Joe Frazier, (1944-2011)

[ed.  Another legend passes.  Along with the links in this story, there's also this article by David Halberstam from 2001.]

by Aaron Goldstein, American Spectator

Boxing legend Joe Frazier died tonight of liver cancer. He was 67.

Popularly known as Smokin' Joe, Frazier turned pro in 1965 after winning a Gold Medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He captured the vacant WBC and WBA Heavyweight titles with a TKO over Jimmy Ellis at Madison Square Garden in February 1970.

But just over a year later, Frazier would become a household name when he became the first man to defeat Muhammad Ali, winning a unaminous decision at Madison Square Garden becoming the Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World in what was billed as "The Fight of the Century." Frazier's triumph was punctuated with a devastating left hook which felled Ali to the canvass.

After two more successful title defenses, Frazier lost his title in January 1973 to George Foreman on second round TKO in Jamaica. It would mark the first defeat of his professional career. A year later, Frazier would fight Ali for a second time at Madison Square Garden and lose a twelve round unanimous decision.
However, Frazier would tally victories against both Jerry Quarry and Jimmy Ellis which would earn him one more shot at Ali who by this time had once again become the Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World with his victory over Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire. In October 1975, Frazier and Ali fought a blistering battle in the Philippines in what became known as The Thrilla in Manila. Ali prevailed when the fight was stopped before the 15th round by Frazier's trainer, Eddie Futch. The truth is that neither fighter was the same after that night.

Frazier fought once again against Foreman the following year and once again lost by TKO. After a five year absence, Frazier laced up his gloves for his last professional fight in 1981.

What is so mysterious is Ali's contempt toward Frazier. Ali frequently called Frazier an "Uncle Tom" and a gorilla despite the fact that Frazier had publicly opposed Ali being stripped of the title for refusing to fight in Vietnam. Not only that but Frazier personally lobbied President Nixon to allow Ali to fight.

His son Marvis would also turn pro although he would never attain his father's success in the ring. Frazier spent his later years largely away from the limelight, preferring to train up and coming fighters in his gym in Philadelphia.

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Photo: AP

Living room design from the Home Furnishings Guide, 1967.via:

Fighting the Vapors

[ed.  John Tierney looks at e-cigarettes and the forces shaping both sides of the debate.]

by John Tierney, NY Times {excerpt}

The controversy is part of a long-running philosophical debate about public health policy, but with an odd role reversal. In the past, conservatives have leaned toward “abstinence only” policies for dealing with problems like teenage pregnancy and heroin addiction, while liberals have been open to “harm reduction” strategies like encouraging birth control and dispensing methadone.

When it comes to nicotine, though, the abstinence forces tend to be more liberal, including Democratic officials at the state and national level who have been trying to stop the sale of e-cigarettes and ban their use in smoke-free places. They’ve argued that smokers who want an alternative source of nicotine should use only thoroughly tested products like Nicorette gum and prescription patches — and use them only briefly, as a way to get off nicotine altogether.

The Food and Drug Administration tried to stop the sale of e-cigarettes by treating them as a “drug delivery device” that could not be marketed until its safety and efficacy could be demonstrated in clinical trials. The agency was backed by the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, Action on Smoking and Health, and the Center for Tobacco-Free Kids.

The prohibitionists lost that battle last year, when the F.D.A. was overruled in court, but they’ve continued the fight by publicizing the supposed perils of e-cigarettes. They argue that the devices, like smokeless tobacco, reduce the incentive for people to quit nicotine and could also be a “gateway” for young people and nonsmokers to become nicotine addicts. And they cite an F.D.A. warning that several chemicals in the vapor of e-cigarettes may be “harmful” and “toxic.” But the agency has never presented evidence that the trace amounts actually cause any harm, and it has neglected to mention that similar traces of these chemicals have been found in other F.D.A.-approved products, including nicotine patches and gum. The agency’s methodology and warnings have been lambasted in scientific journals by Dr. Polosa and other researchers, including Brad Rodu, a professor of medicine at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Writing in Harm Reduction Journal this year, Dr. Rodu concludes that the F.D.A.’s results “are highly unlikely to have any possible significance to users” because it detected chemicals at “about one million times lower concentrations than are conceivably related to human health.” His conclusion is shared by Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.

“It boggles my mind why there is a bias against e-cigarettes among antismoking groups,” Dr. Siegel said. He added that it made no sense to fret about hypothetical risks from minuscule levels of several chemicals in e-cigarettes when the alternative is known to be deadly: cigarettes containing thousands of chemicals, including dozens of carcinogens and hundreds of toxins.

