Category: Articles

In some circles, there is now what appears to be an established, unquestioned and largely unchallenged consensus that modern agriculture is an unsustainable failure and responsible for any number of ills in our society. The media and our larger cultural discourse are riddled with well-orchestrated misinformation about our food supply and how it is produced. Every ill is blamed on modern food production. An outbreak of E coli 0157:H7 in spinach was widely blamed on industrial. Months later when the source was identified as being organically grown spinach and that the E coli probably came from free range cattle in a low density ranch across the river, it was old news and largely unreported. In fact, it is difficult to find any reporting of it in either mainstream media or alternative media. There are numerous other incidences such as avian influenza or swine flu where the initial news got it totally wrong. In the case of avian influenza, the mythologies cumulated through time from its origins to its transmission. The anti-modern agriculture ideologues know the cause of all our food ills before they happen and are quick to put in Op-Ed pieces (including in the Houston Chronicle, in this case via the L.A. Times) and otherwise voice their opinions blaming “industrial agriculture.”  Those who await the evidence from scientific inquiry will find that contrary opinions are again not accepted because they are no longer news. Unfortunately the internet and the abiding faith of the anti-modern true believers means that no matter how thoroughly the original myths are factually refuted, they tend to live on in cyberspace to be called forth years later as needed.

All too often, what the critics propose would make our food less safe in the name of protecting us from the evils of industrial agriculture. A demagogic cooking program on a major television network initiated a tirade against “lean textured beef” (LTB) which was called pink slime. This was followed by news stories that were almost as bad on that same network, and by a national campaign led by a local activist that resulted in school districts across the country no longer serving it in school lunches, and supermarket chains no longer selling it. The local activists proudly wrote an op-ed piece for the Houston Chronicle which had an editorial praising it and endorsing her work. What the overall publicity succeeded in doing was closing three of the four meat processing plants that were considered by both industry and food safety experts as among the safest if not the safest in the country. A call to the Texas A&M Center for Food Safety or the A&M Department of Animal Science would have obtained an informed contrary view. If the local network affiliate, the Chronicle or the activist contacted A&M, it was lost to me in the voluminous noise on the subject. I have a huge file on this matter and I would both like to comment further and debate both the activist and the editorial writer when the libel suit filed against several of the parties including the network and the local activist is settled. To my knowledge, it has not been but I could be wrong.

One of the proffered remedies for the alleged dangers of lean textured beef was for the consumer to pick out a cut of beef and either have the butcher grind it for you or for the consumer to grind it at home. Any food safety expert can see the real dangers in doing this and I will leave it to the reader to find out why. When confronted with the safety procedures at the LTB plants such as testing for toxins (STECs) not tested for by other producers, an activist dismissed this added safety procedure on the grounds that the 2011 sprouts outbreak in Germany that killed 53 and sickened 3,950 was caused by a previously unknown bacteria, E. coli 0104:H4. Somehow, we were confronted with the logic that because of the possibility of unknown bacteria lurking out there somewhere, food safety would be furthered by closing the safest plants. May I add that the sprouts were grown organically.

Sprouts have been continuing source of E coli and salmonella. One national chain with local outlets had salmonella outbreak in one area of operation followed by an E coli outbreak in another. Following these and a multitude of other instances another chain also with local outlets suspended its offering of raw sprouts as did several grocery chains. Basically the humidity and temperature for sprouting seeds are almost perfect for culturing various harmful bacteria from even the slightest contamination. Most all known methods of cleaning them with solvents are not effective as there are a multitude of niches in which the bacteria can be safe. There is one sure safe way of cleaning sprouts – irradiation – but restaurants and food stores know the demagogic campaigns that will be waged against them if they offered them. Forget the dirty little secret that many spices have been irradiated and for very good food safety reasons. I will forego revealing which brands are irradiated and which are cleaned in other ways since it is likely that none of the readers could tell the difference.

Let us step back a bit and look at some population data to get an idea of what modern agriculture has achieved. In other words, let us look at how many people are being fed today compared to previous times and how quickly this transformation has taken placed. These are numbers that I go over repeatedly in class because they are illustrative of the changes in food production that had to take place. Let us start about 500 years ago in 1500 in the Common Era when world population was around 400 million people. That number was to double to 800 million people in 1800 reaching 1 billion in 1830 and 1.6 billion in 1900. Population reached 2 billion in 1930 adding another billion to 3 billion in 1960 and doubling to 6 billion in 2000. Today, world population is between 7.2 and 7.4 billion. This means that world population has increased nine times in a little over 200 years. Even if one uses other population estimates for the pre-1900 populations such as population reaching 1 billion by 1800, it still means more than a seven fold increase in population in a little over two hundred years.

Let me add as I will argue below, the world is better fed today than ever before. Let us look at the dates such as 1800. This was two years after the 1st edition of “An Essay on the Principle of Population” by Reverend Thomas Malthus which was first published in 1798. If someone in the 1790s had forecast a seven or nine fold increase in population in the next 200+, even William Godwin or the Marquis de Condorcet against whom Malthus was arguing would have had trouble being optimistic about the prospects of feeding 7+ billion people.

From 1960 to 2000 when world population doubled, food supply increased 270% or 35% per capita with the largest increase in the developing world such as East Asia where the per capita increase was closer to 70%. In fact since 1960, per capita food production and availability has increased on every continent except Africa. Africa has seen a number of countries turn their food production around in the last decade. In the 1960s, we had Paul Ehrlich and others making wild predictions about famine and almost unimaginable mass deaths. Some of the doomsday forecasters are still around today, and remain unabashedly critics of the modern agriculture that helped us to avert the mass catastrophes that they so confidently expected.  None will ever admit that they were wrong.

Looking more closely at the population data, historically, global population growth has been associated with declining death rates and not increasing birth or fertility rates. Some economists have looked at population growth in Europe and often found that countries with the fastest rates of population growth also had the highest rates of economic growth. It is not always clear in which direction the causality runs but it does show that the population issue is much more complicated than the catastrophists realize.

Since 1950, it is certainly true – as one writer has claimed, mixing his metaphors – that global population has grown not because we are breeding like rabbits but because we are not dying like flies. From 1950 to the present, decade by decade data indicate the most rapid decline in the global birth rate that is known to us. In 1950, fifty million people died of all causes. For the next 30 plus years as world population was close to doubling from 2 ½ billion to close to 5 billion in the 1980s, the number of people dying each year was fifty million or below. Now with a population close to three times that of 1950, the number of people dying this year will likely be less than 60 million. An aging population is an important factor in the increase number of deaths in addition to an increase in population.  

It should be noted that if the births and death rates of 1950 were projected to the year 2000, the population would have also reached just over 6 billion only with a lot more births and deaths along the way. Projecting these rates to 2050 would give us over 15 billion people. Current projections are for about 9 billion, possibly 10 billion for 2050 with some demographers predicting a declining population after 2050. In other words, the best way to control population is to bring down the infant and child deaths. Thus far, this has led people to want fewer children knowing that the smaller number will survive. Population programs promoting voluntary population control can be helpful maybe even essential but they work best when other factors such as declining death rates are operating.  To ignore these other factors dooms population control programs to likely failure.

In other areas, the data is as spectacular. The infant mortality rate today is about 1/3rd of what it was in 1950. In 1960, the first year in which the under-five child mortality figures were calculated, close to 20 million children died. Than number fell to 12 million in 1990 and declined slowly until about 2004 when the decline accelerated reaching 6.9 million in 2011 and 6.6 million in 2012. That number is clearly lower today. If the 1990 rate prevailed currently, 14,000 more children would be dying each day. Maternal mortality has also accelerated in its decline being down 47% since 2000. Global life expectancy has increase more than 20 years since the 1950s.  One of the class projects for both of my classes this semester will be a presentation with graphs and charts etc. showing the number of people, adults, infants and children who are not dying each year because of the transformations of the last half century.

There are many factors that account for these declines in death rates. Immunization and antibiotics clearly top the list. It is hard to imagine these interventions working their magic without an improvement in food availability beginning in the womb. This observation is re-enforced by the global increases in average height which require improved nutrition.

In 1950, close to 60% of the world’s population was in hunger. In 1960, roughly 50% of the world’s 3 billion people were in hunger. Since then, there has been an almost continuous decline in in the rate of hunger reaching around 12 to 13% today.  These figures also reflect an absolute decline in people in hunger from 1.5 billion to just under 800 million today. Add in another 1.2 billion malnourished human beings and that gives us a total of 2 billion people malnourished with 800 million of them in hunger also. However, horrific these numbers maybe, they also mean that over 5 billion people are getting adequate food today – an extraordinary achievement!

From the press release for the Human Development Report 2013 (I have read the entire report for which this release is accurate): “Over the past decades, countries across the world have been converging towards higher levels of human development, as shown by the Human Development Index,” says the 2013 Report. “All groups and regions have seen notable improvement in all HDI components, with faster progress in low and medium HDI countries. On this basis, the world is becoming less unequal (Human Development Report 2013: The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, UNDP, http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/hdr/human-development-report-2013/).

However spectacular these trends maybe, they are not grounds for complacency. There is a critical need to understand the basis of these trends if we are to continue or even accelerate them. One would hope that in the lifetime of readers of this article that they will see the spectacular changes that I have been privileged to see and in a small way be involved in. With enough effort and understanding hunger, malnutrition and preventable deaths will be eliminated. It will not be achieved by shouting feel-good slogans or by romantic visions of nature and agriculture.

Apart from the favorable trends just noted, at some level of discourse, one has to credit modern industrial agriculture with simply its ability to accommodate these increases in population without the predicted catastrophes and to ask whether there were alternate pathways that could have gotten us to the Twenty-first century. It would be naïve to believe that we could have achieved these levels of population growth and food supply increases without creating problems.  Contrary to fairy tales of living in harmony with nature, agriculture however it is carried out disrupts the environment. If we act intelligently, we can try to minimize the disruption and try as best as possible to work with various forces of the environment rather than against them. But some disruption is inevitable and the larger the change in population and food production, the greater the potential for disruptions that have to be corrected.

If you look at the population growth data from 1500 to 1900, you will find that it was concentrated in two population groups, Chinese and Western European peoples in Europe and the areas of the world in which they colonized.  For the Chinese it was improved varieties of paddy rice that allowed for an additional crop each year and new crops such as sweet potatoes from the New World. For Europe and emigrants of European descent around the globe, it was as we will argue the rise of science, technology and the industrial revolution. For both the Chinese and the European populations, the addition of new crops from the New World was also important.

Part of the transformation of European agriculture after 1500 was simply to catch up with agriculture as practiced in China for hundreds of years. In the European Middle Ages, China was obtaining about a ton of wheat per hectare while Europeans were generally getting about 500 pounds. For every wheat seed planted, Europeans were getting (by the best estimates available) about 4 ½ + seeds back. Needing to plant one meant that the farmer received a net of about 3 ½ seeds for eating. Plant breeding in the 17th and 18th centuries got the seed to yield ratio for wheat to about 1 to 7 or 8. For the activists with their slogans of save the seed and claims that farmers have been doing that since time immemorial, it should be noted that the 17th century English plant breeders were frequently criticized for replanting their own seeds instead of importing them from north England or Scotland.  Today, the seed to yield ratio for wheat is about 1 to 20.

However important the plant breeding of the gentleman farmers was, even more important was the new crops that came to Europe.  Maize and potatoes came from the New World in what is called the Columbian Exchange. Though sugar cane came from India, Europeans would be getting it from the Caribbean at a critical time in their history. Corn (maize to the rest of the world), potatoes and later sugar cane have been demonized by the critics of modern agriculture yet they played an absolutely essential role in allowing the transformations in Europe in the four centuries from 1500 to 1900. Corn with its high yields per hectare or acre and its high sugar content made excellent silage for cows and its seeds for chickens increasing the milk, meat and eggs for the population. There is a growing literature in economics on potatoes with their high yields both for feeding animals and allowing fewer people on the land to feed a growing urban population not only allowing for the Industrial Revolution but also for the growth in Universities with their arts and music and their science. Urban life and all of its manifestations as it developed in Europe from the 17th and 18th century onward would not have been possible without corn and potatoes. As Robert Fogel has shown, by the end of the 18th century, much of the population received barely enough calories for basal metabolism and the work that they had to carry out. In the 19th century, sugar from the Caribbean, those proverbial empty calories, provided the additional energy to help drive the expansion in population and the economy.

By the 19th century, Europe’s success in getting ever increasing amounts of food out of the same amount of land began to take its toll. If you grow food one place and eat it someplace else, you will be mining the soil. Farmers can use various strategies to try to mitigate the decline in fertility but eventually they will have to replenish the lost soil nutrient. Agriculture is not a form of magic though many seem to view it that way. Repeat it was the increasing success at growing more food to feed a rapidly growing population that created the potential crisis.

Fortunately chemistry was able to provide new understandings that allowed for the emergence of modern agriculture and its ability to address these problems. It was believed that humans could not create organic compounds; only living matter could. In 1928, Friedrich Wöhler was able to synthesize urea providing at least some of the foundation for organic chemistry and signaling the end of vitalism. How and why he did it is a matter of some controversy but the fact is he did it. Justus von Liebig followed in the 1830s and 1840s analyzing the chemical constituents of plants and what chemicals were needed in the soil to grow them. He argued that minerals from non-living sources in the soil could be used to provide the required nutrients for plants.  He also posited his famed Law of Minimum stating that a plant or other organism was limited in its growth by the least available nutrient.

In 1843, John Bennet Lawes founded the Rothamsted Experimental Station to study organic and inorganic fertilizers and their impact on crop yields. It is now the longest continuously operating agricultural station in the world. What Rothamsted showed and has continued to show was that Liebig was essentially correct and that non-living matter can provide plant nutrients.  

Opposition to Liebig formed the basis of the modern organic or biodynamic (as it is called in Europe) movements. First it was argued that it would not work.  Rothamsted and the growing effective use of fertilizers proved the critics wrong. So others conceded that it would work but that the plants lacked vital properties. Currently the litany runs that these plants are less nutritious. Writers such as Michael Pollan seem almost obsessed with Liebig as they offer a gross distortion of his ideas.  In accusing him of “NPK mentality” reductionism, they clearly do not understand or maybe are not even aware of his Law of Minimum. Pollan’s work such as the “Omnivore’s Dilemma” is so riddled with basic errors of fact that it can best be described as empty calories for nutritionally deficient intellects.

Chemistry was necessary but not sufficient to solve the problems of 19th century declining soil fertility in Europe and parts of North America. One of the most interesting chapters in world history was the mad rush by various countries including the United States to claim uninhabited islands for their guano. Guano was definitely a depletable resource but by the early 20th century, chemistry once again came to the rescue with the Haber-Bosch creation of synthetic fertilizer.  

Modern Scientific Agriculture as land sparing

Had crop yields had remained at the 1900 level, “the crop harvest in the year 2000 would have required nearly four times more land and its total (nearly 60 MKm2) would have claimed nearly half of all ice-free continental area rather than the less than 15% the agricultural lands claim today” ( “less than 15%” is actually about 12% agricultural land area would have had to more-than double its actual 1998 level of 12.2 billion acres to at least 26.3 billion in order to produce as much food as was actually produced. Thus, agricultural land area would have had to increase from its current 38 percent to 82 percent of global land area. Cropland would also have had to more than-double, from 3.7 to 7.9 billion acres. In effect, an additional area the size of South America-minus-Chile would have to be plowed under. Thus increased land productivity forestalled further increases in threats to terrestrial habitats and biodiversity” (http://goklany.org/library/Water%20International%202002.pdf , Comparing 20th Century Trends in U.S. and Global Agricultural Water and Land Use By Indur M. Goklany, Water International, Volume 27, Number 3, Pages 321–329, September 2002 , International Water Resources Association).

