Tuesday morning Radio 4 Today programme. Tom Fielden, reporting rising food prices, informs us, in portentous tones, that the living outnumber the dead. There are more mouths to feed now than have needed to be fed in the whole of human history
You do not have to think very hard to realise that this cannot be true. We, collectively, have more than 7 billion ancestors.
A more elegant & detailed estimate of the total numbers of human deaths since 40,000 BC (60 billion) was given by Roger Thatcher, former Registrar-General, in papers read to the International Statistical Institute & the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1983
The interesting question is why people are so quick to believe this non-fact – it crops up regularly in all sorts of places and has done, in its modern form, for at least a quarter of a century. As Roger Thatcher said in his paper This has even been quoted in a debate in Parliament
Such credulity goes hand in hand with a dislike of the modern world, a mindset which says We are all doomed & it is all our fault
In the English case I put it all down to Malthusian guilt & the Irish Famine
Up to the 18th century at least a growing population was seen as a sign of Gods favour – Be fruitful & multiply. Bad weather, failure of the harvest, epidemic disease, were Gods punishment for our sins
Thus an Edinburgh clergyman Robert Wallace could take exactly the opposite of this modern view. He read a paper to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society arguing that the population of the ancient, civilised world of Greece & Rome was more numerous than that of their barbaric, papist influenced 1750s
David Hume begged to differ & published a spirited response: On the Populousness of Ancient Nations
It is worth quoting Humes concluding sentence:
The humour of blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature, and has an influence even on persons endued with the profoundest judgment and most extensive learning.
