The famous ‘mouse utopia’ experiment demonstrated beyond a doubt that a prosperous society creates an environment of comfort, peace and happiness among a mouse population – fertile conditions for reproduction. Population grew uncontrollably and more quickly than was sustainable. Before long, there was overcrowding, increasing conflict and eventually cannibalism as the once prosperous society quickly and violently collapsed under its own weight. The theory surmises that if applied to the human population, likewise, too much of a good thing will eventually kill us all. However, humans are not mice, and experiments control variables that are less controllable in reality. Perhaps, for the human population living in the real world, the outcome might turn out surprisingly different.
The mouse experiment assumed the Malthusian idea that rapid population growth would consume the resources required for survival at an unsustainable rate, causing increasing social friction among the population as the competition for resources ramps up, eventually leading to social collapse. Following the theory, the experiment created the conditions that proved it: furnish a finite environment with an abundance of resources necessary for mouse survival, and start with a tiny population of mice. Since mice reproduce like rabbits, soon enough there was overcrowding, and a population that grew increasingly stressed over space and competition for resources. Conclusion: uncontrolled population growth turns paradise into hell. Theory proven. QED.
In many ways, the rapid growth of the human population on Earth is causing conditions that are similar to the mouse experiment. Our rates of resource consumption are already feared to be at unsustainable levels thanks to how many of our economies today depend on consumerism. Similarly, the industries that crank out the stuff we gleefully buy are also polluting our living spaces with toxins and greenhouse gases, creating climate change that threatens the sustainability of life as we know it.
Apart from depleting resources, many prosperous human population centres are dealing with overpopulation and the stresses that come with it. If people were reproducing themselves in these areas, the problem would be less emotionally reactive. Prosperous cities attract people with a slice of pie they can’t get in their home countries. This influx not only causes overcrowding in public spaces, but also competition for jobs, and sparks fears of cultural dilution. Today, countries like the United States, parts of the European Union and Australia are pushing back with anti-immigrant policies hoping to stem the tide. Such responses are reflexively xenophobic, but they reflect what people fear about uncontrolled population growth and how it eats away prosperity while reducing quality of life for the existing population. Many people today already know what it feels like living in a mouse experiment and are responding like the mice did.
But clearly human beings are not mice in an inhumane experiment. We have proven resistant, if not hostile towards uncontrolled population growth. We are not being nice mice when we turn away refugees at our borders, rail against immigrants ‘taking away our jobs’, and make qualifications for citizenship stringent, yet opaque. Call it human selfishness in protecting limited resources, but we know that uncontrolled population growth spells disaster even for a prosperous society. We can feel the water boiling and choose not to croak.
Even if we aren’t actively strengthening our borders against foreign immigrants, an interesting phenomenon is happening across practically all developed societies today: a declining birth rate and the ageing population that comes with it. The most prosperous societies are passively not having babies. Whether it’s the result of increased contraceptive use, or that individual priorities have shifted from family to career advancement, or that people are willingly (or unwillingly) choosing to not have sex any more, we seem to be, in effect, putting some hard controls over human population growth.
There seems to be an underlying pessimism present in the developed world that humanity has already f’ed up the world so badly that putting more people on it would be irresponsible. But people could be mistaken about that notion. Another variable the mouse experiment overlooks is that the mice are pure consumers of resources. In contrast, human beings steward, cultivate, multiply, and apportion resources in a way that has satisfied a steadily growing population of people for millennia. We have even been able to convert what doesn’t look like a resource into a resource (petroleum-yielding rocks for generating power, for instance) through imagination and innovation. We have also been uniquely adaptable to living in nearly every climate – except the most inhospitable ones – on the surface of this planet. That’s yet another advantage the mice didn’t have: territorial expansion.
Put us in a box, and civilization collapse through uncontrolled population growth is a foregone conclusion. But human beings don’t live in a box, can think outside the box, and can even turn the box into a resource if need be. If eventually we run out of box, there are other boxes in space we can occupy – if we can survive our initial box long enough to learn how to leave it. Long term survival of the human population depends on just one question. Are we mice, or are we men?
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Inspired by Singapore-Cambridge GCE ‘A’ Level H1 General Paper (Paper 1) 2020 Question #12