The Cold Heart
On the Misery of Neo-Malthusianism
If the Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought the cold war’s frost back into thinking and has découvred the energy turn-a-round’s dubiousness, this marks not so much a turning point in time as it brings to the fore the fantasies of the classe politique. One of the astonishing surprises is that the Green Zeitgeist's greatness of heart, when put in charge, begins to betray some very unfriendly traits and even reveal some thinking resembling Neo-Malthusianism.1 And in a paternalistic way, they’re not above promoting using a washcloth [Waschlappens]2 instead of taking a shower; while taking a tenth of the primary energy off the grid with nuclear power as a matter of course, for the sake of ideological purity or their clientele. The fact that this decision threatens to de-industrialize the country, that even large sections of the middle class will be held liable, is washed aside without further ado – or wiped away with a suggestion of market laws and the urgent need for climate protection.
This ideological well-being imposes significant burdens on the rest of the world; even though the otherwise much-wooed global South is denied the right to further development is as generously overlooked as the biodiesel's introduction has already led to Indonesian palm forests and Amazon rainforest deforestation. And because, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, this gives us reason to look back to where and how the Reverend Thomas Malthus put this figure of thought into the world that’s become the World Rescuers Catechism in the Climate Debate’s shading. It is significant that Malthus' 1798 publication, An Essay on the Principle of Population, isn’t a positive vision of the future; instead, it’s a reaction to the progressive optimism of the French Revolution.3 Since, as in Condorcet's Reflections on the Progress of the Human Race, we read "that nature has set no limit to our hopes."4 But because the English establishment was terrified by the revolutionary enthusiasm in William Godwin's 1793 anarchistic Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, they decided to nip the revolt’s progressive spirit in its bud. Being pragmatic, they opted not for violence but for social sedatives. So the 1795 Speenhamland Act enforced the so-called Poor Laws as a kind of early basic income which required boroughs to care for their poor. Now reactions from the propertied classes were not long in coming. It started with Joseph Townsend's dissertation on the Poor Laws, in which he defended the view that starvation alone was an effective educational tool against idleness and that "he who employs the poor in useful labor is their only friend, he who merely feeds them is their greatest enemy."5 The Reverend Malthus took his rejection one step further. In his writing on the Limits to Growth, he reminded us that fixed land resources couldn’t keep pace with population growth; that excessive population growth must inevitably lead to hunger and poverty. Thus, from above, a class struggle could be spread as propertied classes became convinced that the lower, overly procreative classes were themselves to blame for their own misery while, conversely, they could also be counted among the chosen ones in the struggle for existence. And when the decision was made to abandon the Poor Laws in 1834, it was with reference back to the ethic of work’s educational function — making Malthusianism the ideological armament with which Manchester capitalism could prevail. In the most beautiful brevity, this worldview can be found in the words of Harriet Martineau, who popularized economic thinking and made it suitable for the masses with her moralizing writings:
.... one of my political panic transformations (which I went through again and again) was that the country would go bankrupt because of its poor law. Another panic was about revolution, where of course, our idea of revolution was guillotines in the streets and all those things.6
Because hunger had become an educational measure, hard-heartedness became socially acceptable. As a result, when in mid-19th century Ireland, a new type of fungal infestation (Phytophthora infestans) resulted in potato crop failures and a significant famine; English society felt this fate that could curb the overly procreative Catholics’ sex drive and bring pauperism down to a socially acceptable level — which was nothing more than an application of Malthusian thinking. And because of the insistence on free trade, Irish grain harvests were shipped to England, while the Irish population was decimated by almost half and left to starve. What a contemporary acknowledged with the laconic remark:
"The Almighty, certainly, sent de potato blight, but the English created the famine."