Both sides in the debate agree that e-cigarettes should be studied more thoroughly and subjected to tighter regulation, including quality-control standards and a ban on sales to minors. But the harm-reduction side, which includes the American Association of Public Health Physicians and the American Council on Science and Health, sees no reason to prevent adults from using e-cigarettes. In Britain, the Royal College of Physicians has denounced “irrational and immoral” regulations inhibiting the introduction of safer nicotine-delivery devices.

“Nicotine itself is not especially hazardous,” the British medical society concluded in 2007. “If nicotine could be provided in a form that is acceptable and effective as a cigarette substitute, millions of lives could be saved.”

The number of Americans trying e-cigarettes quadrupled from 2009 to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Its survey last year found that 1.2 percent of adults, or close to three million people, reported using them in the previous month.

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illustration: Viktor Koen

Joán Miró - Painting (Personage and Moon)
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The Tweaker

by Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker

Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ”

It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”

Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Jobs’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase. . . . He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”

Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. He then charts the even greater triumphs at Pixar and at a resurgent Apple, when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes. “At one point, the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated,” Isaacson writes:

Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked. . . . He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his finger. He told them it was ugly and too complex.

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Illustration: André Carrilho

Facebook, Spotify and the Future of Music

by Steven Levy, Wired

Even if Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t been introduced to Spotify two years ago, it was probably inevitable that the two companies would hook up. The European music service had already won millions of fans, thanks to a business model that allowed music nuts to stream any song, instantly, for free. More important, it made it easy for people to share music with one another. This vision—of music as a social experience—fit perfectly with Facebook’s view of the world, which values sharing over all else. And that’s why, when former Facebook president and Napster cofounder Sean Parker discovered Spotify in 2009, he made a point of telling Zuckerberg about it.

“I’d never even heard of Spotify, but Sean mentioned it to me one day,” Zuckerberg says. “I was like, wow, this person has built a really cool music product and also understands how you can integrate social things in it.” Within a day, Zuckerberg had updated his Facebook status: Spotify is so good.

This brief blessing from the Pope of Poke presaged a turning point for the entire music industry. The original Napster—which let users download practically any song for free—may have died a decade ago, but its ghost still haunts the major labels. Unleashed in a dorm room in 1999 and killed in a courtroom in 2001, it taught a generation that music should be obtained with mouseclicks, not money. Music executives interpreted it differently: Allow people to share music online and they will never pay for it again. For much of the past decade, their attitude toward digital music and licensing has been driven by the fear that showing one bit of flexibility will summon Napster back from the grave to destroy what’s left of their business.

But that’s changing now. In September, after two years of speculation following Zuckerberg’s four-word swoon, Facebook announced an ambitious initiative that lets its users quickly and easily share music with one another—in many cases for free. Facebook worked closely with Spotify, as well as with a dozen other services, and is opening itself up to potentially hundreds more. Now Facebook users will see the songs that their friends listen to, the playlists they compile, and the bands they discover. And they can easily hear all that music with a single mouseclick.

An orgy of free song-sharing seems to be exactly the kind of thing that the horrified labels would quickly clamp down on. But they appear to be starting to accept that their fortunes rest with the geeks. Or at least they’re trying to talk a good game. “I’m not part of the past—I’m part of the future,” says Lucian Grainge, chair and CEO of the world’s biggest label, Universal Music Group. “There’s a new philosophy, a new way of thinking.”

Facebook’s music initiative is only one example of the neo-Napster transformation in which music is streamed from a collection of servers, rather than stored on local hard drives. Indeed, over the past year, every dominant Internet company—including Apple, Amazon, and Google—has ramped up a streaming music service, each one an attempt to reinvent the way we purchase and listen to music. Smaller companies like Rhapsody and the personalized radio service Pandora have championed the streaming model for years; now they are being joined by second-generation services like Rdio, MOG, and Turntable.

Taken together, all of this activity is shaking up an industry that has stubbornly resisted change. The music world has barely managed to process the revolution wrought when songs became files. But streaming subscription services hasten an even bigger upheaval: songs becoming links, playable with one click, from a newsfeed, email, or Facebook profile. The real fun is about to begin.

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Photo: Sculpture: Ebon Heath; Max Merz

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Saudade

Among the world’s languages, one of the hardest terms to translate is “saudade”, the Portuguese word for a feeling, a longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future.

