Book Review: “Too Many People? A Problem in Values” by Christopher Derrick
Christopher Derrick, Too Many People? A Problem in Values (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1985)
Christopher Derrick’s reflections on the “population problem” are an important contribution to the population control debate. Derrick does not even begin to look at the demographic evidence which confirms or disproves fears of overpopulation. He does not look at gross national product or projections for oil reserves. Nor does he enter into the dispute about what means of population control, voluntary or coercive, natural or artificial, can morally be employed.
Instead, Derrick insists that facts about population growth mean nothing outside the context of values which give shape to a policy which reflects those facts. Thus, it is absolutely critical to examine the implied values which underlie the notions that 1) there is a population “problem” and 2) if it is at all possible, we must try to find a “solution” for this “problem.”
To begin, Derrick observes, at various times and places the perceived “problem” has been under-population, while at other times and places it has been argued that the “problem” is overpopulation. These “problems” imply that there is some “right sized” population, though no one knows quite what this is. And what basic set of values will be used to define it.
The “overpopulation” argument generally goes that the increase in population leads to an increase in the number of poor people suffering great hardship. Notably, this argument is mostly made by people who are not poor and suffering. But more notable is the tendency of the overpopulationists to argue that overpopulation threatens not only our common welfare and comfort but our actual survival as a species. There stated fears have a very apocalyptic tone. But clearly in a biological sense “overpopulation” does not threaten a humans as a species. At worse it leads to a point where “overgrazing” forces a population decline. But, as Derrick notes, “For the sake of appeal and impact, doomtalk always needs to exaggerate. If you say, ‘Something distinctly unpleasant is rather likely to happen,’ nobody will take much interest. But if you say, ‘Something utterly and finally disastrous is quite certain to happen!’, people will love you for it. Your book will sell. But you always need to an ‘unless…’ Nobody wants unqualified despair.” This is how overpopulationists have sold the need to spend billions on controlling the population growth of the poor people in other countries. “Their children threaten our survival, unless we control their rate of reproduction.”
Most of the problems associated with the “population explosion,” Derrick notes, are really the result of an “urban implosion” as more and more people begin to concentrate in major metropolitan areas where specific economic benefits have also been concentrated.
Where Derrick’s analysis is especially interesting, however, is in his discussion of the “language of superfluity or excess.” The notion that there is “too much” of something implies that there is “too much” of it for some purpose. For example, if I say I have “too many shirts” it does not mean that “too many shirts” is a moral evil but rather that I have more than serve any useful purpose. But, Derrick notes:
Things get trickier when we turn to objects and creatures that are not man-made. What sense would it make to speak (for example) of ‘too many rats’?
One thing is clear enough: we cannot there define superfluity in relation to purpose, since we don’t know what (if anything) rates are for. A materialist will say that the language of teleology or purpose is nonsensical when applied to the material universe or to any object or creature within it: nothing that isn’t man-made is ‘for’ anything at all. A Christian might feel that God was moving in a particularly mysterious way when he invented Rattus norvegicus…
[But when we decide to destroy an infestation of rats for health reasons,] we make an almost teleological assumption about them. The purpose or raison d’etre of a rat–if it has one–is totally unknown to ourselves. But that doesn’t mean that we can say absolutely nothing about it. By implication (such things are seldom spelled out) we can declare it [the rat’s purpose] secondary or subordinate to human purposes and human needs… On that basis, though not otherwise, ‘too many rats’ is a judgment that we can form and then use as a basis for action. Even then, however, it is not an ontological value judgment. It is not the rats’ existence that we object to, but only their location and behavior as affecting ourselves…
Where purpose is non-existent or unknown and where we ourselves remain unaffected, quantitative value judgements upon existence become absurd. What could it possibly mean to speak of “too many stars.”
This discussion of purpose has a direct bearing on discussion regarding “too many people.” At least most of us agree that people are not rats. The teleological value of others is not less than our own. If I were to say that your and my interests are best served by controlling the reproduction of others, I am essentially claiming that our interests must prevail over theirs in just the same way as our interests must prevail over rats. For some, this is nothing more than racism, where “too many people” is code for “too many black and white people for the comfort of white people,” while for others it is pure elitism, where they dislike too many poor and uneducated people.
