The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  William Godwin had imagined a society in which everyone shared in agricultural labour instead of slaving away in industrial cities. If everyone followed ‘a frugal yet wholesome diet’, Godwin argued, they would no longer have to labour to produce superfluous luxuries, and would thus only have to work for as little as half an hour a day. The result would be a happy populous society with no war, violence or crime.19 For the sake of argument, Malthus allowed that Godwin’s system of perfect equality would remove some of the ordinary checks to population growth, and that England’s population could perhaps be doubled. However, he argued that as populations grew, everyone would have to become a vegetarian: ‘The only chance of success would be the ploughing up all the grazing countries, and putting an end almost entirely to the use of animal food.’ He readily acknowledged that ‘It is well known that a country in pasture cannot support so many inhabitants as a country in tillage.’ He also acknowledged Adam Smith’s projection that ‘if potatoes were to become the favourite vegetable food of the common people … the country would be able to support a much greater population.’ This was precisely what the vegetarians were arguing for, but Malthus thought that giving up meat was an undesirable eventuality. Apart from anything else, he objected that a purely arable system would not produce the manure required for improving soils in Britain. Animal agriculture, he implied, provided meat for the rich and shit for the poor.

  But Malthus’ principal objection was that once the object of doubling the population had been attained – in twenty-five years or so – the problem of the limitation of resources would present itself again. With the population doubled from seven million, ‘the food, though almost entirely vegetable, would be sufficient to support in health the doubled population of fourteen millions.’ But as people continued to multiply, they would eventually outstrip the capacity for food production and face the prospect of famine once again. Then Godwin’s imagined reign of universal benevolence would give way to competition for resources: ‘The mighty law of self-preservation expels all the softer, and more exalted emotions of the soul … self-love resumes his wonted empire, and lords it triumphant over the world.’

  To illustrate this, Malthus turned to the vegetarian Chinese and Indian masses championed by Paley and Adam Smith. These enormous populations, said Malthus, survived on the smallest possible quantity of resources produced in the most efficient way on the available land. While this might look like the kind of perfect situation Godwin and Paley imagined, Malthus argued that it was fatally precarious. Because the populations did not have any superfluous luxuries, he speculated that whenever they had a bad harvest, they must necessarily be hit with the most devastating famines: ‘It is probable that the very frugal manner in which the Gentoos are in the habit of living contributes in some degree to the famines of Indostan.’ Malthus regarded luxuries as a buffer against famine, and he imagined – with nearly as much idealism as the Godwinites – that wealthier classes would part with their luxuries in time of hardship and use their excess money to provide employment for the poor. Furthermore, Malthus did not agree with Paley and the others that large populations were in themselves desirable: bringing more people into a life of indigence merely multiplied the quantity of misery, not happiness.20

  Godwin responded to this by pointing out that Malthus had refuted his utopian vision by arguing that once it had been achieved it would eventually be defeated by its own success. But this, said Godwin, ignored the value of achieving it in the first place, and it assumed that when a population reached its capacity for food production people would still be hell-bent on multiplying as fast as possible. On the contrary, Godwin insisted, at this point people would sensibly turn to family planning; men could be optionally sterilised or they would exercise moral restraint on their reproductive appetite. Thus, agricultural reform could achieve a doubling of the population without causing the famine Malthus predicted.21 In later expanded editions of the Essay, Malthus did in fact put more emphasis on curbing populations through ‘moral restraint’, by which he meant late marriage and celibacy. As Southey and Coleridge pointed out in 1803 in their joint review of Malthus’ Principle of Population, Malthus himself ended his essay with the paradoxical assertion that the Christian exercise of chastity could overcome the harsh laws of overpopulation. Nature itself, Malthus had said, encouraged the use of restraint. By conceding that nature would force people to control reproduction, said Southey, Malthus revealed himself to be no less of a utopian than Godwin, for he had the optimistic laissez-faire faith of Leibniz and Buffon that deregulated natural forces would establish their own harmony: ‘Malthus also is an optimist, but of the Pangloss school,* holding that the present state of society is, with all its evils, the best of all possible states.’ His inconsistent pessimistic attack on liberal reform, they argued, was really a sinister plan to reduce the poor to brutal slavery.22

  Although Malthus was not in favour of being forced to give up meat to increase agricultural yields, he did seem to assent to the vegetarians’ basic argument that populations could thereby be increased. Godwin pointed out that Malthus’ statistics reaffirmed that ‘much would be economised as to human subsistence, by the general substitution of the vegetable for the animal productions of the earth’.23 Likewise, when Shelley came to refute Malthus, he did so by embracing the greater part of his arguments, but subtly manipulating the perspective: ‘Without disease and war, those sweeping curtailers of population,’ he said, echoing the Principle of Population, ‘pasturage would include a waste too great to be afforded.’ If populations were not wiped out by war and disease, he implied, they would thrive so well that the meat industry would have to give way to the arable system to provide for all the people. The only reason why population growth had not forced a wholesale conversion to arable agriculture was because politicians allowed people to be oppressed by war, tyranny and disease. Shelley implicitly turned Malthus into a latent mass-murderer: he would prevent millions of people from coming into existence rather than make people give up flesh to increase food production.24