Currently, about 12% of ice free land is being cultivated while another 24 to 26% is pasture for a total of circa 38%. Statements by Smil and Goklany about how much land that we would need to produce current output assume that the additional land would be of equal quality to that already in production. In other words, as these authors well know, their estimates of land needed are considerable understatements. At either 1900 or 1961 yields, it is quite likely that we could not produce today’s output.  In the U.S. today, we have less land under cultivation for corn than we did in 1925 yet our output is at least seven times higher.

From my own article Green Myth vs. the Green Revolution (Butterflies and Wheels 2004): 

The yield-increasing, land-saving nature of the Green Revolution has reduced the pressure to put more land under the plow. Indeed, the recent data bear out this interpretation: Indian food grain output has continued to grow at a healthy rate of 3 percent annually through … 1981-1991 while the land under cultivation has actually decreased annually (Nanda 2003, 243 citing Sawant and Achuthan 1995; Hanumantha Rao 1994). The enhanced Green Revolution yields in the primary food/calories source, makes more land available for a variety of other crops and greater diversity in the population’s diet. This is counter to the conventional wisdom about the Green Revolution and its impact upon diet and nutrition. Sawant and Achuthan found the “decisively superior performance of non-foodgrains vis-a-vis foodgrains” to be the “most striking feature of India’s agricultural growth in the recent period (Sawant and Achuthan 1995, A-3). For 1981-1992 in India, the compound annual growth rates (CAGR) of non-foodgrains of 4.3 per cent “exceeded significantly that of foodgrains” at 2.92 per cent. Though there was annual decline of O.26% in the area of food grain cultivation, “it is important to recognize that foodgrains output continued to grow at the rate of 2.92 per cent as the growth in yield per hectare exceeded 3 percent” for a CAGR of 3.19 per cent, all of which indicates an “an increasing shift of land from foodgrains to non-foodgrains” (Sawant and Achuthan 1995, A-3). “The entire output growth in this period can, therefore be attributed to the increase in yields per hectare” (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 12). –

Hanumantha Rao, C. H. Agricultural Growth, Rural Poverty, and Environmental Degradation in India. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Nanda, Meera. “Is Modern Science a Western Patriarchal Myth? A Critique of the Populist Orthodoxy.” South Asian Bulletin XI(1991):32-61.

Nanda, Meera. Breaking the Spell of Dharma: A Case for Indian Enlightenment. Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2002.

Nanda, Meera. Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003

Water and Fertilizer

The modern rice varieties have about a threefold increase in water productivity compared with traditional varieties. Progress in extending these achievements to other crops has been considerable and will probably accelerate following identification of underlying genes…Genetic engineering, if properly integrated in breeding programs and applied in a safe manner, can further contribute to the development of drought tolerant varieties and to increase the water use efficiency…Overall, The best estimates are that “the water needs for food per capita halved between 1961 and 2001″ (FAO 2003 28). Higher yields “require” more fertilizer, as the more nutrient is extracted from the soil, the more it has to be replaced. Norman Borlaug in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech states: “If the high-yielding dwarf wheat and rice varieties are the catalysts that have ignited the Green Revolution, then chemical fertilizer is the fuel that has powered its forward thrust … The new varieties not only respond to much heavier dosages of fertilizer than the old ones but are also much more efficient in their use” (Borlaug 1970). The old tall-strawed varieties would produce only ten kilos of additional grains for each kilogram of nitrogen applied, while the new varieties can produce 20 to 25 kilograms or more of additional grain per kilogram of nitrogen applied (Borlaug 1970). Not only are the Green Revolution plants more efficient in fertilizer use, but equally important has been the improvement in the use and application of fertilizer. For example, there has been a 36% increase in “N efficiency use in maize” in the United States over the last 21 years as a result of improved knowledge and technology (Blair and Blair 2003). –

Blair, Graeme and Nelly Blair. Fertilizer is Not a Dirty Word, Paper prepared at the IFA-FAO Agriculture Conference, “Global Food Security and the Role of Sustainable Fertilization,” Rome, Italy, March 26-28, 2003.

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). Unlocking the Water Potential of Agriculture. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2003.  

http://www.fao.org/ag/AGL/aglw/aquastat/kyoto/index.stm.  ftp://ftp.fao.org/agl/aglw/docs/unlocking_e

Borlaug, Norman. The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, December 11, 1970. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1970/borlaug-lecture.html

https://www.academia.edu/195371/The_environmental_impact_of_dairy_production_1944_compared_with_2007

The environmental impact of dairy production: 1944 compared with 2007 by Jude Capper, Journal of Animal Science, Vol. 87, March, 2009, pp.2160-2167.

ABSTRACT:

“A common perception is that pasture-based, low-input dairy systems characteristic of the1940s were more conducive to environmental steward-ship than modern milk production systems. The objective of this study was to compare the environmental impact of modern (2007) US dairy production with historical production practices as exemplified by the US dairy system in 1944. A deterministic model based on the metabolism and nutrient requirements of the dairy herd was used to estimate resource inputs and waste outputs per billion kg of milk. Both the modern and historical production systems were modeled using characteristic management practices, herd population dynamics, and production data from US dairy farms. Modern dairy practices require considerably fewer re-sources than dairying in 1944 with 21% of animals, 23%of feedstuffs, 35% of the water, and only 10% of the land required to produce the same 1 billion kg of milk. Waste outputs were similarly reduced, with modern dairy systems producing 24% of the manure, 43% of CH 4, and 56% of N2O per billion kg of milk compared with equivalent milk from historical dairying. The carbon footprint per billion kilograms of milk produced in2007 was 37% of equivalent milk production in 1944. To fulfill the increasing requirements of the US population for dairy products, it is essential to adopt management practices and technologies that improve productive efficiency, allowing milk production to be increased while reducing resource use and mitigating environmental impact.”

Part 2

The Type III (or Type IV) ranking of glyphosate was long ignored by the anti-biotech opponents of Ht cotton as was the assessment by WHO and various Cancer societies that it was not likely a carcinogen. Suddenly with the new findings, the same groups are now demanding policy actions based on the findings of a source which they long implicitly discredited by ignoring it. Any credible evidence that does not support their firmly held beliefs does not exist in their universe. Nor did they indicate any awareness of the array of more toxic pesticides that were replaced by glyphosate or the resulting significant improvement in the Environmental Impact Quotient (EIQ – “The EIQ impact assessment is based on the three principal components of agricultural production systems: a farm worker component, a consumer component, and an ecological component.”) and other measures of toxicity and environmental impact. (A Method to Measure the Environmental Impact of Pesticides – http://www.nysipm.cornell.edu/publications/eiq/ and
http://cars.uark.edu/ourwork/Cotton%20Toxicity%20Final%20Report%203.3.10%20Project%2009-591.pdf, Glyphosate and Cancer and Why It’s Still Recommended for Weed Control – http://hyg.ipm.illinois.edu/article.php?id=657).
In March 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) convened 17 scientists from 11 countries to evaluate existing science on five pesticides, including glyphosate. The group deemed glyphosate “probably carcinogenic,” the second-highest designation given out by IARC behind “carcinogenic to humans.”  (https://news.vice.com/article/the-most-widely-used-herbicide-in-the-united-states-could-cause-cancer-in-humans-says-a-world-health-organization-study  see also   IARC Monographs Volume 112: evaluation of five organophosphate insecticides and herbicides – http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/MonographVolume112.pdf  and Carcinogenicity of tetrachlorvinphos, parathion, malathion, diazinon, and glyphosate – http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(15)70134-8/fulltext  ) –This previously non-existent evaluation was suddenly noticed and its alleged conclusions spread at warp speed throughout the NGO even though the final report was not due out until July 2015.

As would be expected, those who leaped on the initial report either did not read beyond the headlines or simply over-interpreted it to suit their ideological needs. The initial brief for glyphosate clearly distinguished between consumer use where there was no change from the previous conclusion of not being a hazard at the dosages encountered and occupational use, primarily in agriculture where there was a potential hazard  but a risk factor was not given.  It is important to note, that there were no new studies or data, just a re-evaluation of existing studies. It is understandable then that a number of regulatory agencies in U.S. and Europe quickly re-affirmed, in some case strongly re-affirmed their previous determination as to the safety of glyphosate.

One of the worst distortions of the report was on VICE an HBO presentation that was offered as a balanced look at GMOs. The host of the program, Isobel Yeung interviewed critics of GMOs clearly with the questions that they wanted asked while aggressively questioning a distinguished scientist (and Monsanto vice-president) on a rather trivial point that she did not seem to understand.  The program was unbalanced throughout (Savior Seeds: VICE on HBO Debrief (Episode 31) Isobel Yeung, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLYbnfz3OU4 –Unfortunately, the full program is available only to subscribers).

Towards the end of her program, there are two brief snippets from an interview with Dr. John McLaughlin a member of the IARC committee that made the re-assessment of the toxicity of glyphosate and other chemicals. The snippets were either a case of creative editing – the video equivalent of cherry-picking – or extreme cleverness in asking questions that would only get the answers she sought.
Fortunately, Dr. McLaughlin was on a long program with another scientist where the interviews were not edited (The Agenda with Steve Paikin: The Last Roundup Debate – http://tvo.org/video/212783/last-roundup-debate). He distinguished between hazard and risk and indicated that as a hazard, the new assessment was a worst case scenario and not a risk factor. Even for agriculture, the major potential occupational hazard, “McLaughlin says that if the glyphosate is used according to instructions given by Health Canada, it is not a health risk” (Video: Canadian scientists say glyphosate hazard but not health risk – http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/04/29/video-canadian-scientists-say-glyphosate-hazard-but-not-health-risk/  ).

Agroecology is currently the rage among activists in developed countries simultaneously increasing yields and protecting the crop against pests of all kinds. It needs to be stated that all agriculturalists are agroecologists in that they recognize the agriculture takes place in differing environments which must be understood if one is to be successful in producing a crop and sustaining production through time. It is not a perspective invented by and unique to urban activists in developed countries who have never in out in the field and had to deal with real problems of producing a crop.

It is easy for a representative from Consumer’s Union on a panel in Manhattan to proclaim “We favor a knowledge-based approach rather than a chemical-based approach to increasing production” without having to identify and implement these “knowledge-based’ solutions. Walter De Jong, a Cornell University agriculturalist on the same panel “was shocked at how people who don’t live near farms feel entitled to advise farmers, especially on environmental matters.” He adds that “There is a romantic notion of environmentalism, and then there is actual environmentalism.” In addition, “farmers are very conscious of the environment. They want to hand off their operation to their kids and their kids’ kids, so they maintain the land the best they can while doing what they need to do in order to sell their harvest,” (Contemporary Selective Breeding. Plant Edition. http://fafdl.org/blog/2015/06/06/contemporary-selective-breeding-plant-edition/, see also  The Return of a Simplot Conspiracy – http://www.cc.com/video-clips/ixxwbt/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-the-return-of-a-simplot-conspiracy ).
No one would deny that an intensive study of agroecology as a scientific inquiry and discipline could yield many insights and make a substantive contribution to agricultural development throughout the world. The problem is that it has become a religion and not a science and is being offered in exclusion to other approach and not complementary to them. The larger problem is that as such, they don’t work except in the minds of urban activists mentally and physically divorced from the realities of agriculture.

Nathanael Johnson asks the question – “Why aren’t  agroecological techniques farming spreading faster among poor farmers?” Johnson proceeds to list the many virtues of agroecology. Children in school and in 4H clubs are taught agroecology and organic methods. This has been going on for decades yet when they become adults and actually farm, they use pesticides. “It could be that organic methods just aren’t working for poor farmers”(Even this organic advocate thinks African farmers need herbicide by Nathanael Johnson – http://grist.org/food/even-this-organic-advocate-thinks-african-farmers-need-herbicide/ ).

A title of paper by a dedicated scientist is revealing – “Facing food insecurity in Africa: Why, after 30 years of work in organic agriculture, I am promoting the use of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides in small-scale staple crop production” by Don Lotter.

“Food insecurity and the loss of soil nutrients and productive capacity in Africa are serious problems in light of the rapidly growing African population. In semi-arid central Tanzania currently practiced traditional crop production systems are no longer adaptive. Organic crop production methods alone, while having the capacity to enable food security, are not feasible for these small-scale farmers because of the extra land, skill, resources, and 5–7 years needed to benefit from them—particularly for maize”

Lotter further argues “Conservation Agriculture (CA) in Africa has two main categories—organic and herbicide-mediated. The organic version of CA, despite years of promotion, has had a low rate of adoption. Herbicide-mediated zero tillage CA via backpack sprayer can substantially increase conventional maize yields while at the same time nearly eliminating erosion and increasing rainwater capture up to fivefold.”

And the pesticide that he advocates is Glyphosate a herbicide “which is a non-proprietary product produced in Africa and approved for small farm use. The systemic nature of glyphosate allows the killing of perennial grasses that would otherwise need deep plowing to kill. The rooted weed residues protect the soil from erosion. The risks of glyphosate use are substantially outweighed by the benefits of increased food security and crop system sustainability” (Agriculture and Human Values March 2015, Volume 32, Issue 1, pp 111-118 , http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10460-014-9547-x).

They don’t work is a refrain I and others have often heard in the developing world.

After World War II, antibiotics and pesticides such as DDT seemed like miracles saving lives and crops and killing disease vector insects such as malaria bearing mosquitoes. They were cheap and effective. We quickly learned how to use them but unfortunately, we did not at first know when not to use them. This could only be learned by making mistakes of overusing them.

In many parts of the developing world, modern synthetic pesticides came in the 1960s with the Green Revolution. For those for whom losing a crop to disease or insects was a constant threat, pesticides had the same status as antibiotics and vaccines that also saved human lives.

The time to spray again was defined by the calendar and not by objective conditions in the field. In the 1970s and beyond, when various IPM programs emerged to facilitate using less pesticide and using them more effectively, the task became one of convincing the farmer. To the farmer who as a child or young adult experienced the devastating effect of a crop lost, convincing them to use less pesticide was not an easy sell.

A story that I have often told was about interviewing a farmer about his use of pesticides in growing cabbages. I asked him what would he say if I told him that a farmer across the valley harvested the same size crop that he did but used less than half the pesticide that he did. He very calmly and politely replied that he would not believe me.

The following articles and the quotes from them might make some interesting reading for those who remain adamant that it is beyond the realm of belief that a pesticide could be anything other than a POISON.

Glyphosate and AMPA inhibit cancer cell growth through inhibiting intracellular glycine synthesis by Li Q, Lambrechts MJ, Zhang Q, Liu S, Ge D, Yin R, Xi M, You Z, Journal of Drug Design, Development and Therapy, Vol. 7, July 24, 2013, pp. 635-643

“This study provides the first evidence that glyphosate and AMPA can inhibit proliferation and promote apoptosis of cancer cells but not normal cells, suggesting that they have potentials to be developed into a new anticancer therapy.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC89043/

Antimicrobial Agents Chemotherapy, Vol.43, No. 1, January 1999, Pp. 175–177.

Targeting the Shikimate Pathway in the Malaria Parasite Plasmodium falciparum By Glenn A. McConkey. Antimicrobial Agents Chemotherapy, Vol.43, No. 1, January 1999, Pp.175–177.

“The sensitivity to shikimate analogs suggests that the shikimate pathway is viable for malaria chemotherapy. The 50% inhibitory concentrations of these analogs are below those of some currently used antimalarial drugs (13). … Therefore, shikimate analogs may act as universal inhibitors of apicomplexan parasites, such as Toxoplasma gondii and Cryptosporidium parvum, which cause opportunistic infections in patients with AIDS.”

“Based on the observations that mice were protected by 6-fluoro-shikimate from intraperitoneal bacterial infection (2) and that mice were cleared of Toxoplasma by treatment with a glyphosate-pyrimethamine formulation (13), the effectiveness of 6-fluoro-shikimate on malaria treatment awaits testing in rodent models.”

Evidence for the shikimate pathway in apicomplexan parasites by Fiona Roberts^1,2,3, Craig W. Roberts^1,2,3,4, Jennifer J. Johnson³, Dennis E. Kyle⁵, Tino Krell⁶, John R. Coggins⁶, Graham H. Coombs⁶    Nature,  Volume 393 Number 6687, June 25, 1998, pp 801-805.

