By Roger White, March 1994
Malthus wrote a gloomy prediction for the future of humanity. A modern paraphrase of his hypothesis would be: because human populations can grow geometrically but the resources available to humanity are limited, the end point for every civilization will be population control by disaster: war, violent internal unrest, disease or natural disaster.
Korea is an interesting case study for the Malthusian hypothesis, and offers an alternative end for a civilization that has fully exploited its resources.
The Korean Condition
The Korean peninsula lies at the heart of northeast Asia between China and Japan. It is a land remarkably free of natural disasters, and remarkably well-suited to rice growing. Korea has a monsoon, and during July and August copious rains fall on thirsty rice fields. The rest of the year Korea's is rainfall light and even.
Unlike Japan, Korean land is solid continental shield land--no earthquakes or volcanoes. Japan is solidly in the typhoon belt, Korea on the fringes. Long, large, capricious rivers water China's farmlands. These rivers flood, fail to flood, and change course. Korea's rivers are short and comparatively well behaved. The land between the river plains is heavily forested mountain--easy to defend and a good weather and water moderator.
All this makes Korea a land that is predictable. There are modest mineral resources, and it's easy to plan for their extraction, Korean farming conditions are as predictable as anywhere on earth, and the peninsula is easy to defend. The Koreans have spent generations growing rice, exploiting the land, and defending it. Koreans have grown rice since prehistory, and rice growing is a symbol of Korea in the minds of Koreans. As long as Koreans grow sufficient rice, they can't be starved out of their land. There is a proverb, "You can't split the body and the earth." which the Koreans use to explain their strong attachment to rice growing.
This gives Korea a distinctive feature: it can be self-sufficient as long as the culture remains pre-industrial. Koreans have taken this possibility for self sufficiency to heart. Maintaining self sufficiency has been the goal for countless generations of Koreans. Self sufficiency has allowed the Korean leaders to close the country from time to time to hold out foreign ideas. What all this adds up to is Korea is a stable place, and has been a stable place for generations. It has few natural disasters to drive people out, and it is easy to defend against outsiders who would come in.
Generations of stability and inward awareness make Korea a good place to watch Malthus's hypothesis in action.
Korea over the generations
I have been reading Korean history, and I've been living and talking with Koreans for close to six months now.
It appears that Korea disproves Malthus. By the beginning of the Choson dynasty in [___], Koreans had developed most of the distinctive elements of Korean culture: They had adopted Confucianism as the philosophy of government. They had adopted rice as the staple crop. Koreans knew how to make pottery, brass and iron work. They had developed an educational system to supply the government with well educated men, and they had a caste system so that all members of society knew their place.
All this was in place at the beginning of the Choson dynasty. In fact the outstanding accomplishment of 600 years of rule by the Choson dynasty seems to be simply that Koreans were allowed to keep doing the same thing--they weren't swallowed by the Chinese or Japanese during that period.
The alternative to Malthus: orderly decline
Korea during the Choson dynasty was remarkably free of unrest. There was little class warfare. The lower class people of Korea weren't in constant rebellion against the leaders, and ambitious people don't seem to dominate the history of the Choson. There were factional disputes, but these appear to be mainly concerns of different wings of the aristocracy. There are no stories of peasant heroes becoming generals or leaders.
Even the few ambitious leaders Korean history talks about have been reluctant to topple the established aristocratic families--General Yi who started the Choson dynasty for example. These ambitious leaders marry into an aristocratic family to cement their claim; they don't massacre the royal family and replace it with their own circle of leaders.
The difference between early Choson Korea and late Choson Korea seems to be that late Choson Korea was poorer than early Choson Korea. "Making do" seemed to satisfy the Choson Koreans. For instance, as the country used up its best rice land, people made do by developing marginal rice land, and by eating less. Nutrition in the late Choson appears to have been very bad. The old Koreans I see--the last of the Choson Koreans--are short and their bones twisted. This doesn't seem to be genetic, young Koreans are tall and well formed, so the old diet was poor.
As more land became rice land, Koreans "made do" by loosing other uses for the land. For instance, there are few horses left in Korea--the horse pastures became rice paddies.
So I see Choson Korea as an example of the Malthus situation--a land with rising population but fixed resources--but I don't see a Malthusian response. The Koreans didn't respond by plunging their world into chaos. There weren't endemic peasant revolts. Korean intellectuals didn't rage against their destiny. They didn't rise up against their overlords and demand a solution, an improvement, an innovation. Instead they became very orderly about extracting every ounce they could from their land.
I see this Korean end, this orderly end, as the most human result of man running out his resources on this world. Unrest comes from dashed hopes. If there is no hope, no other possible solution, then mankind becomes very orderly.
I also see the Choson example as a really scary alternative for mankind. I see the current call from eco-types to concentrate on recycling and renewable resources as a Choson alternative intellectual dead end. The eco-types have given up hope that improved technology can improve our lives, and they don't realize that improved technology can increase the efficiency of all our resources. These people are forgetting, for instance, that pounds of glass in a fiber optical cable (a non-renewable resource) replace using tons of paper (a renewable resource), and the cable transmits information millions of times more quickly.
Mankind can settle down to a peaceful, orderly existence; the Choson dynasty demonstrates that. The Choson dynasty also demonstrates that even if the existence is terminally static, it will still be stable and orderly.
The second scary thing about the Choson example is that the Koreans were shocked out of their Choson stupor by outsiders--foreign barbarians who demonstrated there were better ways of living. They couldn't shake themselves out of their own stupor. Throughout the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s, the choice of the Korean leaders was to follow their internal and historical example and carry on.
Once the global village is complete, who will be our outsiders? Who will shock us out of our "post-modern eco-stupor"? Who will show us that small scale nuclear power and recombinant genetic engineering are useful tools? Who will show us that relaxing our product liability laws may not be something we want to do, but something we have to do anyway.
Someone will have to show us. If someone doesn't, if we slip into a Choson stupor, it won't matter how much we recycle and renew--we will still be draining our resources for no reason. Human life, and life in general will remain a small and insignificant curiosity of this universe.
Progress is part of humanity. It our most important part--if it isn't, then it will be the most important part of the species that replaces us, and finds the key to leaving our solar system.