How can we deal with the global population explosion?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Question How can we deal with the problem of global population explosion Answer Before we can deal with a problem we need to first understand what the problem is certainly if we live in India India has a huge population and there is a significant concern about population explosion and there are people across the world who are population doomsday prophets who talk about how the world is going to be overrun by humans and everything is to propel to destruction and most such people are Malthusians Malthus was an economist who predicted centuries ago that Thomas Malthus in the 18th century that food production could not possibly keep up with population growth but none of his economic predictions, his dire predictions have literally come true and although at one level there is the problem of iniquity in the world but still we also recognize that there is more that food production in various parts of the world increase and this sheer population itself whether it is increasing or decreasing is a matter of serious question this might appear to be like a very controversial idea but while the population itself is in absolute terms has increased in recent times but we have to see in much more broader perspective to understand the reality of what is going on and that means if you look at much of the developed world and almost the entire world is following the direction of the developed world so the world may well be in danger of underpopulation than overpopulation if you look at Europe on an average the society needs to reproduce 2.1% every per woman to at least maintain itself but currently in the western world it is much lesser much much lesser in Europe even America has it about 1.8 and the reason for this you could say is multifarious but primarily it is there are 2 reasons John Ibbotson and Darrell Brackett have written a book called Empty Planet and then they pointed out that urbanization and increased education or birth control access these are 2 main things which have accompanied which have correlated with and which could have caused population decline so as America at least because it is much more open to immigration has a reasonable 1.8 kind of population reproduction rate but other parts of the world, Japan is strongly against immigration and their population is on a sharp decline and if you consider China you could say that it has got into a self induced fertility trap fertility trap means that you have a large part of the population which is living but it is beyond the fertility rate so there are older people who because of in compared to recent past their life spans have increased but they are beyond the reproduction rate and beyond the time of reproduction and the number of people who can consume produce and consume which is what keeps an economy going from a worldly perspective they young are decreasing in fact the fertility rate even in places like any place that becomes modernized or westernized where the women start pursuing not a job women start considering career to be the most important thing in their lives this has had severe consequences on society and is an uncontrolled experiment we have not studied it till now of course huge families with maybe a dozen children has become like a relic of the past as far as mainstream society is concerned but even one or two children if people have just one or two children there are lots of issues that come with it because that is the only child the parents have the child is treated as precious more precious and does the child is pampered the child doesn’t get to socialize with siblings because there are no siblings and the child is over protected over pampered, over scheduled and often under challenged over scheduled means that from morning to evening the child is just ok go to this class, do this, do that do that and often the child does not learn to entertain oneself, does not learn to be self driven and especially what are the consequences of this are again difficult to know of course parenting is a whole different issue but the point is in this context how the world is going to move forward is not as predictably dystopian as some people would have us believe that means the population is going to increase and we are going to over run the world or is it that as the developmental model of the western world is adopted by the rest of the world the reproduction rates are going to decline and that itself is going to cause a problem so we do see that if the fertility rate is reasonable is at least 1.5 or somewhere near 1.8 in America that’s because of immigrants and some people say that immigrants should be encouraged more and more and that’s what will keep the population going but then even the immigrants who come to a particular country they start adopting the social ethos of that country after some time and that’s only a temporary solution you need to re-examine the social ethos so Singapore even the government has tried to intervene so in some countries there are generous maternity allowances Sweden has had for example a policy of giving huge amounts of maternity leave.
