Kevin Parker had just finished another week at the Bristol University School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies.
There would be no Friday-night drinking to oblivion with fellow lecturers and other hangers-on tonight, though. Kevin had an appointment.
He’d spent most of the day in the library rather than teaching, so he was even more casually dressed than normal. With six years of trying to teach British Economic and Social History to students with mixed results and very little self-satisfaction behind him, Kevin’s weekends, most evenings, and any other spare time were spent on his real interest - moderating the website of the International Malthus Society.
“Dedicated to exploring the ideas of Thomas Malthus on a theoretical and a practical level” was the somewhat uninspiring strap line of Kevin’s website. But it opened the doors for all sorts of comment,
opinion, political lobbying, or action linked to Thomas Malthus’ dire eighteenth-century warnings of the effects of overpopulation. He had written the following:
The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. The increase of population is limited by the means of subsistence.
Kevin had personal experience of overcrowding. As the oldest sibling of eleven brought up on a poor housing estate in Liverpool, he had seen and felt the consequences. His father had left soon after Kevin was born. His ten brothers and sisters had ten different fathers, but he still felt proud to be called a Liverpudlian.
Kevin, in his usual daytime wear of crumpled brown corduroy trousers, a green open-necked shirt, and bright red sweater that said Liverpool FC on the front, was on his way by train to London to give what he thought was a talk to Malthus Society members and any other enthusiasts interested in human population control. He was an expert on the subject. He lectured on it, so he had all the facts and figures at his fingertips. He also tried hard to temper his lectures to conceal his own views and, even more so, his radical solutions. He was, he would often remind himself, not there to brainwash students like some radical cleric from an Islamic Mosque. Nevertheless, he often felt comfortable enough to expound on his wish to see direct action to radically reduce the world population so that the quality of life for those remaining improved. Kevin liked giving talks to gatherings of like-minded folk.
But this invitation had come as a surprise, a phone call from someone he hadn’t even heard of, an Arab, if the man’s accent and name of El Badry was anything to go by. He also seemed to be an Arab with money as the flat Kevin had been invited to was overlooking Chelsea Embankment. It would certainly be large enough to hold several other members of the Malthus Society if that was what the caller intended.
On the train, he took out his notes and a yellow marker to set about highlighting the points he would make. But then he put it down again.
The fact was he was tired of giving straight talks with facts and figures. His preference now was for direct action. A rowdy
demonstration in Trafalgar Square, outside the Houses of Parliament or at Davos, was what he wanted. It was something to catch the attention and stir some proper debate. In his flat, he’d practiced TV
appearances, interviews, and press gatherings. He’d watched other events take hold. Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion and others had all caught the imagination, and even if you’d never share their opinions, they’d raised the profile of their cause. Kevin had been running the Malthus Society for years and never achieved anything yet. It was time, he’d decided, for a change of tactics. To hell with the university hierarchy and their intolerance of anything that looked like an assault on the freedom to breed like rabbits and for old people to be forcibly kept alive way beyond any quality of life.
Kevin had tried the civilised route of discussion, but the only things politicians wanted to discuss these days were the environment and climate change. The fact, Kevin constantly said, was that both those problems as well as job creation, mass migration, resource depletion, human conflict, and social problems could only be solved by reducing the human population by around four billion. But suggestions like that killed off further discussion. They’d shrink away, embarrassed at having agreed to meet such an antisocial, working-class misfit wearing a Liverpool football club tee shirt.
Kevin came away from those meetings, feeling they thought he was mad for even suggesting such radical solutions. Indeed, it was becoming politically incorrect to even mention reducing the human population. “Are you offering to go first, Kevin?” someone would inevitably shout out.
Population control infringed basic human rights, they said. It went against religious freedom. It was racist. The excuses were endless.
The political will wasn’t there. It was too contentious an issue when an election was looming, which it invariably was. Reasons to sweep the matter under the carpet for future generations to worry about just went on and on. There were even countries that considered population as a source of political, economic, and military strength. He had written extensively on the subject under his screen name of Thalmus.
Kevin, having concluded that democracies worked OK for some things but dictatorships were best for decision-making, had become an angry and impatient man, although he did his best to conceal it from friends.
Kevin’s Malthus Society normally shared views online. As website moderator and unelected chairman, Kevin had only ever managed to organise one full meeting of members in the past, and that meeting, held at the back room of a public house in Wolverhampton, had not been the success Kevin had hoped. If the group was to move its views forward, then they clearly needed funds from somewhere, but despite Kevin’s efforts, no one had offered either to donate to the group or pay a monthly membership subscription. Come closing time, Kevin had even had to pick up the bar tab. But, undeterred and three years later, he was still at it—if anything more motivated than ever and certainly keener for some direct action.
Sitting back in his train seat, he put his notes to one side. Despite being the society’s chairman, he was unsure where this strange Mr El Badry, who he was due to meet, stood in relation to the Malthus Society. He could well have been a regular reader or even a contributor, but because the website only asked for screen names and not anyone’s full contact details, there was no way of telling. In fact, Kevin only knew the details of about twelve members by their screen names.
But Mr El Badry could also have been based somewhere outside UK
because there were many other affiliated groups that Kevin monitored—not least the followers of the American professor, Paul R.
Ehrlich. Kevin had also lectured on Ehrlich but Thomas Malthus had preceded Ehrlich and was the one who had set the ball in motion.
Knowing that there were thousands of people out there who shared his views was what Kevin found encouraging.
