Bringing Malthus Up to Date : Today’s intellectual overlords echo the 19th-Century economist on making the wretched more so.

The problem with the row over Louis Farrakhan and the deplorable views of his aide is that it focuses attention on the wrong target. American Jews aren’t in any danger from the Nation of Islam. In fact, as a group liable to persecution, they aren’t in any danger at all.

The whole uproar is fraudulent, rearing a vast mountain out of a tiny molehill; just another way of hyping Israeli bond drives.

But there are potential mass murderers in our midst. They don’t wear swastika armbands. Many of them are policy-makers, opinion-formers and respected members of the polity. Liberal foundations--particularly environmentally oriented ones--are top-heavy with them. They are Malthusians.

In the town of Chico the other day, a woman who said she was head of the Population Committee of the Sierra Club in California asked why I was so hard on Malthus. Why was I discounting the menace of overpopulation?

Thomas Robert Malthus was an English economist of the early capitalist era. Read him and it will save you a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, Progressive Policy Review, the New Republic and almost every other journal of neoliberal opinion.

Malthus believed that the overbreeding poor would inevitably outstrip the means of subsistence. Attempts to alleviate poverty and misery only make things worse; the misery of the lower classes is the consequence of a natural law that functions “absolutely independent of all human regulation.”

Malthus felt quite differently about the more privileged sectors. Whereas the lower classes overbreed, the upper classes regulate their numbers, fearing that excessive reproduction will damage their station.

As a political economist, Malthus had to reconcile his theories of population with the problem of effective demand. Who were the consumers necessary to keep the system turning over? Malthus loathed the poor and rejected the idea of increased purchasing power among the laboring classes, arguing that under a system of private property, “the only effectual demand for produce must come from the owners of property,” and that these affluent underbreeders would spare the otherwise inevitable visitation of misery on their own sector of mankind and secure “to a portion of society the leisure necessary for the progress of the arts and sciences,” thus conferring on society “a most significant benefit.”

For Malthus, the poor--excepting workers necessary for production--are dispensable and should not be assisted in any way. Consumption--the exercise of effective demand--is mostly the purview of the wealthy.

Travel from Malthus to another English thinker, Cambridge philosopher and historian Ernest Gellner, whose speech on “Nationalism and the New World Order,” offered at a 1993 conference on “Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention,” appeared in the February bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Gellner advances the foggy proposition that human society has been dominated by three types of motivation: honor, interest and salvation. Concerning us here is salvation, which Gellner defines as the idea of perfecting an industrial economy through the establishment of righteousness on Earth--in other words, the just society.

According to this eminent thinker, salvationism has conclusively failed. All that remains for the human project is the establishment of a world government “to combat ecological threats and those posed by terrorism” and the formation of “a kind of International of Consumerist Unbelievers.” In sum, a world police force plus Malthus’ gentry, attending to the all-important work of circulating commodities. This adequately represents the thought of today’s intellectual overlords. In Malthus’ era, the answer to the problem of the poor was definitively given when the British did nothing to alleviate the starving to death of about 1 million Irish peasants in the mid-1840s. The welfare reformers of today have essentially the same perspective, for no “reform” is possible within the terms of capitalism, so there won’t be any, aside from endeavoring to make life worse for the wretched. For openers: linking welfare to sterility.

The answer to Malthus and to Gellner is despised “salvationism”--meaning that a society has to care for all its people, the “surplus poor” as well as the elites. Desperate people produce more babies than secure ones. Meanwhile, give me the single teen-age mom every time, making her rebellious, entirely rational choice.