What is theoretically possible, however, is often practically almost impossible. There are colossal difficulties in the way of implementing any large-scale policy of limitation of population; whereas death control is extremely easy under modern circumstances, birth control is extremely difficult. The reason is very simple: death control—the control, for example, of infectious diseases—can be accomplished by a handful of experts and quite a small labour force of unskilled persons and requires a very small capital expenditure. In the case of Ceylon, malaria was stamped out simply by spraying swamps and pools with DDT and spraying the interiors of houses.
Similarly, digging wells for clean water is quite a cheap procedure. But when we come to increasing production, or to decreasing the birth rate, we find ourselves confronted with problems which can only be solved by the co-operation of the entire population. Increasing agricultural production requires an immense amount of educational work among millions of smallholders and peasants and farmers, and any policy of birth control requires the co-operation of the entire adult population. So the current state of imbalance is likely to continue for a long time.
The problem of control of the birth rate is infinitely complex. It is not merely a problem in medicine, in chemistry, in biochemistry, in physiology; it is also a problem in sociology, in psychology, in theology, and in education. It has to be attacked on about ten different fronts simultaneously if there is to be any hope of solving it. First of all, there has to be a great deal of fundamental research into biology and the whole problem of reproduction, in the hope of producing some satisfactory oral contraceptive which can be distributed easily and cheaply to masses of people.
I was talking last year with researchers in the Rockefeller Institute who told me that they think there is still a great deal of fundamental research to be done. We just don’t know enough yet to be able to produce an entirely satisfactory oral contraceptive. And unfortunately very little money is going into this research; in general, far more goes into physical and chemical research than into biological research, and far more goes into other areas of biological research than into this particular area. Nevertheless, assuming that enough money and ability are put into this problem, it can probably be solved within ten years and something completely satisfactory produced and manufactured in bulk. But within ten years the population of the earth will have increased by five hundred million.
Then we have to consider the time it will take to get the new oral contraceptive accepted by countless millions of men and women all over the world. Some interesting research into this kind of problem was undertaken years ago by the English Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. They made an historical study of the average time it took for an idea which at its first enunciation seemed revolutionary and revolting to be taken for granted and to be acted upon by the whole population. They concluded that the average time is twenty-eight years—roughly the length of a generation. It is very difficult to persuade adults to change their points of view; they have to die off before a new generation can accept new ideas. If it takes ten years to produce chemically, by basic research, what we want, and then another twenty-eight years to get the product accepted, by this time the population of the earth will have increased by about a billion and a half. Again, we are up against the awful Alice-Through-the-Looking-Glass parable, rushing on in order to stand in the same place.
Merely from a technical and temporal point of view, we are obviously in a very tight spot. But we have also to consider the political point of view. There would undoubtedly have to be either world-wide agreement or regional agreements on a general population policy in order to have any satisfactory control of the situation at all. But there is absolutely no prospect at the present time of our getting any such political agreement.
The trouble is that political leaders just don’t think in biological terms. Here is a rather interesting speculation: What might have happened if the only man who had had considerable experience in practical biology, and who was in politics, had become President of the United States? I am referring to Henry Wallace. Henry Wallace was undoubtedly a very bad politician, but he did think in biological terms, and by helping to develop hybrid corn he had done something which was unquestionably and unmitigatedly good for the entire human race—which is probably more than can be said for any other man in public life that I can think of. Maybe if we had had such a man for President the whole thinking about these problems would have been pushed away from the field of politics, where they are completely insolvable, towards the field of biology, where they are possibly solvable.
We might have seen a policy which would have made a great deal more sense in the long run than the one which is now being pursued by all parties—from the long-range point of view, a kind of monstrously frivolous and irresponsible fiddling while Rome burns. We fiddle with the awful business of nationalistic power politics when our basic problem is whether the human race, expanding as rapidly as it is doing now, can survive in any decent condition—and what we are to do to preserve the world in any tolerable state for our great-grandchildren or even for our grandchildren. Unfortunately we missed our chance, and there has never been, at the head of a great State, a man who has habitually thought in biological terms.
Another problem which I think we must just briefly mention in regard to the increase in human numbers is the educational problem. The enormously rapid increase makes it almost impossible to realize the idea of providing a basic education for everybody. Immense efforts have been made, above all since the end of the Second World War, to provide elementary education throughout the world. But the fact remains—these figures were published just two months ago by UNESCO—that the absolute number of illiterates is greater today than it has ever been, in spite of all efforts. We have now eight hundred million children to educate, but we also have seven hundred million illiterate adults. In the underdeveloped countries (a) there is no capital for building schools, (b) there is no tax money to pay teachers, and (c) there are not nearly enough trained teachers.
Even in this country, the richest country in the world, grave complaints are heard that schoolrooms are overcrowded, that we don’t have enough school buildings, and so on. Imagine what the problem is in countries like Mexico or Brazil or Ceylon where there is a much higher rate of population increase and far fewer resources, both in money and in trained manpower. We are then confronted with the awful probability that we are just going to go on having more and more illiterate adults than we ever had before. And we have to remember that these adults will be illiterate, not within the framework of a traditional civilization—where it didn’t matter very much whether or not they were illiterate—but within the framework of a traditional civilization which has broken down completely and which is being replaced by the worse features of our own Western civilization.
Now we have to ask ourselves what our attitude should be towards these problems. We come to the other end of the bridge. We pass from the world of facts to the world of values. What we think about all this depends entirely on what we regard as the end and purpose of human life. If we believe the end and purpose of human life is to foster power politics and nationalism, then we shall probably need a great deal of cannon fodder, although even this proposition becomes rather dubious in the light of nuclear warfare. But if, as I think most of us would agree, the end of human life is to realize individual potentialities to their limits and in the best way possible, and to create a society which makes possible such a realization, then we find ourselves equipped to think in a rational and philosophical way about the population problem. We see that in very many cases the effort to raise human quality is being thwarted by the mere increase of human quantity, that quality is very often incompatible with quantity.
We have seen that mere quantity makes the educational potentialities of the world unrealizable. We have seen that the pressure of enormous numbers upon resources makes it almost impossible to improve the material standards of life, which after all have to be raised to a minimum if any of the higher possibilities are to be realized: although it is quite true that man cannot live by bread alone, still less can he live without bread, and if we simply cannot provide adequate bread, we cannot provide anything else. Only when he has bread, only when his belly is full, is there some hope of something else emerging from the human situation.
Then there is the political problem. It
