Dan Brown’s “Inferno” and the Misplaced Focus on Population
Dan Brown became one of the most famous authors in the world upon publication of The Da Vinci Code, which sold 80 million copies. To put that into perspective, that’s more than every Harry Potter book except for the first. It put forth the controversial idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children, spawning what would eventually become the Merovingean Dynasty of France and inspiring the creation of an influential secret society, whose members include Leonardo da Vinci, to guard the truth. Naturally, such an explosive idea created a lot of buzz.
When it came out in 2003 I devoured it same as what seemed like everyone else. Afterwards, I looked into the claims the book made. Scholars have debunked many of them. Also, “da Vinci” was not Leonardo’s last name but simply meant “from Vinci”, so The Da Vinci Code is a poor title. That may seem like a nitpick, but I’ve heard it many, many, many times from Renaissance enthusiasts so I figured I’d mention it.
Dan Brown’s books have many factual errors despite giving off the impression that they are well-researched and even educational. And their writing is arguably terrible. But until his latest book, Origin, which had few redeeming factors in my opinion, I still enjoyed Dan Brown’s books because of their ability to successfully play with my expectations and surprise me. Maybe the plot twists have been predictable for you, but except for Origin they’ve fooled me each time.
For example, in The Lost Symbol, Brown’s protagonist Robert Langdon, fresh off his The Da Vinci Code adventure, is being interrogated by the villain, who threatens to drown him if he won’t cooperate. There’s no tension in the scene because obviously the hero isn’t going to die. Langdon has even nearly drowned in previous books. But then the unthinkable happens. Langdon runs out of breath and inhales the fluid into his lungs. I was amazed. Dan Brown killed his main character in the middle of the book! He actually did it!
No, he didn’t. But his solution was very clever. Langdon had inhaled breathable liquid, something I’d never heard of before. I learned something from the twist, and something that was actually true for once.
Inferno also had a number of clever twists and manipulations of audience expectation. I won’t discuss them, but what struck me about them was how Dan Brown used the medium of writing to his advantage. I couldn’t think of how they’d be able to translate these twists to a visual medium. And indeed they weren’t.
But other than the twists and turns of plot, Dan Brown’s books claim to be about big ideas like the divinity of Jesus, Freemason control of America, and, in the case of Inferno, the inevitable destruction of the environment due to that awful menace overpopulation.
You’ve probably heard the refrain that overpopulation is going to lead to environmental destruction. You’ve seen the graphs of organisms growing until they hit that carrying capacity and crash.
The villain of Inferno sees this threat and takes action, planning to release a virus that the reader at first thinks will unleash a new plague on the world but in reality just leaves a proportion of the population infertile. He even successfully releases it. Though he’s an antagonist, by the end the villain is seen as a poor, misunderstood genius and it’s framed as if the fictional WHO director who tried to stop him should have listened to his ideas instead of treating him like a monster. His concerns are valid. The heroes even suggest that his victory was a good thing and that it would be wrong for them to try to reverse the effects of the virus and restore the fertility of the infected, their dreams and desires be damned.
Inferno was published in 2013, 10 years after The Da Vinci Code. It didn’t sell nearly as well but still stayed number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list for 11 straight weeks. Regardless of what you think about Dan Brown’s books, a lot of people read them and are influenced by the ideas they put forth.
That’s why I want to push back on the idea of overpopulation as a big environmental threat.
First of all, the book assumes that the population will continue to grow exponentially. The global total fertility rate has undergone a large drop from almost 5 births per woman in 1960 to 2.44, not that much higher than the replacement rate. It is below the replacement rate in most of the developed world and much of the developing world, including China and South India. Many countries that have conducted massive campaigns to reduce the fertility rate, such as Iran and Turkey, are now reversing, trying to encourage people to have more children. If these trends continue, the population will level off at 11 billion in 2100. Then, it will start declining, which will cause a host of issues that need to be discussed more than overpopulation. One of the reasons for this decrease is increased availability of contraception, which the characters scoff at when it comes to addressing overpopulation and which the book also treats as totally inadequate, along with the improving status of women in many parts of the world.
While it gets its facts on population wrong, the more fundamental issue is that the book fails to realize that the real problem is not overpopulation but rather consumption. There is no magic number of humans that the Earth can hold. Unlike algae in a pond or bacteria in a petri dish, which can exhibit the familiar trend of exponential growth to a predictable number followed by collapse, humans show huge variation in resource consumption.
For example, the country with the highest fertility rate in 2018 was Niger with 7.2 births per woman according to the Population Reference Bureau. Compare that to South Korea with its total fertility rate of 1.1, nearly the lowest in the world. So we have a difference of a factor of about 6.5. But in terms of per capita carbon emissions (which I realize is only one aspect of environmental impact) Niger has .1 metric tons and South Korea has 11.8, a factor of 118! Comparing Niger to the US with its total fertility rate of 1.8 and carbon emissions per capita of 16.5 yields a factor of 4 vs. a factor of 165. A little quick arithmetic shows that the children of the average South Korean woman will have 18 times the carbon emissions of the children of the average of Nigerien woman, and for America that figure is over 40.
The challenge facing the environment is that consumption is rising, and rising much faster than population. The villain’s plan in the book would have done nothing to solve that. Moreover, shifting the focus from consumption to overpopulation is not only foolish but also insidious. It shifts the blame to poor countries when the problem is being caused by rich countries.
So the next time you hear someone talk about the environmental risks of global overpopulation, realize that they are as far removed from reality as someone saying a secret society devoted to protecting the bloodline of Jesus is running around controlling the world.
