Following is an excerpt from Aldous Huxley's 1958 essay called Brave New World, Revisited. Understanding what he said may give us a bit of insight into why we're witnessing the things we are in the world today.
It's peculiar how it seems you can better understand a moment from a distance. Enjoy the read...
"On the first Christmas Day the population of our planet
was about two hundred and fifty millions -- less than
half the population of modern China. Sixteen centuries
later, when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock,
human numbers had climbed to a little more than five
hundred millions. By the time of the signing of the
Declaration of Independence, world population had
passed the seven hundred million mark. In 1931, when I
was writing Brave New World, it stood at just under two
billions. Today, only twenty-seven years later, there are
two billion eight hundred million of us. And tomorrow --
what? Penicillin, DDT and clean water are cheap
commodities, whose effects on public health are out of
all proportion to their cost. Even the poorest
government is rich enough to provide its subjects with a
substantial measure of death control. Birth control is a
very different matter. Death control is something which
can be provided for a whole people by a few technicians
working in the pay of a benevolent government. Birth
control depends on the co-operation of an entire people.
It must be practiced by countless individuals, from
whom it demands more intelligence and will power than
most of the world's teeming illiterates possess, and
(where chemical or mechanical methods of
contraception are used) an expenditure of more money
than most of these millions can now afford. Moreover,
there are nowhere any religious traditions in favor of
unrestricted death, whereas religious and social
traditions in favor of unrestricted reproduction are
widespread. For all these reasons, death control is
achieved very easily, birth control is achieved with great
difficulty. Death rates have therefore fallen in recent
years with startling suddenness. But birth rates have
either remained at their old high level or, if they have
fallen, have fallen very little and at a very slow rate. In
consequence, human numbers are now increasing more
rapidly than at any time in the history of the species.
Moreover, the yearly increases are themselves increasing.
They increase regularly, according to the rules
of compound interest; and they also increase irregularly
with every application, by a technologically backward
society of the principles of Public Health. At the present
time the annual increase in world population runs to
about forty-three millions. This means that every four
years mankind adds to its numbers the equivalent of the
present population of the United States, every eight and
a half years the equivalent of the present population of
India. At the rate of increase prevailing between the
birth of Christ and the death of Queen Elizabeth I, it
took sixteen centuries for the population of the earth to
double. At the present rate it will double in less than half
a century. And this fantastically rapid doubling of our
numbers will be taking place on a planet whose most
desirable and productive areas are already densely
populated, whose soils are being eroded by the frantic
efforts of bad farmers to raise more food, and whose
easily available mineral capital is being squandered with
the reckless extravagance of a drunken sailor getting rid
of his accumulated pay.
In the Brave New World of my fable, the problem of
human numbers in their relation to natural resources
had been effectively solved. An optimum figure for world
population had been calculated and numbers were
maintained at this figure (a little under two billions, if I
remember rightly) generation after generation. In the
real contemporary world, the population problem has
not been solved. On the contrary it is becoming graver
and more formidable with every passing year. It is
against this grim biological background that all the
political, economic, cultural and psychological dramas of
our time are being played out. As the twentieth century
wears on, as the new billions are added to the existing
billions (there will be more than five and a half billions of
us by the time my granddaughter is fifty), this biological
background will advance, ever more insistently, ever
more menacingly, toward the front and center of the
historical stage. The problem of rapidly increasing
numbers in relation to natural resources, to social
stability and to the well-being of individuals -- this is
now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain
the central problem certainly for another century, and
perhaps for several centuries thereafter. A new age is
supposed to have begun on October 4, 1957. But
actually, in the present context, all our exuberant post-
Sputnik talk is irrelevant and even nonsensical. So far as
the masses of mankind are concerned, the coming time
will not be the Space Age; it will be the Age of Overpopulation."
I quoted Huxley because he wrote about it dispassionately. I'm afraid if he tried to write about it today, he'd be drawn into a fruitless political arena and be shouted down.
