Category: Articles

Recent events in both France and England have again focused attention on the wearing of the veil, headscarf or hijab by women from Muslim communities. Is this, as Islamists claim, an issue of religious freedom? Or is it rather, as many women of Muslim origin would argue, about oppression?

The French government, who recently banned the wearing of headscarves in schools and public institutions are in no doubt. Nor was the judge in Luton, England, who decided that requiring a Muslim girl to wear a standard school uniform – and no veil – was not an infringement of her religious rights.

Suddenly the veil has become a major issue. Veiling the heads and bodies of little girls and adolescents has a devastating impact on their minds and lives. Those who care about children’s rights should demand that this imposition be legally prevented. A child has no religion, tradition or prejudices. She has not joined any religious sect. She is a new human being who by accident of birth has been born into a family with a specific religion, tradition, and prejudices. It is the task of society to neutralize the negative effects. Society has a duty to provide fair and equal living conditions for all children, for their growth and development, and for their active participation in social life.

Those who wish to impede the free and open mental and social development of a child – just as those who would physically abuse a child – should be opposed by society and prevented by the law from doing so. No nine-year-old girl chooses to be married, sexually mutilated, serve as housemaid, cook for the male members of the family, nor be deprived of exercise, education, and play. No child of nine will willingly wear an all-enveloping garment that restricts or impedes her freedom of movement. The child grows up within her family and society according to established customs, traditions and regulations, and automatically learns to accept these ideas and customs as the norms in later life. To speak of a young girl freely exercising her own choice in being veiled is a sick joke.

Those of us who want to see every girl enjoying the benefits of a free, full and healthy life should oppose such repressive restrictions on the young. Banning the veil in school is a progressive measure, but more is needed. In order to fully protect girls the hijab should be banned everywhere and in every Islamic society for girls under 16.

Azam Kamguian is the editor of the Bulletin of the Committee to Defend Women’s Rights in the Middle East.

Peter J. Swales, author of numerous pioneering essays exploring the early history of psychoanalysis, is unimpressed by Mark Solms’s article in the April 2004 issue of Scientific American, “Freud Returns”. Here we reproduce an unpublished letter to Scientific American which questions Mark Solms’s competence in the field of Freud scholarship, together with an addendum and postscript.

Letters to the Editors
Scientific American

May 10, 2004

In reproducing a diagram from an 1895 manuscript, Mark Solms endeavours to portray Sigmund Freud as both percipient and prescient by drawing special attention to the “contact barriers” between neurons whose action he there supposedly “predicted”. Solms elaborates: “Two years later English physiologist Charles Sherrington discovered such gaps and named them synapses”. In truth, however, the separating surfaces between nerve cells had been recognized by the histologist Ramón y Cajal as early as 1888, then reported on by him in 1892; and the significance of these had, by the year 1895, been much discussed – by, among others, Auguste Forel, Wilhelm His, Wilhelm Waldeyer, and Freud’s former teacher Sigmund Exner.

In 1897, while Sherrington was at work on a text on the nervous system requested of him by the physiologist Sir Michael Foster (himself a proponent of such gaps between neurons), he felt a need for a convenient term — whereupon Foster obliged him by consulting the Euripidean scholar Arthur W. Verrall, who proposed the word “synapse” (from the Greek for ‘clasp’). Thus, Sherrington made no such discovery, and is to be credited only with having solicited a name; and Freud, in 1895, was being in no way percipient nor prescient but, as a neuropathologist by profession, was simply deferring to the then current understanding of the nervous system.*

Solms’s tendentiousness in seeking to rehabilitate Freud’s ideas is betrayed not simply by his distortion of the history of neurology but his cavalier disregard of modern Freud scholarship. He asserts that “Freud’s early experiments with cocaine — mainly on himself — convinced him that the libido must have a specific neurochemical foundation” — one that the author now tries to identify with the systemic action of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. But this is precisely what I contended as long ago as 1983 in an essay entitled “Freud, Cocaine, and Sexual Chemistry: The Role of Cocaine in Freud’s Conception of the Libido”, reprinted in 1989 in a 4-volume Routledge anthology of enduring critical assessments of Freud and his work.

Mine, though, is a thesis routinely maligned by Freud-partisans as lacking any evidence and purely speculative in nature. It is truly ironical, then, that in now espousing such a viewpoint Solms should be controverting the received Freudian wisdom — also that in doing so, both in a 2002 essay and in his recent article, he should eschew any citation of my heretical 1983 essay and proffer his assertion as though its truth were something manifestly self-evident (also, by bibliographic omission, as a novel product of his own intellectual labours). My object in 1983 was to show how Freud’s toxicological libido theory, rather than having been clinically derived, had functioned as an a priori principle in all of his psychological investigations. Would only that, like me, Solms were now to demonstrate some grasp of why it should be that, epistemically, such a prepossession serves to vitiate all of Freud’s subsequent clinical and hermeneutic presentations.

*[Addendum, June 30, 2004]
Albeit an understanding still then contested in that some — most prominently, Camillo Golgi — would continue very ardently to advocate a reticular theory of brain structure that was only finally to be overthrown more than a half century later. Evidently Solms went astray because, rather than consulting the authoritative texts, he would seem to have relied instead on the neuromanticist volume of his colleague, Joseph LeDoux: Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (2002). There LeDoux portrays Freud — rashly, many would say — as a champion of the Cajal/Waldeyer neuron doctrine and notes how their cell theory “figured prominently” in his 1895 manuscript, wherein he “introduced the term contact barriers to describe the points where neurons abut…” (pp. 38-39). (Freud’s text, dubbed by his editors Project for a Scientific Psychology, was published only posthumously, in 1950.) Citing the work of G. Shepherd, LeDoux continues: “Two years after Freud wrote his Project, Sir Charles Sherrington proposed a different term for the connections between neurons… He was probably unaware [sic!] of Freud’s contact barriers, and chose to call the gaps synapses, derived from the Greek word meaning to clasp, connect, or join” (p. 39). Thus, it would certainly seem that, in crediting Sherrington with an 1897 “discover[y]”, Solms has simply bastardized what his associate LeDoux had had to say — of course, to Freud’s great advantage.

Peter J. Swales

Sources:

Fielding H. Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine, W.B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia, 1929 (pp. 525-526, 542-543); Garrison’s History of Neurology revised and enlarged by Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr., Charles C. Thomas, Springfield IL, 1969 (p. 205); cf. Malcolm Macmillan, The Completed Arc: Freud Evaluated, MIT Press. Cambridge MA, 1997 (pp. 178-184). Garrison (ibid); McHenry, Jr. (ibid). Sigmund Freud: Critical Assessments, edited by Laurence Spurling, Routledge, NY, 1989 (Vol. I, pp. 273-302). Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, W.W. Norton, NY, 1988 (p. 749); Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Subject to Biography, Harvard University Press. 1998 (pp. 118-119); Nathan G. Hale, Jr., “Freud’s Critics: A Critical Look”, Partisan Review. LXVI, 1999 (p. 239). Mark Solms, “An Introduction to the Neuroscientific Works of Freud”, in: The Pre-Psychoanalytic Writings of Sigmund Freud, edited by Getrudis van der Vijver & Filip Geerardyn, Karnac, London, 2002 (pp. 25-26).

Postscript [May 20, 2004]

Cave: asinus ad lyram asinum fricat

In his article entitled “Freud Returns”, published under the rubric “Neuroscience” in the May 2004 issue of Scientific American (pp. 82-88), author Mark Solms ends a paragraph (p. 88) with the following two sentences:

In the words of J. Allan Hobson, a renowned sleep researcher and Harvard Medical School psychia­trist, the renewed interest in Freud is lit­tle more than unhelpful “retrofitting” of modern data into an antiquated theoret­ical framework. But as Panksepp said in a 2002 interview with Newsweek magazine, for neuroscientists who are enthusi­astic about the reconciliation of neurology and psychiatry, “it is not a matter of proving Freud right or wrong, but of fin­ishing the job.”

Earlier in his article (p. 84, cf. pp. 87, 88), Solms has identified Jaak Panksepp as one of a number of “experts in contemporary behavioral neuroscience” and a member of the editorial advisory board of “the successful journal” Neuro­-Psychoanalysis (sic!).

In a recent article entitled “Reply to Domhoff (2004): Dream Research in the Court of Public Opinion”, published in the journal Dreaming (Vol. 14, No. 1. pp. 18-20) as a rejoinder to G. William Domhoff’s essay, “Why Did Empirical Dream Re­searchers Reject Freud? A Critique of Historical Claims by Mark Solms” (ibid., pp. 3-17), Solms ends by again quoting Panksepp (p. 20):

I, no less than Domhoff, would like to develop a new theory of dreams, but I do not want to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. As Panksepp put it in a recent interview with Newsweek magazine, “it is not a matter of proving Freud right or wrong, but of finishing the job” (“What Freud Got Right,” 2002, p. 51).

The cited article in the magazine Newsweek, “What Freud Got Right: His theories, long discredited, are finding support from neurologists using modern brain imaging” (November 11, 2002, pp. 50-51) — an article authored by journalist Fred Guterl, and featured under the rubric “Psychology” — ends with the following paragraph:

Freud’s psychological map may have been flawed in many ways, but it also hap­pens to be the most coherent and, from the standpoint of individual experience, mean­ingful theory of the mind there is. “Freud should be placed in the same category as Darwin, who lived before the discovery of genes,” says Panksepp. “Freud gave as a vi­sion of a mental apparatus. We need to talk about it, develop it, test it.” Perhaps it’s not a matter of proving Freud wrong or right, but of finishing the job.

A suitably attentive reader discovers, then, that Solms has twice misattributed his quotation while at the same time garbling it. Besides his transposition of “wrong or right”, he has omitted the qualifier, “Perhaps”, and hence converted a statement hedged by possibility and uncertainty into something apodictic. But. even more significantly, he has misattributed authorship of the sentence and thereby imbued it with some greater authority and greater gravity — after all, a categorical statement from the mouth of a neuroscientist bears a great deal more weight than could ever the all-too-glib punchline of a news-magazine hack.

Whether or not Dr. Panksepp might mind that a colleague has represented him in print as having, without heed, bought futures is here of no concern — after all, Panksepp is a member of the “Neuroscientific Advisory Board” of the so-called Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuro-Psychoanalysis [sic!] of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, of which Solms is himself Director. Asinus asinum fricat. Far more important is the matter of Solms’s appalling lack of scholarly rigour. Asinus ad lyram.

In a biographical blurb accompanying Solms’s article in the current issue of Scientific American, he is heralded as “editor and translator of the forthcoming four-volume series The Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud (Karnac Books)” (p. 87). Solms’s mangling and misattribution, twice, of a quoted statement — also, for that matter, his misattrib­ution of a discovery to physiologist Charles Sherrington, in 1897, in such a way as to render Sigmund Freud, in 1895, both percipient and prescient; and his non-attribution of certain radical assertions about Freud, cocaine, and the libido to an heretical 1983 essay by yours truly (vide: the undersigned’s Letter to the Editors of Scientific American dated May 10, 2004) — do not augur well for the field of serious Freud-studies, to say the very least. Are we soon gonna learn that Solms has misattributed to Freud what is in fact the work of another author? Cave asinum.

Yours very truly,
Peter J. Swales

Update: New material on the campaign against Shari’a Court in Canada

Report of Meeting with Marion Boyd Regarding Shari’a Court in Canada

On Thursday July 15, 2004, Homa Arjomand, Co-ordinator of the International Campaign Against Shari’a Court in Canada was called to a meeting with Marion Boyd regarding concerns about Shari’a court in Canada. Marian Boyd has been appointed by Premier Dalton McGuinty to review the 1991 Arbitration Act

This meeting lasted over three hours and many issues and case studies were presented:

Homa Arjomand emphasized the fact that The Ontario Arbitration Act 1991 has made it possible for the Islamic movement to make another attempt to attack both secularism and the women’s movement for equality. She stated that this move has proven, historically, to be a major force in creating serious setbacks to the lives of women. Arjomand also stated that the key features of this move include opposition to the freedom of women, opposition to women’s civil liberties and opposition to freedom of expression.

Ms Arjomand, by presenting some case studies, demonstrated that due to social pressure and the strict adherence to role and obligation imposed on women by Shari’a, battered women coming from so called Islamic countries remain in abusive relationships even in Canada. The government not only has done nothing to help these battered women come out of unbearable situations but now has also created another tool of oppression in Ontario.

Now, using the Ontario Arbitration Act 1991, which allows family disputes to be resolved by arbitrators who are Imams or elderly scholars of Islam, family matters can be resolved according to Shari’a law. Ms. Arjomand explained the consequences of allowing Shari’a arbitrators to handle family disputes. She listed some of the direct violations of social, political and civil rights that will result from the application of Shari’a law through the Arbitration Act. Once more, she stated that family law must be removed from this Act. The mere suggestion of Islamic cultural or religious tribunals has already generated an atmosphere of fear among Muslim women.

Ms. Arjomand finally drew attention to the fact that, in Canada, we uphold the separation of church and state, which means that there should be no religious determination in the laws that are applied through the courts. To ensure this, it is essential that all aspects of family law be removal from the Ontario Arbitration act 1991. Our campaign will not settle for less and we will not allow a shallow concept of “religion freedom” to translate into the bondage of thousands of women in Canada.