Some would avoid this discrimination by trying to claim not that there are too many of them, but that there are “too many of us when and where our numbers threaten and frustrate our own purpose in existing.” To this formulation a materialist might object that there is no “purpose” to our existence. But “if our existence has no real purpose, no possible development can militate against that non-purpose, and ‘too many people’ becomes a meaningless expression once again.
And here is the crux then of Derrick’s argument:
In the last analysis, purpose is presupposed by every concept of pure superfluity. We can easily say that ‘too many people’ are crowded here or there, or engage in one deleterious activity or another. But we can only say that ‘too many people’ exist if their numbers threaten the purpose of their own existence; so we need to know what that purpose is. There is no escaping the ultimate question of what people are for.
There are only three possible answers to this question of mankind’s purpose. Option one: “We are put into the world in order to be of service to others and to society at large.” This answer has religious implications, implying a God who made us to be of service. It is also used by those who would raise “society” – which often means “government” – to the status of a god. Thus, “society” is tempted to play god and control lives to the service of “society.” This temptation is faced by us all. As one commentator put it: “Even the most unselfish well-off persons think they know better than do poor people what is good for them and for the world…But the thought is only a matter of concern when it is hitched up with sufficient arrogance and willfulness that we are willing to compel them to do what we think they ought to do.”
The history of society shows that such arrogance and willfulness is not uncommon, and this is a warning to us.
‘People exist in order to serve others, in order to serve the good of society’: that sounds like a splendidly unselfish thing to say, a plea for altruism. But unless supplemented from elsewhere, its a formula for totalitarianism. There are so many people who, on that reckoning, should not be existing at all. Society or Big Brother doesn’t want them: they’re useless….
So, while population control is partly a cause of the rich against the poor, it’s also a cause of government against the citizen. Where poverty continues, witness is borne to the very limited competence of government, to the unwelcome fact that it does not really have a God-like power to solve all problems and provide all good things; and in any case, what farmer wants to have more cattle than he can manage comfortably?
While Derrick acknowledges that few population controllers advocate great massacres of the excess population, “the underlying value judgement” between massacres and population control by other means is no different. “Either way, we invoke the concept of a human life that’s socially useless or deleterious and is superfluous and undesirable…”
The second alternative for describing the purpose of human life is to reject any utilitarian measure of purpose, which inevitably invites totalitarianism, and to instead “assert firmly that each person is an end in himself, that government is only a means and ‘society’ [is] an unreal abstraction.” This proposal almost immediately leads to an absolute individualism which leads to anarchy. “We shall also come close to self-contradiction. If each individual is an end absolutely, serving no purpose beyond himself, he isn’t for anything at all. He just exists as the stars do, and the concept of ‘too many people’ becomes null and void once more.”
Yet to avoid the religious alternative, some would argue that we exist for happiness. But if this is the case, then the notion of limiting people would seem to limit the total sum of human happiness, for if we “agree in general terms, that we want the world to contain as much human happiness as possible: in that day of [overpopulated] doom and collapse, there might well be more of it than is now. Individuals might have less of it, but there would be more of them to have it.” The same type of analysis would apply to any other abstract notion such as the desire to maximize human satisfaction. Yet this kind of value judgement underlies most overpopulationists beliefs.
The sad fact is that fortunate people have a marked tendency to see theirs as the only tolerable sort of existence. It’s as though two propositions added up to a third. “I wouldn’t want to live in that wretched condition!” That’s understandable enough. “I am offended and disgusted by the spectacle of people who do live in that wretched condition!” That’s understandable too, if morally unpleasant” But no kind of logic will then enable us to say “Life in that wretched condition is simply worthless; they’d be better off without it.”
Yet such is exactly the type of illogic employed. Indeed, the poor often describe themselves in much happier terms than the elite feel that they would have in the same circumstance. Indeed, it is not the poor who are begging for population control, but the rich who would not want to live like them. Yet the rich continue to insist that somehow a poor person, or a cripple, could be “better off” if they never existed. But obviously this is an absurdity, since only a person can be better off, not some hypothetical non-person who doesn’t exist.
