Malthus and Conservatism

One of the many ironies of contemporary political discourse is the co-option of Malthus by the political left, for the Rev. Thomas Malthus was undoubtedly a man of the right. His Essay on the Principle of Population was an anti-utopian tract designed to refute what Malthus called, in his original title, “the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers.” He wished to expose the folly of the Enlightenment’s confidence in the perfectibility of man and society. He would have shuddered to hear contemporary calls for “concerted action based on a new dream for Earth.” Malthus’s goal was precisely the opposite: He hoped to awaken his contemporaries out of such dreams.

Malthus’s argument has a certain elegant simplicity. Two forces provide the primary axes of human existence: hunger and sexual passion. Malthus entertained no hope that these relentless drives would wither away. Because population grows at a geometrical rate and subsistence at an arithmetic rate, eventually there will be more people than the resources of the earth can sustain. England would, according to Malthus’s calculations, reach this point a few decades after the time he wrote. Only two external factors can maintain a balance of population and resources, and ensure the survival of the race: misery and vice. Wars, plagues, famines, and other horrors offset the iron laws of hunger and sex.

Malthus’s argument rested on several assumptions that today are the intellectual property of conservatism. Assuming that men and women possess and would continue to possess a fixed human nature, he condemned Godwin’s silly hope that sexual passion would someday wither away. Moreover, Malthus believed the world is governed by natural law, a moral order established by the God of Nature. On this basis, he attacked Condorcet’s hope for eternal natural life. If natural life had no limits, Malthus argued, the immutable laws of human nature, which are the foundation of all science, would be destroyed.

The Essay was written by a man with a realistic appreciation of human sinfulness and frailty. Godwin was wrong, Malthus wrote, to attribute all evil to institutions. Institutional evil is “mere feathers” compared to “those deeper seated causes of impurity that corrupt the springs, and render turbid the whole stream of human life.” The greater part of mankind, Malthus believed, is subject to evil temptations, and the vices and weakness of human nature are simply invincible.

Malthus offered no proposals to save humanity from the cycle of growth and misery. Instead, he claimed to be simply explaining the way the world works, and he ended the Essay with an effort to justify the ways of God to man. His theodicy developed in several directions. First, the failure of all efforts to perfect human nature in this life is designed to point toward the hope of resurrection, perfection, and eternal life in another world. Second, human beings are loathe to exert themselves without some stimulus to action. Men would not be likely to bring new lands into cultivation except for the pressure of population growth. The bleak realities of natural law thus generate industry, energy, and talent that would otherwise be wasted. Finally, in traditional Christian fashion, Malthus argued that suffering was necessary to humanize humans.

Elegant though the theory is, it has been discredited beyond hope by two hundred years of history. Malthus thus confronts today’s conservatives with a perplexing question: How could a man of the right be so colossally wrong? The fallacies of his economic reasoning have been analyzed by Julian Simon and others. But the enormity of his mistakes raises questions about his basic philosophical and theological assumptions.

As I see it, Malthus made one fundamental misstep: His static conception of human nature and of humanity’s relationship to God is theologically insupportable. In certain fundamental respects, of course, the relationship of God and man is unchanging. The Lord will always be Lord, and men and women will always be His willing or rebellious servants; between Creatorhood and creaturehood there is, and will ever be, a great gulf fixed.

Within that context, however, the Bible reveals a God who promises to do new things, who gives new hearts, forms new creatures, and even proposes to create a new heavens and a new earth. The New Testament’s gospel is the announcement of the new world order of the kingdom, inaugurated in the Person and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. The Lord revealed in Scripture is not Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, nor does He act in some abstract noumenal realm of Heilsgeschichte, but is active in the strife and tumult of real historical events in unpredictable and alarming ways to fulfill His unsearchable purposes.

This Biblical revelation of the character of God, it seems to me, provides our only hope for environmental sanity. Because it is true that “the earth is the Lord’s,” humanity is not free to destroy it; but because it is not true that “the earth is the Lord,” humanity is freed for enterprise and development. Confession of a God who acts creatively in history provides a starting point for theological reflection on the possibilities and dangers of technological progress.

By implicitly binding God Himself with the iron laws of nature, Malthus veered dangerously close to the “watchmaker theology” of Deism. Malthus forgot that the God he confessed as Lord has a habit of turning wildernesses into pools of water and of making deserts bloom like a rose.