Here’s a tough thought that I have been analyzing. It’s quite drastic and not something I personally support, but here it is:
What if we let natural selection do its job and let the poor, war-stricken, and starving people die? It sounds terrible, I know, but bear with me.
The world is overpopulated and is becoming increasingly stripped of sufficient resources to feed and care for its people. Many geographical areas do not have the food and water its inhabitants need, so many of these areas rely on support provided by wealthier and more resource-rich nations.
When support flows in from wealthier countries, people in the very poor areas can manage to delay otherwise inevitable death. They then can continue to reproduce and even more people are born into extreme poverty. However, the problem of having no resources and means of caring for their families and communities does not go away. Instead, what we end up with is an even bigger number of people who cannot live without the help of outside resources.
We can send as much food, water, and medicine to these nations. All that will happen is they become healthy enough for long enough to reproduce. Food only lasts until it’s eaten. Medicine only lasts as long as it’s used. Whatever supplies are sent to these people are only bandaids slapped over a huge wound that is slowly getting worse and infected.
Without any aid whatsoever, many people living in extreme poverty would die of hunger, thirst, or disease. The earth’s population would be reduced to a more manageable level. If it was up to nature, that’s what would happen. It is nature’s way of taking care of itself.
Nature knows how to keep itself in balance. It’s been doing it for countless years before humans decided we would “help” keep the balance. Since we started intervening in nature’s cycles and natural selections, the environment has become chaotic. We’re struggling to provide for all people, against the will of the environment, and against the way nature has been working forever.
What happens when we disrupt nature’s perfect cycle? Disaster. I think that’s where many people would agree we’re headed, if we’re not there already.
Like I said before, I cannot morally agree to letting a third (or more) of the world’s people die out. However, the positive global and environmental outcomes it could produce are undeniable.
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
Um ... There is plenty of space and room to go around. Humans aren't even using up half of all the land mass that we could. Not to mention the fact that in general we produce far more food than we need. The primary problem that people are starving is a lack of funding to by food.
Smile Like You Care
It wasn't until pretty modern times that people used funding to buy food. People obviously survived quite well before the development of currency. So, no, I don't think the problem is lack of funding.
... It also wasn't until pretty modern times that anyone was anything other than a farmer or hunter. Not to mention the fact that we have a far small percentage of starving people that less modern times.
Smile Like You Care
I was just talking about this at school with some friends. They said that if there weren't so many genocides and epidemics then perhaps there would be too many people in the world.
Perhaps we are like a virus and the earth is trying to heal herself.
Once I read this poem about the life of a cancer cell, it was about how hard a life it had had, and in the end the poet said that perhaps one person dying from cancer is really one cancer triumphing in life. But we really don't sympathise with disease.
Why should the earth sympathise with us?
... The Earth isn't alive ... It doesn't try to heal itself ...
Smile Like You Care
The earth is totally alive. It's practically a living, breathing organism. Think about all the life that's delicately balanced throughout the globe... from the biggest mammal to the smallest single-cell organism. It's really quite amazing when you think about it.
All this life works together to be sure that it can all exist. Yes, Earth is full of energy and life. Sure, perhaps the rock itself is fairly lifeless, but everything else is super-alive and trying to stay that way.
First off, I think CS Lewis would agree with me that the earth is alive.
Second off, if the earth is the sum of all its part, and if any of the parts are alive and working, then of course the earth is alive.
Perhaps we are like a virus and the earth is trying to heal herself.
This is often called the "Malthusian Solution" named after an economist: Dr. Malthus. He essentially argued that human population would expand until it exceeded the environment's carrying capacity and that it would then be whacked back into balance by war, pestilence and famine.
Malthus's predictions have received a lot of ridicule in the last century. The big flaw in his argument was that he failed to account for technology. We have vastly expanded the carrying capacity of the earth by harnessing energy in various forms and with genetically improved crops, and with vaccines and other medicines and generally with the rapid expansion of human knowledge. For most of the last century, Malthus has looked like an idiot and human population has expanded by orders of magnitude since he made his predictions.
