If an average woman has three children, the population grows about 1.5% yearly. With this growth the population doubles in about 50 years. It means that in 500 years the population grows to be one thousand times larger and in one thousand years it will be one million times larger. How many might be in two thousand years? Yet our species is 200,000 years old. The average population growth must have been very close to zero for all this time.
Obviously, a yearly population growth of 1.5-2% cannot be sustained for a long time. People had to cope with overpopulation in some way. There were “natural” mechanisms reducing population growth: famine, war and diseases, but there were also less catastrophic ones. Infanticide and lowering fertility by a longer breast-feeding time were practiced by all hunter-gatherer societies. Abortion and exposing babies was practiced in most Antique cultures. In several religions significant fraction of the population lived in celibate. In modern times there are contraceptives.
Maybe the most common mechanism reducing population growth in Europe over the centuries was taking men to army service. If marriages are monogamous and morals forbid children for lonely mothers, this practice reduces married couples and lowers the birth rate. As an extra bonus, the armies fought wars and killed large numbers of people, largely civilians. The result of all these mechanism was that populations used to grow very slowly, not faster than the development of technology allowed.
When some population did not control its population growth, which happened often, the overpopulation had to emigrate, go to a war, or sink to misery. Vikings had constant overpopulation of younger brothers and were raiding Europe and establishing new states. The population growth did not stop to the people being converted to Christianity, thus, there were wars, famines, disease outbreaks, monasteries and cloisters, and emigration, all to reduce overpopulation. Very strangely, now when European population finally is stable, or even slightly decreasing, some people are alarmed by it. The population should be fairly constant and not grow faster than technology develops, while technological development should eventually slow down to near zero assuming that we want the system to stay working for yet another thousand years.
But as I have recently been reading The Unz Review where everything seems to lead to the Jewish Problem, let us just mention that the population growth is the essence of the Jewish Problem. That is what caused it and that is where the solution might be.
God in the Torah told people to be fruitful and to fill the earth. So, the good book was wrong from the very beginning. That’s the problem.
The Promised People tried to be fruitful for a long time and it lead to problems.
The Jewish population in the USA is not growing any more and Jews are assimilating in Europe and the USA. In Israel they still have the population growth of 1.4%, which is very high, but overall, the Jewish Problem is much smaller now than earlier. Civilized people do not mention it, well, apart those in The Unz Review. (But there are some good articles.)
Jews still have power in the West, especially in the USA, but it all may even out for some time if the population growth stays low. We can briefly look at their experiences as a historical example of the dangers of high population growth.
Whatever the historicity of the biblical account be, Israelites are said to have been in Egypt for 400 years. When they came there were the families of 12 brothers and the father, when they left there were supposedly 4 million of them. Assuming men had 2-3 wives and 6-9 children, there could be some 150 family members, but additionally there were hired people and slaves, so maybe 1500 people grew to 4 million in 400 years. That is growth of 2,666 times. It requires over 11 doublings, thus the doubling time was 35 years. Population growth of 2% per year leads to this kind of growth. As a second case, the captivity in Babylon lasted some 170 years, 3,000 Jews were taken to captivity and 40,000 Jews returned to the home country. That means growth of 13 times in 170 years. 13 times is a bit less than 4 doublings, so the doubling time was a bit longer than 43 years. The yearly population growth was between 1.5% and 2%. Later, in Eastern Europe, the Ashkenazi Jewish population grew 360 to about 12 million in about 800 years. That is: 15 doublings in 800 years giving the yearly rate a bit under 1.5%. Clearly, the Jewish population growth rate has been 1.5-2%.
The local population could not grow because the size of the population is limited by the environment, food available. Thus, a growing immigrant population competed with the local population and some solution to this conflict was necessary.
In the biblical story of the conquest of the Promised Land Israelites kill the locals (men, women, children and even livestock) of Levant and take their land. This is rather extreme. In Europe conquerors killed men but saved women. The story of conquest is of course only a story. It draws from the events at the fall of the Middle East Bronze Age. The conquerors are likely to be the Sea Peoples of Greek origins, not Israelites of the Bible. Yet, this solution to the competition problem is quite normal: the conqueror submits the locals.
Often it is not so easy to do it. In that case the newcomers with their higher population growth will fall into poverty and misery. Many of them will leave the community and assimilate. There can remain a core of the original population, but it will not grow too large. This is what usually happens, but not with the Jews. They always went up the ladder.
Eastern European Jews did not need to kill the locals when the immigrated into a new country. They lived in cities and earned on other ways than by agriculture, so they did not replace the locals, but nevertheless, they were seen as parasites living from the local people by usury, monopoles, trade and tax farming. Jews were exempted from army service, so they could make more children. They were supported by kings and nobles and hated by the locals because they exploited common people. Jews coped with the high population growth by spreading to new areas. Often they were expelled by locals.
That’s what you would expect from such a strategy and that was their experience.