It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return.

Few other languages have a word with such meaning, making saudade a distinct mark of Portuguese culture. It has been said that this, more than anything else, represents what it is to be Portuguese.

“The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.” (In Portugal, by A.F.G Bell, 1912)

Although the word is Portuguese in origin, saudade is a universal feeling related to love. It occurs when two people are in love or like each other, but apart from each other. Saudade occurs when we think of a person who we love and we are happy about having that feeling while we are thinking of that person, but he/she is out of reach, making us sad and crushing our hearts. The pain and these mixed feelings are named "saudade". It is also used to refer to the feeling of being far from people one does love, e.g., one's sister, father, grandparents, friends; it can be applied to places or pets one misses, things one used to do in childhood, or other activities performed in the past. What sets saudade apart is that it can be directed to anything that is personal and moving. It can also be felt for unrequited love in that the person misses something he or she never really had, but for which might hope, regardless of the possible futility of said hope.

According to some historians, this word came to life in the 15th Century when Portuguese ships sailed to Africa and Asia. A sadness was felt for those who departed in the long journeys to the unknown seas and disappeared in shipwrecks, died in battle, or simply never returned. Those who stayed behind — the women, children and old folks — deeply suffered from their absence. There was the constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that was missing, the yearning for the presence of the loved ones who had sailed.

Saudade is not “nostalgia”. In nostalgia, one has a mixed happy and sad feeling, a memory of happiness but a sadness for its impossible return and sole existence in the past. Saudade is like nostalgia but with the hope that what is being longed for might return, even if that return is unlikely or so distant in the future to be almost of no consequence to the present.

One might say that nostalgia conveys a feeling one has for a loved one who has died and saudade as a feeling one has for a loved one who has disappeared or is simply currently absent. In Portuguese, the same word, nostalgia, has quite a different meaning.

Although it relates to feelings of melancholy and fond memories of things, people and days gone by, it can be a rush of sadness coupled with a paradoxical joy derived from acceptance of fate and the hope of recovering or replacing what is lost by something that will either fill the emptiness or provide consolation.

- Wikipedia
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Tosca Olinsky Still Life with Guitar
1941

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Josie Charlwood

"Feel Good Inc" - Gorillaz Live Looped Cover - Josie Charlwood - BOSS RC-30 

 

Electric Feel (MGMT Cover) - Josie Charlwood - BOSS RC-30 & TC-Helicon VoiceLive2 

[ed.  Two great songs, beautiful vocals and an amazing ability to multi-task.]

installation de Nele Azevedo
by Lemoox Bertrand Eberhard (flickr)
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The Book of Revelation: Prophecy and Politics

[ed.  If you're like me and have a hard time understanding the plot and context for a lot of biblical scripture (but are curious about what's actually happening), this is for you.  An excellent history of Revelelations, told in narrative and art form in a Master Class lecture by Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University.]

by Elaine Pagels, Edge

The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible. It's the most controversial. It doesn't have any stories, moral teaching. It only has visions, dreams and nightmares. Not many people say they understand it, but for 2000 years, this book has been wildly popular. Why would anyone bother with a book that rationalists love to hate, I was thinking that from Epicurus to Richard Dawkins. Many people assume what I learned from my father, who converted from Presbyterianism to Darwin and became a biologist, that religion was nothing but a compensation for ignorance, and would soon die off. In fact, I thought I heard Steve imply this yesterday when you included in modernity, science, but not religion.

Anthropologists can find some redeeming value in creation myths when they see that they are condensed versions of cultural values. Sociologists from Weber to Durkheim have shown how certain elements of ancient western religion like the Torah and Jesus' revision of the Torah become structural elements of social codes, and so forth.

What do you make of Revelation? Here, there are no ideas. There's not a shred of socially redeeming ethical teaching, just fantastic visions of monsters, whores, angels battling demons. How do we account for the fact that ever since it was written, even today, the book has been enormously influential in western culture? (Although Jason Epstein, my editor, loves what I've been writing about it, he never misses a chance to take a swipe at the idiocy of people who actually read this book.)

I chose the book of Revelation as the toughest test case for the questions I've been asking myself. Why is religion still around, and not only among illiterates, exclusively, not at least? Why do people still engage in these folk tales and myths that are thousands of years old? And that's in their written form. Probably they were told for millions of years before that.