But Dr. Malthus may get the last laugh. Modern agriculture is essentially the act of transforming fossil fuels into food. Now that we are running up against the upper boundaries of fossil fuel production and we are starting to turn food into energy, it seems to me that we are hitting limits that technology is not solving.
And in the disease department, it is only a matter of time before something like SARS or bird flud gets loose with devastating consequences. We have only gotten a tiny taste of that so far but it seems obvious that it is a matter of when not if.
And war of course was the one part of Malthusian Solution that everybody agreed was immune to and defied technological advance and indeed technology has made us far more efficient at killing. There is no reason to believe that there will be less war as population expands and puts increasing demands on food, energy and other resources.
I'm pessimistic but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we are due for another huge technological advance. Maybe they will discover fresh water on Mars and we can start settling another planet. Put the poor on rockets and ship them off with a plow and a bag full of seed corn.
Are you serious? Did you read this out loud to yourself? What if these people not "naturally selected" were you and your family and friends? Instead of working hard to come up with more long-lasting and permanent solutions to helping people you would rather see them die of starvation? These are people. People who love, laugh, cry---who have families and hopes and dreams. It doesn't just "sound terrible" it IS terrible. One of the main reasons other countries are poor and we are rich is because Western nations made them that way, through years of colonization and trade protections, not because they have no resources or skills of their own. Please, these are human beings we are talking about.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
I wrote something very similar a few weeks ago:
Hunger and Tough Love
I am 50 years old and we have been feeding starving people since before I was born. For the most part it has vastly increased the misery and has set the stage for almost certain future calamity. If we had followed your advice 50 years ago, there would not be a problem now. If we don't start following your advice soon, the problem will soon be so large that we will no longer have an option. There simply won't be enough to go around. World wide food riots and spiraling energy costs are a pretty good sign that we are bumping up against the upper limits of maximum short-term carrying capacity. My guess is that we are already well past the upper limits of long term sustainable population.
Misguided generosity now means untold misery in the future. The world is adding 70 million new people per year and almost all of that growth is happening in the parts of the world that can least afford it. Some people see your solution as harsh and inhuman. I see it as compasionate and wise with an eye towards the future.
I have to laugh at the argument that there is plenty of unpopulated land mass and therefore we are not bumping up against environmental constraints. If land were the constraining resource then we could easily solve this problem by simply transporting all the millions of starving people to Antartica where there is plenty of underpopulated land mass. There is lots of fresh water there too. They would of course quickly die which would prove that land and fresh water are not the constraining resources on human life. We of course don't need to carry out that experiment because anybody who thinks about it very hard already knows those things.
I see this as a cultural issue. Humans love to pro-create and are very good at it but historically they have developed cultural traditions that have kept their populations in check and in balance with the carrying capacity of their environment. But the world has changed and those cultural traditions have been disrupted or are no longer fuctioning for other reasons and new cultural traditions are needed. But culture is resistant to change and the only thing that is going to make it happen is pain. Only painful consequences will cause cultures to adopt behavior patterns that include responsible reproductive behavior that will keep their populations in check and in harmony with the carrying capacity of their environment. When we keep bailing people out with food and aid, we are depriving them of the pain which is necessary to help them change their cultures. I do a better job of explaining this thought in the blog I linked to above.
Nice blog!
... at the misunderstanding people have concerning natural selection.
Er ... Natural selection IS doing its job. Natural selection means "nature selects" ... and by "nature" what is meant is the "environment". Since humans are a societal animal, our environment is our society. We make our own society. We can make a society that maximizes opportunities for all or we can make a society that selects against a certain portion of the society.
You are advocating (although you deny it), that we develop a society that selects against "the poor, war-stricken, and starving people". Do you think this is going to change human nature for the better? Natural selection may work on any identifiable trait. But if it is to have an effect on future generations, those traits must be heritable. Do you really think there are genes for poverty, being war-stricken, or for a propensity to starve? If there isn't then the selection you propose will have no effect on human nature.
But, let's take a look at your reasoning as to why this may be a good idea.
