Human Destiny and World Population: The Individual as Horizon and Frontier

HUMAN DESTINY AND WORLD POPULATION: THE INDIVIDUAL AS HORIZON AND FRONTIER Adam was therefore established in the perfection befitting the founder of the whole human race. And so it was necessary that he should reproduce in order to multiply the human race and hence that he should take food. But the perfection of the risen will consist in a human nature coming totally into its perfection once the number of the elect is complete. And consequently there will be no place for reproduction nor for the taking of nourishment.1 (Thomas Aquinas: Summa contra Gentiles, IV, 83) ESTIMATES OF THE TOTAL number of human beings who already have lived on the planet Earth are, of course, highly problematic. In any case, whether or not the number is approximately 85 billion, as indicated by several responsible calculations, there have been a finite number of human beings during the course of the aeons since the human race first appeared. Recent attention, furthermore, has concentrated not .so much upon the men and women who have already lived, nor even upon the roughly four billion now alive, as upon the supposedly vast numbers who will yet live: the "futurables," the objects of "futurology." We now know, moreover, that there is a vast difference between the number of people who, severally if not collectively, could emanate from any one human couple-several hundreds on the part of the female if all ova were fertilized during one lifetime, billions on the part of the male-and the number who actually will exist. The decision as to which, if any, of the potential combinations 1 Institutus ergo £uit Adam in tali perfectione quae competebat principio totius humani generis. Et ideo oportuit quod generaret ad multiplicationem humani generis; et per consequens quod cibis uteretur. Sed perfectio resurgentium erit natura humana totaliter ad suam perfectionem perveniente, numero electorum jam completo. Et ideo generatio locum non habebit, nee alimenti usus. HUMAN DESTINY AND WORLD POPULATION 93 should be realized becomes a serious social and moral question once men recognize that the reproductive process can be controlled by will, by force, or by scientific techniques. This has become a crucial contemporary issue because the earth is popularly believed to be reaching its " finite limits " or carrying capacity. Indeed, morality, what it is to be a good man, is currently being interpreted more and more in terms of population density, so that the control of this human population becomes the prima lex for the salus, the wellbeing, of a republic, or of the world. Our primary enemy is coming to be seen as the very existence of additional men, against whom a kind of " incipient " warfare is to be waged by eliminating human conceptions or terminating them before, by birth, they can break into the light of day and gain rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In this manifoldly questionable view, moreover, men conceive their " function," that is, the justification for the whole collectivity of men to exist at all, as the transformation of the earth in such a manner that there will exist only a steady limited number-say, three to five billion-on Earth at any given time. The purpose of the human race on the planet, seen in its temporal sequence, is held to be the preservation and wellbeing of this privileged collection for as many centuries or ages as possible until the sun finally burns out or some other cosmic event terminates life on Earth. Ultimately, those who do not fall within this planning have no right to exist, since they threaten the collectivity that the Earth allegedly can support. And, even when the Earth can no longer supportlife, as Wernher von Braun remarked when men first walked on the moon, the earthly race of men may now be " immortal " precisely because it may be able to send its own kind to populate the myriads of Earth-like planets that are thought to dot the cosmos. This new ethico-political goal proposed to the human race, it should be noted, deserves more critical attention than it has been receiving, especially from Christians, who have not been quick to recognize how this thinking often diverges from...