Mrs. Boyd stated that she is willing to meet with 35 other members of this campaign on August 3rd, 2004 at 9: 30 AM.

Re: Islamic Shari’a Arbitration Proposal Submitted by “The Islamic Institute of Civil Justice”

Dear Mrs. Boyd:

We wish to state our opposition to the recent move for establishing an “Islamic Institute of Civil Justice” in Canada. This move should be opposed by everyone who believes in women’s civil and individual rights, in freedom of expression and in freedom of religion and belief. We also wish to emphasis that even the mere suggestion of the Shari’a tribunals causes an atmosphere of fear among women who came from “Islamic” countries. If this Institute gains validity, it will increase intimidation and threats against innumerable women and it will open the way for future suppression.

While, technically, all Muslim women have access to Canadian laws and courts, and while the Canadian legal system would reject the oppressive decisions made under Shari’a as being contrary to Canadian Law, the reality is that most women would be coerced (socially, economically and psychologically) into participating in the Shari’a tribunal. Women are told that the Shari’a Tribunal is a legal tribunal under the Arbitration Act 1991. The women would take that to mean that whatever is decided by the Tribunal would be considered as lawful. Even women who know that Canadian law would not uphold the decisions would not challenge the decisions for fear of physical, emotional, economic and social consequences. Therefore, it is most unlikely that decisions that are contrary to Canadian law would ever come before the courts.

It is a sad and painful fact that, even in Canada, we still have to talk about the religious oppression of women. Nonetheless, the reality is that millions of women are suffering and being oppressed under Sharia law in many different parts of the world. Some of us managed to flee to a safe country, a country like Canada with no anti-secular backlash. Unfortunately, Canada is the only Western country that has given validity to an “Islamic Institute of Civil Justice” (through Ontario arbitration act 1991) that will allow family and civil matters to be arbitrated according to the Islamic Sharia law. If the government of Ontario and secular forces allow this move to succeed in Ontario, we don’t see how it will be possible to block it from gaining recognition in the rest of Canada and in every other country in the west.

We strongly believe that Shari’a tribunals will crush women’s civil liberties. It will enforce brutal laws and traditions on abused women who are living under the intensive influence of Islam. These tribunals will be applying Islamic Shari’a law which will compel abused women to stay in abusive relationship and will give them no choice but to be obedient’ or attempt suicide.

The acceptance of the Shari’a Tribunals as part of the Ontario legal system, is a move against secularism, modernism, egalitarianism and women’s rights. It will only send a massage to women that they are undeserving of human rights protection.

We believe it is the government’s duty to protect the individual and civil rights and liberties of all citizens living in Canada. There must be no state within a state. The Islamic advocates argue that, as Mr. Momtaz Ali stated in his proposal, it is their duty as good Muslims to work towards their own state. They also emphasize that there should be no separation between religion and the law.

We need a secular state and secular society that respects human rights and that is founded on the principle that power belongs to the people and not a God. It is crucial to oppose the Islamic Sharia law and to subordinate Islam to secularism and secular states. Under Shari’a family law and its penal code (which has remained unchanged since 1400 years), women are considered inferior to men. Marriage is a contract according to which the husband should perform sexually and provide materially for the wife. He has the legal, moral and religious duty to beat his wife, if she does not obey him. Sharia states that a man can easily divorce his wife, by declaring that fact three times.

One must bear in mind that Shari’a is not only a religion; it is intrinsically connected with the state. It controls every aspect of an individual’s life from very personal matters such as women’s periods to the very public ones such as how to run the state. It has rules for everything. An individual has no choice but to accept the rule of Sharia or face extreme consequences, as non believers are shown no tolerance.

Shari’a considers women to be a potential danger by distracting men from their duties and corrupting the community. It therefore suppresses women’s sexuality, whilst men are given the rights to marry up to four wives and the right to temporary marriage as many times as they wish. Young girls are forced to cover themselves from head to foot and are segregated from boys. These law and regulations are now implemented in Canada, but are usually hidden from secular society although, some, such as what happens in Islamic elementary and secondary schools, are visible. According to Shari’a law, a woman’s testimony counts for only half that of a man. So in straight disagreements between husband and wife, the husband’s testimony will normally prevail. In question of inheritance daughters receive only half the portion of sons and in the cases of custody, the man is automatically awarded custody of the children once they have reached the age of seven. Women are not allowed to marry non-Muslim whereas men are allowed to do so.

The message is clear: men dominate, women obey. A woman does not have the right to choose her husband, her clothing, her place of residence, and cannot travel without husband’s consent. The danger is that once these tribunals are set up, people from Muslim origin will be pressured to use them, thereby being deprived of many of the rights that people in the west managed to gain.

We, the defenders of secularism, believe that the introduction of Shari’a a tribunal or a “Shari’a court” in Canada would discriminate against the most vulnerable sectors of society: women and children. It would deny them the Canadian values of equality and gender justice.

In light of the above, and on the grounds of human rights, equality and gender justice we strongly urge the Ontario Government the removal of family law from the Arbitration Act 1991 so that all family disputes be resolved in Canadian secular court system regardless of their race, ethnicity and religion.

Sincerely

Homa Arjomand

Editorial introduction: The possibility of Shari’a courts in Ontario has raised concern among Muslim women, as reported in the Toronto Star recently. Homa Armojand is the campaign co-ordinator for the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada.

Once more I’d like to emphasize the presence of two forces operating within the Canadian Muslim community. One tries to implement Shari’a law with its repressive measures against women, while the other relies on modernism and secularism to resist such attempts.

The question I am asked time and time again by the media is: Since it was possible for Shari’a to be used from 1991 when the Ontario Arbitration Act was enacted, why do we care now?

The reality is that in 1991, political Islam did not show its flag. There was no overt political message because there was no apparent legal validation. The public was not aware of its hidden message.

But on October 23, 2003, the flag of political Islam was raised.

We, as activists for women’s rights in the Middle East, have experienced the oppression of political Islam and knew the danger if it gained legal credibility in Canada. We immediately called for an urgent international campaign. We believed that an attack on women’s rights in Canada would soon be followed by an attack on women’s rights across the oceans. Political Islam is global.

Historically, political Islam has proven to be a major force that imposed serious setbacks on women’s lives. Political Islam is a political movement that came into force against secular and progressive movements for liberation, and against cultural and intellectual advances. In the 1970’s the political Islamic movement grew stronger and became more widespread. In the 1980’s political Islam was supported and nurtured by western governments to be used in the conflicts and tensions of the cold war.

The key features of political Islam include opposition to the freedom of women, to women’s civil liberties and to freedom of expression. The enforcement of brutal laws and untouchable traditions made women’s homes into prisons. Women were excluded from many fields of work and from education. Their brutal treatment became the norm. Under political Islam women are second-class citizen who are denied their full legal rights.

We strongly believe that only the secular movement which is already present in our society can effectively counter political Islam.

We must repeal the Ontario Arbitration Act 1991. Only then we will be able to prevent Shari’a arbitration in Canada.

Homa Armojand is co-ordinator of The International Campaign Against Sharia Court In Canada. She can be emailed here: homawpi@rogers.com

Visit No Sharia.

Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative religious organization, delivers what could be the signature line for our backwards times in America:

There’s an arrogance in the scientific community that they know better than the average American.

In fact, of course, scientists do know quite a bit better than the “average American” about the matters for which their scientific expertise equips them. Those with knowledge, surprisingly, know more than those who are ignorant. Is that arrogance?

As Chris Mooney remarked, “science is not a democracy,” and in a democratic culture, that inevitably becomes a cause of resentment, as Ms. Lafferty’s comment attests. This resentment of competence was first made vivid to me when I appeared on CNN more than a year ago to discuss the textbook selection process in Texas. When I dismissed the argument that the textbook selection process should be “democratic” (which it isn’t, though it pretends to be) on the grounds that competent educators should vet textbooks, not political and religious groups, the CNN host, Anderson Cooper, cut me rather short: that reply clearly made him uncomfortable, and he changed the topic to how the selection process wasn’t really democratic anyway.

Resentment of competence was also a motif suggested by my exchange with Professor Eastman – one of the ignorant law professors shilling for teaching creationist lies to schoolchildren–who used that favorite rhetorical device of the anti-Darwin crowd by referring to its “tyrannical orthodoxy.” Unfortunately, as I noted on that occasion, “views that are correct ought to be orthodox, and they ought to exercise the tyranny appropriate to truth, namely, a tyranny over falsehood and dishonesty.”

But when truth and knowledge clash with deep-seated prejudices–especially those reinforced from the pulpit and in the public culture–resentment towards the “arrogance” of those with knowledge and competence grows.

Unfortunately, I don’t see much room for compromise in this domain. Knowledge and competence can not become meek and abashed merely to avoid offending the vanity of the undereducated, the parochial, and the unworldly. The Enlightenment dream was to extend the blessings of reason and knowledge as widely as possible. In the United States, that Enlightenment project has been stymied: at the highest echelons of the culture, the material and institutional support for the pursuit of knowledge and competence is unparalleled, yet the fruits of these labors are often either regarded with suspicion and resentment in the public culture at large–or simply go unrecognized and unnoted altogether.

Could there be a greater failure of the Enlightenment project than that a huge majority of U.S. citizens actually believe there is an intellectual competition between Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and “intelligent design” creationism? Or that the President of the country publically affirms their skepticism, without being held up for ridicule in the media and the public culture?

These are, for various reasons, scary times in America, but the increasingly brazen haughtiness of the purveyors of ignorance and lies–who cloak their backwardness in the judgmental rhetorc of “arrogance” and a none-too-subtle appeal to the “ordinary” person’s sense of democratic equality–may be the most worrisome development of all. That the empire of ignorance spreads its domain portends calamities from which it could take centuries to heal.

This article first appeared on The Leiter Report and is republished here by permission.

Although Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature is clearly intended to be read primarily by graduate students or instructors just beginning their teaching careers, one can also read the book, against the grain of the author’s own rhetorical goals, perhaps, as a guide for the academic outlander to the curious practices of that disciplinary subculture responsible for what still passes as literary study. Those who retain an image of the English professor as a high-minded if pedantic guardian of the treasures of Literature will find provided here what amounts to the finishing touches on the recast image the profession has been working on for at least twenty years. Just as high-minded but in a more earnest, socially-conscious way, even more firmly attached to scholastic attitudes and the conventions of academic discourse, the self-appointed curators of this recast image have nevertheless worked very hard to dissociate literary study from its former aspirations to establish works of literature as a kind of secular scripture, an authoritative source of time-tested wisdom and a superior sensibility. Unfortunately, in the process they also have succeeded, as Showalter’s book finally demonstrates, in dissociating it from literature as well.

The story of how “literature itself” came to be the focus of study in the English departments of American universities has been admirably told in Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature, and I will not recount here the details of the process by which over the course of the 20th century the role of literature in academic study was transformed from being a source of philological analysis to being a “subject” in its own right, a source of distinctive knowledge to be pursued for its own value. But as Graff’s account shows, this change in status took place amidst great disagreement over ultimate purposes, even among those proposing it, and in many ways the metamorphosis was never really completed, as no real accord was ever reached about how the literature curriculum ought to be organized, how best to teach it, or even finally how to define “literature” in such a way that its disciplinary principles could be well understood and its boundaries well identified. As a result, the past seventy years or so in American literary study has been characterized mostly by its instability, as one new wave of revolutionary thinking about the way it ought to be done has followed upon another, the only certainty being that the approach you now believe to be truly conclusive ten years from now will be moribund.

It has happened to the New Humanism, Marxism, the New Criticism, the Chicago School, Myth Criticism, Reader-Response Theory, Structuralism, Deconstruction, New Historicism (as happened also to the Old Historicism), multiculturalism in each of its variants, to the ideas of Freud, Sartre, Foucault, Bakhtin, Eco, Eagleton, Lacan, Jameson, Bloom, Fanon, Tompkins, Sedgwick, Said, Gilbert and Gubar, hooks, Burke, Auerbach, Kermode, de Man, Hartman, and Lentricchia. Not all of these movements, critics, and theories have been discredited or entirely discarded, of course, but none of the systems or elaborate critical structures erected in their names could still plausibly be considered the definitive method of literary study and criticism, the one method making all others, past and future, superfluous. To the extent that academic literary study has come to be perceived by the public, as well as by other academics, as frivolous, intellectually capricious at best-and I believe that it has-it is a consequence of this instability of approach built in at the very origins of the discipline’s historical identity, rather than any of the specific excesses that have been popularly attributed to current practices and particular scholars.

The present lack of obvious purpose in the English department, more pronounced than during the height of the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s but no less a sign of the disorder inherent in the discipline from the start, is fully reflected in Showalter’s attempt in Teaching Literature to survey all of the options available to the college literature instructor. Ironically enough, Showalter’s obvious, even admirable, effort to include references to numerous possible approaches to the teaching of literature, and thus not to “privilege” any one approach in particular, only reveals more plainly the degree to which the organized study of literature in American universities finally neither involves nor requires any particular regard for literature at all, not even the sort of unstated “resentment” Harold Bloom ascribes to the contemporary literary academy. The clear implication of Showalter’s account of what teaching literature is good for, in fact, is that if the whole endeavor is good for anyone, it is the teacher him/herself, whose well-being and sense of professional accomplishment are the incessant focus of Teaching Literature.