Canada itself for example gives almost one year for both parents combined maternity leave but Sweden had to abandon its policy because it was very costly for the state and its results were unpredictable Singapore even had a government sponsored dating agency so they had a social development unit as it is euphemistically called it’s also been referred to as single desperate ugly as a means to find a match for people who are above 30 so now governmental policy to try to reverse social trends or you could say trends that arise from culture that how what will be its productivity China was successful say by their one child policy one family one child policy to bring the population down but there are several serious next generation problems that have not been that are not widely known as China has got into fertility trap so the point overall I am making is that yes population has been increasing for the last several last few centuries but it’s easier to attribute existing problems to one single cause but reality is complex, problems are complex solutions are complex so it’s a sign of intellectual unsophistication to want to find quick causes and prescribe patch solutions to incredibly complex problems so at one level you could say that say greater education and urbanization would naturally cause the reproduction to decrease and that will also lead to the population to decrease but whether that is desirable or undesirable is a complex question it’s not just that we want the population to decrease for an economy it is the healthy productive population that is the most important if you have young brains who are intelligent, well educated then that is itself going to be a powerful solution they can come up with creative measures to deal with situations in fact the best way the world could deal with problems it seems according to several prominent thinkers is to invest in countering child malnutrition because if children are malnourished then that interferes with their development and that interferes with their development in terms of their neurological development in terms of their brain capacities and that has severe consequences for both their own individual growth and for their social contribution so this has been pointed out by not just a few people it’s important that the John Lomborg who wrote how to spend 75 billion dollars to make the world a better place and he recommends focusing on child nutrition as compared to much of the other doubted other much more publicized problems such as climate change, this and that so moving on if we consider whether when the government tries to institutionalize changes it is not always a sustainable solution either it could be population increasing population increasing, population degradation or population elimination, we see the Nazis tried it eliminate the population by the holocaust they are having eugenics, they attempt to create a more advanced human race by tinkering with population and that didn’t work we consider it vastly social Darwinism is a rejected idea that there is survival for the fittest among the various races and that certain races deserve to be eliminated so that humanity can continue that has been completely rejected demonized and considered unacceptable according to the current way of thinking and rightly so so ultimately we need a more spiritual understanding of the self and the purpose of life which is a spiritual understanding we will do what is required if we see that we are there is a indestructible core to us that we are the species that bring meaning and purpose ultimately to the universe it is we who have the capacity for spiritual realization for self realization it is we who has the dharmic text from India explain that all living beings are spiritual on a journey of spiritual evolution and as human beings who have the capacity to pursue that and the purpose of society is to further growth in spirituality further the spiritual evolution society needs to be arranged in a way that is furthered so the family is one vital central unit which furthers this and we need to encourage that at the same time there needn’t be indiscriminate reproduction which will cause its own multiple problems so at one level because of sensuality people may within a family structure reproduce more than what they can maintain or in today’s culture because of sensuality people may decide that children cramp their style and then they justify that their unwillingness to have children in various high sounding with various high sounding reasons such as the world cannot afford more people so either way it is sensuality or the opposite of spiritual consciousness that will need to be addressed whether that obsession with sensuality makes people reproduce indiscriminately or it makes them run away from reproduction by adoption of technologies such as the birth control pill while still pandering to their senses whether within the bonds of a family or outside and whether whichever way the problem emerges if we do not have spiritual consciousness the problem will end up worsening. Spiritual consciousness doesn’t mean necessarily like sectarian religion at all it just means that we understand that there is a higher purpose to life the purpose of spiritual evolution and we humans and through our life journey are meant to mold our life in such a way that it helps us grow spiritually a part of growing spiritually is to become selfless is to expand our consciousness from being centered on oneself to being centered on something bigger than oneself and that can be the family, that can be society, that can be ultimately the source of everyone so once our consciousness expands beyond sensuality we will both be naturally directed toward and we will intelligently direct ourselves toward a way of living that is sustainable and that’s what is vitally needed in today’s world so the parts of the world which are in fear of overpopulation if there is a more spiritual self understanding there will be natural regulation and the parts of the world which are in danger of underpopulation then there will be a more, with a more spiritual understanding there will be a more focus on the family and on having children as a part of a meaningful life instead of just chasing after career and shallow relationships and then again the population rate will balance itself so if we understand ourselves and the purpose of our life better then we will be able to make individual choices and create social policies that help us to live best on the ecology help us to live best with the ecology of the planet, thank you