  The vegetarian argument renegotiated Malthus’ pessimism by denying his premise about the limited potential for increasing the carrying capacity of European agricultural land. Dismissing Malthus’ warnings as hollow, the vegetarians remained convinced that if people gave up meat and turned to the more efficient produce of arable agriculture, there would immediately be an astronomic leap in available food, leaving ample room for populations to expand. John Frank Newton took on Malthus’ anonymously published tract with exactly this argument:

  A writer on population of some celebrity has contended that the destructive operations of whatever sort by which men are killed off or got rid of, are so many blessings and benefits, and he has the triumph of seeing his doctrine pretty widely disseminated and embraced; although no point can be more clearly demonstrable than that the earth might contain and support at least ten times the number of inhabitants that are now upon it.25

  Newton’s sanguine projection that populations could be multiplied by ten went beyond even Godwin, Darwin and Shelley’s estimation, and it dwarfed Paley’s more sober calculation that they could be doubled. Although in his more visionary moments Darwin promised a hundredfold increase in populations, in his specific comments about agriculture he suggested that ten times the food could be produced on arable than on pasturage, and Shelley adopted this figure. But this did not imply, as Newton seems to have believed, that populations could be universally multiplied by ten, for that would assume that everyone currently ate meat exclusively. In 1811 Newton was still corresponding with Godwin about the exact statistics one could rely on.26

  Intriguingly, the ‘ten times’ claim has remained pervasive right up to present – demonstrating just how directly this debate has been kept alive through the intervening two centuries. The problem faced by Malthus and the Bracknell vegetarians has not changed, perhaps it has only been postponed, partly by intensifying agriculture, but also by resorting to exactly the measure that seeme
d so undesirable in the early nineteenth century: importing food from abroad. In 2003 a Research Fellow of the London School of Economics, Colin Tudge, warned that the world would run out of agricultural space if growing levels of meat production are not curbed. Like Malthus and Saint-Pierre, Tudge pointed out that a small number of animals in a mixed farming system were in fact desirable because they harness otherwise unusable resources like chaff, straw and inedible cellulose-rich plants like grass; and they provide useful resources like manure. But the basic claim remains intact, that ‘Vegetarians point out that a hectare of wheat or pulses, say, produces about ten times more protein or calories as would the same area dedicated to beef or sheep.’27

  Shelley, Godwin and the Bracknell vegetarians imagined that Malthus’ harsh law of population pressure could be overcome. Human societies could grow, competition could be eradicated, and humans could live in harmony with animals. The naturalists regarded the Romantics as absurdly ignorant of both ecology and agriculture, and Malthus, whose population dynamic was essentially an ecological model, agreed. Malthus’ forebears were outspoken in their attack on the vegetarians’ lack of realism. In the 1760s Buffon’s follower John Brückner had pointed out the naïvety of the vegetarians’ faith that arable agriculture could obviate the need to kill animals. Imagine asking the world’s nomadic animal herders to convert to vegetarianism, he proclaimed: their land was not suitable for arable cultivation; the only way they could fit in with natural ecologies was as a sustaining carnivore. Both the animals and the humans depended on this relationship to survive. The naturalist-ecologists like Buffon, Brückner and, before them, the theodocists such as Archbishop William King, recognised that the relation between humans and their domestic animals was symbiotic. The vegetarians’ desire to abolish these relationships was as absurd as it was unecological. ‘Senseless and stupid mortal!’ Brückner exclaimed, ‘This perfect calm, this universal and uninterrupted felicity they wish to introduce into the world; this beautiful chimera, will always appear possible to those who judge of things according to their imagination only.’ Brückner’s own laissez-faire attitude was arguably far more ecological than the vegetarians’ antipathy to predation. There was no sense in trying to separate humans from the rest of the ecological system. Humans had unique power, but it was both in their ecological interests and in their compassionate nature to use that power responsibly. Man, said Brückner, ‘is the only creature on earth upon whose will the preservation, or total ruin, of a multitude of species finally depend.’ Humans’ natural compassion, as well as their self-interest, was what could mitigate their dominion over the rest of the world’s species.28

  William Smellie (1740–95) translated Buffon’s work and in his Philosophy of Natural History (1790) he reiterated why Buffon’s theory flawed the vegetarians’ idea of harmonious nature. ‘Nature, it must be confessed, seems almost indifferent to individuals, who perish every moment in millions, without any apparent compunction … But, by making animals feed upon each other, the system of animation and of happiness is extended to the greatest possible degree.’ It was the destruction of individuals, observed Smellie, that facilitated the coexistence of so many species. Smellie’s warning against trying to tamper with this law of nature was just like that of Buffon and later that of Malthus: ‘If the general profusion of the animated productions of Nature had no other check … the whole would soon be annihilated by an universal famine’. Humans were inescapably part of this cycle. It may seem cruel that domestic animals were killed for food, but, Smellie insisted, ‘This is not cruelty. He has a right to eat them: For, like Nature, though he occasionally destroys domestic animals, a timid and docile race of beings, by his culture and protections he gives life and happiness to millions, which, without his aid, could have no existence.’29