The book’s concern to raise the level of the college English instructor’s self-esteem is sounded in its very first chapter, “The Anxiety of Teaching,” in which Showalter anatomizes the various causes of such anxiety and explicitly offers her succeeding chapters as the sort of informed advice that can alleviate them if sincerely considered. Some of her advice is perfectly sound, to be sure-as is the more general contention that teaching induces its own distinctive kinds of anxieties-and that which touches on such unavoidable, perhaps more quotidian issues of class preparation and grading could of course be useful to those readers unable to acquire such information through more immediate means. Showalter is entirely correct in maintaining that much of the ordinary work of college teaching is systematically ignored in English graduate study, and is not much discussed by a younger instructor’s potential mentors among the faculty either, and thus any pedagogical guide that addresses this problem is undoubtedly to be welcomed. But this worthy intention is altogether undercut in a book that otherwise encourages its readers to view literature as essentially an adjunct to the act of teaching itself, as the platform from which the literature professor performs the salutary (and self-assigned) service only he/she (for reasons however vague and indefinite) is able to render.

“Performance,” as a matter of fact, is an important concept in Teaching Literature, as it would almost have to be in a depiction of the work of the literature professor that emphasizes so minimally an appreciation of the intrinsic merits of the subject purportedly being professed. Performance doesn’t necessarily involve simply the theatricality with which the professor chooses to present works of literature (Showalter explicitly disdains what she identifies as “teacher-centered” methods of instruction), but extends as well to the transformation of the classroom, indeed, of the literature course itself, into a kind of performance art whereby literature becomes the inspiration for the instructor’s own ingenuity in attracting students’ interest, but otherwise fades into the background as the more pressing requirements of the classroom drama necessarily take precedence. For example, Showalter describes her own method of imposing suitable order and form on courses in the novel, by which she gives such courses their own narrative structure, complete with “Beginnings,” Middles,” and “Endings.” Further:

In my fiction classes, I try to incorporate elements of narrative into the teaching process, and also make students aware of how these elements operate to define experience as a story. I compare lecturing to narration in the novel, demonstrate ways to vary and violate it, and encourage students to think of how it might be done. (Once to show how you could rupture or break the narrative frame of the classroom, I had a graduate student interrupt the lecture by loudly announcing he had a pizza to deliver to a student. Readers will recognize the homage to Fast Times at Ridgmont High. But every semester provides its own spontaneous frame-breakers, from a squirrel running around the auditorium to fire drills to students streaking.)

Something like this mirroring device seems to be what Showalter has in mind when claiming that “the most effective members of our profession are those whose literary theory is consistent with their teaching theory and practice.” In other words, one’s “theory” of the significance literature bears ought not merely to inform one’s scholarly work, or the choice of text to assign and study in the classroom (both of which already go a long way toward creating a distinct context in which the ultimate significance of literature is to be understood), but also ought to provide the mold into which one’s very classroom practice is to be poured. At first this highly artificial approach seems somewhat at variance with Showalter’s further statement in the same discussion of “Personae: The Teaching Self” that “although a persona can protect you against the intimacy and threat of self-revelation in the classroom, it can also prevent you from achieving the real exchange of ideas that makes teaching memorable” as well as from revealing the literature instructor’s “true self.” But finally these seemingly contradictory impulses-toward pedagogical contrivance and toward authentic self-expression-are bound together, part of the same goal of using the literature classroom for what Teaching Literature really affirms as the most compelling rationale for the activity named in its title: the valorization of the good intentions of the literature professor, provided the appropriate assurances of concern for the welfare of students can be made with credible conviction at the same time.

To those who believe that the tarnishing of the image of literary study is due mainly to the hyperpoliticization of literary scholarship over the past 15 years, I would argue instead that literature’s observable loss of luster comes as much from this more general evolution of literary study into the vehicle for the professor’s own self-aggrandizement, the current dominance of politically-minded scholarship being its most prominent manifestation for now. What the future developments of this tendency might bring about is anybody’s guess, but in my view that it certainly will mutate into some other method of the moment is beyond question. Whether the study of literature for its own sake, free of the enshrouding accumulations of which the self-projection advocated in Showalter’s book is only the most recent, will find its way back to the curriculum of the English department-or any other academic discipline that might arise in wake of its ultimate demise due to its lack of utility to the corporate university-is equally open to speculation, but if the history of literary study over the past century is any kind of reliable touchstone, such a renewal of purpose could only prove temporary.

One might well conclude from the pessimistic (to be candid, thoroughly defeatist) tone of these remarks that I believe literary study as the organized inquiry into the literary qualities of literature-its pristine form, if you will-is not merely a thing of the past but was a futile endeavor in the first place. This would be close to the conclusion I have in fact reached, although it has come not so much through dissatisfaction with books like Teaching Literature-I myself began as an aspirant to the office of the Literature Professor, but am well past the time I could still find the job delineated by Showalter intellectually credible-than through my own experience in the literature classroom and in attempting to square my own “theory” of why one would want to study literature with what can actually be accomplished in a college literature course given both existing conditions in American higher education and the inherent limitations of literature as part of an academic curriculum. As Teaching Literature inadvertently demonstrates, literature functions poorly as a subject of academic inquiry, not because it lends itself to no plausible method of focusing this sort of inquiry but because it lends itself to so many possible methods.

That works of literature themselves invite readings that find their own particular centers of interpretive gravity, angles of approach that are almost infinitely variable and determined by the individual reader’s own presumptions, is so obviously true that it seems in retrospect somewhat peculiar that such an unavoidable consequence of academic literary study would have been ignored by those who persevered in the struggle to install literary study as a recognized academic discipline. Alongside so many other disciplines with true discipline-that have a single center of gravity, or at the very least do not encourage a proliferation of interpretation for its own sake-literary study was always fated to appear to circle around its purported subject without ever conveying the impression that its essential work helped to get us closer to an informed understanding of the subject-or even that it has anything that could be called essential work to do. Even the initial dispensation prevailing in literary study, whereby works of literature were considered primarily for their claims to possessing literary qualities (judged to be good things to have) and the ultimate justification of which was to clarify our ideas about the very category of the literary, produced “knowledge” of frankly dubious value all too easily dismissed by an academy that esteems instead processes more objective and results more exact that literary critics-even when transformed into “scholars”-are generally able to provide.

Literary scholars have not failed at conforming to this model through want of trying, however. Various attempts to make literary study and scholarship more “scientific,” either in spirit or in fact, have been made, from the more doctrinaire applications of New Criticism to the virtual conversion of literary scholarship into a branch of social science found in the current move to cultural studies. And while on the one hand this is just the predictable consequence of trying to bring academic “rigor” to the study of literature, on the other the more extreme of these approaches (including the extreme laissez-faire approach encouraged by Elaine Showalter) manifests an obvious lack of enthusiasm for the inherent and more immediate benefits that works of literature have to offer, benefits that presumably draw most readers to them to begin with, namely aesthetic delight, the pleasures of a compelling reading experience, particularly those pleasures that can be the result of meeting the challenges posed by complex or innovative works, of actually expanding one’s capacity to enjoy satisfying reading experiences. It is precisely that imaginative writing that does elicit this kind of response most readers would identify as “literature,” and such a pragmatic definition of the term is probably as useful a way to distinguish what these imaginative works have in common as can be devised.

This may seem markedly similar to the definition Showalter endorses, literature as “what gets taught.” But actually it here I am in the starkest disagreement with Showalter’s own theory. It is a measure of how far the assimilation of literature to the academy has gone-some might say how thoroughly trivialized it has become-that apparently for many people it is unexceptional to so readily conflate works of literature (what gets read) with their place in the classroom, their potential for being taught. Furthermore, while this close association of the literary and the academic might seem to lead to a perception of literary study as largely an elite activity (as at an earlier period it probably was so perceived), Showalter explicitly renounces elitism by welcoming to the literature syllabus any fiction, poetry, or drama, “whether by Wordsworth or Maya Angelou. . .Jane Austen or Stephen King. . . .” (She also approves of film, television, and other “cultural materials,” although considers their use to be separate from “teaching literature” proper.) Ultimately, Showalter’s come one, come all attitude to determining the borders of literary study only confirms the effective purgation of all meaning from the very concept of literature among the current coterie of literature scholars and teachers.

Yet I for one finally cannot muster any great enthusiasm for the idea of reclaiming literary study on behalf of something similar to the more focused, literature-centric conception I have myself advanced. To believe that works of literature are valuable first and foremost for those qualities that sharpen the individual reader’s critical faculties and enhance that reader’s aesthetic sensibilities is not to conclude that these are values that can easily be conveyed through formal classroom study. In fact, to believe that what literature is good for is to provoke this kind of encounter between one reader and the latent if still unexplored possibilities of the imagination and of human language, a fundamentally subjective and personal achievement on the reader’s part, is probably to conclude that the study of literature in a classroom setting can only be a distraction from fostering such an encounter. Indeed, the perhaps inevitable result of bringing literature to the classroom at all is exactly the indulgent, aimless fragmentation depicted in Teaching Literature.

One might object that such an emphasis on the experiential encounter with literature would also deny the relevance of literary criticism broadly conceived. However, the opposite is true. Literary criticism that ultimately worked to enhance one’s experience of a given work of literature would be for that reason all the more valuable, but at the same time literary criticism in any recognizable form has been almost entirely superseded by academic scholarship, making the whole issue more or less moot in current literary culture. Even if it were to make a comeback-which itself would require a more general turn away from the protocols of academe among those who still find themselves drawn to literature as something separate from sociology and admirable beyond its utility as a species of agitprop-merely to reintroduce it into the classroom as a way to focus attention on “literature itself” would be self-defeating for the reasons I have discussed. The best way out of the dilemma paradoxically created by academic critics hoping to elevate the status of literature in American culture would be for a new generation of literary critics to bypass the academy altogether and seek out some fresh and more reliable direction by which to guide readers to their own recognition of literature’s abiding merits, which as ought surely to be evident by now, most productively occurs only outside the college classroom.

Daniel Green has published other
essays on related topics in College English, Philosophy and Literature,
Context, American Book Review, and Newtopia, among others. He is an
academic expatriate, and currently maintains a literary weblog: The
Reading Experience.

Our brains are huge, particularly if you take into consideration the relative size of our bodies. Generally, the proportion of brain to body is pretty tight among mammals. But the human brain is seven times bigger than what you’d predict from the size of our body. Six million years ago, hominid brains were about a third the size they are today, comparable to a chimp’s. So what accounts for the big boom? It would be flattering ourselves to say that the cause was something we are proud of–our ability to talk, or our gifts with tools. Certainly, our brains show signs of being adapted for these sorts of things (consider the language gene FOXP2). But those adaptations probably were little more than tinkerings with a brain that was already expanding thanks to other factors. And one of those factors may have been tricking our fellow hominid.

In the 1980s, some primatologists noticed that monkeys and apes–unlike other mammals–sometimes deceived members of their own species, in order to trick them out of food or sneak off for some furtive courtships. The primatologists got to thinking that deception involved some pretty sophisticated brain power. A primate needed to understand something about the mental state of other primates and have the ability to predict how a change in that mental state might change the way other primates behaved.

The primatologists then considered the fact that humans aren’t the only primates with oversized brains. In fact, monkeys and apes, on average, have brains twice the size you’d predict for mammals of their body size. Chimpanzees and other great apes have particularly big brains, and they seemed to be particularly adept at tricking each other. What’s more, primates don’t simply have magnified brains. Instead, certain regions of the brain have expanded, such as the neocortex, the outer husk of the brain which handles abstract associations. Activity in the neocortex is exactly the sort of thinking necessary for tricking your fellow ape.

Taking all this into consideration, the primatologists made a pretty gutsy hypothesis: that the challenges of social life–including deception–actually drive the expansion of the primate brain. Sometimes called the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis, it has now been put to its most rigorous test so far, and passed quite well. Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland published a study today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. (The link’s not up yet, but here’s a New Scientist piece. They found that in 18 species from all the major branches of primates, the size of the neocortex predicts how much deception the species practices. Bigger brains mean more trickery. They were able to statistically rule out a number of other factors that might have created a link where none existed. And they were able to show that deception is not just a side-effect of having a big brain or something that opportunistically emerges more often in big groups. Deception is probably just a good indicator of something bigger going on here–something psychologists sometimes call “social intelligence.” Primates don’t just deceive one another; they also cooperate and form alliances and bonds, which they can keep track of for years.

While deception isn’t just an opportunistic result of being in big groups, big groups may well be the ultimate source of deception (and by extension big brains). That’s the hypothesis of Robin Dunbar of Liverpool, as he detailed last fall in the Annual Review of Anthropology. Deception and other sorts of social intelligence can give a primate a reproductive edge in many different ways. It can trick its way to getting more food, for example; a female chimp can ward off an infanticidal male from her kids with the help of alliances. Certain factors make this social intelligence more demanding. If primates live under threat of a lot of predators, for example, they may get huddled up into big groups. Bigger groups mean more individuals to keep track of, which means more demands on the brain. Which, in turn, may lead to a bigger brain.

