Malthus demon
In demonology, Malthus is an Earl of Hell, commanding 26 legions of demons, who is said to have a rough voice when speaking.
Malthus builds towers and fills them with ammunition and weapons, an armorer of sorts. He is a prince of Hell. He is also said to send his legions into battle, or to places designated by higher commanding demons.
He is depicted in the shape of a stork.
Rev Thomas Robert Malthus (February, 1766 – December 23, 1834), was an English demographer and political economist best known for his pessimistic but highly influential views.
Malthus was born to a prosperous family. His father was a personal friend of the philosopher and sceptic David Hume and an acquaintance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The young Malthus was educated at home until his admission to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1784. There he studied many subjects and took prizes in English declamation, Latin and Greek. His principal subject was mathematics. He earned a masters degree in 1791 and was elected a fellow of Jesus College two years later. In 1797, he was ordained and became an Anglican country parson.
I have since learned that demons are figments of the imagination, and so it is here, as well.
A recent issue of The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization was devoted to Spencer. It provides an interesting contrast in approaches. Discovery Institute Fellow (and serial occasional denier of same) Richard Weikart reprises his slander against Spencer and Darwin being responsible for the Holocaust. It seems that if you want to create a demon, the Holocaust is the event the demon must shoulder responsibility for (and not, say, the last 500 years of Christian antisemitism). That Hitler’s ideas are a mishmash of Romantic religious belief, folk religion, racist anthropology that predates Darwin and Spencer by a century or more, and in fact owes more to animal husbandry and possibly Plato’s Republic than anything Darwin set in train is irrelevant. The slander is all that matters. It’s a bit like the “blood libel” against Jews. Strike that demon! I love the way Weikart sets up a false dichotomy: either Darwin or Spencer are responsible for Hitler. That neither are escapes his eagle eye (and similar things can be said about Haeckel’s supposed contributions to Nazism, although he was more plausibly antisemitic).
