The More You Know….?

In the course of this mildly interesting article (related to this absolutely fascinating area of research), I find a reference to the following:

[T]he constellation of challenges created by population growth […] have contributed to a rebirth of the profoundly misguided philosophy espoused by Thomas Malthus, an English priest and economist who lived during the late 18th Century. In 1798, Malthus argued that human population always grows more rapidly than the human food supply until war, disease or famine reduces the number of people. He was wrong – and spectacularly so.

(source: Thomas Malthus: Wrong Yesterday, Right Today? – Forbes)

And I stay with this topic a moment, because it seems worthwhile to notice that Malthus, as an Anglican cleric and man of his times, could be critiqued on other grounds, too.  His teaching bears clear marks of confusion, rooted in the idealist/materialist debate; he lands on the border between materialist monism and emergent dualism, and seriously muddles his categories:

A state of trial seems to imply a previously formed existence that does not agree with the appearance of man in infancy and indicates something like suspicion and want of foreknowledge, inconsistent with those ideas which we wish to cherish of the Supreme Being. I should be inclined, therefore, as I have hinted before, to consider the world and this life as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of mind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay. And in this view of the subject, the various impressions and excitements which man receives through life may be considered as the forming hand of his Creator, acting by general laws, and awakening his sluggish existence, by the animating touches of the Divinity, into a capacity of superior enjoyment. The original sin of man is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter in which he may be said to be born.

(source: An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus)

The idea that “torpor and corruption of … chaotic matter” is “original sin” clearly crosses a boundary, and we may expect that reasoning so vitiated at the source will make other significant errors.  A look at his sermons tends to bear this out.

[note:  despite the criticism, I think Malthus strikes near a correct understanding in the next paragraph, when he says that “Mind is as essentially mind, whether formed from matter or any other substance.”  So close, and yet so far….]

I think it is worth bearing in mind the religious and philosophical dimension of this strand of modern thought, which is inextricably woven in with the sociological and the empirical strand.

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