Suppose a member of the "poor, war-stricken, and starving" wrote a blog saying that we should develop a society that limits resource utilization at a personal level. An average person in the United States uses 1000 times the resources of an average person in the ghettos of his country. Just think of all the people those resources could support if there were a more equitable distribution of those resources. A few million people might be disadvantaged but hundreds of millions would be advantaged if that were done. I suspect all this is true.
So what is the point of that? You are not considering resource utilization at all, so you conclude the problem is overpopulation. The hypothetical blog above does not consider overpopulation at all, so it concludes that the problem is resource utilization. The problem is a combination of resource utilization and overpopulation.
(1) YOU cannot live without the help of outside resources ... at least not in the manner you live now. Your car comes from Japan, clothes from China, your food is grown in other parts of the country, your house was built by laborors from Mexico and Central America (possibly).
(2) I suspect, considering the general population, I was born into poverty. My father had an 8th grade education. He had no job when he married my mother. He moved to Virginia on the off chance that his brother could get him a job in the ship-building industry ... He couldn't. My father joined the Air Force. This is the environment I was born into ... in 1951.
I now have two doctorate degrees and I make a pretty good living. Being born into poverty is not an automatic death sentence. It is certainly an impediment, but so is being short. Yet no one is advocating we create an environment in which short people are not allowed an opportunity to reproduce (and shortness is a heritable trait).
(3) A well-researched area of evolutionary theory concerns what is called RECIPROCAL ALTRUISM. Members of a group improves there individual FITNESS (a technical term for a measurement of an organism's ability to transmit its genes into future generations compared with that of a control group) if they share excess resources with others in their group who are willing to reciprocate if the tables are turned. In other words, the advantaged and the disadvantaged benefit. Why can this not be used as a model for your hypothetical situation?
We could have said the same thing about Japan after WWII. We could have said the same thing about China during the 1960's and 1970's. We gave them a huge amount of money in the form of foreign aid. ... Now we owe those countries MUCH more than they owe us. WE are living off of their kindness. THEY can say that about us now. The point being ... things change. There are instances in which aid is not "wasted". It serves as a springboard for economic development. ... In the case of China and India (maybe) it may be working TOO well. As these two people-dense states improve their economies and their resource utilization per capita starts to move more our direction, it will certainly strain world's resources. I suspect that it already contributes to the increased price of oil.
Who says? You seem to think that "poor people" are homogenous group. They will always be poor, their children are destined to be poor ... nobody improves their lot and becomes no longer poor & nobody who presently isn't poor is going to have misfortune and become poor.
Historically, genocide does not lead to a population decline overall. People who benefit from the genocide increase their birthrate and replace the ones that die. So your scenario is flawed.
(1) The environment may select but it doesn't have a "will". Certain environments favor certain straits, other environments may favor competing traits. NO TRAIT is universally favored in all environments.
(2) Nature DOESN'T know how to keep itself in balance ... at least over the very long haul. There is bound to be something that changes the environment. That is why there have been mass extinctions. Nature produced US, and we are responsible for an on-going mass extinction rivalling that produced any meteorite. We do this by changing the world's environment. To give you some idea of how much ... Before Europeans came to North America, it was supposedly possible for a squirrel to travel from New Brunswick, Canada (North of Maine) to Texas without ever having to touch the ground. Not any more. Your proposal is not likely to change any of that.
We could be headed to disaster. I suspect we are, but I am not prescient enough to know for sure. But having problems does not warrent an "any solution will do" approach. If you don't understand the dynamics of the system, you could very well end up making things worse. I suspect your hypothetical solution would do just that.
(1) If you cannot morally agree to your solution then why do you claim that it would have undeniable beneficial effects? It seems to me that if this is the way to avoid "disaster" (your term) it would be morally wrong NOT to do it. However, I don't think this is the way to avoid disaster ... it is a way of creating disaster.
(2) Not only are "positive global and environmental outcomes" deniable, I deny them. I have presented the data and reasoning that I think substantially DO deny them.
Cheers,
DB
===
If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. - Anatole France