by JOHN MEYER
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) PAINTING/John Linnell/Wikimedia Commons
Aristotle, Da Vinci, Darwin, and… Malthus?
Human societies have been shaped by surges in intellectual advances often spurred by single individuals. Some are revered and some are forgotten but Aristotle, Da Vinci and Darwin stand pretty much in a league of their own. The way humans think about themselves and their world through physics, philosophy, and social lenses was changed by these intellectual giants.
But there is one name yet to be added. Thomas Malthus dealt with difficult questions of human nature and his teachings have yet to be applied.
Not so Aristotle, whose intellectual range was vast, covering most of the sciences and many of the arts. He was the founder of formal logic and his work remains a powerful current in contemporary philosophical debate.
Then there was Leonardo da Vinci, whose genius as a painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of their time.
Charles Darwin was a naturalist whose scientific theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. The new evolutionary narrative rapidly spread through all of science, literature, and politics and profoundly changed the way humans viewed themselves and the world around them.
In contrast to these timeless greats, Thomas Malthus is now little more than an arcane historical footnote, not widely studied yet regularly panned by the economic establishment. However, Darwin and many scientists found inspiration in Malthus’ writings even as they were spurned by the commercial world.
Whereas Darwin, da Vinci and Aristotle opened our minds to a world of wonder, a world of progressive change for all, Malthus held forth a view which presented difficult choices. And these difficult choices required significant sacrifices by the powers of the day.
Malthus laid out the principle causes of societies’ failure down through the ages, an immeasurably valuable revelation of cause and effect. Malthus was an observer of history and was the first to try to explain past events in history through the application of logic and mathematics. Yet he has been ignored and even ridiculed by commercial and political elites who rightly saw his concepts as direct threats to their own prosperity and power.
He noted:
the inevitability of repeated social collapse given the human tendency to reproduce,
the surges in population and collapses of societies through history,
the very high rates of population growth in new lands,
the impossibility of sustaining high rates of growth,
the inequality in industrial development and social structure,
the food inefficiency of meat productio
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