Cannibals and Kings (29 page)

As late as the 1770’s Europe had what demographers call a “pre-modern” population: high birth and death rates (about forty-five and forty per thousand, respectively), a .5 percent per annum rate of increase, and a life expectancy at birth of about thirty years. Less than half the people born survived to fifteen years of age. In Sweden, where the eighteenth-century censuses are more reliable than elsewhere, 21 percent of the infants whose births were registered died within the first year.

After 1770 some parts of Europe entered what demographers call an “early transitional” phase. There was a notable decline in the death rate, while the birth rate remained approximately unchanged. This does not necessarily mean that the standard of living was improving. The study of “early transitional” populations in modern underdeveloped countries indicates that declines in death rates and consequent increments in population growth are compatible with unchanging or even deteriorating standards of health and welfare. Benjamin White, for example, has found in a recent study of impoverished central Javanese peasants that parents will rear additional children if this brings only a slight balance of benefits over costs. This relationship between numbers of children and income helps to explain why many underdeveloped countries seem so unresponsive to population control by voluntary family planning
methods. Where the net benefits of rearing children exceed the costs, a family that somehow succeeds in rearing more children will be slightly better off than its neighbors, even if in the meantime the standard of living of the population as a whole may be declining.

The late eighteenth century in Europe was a time when there was a great demand for child labor. Within the household, children participated in a variety of “cottage industries,” helping to card wool, spin cotton, and manufacture clothing and other items under contract to entrepreneurs. As the locus of manufacture shifted to the factories, children often became the main source of labor since they could be paid less than adults and were more docile. It is safe to conclude, therefore, that the falling death rate during the early phases of the industrial revolution was due at least in part to the increased demand for child labor rather than wholly to a substantial overall improvement in diet, housing, or health. Children who previously would have been neglected, abandoned, or killed in infancy were now given the dubious privilege of living to the age at which they could begin to work in a factory for a few years before they succumbed to tuberculosis.

The failure of the first three centuries of post-feudal mechanization and scientific engineering was apparent to everyone. After all, widespread misery and suffering on the Continent provided the spark that ignited the French Revolution. In 1810 the workers in the factory districts of England were chanting “bread or blood.” More and more, the impoverished masses had to steal in order to eat. Annual convictions for larceny in England rose 540 percent between 1805 and 1833; 26,500 people were hanged between 1806 and 1833, mostly for thefts of minor sums of money. In 1798 the fear of revolution and the appalling plight of the working class
in the midst of technical progress and economic growth had led the English parson Thomas Malthus to propound his famous doctrine that poverty and distress were inevitable. The means of subsistence had been increasing even faster. Malthus did not claim that population would never get into balance with food supply; rather, he warned that unless population was restricted through abstinence, it would be checked by wars, infanticide, famines, plagues, abortions, and undesirable forms of contraception. As far as the past was concerned, Malthus was absolutely correct. Where he went wrong was in failing to foresee how industrial production in combination with new modes of contraception would soon create a rapid and unprecedented rise in the standard of living.

Malthus and other nineteenth-century economists whose forebodings came to be known as the “dismal science” were challenged by Karl Marx and other reformists and radicals on the grounds that the poverty and misery into which the peasants and workers of Europe had sunk was a result of laws peculiar to the political economy of capitalism and not of human existence in general. According to Marx, capitalists made their profits from exploiting labor; under capitalism, wages would always be driven down to subsistence levels regardless of whether population was rising or falling. Marx insisted that the internal laws of capitalism would inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few plutocrats and the pauperization of everybody else. Like Malthus, he failed to predict the rapid and unprecedented rise in standard of living which was shortly to take place.

Neither Malthus nor Marx—the one obsessed with the law of reproduction, the other obsessed with the law of production—grasped the fact that the industrial
revolution was creating an entirely new relationship between production and reproduction. Unlike all previous major shifts in modes of production, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century resulted in an enormous spurt forward in labor efficiency accompanied not by an increase but by a decrease in the rate of population growth. From a peak of about 1.0 percent per year in the early 1800’s, the rate of growth fell to 0.5 percent a century later, even though the amount of food and the number of other basic subsistence items available per capita were increasing far more rapidly. Although emigration to the Americas helped to slow the overall European rate of growth, a drop in the birth rate from 45 per thousand to less than 20 per thousand accounts for most of the decline.

This phenomenon is called the demographic transition. Around the world, economists and statesmen pin their hopes for economic development on the expectation that a fall in birth rates is a normal response to the introduction of more efficient technologies. But in anthropological perspective, nothing could be more abnormal. Every major shift in labor productivity has hitherto been accompanied or followed by a rapid increase in population density. This seems to have been true of the paleolithic to neolithic transition, of the Yanomamo shifting from stone to steel tools, of the Mesoamericans shifting from slash-and-burn to
chinampas
, of the Chinese shifting from rainfall to irrigation. And it appears to be specifically true of Europe from the bronze age on; certainly from early medieval times to the beginning of the nineteenth century, every period of rapid technological change was also a period of rapid population growth.

Let me try to explain why the demographic transition took place. It seems to me to have been caused by the
conjunction of three extraordinary cultural events: the fuel revolution, the contraceptive revolution, and the job revolution. I’ll take these up one at a time. By the fuel revolution, I mean the hundred-, thousand-, even millionfold increase in labor productivity brought about by the application of steam, diesel, gasoline, electric, and jet engines to agriculture, industry, mining, and transport. The utilization of these engines on a scale large enough to compensate even for the relatively slow rate of population growth of the past 100 years was entirely dependent on the sudden release of vast amounts of previously untapped energy stored up inside the earth in the form of coal and oil. I have difficulty in imagining how the harnessing of so much energy in such a short span of time would not have resulted in at least modest gains in living standards for substantial numbers of people. That coal and oil happen to be nonrenewable sources of energy (unlike trees, water, wind, and animal muscle power, to which previous generations had restricted themselves) is a significant fact which I shall return to in a moment.