The curiosity of the Malthusian figure of thought, which inspired economists and evolutionary biologists alike, is how it could defy every reality, every refutation, no, even worse, that it celebrated its first days as an intellectual revenant in the most diverse disguises.7 That Paul Ehrlich, in 1968 with his Population Bomb,8 spread his thesis of the population explosion and, a little later, that the Club of Rome decreed the Limits to Growth,9 resurrecting Malthusian thinking — only now it had donned the vestments of environmental protection. Now Ehrlich's statement that hundreds of millions of people would die of hunger in the 1970s and 1980s turned out to be empty alarmism - just as almost all his forecasts proved groundless. However, this in no way has challenged the author. Consequently, the ninety-year-old is still convinced that the impending catastrophe has been postponed but not canceled10. Paul Ehrlich may have made a name for himself as an "irrepressible doomster," but his Malthusianism has proved far more explosive than the population explosion.
It is no coincidence that almost everyone now subscribes to the opinion that there is a natural limit that people are criminally neglecting. This thinking completely overlooks that digitization has shifted the idea of growth into PlusIntra11, and Silicon Valley has successfully demonstrated storing billions of times more information than was stored on the original silicon crystal in the 1950s — on the same amount of material, no less. And ironically, this was precisely the conditio sine qua non of the model calculations that Dennis Meadows had undertaken for the Club of Rome. In this sense, we could say that the Limits to Growth were primarily used to perpetuate one's own limitations into the future — and, on the other hand, criminally neglect human and social ingenuity.12
For this reason alone, the Malthusian-inspired discourses are to be approached with utmost caution. The apparent self-evidence of the natural limit is perhaps the biggest problem, for it allows the one who introduces it into the field to become the spokesman of their reality principle — a measure that goes hand in hand with a self-empowerment of the first order. In remembering the wasteful of scarcity, you know you are on the right side of history, or more precisely: on the side of nature. And is there a more powerful argument than this? It is no coincidence that every economics student is confronted with the thesis that humans inhabit the cold star of scarcity at the beginning of their studies. However, a trip to the supermarket or a glance at one’s desktop should be enough to convince one that this is an article of faith or even wishful thinking of the economic guild.
And if Desiring Wishes are the Father of Thought, so is it the Mother of the Sensory Delusion
In any case, the assertion of a nature-given limit obscures the question of the psychological value added that the Advocates of such a way of thinking derive from it. Because behind the claim of any nature — even more so if you combine it with a form of limitation — is hidden the refusal to think about whether this limit does not merely let your own thinking’s limitation have its say. Either way, you can end up in your worldly edifice by appealing to a higher authority. And just as Malthus (after all, a contemporary of James Watt and Jacquard) completely ignored the operating system of modern capitalism, he is also the contemporary who insists on the natural border and is relieved of the embarrassment of thinking about the solution to the self-created problems. If Charles Dickens could still say change begets change, nothing propagates so fast; then here we are dealing with a way of thinking in which scarcity creates scarcity (which is why the preachers of the Apocalypse find nothing wrong with promoting the general scarcity situation — for example, by blocking gas pipelines). Correspondingly, in a literal sense, we are dealing with a reactionary worldview. And this is also true of those who consider themselves enlightened and progressive.13 Because if economics can only be a zero-sum game, the political task is exhausted in distributing scarcity in the fairest possible way. And, following this premise, you very soon find yourself entering a dark register of who watches the Watcher. As a matter of course, the admonisher pointing out the natural limit is, in their turn, tempted to assume the role of limit guardian — of the Watcher who watches over the limits, takes care of distribution, and separates the permissible from the impermissible. And because regarding the natural limit, the Watcher is called upon to do so by a higher authority; a good conscience also joins this self-empowerment formula as a legitimacy derived from a higher power (already highly dubious from a democratic theoretical viewpoint). Unlike God's grace, which still contains a trace element of the otherworldly, this power (nature) is consistently inner-worldly. Consequently, Malthusian thinking knows neither mercy nor forgiveness; instead, it confronts the sinner in the form of a punishing deity, an institution behind which is hidden the bare nothingness (which led a 19th-century philosopher to locate in Malthusian thinking an imbroglio of pessimism, nihilism, and social Darwinism). This may explain the intimate connection that Malthusian thought maintains with the Apocalypse, as it no longer functions as a revelation but as a means of self-empowerment. Ideologically, this is a most remarkable deception. By replacing the proletarian (the alienated creature) with the disgraced earth mother, thinking has freed itself from the grip of political economy. Because this has opened the door to voluntarism, the fantasies of the coming end of the world can be converted into a claim to political power and the right to redemption. It is no coincidence that the debate is no longer about this or that political measure; instead, it is about the big picture — even the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has committed itself to a system change(whatever that may mean). Admittedly, you only need to look at the World Rescuers’ educational measures to realize that a misanthropic ideology has clandestinely broken through here. Once you have converted a child's life into a CO2 footprint, the birth strike is not far away, just as Antinatalism is suitable for moral grandstanding. It is best not to be born.