Years of lecturing students first thing on a Monday morning had taught him the need to get people’s attention right from the start, and for his meeting, he wanted to cover as much as possible - conflict over food and water supplies, the misery of war and sickness, economic migration, and mass unemployment in the West. He wanted
to offer quotes from the great Robert Wallace who said, “The earth would be overstocked and become unable to support its numerous inhabitants, ” or, as Thomas Malthus had put it, “The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds, in the course of a few thousand years.”
Thomas Malthus, a British clergyman and economist, had published
“An Essay on the Principles of Population” in 1798. Population, when unchecked, he proposed, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increased only in an arithmetical ratio. Malthus outlined the idea of positive checks and preventative checks on population.
Disease, war, disaster, and famine were what Malthus considered as positive checks that increased the death rate. Malthus’s preventative checks included moral restraint, abstinence and birth control. He predicted that only positive checks on exponential population growth would ultimately save humanity from itself. Without positive checks, he said, human misery was an “absolute necessary consequence.”
Anger and impatience were what had led Kevin to track down the many hundreds of groups with similar opinions on population control dotted across the world. He had found them in North America, South America, right across Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Far East, Japan, and Australia. Many were closeted individuals operating from bedrooms. Others were far better organised but Kevin’s list of contacts now ran to thousands.
There was the German group that operated from somewhere in Cologne with a membership claimed to be in the hundreds. Ausser Kontrolle (Out of Control) still advocated extermination of certain ethnic groups that did not match up to a long list of criteria they had published. Moslems were high on this list due, according to Ausser Kontrolle, to “their unwillingness to move their culture forward from where it had stagnated since the heyday of Islamic influence on science and education.”
Then there was his Indian group, his Indonesian group, and a Singaporean group that advocated a policy of setting IQ tests with those not reaching the required level being left to fend for themselves.
There was the Spanish group, the Italian group, and a very low-profile South African group with similar views to Ausser Kontrolle.
But Kevin’s favourite group was the Nigerian one. Tunji Fayinka, a college lecturer in sociology, ran the group from his flat in Barnet, North London. Tunji believed that even the current population of Nigeria of some 200 million - a figure expected to reach 390 million by 2050 - was already totally unsustainable. Increasing ethnic and religious conflict was already proof of the need to reduce the population back to at least the 45.2 million figure it stood at in 1960.
Kevin and Tunji had a lot in common. They were, in fact, good friends and verbal sparring partners. But Tunji had learned to be far more careful with what he said in public or wrote online.
“Big Brother is always watching, Kevin. Go careful. The least you should do is keep the laptop hidden some place where MI6 won’t go looking. Alternatively, just appear to be an innocent nutcase.”
Until then, Kevin had not thought very much about security.
He sat back as the train rolled into Reading Station and picked up his copy of the Guardian. He read the headlines again and then dropped the newspaper back on the empty seat. Buying the Guardian had become a habit, although he rarely read it these days. The newspaper was another English institution he now disliked because of the furore that had erupted amongst indignant would-be mothers attending fertility clinics and wealthy politicians with four children after his open letter to the editor was published. Indeed, he had, afterwards, been summoned to meet the department’s head for an explanation.
Professor Antony Kilbride, Kevin’s ultimate boss, had hurled the paper towards him across his desk. “What the hell’s this, Kevin? You really believe all this?”
Kevin had had a few drinks that lunchtime and was very relaxed. He had shrugged. “What’s your problem, Tony? Got yet another problem with free speech? Want to sack me for my opinions?”
The argument had intensified, and Kevin’s language was never at its best after a few beers.
“It’s a free society, Kevin. We have the freedom to choose how many kids we have.”
“But not the freedom to object?”
“We can’t have the university linked to extreme views like this?”
“Ah. So that’s it. My extreme views? What the fuck! Is it extreme to talk common sense now?”
“Some find it hurtful.”
“I’m hurt every fucking day. If they’re hurt, then ignore me and argue a case that every woman should be encouraged to have eleven kids like my mother did.”
“It’s their right, Kevin.”
“Yeh, sure. But why should I then have to pay for all their fucking kids because they suddenly realise, they can’t afford them? Anyway, half of them are unmarried mothers who deliberately milk the system because they know the state picks up the tab. And where are all the bloody fathers? Fucking around some more? And where’s the housing and the schools and the hospitals for all these kids? Do I have to pay for it? If so, I object. My point was that it’s all totally unsustainable, but it seems to me that, just like all the others, you fail to understand that and can only see my so-called hurtful comments. I despair.”
“Cool it, Kevin. Anyway, I thought the birth rate here was falling?”
“Yeh, except amongst a certain section who come here to breed and rely on state fucking handouts.”
Kevin was perhaps fortunate to still have a job when the meeting finally ended.
***
Castration or mass sterilisation had once been an attractive and popular idea put on the Malthus Society website, and Kevin, with Tunji Fayinka’s help, had become an expert on access to water supplies in target countries just in case an opportunity arose. But what was really needed was action on an international scale. A world warwith nuclear weapons might have helped but was too indiscriminate.
An epidemic, a pandemic of biblical proportions, had possibilities, but science moved so fast these days treatments almost always became available before they had any real effect. Mass famine brought on by essential crops like rice and wheat being ruined by widespread resistance to pesticide was another idea.
Kevin had been running out of new practical ideas until, that is, he reached the Chelsea Apartment of Mr El Badry.