  Buffon and his followers accepted the war in nature as a prerequisite for achieving the greatest number and greatest variety of species. This principle became their rallying cry. They can be charged with having fostered the ‘Fascist’ implications of ecological thought in their cool detachment from the plight of individuals in the struggle for survival.30 But theirs was the system that valued biodiversity in ways that today would be regarded as ‘ecological’. They valued biodiversity for its own sake, and their values were inherited from the ancient valorisation of ‘plenitude’ – the idea that God’s greatness was manifested in His creation of an infinite variety and abundance of life. Carnivorism, parasitism and scavenging were all essential in the planet’s ecological equilibrium. Predator and prey were intimately connected and dependent on each other: the one obtained food, the other had its populations helpfully controlled. Attempts to tamper with the intricate workings of natural ecologies invariably ended in disaster. If carnivores – humans among them – did not kill to survive, the carnivores would cease to exist and the prey species would suffer catastrophic overpopulation and subsequent annihilation.31 The same was true of human populations. Just as the vegetarians wished to prevent mass deaths of animals by stopping human predation, so they ignored Malthus’ stark observation that allowing human populations to grow unchecked would result in a devastating tragedy of mass death. This attitude, warned the counter-vegetarians, was a futile attempt to evade the human place in an ecological system of which death was an integral part.

  In the 1800s, when Shelley revived the movement of Rousseauist vegetarianism, Buffon and Brückner’s critique was once again reignited. This time by Shelley’s acquaintance, Sir William Lawrence, the young radical materialist whose theories on spontaneous variation later assisted Charles Darwin’s discoveries and earned him the undying respect of Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, Thomas Huxley, for helping to ‘break down the barrier between man and the rest of the animal world’.32 In 1814 or thereabouts, Lawrence had participated in Shelley’s vegetarian experiment and kept it up for about a year, and in 1815 William Lambe claimed that Lawrence acknowledged that it had improved his health. But when Shelley consulted Lawrence in 1815 with his chronic abdominal illness, Lawrence seems to have decided that vegetarianism was a dangerous fad and apparently instructed Shelley to eat some meat, which Shelley duly did for part of that year. Lawrence immediately went on to develop a thorough scientific attack on Shelley’s vegetarian ideals in his notorious Lectures on the Natural History of Man, delivered to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1817 and published in a summarised form in the article on ‘Man’ in Abraham Rees’ monumental thirty-nine-volume Cyclopædia; or Universal Dictionary (1819).33

  Lawrence assented that human teeth and guts were similar to those of herbivores: ‘In general, then, the human teeth and joint of the jaw resemble most those of herbivorous animals: and man approaches most nearly in these, as well as in other points, to the monkey race, which are, in their natural state, completely herbivorous.’ (The Bracknell vegetarians seized on this concession and Lambe quoted it in his own vegetarian treatises.34) Lawrence also agreed that a serious scientific experiment needed to be conducted to test the effects of the vegetable diet, though on a broader spectrum than the domestic trial he had attempted with the Bracknell vegetarians; numerous people of different constitutions would have to be tested over three generations. But Lawrence went on to insist (and needless to say Lambe excised these points from his own discussion) that ‘In stating these circumstances, we do not wish our readers to draw the inference, that man is designed by nature to feed on vegetables.’ To make this deduction, he suggested, was to misunderstand the entire meaning of ‘nature’, for as the Bracknell crowd had always agreed, ‘nature’ and ‘civilisation’ were not distinct. It was perfectly natural for humans to use their hands and the art of cookery to procure animal food. Vegetarianism, he indicated, was inherently a primitivist attack on civilisation and society. Quoting Buffon, he ridiculed the vegetarians’ beliefs ‘that, in the golden age, man was as innocent as the dove … and always in peace both with himself and the other animals.’ It was appalling, said Lawrence, that in the nineteenth century ‘men are actually found, wh
o would have us believe, on the faith of some insulated, exaggerated, and misrepresented facts, and still more miserable hypotheses, that the development, form, and powers of the body are impaired and lessened, and the intellectual moral faculties injured and perverted by animal diet.’ Shelley thought his use of ‘empirical’ evidence defied the characterisation of him as a hyper-imaginative idealist – or ‘Romantic’ in the modern idiom; but Lawrence pointed out that people like Shelley and Lambe just manipulated facts to match their idealistic dream. Vegetarianism was not scientific and it was not ecological: it betrayed a total misunderstanding about how ecologies worked.35