Judaism required mutual help: rich and influential members of their community, whether religious or assimilated, helped their fellow religionists. This strategy works because some people form any population are successful. Necessarily, some must be. Usually these successful individuals do not much care of their poorer compatriots or coreligionists, but with the Jews they were required to help other Jews. With this help from the tribe, because it is a tribe, Jews had an unfair advantage over non-Jews. Non-Jews could not count on any help in individualistic societies and a group overcomes an individual. (That is unfair, but Europeans would not like to belong to any tribe. It would suffocate them.)
There are a number of known countermeasures to this Jewish way that Kevin MacDonald (whose books I just read) calls an evolutionary group strategy, but I would drop the word evolutionary: I do not think it is in any way genetic or racial. This is all culture.
It is possible for the locals to adopt a similar mutual help strategy. If they do so, they as a larger group overcome the smaller group, but this strategy requires changing the individualistic society to a communal (tribal) one. Communal societies are much worse in most respects, Communism being one example of such a system. Most Europeans do not like to adopt this strategy, but it is similar to the way Islam controls Jews. Such a communal society tends to be ethnocentric, endogamous, clannish and unfair for minorities. Minorities are kept in an inferior position in such a solution.
The second strategy is to put restrictions on Jews. An extreme example is in the story of the Exodus: Israelites are enslaved by Egyptians because their number grows too large and Egyptians limit the birth rate of Israelites by killing Israelite children. Naturally, this is just a story. Israelites most probably were never in Egypt. Indeed, Egyptians were in the Levant. The story of the Exodus seems to be based on the expulsion of Hyksos, which was a very different issue, Hyksos having been the gruel oppressors of Egyptians. There are many more real cases of restrictions on Jews, like closing them in ghettos, allowing only some trades, restricting enrollment to higher education and so on. Restrictions on some ethnic groups do not well fit to modern Western societies, but for some time they work as a counterstrategy.
The third strategy is expulsion. Naturally, it solves the problem and was commonly used, but it cannot be recommended: the Second World War should be the last time this strategy was applied. (But it was not, Zionists forced Iraqi Jews to move to Palestine.)
The fourth strategy is assimilation. It is the “kindest” of the solutions (but still not liked by any minorities). Jews, naturally, refused to assimilate. European and American Jewish populations finally seem to assimilate today with the locals, but a core group stays endogamous. These populations do not grow any more, but the core endogamous population still has a high population growth and worldwide Judaism has the second highest growth rate after Islam. In Israel the Jewish population growth is 1.4%. It seems that the Jewish Problem will disappear in the developed world for some time because of the low population growth and assimilation, but it will reappear later because the core group is still there.
Jewish population growth is then not a problem at the moment, but as a historical example it is useful. The present problem is the population growth in developing countries, mostly Africa and the Middle East. Those countries are largely Islamic. Egypt, for instance, has the annual population growth of 2% meaning that the population is doubling in 35 years. High fertility is characteristic to the region. Also Israel has a high population growth.
Islam often blamed for the high population growth, but actually most directions of Islam accept birth control. Iran, a Muslim country, has currently population growth 1.2%, which closely approximates the world average of 1.1%. Some level of population growth in developing countries is natural, since the population can grow with improved technology. A general trend in the world is that the population growth is slowing down while technological development is still strong. It kooks a bit better worldwide.
Nevertheless, Muslim countries worldwide grow with the annual rate 1.8%, which falls into the range that is bound to cause serious problems sooner or later. Non-religious people and Buddhists are making less children than are needed for replacing the population, but they are not dying out: renegade Christians often turn to these philosophies. Islam does not gain much from conversions. The growth is almost completely because of a higher birth rate. The high birth rate probably would drop is Muslim countries would turn to Western-style democracies, but it will not happen. Forced changes of systems in Muslim countries have also failed and Muslim populations in Europe and elsewhere are growing.
The unfortunate fact is that a population growth rate of 1.5-2% usually leads to problems, often to wars. Israel, being in the Middle East in the center of this population growth, will this time not be the problem. Instead, it will soon have a problem. There is some justice: the problem that was created by a higher population growth will finally be met with a mirror strategy of the local population growing even faster. As said before, there are several known countermeasures to this strategy of a higher population growth, but none were good.
I understand the population growth in Sub Saharan Africa: for a long time it was an under-populated continent, but the Middle East was not. Population growth there will create more wars and there are nuclear powers and old tensions. Israel will very possibly have a problem because the long-lasting control of media is waning away. While it is possible to direct such sources of information as the Wikipedia, there are too many web sites. Trolling sites makes it only worse. Young people will not very long any more trust the main media. The lack of trust may reflect to the USA-Israel relations and that can have an effect. Another trend working to the same direction is the decreasing belief in the Bible: though the Jews have disliked Christianity, it is the main reason for the relatively positive view of Israel. The fair view is not positive, considering the actions against Palestinians. It is an interesting situation. I see trouble in the future. But, of course, they could just stop doing what they are doing and all would be fine.
Well, this looks a bit too political. I am not political. Must be reading this crazy Unz, I have to stop it. I’ll write the next post from something else.