In the wake of reading Steven Stoll’s incredible, The Great Delusion, about John A. Etzler’s mad vision of a limitless world, I’ve been thinking a lot about growth. The following piece is an exploration of the idea of growth with particular emphasis on how Malthus has been used rhetorically by those undercover technoutopians who promise that wealth will always increase.

But first, The Great Delusion. Stoll makes a convincing argument that our obsession with growth as the indicator of national progress was born in in the utopian fervor of the early 19th century, when the idea that we might run out of any natural resource seemed nuts and possibly evil.

“Faith in economic growth ignited during a certain moment, when a providential belief in the limitlessness of the earth coalesced around the accelerated production made possible by fossil fuels,” Stoll writes. “Progress toward salvation became the progress of a more durable existence. Growth has since become a condition of the political order, but that way of thinking might not survive much longer.”

So I’ve been thinking about that: how long and where and how and which parts of Costco culture can survive?

Many critics, usually on the right, have a name for this type of thinking, this strange idea that humans won’t find yet another parachute under their airplane seats just when it seems the plane is going to crash. They call it “neo-Malthusianism” after one of the most famous incorrect predictions in history.

We’re all familiar with the story of Thomas Robert Malthus, who right as the industrial revolution brought incredible amounts of food and power into human hands, predicted that the rate of population growth would outstrip the ability of agriculture to provide enough food. Within 50 years, he said, there wouldn’t be enough food to feed all the people. Clearly, he was wrong. Partially because technology increased yields and partially because that technology allowed the British to found an empire that could bring resources from all over the world for consumption on their little island.

It was clearly an argument embedded in its time — and no one seriously thinks in the terms that Malthus did back then. But he’s proven a very convenient foil for any growth advocate who wants to abolish the idea that humans might run into limits of any kind.

Take this Bloomberg commentary by Caroline Blum from October of 2007. It’s titled, “Neo-Malthusians Worry About Food Supply Again.”

Some bad ideas refuse to die a quiet death. Instead they come back to haunt us at a different time, in a different place or in a slightly different format. Take, for example, the notion that the world population will outrun the food supply. That prediction, along with the “cure” (population control), gained currency with Thomas Malthus in the late 18th century; was revitalized with the 1968 publication of “The Population Bomb,” by biologist Paul Ehrlich, predicting famine and death on an unprecedented scale; reappeared, courtesy of the Club of Rome, in the 1972 book, “Limits to Growth;” and garnered renewed media attention in 1980, when economist Julian Simon challenged Ehrlich on his prediction of massive shortages of natural resources (Simon won), before landing on today’s doorstep with the huge rally in grain prices.

That history leaves out everyone from 1790 to 1968, a mere 200 years in which furious debates occurred over Malthus’ theories, but leaving that aside, let’s see what Blum’s argument is. Surely, she must have some unshakable evidence that there are no possible limits to agricultural production.

“Somehow man, through his eternal inventiveness, always finds a way to produce more with less,” she says. That’s the answer. It will be provided. How?

“‘Remarkable technology coming down the pipeline” someone from the USDA tells her, including the use of a global positioning system. GPS! Ye gads. “It sounds pretty impressive,” she concludes. But does it? The only argument is that technology is great and Malthus was wrong. So latter day Malthusians are wrong also. Innovation will provide!

Malthus has drawn so much hate because he stands at one end of a spectrum that runs from him to technoutopianists, who don’t believe that there could ever be any limits placed on humanity’s ability to support ever-increasing numbers of humans.

But those arguing for limits on human potential or the biosphere’s ability to support any amount of people with any standard of living are not making the same argument that Malthus did. They are not, as Time’s Michael Shulman wrote in an April 25th piece on the commodities runup in 2007, “dust[ing] off Malthusian theories.”

Few read Malthus anymore because whether or not he was right or wrong doesn’t say anything about the human situation now, but many use Malthus now because he was wrong enough to make any connection to him radioactive. And that’s been true since at least 1890, when a new edition of his essay was released with this introduction by George Thomas Bettany.

“It is quite safe to say that of the multitudes who have denounced ” Malthus on Population,” and ” the Malthusian doctrine,” very few have read this book, or know anything of the life and character of its author,” Bettany writes.

In fact, Malthus began his work arguing against Godwin, who, among other things, speculated on human immortality.

As quoted by Siobhan Chonaill:

For if the mind could gain power over all other matter, Godwin asks, then:

why not over the matter of our own bodies? If over matter at ever so great a distance,
why not over matter which, however ignorant we may be of the tie that connects it
with the thinking principle, we always carry about with us, and which is in all cases
the medium of communication between that principle and the external universe? In a
word, why may not man one day be immortal?

This claim, its purpose and motivations, has intrigued, confounded, and divided
scholars as they have attempted to either reconcile the rational philosopher with such a
seemingly absurd and irrational assertion, or alternatively to endeavour to omit this
curious and somewhat embarrassing aspect of his philosophy from his oeuvre entirely.

Godwin believed that “our virtues and our vices may be traced to the incidents which make the history of our lives, and if these incidents could be divested of every improper tendency, vice would be extirpated from the world.” So, it really wasn’t too much of a stretch to extend perfectability from the corps to the corpse.

Leaving aside whether immortality is even an interesting type of utopian goal or whether Godwin wasn’t a kind of proto-bizarro-Marxist, I just want to point out that this is the guy that Malthus was arguing with. It wasn’t Malthus versus the industrialists, it was Malthus versus this anarchist utopian whose solution to overpopulation was to “project a change in the structure of human action, if not of human nature, specifically the eclipsing of the desire for sex by the development of intellectual pleasures.” So, you know, listen to opera instead of having sex. That was his solution to overpopulation. (In fact, we have found that, to a certain extent, this works. We call it the “demographic transition” and it’s a very good story.)

The opponents of neo-Malthusians then are the neo-Godwinians! (And, in fact, there is a strain of Americans who believe also in immortality and eternal plenty: the transhumanists.) And if you had to choose, who would you say is the more realistic advocate? Yet it’s always the neo-Malthusians who are the kooky “prophets of doom” as this 1954 Time article calls them:

Many books by neo-Malthusian prophets of doom have attempted to answer these questions. Most of them have been superficial, emphasizing minor and easily corrected threats to man’s food supply, such as erosion of farmlands.
[ED: the erosion of farmlands is a minor and easily corrected threat?]

The reason, then, that Malthus draws such continued ire through the centuries is that he identified the new idea which Stoll traces in his book that goes like this: God is infinite and nature is God, so nature is infinite. And he said, in his cranky old British parson way, “This is bloody nuts.” Without fossil fuels, he would have been right. And now with fossil fuel supplies — particularly the cheap, easy to get ones — coming to an end, we need to heed Stoll’s warning. Because a future of limited economic growth informed by the biophysical limits of the world surely is not “as far-fetched as the notion that we can project the status quo into the distant future.”