“The discovery of the shikimate pathway in apicomplexan parasites provides new opportunities for the development of antimicrobial agents effective against these parasites. The inhibitor used in these studies, glyphosate, should be a valuable lead compound in this process. A variety of derivatives of glyphosate are currently being used to elucidate structure–function relationships for inhibitors of plant EPSP synthases¹⁸, and a similar approach could be useful for characterizing the active site of the parasite enzymes. Inhibitors of chorismate synthase¹⁹ and other enzymes within the shikimate pathway also are being developed in the search for new herbicides and antimicrobial agents effective against bacterial and fungal pathogens. These too may be useful against apicomplexan parasites. Indeed, because many other microbes that cause opportunistic infections of AIDS patients, including Pneumocystis carinii²⁰ and Mycobacterium tuberculosis²¹, also have the shikimate pathway, there is now the exciting possibility that compounds with broad-spectrum activity could be useful against several opportunistic pathogens “

—

Could malaria be killed by a garden weedkiller? by Helen Phillips, Nature News, Volume 394, Number 6688, July 2, 1998, doi:10.1038/news980702-2.

“The parasites that cause malaria, toxoplasmosis and cryptosporidiosis are all members of a group of microorganisms known as the Apicomplexa. This group of parasites kills well over one million people each year, and includes some of the most common opportunistic infections of AIDS patients. New medicines to treat these infections are needed urgently.

“In the 25 June 1998 issue of Nature one team of researchers describe how they are well on the way to finding such a treatment. The downfall of the Apicomplexa might turn out to be a common herbicide.

“A herbicide may sound like a strange treatment for a parasitic microorganism. But plants and many microorganisms share a common biochemical pathway that other living forms – notably humans – don’t have. An agent that disables this pathway will kill plants and microorganisms, but will be completely harmless to humans.

……..

“The researchers conclude that ‘such combinations should be useful for the treatment of toxoplasmosis. Furthermore, they could also have applications against other diseases caused by apicomplexan parasites, such as malaria.”
THE SHIKIMATE PATHWAY by Klaus M. Herrmann and Lisa M. Weaver, Annual Review of Plant Physiology and Plant Molecular Biology, Vol. 50, June 1999, pp. 473-503.

Source

Department of Biochemistry, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907; e-mail: Herrmann@biochem.purdue.edu, Monsanto Company, St. Louis, Missouri 63198; e-mail: Lisa.m.weaver@monsanto.com
Abstract

“The shikimate pathway links metabolism of carbohydrates to biosynthesis of aromatic compounds. In a sequence of seven metabolic steps, phosphoenolpyruvate and erythrose 4-phosphate are converted to chorismate, the precursor of the aromatic amino acids and many aromatic secondary metabolites. All pathway intermediates can also be considered branch point compounds that may serve as substrates for other metabolic pathways. The shikimate pathway is found only in microorganisms and plants, never in animals. All enzymes of this pathway have been obtained in pure form from prokaryotic and eukaryotic sources and their respective DNAs have been characterized from several organisms. The cDNAs of higher plants encode proteins with amino terminal signal sequences for plastid import, suggesting that plastids are the exclusive locale for chorismate biosynthesis. In microorganisms, the shikimate pathway is regulated by feedback inhibition and by repression of the first enzyme. In higher plants, no physiological feedback inhibitor has been identified, suggesting that pathway regulation may occur exclusively at the genetic level. This difference between microorganisms and plants is reflected in the unusually large variation in the primary structures of the respective first enzymes. Several of the pathway enzymes occur in isoenzymic forms whose expression varies with changing environmental conditions and, within the plant, from organ to organ. The penultimate enzyme of the pathway is the sole target for the herbicide glyphosate. Glyphosate-tolerant transgenic plants are at the core of novel weed control systems for several crop plants. “

The concern over the Bt. Is a subset of the obsession, some might legitimately call it hysteria over the safety of transgenic using recombinant DNA (rDNA) to produce agricultural crops, particularly food plants generally called genetically modified or GMOs. It is easier to scare people than educate them. Need a new term for some forms of ignorance that is less pejorative. In the vast array of human knowledge, the best any one of us can do is to master small portion of it. In another words, all of us are uninformed or ignorant or at best minimally informed about all the rest of knowledge.  True ignorance is when an individual or group has an absolutely unshakeable conviction on a subject such as agricultural biotechnology about which they know nothing and even worse, about which they are certain that they know is egregiously in error. Ignorance is the one crop, the lucrative cultivation of which anti-GMO NGOs have mastered even though they may not have raised any other crops or done anything to help feed people. Financial nutrient for the organization seems to take precedence over nutrition for real people.

Ironically, in recent years, it has been conventionally bred varieties of crops such as celery, potatoes and zucchini that have been removed from the market because they were expressing large amounts of their naturally occurring toxins.  Celery – contains psoralens that increase sensitivity to sunlight that can lead to dermatitis or chloracne and being a mutagen, can lead to skin cancer. Celery also contains goitrogenic compounds that interfere with the uptake of iodine into the thyroid. Potatoes contain highly toxic compounds known as glycoalkaloids, of which the most prevalent are solanine and chaconine. Zucchini may occasionally contain a group of natural toxins known as cucurbitacins. In 2002 in New Zealand, highly toxic zucchini led to sickness and hospitalization for those who ate it (Killer Zucchini. Life Sciences Network, 2003. http://www.lifesciencesnetwork.com/news-detail.asp?newsID=1122). . I was in New Zealand later that year and discussed this with the scientists who investigated it and have written on it. However, the following account is worth quoting at length because of the many issues important that it raises.

“The most recent episode was an outbreak of “killer zucchini” which produced the “only food scare in recent history in New Zealand” and interestingly it “stemmed from the farming methods of organic farmers and others who use unconventional farming practices” (LSN 2003). In February 2003, Zucchini with “high levels of natural toxins” was sold on the vegetable market and resulted in “several recorded cases of people suffering food poisoning” (LSN 2003). We often worry about the toxicity resulting from spraying crops but rarely are we as concerned about those from not spraying them.

“An examination of common factors shows the levels of toxin apparently increased among zucchini growers who did not spray their crops. Unusual climatic conditions meant there were huge numbers of aphids about in January and insect predation is sometimes associated with increased levels of toxins in plants (LSN 2003).

“In this case, there was a “clear link between increased toxin levels and older open-pollinating varieties of seeds” (LSN 2003). It is another of the “inferior is superior” views that there is something inherently virtuous in farmers planting their own saved seeds but it is “likely zucchini grown from saved seed will therefore be more vulnerable to toxin build-up” (LSN 2003).

“The scientists who reviewed the “killer zucchini” case were very clear that the “most likely cause of the build-up of toxins is a genetic weakness in older varieties.” However worthy the farmer’s intentions may have been, “the growers’ decision to use older varieties and to save seeds is likely to have resulted in a health risk for consumers – something which has never happened with crops derived from genetic modification” (LSN 2003).”

In virtually every country in Asia and elsewhere in areas that benefited from the Green Revolution increases in wheat and rice and the increased yields from hybrid corn, the % of land under cultivation to primary grains has actually been decreasing while the % of land globally under cultivation to fruits and vegetables has increased substantially (more than tripled since 1980 by my calculations, closer to doubling by others). From 1980 to 2004, fruit production increase 3.6% per year and vegetable production increase 5.5% per year. Only 4% of this increase occurred in developed countries. (World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development, World Bank, page 58, and  Horticulture for Poverty Alleviation – The Unfunded Revolution, AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center, 2005, http://www.avrdc.org/pdf/WP15.pdf , page 3 -“The worldwide supply of fruits and vegetables per capita has increased continuously since 1961.” page 5, “Between 1970 and 2000, annual growth rates in vegetable yields have been impressive in South Asia (1.8%), Latin America and the Caribbean (1.7%) and East and Southeast Asia (1.6%).” page 9, “25% increase in fresh fruit and vegetable consumption in the USA between 1977 and 1999,”

I try in a small way to immunize my students against scare tactics by having a one class period devoted to some of the things that are in your food about which you would prefer not to know when you are eating it. The general tenor of the class is a big loud so what? –If in fact the disgusting things in your food improve it in any way either by appearance, taste or texture then so what? And of course, if there is no harm from eating it then again, so what? Finding a list of 10 or 15 or 20 of the supposed grossest things in your food is easy.  Using a search engine will bring up more lists than you need or want. Most all the lists have a sub-text on the evils of modern food production.

Beware the rhetorical question that is designed for you to give the answer that the questioner is seeking. I have a couple of my own. How about – do you want rat poison in your children’s milk? Well yes if it is a calciferol that provides vitamin D 2 (ergocalciferol) and vitaminD-3 (cholecaciferol) both of which are constituents of many rodenticides.  The synthesis of this “rat poison” in the 1920s was one of the important medical advances of the time as it contributed to preventing rickets which was all too common at that time.  It also allowed along with electric lighting for domesticated chickens to lay eggs all year long and was an essential element in raising egg production from  an annual average of 83 per chicken in 1900 to the over 300annual  average today. We have all eaten dog poison, namely chocolate. Most of us if asked know that chocolate is lethal to our beloved pets but do not think of it in that way when we eat it.

What about Ethyl butyrate in our orange juice or martinis? Now that is a chemical and it is used as a solvent in a number of products (nail polish remover) and also as a plasticizer in cellulose. The Ethyl butyrate in your reconstituted orange was originally a natural constituent of the oranges themselves.

It is fun to send the students   looking   for what foods that they eat that have Castoreum  or Cochineal in them. Castoreum comes from beaver’s   castor sac (often called an anal gland because of its proximity to the posterior) and is secreted (or an exudate) in the urine to mark a trail for the beaver.  What could be more natural? Cochineal is a scale insect that is cultivated on cactus in Mexico and has been ground up and used as a food coloring for centuries by the Mayans.

Many of these lists are from websites or groups that criticize modern food production for its alleged waste yet also criticize it for finding uses for the entire animal finding ways to use parts that are not found appetizing in our culture.  Some of these are constituents of what are prized in other cultures such as Haggis among the Scots and blood sausages for the Argentinians. Being raised in New Mexico, I remember Rocky Mountain oysters with great affection.  Or how about what has been identified as the roe or the “fully ripe internal egg masses in the ovaries, or the released external egg masses” of sturgeon except that most of us know it as caviar.

One site even criticized “cheese makers” for using   “rennet derived from the mucosa of a veal calf’s fourth stomach to create the beloved, versatile dairy product” a process used for making certain types of cheeses for several thousand years. Modern biotechnology has provided us with GM chymosin enzyme for rennet cheese which passes muster for vegetarians if they are not ideologically opposed to GMOs.

Processed food has become a code word for modern food evil. Could we not consider wine to be processed grapes and fine cheeses and yogurts and other delicacies as being processed milk?

One of the silliest complaints found   spiraling   through   cypher space is the disdain for having chicken feathers or duck feathers or even human hair or cow horns in our bread and a variety of other products. What many are getting excited about is the extraction of L-cysteine from these for various food and other uses. L-cysteine is an amino acid and therefore a nutrient. For infants and children and even some adults, it is an essential amino acid.

If the critics would calm their hysteria and think about it a minute, they would have to consider this one a plus for the hated “industrial agriculture.” They have taken what would otherwise be a waste product (except maybe for stuffing pillows) and extracted a nutrient from it and added it to the food that we eat. Maybe the organizations and websites promoting these fears don’t want their followers to think about it. Ironically, some of those most vociferous about the “right to know what they are eating” are among the most ignorant of what is in their food or at least its significance.

One of the true achievements of modern science and agriculture is that it finds uses for so much of what is grown and thereby reduces waste. Waste such as not picking crops because they do not have an appearance that is saleable is a separate matter and is deplorable and is rightly condemned. Waste because in our affluence we overstock our refrigerators and then dispose of the inevitable spoilage is also deplorable particularly when there are still so many in hunger. But fuller utilization of what we produce is commendable.

Critics of biotechnology with zero knowledge or experience in agriculture often argue that we should attack world hunger by reducing waste rather than advancing new agricultural technologies. Some of us prefer to use all means at hand both by reducing waste, by increasing output and by seeing that those in need get their fair share. I actually had the good fortune of having someone make the reducing waste argument to me. When I asked him what forms waste takes in poor countries, he did not know but was sure that was what he wanted to work on. In reality, he wanted to dictate how and what those actually working on issues of hunger would do. He was blissfully unaware of the basic fact that farmers and others have been working on reducing post-harvest food loses everywhere and for as long as we have had agriculture.

A favorite rhetorical question uttered by anti-biotech activists is do you want a virus in the DNA of the GM food that you eat? This is raised because as part of the transgenic process small viral segments have been inserted into some plant DNA. Little do they know that through the history of life on this planet, viruses have found a convenient way of replicating themselves by simply becoming part of the invaded organism. As much as 2/3rds of the human genome consists of whole viral sequences or recognizable parts of them.

Modern science and technology have in fact transformed the environment and converted waste into nutrient, it has transformed that which has harmed us into food stuff or medicine. The fungi Claviceps purpurea produces a toxic, ergot, which infested grains such as rye and maize and caused enormous pain called St Anthony’s fire throughout human history. My wife and many others have taken ergot for relief from migraines. This is one of a number of cases where we have taken a poison and used it for medicine or a pain killer or anesthesia. Friedrich Nietzsche’s famed quote – generally translated as “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Probably has more truth than Nietzsche himself may have realized.    .

There are a whole raft of other truly disgusting things in the foods that we eat but you will not find them (with a very few exceptions) on the disgusting food lists because their being in our foods does not serve an anti-modern food production agenda. Rat feces or even bits of a rat itself in your cereal or toast or cookies are not pleasant thoughts when eating ones breakfast. . One must not forget the multitude of insects and micro-organisms   that “contaminate” the food that we eat. These and many more can be found in the USDA/FDA Defect Levels Handbook: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods that Present no Health Hazards for Humans found at  http://www.nal.usda.gov/nal_web/fsrio/fseddb/fseddbsearchdetails.php?id=1412 “This booklet includes the source of each defect and how the defect affects the food. The information is helpful as a quality control tool in food operations.” Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/G
uidanceDocuments/Sanitation/ucm056174.htm.

The term Unavoidable Defects in Foods that Present no Health Hazards for Humans says it all. They have been part of the food that we humans have eaten   for as long as we have been eating. As with the Fusarium/fumonisin mentioned above, some of the micro-organisms in our foods produce highly harmful toxins if the dosage is high enough. The dirty little secret that our foodie activists ignore is that modern food production, storage, transporting and processing have reduced these harmful products to extremely small (but not zero) manageable levels. This has not always been the case as our progenitors often suffered mightily from them and as with the cases above with the fumonisins, many poor people today still suffer from them. When you discard a food item because it has become infested with a fungus, think of the poor subsistence family that has a choice of eating something similar or not eating at all.  A quick search will turn up numerous articles in medical journals such as the Lancet of the severe organ damage to those who have little choice but to eat contaminated food. Contrast with tolerance level measured in parts per billion in many foods of “industrial agriculture” that we are privileged to eat.

An ongoing myth is that the manufacturing of L-tryptophan,   using a genetically- modified   bacteria was responsible for an epidemic of Eosinophilia-Myalgia. in the United  States in the 1980s.. This enduring legend remains one of the enduring factoids of the anti-GM movement in spite of massive evidence to the contrary. To the believers, no explanation is required as to how the manufacturing transformed the L-tryptophan   and what pathway or action in the human body would result in the condition of Eosinophilia-Myalgia. When presented with peer reviewed in an email that demonstrated the pathway to Eosinophilia-Myalgia from overdosing on L-tryptophan – a common practice at that time -, one of the leading lights, author,  guru of the movement responded within an hour that nothing in the article – assuming that he read it? –altered his opinion. What more could you expect when your movement is represented around the world by a former ballroom dancing teacher with no training in science who believes that if a enough people in an area engage in something called “yogic flying,” it creates an “harmonic convergence” that will lower the crime rate and raise the average intelligence (A heretofore undisclosed crux of Eosinophilia-Myalgia Syndrome: compromised histamine degradation by M. J. Smith1 and R. H. Garrett2 Inflammation Research, November 2005, Volume 54, Issue 11, pp 435–450).