If that’s true, then the human brain may have begun to emerge as our ancestors huddled in bigger groups. It’s possible, for example, that early hominids living as bipeds in patchy forests became easier targets for leopards and other predators. Brain size increased modestly until about two million years ago. It may not have been able to grow any faster because of the diet of early hominids. They probably dined on nuts, fruits, and the occasional bit of meat, like chimpanzees do today. That may not have been enough fuel to support a really big brain; brain tissue is incredibly hungry, demanding 16 times more energy than muscle, pound for pound. It was only after hominids began making butchering tools out of stones and got a steady supply of meat from carcasses that the brain began to expand. And it was probably around this time (between 2 and 1.5 million years ago) that hominids began evolving the extraordinary powers of deception (and other sorts of social intelligence) that humans have. We don’t just learn how other people act–we develop a powerful instinct about what’s going on in their minds. (I wrote about the neuroscience behind this “mentalizing” last year in an article for Science.)

So next time you get played, temper your anger with a little evolutionary perspective. You’ve just come face to face with a force at work in our evolution for over 50 million years.

UPDATE 7/3/04: A skeptical reader doubted some of my statements about the brain and the energy it requires. Those who crave more information should check out Northwestern University anthropologist William Leonard’s article “Food for Thought” in Scientific American.

Carl Zimmer is the author of several popular science books and writes frequently for magazines including The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Science, Newsweek, Discover, Popular Science and Natural History. His latest book is Soul Made Flesh. This article first appeared on his blog The Loom and is republished here by permission.

The European and local elections of June 2004 saw the emergence of a new political party in the United Kingdom; called Respect, it presented itself as a new force in British politics, driving a progressive agenda. However, there are contradictions within this agenda, and in its practices, which threaten to turn it into a reactionary party rather than a progressive one.

Respect, or to give it its full title, Respect – The Unity Coalition, was formed on the 1st February 2004. It was set up both to replace the Socialist Alliance (although it was stated that Respect’s position was not explicitly socialist), and also to transform the Stop the War Coalition into a political party – thus taking protest against the war in Iraq to the ballot box. Both the Socialist Alliance and the Stop the War Coalition had been heavily dominated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a Trotskyist organisation with a history of trying to build coalitions with other organisations in order to generate a ‘broad front’ [1], and this is reflected in the leadership of Respect. For example, two prominent SWP activists, Lindsay German and John Rees, both held senior positions within the Stop the War Coalition leadership and both became electoral candidates for Respect. The new party also enlisted George Galloway, the anti-war MP who had been expelled from the Labour Party for urging British soldiers to disobey orders during the Iraq War. George Galloway has quickly become the most prominent public figure representing Respect.

George Galloway has always been a controversial figure, even among many people who opposed the Iraq War. Whilst most people who opposed invading Iraq clearly abhorred the regime of Saddam Hussein, even if they did not support going to war to remove him, Galloway’s relationship to Saddam has always been much more ambivalent. Although Galloway denies having had links with Saddam’s regime [2], he often visited Saddam and his deputies in Iraq during the 1990s, most notoriously to tell Saddam in 1994 that, “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” Even after the toppling of Saddam‘s regime, he was still willing to class Saddam’s deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz as a personal friend. [3] He has also expressed support for undemocratic regimes elsewhere in the world, insisting that Fidel Castro is “not a dictator” [4] and describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the biggest catastrophe of my life.” [5] Further controversy ensued recently with the publication of his book I’m Not the Only One [6], which received mixed reviews. The Independent columnist Johann Hari was especially scathing in his review, claiming that the book “made me feel as though I was trapped in a lift with a crack-smoking Stalin” and accusing Galloway of distorting recent Iraqi history to downplay the human rights abuses committed by Saddam. [7]

It is ironic that the founders of Respect chose to subtitle their party “the Unity Coalition”, as many of their former allies showed little desire to show unity with them. Few of the SWP’s comrades on the hard left joined Respect, with the notable exception of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who agreed to join, but with a decided lack of enthusiasm, and only in order to engage critically with Respect. [8]

The SWP fared little better in enticing member organisations of the Stop the War Coalition to join Respect. Within weeks of Respect’s launch, attempts to generate an alliance between Respect and the Green Party had fallen through, which led to the departure not only of the Greens but also of the writer and environmental activist George Monbiot, who is a Green Party member. Monbiot attempted to avoid ill-feeling in departing Respect, insisting that “I’m not apportioning blame for this: I recognise that it has been difficult for both sides to find a means of working together.” [9] The spokespersons of the two parties were distinctly less conciliatory in tone. Respect claimed that they had been “snubbed” by the Greens, while the Green Party in their turn dismissed Respect as little more than an SWP front. The Greens claimed that Respect meetings had been organised by SWP activists without so much as an invitation to Green Party spokespersons, and expressed the view that, “Mr Galloway and the SWP simply wanted the Green Party involved in their project to lend credibility and make them appear more broadly based.” [10]

One former ally in the Stop the War Coalition that the SWP had more luck in attracting to Respect is the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), a rather conservative organisation with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist movement. This has resulted in one of the most bizarre pairings in recent British political history – a revolutionary Trotskyist organisation allying itself with a conservative Islamist one. It is this pairing that makes Respect’s position more than a little contradictory.

Trotskyism and Islamism would appear, on the face of it, to be diametrically opposed ideologies. The desire of Trotskyism to create a secular, classless society has little in common with the Islamist ideal of society organised on strict religious lines. However, the SWP and the Muslim Association of Britain share two beliefs that have become key to their alliance – vehement opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and uncompromising support for the Palestinians in their struggle against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thanks to the MAB’s co-sponsoring of the Stop the War Coalition’s marches, the SWP found themselves working increasingly closely with the MAB, and hence the two movements began to forge bonds.

There are, of course, areas in which the ideological differences between Trotskyism and Islamism are difficult to ignore; in particular the issues of women’s rights and gay rights have proven problematic. This was highlighted recently when the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, along with protestors from Outrage and the Queer Youth Alliance, joined a march protesting against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The gay rights protestors had opted to protest both at the human rights abuses committed by Israel against Palestinians, and also against the persecution of gay people by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and they carried placards bearing the slogan “Israel, stop persecuting Palestine! Palestine, stop persecuting queers!” The Outrage press release describes what happened next.

As soon as they arrived in Trafalgar Square to join the demonstration, the gay protesters were surrounded by an angry, screaming mob of Islamic fundamentalists, Anglican clergymen, members of the Socialist Workers Party, the Stop the War Coalition, and officials from the protest organisers, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC). They variously attacked the gay activists as “racists”, “Zionists”, “CIA and MI5 agents”, “supporters of the Sharon government” and “dividing the Free Palestine movement”. [11]

Officials from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign tried to persuade the gay protesters to stand at the back, and when the protesters refused, tried to block their placards with their own. It was a shameful display of intolerance on the part of people who claimed to espouse tolerance.

Any organisation wanting to create a progressive movement out of the anti-war/pro-Palestine movement would need to confront these sorts of reactionary attitudes. Unfortunately, signs so far within Respect appear to indicate that the opposite is happening. At one point it looked as though Respect might not have any commitment to gay rights or women’s rights at all, when at a Marxism 2003 meeting Lindsay German of the SWP (and later a Respect electoral candidate) announced that although she was in favour of defending gay and women’s rights, she was “not prepared to have them as a shibboleth.” It was subsequently pointed out to her that the “shibboleths” were in fact two of the causes celebres of the British left and a vital part of any genuinely progressive movement. The Communist Party of Great Britain, soon to become the SWP’s somewhat reluctant partners in Respect, condemned her comments, insisting that, “Doctoring, abandoning or putting aside demands so as not upset the sensibilities and prejudices of the mosque is not only crass opportunism, but is actually to give up on the struggle for democratic rights in the here and now.” [12]

In the end, Respect included in its founding declaration statements expressing commitment to “Opposition to all forms of discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs (or lack of them), sexual orientation, disabilities, national origin or citizenship” and “ The right to self-determination of every individual in relation to their religious (or non-religious) beliefs, as well as sexual choices.” It has been suggested that it was these two statements that prompted the Muslim Association of Britain’s decision not to give outright support to Respect. The MAB did however retain informal links with the party, and the MAB’s former President Anas al-Tikriti stood as lead Respect candidate for Yorkshire and the Humber in the European elections. At the official launch of Respect, an MAB spokesman told the assembled crowd that, “We hope to cooperate with Respect, and that it will maintain a position which will prolong that cooperation. We know that on some issues we take different stands: that is why it is important to keep the door open.” The “different stands” were interpreted by some of those present as a reference to the statements on sexual orientation in the founding declaration. [13]

Despite the failure to win the outright support of the MAB, who instructed their members to vote tactically for Respect in some constituencies, and for the Greens, Liberal Democrats and Ken Livingstone in others, Respect continued to campaign heavily for the Muslim vote in the run-up to the June elections. Respect activists trooped around the mosques of Britain (the Respect campaign in Wales was actually launched in a mosque), and no opportunity was missed to build links with the Muslim community. Meanwhile, the shibboleths were being quietly shunted aside. Respect’s feverish efforts to win over Muslim votes were being matched by a deafening silence on the issues of gay rights and women’s rights.

This can be illustrated by a simple, if not entirely rigorous, method. On the 22nd June 2004, running the word “Muslim” through the search engine on the Respect website returned an impressive 224 results. By comparison “Christian” returned only 17 results, while “Jewish” yielded up 25. “Sikh” produced 2 results and “Hindu” just one. “Buddhist” and “Buddhism” returned none at all.

Moving on to the shibboleths, the gulf grew yet further. A search of the website under the word “gay” returned just one document – a newsletter from the Brighton and Hove branch of Respect that made brief reference to a Stonewall protest for gay rights in their area. Searching under “gay rights” again returned just that one document from Brighton and Hove. “Homosexual”, “bisexual”, “feminism”, “feminist”, “abortion”, “contraception” and “sexuality” all returned no documents whatsoever. The word “sexual” produced only results that referred to the original statement in the founding declaration about the right to self-determination over sexual choices.

In comparison, typing the word “gay” on the same date into the search engine at the Conservative Party website returned only two documents created in the period between the launch of Respect and the June 10th elections. In itself a pretty unimpressive result. However, one of these documents was a report on a “gay and lesbian summit” that had been held by the Conservative Party. The event was attended by Steve Norris, the Conservative candidate for London mayor, Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary and, of all people, that favourite whipping boy of the right-wing press, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, the gay senior police officer who had nearly been hounded out of the Metropolitan Police by a media storm riddled with thinly-veiled homophobia. At the summit “delegates from both national and community-based organisations discussed key issues, including strategies for tackling homophobic bullying, the role of government, and the importance of promoting healthier lifestyles.” [14] By contrast, during the same period Respect had failed to produce a single press release relating to gay issues, let alone an actual campaign. From this (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) test, a party that had been launched with the aim of being a new voice for progressive politics had emerged as less gay-friendly than the Conservatives!

While gay rights and women’s rights were being quietly ignored, anything that might be perceived as offensive to the Muslim community was being pounced on and denounced by Respect. On 26th April 2004, Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat candidate in the London mayoral elections, expressed concerns about young Muslims in London being converted to religious extremism. “The major concern is that there is a growing group of young, particularly Muslims in London, who are becoming more fanatical,” he said. “It is the extremists in London who may be growing in number rather than going down in number.” [15]

Respect issued an immediate press release denouncing Hughes’ comments. “Simon Hughes’ comments can only help to stir up hostility to Muslims in the capital,” protested Respect’s Lindsay German. “He should apologise to young Muslims for his outrageous attack on them in today’s press.” Oliur Rahman, another Respect candidate, said, “What is Simon Hughes trying to achieve with these comments? If his aim was to win racist votes to the Liberal Democrat cause then he should stand down. It is clear to me that no Muslim should back a candidate who is creating hostility towards our community.” [16]

Nowhere in Respect’s press release was any evidence offered, or even the claim made, that Islamist extremism was not on the rise among young Muslims in London. The mere fact that Hughes had suggested this was touted as evidence of his racism. Arguably, Respect action’s crossed the line between denouncing Islamophobia and attempting to stifle legitimate criticism of Islamist extremism.

More sinister still was the reaction of first the Muslim Association of Britain, then of Respect, to the assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin by Israeli forces. Sheikh Yassin was the founder and religious leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas. On March 22nd 2004 an Isreali helicopter gunship fired a missile at Yassin’s car as he was returning from morning prayers, killing Yassin and 9 other Palestinians.

The assassination was denounced across the world. Amnesty International said, “Once again Israel has chosen to violate international law instead of using alternative lawful means. Sheikh Yassin could have been arrested and prosecuted.” [17] The Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called the assassination “unjustified” and “very unlikely to achieve its objective.” [18]

The Israeli attack was certainly disproportionate, reckless and probably illegal under international law, but one should not whitewash Yassin. As the founder of Hamas, he bore direct personal responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians at the hands of Hamas’ suicide bombers. He also poisoned the minds of young Palestinians by preaching martyrdom. In 1996, a wave of suicide bombings by Hamas wrecked the Oslo peace agreements and caused the election of a hardline Israeli government under Binyamin Netanyahu. Arguably, Hamas have also done much to keep Ariel Sharon in power. Sharon may be a thug, as his detractors insist, but he is an elected thug, and the suicide bombs of Hamas have done much to persuade the Israeli public to elect that kind of leader.