First thing I discovered is that controversy about this book is nothing new. Ever since it was written, Christians argued heatedly for and against it, when it barely squeezed into the Bible 300 years later. From the start, people who hated the book said a heretic wrote it. People who defended it claimed that it was written by one of the disciples of Jesus, which is obviously not the case.

I started with three questions. First, who wrote this book? And what was he thinking? Second, what other books of Revelation were written about the same time? How did this book, and only this one, get into the Bible? And what constitutes the appeal, whether you're talking psychologically, literarily, politically, of this book? So this is just a kind of mad dash through where those questions led me.

Now, just in case you haven't read it lately, I wanted to give you a kind of cliff notes version of the book's complex structure, along with some of the art it inspired, to show its cultural influence.

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Samurai Skills

[ed. This certainly demonstrates how lethal a sword can be in the hands of a master.]

In this clip, a "modern samurai" called Isao Machii efficient slices a large variety of challenging objects in twain with his sword, including a round fired from a nearby pellet-gun. It's pretty astounding stuff.

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The Drone Mentality

by Glenn Greenwald, Salon

In a New York Times Op-Ed yesterday, international human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith describes a meeting he had in Pakistan with residents from the Afghan-Pakistani border region that has been relentlessly bombed by American drones; if I had one political wish this week, it would be that everyone who supports (or acquiesces to) President Obama’s wildly accelerated drone attacks would read this:

The meeting had been organized so that Pashtun tribal elders who lived along the Pakistani-Afghan frontier could meet with Westerners for the first time to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged by the Central Intelligence Agency in their region. Twenty men came to air their views; some brought their young sons along to experience this rare interaction with Americans. In all, 60 villagers made the journey. . . .

On the night before the meeting, we had a dinner, to break the ice. During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.

The next day, the jirga lasted several hours. I had a translator, but the gist of each man’s speech was clear. American drones would circle their homes all day before unleashing Hellfire missiles, often in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. Death lurked everywhere around them. . . .

On Monday, [Tariq] was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile.

My mistake had been to see the drone war in Waziristan in terms of abstract legal theory — as a blatantly illegal invasion of Pakistan’s sovereignty, akin to President Richard M. Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1970.

But now, the issue has suddenly become very real and personal. Tariq was a good kid, and courageous. My warm hand recently touched his in friendship; yet, within three days, his would be cold in death, the rigor mortis inflicted by my government.

And Tariq’s extended family, so recently hoping to be our allies for peace, has now been ripped apart by an American missile — most likely making any effort we make at reconciliation futile. (...)

Of course, nobody inside the U.S. Government is objecting on the ground that it is wrong to blow people up without having any knowledge of who they are and without any evidence they have done anything wrong. Rather, the internal dissent is grounded in the concern that these drone attacks undermine U.S. objectives by increasing anti-American sentiment in the region (there’s that primitive, inscrutable Muslim culture rearing its head again: they strangely seem to get very angry when foreign governments send sky robots over their countries and blow up their neighbors, teenagers and children). But whatever else is true, huge numbers of Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — defend Obama’s massive escalation of drone attacks on the ground that he’s killing Terrorists even though they — and, according to the Wall Street Journal, Obama himself — usually don’t even know whose lives they’re snuffing out. Remember, though: we have to kill The Muslim Terrorists because they have no regard for human life.

This is why it’s so imperative to do everything possible to shine a light on the victims of President Obama’s aggression in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere: ignoring the victims, rendering them invisible, is a crucial prerequisite to sustaining propaganda and maintaining support for this militarism (that’s the same reason John Brennan lied — yet again — by assuring Americans that there are no innocent victims of drone attacks). Many people want to hear nothing about these victims — like Tariq — because they don’t want to accept that the leader for whom they cheer and the drone attacks they support are regularly ending the lives of large numbers of innocent people, including children. They believe the fairy tale that the U.S. is only killing Terrorists and “militants” because they want to believe it (at this point, the word “militant” has no real definition other than: he or she who dies when a missile shot by a U.S. drone detonates). It’s a self-serving, self-protective form of self-delusion, and the more we hear about the dead teeangers left in the wake of this violence, the more difficult it is to maintain that delusion. That’s precisely why we hear so little about it.

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Try This At Home

ElBulli’s food is famous for its extravagance, artistry and complicated production. So, asks Adam Gopnik, what can we expect from chef Ferran Adrià’s new cookbook?