Most vitamins are either harvested from soybeans which are likely transgenic using hexane a potent solvent   or manufactured by bacteria in huge vats in Japanese chemical companies, shipped to the U.S. in huge containers to factories where they are put in pill form in a bottle labeled all natural for a stand- alone vitamin that we mostly get as part of complex proteins.

NOW BACK TO OUR TITLE – A Pesticide as Medicine?

Our question is asked in an news article in Nature news a week following  an article in Nature that explored the possibility that pesticide Glyphosate could possibly be used to treat malaria in other words as medicine.  Could malaria be killed by a garden weed killer? Asks Helen Phillips in Nature News,( Volume 394, Number 6688, July 2, 1998, doi:10.1038/news980702-2) The answer, yes it is possible and also by the same understanding, Glyphosate might also be able to treat other diseases.

“The researchers have also found other shikimate-pathway enzymes in T. gondii and P. falciparum, each one a potential target for new drugs, and plan to try other new combinations of treatment. They have worked out the genetic sequences of a gene that produces one of these enzymes, which may turn out to be a powerful tool in the hunt for a ‘designer’ drug.

“One real advantage of this approach to treatment will be for AIDS patients. Because the immune system of these patients is suppressed they often suffer from multiple opportunistic infections, including pneumonia and tuberculosis, as well as some of the apicomplexan infections. As all of these organisms also have the shikimate pathway, the researchers say “there is now the exciting possibility that compounds with broad-spectrum activity could be useful against several opportunistic pathogens” (Could malaria be killed by a garden weedkiller? By Helen Phillips, Nature News, Volume 394, Number 6688, July 2, 1998, doi:10.1038/news980702-2.)

How could that be possible? Glyphosate works by disrupting the Shikimate pathway in plants causing them to die. A plant’s metabolic process takes energy from the sun  and uses it along with the plant nutrient to create among other things amino acids. The Shikimate pathway is used by the plant for the biosynthesis of the aromatic amino acids including tryptophan which we discussed above. The Shikimate pathway is also used by bacteria, fungi and algae but not animals. We humans and other animals get our amino acids from plants and other animals. Since we do not have to manufacture our amino acids (though we do transform them), it saves our energy for other uses.  Plant photosynthesis using energy from the sun is the ultimate source of both our nutrients and the energy to use them.

In other words, what makes Glyphosate toxic to plants and micro-organisms does not make it toxic to humans. One life forms poison may be another life forms nutrient or at least be neither.  That does not mean that there might not be other toxic side effects for humans but that is an open question and not settled as many fervently believe. Glyphosate has the potential of being medicine for the same reason it is a pesticide – it kills or retards the development of what harms the plants that we are trying to grow or kills or retards the growth of that which harms us. The number of articles in reputable peer reviewed scientific journals strongly suggests  that it may not be toxic to humans or at least not sufficiently toxic to offset possible benefits for disrupting the Shikimate pathway of invasive organisms that harm.  This is in line with the long standing ranking of the toxicity of glyphosate as being type III in a ranking where type I is the most toxic and type III (sometimes a Type IV is added) is the least toxic. Since this article was first drafted, the IARC (WHO) has reclassified Glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen. Since then, a number of scientific agencies that previously approved Glyphosate for use in agriculture have reaffirmed their prior findings contrary to IARC findings. I will leave it to those knowledgeable about the scientific issues to make any further assessments.

Part 3

What is in a name?  Plenty! The mere hint or even question suggesting that a pesticide might have any medicinal value would strike many as being ludicrous while to many others if not most others, it is beyond belief and therefore there is no need to continue reading. PESTICIDES ARE POISON! They are inherently evil and any attempt to define them in any other way makes one a member of a corporate cabal or a servant of them.  For those brave souls still reading, let us begin with a few definitions or concepts – oversimplified but not incorrect.

Poison – disrupts a vital function or functions in a living organism or organisms that could lead to death but not necessarily so. There are many confounding factors including one’s immune system and, most important in toxicology, the dose and which organism is attacked.

Toxin – essentially the same as poison, but with some exceptions largely refers to a substance created by a plant or micro-organism, most often for defensive purposes.

Dose – The well-established principle of toxicology is that: Dose makes the poison. Or as stated by Paracelsus (German speaking doctor, Swiss, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493 – 1541) who is credited with the concept: All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous (in Greman – Alle Ding’ sind Gift, und nichts ohn’ Gift; allein die Dosis macht, daß ein Ding kein Gift ist). The demand of many for “zero tolerance” violates this basic principle of toxicology and is theology or ideology masquerading as” science protecting the public.” For vital nutrients for humans, there are amounts below which result in deficiencies and above which are toxic often with similar outcomes. Much the same is true for plants.

Medicine – For infectious diseases, medicine would largely be something that kills the living organism that causes the infection. In such instances, a medicine would be a form of poison. Medicine as an anti-biotic is simply the use of a toxin (poison) produced by another living organism – a fungus, bacteria or plant – to kill the living organism or organisms that have invaded the human body and are causing harm or possible death. In the last half of 19^th century, with improved microscopes and aniline dyes, scientists could see into the cell and into the blood stream. Koch, Pasteur and others were able to identify the micro-organisms that caused some of the world’s most deadly infections. With the dyes, not only could one identify the micro-organisms, but it was also clear that they responded differently to the dye than did the surrounding blood and tissue. Consequently, if a substance could be found that killed the micro-organism but not the human (or domesticated animal), it would be medicine.

NOTE – Dose makes the poison in medicine in more ways than one. Most everyone knows that not taking enough of a medicine might do more harm than good.  For example – patients not completing a treatment for TB led to the emergence of more lethal drug resistant varieties of TB. Dose is also important in that the medicine can kill the infectious agent and also otherwise hurt the patient, known as side-effects. The choice often is between either letting the infectious agent kill you or allowing the medicine to harm you while saving your life. (On a personal note – I had three of the deadliest infections known to humans. I gave up a leg to survive one of them. For the last of the three, I was being given antibiotics that damaged the kidneys – their more general use had been discontinued decades earlier because of that. The dosage was very carefully monitored as were my kidneys which were “badly” damaged up to the point but not beyond that would allow the kidneys to recover which to my good fortune, they did.) Medicine and poison are therefore relative terms both relative to the organism and as a balance between benefit and harm. Chemotherapy in cancer treatment would be an excellent example of the balance between benefit and harm. Ironically, one says it is a medicine if it is more likely to save you than kill you!

Pesticides – Poisons that could also be considered as plant medicines. (Are you still with me? Have I lost more of you?) In fact, in Indonesia where I worked, pesticides were known as obat  – medicine – or obat pembunuh hama  meaning medicine that kills disease.  Designating a pesticide as medicine may seem preposterous or even insane to the urbanites in developed countries. It makes perfect sense to farmers in many developing countries. Their precious food crops (and other crops) have been regularly getting sick and dying for them and for those who came before them. If they now have something that kills what kills or harms their food crops and allows the plants to return to health, it is medicine in every reasonable sense of that term.

A pesticide as medicine for plants operates with similar constraints as medicine for humans. A pesticide must kill or damage that which is bringing harm to a crop be it a micro-organism, an insect, rodent or another plant competing with the crop for nutrient including light. As with other medicine, a pesticide has to do no harm to the crop or at minimum less harm than that with which it is afflicted. A pesticide has any number of other constraints such as not harming non-target species such as other desired plants, beneficial insects and of course humans. In other words, pesticides must kill a targeted insect or weed without otherwise reducing a desired condition of biological diversity. Like antibiotics for humans, pesticide use must have a strategy of killing targeted micro-organisms, insects or weeds in a manner that minimizes their ability to develop resistance to it.

With or without pesticides, a farmer has to find ways of protecting her or his crop. The more successful agriculture is, the more it concentrates nutrient in an open field. (We will obviously neglect greenhouses and hydroponics for this note though they are not without problems including invading organisms.) Nutrient for humans is likely to be nutrient for a host of other creatures (but not all) including birds, rodents, other wild animals, insects, micro-organisms etc. and be grown in soil with nutrients that supports competitive plants. One way or another, the crop has to be protected. Farmers have been doing this for thousands of years and it has often been with arsenic and other toxins that afflict the target species but are also toxic to humans and a range of other creatures. Many like Michael Pollan seem to believe that the use of pesticides was an invention of modern agriculture (identified as industrial monoculture) which requires its use while agriculture as traditionally practiced did not.

It is naïve in the extreme to believe that organic farmers do not use pesticides as farmers always have. The USDA has “The National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances” for organic agriculture which includes both “natural” and synthetic pesticides. Nor is there any evidence that natural pesticides are any safer or better than synthetic ones. A number of the pesticides used by organic farmers are also used by conventional farmers. In other words, natural pesticides have their uses but if they were superior in every way, there would be no need for synthetic pesticides either in organic or conventional modern agriculture.

Most important among the non-target organisms that should not be harmed by a crop protecting pesticide are of course the humans who will apply the pesticides, those who harvest and later handle it and of course the eventual consumers who eat it. There are more short and long term considerations of pesticide use than we can even begin to discuss here which not only complicates the issue but provides for an unending stream of discourse and debate. Rarely do we discuss the problems of not using pesticides beyond that of losing the crop. Plants in the wild including those that were later domesticated by humans had to protect themselves. They did so by producing substances that are toxic to the organisms that threaten them. Plants were and remain chemical factories that produce a huge array of chemicals. The only choice for those who wish to avoid chemicals in their food had better stop eating.  In the fall term, just before Thanksgiving, I circulate a Holiday Menu provided by The American Council on Science and Health listing some of the many chemicals in the foods that grace our table for the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holiday.  (For nearly 30 years, I have served on various Boards for ACSH and am currently on the Board of Scientific Advisors.)

Humans through time in domesticating plants have selected through the centuries for matters like taste and yield. Many of these attributes selected for, particularly taste, tend to lessen a plant’s ability to defend itself thus needing more defense from the farmer. Modern plant breeding including biotechnology has allowed for the creation of plants with improved defenses. Even so, plants remain chemical factories. Most plant toxins are secondary metabolites and are largely expressed when the plant is invaded. The greater the invasion, the greater will be the likely expression of toxins.

In recent years, it has been argued that organic produce has more nutrients than conventionally produced produce because they are less well protected. When offered by Michael Pollan, it places him on a slippery slope to a place where he does not want to go. First, most of the alleged increased nutrients are anti-oxidants for which there is no evidence of any benefit. In fact, there are a number of studies that show serious potential harm from too many anti-oxidants including one that shows increased risk of diabetes (Reactive Oxygen Species Enhance Insulin Sensitivity, Cell Metabolism, Volume 10, Issue 4, 260-272, 7 October 2009.

Even more, Pollan in effect concedes a toxin or a poison is not necessarily an absolute and that what is toxic to one organism may be a nutrient to another. Another trick used to allege greater nutritional value for organic food is to pick a nutrient in a food which is a poor source for that nutrient. Thus an otherwise insignificantly small increase in that nutrient can be presented as a large percentage increase. A plane with a safety record of one in a million fatalities is twice as risky as one with a safety record of one in two million but few of us would seriously disrupt our travel schedule just to get the “safer” plane. There are a number of factors that could explain small differences in nutrients other than the ones that those dredging the data are seeking to establish as the cause.

Cherry picking nutrient increases because plants are less well protected ignores the other secondary metabolites also expressed that might not only be toxic to invasive organism but also to humans.  As Bruce N. Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold have demonstrated  in a number of peer-reviewed articles in major scientific journals (for example – http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cpdb/pdfs/Paustenbach.pdf and http://ec.europa.eu/environment/ppps/pdf/ma_reding_annex2.pdf), 99.9% of the chemicals that humans ingest are natural but the dosage is sufficiently small as not to be dangerous in most cases.

The aptly named confirmation bias allows those convinced of a belief to find a nugget or two of evidence for their convictions in a mountain of data. Ignored are the large scale meta-studies that find no significant difference in nutritional value between organic and conventionally grown food.

“Results: From a total of 52,471 articles, we identified 162 studies (137 crops and 25 livestock products); 55 were of satisfactory quality. In an analysis that included only satisfactory quality studies, conventionally produced crops had a significantly higher content of nitrogen, and organically produced crops had a significantly higher content of phosphorus and higher titratable acidity. No evidence of a difference was detected for the remaining 8 of 11 crop nutrient categories analyzed. Analysis of the more limited database on livestock products found no evidence of a difference in nutrient content between organically and conventionally produced livestock products.

“Conclusions: On the basis of a systematic review of studies of satisfactory quality, there is no evidence of a difference in nutrient quality between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs. The small differences in nutrient content detected are biologically plausible and mostly relate to differences in production methods” (Nutritional quality of organic foods: a systematic review, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol. 90 no. 3, September 2009, pp. 680-685. See also Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives? : A Systematic Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 157. No. 5, September 4, 2012).

The other question is – are they safer. As we will attempt to show below, there is reason to believe that organic agriculture produces a less safe product.

“The Bt. protein in transgenic Bt. corn is toxic to insects with a base digestive and receptors for the toxin but not necessarily to humans who eat the corn where the Bt. toxin, a protein is broken down to its constituent amino acids in our acid based digestive system.  Certain proteins in tree nuts that can be fatal to some human beings are simply nutritious proteins to other human beings.  There is considerable literal truth to the adage that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. There is ongoing international research on proteins that are allergenic to humans.

(See for example – Protein Allergenicity Technical Committee (PATC),   ILSI Health and Environmental Sciences, Institute.)

Researchers encountering a novel protein can consult the descriptions of known allergens for similarities.  And they can conduct allergenicity tests on it.

Given that increasing yields has allowed more corn to be grown on less land there by leaving more land to return to forests or other vegetation, Bt. corn and other Bt. crops have provided an environmental benefit as has the overall land sparing ability of modern agriculture. Though there is not a scintilla of evidence for any harm from the Bt. corn crop to non-target insects, to the environment or to humans, there is considerable evidence that the crop product itself is safer.

When the Corn borer works its way into the corn plant, it will carry a fungus, Fusarium ear rot into the plant. Simply the act of breaching the plant’s outer defenses makes it more susceptible to disease invasion. The Fusarium ear rot express  neurotoxins called fumonisins. The Bt. protection reduces considerably any fusarium infestation of the corn crop  (Munkvold GP & Hellmich RL (1999) Comparison of fumonisin concentrations in kernels of transgenic Bt maize hybrids and nontransgenic hybrids.”  by Gary P. Munkvold, Richard L. Hellmich, and Larry G. Rice, Plant Disease, Vol. 83, No. 2, February 1999, pp. 130-138).

Fumonisins Disrupt Sphingolipid Metabolism, Folate Transport, and Neural Tube Development in Embryo Culture and In Vivo: A Potential Risk Factor for Human Neural Tube Defects among Populations Consuming Fumonisin-Contaminated Maize by Walter F. O. Marasas, Ronald T. Riley, Katherine A. Hendricks, Victoria L. Stevens,  Thomas W. Sadler, Janee Gelineau-van Waes, Stacey A. Missmer, Julio Cabrera, Olga Torres, Wentzel C. A. Gelderblom*, Jeremy Allegood, Carolina Martínez, Joyce Maddox, J. David Miller, Lois Starr, M. Cameron Sullards, Ana Victoria Roman, Kenneth A. Voss, Elaine Wang and Alfred H. Merrill, Jr.  Journal of Nutrition The American Society for Nutritional Sciences, 134:711-716, April 2004.

