Malthus’s children

Two hundred years ago, the creepy Revd Thomas Malthus would take to his pulpit to rail against the copulating lower orders. Author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus was one of the first promoters of the overpopulation thesis. If people — especially poor people — didn’t stop having so many babies, ‘premature death would visit mankind’. The demand for food would outstrip mankind’s ability to produce it, giving rise to famines, to ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ that would ‘sweep off tens of thousands’. His scabrous sermons provided a satisfying shudder down the backs of his pious, prole-fearing followers.

Today, Malthusian sermons are not delivered in church but in the theatre — the Royal Court Theatre in London, to be precise, where for the past few weeks a modern-day Malthus, Professor Stephen Emmott of Oxford University, has been thrilling the chattering classes with his predictions of population-related global disaster. In Ten Billion, a one-hour lecture dolled up as a piece of drama, Emmott titillates his audience with tales of overbreeding. All these grasping human beings, these mouths to feed and arses to wipe, are putting an unbearable strain on nature’s limited larder. We are about to see a ‘perfect storm’ of resource depletion and pollution.

The audience lapped it up. The well-to-do theatregoers shook their heads and gasped when Emmott revealed how many resources go into making a Big Mac (apparently only the foods favoured by the less well-off contribute to resource depletion). They applauded his reluctant conclusion that, given the conflict overpopulation was likely to cause, the next generation might benefit from knowing how to use a gun.

Malthusianism is back in vogue. Not only in theatres in Sloane Square, but across the opinion-forming spectrum.