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“With complete freedom in reproduction, conscientious people will be eliminated.”
-- Garrett Hardin, The Feast of Malthus: Living within Limits
“What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st. destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2d. it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3d. it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th. it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable.”
-- James Madison, 1791, U.S. President
In the fourth century A.D., one of the Fathers of the Christian church, Tertullian, a Montanist preached the social contract counsels of strict ascetism and chastity, warning his flock to transform the human condition of their sexuality from the ‘state of nature’, to one constrained by ethical conscience. He clearly warned how in a world addicted to warlike breeding, excess populations were culled either by mother nature’s plagues or ‘Conquer and Multiply’ Power and Domination addict resource wars, as proverbial cannon fodder.
In a book review of the The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia, Garrett Hardin writes that Tertullian shocked many traditionalists over the centuries, in a passage where he asked, why is the human population so vast [perhaps 150 million at that time] that we are a burden to the earth, which can scarcely provide for our needs? In a short passage of De Anima, Tertullian explained the very real value of events that are customarily viewed with dismay.What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint), is our teeming population: our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly supply us from its natural elements; our wants grow more and more keen, and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, whilst Nature fails in affording us her usual sustenance. In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race....”
According to Hardin, Tertullian was thinking in terms of ecological limits and carrying capacity. The paramount assumption of practical population theory (toward the expression of which both Tertullian and Malthus were struggling) can be added to an Ecological Decalogue:“Thou shalt not transgress the carrying capacity.”