“State and national investigators would eventually find that Brownsville had an astonishingly high rate of anencephaly, as the condition is called. From 1989 through 1991, 32 women in this town of 130,000 carried anencephalic babies. Many of the children died within hours, and all within days, of birth. … From the beginning, many residents suspected the pesticides that armor nearby fields of cotton and sorghum. Others blamed the chemicals that waft from industries along the Rio Grande. Some parents of affected infants even shared a $17 million settlement from more than 80 maquiladoras – U.S. factories hugging the Mexican side of the river – in 1995. … But now, state health officials wonder whether the culprit was not man-made, but a natural fungus that can cling to corn. The fungus makes a toxin, called fumonisin, unknown to science until 1988. … Fumonisin (pronounced few-MAHN-i-sin) is spit out by the mold Fusarium as part of its chemical defense system. For decades, farmers and ranchers have known that animals can fall seriously ill if they eat corn that has been coated with Fusarium, even if the kernels later seem clean. People in parts of the world with high Fusarium growth, most notably the Transkei region of South Africa, have high rates of esophageal cancer. But it wasn’t until 1988, when South African scientists first described fumonisin, that anyone knew exactly why the mold was dangerous.”

(Corn toxin examined in border birth defects   Diet may have put Hispanics at risk by LAURA BEIL, The Dallas Morning News Saturday, February 4, 2006.  See also Exposure to Fumonisins and the Occurrence of Neural Tube Defects along the Texas–Mexico Border by Stacey A. Missmer,^1,2 Lucina Suarez,³ Marilyn Felkner,³ Elaine Wang,⁴ Alfred H. Merrill, Jr,⁴ Kenneth J. Rothman,⁵ and Katherine A. Hendricks   Environmental Health Perspects,  Vol.  114, No. 2, February 2006, pp. 237–241. And Bt corn reduces serious birth defects by Bruce Chassy and Drew Kershen, Western Farm Press, October 27, 2004)

Part 2

In recent years, the issue of gay rights in Africa has generated intense debate and discussions. Some countries have tried to tighten the laws against homosexuality and prohibit same sex marriage. They claim homosexuality is an evil, corrupt and immoral lifestyle which western societies are trying to impose on African nations.

Concerned individuals, state and non-state actors have been campaigning and lobbying to beat back the tide of homophobia that is threatening to engulf the region. It is frustrating to know that as is often the case when dealing with Africa-related issues, many people have tried to infantilize African agency in the raging homophobia by looking for some western or colonial scapegoats, and they have found one in the activities of the American evangelists who supported the Uganda “Kill the Gays” bill.

It is quite in order to condemn the activities of these evangelists of gay hate and persecution, but I think there has been much more focus on the role of American evangelists than on their African counterparts. In fact the situation has been presented as if Africans are not contributing to the problem of homophobia in Africa and beyond. The role of African migrant churches that are championing a reverse missionary project and spreading and exporting the gospel of gay hate and intolerance to western countries has been ignored.

Many African Initiated Churches are establishing branches in western countries where they propagate what they call “Africanized Christianity,” that is, Christianity with an African flavor in terms of ritual, worship and interpretation of the Bible. The notion is that American and European Christianities have drifted from preaching the true word of God by espousing teachings and practices that are incompatible with what many African church leaders define as “true Christianity”. However this is only a ploy to create a gospel niche which they could use to teach doctrines that are literally against the laws and human rights provisions in these countries such as the human rights of homosexuals.

One of such churches is the Redeemed Christian Church of God. Not too long ago, the General Overseer, Rev Enoch Adeboye came out strongly in support of Nigeria’s anti-same sex marriage bill which was later passed into law. The pastor said that the practice of homosexuality would lead to the extinction of humanity.

He said:

Same-sex marriage is an anathema to the will of God for human beings to be fruitful, replenish and multiply on earth. Anything contrary to that is evil … How can a man who marries a fellow man produce a child and how can a woman who marries a fellow woman produce a child?

According to Adeboye:

If this evil is allowed to stay, there will not be newborns again in the world. As the older generation dies, will there be a new generations to succeed it? Even plants and animals have new generations to succeed them.

He called on people practizing same-sex marriage to desist and flee from the wrath of God, warning that God frowns on same-sex marriage.

The Redeemed Christian Church of God has branches in western countries and across the world, including those where same sex marriage is legal or at least not treated as a criminal offense. These churches look up to Rev Adeboye for spiritual guidance.

Another of Nigeria’s mega-Pentecostal churches – the Mountain of Fire and Miracle Ministries (MFM) – preaches against the practice of homosexuality as well. The church has ‘‘Deliverance Prayers Against Homosexuality and Sexual Perversion’‘. MFM regards homosexuals as sexual perverts in need of salvation and redemption. One of the prayer points of the Los Angeles branch of MFM urges those who are caught in the sexual bondage of homosexuality, lesbianism and other forms of sexual immorality to understand that their bondage can be broken ‘through the power of the blood of Jesus’. The branch of MFM is in New Jersey, an affiliate in Houston has the same prayer programs which partly reads:

Romans 6:14

Sexual sins open the doors for all kinds of evil spirits to enter, This prayer program is for those:

● Who would like to be delivered from the spiritual contamination resulting from past sexual sins.
● Who would like to be delivered from their present sexual lusts, enticement, and other sexual sins.
● Who would like to expel sexual satanic deposits acquired by sleeping with demonised people.
● Who had been a commercial sex worker in the past.
● Who frequently dream of having sex.

Don’t despair if the enemy has subjected you to such a depth of immoral degradation. You would be lifted up to the height of purity, which God has purposed for you as you call upon him to help you.

● Rom. 1:22: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”
● Please, open your Bible and slowly, meditatively read Rom. 1:18- 32 and Leviticus 18:1-30

Are you surprised at the things you’ve just read? Indeed there is nothing new under the sun! (Ecclesiastes 1:9) Basically the laws of God concerning sexual perversion as stated in Leviticus 18 can be divided into 5 groups. They are laws against:

– -incest (I.e having sex with close relatives, brothers, in law’s uncles etc., there are 20 categories of close relatives stated between verses 6 & 19)
– adultery (vs 20)- idolatry I.e. Offering child sacrifices (vs21)
– – homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation, prostitution etc (VS 22)
– – bestiality (having sex with animals (vs 23)

Are you caught in the bondage of any of these? Indeed the chains of habit (perversion) are two weak to be felt till they are too strong to be broken. All kinds of sexual bondage can be broken through the power of the blood of Jesus. There is hope for you, the Bible says, “Sin shall not have dominion over you” (Rom. 6:14) because, “ The law of Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Rom 8:2)

Another branch of the church in Houston in a typical Mugabean style compared homosexuals and lesbians to dogs. It says on its web site:

The Bible refers to homosexuals and lesbians as dogs. Anyone who has ever engaged in these kinds of things would need to receive deliverance from the spirit of the dog, which has entered into him or her. Generally, in the spirit world, dogs symbolize sexual perversion. So, if you see yourself being pursued in the spirit by a dog, check your sexual life. It means that something must be wrong somewhere, whether in your heart or your activities. Psalm 22:16 says, “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have in closed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.”

Another transnational Nigerian church that openly propagates anti-gay gospel is the the Deeper Life Bible Church (DLBC). The General Superintendent of Deeper Life Bible Church (DLBC), Pastor Williams Kumuyi, recently stated the church’s opposition to gay marriage and homosexuality:

We are in the forefront of those fighting what they call homosexuality, whether here in Nigeria or outside…The marriage between members of the same sex is anti-Bible, satanic and anti-God. DLBC can never support homosexuality. We are against it.

While Pastor Faith Oyedepo, the wife of the General Overseer of the Winners Chapel, David Oyedepo, has urged church members against homosexual practices:

“The dictionary defines a homosexual as one who is sexually attracted only to people of the same sex as oneself. God defines it as an abomination. The Word of God says: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination” (Leviticus 18:22 ).Yet the world is teeming with homosexuals; some churches even conduct marriages for homosexuals! They are fighting for the right to be regarded as a nuclear family. They are everywhere: in government, on the streets, in institutions of learning.”

Watching CBN’S 700 club one day, I saw a Christian woman who had been ensnared by the spirit of homosexuality (it’s a spirit you know) and who required help to break the habit. She had suffered in secret for many years and now needed deliverance.

In secondary schools, youngsters are drawn into homosexual practices by cruel seniors, and their own lust. But for whatever reason, homosexuality is of the devil. The Word of God says, “Because they do this, God has given them over to shameful passions, Even the women pervert the natural use of their sex by unnatural acts ( Romans 1:26-27).(Good News Bible) In the same way the men give up natural sexual relations with women and burn with passion for each other. Men do shameful things with each other, and as a result they bring upon themselves the punishment they deserve for their wrongdoing.

She urged members to be ‘born again’, to ‘receive new mind’ and pray in order to be freed from these “deadly diseases of homosexuality and sexual perversions.’’

The human rights community should call these African churches and their affiliates to order. Their homophobic prayers should not be seen as innocuous intercessions and supplications to God or an exercise in freedom of religion and worship. They are not. These prayer programs are actually teachings that shape the minds and attitudes of the people.

However, it is not all African churches and pastors that are exporting anti gay gospel to the West. Rev Jide Macaulay is a Nigerian pastor who promotes a counter gospel narrative. But his ministry has a marginal influence on African migrants when compared with those of the MFM, Redeemed, DLBC and the Winners Chapel.

Just as the world came out and roundly condemned American evangelists who sponsored or supported the Kill the Gay Bill in Uganda, we should also condemn expressly African pastors and churches that are propagating hatred and persecution of gay people here in African migrant churches. Individuals and organizations should try and petition these African churches praying against homosexuality. Non-Africans should not refrain from criticizing these churches because they could be accused of racism. Condemning homophobic churches is not an act of racism but a clear mark of respect for universal human rights, common humanity, racial equality and justice.

We cannot work and campaign for the respect and recognition of gay rights in Uganda, Nigeria and in other parts of Africa and at the same time stand by and allow African pentecostal churches to erode the gains we have made in Europe or America. We need to send a strong message to MFM, Deeper Life Bible Church, Redeemed Christian Church of God, and their affiliates in the Europe and the US that their reverse mission of spreading homophobic gospel is not welcomed in the western world.

I am against the ongoing efforts and campaign by the Catholic Church to make the late South African schoolteacher, Benedict Daswa, a saint. While I acknowledge the heroic struggle waged by Daswa against witchcraft based violence and exploitation of his Venda people, a struggle that eventually led to his brutal murder; while I understand the need to celebrate and commemorate his life, legacy and achievement, this initiative to make him an object of ‘worship’ or reverence by the catholic establishment is a self-serving scheme and is literally an insult on the memory of this critical and courageous mind.

Why do I think so? First of all, making Benedict Daswa a saint sends a wrong message and confusing signals to people in South Africa and to others in the region concerning the significance of his struggle. Though Daswa was a Catholic and a catechist, he campaigned against magical thinking and superstitious beliefs. He opposed witch hunting and the supposed deployment of mystical canons for the solution of human problems.

Daswa was a teacher who understood the importance of enlightening the people and of resisting the force of irrational beliefs. He was an educator who tried to lead his community members out of ignorance and into knowledge.

Daswa was a skeptic who openly challenged and questioned traditional and cultural beliefs and practices in his community. He was courageous to the point of confronting the Sangoma magical establishment and exposing their pretensions despite the risks involved.

Though, as a catechist, he espoused some of those supernatural beliefs that Sangomas peddled, Daswa understood the dark and destructive effects of witchcraft belief on the society and the imperative of proactive skepticism in social and cultural reformation.

Archbishop Stephen Brislin of Cape Town has acknowledged Daswa’s act of ‘great moral courage’ and the fact that “his passion for the truth led him to openly and very publicly oppose the belief and practice of witchcraft,”

He is right.

Brislin further noted that “the fear caused by the practices of identifying witches, the harm this does to the fabric of social relations and the inevitable killing of innocent people; he was prepared to oppose this practice which still persists today….” I totally agree with him.

Benedict Daswa urged an intellectual awakening of his people from ‘sangomic’ slumber and constantly prodded them to rethink, to seek evidence and critically examine popular misconceptions like the idea that these traditional healers have the supernatural powers and ‘medicines’ to change one’s fortune.

Yes he was to this extent a gadfly for his generation and should be honoured for living a life that can rightly be described as a ‘candle in the dark’.

For instance, Daswa urged members of his local team not to patronize local healers or to think that Sangomas have magical powers, ‘muthi’ (medicine) that can make them win a match. He asked them to commit themselves to practicing and training and not to rely on the supposed supernatural powers and medicines of Sangomas whom he considered as charlatans and predators on popular fears, anxieties and insecurities.

It was in the course of this consciousness raising campaign against the fakery and quackery, against the extortion and exploitation of poor gullible folks by these peddlers of supernatural solutions to human problems that he lost his life.

Now my question is this: How is making Benedict Daswa a saint a way to honour this man and his legacy? Daswa tackled those who used their supposed magical and supernatural powers to profit and exploit people, and now the Catholic Church is turning him into a ‘supernatural object’ for other people’s exploitation. I mean how does that make any moral sense?

What is the historic import of this ongoing Catholic fetishization of the life and memory of Benedict Daswa? How is the beatification Daswa a ‘significant moment’ in the history of South Africa as President Zuma has stated? In what way does the proposed sainthood of Benedict Daswa going to weaken the hold of supernaturalism and witchcraft on the minds of black South Africans particularly those in Limpopo province?

Look, the unfortunate thing about this saint making project is that it’s literally going to encourage and promote in a Catholic form those trends, practices and misconceptions which Daswa fiercely opposed during his lifetime.

Take for instance, Benedict Daswa was beatified on September 13 and beatification is the last step before sainthood. To become a saint of the church, Daswa has to perform a miracle. Yes he has to work a miracle that he never did when he was alive before he can be elevated to the status of a saint. Really? I mean how can a dead person perform miracle? And if anyone thinks that this is not witchcraft, Catholic witchcraft, then what is it?

Just imagine this. During his lifetime, Benedict Daswa refused to contribute money to pay Sangomas for their witch hunting activities. Now, Catholics are contributing money to build a shrine in the name of Benedict Daswa where people would be going to pray and asking for his intercession and supernatural interventions in their lives including footballers that want to win a match, those having family and marital problems, politicians who want to win elections or people whose houses were destroyed by rain- or thunderstorms.

I mean what is going on here!

An article published recently has highlighted the significance of the beatification Benedict Daswa and the negative effects of witchcraft beliefs on the black population in South Africa. The author argued that belief in witchcraft was hampering the intellectual progress of black people and hampering their development. The author made it clear that the ‘idea that someone can bewitch another person cast a spell on them or turn their fortunes through some supernatural magic is holding back the progress of black people.’ I quite agree, but is the same narrative not embedded in the catholic faith and in the doctrine of sainthood? Are Catholic saints not supposed to have supernatural powers to perform miracles – acts that violate natural laws – in people’s lives?

So making Benedict Daswa a saint is a dishonor to his name, memory and legacy. It would reinforce the narrative of magic thinking and myth making and turn this Reginald-Scot-kind of skeptic into an ‘icon’ of Catholic reverence and worship, into a mystical entity that can supposedly influence the fortunes of people through supernatural magic. Sainthood for Benedict Daswa will replace the sangoma witchcraft which he fiercely opposed with Catholic witchcraft which is as mind numbing as sangoma witchcraft. This is why I am against the sainthood for Daswa. What do you think?

A press release from CFI –

To President Buhari
To Governor Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje
To Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II

We are writing from the International Humanist and Ethical Union, a human rights advocacy organisation accredited as an NGO at the United Nations Human Rights Council. We write to express our distress and deepest concerns over the death sentences reportedly handed down to nine individuals in Kano state this week. Our concerns include the following:

We are appalled that a death sentence should be considered a legally enforceable punishment in any circumstance. In this case where the “offence” committed appears to be little more than the expression of a minority religious belief, the death sentence is particularly disproportionate and constitutes an egregious violation of the right to life.