A waiter at elBulli with one of Ferran Adrià’s creations: peach liqueur bonbons and a spoon of peach liquid on a frozen stone

by Adam Gopnik, Prospect

Learn how to make your family’s dinner from Ferran Adrià! It’s not unlike the notion of learning to write thank-you notes from James Joyce, not unlike taking ukulele lessons from Jimi Hendrix. It is not merely that the master who is to teach you defines a certain standard of excellence, but that he defines a style of extravagant excellence, rococo perfection—overcharge is so essential to the style that to miniaturise or domesticate it seems to betray its essential nature. A uke player who is taught to play with his teeth and set fire to his ukulele is, however excellent, in a certain sense not a ukulele player at all; he is not advancing the style so much as just playing the wrong instrument. Adrià is the author of that classic plat, lambs’ brains with sea urchins and sea grapes. How do you do this at home, and do you really want to?

Adrià is, of course, the chef and patron and resident and general Willy Wonka of elBulli, the now just closed Catalan temple of what is usually called “molecular gastronomy,” even if Adrià much prefers what he sees as the simpler name of  “techno-emotional cuisine.” (Though when “techno-emotional” seems the simplest label that can be applied to something it can fairly be said that the thing being labelled must not be very simple.) A marriage of the extreme edge of French avant garde cuisine with techniques borrowed from the high-tech reaches of the food industry—sort of the offspring of Michel Guérard and a mad scientist—the principles of that cooking were not just rococo but recherché. New machines and new technology, liquid nitrogen and calcium carbonate, were used to turn food from its ordinary, some might say natural, forms into foams and gels and freeze-dried powders and pure smoke. A meal at elBulli might include—indeed, the one I ate there shortly before it closed did include—a tiramisu with tofu and green tea, a corn taco with parmesan ice cream and freeze-dried fraises, and Iberian ham with a ginger and caramel reduction.

As with Hendrix, though, the pyrotechnics and fireworks of Adrià’s style were, from his point of view, merely a playful coating on what was meant to be admired as a magnificent virtuoso technique. And so the recipes and dishes in Adrià’s The Family Meal (Phaidon) are plain—really plain, much plainer than almost any cooking you will find in any other recipe book by a famous cook, a catalogue of the recipes for the cheap simple meals that were served to the staff every night at 6pm, before the service began at elBulli. One realises that, if for the ukulele student lessons with Hendrix might seem too much, for Hendrix it might seem just right—a chance to show the real basis of his style, without the intrusions of a too-big amp and a too-wailing pedal, and without trying to please anyone who wants the guitar to flame, rather than just catch fire.  (...)

His purpose, one senses, in offering these complete, three-course menus for ordinary weekday night dinners, illustrated with step-by-step, photo-romans style illustration, is not to spread his style but to justify his genius. The famous tricks are merely devices, he suggests, what matters for my kind of cooking is the mise en place, the habit of preparation. Adrià, with the eccentricity of genius, truly believes this: that what separates what he does from what you and I do is simply that he takes more trouble laying out his ingredients and keeping the plan in his head. (So Dante might have imagined that the difference between what he did and what you and I do was the ability to think of things in circles.) If you and I had the self-discipline to plan our meals and lay out our ingredients thoughtfully, Adrià sincerely believes, we could soon be making electric eel powder with goat-brain gels for our children.

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The Ongoing Appeal of this ‘Libel Against the Human Race’

by Tim Black, Spiked

The reason why such an army of present-day miserabilists are drawn to the gloomy reverend has far more to do with Malthus’s thorough-going social pessimism than his supposed laws of population growth.

Lisping, reclusive and reviled by the working class of his day, the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) – the man behind the idea that the ‘lower orders of society’ breed too quickly – would probably be surprised by his current popularity. Because that’s what he is today: popular. Commentators, activists and academics positively fall over themselves in the rush to say, ‘you know what, that Malthus had a point. There are too many people and, what’s more, they are consuming far too much.’

Earlier this summer, a columnist for Time magazine was in no doubt as to the pastor’s relevance. The global population is ‘ever larger, ever hungrier’, he noted, ‘food prices are near historic highs’ and ‘every report of drought or flooding raises fears of global shortages’. ‘Taking a look around us today’, he continued, ‘it would be easy to conclude that Malthus was prescient’. Writing in the British weekly, the New Statesman, wildlife lover Sir David Attenborough was similarly convinced: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this Earth than can be fed.’ Not to be outdone, the liberal-left’s favourite broadsheet, the Guardian, also suggested that Malthus may have been right after all: ‘[His] arguments were part of the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and they have validity in the natural world. On the savannah, in the rainforests, and across the tundra, animal populations explode when times are good, and crash when food reserves are exhausted. Is homo sapiens an exception?’ The melancholy tone whispered its answer in the negative. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman was less coy: ‘Malthus was right!’ shouted the headline.

