Free Vintage Reading by Robert Kanigel Page A

generations might be beneficiaries of more leisure, better education, and “better and more equal laws.”
    He argues against the “poor laws” of the time; he thought that though benevolently conceived, they did more harm than good—that they were, to the very people they were supposed to help, “grating, inconvenient, and tyrannical.”
    Malthus’s seeming acceptance of—and even justification for—human misery comes across as, at worst, tough-minded realism. He is hardly the perpetrator of the “vile, infamous theory, [the] revolting blasphemy against nature and mankind,” that Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels placed at his door.
    To be sure, Malthus was often just plain wrong. He ridiculed, for example, Condorcet’s idea for a system that eerily foreshadows our Social Security. And he pooh-poohed Condorcet’s equally prescient vision of longer lifespansand “the gradual removal of transmissible and contagious disorders by the improvement of physical knowledge.”
    But wrong or not, Malthus advanced his views and countered those of his foes with rare intellectual vigor. Which may explain, even more than those views themselves, why from the beginning they excited such fierce opposition—and why today they are remembered.
    Godwin’s utopia would ultimately lead to a time, Malthus wrote, when “the spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling breath of want... The corn is plucked before it is ripe, or secreted in unfair proportions, and the whole black train of vices that belong to falsehood are immediately generated. Provisions no longer flow in for the support of the mother with a large family. The children are sickly from insufficient food. The rosy flush of health gives place to the pallid cheek and hollow eye of misery. Benevolence, yet lingering in a few bosoms, makes some faint expiring struggles, till at length self-love resumes his wonted empire and lords it triumphant over the world.”
    A “Malthusian nightmare” if ever there was one.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
    ____________
    By Edward Gibbon
First published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788
    “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”
    Before the great project was finished 24 years later, it embraced the whole Roman Empire and spanned a period from the emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century A.D. to the fall of Constantinople in 1452.
    The first of Gibbon’s six-volume history, while warmly received by the public, incurred the wrath of clerics and scholars. For Gibbon had dared explain the rise of Christianity paralleling Rome’s decline, largely in human terms. Oh, the correctness of Christian doctrine, Gibbon had dutifully noted, was of course the primary reason for its success. But as “the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart... to execute its purpose,” he had accordingly explored these secondary causes.
    This fiction fooled no one. For the “secondary” causes included the Machiavellian intrigues of popes and bishops, the rapaciousness of the crusaders, the zealotry of monks and martyrs, and the like. Unlikely to endear Gibbon to the church, for example, was his observation that monks capable of inflicting pain upon themselves in pursuit of spiritual purity rarely felt much “lively affection for the rest of mankind. A cruel, unfeeling temper has distinguished the monks of every age and country: their stern indifference, which is seldom mollified by personal friendship, is inflamed by religious hatred.”
    Plainly, then, Gibbon’s monumental work is no dreary listing of dates, kings, and battles. Despite its great length, it rarely bogs down in tiresome detail; Gibbon has already done the selecting, has