It is considered bad taste to speak ill of the dead, so it is presumably with good taste in mind that the Muslim Association of Britain chose to commemorate this architect of mass slaughter with the words, “For millions of Muslims around the world and for many freedom lovers and justice defenders across the globe Sheikh Yassin was a symbol of struggle for freedom and justice.”[19] The MAB also described as “most regrettable” the decision of the European Union to declare Hamas a terrorist organisation, a decision that the MAB claimed “gave the green light to open what Sharon and his generals termed the ‘hunting season’ going after Hamas.” [20]

Faced with such a shocking apologia from one of their closest allies for one of the most brutal terrorist organisations in the world, Respect knew exactly what to say, and whom to blame.

Respect declared Jack Straw (yes, the same Jack Straw who unreservedly condemned Yassin’s assassination), to be a “co-signatory on Sheikh Ahmed’s death warrant.” On the day of the assassination, George Galloway said that, “Jack Straw pushed the EU into taking the catastrophic decision to declare Hamas ‘terrorists’ and from that the tragic consequences inevitably flowed.” [21]

In the week before the election, a sudden burst of vitriol was aimed at Respect from commentators in the quality press. Ironically, this vitriol came not from right-wingers, but from those left-wingers who had supported the war in Iraq. Nick Cohen, writing in the New Statesman, declared that “the far left has reduced anti-war protest to absurdity, not to say ignominy.” [22] Meanwhile, in the Independent, Johann Hari claimed that a vote for Respect would be “a vote for totalitarians in an unconvincing left-wing costume.” [23] The Guardian’s David Aaronovitch went further than mere commentary, choosing to attend a Respect meeting. He reported back, “I chose at random, but I chose badly. The Respect website is full of reports of huge meetings comprising hundreds of cheering people, and yet I wound up in a pleasant community hall in north-east London with 25 Trots, some of their more sceptical mates and five or six Muslims.” He spent an evening enduring “the almost inconceivably tedious routine of the far-left political meeting” before finishing his report by commenting, “I give ‘em a year.” [24]

It’s probably not surprising that so much venom has come from left-wing writers working for left-wing publications, while right-wingers have simply dismissed Respect, who are probably no threat to the right. Cohen, Hari and Aaronovitch on the other hand saw a party claiming to champion the left that was so desperate for the Muslim vote that it was willing to jettison any commitment to women’s rights or gay rights so as not to offend the more reactionary elements within the Muslim community; that tried to stifle legitimate condemnation of Islamist extremism in the name of combating Islamophobia, and that was willing to campaign against civilian deaths caused accidentally by RAF and USAF warplanes but not those caused deliberately by Hamas suicide bombers. A party claiming to bring back democracy to Britain, whose figurehead George Galloway had apparently been happy to socialise with dictators in Iraq and Cuba. Such a party would be likely not so much to save progressive politics as to destroy it.

When the June 10th elections finally came, success eluded Respect. Across England and Wales they polled just 1.7%, dashing George Galloway’s hopes of winning a seat in the European Parliament. Hopes of riding on the back of public opposition to the Iraq war had failed, with most of the anti-war vote going to the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. However, this low national figure masks some surprisingly high polling figures in certain very localised areas, particularly in parts of London and Birmingham. In the London borough of Tower Hamlets, Respect actually polled more than any other party, with 20.36% of the vote, while in Newham they polled 21.41% of the vote. Across London as a whole they gained 5% of the vote for the Greater London Assembly, and hence only just missed out on getting a seat on the GLA. [25] Given the very localised nature of Respect’s successes, the Green Party’s Spencer Fitz-Gibbon commented that, ”A quarter of Respect’s votes [in London] came from one constituency alone, so I think we’ve witnessed the impact of some highly disciplined Muslim politics here, with what looks like a large block vote being given to Respect thanks to the efforts of the Muslim Association of Britain.” [26]

Defenders of Respect point out that the party is only a few months old, and its policies are still evolving. However, if Fitz-Gibbon’s analysis is correct, Respect now find themselves in a quandary. Their greatest hopes of electoral success lie in maintaining and developing their alliances with the Muslim community. However, if they wish to continue pandering to the prejudices of reactionary organisations such as the Muslim Association of Britain, they abandon all hope of becoming a genuinely progressive movement. If, on the other hand, they wish to promote gender and sexual equality, and to campaign against human rights abuses whether committed by Israel or Hamas, then they risk biting the hand that has so far fed them votes. The path which they take is up to them.

Notes

1. As well as the Socialist Alliance, the Stop the War Coalition and Respect, the SWP have also been heavily influential within the Anti-Nazi League and Globalise Resistance.

2. Letter by George Galloway to the Guardian. 7 June 2004

3. Mueller A. (November 2003) George Cross: George Galloway MP. The Independent on Sunday.

4 ibid.

5. Hattenston S. (September 16, 2002) The Monday Interview: Saddam and Me. The Guardian.

6. Galloway G. (2004) I’m Not the Only One. London: Allen Lane.

7. Hari J. (May 14 2004) Book Review: I’m Not the Only One by George Galloway. The Independent.

8. Neira M (January 29 2004) RESPECT Launch – Socialism: The Final Shibboleth. Weekly Worker 513

9. Green Party (Feb 18 2004) Monbiot resigns from Unity.

10. Green Party (Feb 12 2004) Greens regret attack by Galloway/SWP “Respect” party.

11. Outrage (May 15 2004) Gays attacked at Palestine rights protest.

12 Conrad J. (July 10 2003) No compromise on sexism and homophobia. Weekly Worker 488

13. Neira M. op. cit.

14. Conservative Party (March 29 2004) Conservatives stage gay and lesbian summit.

15. Woolf M. (April 26 2004) Simon Hughes: ‘It is easier to beat Livingstone now he is the Labour candidate. He is Blair’s mayor now.’ The Independent.

16. Respect – The Unity Coalition (April 26 2004) London candidates denounce Simon Hughes for stirring up hostility to young Muslims in capital.

17. Amnesty International (March 22 2004) Amnesty International strongly condemns assassination of Sheikh Yassin.

18. BBC News Online. (March 23 2004) World anger after Hamas killing.

19. Muslim Association of Britain. (March 22 2004) MAB Condemns Israeli Assassination of Palestinian Spiritual Leader Yassin.

20. Ibid.

21 Respect – The Unity Coalition. (March 22 2004) Foreign Secretary “co-signed Hamas leader’s death warrant.”

22. Cohen N. (June 7 2004) Saddam’s Very Own Party. New Statesman

23. Hari J. (June 4 2004) This election proves that politicians, whatever their faults, aren’t all the same. The Independent.

24. Aaronovitch D. (June 5 2004) Same old guff with an added ingredient. The Guardian

25. Respect – The Unity Coalition. (June 14 2004) Respect polls over a quarter of a million votes and establishes itself as a serious national party.

26 Green Party. (June 12 2004) Mixed fortunes in London elections.

John Milton, who in his Paradise Lost selflessly gave the world the image of hell as a lake of fire, was also the 17th century’s greatest proponent of freedom of speech: as long as you were a Puritan (like Milton) or an Anglican (like the king) you should be able to say anything you like–as long as you did not attack Puritanism or the Anglican Church. Catholics, on the other hand, were but the puppets of a Satanic pope, disloyal British subjects who therefore should be allowed no such rights. John Locke, another Puritan and one who greatly influenced the founders of the American republic, held similar views.

This is all mildly interesting from an historical point of view, but presents the moralist with certain problems, such as whether Milton and Locke’s anti-Catholic views should diminish their high historic reputations as champions of the rights of man. Fortunately historians do not meddle with morality, nor do they sit in judgment of historical figures, at least not those historians who follow Henry Steele Commager, the Amherst don who preached that the duty of the historian “is not to judge but to understand.” In his essay “Should the Historian Sit in Judgment?,” Commager writes:

…when we come to pronounce judgment on slavery, we are met at the very threshold with the most intransigent consideration: generation after generation of good, human Christian men and women not only accepted it but considered it a blessing … Clearly we cannot fall back on the simple explanation that all of these men and women …were bad … It is absurd for us to pass moral judgment on slaveholders, absurd to indict a whole people or to banish a whole people to some historical purgatory where they can expiate their sins.

Moral considerations then should be left to ethicists and moral philosophes. But donning the robes of the moralist presents problems of its own, notably the problem of Presentism, that is judging historical figures by contemporary moral standards. The popular view is that contemporary man is morally superior to his ancestors, and given time, he will reach a state of moral perfection, or something very near. This despite the knowledge that today and for the past three thousand years the West’s Judeo-Christian moral principles have been largely set in stone beginning with Moses’ climb up Mt. Sinai.

The charge of Presentism seldom prevents the non-historian from reconsidering the evidence and handing down his own brand of retroactive justice. Such reconsiderations have led some Native Americans, for example, to regard Columbus as a genocidal maniac akin to Hitler. Some African-Americans regard Washington and Jefferson as greedy Neolithic slavemasters. But mostly Native and African Americans object to the continuing deification of men they regard as cretins and villains. Time does not necessarily heal historical wounds, and around the globe peoples and races continue to maintain hostilities going back hundreds, even thousands of years, regardless to what extent moral standards and notions of right and wrong have changed or “evolved.”

When we read of some great intellectual humanist posthumously accused of anti-Semitism we are surprised and shocked–surprised because no matter how distant their era we know these men to have been mainly of sound mind and principles. Indeed many of these accusations by contemporary biographers seem rather weak and are often based on little more than a single dubious public statement such as Erasmus’, “If it is Christian to hate Jews, then we are all good Christians.” Interestingly many of these Reformation-era intellectuals accused of anti-Semitism turn out to belong to the group of Northern Humanists closely linked with the Catholic Church (the bible translator Erasmus, and the saintly Sir Thomas More), or those who considered themselves holier than the Roman Church (Luther and Calvin).

Though I use the acid test of anti-Semitism to examine their moral bona fides, I might just as well ask whether these men were particularly superstitious, if they, like Luther and Calvin, condoned burning witches and heretics, if they considered Africans to be nothing more than potential property and held women scarcely a step above indentured servants. It is something of a relief then to find that most of the pre-eminent intellectual thinkers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (a time of fierce anti-Semitic violence and expulsions) were not anti-Semitic, nor did most advocate burning heretics and witches. Among those artists and intellectuals who seem to have had little or nothing hateful to say publicly against Jews, Protestants, Catholics or women one finds Abelard, Bacon, Cervantes, Copernicus, Dante, Da Vinci, Descartes, Galileo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Newton, Petrarch, Rabelais and Shakespeare, to cite but a few examples. There are exceptions. Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta often gets tagged as anti-Semitic because, even though it is peopled with unpleasant characters, the Jew Barabas is the most unpleasant of all. Chaucer likewise is written off as anti-Semitic because of a story included in his Canterbury Tales. “The Prioress’ Tale” tells the story of a Christian boy killed by ghetto Jews (Jews had been expelled from England some 100 years before Chaucer’s writing). It was an old anti-Semitic tale by then, but whether the anti-Semite is Chaucer or the Prioress-Narrator is still a matter of debate. Some scholars suspect Chaucer was satirizing the anti-Semitism of ignorant peasants and church leaders. To me it seems unlikely that a satirist and social critic as brilliant as Chaucer would have meant a poem as loathsome, melodramatic, and ham-fisted as “The Prioress Tale” as anything but a satire of Christian hypocrisy and the Blood Libel, and the fact that most of the other tales satirize some smug, self-righteous group or other only bolsters that opinion.

We know that many Greek and Roman intellectuals (Seneca, Juvenile, Horace) were critical of Jews, largely due to the latters’ refusal to convert and worship the Greek or Roman gods, and this in turn led to periodic persecutions and subsequent revolts, and the occasional accusation of ritual murder. During the Reformation these remained among the reasons Christians persecuted Jews, the major change being the appearance on the scene of Christian rather than pagan persecutors. Imagine then some Middle Age moralist, say a Dante, suggesting that the Classical Romans and Greeks were not anti-Semitic because they were a primitive people who lacked the progressive values of the Medieval Dutch peasant.

Conservatives love to accuse others of Presentism, but are they any less guilty each time they praise a Copernicus, Edison, Bell, Newton, or Magellan? When lauding Luther, contemporary Lutherans do not put themselves in the role of a 16th century German peasant and conclude that Luther was a brave and brilliant man. Rather they view him from our own modern perspective where Brother Martin remains brilliant and brave. Then, without detecting a note of hypocrisy, they ignore or dismiss Luther’s sins as quite common and normal for the moral standards of his time and place. But as author Ibn Warraq says of Mohammed and other early Muslim leaders, “if we cannot condemn [their] faults according to contemporary standards, then neither can we hold them up as the wise and tolerant lawgivers whom contemporary moderates praise.”

In order to really comprehend the hypocrisy of Presentism’s critics, one must put one’s self in the boots of the same Medieval Jew so mercilessly victimized by Luther and the Catholic Church. Perhaps Luther honestly did not think persecuting Jews was evil (though in his earlier writings–before he despaired of converting Jews–he preached religious tolerance), but the persecuted Jew knew it well enough. Many theologians and conservative historians maintain that it is quite possible that Luther, et. al., could be blissfully ignorant of the evil of anti-Semitism, but is not this the equivalent of excusing Nazi soldiers for massacring Jewish civilians since the soldiers truly believed it was fine to kill untermenschen? If anything Luther is more to blame because he was the equivalent not of some Bavarian foot soldier, but of a Goebbels or Himmler. Presentism, it seems to me, is simply a convenient way of letting Luther, Jefferson, Washington and their ilk off the hook for crimes against humanity. I doubt you will find one intellectual who will honor as heroes the settlers who gave American Indians blankets tainted with small pox. But are not these intellectuals guilty of Presentism, for at the time were not tainted blankets just another legitimate weapon to be utilized in the Indian Wars?

