Population problem: The raging debate, where to?

It’s just so good, the raging debate on the population issue.For years I had dreamed of the day our media would take it up, the nation’s leaders, politicians, the world of academe, concerned professionals and NGOs, and every interested Tom, Dick and Harry. Now, I’d like to add my broad brush strokes on this issue which a social scientist said could be the overpo-wering issue, the most tangled and yet the most challenging issue in the first quarter of the 21st century.

We’ll have to start with two famous English philosophers – Thomas Hobbes and Richard Malthus.

Hobbes forcefully argued that human beings, in order to physically protect themselves, "have no choice but to submit themselves to Government". Otherwise, chaos and anarchy would prevail. The Government thus is the all-powerful Leviathan, "what God in the book of Job calls the ‘king over all the children of pride’." Here, I am quoting from Robert Kaplan’s Warrior Politics.

Without a Leviathan to punish what is wrong, "there can be no escape from the chaos of the state of nature". This is very much the case emerging and prevailing in the Philippines today. Our government is virtually helpless in the face of a nation deeply torn, execrably poor, lost, terribly confused with a bloated population of 84 million it cannot adequately feed. There can be no freedom if there is no order. Isaiah Berlin said that. So did Samuel Huntington. Again, two social philosophers of the first rank.

The freedoms Filipinos enjoy today, therefore, are phoney and superficial. A hungry, poor and oppressed nation cannot be free.

Human beings, said James Madison (The Federalist Papers) echoing Hobbes, are disposed to conflict. "The only solution is a higher, controlling force. A NATION, without a NATIONAL GOVERNMENT, is, in my view, an awful spectacle." I suppose Hamilton means a strong, effective, no-nonsense government. And that is what we Filipinos, all 84 million of us, do not have today.

So then, this is the drama that grips us, twirls the nation like a top. And we are just beginning to understand it, too long have we been immersed in empty and phoney politics. "Life is nasty, short and brutish," said Hobbes, and the Philipines is coming close to his envisioned perfect state of anarchy, where "every man is fighting every man".

And from Hobbes, we switch to Robert Malthus who was born in 1766. Malthus is best known for his theory that population increases geometrically while food supplies increase only arithmetically.

He was right and he was wrong. The Industrial Revolution stupendously increased agricultural output. But Malthus’ contribution to social science went deeper. He introduced the subject of ecosystems into political philosophy. Humankind’s politics, its social relations, are affected both by natural conditions and by the densities by which humans inhabit the earth.

Take the Philippines. Many pillars of the Church argue we have no population problem. We have a government problem, an economic problem. The Philippines is rich in natural resources. All we have to do is properly exploit them and all 84 million Filipinos will eat well, live well, and prosper. That is basically the Church argument.

That may be true. But our political and economic system, our scandalous rich-poor social system, our still mendicant culture, are so many daggers thrust at the heart of a government that has no political will to curb the demographic explosion. True, modern technology will one day work its magic on agricultural productivity and food will come off our farms like abundant manna from heaven.But how long can we wait?

Will the serried millions of poor crowding our urban areas – the long dreaded urban blight – have to fight each other in gang, tribal or religious wars, resort to more and more crime in the struggle to survive?Shall we have to be wracked with disease and pestilence, die of starvation, be killed off by a brutal police and the military before the rescue of technology comes? The human population now rises from 6 to 10 billion before it tapers off, with an estimated 1.5 billion going to bed hungry.

The Church cannot just pompously fold its arms and say there is no population problem. There is a problem. The Church cannot blink it away.

Our Church, our so-called betters will have to understand that the paramount issue in the Philippines, as in many other Third World countries, is the re-establishment of order. This is a Hobbesian problem before it becomes a Malthusian problem before it becomes a Darwinian problem. Charles Darwin (Origin of the Species) it was who said life is always a life and death struggle and only the fittest, the strongest will surive. Yes, only those who can swim the raging Yukon are fit not just to survive but rule humanity. Ah there we are surging close to the philosophy of the superman, which Adolf Hilter so assiduously cultivated.

Now, we are up against the philosopher’s stone. How do we reestablish order in the Phiilppines? What is the process?

At this stage, the instructed, the educated, the intelligentsia are close to knowing or understanding all our basic problems. Po-verty. Graft and corruption. The demographic explosion. Crime and violence. A fragile if almost impotent leadership. A wobbly political system. A fiscal, financial system close to bankruptcy. An archaic economy.

How do we get out? How did the Asian group called Country Inc. forge the so-called East Asia economic miracle?. For a number of reasons, the Philippines was not able to join that gravy train.We had in the past already quoted Malaysia’s Dr. Mahathir Mohamad on this issue. He said: "It is just the realization of an idea of how to manage an economic sysstem. It is making the right choices, the right mixture of economic and political methods."

"Rapid growth with equity," the World Bank put it.Some books I have read contended the secret "was the guiding hand of government, an elite cadre of bureaucrats who endlessly engage in picking winners and calling the shots." Superbly trained and educated bureaucrats, of course. The go-vernments involved in the miracle were ‘market-friendly". This means "high savings rates, low inflation, a strong orientation to exports, and high commitment to education, especially education geared to changing political skills required by industrialization".

The political bedrock involved largely "dictatorship, authoritarianism, or at least regulated politics and a de facto one-party system."

This gives the lie to Speaker Joe de Venecia’s boastful claim that a switch to the parliamentary form of government will save us. It also gives the lie to Peter Wallace’s recent thesis that the less regulated a nation is, the better. The governments did intervene often, forcefully and drastically. Now here is the rub. Countries, Inc. "have long enjoyed a degree of common purpose few firms can match, a nationalistic drive, molded by living memories of colonization, conquest, secession, civil conflict, subversion or war."

This largely refers to Japan under the naval guns of American Admiral Matthew Perry in 1868 for Dai Nippon to open its markets – "or else". China of course is a core country in this group. Britain ruthlessly poured unwanted opium on the country as a result of which the Opium wars enveloped and devastated all of China. There were also the shameless "unequal treaties" imposed by the colonial powers on China. A now awake and bestirred India has never forgotten the indignities heaped on it by the Raj, by British cololnialism. Often the haughty and exclusive English clubs in India sported the sign: "No dogs or Indians allowed."

The overarching model of course was Japan, the first nation in Asia to attain the industrial achievements of the West.

Can the Philippines now hack out of its dense and suffocating political jungle a road that can catch up with Countries Inc., so-called because in the Asian miracle, countries often behaved like firms? Can this be achieved without recourse to heavy bloodshed, revolution or civil war? What kind of government or political system is sought to be achieved?

I have time and again referred to the probability that out of the debris of more than half a century, we might be able to set up a "revolutionary government". I once discussed this issue with Eduardo (Danding) Cojuangco, and he reacted positively. Several taipans also do but they will not come out openly, which is understandable. Some top members of the business community will not touch the subject with a ten-foot pole. Again, this is understandable; they support and are part of GMA, Inc.

We have a lot more to say on this subject in a future column.