We object fundamentally to the notion that “blasphemy” is treated as a criminal offence. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, and numerous other bodies and experts, have repeatedly called for the abolition or repeal of laws prohibiting “blasphemy”, which in practice criminalize the expression of religious beliefs. The fact that some religious ideas conflict with other religious ideas, or cause offense to other religious believers, is no reason to curtail the right to freedom of religion or belief, and to freedom of expression, and yet under the Sharia courts’ “blasphemy” prohibition, both these human rights are clearly being violated.

We understand that Abdul Inyas, Hajiya Mairo Ibrahim, and the other seven convicted of blasphemy this week are all of the centuries-old Sufi Tijjaniyya sect, whose annual Maulud ceremonies are sometimes regarded as blasphemous or provocative by other Muslims who perceive the sect as elevating Tijjaniyya religious figures above the status of the Prophet Muhammad. Reliable local reports of the mob violence surrounding the initial arrest of Abdul Inyas, and of ongoing threats of violence should Abdul Inyas and his co-accused have been acquitted, constitute serious pressure on the judiciary and raise the most severe doubts about both the decision to prosecute, and the trial itself. The trial was conducted in secret, with no transparency, many of the names of the co-accused not released, nor the name of the judge. The initial and ongoing threat of violence and the closed nature of the trial, the obscurity around the exact nature of the charge, and the doctrinal basis of the court, lead us to conclude that the right to a fair trial has been violated.

Our understanding is that federal intervention, citing the constitution (Section 38, subsection 1) which is superior to any court, could enable these horrendous and illiberal convictions to be lawfully overturned in a civil court. We urge you all to do whatever you can to seek true justice, respecting and restoring the human rights of those accused, and to work to end the malicious and unjust use of “blasphemy” as a criminal prohibition anywhere in Nigeria.

Sincerely,

Andrew Copson,
President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union

Leo Igwe,
Nigerian Humanist Movement

What should humanism stand for in the decades to come? Are the assumptions and values of humanism easily transferable to these new conditions? Many would see even posing such a question as laughable. Is not humanism as a voice of reason, progress and optimism, thoroughly discredited in an age where such things ring hollow?

It’s true that many of the promises of the twentieth century have proved to be illusory. And even when they have been realized, only a relatively few have benefitted. Looking to the future, even if we take the more alarmist forecasts with a pinch of salt, the changes ahead are going to be enormously challenging. Climate change, population growth, peak oil, failed states, rogue states, religious fundamentalism and terrorism, just to name the most menacing of them, all smoulder in sullen anger. And the Western nations seem oblivious to the dangers, preferring instead to wallow in celebrity culture, “reality” programmes, and an untenable sense of entitlement to the resources of the world.

So, for humanism to have something worthwhile to say in the years to come we will need to adjust to the difficult conditions ahead. Promises of sunlit new uplands where our children will achieve more than us no longer ring true. Whichever adjustments are made, they will all have to involve some accommodation of humanism and pessimism. But what is meant by either term in the current context?

We have, for example, the unvarnished pessimism most famously articulated by Arthur Schopenhauer. Each separate misfortune, he wrote, seems “to be something exceptionable; but misfortune in general is the rule.” And even more gloomy, he wrote that the “safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.” Whatever the power of these insights, they are too debilitating for any workable humanism. We need to remain active participants, while seeing the world as it actually is. One thinker who has understood this problem and articulated a useful understanding of contemporary pessimism is Roger Scruton, an English philosopher and political conservative. Scruton rejects simple unalloyed gloom, preferring to see pessimism as a necessary corrective to unrealistic expectations of utopians and pedlars of false hope. His pessimism takes note of constraints and boundaries and counsels taking a second look before rushing in to grand new commitments.

One of the great errors of twentieth century optimism was to misread the message of science as an onward march toward perfection. Few people committed this error more openly than Marxists, though paradoxically it is their neocon opposites who have more recently taken on this attitude. Cumulative acquisition of knowledge was read as progress toward ever-better outcomes for us all, whether delivered by the state or the market. This is not the way things happened, which in turn fuelled the equally baseless reactions that we now see in postmodernism, creationism and many forms of religious irrationalism.

A common feature of these anti-modern reactions is their antipathy to science, but it remains true today that the principal agent for offering a realist view of the world is science. Science has led the way in discrediting all the old illusions preferred by religions, mystagogues and romantics. Science has showed us we are not the center of the universe. Thank you Copernicus. Science then showed us we are not the apex of the great chain of being. Thank you Darwin. And today science is revealing our genetic make-up and the workings of our brain. Thank you Watson, Crick and Franklin.

Each of these breakthroughs has enormous implications for our world view. And none of them give strength to optimism, nor to its close relation, scientism. Each of these successive demotions of humanity gives strength to a more humble assessment of our role in the cosmos. This is what Erik Wielenberg, in Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe, has called naturalistic humility. So what is being talked about here is not the blanket gloom of Schopenhauer, nor an hysterical anti-science reaction. Neither are we intending a systematic critique of optimism, as Albert Schweitzer undertook, although we should endorse Schweitzer’s prediction that the time has come “when pessimistic and optimistic thought, which have hitherto talked past each other almost as strangers, will have to meet for practical discussion.” Using Scruton’s language, this practical discussion will take the form of looking askance at extravagant promises, from whichever source, of liberation, ecstasy, fulfilment or paradise, knowing they are more likely to bring forth their opposites.

Scruton had the traditional left in his sights as purveyors of utopias and pedlars of false hope, but no institution has come close to rivalling monotheistic religion in this respect. The genius of Western monotheistic religions is their ability to disguise a colossal conceit under the fake shroud of humility. These religions speak of humility and submission before God while at the same time assuring believers that they matter to the creator of the entire universe and that a favored seat in heaven awaits them. This ability to rebrand conceit as humility is surely the greatest marketing triumph in human history. And the power of its promise renders it impervious to most reasoned criticism.

By stark contrast, the naturalistic humility of non-supernaturalist systems offers no consolation to disguise the true meaning of being inconsequential. This has been a theme of atheist writing from before the birth of Christianity. Lucretius asked, insightfully, what the gods could possibly gain from our gratitude that would motivate them to create a cosmos just for us. Spinoza was urging us in the direction of naturalistic humility when he recommended the perspective of sub specie aeternitatis, or “under the aspect of eternity.” Baron d’Holbach, author of the first explicitly atheist philosophical system, cited human anthropocentrism as the first of the delusions people labor under. And Bertrand Russell had the same thing in mind in a 1941 article called “On Keeping a Wide Horizon,” where he wrote: “To me it is very consoling to sit and look at a mountain range, which took thousands of ages in the building, and to go home reflecting that it is not after all so bad that the human race has achieved so little in the paltry six thousand years or so of civilization. We are only at the beginning.” Wisdom of this nature is the starting point of what could be called an atheist spirituality, what Albert Camus understood as the “desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe.” And when one comes to examine the principal strands of an atheist spirituality, it seems they boil down to three; unity of mind and body, interdependence of all living things, and the continuity of humanity with the rest of life. None of these are conducive to an inflated sense of one’s own importance, or even that of our species. And each of them is informed at a fundamental level by science. This is the intellectual bedrock of naturalistic humility.

Many humanists are uncomfortable with the notion of atheists talking of spirituality. But it is a mistake to bequeath to non-humanists this language and the human needs it expresses. It ends up limiting the range of humanist thought and experience that impoverishes us all. We don’t need to like words such as spirituality, but it is the simplest way to engage with religious people in a way that concentrates on what we have in common rather than what divides us. One of the many failures of twentieth century optimism was the supposition that prosperous people would have no need of any form of transcendental temptation. We now know this to be untrue, and the language of atheist spirituality helps fill that human need without resorting to enticing dogma or supernatural promises that enflame the sense of self.

We now need to look a bit more closely at what distinguishes a specifically humanist pessimism from other varieties. We’ve already distinguished humanist pessimism from Schopenhauerian gloom. Some contemporary pessimism comes close to seeing the problem acutely. There is, for instance, the Dark Mountain Project, so-called because of a poem by that name from 1935 by Robinson Jeffers. His obsession was with the popular appeal of fascism and Stalinism. Eight decades on, the evils have changed, but the underlying dangers remain the same. Dark Mountain’s website proposes the Eight Principles of Uncivilisation and criticizes three great fallacies of our civilization: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from nature. All this is very sensible and quite in line with a lot of atheist thinking. But Dark Mountain then wanders off into vague dreams about writing new stories we can live by and writing with “dirt under our fingernails.”

The Dark Mountain Project illustrates some of the strengths and some of the weaknesses of pessimism. And if we are to articulate a humanist pessimism, there are several pitfalls to avoid. The first of them is the smugness that so many prophets of doom affect; almost the same degree of smugness that earlier apostles of inexorable progress exuded. It’s easier to predict things will turn to custard than to look for positive outcomes. John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” The extreme version of this has now got its own name: apocaholism, or the addiction to seeing awful disasters around every corner. An associated ailment is that prophesying gloom absolves one of the responsibility of working for a better world. Writing myths we can live by, with or without dirt under our fingernails, is not going to help alleviate mass poverty or prevent climate change. No better example of this is the currently fashionable defeatist John Gray who, after lambasting humanists and others for their commitment to progress, offers nothing better in return than to ‘seek the company of mystics, poets and pleasure lovers rather than utopian dreamers.’

John Gray’s other weakness, one also shared by the Dark Mountain Project, is to assume there is no valid space between utopianism and apocaholism. But there is, and this is space twenty-first century humanism can occupy. And the many insights from Schweitzer’s philosophical fusion of optimistic and pessimistic thought should play a large role in helping fill this space wisely. True resignation, Schweitzer wrote, comes not from world-weariness but from a far deeper appreciation of how precious and beautiful life can be, despite all that can be thrown against us. So, in spite of a greater awareness of the difficulties ahead, we refuse to give up working for a better future. Pessimism, in this sense, is a necessary companion to meliorism, which is the idea that progress is still possible, but that it will take a lot of dedication and hard work to achieve, and will take place in a context of frequent failures and need to reassess.

If we can no longer presume an uncomplicated progress towards a better future, neither should we assume an equally-inevitable downward slope to hell. Some of the more shrill postmodernists liked to shout that modernity led us straight to Auschwitz. And many other types of anti-humanist have insisted that no humanism is possible after Auschwitz or the Gulag. Oddly, many of them still seem to think that monotheistic religion is still possible in such circumstances. The work of Tzvetan Todorov has been valuable in this context. Far from evading this reality, Todorov’s humanism begins at Auschwitz and the Gulag. Any intellectual journey that begins at such unpropitious starting-points must recognise the evil that people can do to one another. But the next point must also be made: that the possibility of good remains. With nothing in it for them, with no special reason to act bravely or considerately, countless people nonetheless did behave in this way. That unaccountable fact gives far more ground for hope than a rationalized, abstract persuasion of ultimate perfectibility, whether in heaven or on earth. Todorov offers a way forward: ‘A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to  be found.’

Following on from Karl Popper or Isaiah Berlin in the twentieth century and Todorov today, contemporary pessimists will be wary of peremptory dismissals of valued habits of mind or patterns of public discourse that get labelled out-dated or somehow offensive to the current zeitgeist. And they will be careful not to sneer at the institutions that uphold the democratic values we cherish. To take an example, upholding the values of secularism is no less valuable and necessary, even when postmodernists and others label it as a leftover of Western metaphysics, or an outdated metanarrative, or some such nonsense.

These things, then, are features of a specifically humanist pessimism. Humanist pessimism sees Western monotheist religions as one of the principal purveyors of false hope and hubris. And from this, a consciously atheistic flavor to our humanism is an important condition for naturalistic humility if we are going to be consistent. But equally, pessimistic humanism is no less determined to help improve the human lot. And much of this will be done best by defending institutions of non-corrupt governance, accountable leadership, and general approval for the performance of civic duty.

The twenty-first century humanist is going to have to defend all over again what had once seemed like entrenched freedoms while also being more circumspect about the values we extol. Three examples will be enough to illustrate the kind of changes needed. John Stuart Mill’s 1859 essay On Liberty is rightly recognized as a humanist classic. But Mill’s optimism that truth and reason will always prevail in the open marketplace of ideas has not been borne out by events. Liberty looks more frail in an age of manufactured consent and short attention spans.

A century after Mill, the American humanist Paul Kurtz spoke of exuberance as the essentially humanist condition. But, looking at this choice of word now, it’s clear that this took for granted too many things, such as access to limitless resources and the boundless opportunities such plenty afforded. Here we can turn, once again, to Aristotle for help in recalibrating the humanist stance. For the twenty-first century, we can see that it is not exuberance at one end of the spectrum, nor despair at the other, that defines the humanist stance. It is perhaps the middle ground of acceptance. Acceptance that life is basically unfair, but, for all that, I do have certain skills and attributes that, with luck, I can use to the benefit of myself and those I love. Acceptance that my dreams can no longer be stratospheric without presuming to darken the lot of many others. Acceptance that my achievements are going to be small, short-lived and inconsequential. Acceptance that there is nothing out there that gives a damn whether I do well in life, am a good person, or deserve an eternity in divine company. Acceptance that, notwithstanding all this, I still have an obligation to be a good person, in full knowledge of an utter extinction of this effort and all that constitutes me. Acceptance that, however inconsequential my life is, it is a rich paradise when compared with the lives of millions of other people, and it may well be that working to alleviate their condition is actually the best way I can spend my time. In this way, acceptance is borne of gratitude and will lead to a joy for living considerably better grounded than a brash exuberance.

The third point relevant to humanism in the twenty-first century is that religion has not gently disappeared, as generations of optimists have casually predicted. Many humanists in the 1960s liked to see themselves as superior to older-style rationalists because they were less confrontational about religion. In her 1967 Conway Memorial Lecture, Marghanita Laski spoke of the secular responsibility to build a new society. Why? “I think the answer must be, because we have won – whether by our own efforts or by the increasing incompatibility of religion and society I would not care to say. But unbelief in religion, in both its fundamental tenets an in its institutions, is the order of the day.” We now know that the humanists of the 1960s were wrong and it was the supposedly old-fashioned rationalists who had a clearer understanding of the resilience and power of religion. God is back, as many commentators have observed, and he’s in a mean temper.

What this means is that we can’t expect to vanquish religion simply by strength of argument. This was the error the old-fashioned rationalists made. Religion doesn’t work like that. Humanism, when seen through a pessimistic lens, understands that the dialogue will go on forever, in the manner of Karl Jaspers’ notion of limitless communication. Each side will twist and turn, react to new conditions quickly or slowly, as is in their nature. Each new generation will need to renew the argument, often the same argument their predecessors engaged in, against an ever-renewing swarm of religiously illiterate believers. Far more likely than either side ‘winning’ is that the divide between religion and non-religion will become utterly irrelevant long before victory by either side has been achieved.

Many anti-humanist critics believe that humanism is not up to the task of responding to the challenges imposed by the more demanding twenty-first century conditions. But if we look carefully through the vast corpus of humanist thought, there is plenty of material to help and guide us. H G Wells, so often caricatured as an uncritical apostle of progress, was consistent in his warnings not to take progress for granted or to presume the universe was anxious for our welfare. Writing in the gloomy aftermath of the First World War, he ended his Outline of History with the sage warning that human history “becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” The perennial truth of that warning can serve as the guiding leitmotif of twenty-first century humanism. And the first lesson in this education was the realisation of the “complete indifference of the universe to us and our behavior.” Wells’ many dystopias are well overdue for rediscovery.

In the even gloomier aftermath of the Second World War Albert Camus spoke of pessimism and courage as essential qualities of a new authenticity which could withstand the paralysing influences of fanatical ideologies and nihilism. As with Wells, Camus’ work is waiting patiently for us to return to it when we are ready. So is this understanding of humanism, written in 1968 by the English sociologist Ronald Fletcher.