The reputations of Luther, Calvin, Jefferson, Washington, (though not Columbus), have survived the evils they committed. Perhaps rightly so, for it may be argued that the good they did outweighed the bad. (On the other hand, some scholars have noted that the fact that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves gave a legitimacy to Southern slaveownership that allowed the practice to continue through the Civil War.) More, many of the writings and teachings of these men continue to influence the actions of our contemporaries. Luther’s anti-Semitic writings were used in our own lifetime as highly effective Nazi propaganda, including his “Last Sermon” containing the infamous “Warning against the Jews” used by the Nazi Bishop Martin Sasse as a means of stirring racial hatred and inciting good Lutherans to persecute Jews. One may excuse Luther and blame the Nazi propagandists, but one cannot escape the fact that the Nazi propagandists were inspired by Luther’s vitriol and bile, or that in the days following Kristallnacht German newspapers published statements by Lutheran theologians who announced they were pleased that the persecution began on Martin Luther’s birthday.

The danger comes when we use the charge of Presentism to excuse these sins. Next time some know-it-all comes at you with the charge of Presentism, why not ask him or her why if the slave knew slavery was wrong, the slaveowner didn’t? Why if the Jew knew anti-Semitism was wrong didn’t the Christian? If the heretic being roasted at the stake knew he was innocent, why didn’t the Inquisitors?

Much of the opposition to Presentism seems to rest heavily on the contention that contemporary man is far more morally advanced than was, say, Renaissance man, though there seems scant evidence to support this. Today Jew-hatred remains curiously strong in Eastern Europe, even though few Jews survive there. (On a recent trip to Poland I noted a disturbingly vast amount of graffiti reading “Jews to the gas” and “Jews out, Poland for Poles” even though there are but a handful of Jews remaining in the country.) Americans and West Europeans seem as divided as ever over race. Whites still flee areas the moment blacks move in, while sending their children to majority white private schools—though admittedly other factors play into this phenomenon including the prevalence of crime, drugs and the disgraceful conditions in many city public schools. Today women are largely equal to men before the law and outnumber them in universities and schools of law, but it was largely something women had to force down the throats of men like bad medicine. Gays and lesbians remain second-class citizens, and drug addicts are treated as criminals instead of the sick individuals they are.

Perhaps the reason we relate so well to men like Jefferson and Luther is that we well understand where they are coming from. Perhaps it is not such a stretch to put ourselves into their shoes and adopt their way of thinking. Perhaps their values are not that different from ours, no matter how much we like to pretend they are. And perhaps that is why we are so eager to defend them.

Around the time of the huge demonstrations of February 15 th 2003, the Stop the War Coalition had emerged as one of the biggest protest movements in British history, yet it failed to achieve its goal of preventing war in Iraq. Moreover, within weeks of the February protests, the STWC had gone into decline with startling rapidity. Its core activists were unable to capitalise on the huge groundswell of support they had received prior to the war in Iraq , and it was to become dogged by poor leadership and vulnerable to hijack by political and religious extremists.

The Stop the War Coalition had been formed on September 21 st 2001 in London , in the wake of the September 11 th attacks. The aim of the Coalition was, to stop the war currently declared by the United States and its allies against ‘terrorism’. We condemn the attacks on New York and we feel the greatest compassion for those who lost their life on 11th September 2001. But any war will simply add to the numbers of innocent dead, cause untold suffering, political and economic instability on a global scale, increase racism and result in attacks on civil liberties.[1]

The Coalition was at first concerned with campaigning against the war in Afghanistan . However, when the focus of US military intentions switched to Iraq , the Coalition began to develop a new prominence in British civil society. Public support for war in Afghanistan had been much stronger than for that in Iraq . Afghanistan had been a war with a clear casus belli (the September 11 th attacks by al Qaeda, and the Taliban‘s subsequent refusal to expel al Qaeda from Afghanistan), whereas Iraq had no such clear grounds for war. Upon being asked to support war based on little more than vague claims about intelligence of WMD production in Iraq , it is unsurprising that the public was sceptical. The Stop the War Coalition grew at an unprecedented rate as grassroots organisations developed local networks, and its spokespersons and events became increasingly prominent. However, there were clear flaws in the STWC’s organisation that would prevent it from making effective use of the support it received at this time.

The main flaw in the STWC was that, although the demand it was making in late 2002 and early 2003 was a fairly moderate one (“Don’t Attack Iraq ”), a significant chunk of its leadership displayed extreme-left views that moderates would find repugnant. For example, the appointment of Andrew Murray, who sits on the politburo of the Communist Party of Britain, to the chair of the STWC was to cause PR problems for the STWC when it emerged that he had written an article in Morning Star to commemorate the 120 th anniversary of Stalin’s birth. Murray had dismissed as “hack propagandists” those who “abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others.” These comments drew particular criticism from Observer journalist Nick Cohen, a left-winger who argued in favour of war on humanitarian intervention grounds. Cohen pointed out, quite rightly, that “there were 20 million reasons”[2] (the number of people killed by Stalin) to abominate the name of Stalin beyond all others.

Moreover, Andrew Murray was not the only figure in the STWC’s leadership to show a certain wistful nostalgia towards history’s greatest mass murderer. George Galloway MP, the renegade Labour MP who became Vice-President of the STWC and who was expelled from the Labour Party in the aftermath of the war, was asked in 2002 if he was part of the Stalinist left. He replied, "I wouldn’t define it that way because of the pejoratives loaded around it; that would be making a rod for your own back. If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union , yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe."[3]

Just as Galloway indulges the regimes of tyrants of the past, he has also done so with more recent dictators. He describes Fidel Castro as “the most magnificent human being I’ve ever met”.[4] Once a vehement opponent of Saddam’s regime, he now classes Saddam’s deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz as a friend, saying of him, “I admire Tariq Aziz, very much. He’s a sophisticated and interesting man…He was a great Shakespeare man, a great Sinatra man. If Saddam Hussein had listened to him more, Iraq might not be in the mess it’s in today.”[5] Most notoriously, in 1994 he travelled to Baghdad , stood before Saddam, the man he had once protested against, and said, “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” Small wonder then, that Nick Cohen commented that, ‘It was as if the supporters of fox-hunting and village post offices had allowed the British National Party to run the Countryside Alliance.'[6]

Also prominent in the Stop the War Coalition leadership were the activists of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a Trotskyist organisation wedded to the principle of protest politics. Lindsey German of the SWP is the convenor of the STWC, and John Rees, also of the SWP, sits on the STWC’s steering committee. SWP activists have contributed to a significant part of the STWC’s organisation in many local branches as well as at the national level. Because of the strong influence of the SWP on the Coalition, the STWC has inherited some of the SWP’s strengths (notably the ability to organise and coordinate protests on a large scale), but also many of its weaknesses (crass dogmatising, reducing complicated issues to a banner-sized slogan, kneejerk anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment, unwillingness to criticise totalitarian regimes that suit their ideological outlook). One particular weakness of the SWP that came to be inherited by the STWC is its bizarre tolerance of Islamic fundamentalism, an ideology that is antithetical to socialism. This appears to stem partly from the SWP’s stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict, which is aggressively pro-Palestine and anti-Israel. Also, the SWP appeared to be aware of the potential for Muslim activists to be mobilised via the mosques of Britain . A consequence of this was the involvement of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), which, along with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, would co-sponsor the Stop the War protests. The involvement of the MAB in the STWC has been controversial, especially when it emerged that the organisation is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist organisation that operates in Egypt , the Sudan , Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East , where it has pursued an agenda that is thoroughly anti-democratic, anti-secular and anti-feminist.[7]

This conjunction of the SWP and the MAB led to the STWC drawing a clear link between war in Iraq with Israel/Palestine. At protests such as those on February 15 th 2003, middle-of-the-road liberals who had turned up to voice their disquiet at a reckless military adventure in Iraq were bemused to find themselves being handed placards that said not just “Don’t Attack Iraq” or “Not in My Name” but also “Freedom for Palestine.” The MAB in particular seemed to be giving out almost as many “Freedom for Palestine ” as “Don’t Attack Iraq ” placards. The Socialist Alliance went further, subtitling their “Freedom for Palestine ” placards with the words “Victory to the Intifada”, at a stroke turning middle-class Guardian readers into standard-bearers for suicide bombers.

Despite claims to the contrary by STWC leaders, there was little to link the Israel/Palestine issue to Iraq , other than their being geographic neighbours. Although the Israeli government strongly supported the US in its stance on Iraq , Israel remained a neutral country during the Iraq War. Most of the arguments claiming to link the Israel/Palestine issue to the Iraq issue tended to be simply comparisons – the malign effect of US foreign policy in the Middle East , a perceived oppression of Muslims by the West, track records on failing to observe UN resolutions – rather than actual concrete links between the two countries and conflicts. By deliberately blurring the two issues of Iraq and Palestine , the STWC arguably did considerable harm to its own ability to make a coherent, well-argued case against war.

Whatever its organisational flaws, the STWC grew at an exponential rate as war loomed, mostly developing through blossoming networks at local levels. It is difficult to trace the exact path of development of the STWC during this period, as the grassroots, DIY ethos of the organisation was something that did not encourage meticulous record-keeping. The extremely fast rate at which the coalition was developing also make it difficult to retrace the paths of its growth, or to estimate exact numbers involved. However, the impression gained from the inside was that the main conduits of its development were hard-left groups such as the SWP, the Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Party and Workers Power, Islamic groups and mosques, trade unions, peace organisations such as the CND, environmental groups such as the Green Party, and the left wing of the Labour Party. In my own city, the local STWC had grown to such an extent by the start of the war that they were able to organise branches, not just on a town-by-town basis, but on a suburb-by-suburb basis – an impressive achievement for an organisation less than two years old.

The most visible outward manifestation of this huge growth was the massive demonstration that took place on February 15 th 2003. Between 750,000 and two million people (depending on whose estimates you believed) marched through the streets of London . Many of these were so-called ‘protest virgins’ – moderate, politically non-aligned people who did not normally take part in protest marches. The march culminated in Hyde Park , where the vast crowd was met by an impressive array of speakers, including the Revd. Jesse Jackson, the London mayor Ken Livingstone, the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, and the pop star Ms. Dynamite.

The effect that this march and other protests had on politicians is unknown, but what is known is that on February 26 th , later to become known as ‘Wobbly Tuesday’, 135 Labour MPs either abstained from or voted against a government motion for action against Iraq.[8] Despite this huge rebellion the motion was passed due to the overwhelming size of Labour’s majority in the Commons, and also due to the support of the Conservative Party.

It is impossible to gauge exactly how many of those MPs who rebelled were influenced by the STWC’s protests. However, a number of factors suggest that the STWC’s influence was actually probably very weak.

First of all, it was arguably a mistake by the STWC to focus on protest marches as the main technique of campaigning. Protest marches are somewhat limited in their effectiveness as a campaigning tool. For one thing, whilst protest marches may tell an MP that a decision will be unpopular , they do not necessarily inform him or her whether this decision is rationally justified . A more effective technique might have been to produce well-researched, well-argued critiques of the arguments for war, which could then be presented to MPs and journalists in large-scale lobbying efforts and media campaigns.

The STWC was probably incapable of doing this. Organisations such as the SWP have a horrendous record in publishing politically biased, ideologically slanted tomes riddled with bad pseudo-logic and pseudo-journalism; not balanced, well-researched analyses. Furthermore, most MPs know this, and a report bearing the stamp of the Socialist Worker’s Party would not be worth the paper it was written on in political circles.

Certain British NGOs were able to produce rigorous analyses. For example, the Church of England produced an excellent review of the arguments for and against war.[9] Likewise, the aid agencies Caritas Internationalis and Save the Children UK produced their own reports detailing the likely humanitarian consequences of war.[10] However, established bodies such as the Church of England and Save the Children were not part of the STWC, and were unlikely to join when one takes into account the explicit or implicit support to totalitarian regimes given by some of its key figures.

Instead of clear arguments backed by proper analysis, the STWC gave incoherent ones. Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories were touted as hard fact. Muddling together Iraq and Palestine into one issue might have been popular when appealing to the membership of the SWP and the Muslim Association of Britain, but had little influence with policymakers looking for clear arguments. Likewise, shouting “no blood for oil” might have played well when preaching to the choir, but was unlikely to sway the opinion of a middle-of-the-road Labour or Conservative MP trying to make sense of the arguments and counter-arguments. Had the arguments by the STWC not been so incoherent and badly argued, it is conceivable that the Commons rebellions over Iraq might have been much larger, and just might have caused Britain not to participate in the Iraq War.

