Josiah Neeley has a great essay on Thomas Malthus, Darwin’s great influence, in Hollywood and in our culture.
In The Population Bomb, [Paul] Ehrlich writes of a formative experience he had during a taxi ride in Dehli on a hot summer night:
The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to the buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.
Ehrlich’s conclusion from all this was that the world had “too many people.” But just below the surface of his description is the idea that the problem is not just too many people, but too many of the wrong kind of people. It’s not a coincidence that concern about overpopulation really got going after birth rates had fallen in the developed world. P.J. O’Rourke summed up this thinking behind the population control movement aptly: “Just enough of me, way too much of you.”
Malthusian overpopulation hysteria is the epitome of junk science. Indeed, it is probably the deadliest idea of modern man — at least two hundred million children have been aborted and killed at birth during the last half-century because of brutally coercive population control programs in Asia. Yet Malthusian hysteria is not in its essence a scientific program — its science is repudiated beyond repair. It is a social program — an undertaking by elites to control and even prevent the lives of people judged to be inferiors — “just enough of me, way too much of you.”
It is distilled evil.