sometimes there were long periods of standstill and sometimes there were even periods of decrease, as in the years immediately following 1348, when the Black Death killed off 30 per cent of the population of Europe and nobody knows how much of the population of Asia.
By the time the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in this country, it is estimated that the population of the world was about twice what it had been on the first Christmas Day—that is to say, it had doubled in sixteen hundred years, an extremely slow rate of increase. But from that time on, from the middle of the seventeenth century, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the first importation of food from the newly developed lands of the New World, population began rising far more rapidly than it had ever risen before. By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, the figure for the human population of the world was probably around seven hundred million; it must have passed the billion mark fairly early in the nineteenth century and stood at about fourteen hundred million around the time when I was born in the 1890s. The striking fact is that since that time the population of the planet has doubled again. It has gone from fourteen hundred million, which is already twice what it was at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to twenty-eight hundred million. And the rate of increase now is such that it will probably double again in rather less than fifty years.
Thus the rates of increase have been increasing along with the absolute increase in numbers. The net rate of increase did not reach 1 per cent per annum until the beginning of this century. It has now risen to an average of 1.6 per cent per annum for the world at large, and there are considerable areas of the world where it exceeds 2 per cent and even reaches 3 per cent or more. Now, a 3 per cent increase when compounded annually (population increases as money increases, by compound interest) doubles the population in about twenty-five years, and a 1.5 per cent increase doubles the population in about fifty years; thus a 1.6 per cent increase will double the population in somewhat less than fifty years. The fact that the rate of increase never reached 1 per cent until the twentieth century, and that in the short time since about 1905, when this point was reached, it has already reached the figure of 1.6 per cent, is extraordinary. It indicates very clearly that we are living in a world for which there are no historical precedents whatsoever and that we have to resign ourselves to thinking in entirely new ways about a problem which our fathers never had any occasion to think about so intensively.
I indicated that, at the present time, there are large differences in the rate of increase in different parts of the world. Western Europe had its great increase during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although the rate never came up to even 1 per cent per annum, the increase was very rapid and startling at the time. The population in Europe has now reached about four hundred million and is increasing at less than 1 per cent per annum; it is thought that it will take about a hundred years at the present rate for Europe’s population to double again. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world that were not increasing rapidly in the nineteenth century, populations have begun to increase at a great rate. We are now seeing the kind of thing that happened in Europe a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago happening on an enormous scale in Asia, in Africa, in South America, in the Caribbean Islands. So we see that the increase is considerably less over the greater part of the Western world than it is in the Asiatic and the African worlds.
Let us now consider the reasons for the steps in the increments of population in the past. Primitive man was limited by his methods of collecting food. Food collecting—wandering about picking up acorns and snails and frogs and things—obviously can support an extremely small population. When hunting becomes organized—when you have flint arrows, when you have invented the bow, and when you have fire hunts and organize whole tribes to chase the game—then considerably more people can be supported. So the experts think that the population doubled at that time.
With the invention of agriculture, there is immediately a very great population increase, as it becomes possible to go on to a much higher level of production and to found cities, to create the division of labour, and to create what we call civilization. The proto-agricultural era lasted with very few changes until the later seventeenth century, when we got the beginning of the industrial revolution coupled with the first results of the exploitation of virgin lands in the New World.
Without the supply of cheap food from the New World it probably would have been impossible for Europe to industrialize as it did; but the historical accident by which vast lands were suddenly opened up made it possible to take a great many peasants off the land in Europe and put them into factories and keep them fed while they were building up the new industrial society. It was this extra supply of food which initiated the modern advance in population; all species live up to their supply of food and then are wiped out as the numbers outrun the supply.
A new factor based upon discoveries in physiology and medicine has entered the picture in recent years: the factor of public health. What is happening now is not that the birth rate is increasing—in fact in many cases it has decreased slightly—but that the death rate has been lowered to a startling extent, mainly by public health measures. The change began in the nineteenth century, with people realizing, for example, that they had to have clean water. Even before Pasteur’s discovery of bacteria, it had begun to dawn on people that it was a good thing to be clean.
It is interesting in this context to read about the early efforts of the disciples of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, to clean up London. The rich, who lived in their own part of the town, had been entirely indifferent to the appalling conditions which prevailed in the eastern part of the City. But when cholera and other diseases like typhus, which raged in the East End, began to invade the smarter sections of the West End, they decided that something had better be done. Men like Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth succeeded in about forty years in transforming London from a pest-hole of the most revolting character into a relatively clean city. The result was a dramatic rise in the expectation of life: the average expectation of life in ancient Rome was about thirty years, as in modern Asia; the average expectation of life in the United States and Great Britain is now about seventy years.
Today, with the newest weapons in the public health armoury, the most amazing revolutionary changes can be brought about in an extraordinarily short time. The two most powerful weapons are the antibiotics and the insecticides—coupled with the discovery that malaria and yellow fever, for example, are insect-carried diseases and that other tropical diseases are also carried by small animals. Consider the case of Ceylon, where the population was held almost stationary by endemic malaria. After the end of the Second World War public health teams were sent into Ceylon with DDT, and malaria was completely stamped out in less than five years. In Europe, on the other hand, malaria had been endemic for centuries (you will find it referred to constantly in the plays of Shakespeare