By the contraception revolution, I mean the invention of safe and inexpensive means of reducing fertility through mechanical and chemical devices. The condom was widely advertised during the eighteenth century, but it was made out of sheep gut and used primarily as a protection against syphilis. With the invention of the vulcanization process in 1843, industrial technology could be used for the mass production of “rubbers.” Along with these, the middle class began to use vaginal douches and vaginal plugs toward the end of the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth century working-class families were doing the same. Infanticide dropped, as can be seen in the sharp decline in infant mortality. And so did the birth rate. Prior to 1830 the
English birth rate stood at close to 40 per thousand, approximately the rate found in such modern underdeveloped countries as India and Brazil. By 1900 it had dropped below 30 per thousand and by 1970 below 20 per thousand.

As Mahmood Mandami’s study of the use of contraceptives in India has proven, mere availability of effective and relatively painless and cheap contraceptive devices would not by itself have brought about such dramatic declines in the birth rate. Modern contraception lowers the cost of interfering with the reproductive process. But families still have to be motivated to want to interfere with the course of nature; they have to want to rear fewer children. Here, then, enters the job revolution. As I’ve already suggested, the motivation to restrict fertility is essentially a question of the balance between the benefits and costs of parenthood. With industrialization, the cost of rearing children increases—especially after the introduction of child labor laws and compulsory education statutes—because the skills which a child must acquire in order to earn a living and be of benefit to its parents take longer to learn. At the same time, the whole context and manner in which people earn their livings becomes transformed. The family ceases to be the locus of any significant form of production activity (other than that of cooking meals and begetting children). Work is no longer something done by family members in or near the family farm or business. Rather, it is something done at an office, store, or factory in the company of other people’s family members. Hence the return flow of benefits from rearing children hinges more and more on their economic success as wage earners and their willingness to help out in the medical and financial crises that parents can expect in their waning years.

The availability of painless contraception and the altered structure of economic tasks—the contraception revolution and the job revolution—provide the key to many puzzling aspects of contemporary social life. Longer life spans and spiraling medical costs make it increasingly unrealistic to expect children to give comfort and security to their aging parents. Thus we are in the process of substituting old-age and medical insurance programs for the preindustrial system in which children took care of their aged parents. When this process is completed, the last vestige of significant counterflow in the parent-child account will have disappeared.

The cost to parents of rearing a middle-class child to college age in the United States now stands at $80,000, only a minuscle portion of which is returned in money, goods, or services. (I do not deny that the intangibles, such as the joys of watching children grow up, also influence behavior. But who is to say that the joy of waching ten children grow up to be carhops is greater than the joy of watching one grow up to be a surgeon? Or that it is more rewarding for a woman to rear one surgeon than to be one herself and rear none?) That is why the U.S. birth rate continues to fall and divorces, unmarried consensual unions, childless marriages, homosexuality and homosexual marriages are all on the increase. And that is why experimental modes of family life, sexual “liberation,” and “generation gaps” also suddenly make news.

To sum up: We can now see how technology got the upper hand in the race against intensification, depletion, and declining efficiency. The industrial world tapped an enormous fresh supply of cheap energy at the same time that it was able to apportion this bonanza among a population that was increasing far below its reproductive potential. But the race is far from over.
The advantage can only be temporary. We are slowly beginning to comprehend that a commitment to machines that run on fossil fuels is a commitment to depletions, declining efficiencies, and declining rates of profits in the strongest possible degree. Coal and oil cannot be recycled; they can only be used up at a faster or slower rate.

Experts, of course, disagree as to how long the usable supplies of coal and oil will last at present rates of consumption. Dr. M. King Hubert of the Shell Oil Company and the United States Geological Survey calculates that the peak in oil production will occur in 1995 and that coal production will peak in 2100. The real question is not when the last drop of oil will be gone nor is it when the last ton of coal will be mined. The effect of depletion on the standard of living becomes unbearable long before the last blade of grass or last horse or reindeer is gone. The farther and deeper we search for coal and oil, the more costly all industrial operations become. Under these circumstances the rate at which energy is applied to the production of food and other sources of energy merely acts to speed up the rate at which declining efficiencies become manifest in the rising costs of goods and services. As coal and oil become scarcer, their costs will go up. And since virtually every product and service in industrial society depends on large energetic inputs derived from these sources, inflation will steadily reduce the ability of the average person to pay for the goods and services now regarded as essential for health and well-being.

How fast and how low standards of living in the industrial nations will fall depends on how long conversion to alternative energy sources is delayed. The possibility of deep impoverishment should not be dismissed. In the face of inevitable and imminent shortages of fossil
fuels, we are not yet cutting back on the rate at which we are squandering these resources. In fact, we are still rapidly expanding the scope of fossil fuel technologies and attempting to compensate for rising prices with more and more lavish injections of fossil fuels into “labor-saving” machines and production processes.

Food production, to take the most critical example, has now become totally dependent on our oil supply. Agricultural traction, lifting, hauling, and transport were captured first. Now we have reached the stage where the conditioning of the soil through chemical fertilizers and the defense of plants through herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides have also become totally dependent on an ever-increasing supply of petrochemicals. The so-called “green revolution” is an oil revolution in which higher crop yields per acre have been made possible by continuous injections of vast amounts of fossil fuel energy into the production of plant varieties specially bred for their ability to respond to petrochemical inputs.