Just over a month after the giant march of February 15 th – arguably the STWC’s greatest achievement – came its greatest failure, and one that sent the organisation into terminal decline. On March 19 th 2003 the Iraq War began. The rapid growth of the STWC before the war was followed by an even more rapid shrinkage. Just as there are no accurate figures for its growth before the war, there are also no statistics for its near-collapse during and immediately after it. However, an anecdotal examination of the protests in my city give an illustration. On the day war broke out, hundreds of people gathered in the city centre to voice their anger, and main roads were blocked by large crowds both at midday and in the evening. A week later, the local STWC was able to amass a crowd that was smaller in size, but still numbering in the hundreds, to march through town. The following week saw marches that were little more than a collection of hard-left groups selling their newspapers to each other – a pitiful sight for an organisation that, less than two months earlier, had buried the streets of London under a sea of people. This pattern seems to have been repeated in other cities across the UK .

As well as reducing in size, the social makeup of STWC protests also changed radically. The ‘protest virgins’ were the first to go. Having failed to prevent the outbreak of war, those moderates who had joined the marches simply melted away, causing the STWC to implode onto its core constituency of extreme-left and Islamist groups. This caused something of a chain reaction as STWC protests came to be seen as extreme-left/Islamist events, providing a further disincentive for moderates either to stay with or join the STWC. Many were repelled by sights such as Socialist Worker-sponsored placards bearing the words “Victory to the Resistance”, a repugnant sight to anyone who had marched against the war out of a principled opposition to what they perceived as an unnecessary war, not to become cheerleaders for Saddam’s fedayeen .

Since then the STWC has enjoyed occasional mild resurgences around such events as the Hutton Enquiry and George W. Bush’s visit to London , but in general the trend is one of an organisation in decline, destined to remain stuck in an extreme left/Islamist ghetto. On March 20 th 2004 the STWC held a march to commemorate the first anniversary of the beginning of the war. The crowd was estimated at 25,000 people by the police, 75,000 by the STWC. 11 A nominally impressive figure, but a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands who gathered the previous February. Even supposed allies of the STWC, such as the Communist Party of Great Britain, were driven to complain that ‘The Stop the War Coalition can still mobilise tens of thousands onto the streets, but politically it offers little more than populist platitudes.’ 12 Attempts to transform the STWC into a political party, the Respect Coalition, have materialised into little more than George Galloway, the SWP, a few other extreme-left groups, a few trade union branches, plus some informal links with the Muslim Association of Britain. The Respect Coalition appear to be belatedly discovering that socialist and Islamists don’t necessarily believe the same things, and at some point will probably have to decide whether to retain the support of the Muslim Association of Britain or whether they want to undertake any meaningful campaigning on gay rights or women’s rights. At the time of writing, the Respect Coalition are gearing up for the European and London mayoral elections of June 10 th , but are not expected to perform well.

At its height, the Stop the War Coalition was the biggest protest movement in British history, but it utterly failed to achieve its objectives. Given its institutional weaknesses and its failure to generate coherent arguments, this was probably inevitable.

Phil Doré is a former activist in the Stop the War Coalition and author of the Stop the Stop the War Coalition website.

Notes
1. Stop the War Coalition: About Us . http://www.stopwar.org.uk/about.asp
2. Cohen N. (2003) Pretty Straight Guys . London : Faber and Faber. p. 132
3. Hattenston S. (September 16, 2002) The Monday Interview: Saddam and Me. The Guardian.
4. Mueller A. (November 2003) George Cross: George Galloway MP. The Independent on Sunday.
5. Ibid.
6. Cohen N. op cit. p. 131.
7. Alliance for Workers Liberty (October 2003) Briefing on the Muslim Association of Britain . http://www.workersliberty.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=570&mode=thread&order=0
8. House of Commons Library. (March 19 2003) Commons Divisions on Iraq : 26 February and 18 March 2003 . http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/notes/snSG-02109.pdf
9. Church of England. (October 9 2002) Evaluating the Threat of Military Action Against Iraq .
10. Caritas Internationalis (November 1 2002) On the brink of war: A recipe for a humanitarian disaster ; Save the Children UK (September 4 2002) The Humanitarian Implications of Military Intervention Against Iraq.
11. BBC News Online. (March 20 2004) Demo marks Iraq war anniversary. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3550411.stm
12. Neira M. (March 25 2004) Leadership still lags behind the led. Weekly Worker 521

[Note: Murli Manohar Joshi was the minister of Human Resource Development and Science and Technology under the BJP government. He led the campaign to Hinduize education in public schools and universities. He was the architect of the Vedic astrology programs introduced in Indian colleges and universities in 2001.]

Murli Manohar Joshi has learned the hard way that astrology does not work after all. The will of the Indian voters has overturned the alignment of auspicious stars in the astrological charts of the BJP, just as it has defied the numerology of the pollsters.

Indian voters have thrown out the obscurantist-in-chief and the party he represented. Even though most of the 370-million-strong voters did not consciously set out to punish the BJP for its obscurantist cultural and educational policies, they have inadvertently created the conditions where secularism has a second chance to succeed. This by itself is reason enough to cheer and hope.

But it is also a time to reflect and reaffirm the role of rationalism in the Indian society. Sure, throwing out the peddlers of superstitions is no mean task. But harder still is the task of creating a society where superstitions lose their hold on the public imagination. Ridding the government of those who would freely and arbitrarily mix science and spirituality is undoubtedly a great achievement. But greater still is achieving a society that has internalised the principle of separation between science and spirituality. Without this deeper secularisation of the cultural commonsense of the Indian people, secularism will remain a shallow legalism, forever at the risk of a saffron take-over.

This is where the intellectuals come in: the Indian voters have done their part, now the intellectuals must do theirs. Secular-minded citizens, scientists, writers, intellectuals, and the liberal, forward-looking clergy of all faiths will have to join the battle for a deeper secularisation of the Indian society. Scientists will have to step out of their laboratories and humanists will have to give up their haughty disdain for modernity. Those Left-inclined intellectuals seeking a “third position” between wholesale Westernisation and a nostalgic traditionalism will have to get over their preoccupation with cleansing modern science of its Eurocentrism. It is time for a no-nonsense commitment to the much-trashed idea of “scientific temper.”

The objective of a genuine and sustainable secularisation is not to denigrate the religious impulses of ordinary people — that would be foolish, because all societies need a sense of the sacred in order to celebrate the rhythms of life and death. The purpose of secularisation is not to hasten the disappearance of the sacred, but to keep it within the limits of reason. In the case of Hinduism, secularisation must involve a critical engagement with those aspects of Hindu sacred teachings that make empirical claims regarding the presence of a disembodied spiritual element in nature “seen” in the mind’s eye by mystics and yogis.

The fact is that people everywhere need a way to reconcile their faith with modern learning driven by science and technology. Fundamentalists (and unfortunately, many postmodernist defenders of “alternative epistemologies” as well) offer one way to reconcile faith with science: they relativise science and, in effect, declare religious cosmologies to be as rational within their own assumptions, as modern science is within its own materialistic and Western (or “Semitic”) context. This road leads to Vedic sciences and the phony Hindutva slogans of “all truths being different only in name.” Indian secularists have to offer a more honest way to reconcile Hinduism with modern science. They must refuse the cheap comforts of relativism. They must insist that all truths are not equal. In the name of respecting popular religiosity, they must not close their eyes to the glaring contradictions between what we scientifically know about how nature actually works, and what our sacred books, our gurus and our godmen preach.

The first challenge before India secularists is to carefully but firmly un-twine the wild and uncontrolled intertwining of science and spirituality that has been going on in Hinduism since the time of Swami Vivekananda in the late 19th century. Public intellectuals, in collaboration with progressive scientists, will have to explain — over and over again, through demonstrations and argument — why modern science is not another name for the same truths known to our Vedic forefathers. Indeed, Indian secularists will have to challenge the deep-seated and self-serving habit of Hindu apologists to draw wild parallels and equivalence between just about any shloka from the Vedas and the laws of quantum mechanics and other branches of modern science. The second challenge will be to bring what we know about the natural world through science to bear upon the cosmological assumptions of such “Vedic sciences” as astrology, vaastu, Ayurveda, yagnas, Vedic creationism, “consciousness studies” and the like. Indian secularists must sow seeds of doubt in the popular imagination about these “sciences” so that the masses reject the worldview of Hindutva on rational grounds.

A principled insistence on drawing clear distinctions between science and religion is crucial in India because Hinduism maintains a grip on this-worldly affairs by claiming to be “just another name” for science and reason. Hindu gurus and godmen stake a claim to extraordinary and extra-constitutional powers not by invoking God’s commandments or by a literal reading of a sacred book — such stratagems are easy to laugh off in this day and age. Hindu apologists instead stake a right to intervene in secular matters by claiming for Hinduism a rational and empirical “holistic” knowledge of the “higher” and “subtle” levels of the material world.

Indeed, even a cursory reading of the voluminous writings of Murli Manohar Joshi, K.S. Sudarshan (or any number of RSS ideologues), David Frawley, Subhash Kak, N.S. Rajaram and the host of other apologists associated with the Ramakrishna Mission and Aurobindo Ashram can show that Hinduism’s unique “scientificity” constitutes the central dogma of Hindutva.

Hindutva ideologues stake their claims to make “Hindu India” into a “guru of nations” on the notion that only Hinduism is compatible with modern science, while all the “Semitic” faiths have been proven to be false by modern science. Hindutva’s self-serving and entirely fallacious equation of Hinduism with modern science — Hindutva’s central dogma — can be summarised as follows:

Hindu dharma is rooted in the eternal, holistic or non-mechanistic laws of nature discovered “in a flash” of insight by the “Vedic Aryans.” These laws have been affirmed by modern science and therefore, Hinduism is uniquely scientific. Because the Hindus live in accord with a scientifically proven order of nature which unifies matter with higher levels of spirit, they are more rational and ecological as compared to those of Abrahamic faiths who derive their moral laws from an imaginary supernatural being, and who treat nature as mere matter, devoid of spiritual meaning. Because Hinduism is so scientific, there is no need for an Enlightenment style confrontation between faith and reason in India. To become truly and deeply scientific, Indians — indeed, the entire world — must embrace the teachings of the Vedas and Vedanta.

It was this central dogma that gave Dr. Joshi and his fellow travellers the chutzpah to install departments of Vedic astrology in public universities, to pour taxpayers’ money into every superstition under the sun, and to try to take over public institutions like IITs and IIMs.

It should now become the first order of business of Indian intellectuals to demolish this central dogma. We must demolish this dogma not because we do not want India to shine and prosper and take its rightful place in the community of nations. We must demolish this dogma because it is based upon false parallels and correspondences between modern science and Vedic metaphysics. We must demolish this dogma because it denies the existence of deeply oppressive superstitions, including the occult notion of the presence of consciousness in matter. And we must demolish this dogma because of its deeply Hindu and Aryan supremacist overtones.

This dogma can only be demolished by drawing clear distinctions between scientific evidence and the evidence of religious and/or mystical experience. Clarifying what is science and what is superstition must become the top priority of India’s freethinkers.

This article first appeared in The Hindu and appears here by permission.

The British astronomer Percy Seymour has recently published a new book entitled The Scientific Proof of Astrology (2004). Two reviews of the book were published in the mainline press—Ian Sample’s “Written in the Stars” (The Guardian, May 18, 2004), and Johnathan Leake’s “Top Scientist Gives Backing to Astrology” (Sunday Times, May 16, 2004). Both articles are misleading in some ways in which they present the information.
For a start, Seymour’s recent ideas aren’t overly different from those he published in Astrology: The Evidence of Science (1988), revised edition (1990), and The Scientific Basis of Astrology (1997). Seymour is not interested in star -sign horoscopes so popular with much of the astrological community. You will also look in vain in his books for surveys of the hundreds of tests conducted on astrology by researchers. His main interest is the results of the French researchers Michel and Francoise Gauquelin, notably the Mars Effect. Those ignored or played-down studies have consistently failed to produce results commensurate with astrological claims. Even the Gauquelin findings involve weak effects.