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
Back in 2020, French author Guillaume Blanc published a book dealing with green colonialism: L'invention du colonialisme vert: Pour en finir avec le mythe de l'Éden africain. Paris 2020.
This was the recommendation of the Green Minister-President of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, who advised citizens to use a washcloth instead of a shower — this was a very useful invention [Translator’s note].
Malthus’ original intent was that it would simply lead to increased population growth and density, unlike the French Revolution’s ideology, which held that increasing abundance would provide progressively better living conditions. [Translator’s note]
This writing was already the work of a driven man, a Girondist, a relatively moderate revolutionary who suspected the revolution would eat its children. To this day, it still isn't clear whether he ended his life with poison — or if it was administered to him.
Joseph Townsend in seiner Schrift zu der Armengesetzgebung, 1795.
Harriet Martineaus’ Autobiography. Bd. 1, London 1969, S. 80.
Neo-Malthusian thinking is an exemplar of how Jacob Burckhardt’s 1889 warning of all these terrible simplificateur who ignore scientific and industrial scientific progress while relying on an inner-worldly religion in the political guises of Divine Retribution, Natural Law, or even Gaia’s Intervention is a form of Carl Schmitt’s political theology that declares a State of Emergency to subvert the rule of law. See Burckhardt, M. Carl Schmitt and his Heirs, Ex Nihilo (Substack), Nov 26, 2022; Burckhardt, M. & Stanley, H. The Inertia of the Heart, Ex Nihilo (Substack), Jan 28, 2003.[Translator’s note]
Erlich, Paul R., The Population Bomb, New York, 1978 [Translator’s note]
See Meadows, Donatella & Dennis [and others]. The Limits to Growth; a Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York, 1972. [Translator’s note]
Meaning that it’s taken on a feeling of synchronic infinite deferral of what will happen without any actual proof that characterizes Messianic thinking. Problematic is it’s become outsourced into our socioplasmic Psychotope that’s accepted as fact rather than theory. See, M. Burckhardt, Philosophie die Machine, Berlin 2018 [Translator’s note]
See Burckhardt, M. & Stanley, H. Administration of Scarcity, Ex Nihilo (Substack), Jan 16, 2023, and The Inertia of the Heart, Ex Nihilo (Substack) Jan 28, 2023. [Translator’s note]
Dennis Meadows' modeling, which he used to make projections over a hundred-year period, was based on just five variables — calling it under-complex would be nothing short of a euphemism.
It’s crucial noting this thinking is based on a synchronistic Worldview analogous to a digital video file where the same, unchanging action can replay infinitely by moving its time sequence forward or backward, but the outcome is unchanged because it has no new information to change its outcome or projected effects; this is its natural limit of knowledge and scarcity of its scarcity compared to with real-world diachronic/trichronic unlimited, unknown futures. But lest we throw the baby out with its bathwater, synchronic thinking isn’t without its utility. In the hands of a skilled expert intuitively cyber-navigating the Plus-Intra, digital technologies, and modeling techniques can provide reasonably accurate predictions, but never with 100% accuracy. This is how the Neo-Malthusian Apocalyptic thinking, by not sufficiently thinking through the current Climate Crisis problem, ensnares the Green Zeitgeist; instead, it takes the route of simply declaring a Schmittian scarcity State of Emergency and proscribes itself (and us) an Ideology of limited-resource Economics [Translator’s note]