Humanism, it seems to me, has to recognize an inescapable undertone of tragedy in the world. Ultimately, the situation of mankind in the world is a tragic one. Human life is transient…All that we are, all that we love, all those things, people, and values to which and to whom we are attached by love, perish. Nothing of an individual nature seems permanent. Nothing is certain. Humanism can offer no consolation.

This refusal to offer the consolations born of hubris is what makes humanism such an important asset to the twenty-first century. Consolations, whether the right to clutter up some corner of the cosmos with a supposedly immortal soul, or some sense of undeserved entitlement down here on earth, are no longer a sustainable or credible way to engage with our surroundings. But where many twentieth century humanists sought to substitute these conceits with fragrant promises of moving inexorably toward a new heaven on earth, humanists of the twenty-first century will be less willing to offer any sort of secularized consolation that might act as a buffer to soften the blow of realizing our finitude and irrelevance to the order of things while retaining the moral duty to work for the betterment of others.

To recap: any serious humanism of the twenty-first century will need to offer us lessons in pessimism. Or, more accurately, realism filtered through the gauze of pessimism. The sort of realism that rejects gloom in the same way as it rejects exuberance. The first step will be to move away from the damaging anthropocentrism of many twentieth-century ideologies, which accord humanity a privileged place in the cosmic scheme of things. Panaceas, utopias, ideologies and quick-fix solutions, from whichever source, will be viewed with skepticism. Twenty-first century notions of progress will focus more on the effort needed for any positive change and the harder, rougher road, more strewn with potholes that will need to be traversed. In the twenty-first century we will do better to speak of our human responsibilities to the earth and to one another than of our rights as individuals. And twenty-first century humanism will foster acceptance and gratitude for the small joys of life. We also need to be reminded of the unremitting cruelty of life lived according to the rules of natural selection, and of the inevitable inability of the shibboleths of contemporary society – satisfaction through work, material prosperity providing peace of mind – to deliver according to their promises. Acknowledgement of interdependence and all that entails will need to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century humanism. And the leaders of twenty-first century humanism will be those who can build all these insights into their life and still find reason to smile.

Bibliography

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              Changing the World, London: Penguin, 2010 [2009].

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www.dark-mountain.net

OB: As a fan of philosophy I’ve been delighted to see the rave reviews for Plato at the Googleplex in major media – the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Slate, NPR, The Atlantic. This has to be a good thing: a sign that philosophy can be made interesting to the reading public, and itself a step to getting more people interested in philosophy. It’s all the more gratifying because part of your point, as I understand it, is to show readers that philosophy has value and has not been rendered superfluous by science. Can you tell us a little about why philosophy does indeed have value?

RG: I’ve been delighted to see the rave reviews, too.

Okay, why is philosophy of value?  The short answer is that it addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.  There are of course, technical, narrow philosophical questions of concern to only professional philosophers, and I don’t mean to disparage them, since I’ve spent a good part of my life on them. But what I’m speaking about here are problems that just about all of us confront in virtue of our being thinking humans: What—if anything— are our lives about?  Even if they’re not really about anything—goodbye to the old monotheistic usurpation of this question—can we find answers that will allow us to maximize our own flourishing and—of equal if not greater importance—reasons to care about the flourishing of others?  (Caring about ourselves comes kind of naturally to us.) Philosophy has been addressing such questions and making significant, if invisible, progress with them almost ever since there’s been philosophy.

Elaboration on short answer: Philosophy emerged in the ancient Greek world contemporaneously (800-200 BCE) with the emergence of the major religious and spiritual traditions that have survived into our day: Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and the Abrahamic religion.  Confucius, the Buddha, Ezekiel, and Pythagoras were all contemporaries of each other. Obviously there was some profound existential self-questioning going on during this period, in all the parts of the world that had attained a certain degree of political organization and stability (all the areas involved in this normative ferment minted coins, as the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber points out in his Debt: The First 5,000 Years) and thus met basic survival needs (all the areas involved had a high energy-consumption).  So it seems that once basic survival wasn’t continuously occupying the mind, questions about putting our survival to some kind of meaningful purpose began to emerge. I like to put these questions in terms of “mattering.”  Do we matter? Is there something we have to do or be in order to achieve mattering, or is mattering something that we’re born into?

Greek philosophy didn’t address these questions in religious/spiritual terms, but rather in human, secular terms, applying reason to problems of mattering.  And systematically applying reason as opposed to appealing to dogma, so-called revelation, and authority, it’s the only one of the normative systems that emerged during that ancient age to have actually made progress.  I have, in the imaginary dialogues I scatter throughout the book,, Plato being amazed by how far he’s been left behind—not just scientifically and technologically, but philosophically, ethically and politically—by the field that he helped create.

Because of the failure of religion to offer satisfying answers to an increasing number of people, it’s time for philosophy to address forcefully these questions that everybody is wondering about.  Our society is falling back increasingly on rampant consumerism and self-promoting social media as a way for people to feel that their lives matter—self-centered means of numbing the questions of mattering. And given the self-centeredness of the kind of conclusions we’re gravitating toward, it’s no wonder that issues of social justice are not at the center of our attention. Our culture has relapsed back into the kind of self-aggrandizing, self-glorifying answers that the Athenians had presumed, which had Socrates railing against them until he got so annoying that they killed him.

OB: It’s a truism of sorts that people do philosophy all the time, it’s just that they do it badly. Would you say that’s one of the themes of Plato at the Googleplex? Are Roy McCoy and Dr. David Shoket and the rest doing philosophy but doing it badly? Or are they doing something entirely different, which they would do better if they had some education in philosophy?

RG: If forced to choose, I’d say they’re not even doing philosophy badly, but rather seeking to foreclose the very possibility of doing philosophy.  Of course, they put forth arguments—bad arguments—for this foreclosing, and one might want to count these bad arguments against the very possibility of philosophy as engaging in philosophy—really bad philosophy, because internally incoherent: using philosophical arguments to argue for the futility of all philosophical arguments.  My character Roy McCoy would foreclose philosophy by appealing to religion as answering all the questions, while my character Dr. Shoket, would foreclose philosophy by appealing to science as answering all the questions. Both are tone-deaf to the (bad) philosophy they’re putting forth.

OB: It’s a good moment for public education via mass media, with Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s remake of Cosmos airing. I think it’s quite apt that your book is making a stir at the same time. But Carl Sagan was frowned on and even sneered at for doing so much public outreach. It’s well known that academics tend to think popularization is infra dig. Is that still true? Do you ever get the hairy eyeball for writing novels and accessible books about philosophy?

RG: How do I even begin to tell that sad story? I think it’s particularly egregious when it’s philosophers who are doing the sneering.  Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don’t realize it’s philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.  If philosophers have special expertise here, if through their natural talents and their training, they can shed some light on the questions that perplex people not trained as they are, then they damn well ought to do it.   Yes, we analytic philosophers love precision, and yes the best philosophical thinking demands a precision that lost on—that loses—most non-philosophers.  But I think that a certain compromise can and should be struck between absolute precision and general accessibility.  Scientists who write for popular audiences have brilliantly struck such compromises..  Why can’t philosophers? Well, I think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any special expertise.  After all, all people—not just philosophers—have attitudes and points of view on various philosophical questions, and they rather resent being told that there are professionals who can think about these things better.  So philosophers feel a little more cautious about letting down their technical guard lest the general public doesn’t recognize their special credentials.  It’s the fact that philosophy is of general interest that, paradoxically, keeps philosophers from wanting to speak in a way that’s accessible to the general public.

OB: I must say, I see the MacArthur grant as a glorious vindication of doing the kind of thing you do; of doing academic philosophy and literary writing. Has it made it easier for you to combine things any old way you want to?

RG: The MacArthur grant came to me when I was in career-despair, feeling both spurned by the community of philosophers for being a novelist and cold-shouldered by the literary community for being a philosopher. I was actively considering a third career, one which would have involved educating young children.  The MacArthur gave me encouragement to continue with my experiments in writing about philosophy in non-academic ways. I’ve  always felt that playfulness is essential to good thinking, and so that’s always been involved in my experiments, the non-fiction and the fiction.  I have my Plato talk a great deal about the importance of play in thinking.

OB: What about Plato himself? Would he be pleased to see A C Grayling on the Colbert Report? Or would he think it was far too vulgar to mix up philosophy and television. In the Protagoras, Socrates seems down on the very idea of trying to teach arête, and perhaps anything else that’s not purely how-to. Do you think Plato loaded the dice against the sophists? Or was he making a good point about the marketing of canned wisdom?

RG: I’m going to answer your question first for Socrates and then for Plato. Socrates plied his trade in the agora, the Athenian marketplace, and he was a sly old fox, willing to use all kinds of tricks to try and wake his fellow Athenians out of their habitual ways of thinking and acting.  Now Plato went and created the Academy, separating himself from the non-philosophical populace.   Perhaps, after the trial and execution of Socrates, carried out by the restored Athenian democracy, he just threw up his hands at trying to figure out ways of speaking to the general population. But maybe not.  After all, he created the dialogues, which were read by the general population. The dialogues are great art and they’re often extremely entertaining, even hilarious—to us, who live 2400 years later. How much more  entertaining they must have been to his contemporaries, who got all the in-jokes, and knew about the real-life characters he peoples his dialogues with.  And it was Plato who gives us, in the dialogues, that sly old fox Socrates.

OB: I encounter a lot of people who have an annoyingly philistine attitude to philosophy, claiming that it’s just a lot of useless pretentious verbiage. I urge various titles on them in hopes they will learn better. Do you have any favorites for this purpose?

RG: Ah, Ophelia, you and I probably encounter many of the same people.  I would say Spinoza’s Ethics, though the book is almost impenetrable without a good background or teacher.  But that book probably did more to bring about the European Enlightenment than any other single work, as beautifully demonstrated by Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, which I also enthusiastically recommend to those who think philosophy does nothing.

Here is the thing about philosophical progress: it changes what we take to be “intuitively” obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the changes.  We don’t see these changes, because we see with them.

OB: Even worse than that, I think, are the people who think Sam Harris wrote a revolutionary book on moral philosophy, and one that has made all other books on moral philosophy pointless. Do you ever encounter such people, and if so, what do you say to show them their error?

RG: No, I’ve never encountered such people. But I would say to anybody who thinks that all the problems in philosophy can be translated into empirically verifiable answers—whether it be a Lawrence Krauss thinking that physics is rendering philosophy obsolete or a Sam Harris thinking that neuroscience is rendering moral philosophy obsolete—that it takes an awful lot of philosophy—philosophy of science in the first case, moral philosophy in the second—even to demonstrate the relevance of these empirical sciences.

Preamble: This essay focuses on a common source of contention in discussions of accusations of rape. It is understood that for some rape survivors, this article will file under “Too Long – Didn’t Read”, purely for reasons of mental health and self-preservation. An obligatory trigger warning also applies.

It is also understood that for many people, a simple “fuck off!” is the best, and a perfectly justifiable, response to what I am calling ‘The “Good Juror” Pose. I’m tentatively offering my prescription to those best able to help, rather than making expectations of those who have been hurt.

I think there is a need, for those in a position to make a difference, for more reflection on what is actually being said, and on where distinctions and demarcations can be made in order to prevent a lot of unnecessary acrimony.

***

Recent discussions of Woody Allen, and revived accusations levelled against him by Dylan Farrow, have drawn the usual roaches and lice out of the woodwork – specifically, those with an interest in the spoils of providing earnest character references for, and supererogated defences of, the accused.

The presumption of innocence is important for jurors, and for journalists reporting the bare facts of cases like these. This is, however, not so much the case for journalists engaging in meta-analysis, and much less so for the rest of us, especially those discussing rape in informally therapeutic environments.

I wish to suggest that, outside of discussions where jurisprudence and primary reporting of facts is relevant, “belief” and “knowledge” are less relevant than “trust” and consequences. I have more than one Facebook friend who has claimed to have been raped as a child and I trust them when they make these claims.

In fact, unless I’m provided with evidence to the contrary, that a given accusations is a lie or a fabricated memory, or unless I’m in a jury, I’m going to presume the truth of what they are saying. The presumption of innocence for the accused, in the context I’m talking about, is not of consequence, because the accused isn’t on trial, nor are they being excoriated by a populist media (or equivalent).

I’m opting, as much as I can, to withdraw from the language of “belief” and of “knowledge” in public discussions of the experiences of rape victims. If you’re not a juror, nor a frontline journalist (or equivalent), it’s not like the welfare of the Woody Allens of the world hinges on your believing them.

Conversely, it’s more likely that you’ll come into contact with someone who has been raped, who needs and deserves your moral support and trust.

***

Before I continue, I’ll point out that I don’t – nor should I – expect in discussions of rape that people who have been raped be as exacting about language as I choose to be. With the exception of the discussion of a few related issues that trigger my depression, I’m in a position to make these distinctions with relative ease.

I’m less forgiving of people who haven’t been sexually assaulted, or people who are purportedly professionals, or responsible community leaders, exercising less care with their language, or being uncharitable in interpreting the language of others. Aside from time and patience, nothing is lost by being thoughtful.

***

So, as I said, I’ve got a Facebook friend – Angie Jackson – who informed her friends that she was raped as a child, and unintentionally courting the sophistry of The Good Juror, in light of all the doubt being poured on Dylan Farrow, innocently asked  by way of status update,  if she herself was believed. Here’s some of what she copped as a result…

“Kids have made up stories of abuse. That is undeniable. Kids have also been brainwashed into believing they were abused by parents (and others) in a custody battle. This too is undeniable. These facts are the reason such claims are investigated and people are not simply put in jail without an investigation, evidence, and trial. I am inclined to neither believe nor doubt any claim based solely on the claim itself. My doubt or acceptance of the claim is based rather on the supporting evidence. Is that really so radical and/or wicked as to elicit such hostility?” – Brian Dalton.

For those not familiar with the name, Brian Dalton is the chief creative force behind the disastrously kitsch series of YouTube videos detailing the tribulations of  his satirical “Mr Deity” character. I caught his talk on his experiences as an ex-Mormon at the Gala Dinner at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, which I found much more interesting than his comedy or scepticism.

It needs pointing out, that despite the mention of “belief”, it was established emphatically prior to Dalton’s comment, that the discussion was not about establishing a guilty verdict, or locking anyone up, or “all those men who get away with rape”, or reaching for the pitchforks. It was at base, and was little more than being, about people’s online relationship with Angie, and that’s it.

All that Dalton’s observations achieved was to point out that it is logically possible for someone to lie, or for people to be brainwashed, but this doesn’t obligate anyone to suspend their trust in Angie. Moreover, these kinds of concerns weren’t even being denied to begin with – Dalton merely pointed out what everybody in attendance already knew.

Forget the courtroom. A setting more analogous to the conversation Dalton injected his opinion into would have you playing the role of a supporting friend or counsellor. Contrary to the Good Juror: as a matter of decision making, while they may be cautious, counsellors don’t suspend their belief in rape allegations.

Dalton may make a Good Juror, but what kind of friend would his red-herring-ridden hectoring make him to people who’ve been sexually assaulted without establishing the fact in court? This isn’t a purely emotive concern – the atheist community has a sizeable subset of people who have left religion owing to sexual abuse, and not all of them have had their day in court. Is Dalton going to talk down to them about the bleeding obvious as well?

Many people in our community can’t avoid making decisions relating to these matters, and a lecture on why people like Dalton don’t “believe or disbelieve” the sexual abuse claims of individuals doesn’t get this decision making done (more on that later).

Dalton continues….

“Angie, I don’t have any reason to doubt your claim. But if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t have any reason to believe your claim either. I don’t know you personally, know your character, background, the specifics or circumstances. For all I know, you were brainwashed by a parent in a custody battle or had some other motive. I don’t know, and that stuff DOES happen. Is it common? No. But we cannot generalize in any specific case based on statistics that represent the whole (it is a common logical fallacy to move from the general to the specific). The fact of the matter is that I have no basis on which to make a judgement one way of the other. I happen to have been intimately involved with a case in which a bay WAS brainwashed into believing that he was molested by an older neighbor child at the age of five by parents who wanted that to be the case because of a dispute with said neighbor boy’s parents. Sadly, I have also seen parents do terrible things to their children during the duress of a divorce/custody battle. And these are people I knew and respected. My only point here is that I don’t jump to conclusions in these cases because the history of the human race is not one of such jumping leading to good things and/or real justice. So let me ask you this: Do you believe that someone accused of abuse should be summarily imprisoned? Or do you believe there should be an investigation and trial? If the former, why?” – Brian Dalton.