Given the encomia that are currently coming the way of Malthus you may well wonder what exactly it was that he was meant to be right about. To find the answer to this it is worth actually taking a look at the work, first published in 1798, on which his supposed prescience is based: An Essay on the Principle of Population. It makes for surprising reading.  (...)

‘The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind [eg, wars for resources] are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep of their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population.’

You can almost hear contemporary misery merchants trilling their approval. You’ve got wars for resources, you’ve got pandemics, you’ve got famine… Indeed, virtually every cataclysm, every End of Man is there, forecast in Malthus’s pulpit prose. No wonder environmentalists sidle up to Malthus’s corpse to whisper their approval: ‘You knew all along that nature would take its necessary revenge unless humans, breeding like rabbits, stopped consuming so damned much.’

But what’s strange about reading Malthus’s actual text is that the ‘imperious all-pervading law of nature’ he outlines – that nature will check population growth if humans don’t implement checks themselves – takes up just a few paragraphs of a work over 120 pages long. In fact, he barely bothers to justify his assertion that population grows geometrically while the means of subsistence expand arithmetically. His sole source for his relentless assertion about population growth seems to be ‘Dr [Richard] Price’s two volumes of Observations’, a 1776 treatise on civil liberty which featured factoids about population growth in the New England colonies during the seventeenth century – ‘when the power of population was left to exert itself with perfect freedom’. As for his assertions about the development of the means of subsistence, there are admittedly a few sketchy paragraphs on the transition between hunter-gather societies and agricultural ones. But beyond that, nothing.

That Malthus’s actual ‘theory of population’ is, by any standard, groundless at least explains why it was vitiated by subsequent history. Because, make no mistake, Malthus has never ceased to be wrong. Not only did population not expand to anything like the ‘geometric’ degree he outlined, but more importantly, the technological developments of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century and the agricultural, ‘green’ revolution of the twentieth century showed that our ability to support a growing population can, as it were, leap forward. The ‘arithmetic’ rate at which we develop the means of subsistence proved to be what it always was – an arbitrary assertion.

Yet, the flimsy nature of Malthus’s supposed laws of population growth should not be surprising. Why would they be anything else? After all, Malthus was never really interested in producing a work of demography. Even the bits he does produce were ripped off, either from Giammaria Ortes (1713-1790) or from Richard Price’s (1723-1791) work, to which he refers at any point he needs something as solid as a fact. What Malthus really wanted to produce was a refutation of social reform, or worse still, revolution.

Take a look at the full title of his essay: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M Condorcet, and Other Writers. His subject was not so much the principle of population growth – this Malthus was happy to take for granted, hence the scant attention he actually paid to justifying it. Rather, his real purpose was the extent to which a supposed law of population would confound those writers like Godwin and Condorcet who advocated social transformation. The theory, the so-called science, was always subservient to Malthus’s main objective of justifying the social order as it is. As Malthus himself wrote: ‘The principal argument of this Essay only goes to prove the necessity of a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers.’ Malthus was not pessimistic about the chances of improving society because of his theory of population – that is the wrong way round. His wilful social pessimism, where misery was the lot of the majority, inspired his theory of population.

A member of the landed gentry – although being the youngest son he was without an estate – Malthus did have every reason to feel insecure. In the towns and cities of late-eighteenth-century England, the industrial bourgeoisie was emerging, much to the anxiety of a bedraggled, landed aristocrat like Malthus. This is why Malthus rejects the labour theory of value developed by David Ricardo and Adam Smith in favour of land and agriculture as the only true source of value. And on what basis? Because ‘the healthy labours of agriculture’, as opposed to the ‘unhealthy occupations of manufacturing industry’, produce things people really, really need – or, if you prefer, the means to subsist. ‘It is with some view to the real utility of the produce’, Malthus cautions, ‘that we ought to extricate the productiveness and unproductiveness of different sorts of labour’. In fact, so keen was Malthus to justify the leisured existence of the landed aristocracy, and the decidedly unleisurely existence of all who till the fields for her, that he remarks with a stunning lack of prescience that: ‘By encouraging the industry of the towns more than the industry of the country, Europe may be said, perhaps, to have brought on a premature old age.’

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