All this finally leads us to the metaphysical question of whether or not human life is inherently good (as traditionally held by Christians), or either illusory or inherently evil in which case “our only real hope then lies in the soul’s liberation from its present jailhouse of corrupted flesh.” The latter can be called the Manichaean view. Some may try to hold to a qualified Manichaean view, arguing that only a life which involves great suffering is an evil in and of itself. But this simply returns us to the totalitarian position that someone who is not suffering is going to decide whose life of suffering has reached a point of moral evil and is better off terminated. All this, Derrick writes, is also polluted by the psychological fact that humans are basically insecure about both themselves and others.
Whenever we consider value judgements upon human existence (as distinct from human well-being) we must allow for the fact that at certain murky depths, we hate ourselves and one another as well, individually and collectively, with little discrimination. All talk of ‘too many people’ defines us as our own enemy, summoned to a just and valiant war against ourselves, in the course of (as always in war) personal freedom will have to count for nothing.
The only third way of answering what people are “for” (if not for society, or for themselves alone) is that they are for God. In this case,
. . . ‘too many people’ involves a value judgement which can only be made–if at all–by God…. Various writers have considered the question of ‘an optimum population’ for this earth and have invariably floundered about in great confusion… But an ‘optimum population’ for Heaven–that’s a subject about which we can only make jokes in doubtful taste.
Derrick argues that only individual parents, standing before God in a “sub-creative relationship” to Him, can question if they are having “too many children,” and even then, only with great caution, for “The only fully Christian attitude towards parenthood is: ‘The Lord may or may not give; the Lord may or may not take away: blessed be the name of the Lord.'”
Thus, Derrick concludes, all talk of “too many people” reveals the extent to which people’s “minds are governed, consciously or not, by non-Christian and even anti-Christian presumptions, broadly totalitarian or broadly Manichaean or both. They say in effect that goodness or desirability of human existence is not inherent or absolute but highly conditional, almost quantifiable…” Those who claim to be doing good for the poor through promotion of population control are suspect because:
Christian moral emphasis was always particular: you were told to love your neighbor, not humanity or ‘Man’… [The masses of humanity are individuals] not insects or statistics, and Blake was utterly right in his famous warning about how they need to be treated: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.”
Many, having abandoned hope in God and have instead invested themselves in a hope in Progress. They believe that in order to preserve this “Progress” we must control the wombs of the world. But in the past such a dreams of controlling our own destiny have either come to nothing or resulted in hellish dictatorships where a few dominate the many.
‘Progress’ is a very unreliable and unsuitable object for what Christians call ‘faith.’ Not all things can be realistically seen in the problem-and-solution terms that we favor so instinctively in this technological age. We’re in God’s hands, if there is a God: if there isn’t, we’re mostly in evil hands or in no hands at all.
And if we understand God at all, it would appear to be that God appears to value human lives for their own sake, not for the “quality” that some humans attribute or deny to the lives of others. Indeed, for Christians it is a revealed part of our faith that Christ came especially to the poor, the outcast, the sick and downtrodden.
So from a Christian based set of values, one cannot speak of “too many people,” but one can speak of “‘the problems consequent upon rapid population growth’…But he then speaks of problems that people have. He crosses a fatal Rubicon if he starts to speak of the ‘problem’ that people are, or will be in some foreseeable future. The existence of human beings does not come under our judgement.” Such judgements belong to God alone. While the totalitarian may seek to usurp this judgment believing all judgments belong to the State, and the Manichee might usurp God’s judgments “since the creator of mankind is evil,” a Christian is called to think differently.
Quoting the London Times with approval, Derrick describes that from a Christian perspective, “The population question…should be classified for purposes of political action with the weather. It is something you try to forecast, and as often as not get wrong; something you do not waste time trying to control, but to which you adapt arrangements and revise plans as need arises.”
In short, Derrick’s Too Many People is a superb analysis of the values that underlie the population debate and a forceful defense for a Christian response.