The Population Conundrum

Not too long ago, the Pope made the very unenlightening remark that the use of condoms would worsen the AIDS situation. Naturally, this got the entire scientific, professional health community and anyone with sufficient level of common sense up in arms. They rightly pointed out that this could set back the many years of efforts to arrest the spread of AIDS through encouraging the use of condoms.

But yet I can hardly fault the Pope for saying that. The Vatican Church has long held to the "pro-life" doctrine without consideration for situation, context and progress in science. I suppose it is always easier to be steadfastly ignorant and primitive in belief than to always examine whether one's belief makes sense and takes into account the advancing frontier of human knowledge. Since the Vatican Church is not prepared to compromise this doctrine, the current Pope and future ones as well would have little choice but to continue to parrot statements like that. So much for free will.

When someone put the words "Go forth and multiply" into God's mouth and therefore became a commandment in the Bible, the someone probably never thought that there would come a day when the human population would explode to its current 7 billion. This gigantic human population is consuming the earth's resources and at the same time producing waste and pollutants at an unprecedented rate. As much as we can try to be more environmentally conscious and do more recycling, at the big picture as long as the earth's human population continue to grow, we would continue to churn out more waste, pollutants and damage the environment. This is because human activities are simply unnatural; especially the modern way of life. Factories, plants and machineries need to exist in order to provide us all the material goods for the modern life; clothes, transport systems, processed food, consumables, buildings, electricity, etc. And all these activities would produce waste and pollutants; carbon dioxide, non-biodegradeable waste, toxins, ash, heat, etc. The amount of space that humans need also edge out other life forms and eco-systems which further disrupt earth's system.

The long term solution would appear to be to arrest this human population boom and possibly even reverse the growth. This is not just for environmental consideration; it is also necessary for the long term survivability of the human species. Afterall, we only have one Earth so the live-able space that Earth would have naturally places a constraint on the perpetuity of human population growth. Yet economics would tell us that in this modern capitalist system, if the human population is to drastically slowdown its growth or falls into a decline, the result could be continuing economic decline.

The reason is that economic growth or increase in wealth is driven by the level of economic activities. And economic activities are nothing more than the buying and selling of goods and services to cater to the needs and wants of people. So if population growth is stopped, it would mean that there would be much less demand in the future for goods and services which would then mean that there would be lesser economic activities and lesser income. A zero growth or declining population would also mean that we would have an ageing population and this would in turn greatly burden the working generation. We modern people used to the fruits of economic growth would find it extremely difficult to live with stagnation or regression so we would not allow this to happen.

We therefore come to a rather startling conclusion and that is the modern and capitalist way of life actually demands that the human population has to keep growing which is what the Church has been saying anyway. So perhaps we should give these religion ecstasy pill poppers of the ancient past who wrote what now passed for scriptures some credit for prescience after all.