Another (to me) very disturbing and painful result of quantity which affects the quality of human life is the fact that more and more of the increasing mass of people is being confined to gigantic cities, that more and more people are therefore living completely out of touch with the natural environment and are instead surrounded by an environment of unutterable dreariness and squalor. When one comes to think of it, there probably never has been a beautiful city of more than, say, two or three hundred thousand inhabitants, because a beautiful city is beautiful in relation to its natural surroundings.
You can have cities with magnificent central areas such as Washington, D.C.; but if you walk out of the central areas Washington cannot be said to be very beautiful, for you go through square miles of extraordinarily dreary slums and second-rate middle-class residential areas. The same thing is true of other, much larger, cities such as New York and London and Tokyo. There are mile upon mile of fearful dreariness, where the children never see any natural object at all and see only ugly human objects. This situation is a blight upon the world at the present time, and as far as I can see it is destined to get worse and worse. I cannot help feeling that this is a very deleterious state of affairs for the human spirit.
Finally, the unlimited increase in human numbers practically guarantees that our planetary resources will be destroyed and that within a hundred or two hundred years an immensely hypertrophied human species will have become a kind of cancer on this planet and will ruin the quasi-organism on which it lives. It is a most depressing forecast and possibility.
I think one can say from this last point that the problem of quality and quantity is really a religious problem. For, after all, what is religion but a preoccupation with the destiny of the individual and with the destiny of society and the race at large? This is summed up very clearly in the Gospel when we are told that the Kingdom of God is within us but at the same time it is our business to contribute to the founding of the Kingdom of God upon earth. We cannot neglect either of these two aspects of human destiny. For if we neglect the general, quantitative, population aspect of destiny, we condemn ourselves, or certainly our children and grandchildren, as individuals. We condemn them to the kind of life which we should find intolerable and which presumably they will find intolerable too.
There are no certain theological objections to population limitation. Most religious organizations in the world today, both within and outside the Christian pale, accept it. But the Roman Catholic church does not accept any method of population control except that which was promulgated and made permissible in 1932—the so-called rhythm method. Unfortunately, where the rhythm method has been tried on a considerable scale in an undeveloped country such as India, it has not been found to be very effective. The fact that the Church recognizes this problem was brought home very clearly in 1954 at the time of the first United Nations Population Congress, which took place in Rome, when the late Pope, in an allocution to the delegates, made it quite clear that the problem of population was a very grave one which he recommended to the consideration of the faithful.
Whether the present attitude towards the methods of birth control will be changed, I don’t know. It is a matter of some interest that one of the main arguments against current and possibly future methods is their ‘unnaturalness’. Precisely the same argument was used in the Middle Ages, and right up until 1515, against the taking of interest on money. It was an argument based on statements in Aristotle that money is barren and has no right to breed. A hint of this is found in the first act of The Merchant of Venice, where Antonio, talking to Shylock, speaks about ‘barren metal’ breeding and asks, ‘Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams?’ It was all right for living creatures to breed, but it was quite wrong for money to do so. This position was gradually modified, the last modification taking place at one of the Lateran Councils in 1515. I don’t know whether a similar change may take place in the attitude towards ‘unnatural’ methods of birth control. Be that as it may, the fact remains that everybody agrees in principle that over-population is a great danger, and the differences are now mainly questions of means.
We can conclude, then, by saying that over-population is quite clearly one of the gravest problems which confront us, and the choice before us is either to let the problem be solved by nature in the most horrifying possible way or else to find some intelligent and humane method of solving it, simultaneously increasing production and balancing the birth rate and the death rate, and in some way or other forming an agreed international policy on the subject. To my mind, the most important prerequisites to such a solution are first of all an awareness of the problem, and then a realization that it is a profoundly religious problem, a problem of human destiny. Our hope, as always, is to be realistically idealistic.
The end