Again, keep in mind that it had already been pointed out that the discussion was not about sending people to jail, or custody battles, or about courts at all. The continued hectoring of people who claim to have been raped, with arguments like this, whether you believe their claims or suspend your belief, is more than fair invitation to criticism.

Yes, inferring from the general directly to the specific is a logical fallacy, but what if you make communicating like this with people who claim to have been raped a general policy? Probability comes into play again, and it is probable that if you keep it up, you’re going to be hectoring people who have been raped. Dalton gives no indication that he is singling Angie out for special treatment, so we can be reasonably safe in assuming that this is a general policy for him, even if not on the basis of his past form.

***

So if people aren’t talking about court battles, and being a Good Juror is beside the point, what is the point?

It’s not enough to simply make the distinction of “trusting” to denote something in a different category than “believing”, without actually having a bit more underlying the distinction. Without that, it’s closer to being a get-out-of-jail-card to be used in awkward situations, than anything else.

At base what I’m talking about when I mention “trust” (and it’s something that’s impossible to avoid) is decision-making, and Bayesian guesstimation. Verdicts, and the matter of believing/knowing them, are matters of hypothesis testing, which is something else.

Opting to give moral support to a friend who makes a rape allegation, may entail consideration of the merits of the accusation, but at base this is an exercise in decision making. Choosing to pick up their kids; make them meals because they’re too depressed to cook; give money to fund legal expenses, all because they claim to have been raped; these are decisions, not hypothesis tests.

The decisions are made on the balance of probability, weighted by the consequences of different choices – and it is not an appeal to consequences fallacy to do so, because again, we’re making choices, not testing hypotheses.

Of course, people (usually MRAs) will complain that one can make inferences about character from people’s decisions, and that this potentially threatens The Good Reputation ™ of the accused. Aside for there being no good reason to self-censor signs of support for someone making a rape allegation, it’s a sign of unchecked privilege when someone claims reputation must necessarily be treated with legalistic precision.

This is because in the first instance, it is literally impossible to consider all matters relevant to reputation in a purely legalistic (or para-legalistic) fashion – only those who can afford to force the point can, and even then not always. Further, it’s far more common than not in our culture for reputation to be managed via decision making; ‘will I employ so-and so?’, ‘do I want to hang out with this person?’, ‘which mechanic will I take my car to?’ – if you can envision these decisions being made without legalistic precision, then you’ve ceded my point.

As far as conventions and organisations in atheist circles go, there’s ‘do I invite this person who has been accused of rape to speak?’ and ‘do I want this person to assume this office?’ This is often the source of an underlying anxiety for public speakers, which in atheist/secular/humanist circles has flared up amongst brattish types in response to harassment policies and claims of sexual harassment.

But this is how reputation is normally addressed and it isn’t going to change any time soon, and to expect better is to expect special treatment. Of course, the usual suspects expect exactly this and as a result, in the atheist community, we have much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the prospective standings of atheist speakers and writers.

Strangely enough, nobody objecting to these ‘witch-hunts’ and ’purges’ by ‘Feminazis/Femistazis’ bother to consider the set of people whose reputation doesn’t allow them to speak at conventions, but who could, and who could do it well if not better than most. Such potential good speakers didn’t earn their lack-lustre reputations, nor did they get such reputations from nowhere, but they don’t deserve their lesser standing any more than at base, the more fortunate deserve theirs.

(And don’t get me started on the contempt towards volunteers, inherent in this sense of entitlement).

Attempts at the preservation of special treatment seem to motivate a lot of The Good Juror pose (and a good deal of nepotism to boot).

***

While it may also have the potential effect of partitioning public opinion away from a jury, my primary intention is for the trust/belief distinction, and any demarcation that goes with it, to circumvent the involvement of The Good Juror in discussions and decision making where it would be ill-placed. There would of course be push-back from the usual suspects and enablers (even if they didn’t push back against… everything).

Let’s be blunt. Often The Good Juror should know full well that the context into which they are deploying their lectures doesn’t and needn’t involve hypothesis testing to a judicial standard (or hypothesis testing at all). For what it’s worth, I don’t trust that Brian Dalton is oblivious to this at all.

Aside from the blunt-instrument effect you’d expect from Dalton’s lecturing in an irrelevant context about concerns of jurisprudence, there’s a second, more insidious aspect to The Good Juror Pose. Specifically, it hides the process of decision-making that The Good Juror must be undertaking on some other level.

In Dalton’s case, it could be ‘will I choose to make back-handed jokes about rape allegations, or will I opt not to be dismissive’, or ‘will I continue to work side by side with my friend Shermer, or wait until this blows over?’… If you’re cynical about Dalton, you may suspect considerations along the lines of ‘how can I exploit the stress that Michael Shermer is under to my own advantage?’

Again, we are talking decisions, not hypothesis tests, and unless Brian Dalton has no executive function at all, something resembling these considerations  must be occurring in addition to his thoughts about “belief/disbelief”. This is Dalton the decision maker – the Good Juror Pose is just that: a pose; a mask.

When you recognise this, you’ve reached the root question relevant to all such scenarios; ‘by what criteria should I make decisions on how to interact with people who say they’ve been raped?’

People will differ, of course, on these criteria. Deontologists, virtue theorists and utilitarians could argue at length. The libertarians who peddle Ayn Rand (who don’t really belong in a category of philosophers), and the people who suck up to them, can be expected to engage in self-serving rationalisations – this is at base, why in these matters, I don’t trust Brian Dalton, or Michael Shermer, or Penn Jillette, or DJ Grothe, etc..

(Well, that and previously documented acts of bullshit artistry by the libertarian primaries).

What needs to be asked, when The Good Juror interlopes outside their remit, is ‘why the pose, and what criteria are you are using to measure your behaviour?’ ‘Are those criteria self-serving or altruistic?’

(One wonders what Brian Dalton’s criteria actually are, or if he’s actually reflected upon them.)

***

The only concession arising out of this, that needs to be made in the opposite direction, is to recognise that “belief” in claims being made, given certain circumstances (being on a jury, journalism reporting on factual claims, and where vigilantism is a probable risk), needs to show due scepticism. That is to say, that sceptical, rigorous discussions of truth claims, even painful truths, have their place where the presumption of truth shouldn’t occur.

However, not all forums for rape survivors where claims are discussed, even where the claims may in fact be unresolved and genuinely contentious, entail prejudicing a jury, producing poor journalism, or setting the torches and pitchforks in motion. And these forums, these informal therapeutic environments, are very much needed in atheist and humanist circles.

What is needed, I think, where possible, is clearer demarcation of these zones in the same vein as “trigger warnings” – something that should be facilitated by those in a position to do so; organizational leaders, professional bloggers and public speakers, may be in a position to help prevent the damage that can occur when these domains leak into each other.

And of course, to varying extents, we can self-regulate, and pay attention to what environment we’re speaking in. Hopefully the Brian Daltons of the scene can heed the signposts a little better in future as well.

Bruce Everett

There is a great problem brewing in Ghana – What to do with all the witches? The government has decided to eradicate witchcraft. The plan is to close down the safe camps where those accused of witchcraft fled to get away from their accusers. The victims are to be sent back to their accusers who will kill them in all likelihood.

Witchcraft is big business in Ghana. Soothsayers, priests and chiefs wield great power over largely helpless people through the threat of exposing common people as witches. Once accused, the “Witch” is usually killed or expelled from the village. The accused witches that escape with their lives end up in witch camps where they are protected from execution.

Now Nana Oye Lithur, Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, wants to close the camps and send the “Witches” home to be killed. She has convened a committee with a mandate to eradicate witchcraft in the northern region of Ghana. The scheme she is proposing in closing down the camps would enable victims to “Flee(sic) their minds from the act.” I am not quite sure what this means but if the camps are closed down and the “Witches” are sent back to their villages as the government plans to do they will probably be killed.

To the superstitious, the witch is a very dangerous person that can cause illness, cast spells to kill livestock or murder innocent people with witchcraft. To the superstitious mind, illness, deaths and accidents are all caused by witchcraft, not natural phenomena. When a calamity befalls a person they pay soothsayers and priests to interpret dreams and omens that point out the witch that is causing the trouble. Once accused of witchcraft, life for the accused can become a living hell that may quickly come to a sudden bad end.

The government of Ghana has recently been under local and international pressure from human rights groups and development agencies to take action against witch hunting in the country. The response from the government is to close the few places those accused of witchcraft can seek protection.

The witch camps are difficult places to live to be sure. There have been reports of inhumane and degrading conditions including cases of sexual abuse and exploitation of the victims by camp managers, local chiefs and priests. Still they provide a shred of support for people who have no place else to turn for help.

The government of Ghana is acting under pressure to redeem its image and its human rights record in the eyes of the international community. It wants to eliminate this embarrassing situation of witchcraft accusation in the region. But closing down the witch camps and sending the “Witches” back to the people who will kill them is clearly not the best choice.

Witch camps are the consequence, not the cause of witch hunting. Witch camps are at the end of an abusive process that starts in minds steeped in religion. Witchcraft is popularly believed to be a real crime punishable by death. It is fueled by lack of real world education and used by soothsayers, chiefs and priests for financial and political gain.

Witch camps are at least safety nets, however poorly run, for these victims of religion whose believers will kill them for crimes it is impossible for them to have committed.

Closing the rescue camps and sending their human wreckage to be disposed of by people who still believe in witches is not the answer. Educating the religious to look for real causes in the natural world so they are not hunting witches, or calling on supernatural forces, but rather finding ways to cure the problems they face would go a long way in making the camps unnecessary and Ghana a better place to live for all.

The government is clearly out of touch with reality concerning the camps. If the government of Ghana is serious about combating witch hunting in the country, it should first focus on addressing the cause, not the symptom of the disease. The government should institute a program of public education and enlightenment that will bring about a mental and cultural shift.

Ghanaians need to abandon this notion that people can kill others spiritually and begin to come to terms with the fact that death is a natural occurrence. That misfortune is a part of life not some spell cast upon them. Part of this program should be devoted to getting Ghanaians to abandon this notion that dreams are the way god reveals the witches in the family or community.

Soothsayers and local priests are largely responsible for promoting and reinforcing these beliefs in witchcraft and magic. These occult entrepreneurs need to be retrained to make a living at a profession that adds to the productivity and well being of the community.

Belief in witchcraft is the problem, not the safe haven of the camps. If Ghanaians abandon the belief in witchcraft, the witch camps will simply fade away.

Fifty or so miles out of Kampala is a small town called Wobulenzi, and here CFI–Uganda runs a clinic devoted to testing the local population for HIV/AIDS and educating them how the disease is contracted. The education program is vital because, as in much of Africa, superstition and misinformation are rife.  So much of what is not understood is attributed to witchcraft and, not infrequently, whoever is identified as the witch ends up dying a horrible death. The churches and the mosques do little or nothing to prevent this superstition, and in many cases are the chief propagators. So, against huge odds, CFI–Uganda is fighting these debilitating superstitions.

CFI–Uganda is also helping an organization called HALEA, or Humanist Association for Leadership, Equity and Accountability. HALEA works in the Kampala slums providing basic information to the people there. It might be about successful job-hunting, or about sexual hygiene and contraception. As elsewhere, there is a strong need to educate people against the prevalent superstitions. Predatory churches seek members by spreading fear and misinformation about HIV/AIDS, contraception, vaccination, education and many other things. The young slum-dwellers, almost all unemployed, are also susceptible to criminal activities, so HALEA organises recreational activities to keep them busy and off the streets.

CFI recently stepped up its funding to the clinic at Wobulenzi, and has donated money for HALEA to buy a motorbike, the cheapest and quickest means of transport around Kampala. The various programs it runs are scattered around the sprawling city but now contact between them is a little bit easier. The CFI’s work in Uganda is the clearest example I know of skepticism and humanism working seamlessly together.

Editor’s note: If you want to donate to support this work, donate to CFI and earmark it for the International Program.

On the fertile high country in central Kenya, in the shadow of the Nandi Hills, is the Ogwodo Primary School. Five or so buildings, two of them built by the parents out of mud and cow dung. All quite large and bare, with forty or more children to each room, sitting on hard pews and working at long benchtops. Here is where a sizable group of orphans are getting their schooling thanks to the Center for Inquiry, the humanist think-tank based in Amherst, New York.

There are many orphans in Kenya, most the result of their parents having died from HIV/AIDs, being too poor to afford medication, or learning of their disease too late. The churches bear a huge responsibility for the unnecessarily high death toll. Their primitive attitudes toward contraception and their encouragement of superstitions and misinformation about what HIV/AIDs is and how it is caught is a scandal to all civilized people. In the face of this ongoing catastrophe, George Ongere of CFI–Kenya has set up the Humanist Orphans program.

School fees keep many of the poorest children away from school in Kenya, as does the cost of uniforms. Most schools in Kenya insist on a uniform. It’s a way of weeding out those parents who are not serious about their children’s education. But, with no parents to look out for their interests, most orphans miss out on school altogether, and have no future to look forward to.

So George Ongere has gathered together this group of orphans in his home district, overseen their placement in the homes of relatives or neighbors, and ensured their school fees and uniforms are paid for from his already-overstretched CFI stipend. It was deeply moving to see these young people being given a chance at life. The needs of the orphans are still legion. But some sort of start has been made.

Addendum: If you want to donate to support this work, donate to CFI and earmark it for the International Program.

George Ongere is on Facebook.

This is another reason why you should raise your voice in protest against Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s planned tour of the Pacific in November. We need to end witch hunting around the globe. Witch persecution ended in Europe and most parts of western world centuries ago. But this violent campaign continues in many regions of the world mainly due to the activities of some Christian churches, pastors and other religious actors.. To stop witch hunting, witch hunters must be check mated and stopped. Witch finding initiatives must be nipped in the bud. Witch hunting movement must be exposed. Witchcraft claims must be challenged and critically examined. Any scheme to export witch hunting goods and services to other countries and regions must be opposed.

I am writing to urge you to join as we protest the tour of the Pacific Region in November of the ‘General Overseer’ of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adeboye. Pastor Adeboye is touring Canberra (November 10-11), Melbourne (12-13) New Zealand (14-15), Fiji (16-17), Solomon Islands (18-19), Papua New Guinea (20-21), Sydney (22-23), Perth(24-25).

The aim of the tour is to establish branches of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in these places. Pastor Adeboye is one of the pastors who openly used their sermons and preaching to rally public support for the anti same sex marriage bill which was recently passed by lawmakers in Nigeria.

Earlier this year he told a local Christian gathering that ‘Same sex marriage is anathema’ and an ‘evil’ that would lead to the end of human race. Due to the sermons of homophobic clerics like Pastor Adeboye, there is a growing trend of attacks and violence against homosexuals in Nigeria. We should not allow this vicious trend to spread and take hold in other parts of the globe. We need to use this opportunity to send a strong message to Pastor Adeboye and other gay bashing African clerics that their gospel of hatred and intolerance has no place in the Pacific Region and that their churches have no future in Australia, New Zealand etc.

Many African churches are trying to re –evangelize the world by promoting literal biblical  interpretations and christian messages that are incompatible with  universal human rights and other civilized values.

If we must beat back the tide of homophobia sweeping across Africa, we must protest the moves and plans by homophobic pastors and religious bigots to establish churches that incite violence and hatred against gay persons. Let us mobilize through the social media against the visit of this Nigerian pastor. Let us get human rights/humanist/secular groups in these places to stage protests and denounce the establishment of homophobic churches in the pacific region.

Leo Igwe, Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement October 11, 2013