• Sample notes that Seymour contends that he does not believe in horoscopes, which means that much of what he says does not fit with what the majority of astrologers believe. They unlike him, contend that the moment of one’s birth is related to all one does in the future. Oddly, in the next sentence in the article by Sample we read, “Could it be that countless devotees ranging from Charles de Gaulle to Ronald Reagan had it right when they kept one eye on the stars?” But Reagan and others were involved with horoscopes, which Seymour rejects! Seymour would not be impressed with the typical claims that astrologers would have us believe (e.g see Star IQ).
• All Seymour’s theory would illustrate is that the position of the moon and some planets could be another speculative (and weak) factor to be taken into account in explaining human behaviour. But the links between geomagnetic resonance and personality are not as straightforward as made out. For example, important aspects of behaviour such as aggressiveness are determined to a large extent by hormone levels, and it is difficult to see how a hormone level could resonate. The induced voltages would be around a billionth of a microvolt, which (given that brain activity is commonly around 100 microvolts) seem very unlikely to say the least, to have any effect., especially as planetary frequencies are some six octaves below the normal 3-50 Hz range in brain frequencies. It is hard to see how such weak and disparate planetary influences could override the neural pacemakers that control brain function, especially when neural networks differ between people, change quickly over time, and are highly individual. Real neural networks do not seem to have the properties required by Seymour. The word ‘Proof’ in the book’s title is also hardly a term that will endear scientific or philosophical readers. Talk of proof may be understandable in geometry or logic or even religion, but even a cursory awareness of the history of science should make any scientist wary of the p-word.
• Sample’s article mentions studies about effect of season findings. But these have nothing to do with astrology. For example, the seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere, but the zodiac signs of people remain unchanged. Furthermore, astrology is based not on causal connections (as occur in seasonal effects which could change in the future given climate change) but on symbolic connections. For example, when Chiron was discovered, astrologers consulted mythology books and determined that Chiron was a satyr associated with healing. And its connection with healing is a part of its role in those who use it in horoscopes. The same occurred when Pluto was discovered. In neither case was the astrological meaning of the planet determined by large scale studies, it was determined by library research and armchair exchanges among astrologers. Indeed, many astrologers claim that causal effects are by definition not astrology, but they enjoy the positive publicity (unless the findings are negative, in which case they are automatically wrong). Unlike biological rhythms and social and psychological factors, astrological relationships are not affected by age, or gender, or socioeconomic background, and people don’t differ in their susceptibility to astrological ‘influences’ as they do with everything else in the social and physical sciences.
• Leake says, “Astrologers were delighted with Seymour’s claims”. He cites astrologer Richard Grant who tells us, “If the moon is connected with the ebb and flow of the tides, and humans are 70% water, then why can’t the moon be affecting us? So we have good moods or bad moods depending on the position of the moon?” Some real problems here, Richard. For a start, tides occur because the gravitational pull on the oceans is sufficiently different between the near and far sides of the earth. People would have to be huge to be similarly affected. Also, moon phase does not usually play a role in horoscopes, rather it is the moon sign, which is quite different. Regarding published studies on the relationship between the moon’s position and human behaviour, the results are not clear cut enough to reach such conclusions anyway. About half of the studies give negative results, and half positive. And unfortunately the positive studies are not in agreement regarding which position or phase is statistically significant. Finally, the positive studies give such small effects that they would hardly justify talk such as “we have good or bad moods depending on the position or phase of the moon.”
• Leake further tells readers that “Several years ago it emerged that the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was using astrology to help manage it’s 5 billion pound investment portfolio…”. One might ask, did the bank do better than it would have without using astrology? How would they find out? We aren’t told. George Bush consults the Bible for guidance. What follows? Other institutions may consult all sorts of sources for investments, including psychics and spiritualists—perhaps some comparative studies are needed.
• We are further told by Leake that “This year’s Sunday Times Rich List included an analysis of the star signs of Britain’s 1,000 richest people—finding significant differences with 110 born under Gemini but only 73 under Pisces.” Is this astrologically significant? Would most astrologers have predicted this result in advance? Actually the numbers (via Shermer), if correct, add up to 1067, and by chi-squared test (df=11, expectancy =1067/12, i.e with no corrections for demography and astronomy), p= . 26, so the results are not even marginally significant. So on what basis are they seen as “significant”? To be sure, something has to come top and something has to come bottom, but so what? Would not ANY other differences have been equally reportable as “evidence for astrology”? One might point out that studies with star signs which produce negative results (which is most of them, and almost all of them when artifacts are controlled), have been roundly criticized by members of the astrological community for violating the basic astrological dictum that astrological factors should never be studied alone.
• Is astrology science as Seymour suggests? Given its connections are determined symbolically, along with the majority of astrologer’s expressing disinterest in promoting large scale studies and abiding by the results (unless they are positive), it is difficult to think so. While scientists continually re-evaluate their basic assumptions and constantly revise basic theories on evidential grounds (consider the theories in astronomy and physics before and after the 20th century), astrology remains basically the same as two millennia ago. Does any reader believe it possible that headlines similar to “ The universe could be a billion years older than we thought” (BBC News), will ever surface in astrological periodicals? News flash, “Top astrologers contend Mars has been determined to have the astrological characteristics of Neptune and vice-versa” or “Astrologer’s determine that Saturn is an astrologically insignificant planet after all.” Whatever Seymour finds, it won’t change the way astrologers conduct their business and erect horoscopes. No astrologer whose results Seymour’s are at variance with are going to change their minds.

I.W. Kelly, Department of educational Psychology & Special Education, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Readers wanting more information will find the following critical reviews pertinent:
Modern concepts of astrology: A critique.

Are scientists undercover astrologers?

Allen Esterson comments on Melvyn Bragg’s radio programme on hysteria, “In Our Time”, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 22 April 2004.

Melvyn Bragg, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s long-running weekly series “In Our Time”, has an impressive record of encouraging practising scientists to make even abstruse scientific topics accessible to the radio-listening public. But when it comes to Freud and psychoanalysis it’s a different story. Whereas scientists are questioned closely about the origins of the ideas in their field, Bragg’s chosen experts on Freud (ne’er a dissenter among them) are given a free run to propagate their faith to the listeners, and manifest errors and dubious assertions are rarely challenged.

On 22 April 2004 the chosen topic was “hysteria”, and as one might have expected, the programme was predominantly about Freud’s early experiences as a neurological practitioner in Vienna in the 1890s. His guests in the studio were Juliet Mitchell, Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge; Rachel Bowlby, Professor of English at the University of York, who has written the introduction to the new Penguin translation of Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria; and Brett Kahr, Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Psychotherapy and Mental Health at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London.

For anyone knowledgeable about the history of psychoanalysis, what immediately came across, aside from the simplistically idealised versions of psychoanalytic history the guests on the programme provided, was the ignorance they displayed on occasion. I’ll run through a few examples.

In the context of the discussion about the relative incidence of male and female hysteria in the late nineteenth century, Brett Kahr stated that Freud “began with a cohort of eighteen hysterical patients, all women” on whom he reported in his 1896 “Aetiology of Hysteria” paper. Of course Freud had treated numerous patients in the years immediately prior to this time, but Kahr’s principal error lies in the fact that six of the patients on whom Freud gave a general report in the paper in question were men (Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 3, pp. 207-208). This is not a trivial mistake, because Kahr was addressing the issue of the preponderance of women among people diagnosed with hysteria at that time.

Juliet Mitchell recounted how Freud came back from his period of study in Paris with the notion that there is such a thing as male hysteria and “got a very poor reception”, as “there was a great denial of male hysteria”. This story, told by Freud in “An Autobiographical Study” (SE 20, p. 15), was long ago shown by the historian of psychology Henri Ellenberger to be completely false. He traced documents pertaining to the meeting in 1886 at which Freud gave his report on male hysteria, and found that Freud’s later account of it was the complete opposite of the truth. Ellenberger reports that, far from rejecting Freud’s views, no one denied the existence of male hysteria. In fact the chairman of the meeting, Bamberger, actually said “All this is very interesting, but I see nothing new in it” (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 441). This complete refutation of the traditional account was published in 1970, more than three decades ago, yet so unaware are Freudians like Mitchell of the critical writings on the early history of psychoanalysis in recent decades, she is still repeating this discredited story! And note that neither of the other guests on the programme pointed out that Mitchell’s account was erroneous, so presumably they too are ignorant of Ellenberger’s exposure of the falsity of Freud’s story in his celebrated volume The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970).

All Bragg’s guests were credulous about the clinical claims of Breuer and, especially, Freud concerning their alleged “cures” in this period. Rachel Bowlby acknowledged that Anna O. spontaneously “talked off her distress” prior to Breuer’s encouraging her to talk freely. But she also said that this process showed “the therapeutic effect that could be got from finding the origins of where her troubles had come from”. Now Albrecht Hirschmüller, Breuer’s biographer, traced the original case notes, and found that this account bears little relation to what actually happened. First, some symptoms partially or wholly disappeared spontaneously. Second, the relief from distress that Bowlby describes did not come initially from “finding the origins” of it. In fact the spontaneous talking that Anna O. did at that stage of the treatment had nothing to do with recollecting distressing incidents, as the traditional account has it, but with the recounting of fantasy stories. Breuer then started to prompt her with phrases designed to set the process going whenever she slipped into one of her recurrent trance-like states. Not one of the guests pointed out a crucial fact about the case, that, contrary to Freud’s later several times claiming that Breuer “restored her to health”, the patient was hospitalized almost immediately after Breuer terminated the treatment, and again some three times in subsequent years, each time with the diagnosis of “hysteria”. All this information is available in Hirschmüller’s The Life and Work of Josef Breuer, available in translation since 1989, and has been reported in several books and articles in the last decade. One would have thought that the fact that the traditional account of the Anna O. case was erroneous in a number of important respects would have been pertinent to the discussion, but listeners would have had no idea that this was the case.

The discussion of Freud’s early patients was marred by the extraordinary credulity with which Freud’s claims were treated. Kahr reported how Freud found that his female patients’ somatic symptoms almost invariably originated from sexual experiences. This is the psychoanalytic fairy tale version of events. In fact Freud started with the preconception (stated explicitly in an article he wrote for an encyclopaedia as early as 1888 [SE 1, p. 51]) that sexuality was always an important factor in hysterical symptoms, and such was his interpretative and reconstructive technique, he invariably ‘found’ what he was looking for. So, as Bowlby pointed out, in Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud reported very few cases of sexual abuse (notably two incidents of attempted assault in teenage). Yet a year later, in accord with the seduction theory he had arrived at on largely theoretical grounds in early October 1895, he was claiming that he had analytically uncovered unconscious memories of sexual abuse in infancy in one hundred percent of his patients.

It was evident that Bragg was slightly disconcerted when Bowlby said that there was very little on sexual abuse in the cases histories in Studies on Hysteria, since he no doubt had in mind the well-known ‘fact’ that most of Freud’s early female patients reported having been sexually abused in early childhood. What a pity the source of Bragg’s puzzlement was not explored, as it would have directed attention to the fact that Freud’s technique of analytic reconstruction and the symbolic interpretation of symptoms always enabled him to ‘find’ whatever his current theory required.

What are the facts about Freud’s supposed childhood sexual abuse cases in this period? In his paper on “Phobias and Obsessions”, published early in 1895, Freud did not report having uncovered a single case of sexual abuse at the root of some eleven patients’ symptoms (and it should be noted obsessional neurosis was as much part of the later seduction theory as hysteria, with six such cases reported in the 1896 papers). And, as already noted, sexual abuse played little role in the cases in Studies on Hysteria (1895). Yet a year later Freud announced that he had uncovered unconscious memories of sexual abuse in infancy for every one of his current patients diagnosed as “hysterical” or “obsessional”. How does one account for this apparent anomaly? In early October 1895 Freud reported to Wilhelm Fliess his exciting new theory, that the “solution” to the aetiology of hysteria and obsessional neuroses was that these patients had unconscious memories of sexual abuse in infancy. Within a mere four months he had completed two papers (one for a French journal) in which he claimed to have corroborated his theory for 13 patients diagnosed as hysterical, and six cases of obsessional neurosis (which patients, incidentally, supposedly also had repressed a memory of an active sexual abuse of an infant sister from around the age of eight). (SE 3, pp. 152, 155-156, 164, 168-169) In other words, a very short time after arriving at his new theory Freud analytically ‘uncovered’ the evidence to confirm it, demonstrating that his analytic technique of interpretation and reconstruction enabled him to ‘corroborate’ whatever theory he currently held. So what about the “cures” he had claimed in Studies on Hysteria? He is now saying (1896) that patients can’t be cured of their major hysterical symptoms unless the crucial infantile traumas are uncovered and abreacted, which calls into question all his earlier claims of therapeutic efficacy. The received account of psychoanalytic history is replete with anomalies such as these, but like members of a true-believing sect, the guests in the studio talked knowingly about such events, seemingly unaware of such blatant inconsistencies.

Towards the end of the discussion, when Kahr was claiming to have uncovered early childhood sexual abuse in one of his patients that he directly associated with symptoms that developed in adulthood, Bragg asked if it was exceptional to find “such a direct link”. Kahr replied “Not at all. I want to resurrect the early trauma model of hysteria”, at which point Bragg made the comment “like the masturbating foot in one of Freud’s early [cases]”, in response to which Juliet Mitchell interjected “that’s right”. But what are the circumstances of this assertion of Freud’s to which Bragg alluded? It comes in “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (SE 3, p. 215), where Freud writes: “Thus, in one of my cases the circumstances that the child was required to stimulate the genitals of a grown-up woman with his foot was enough to fixate his neurotic attention for years on his legs and to their function, and finally to produce a hysterical paraplegia.” I’ll leave aside the question of how, even if we assume the incident occurred as Freud states, he could possibly have ascertained with such certitude that this was the cause of paralysis of the legs decades later. But what evidence do we have that the incident occurred at all? Although in the 1896 seduction theory papers Freud twice said (or directly implied) that he would be providing the “actual material” of the cases he was writing about, he never did so; in other words, everything that people take as given from these papers of 1896 depends entirely on taking Freud’s claims on faith. But the situation is worse than that (for those who do so). None of the participants raised the issue of Freud’s clinical technique that led to his ‘findings’ at that time. Let me give a couple of quotes from the introductory pages to “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896). Freud introduced his account of his clinical methodology with analogies, one of which was that his procedure was comparable to that of “a forensic physician [who] can arrive at the cause of an injury, even if he has to do without any information from the injured person” (SE 3, p. 192, my emphasis). Then, after providing the analogy of the “deciphering and translating” of meagre archaeological remains of a building to reconstruct what the original building must have looked like, Freud wrote: “If we try, in an approximately similar way, to induce the symptoms of a hysteria to make themselves heard as witnesses to the history of the origin of the illness, we must take our start from Josef Breuer’s momentous discovery: the symptoms of hysteria…are determined by certain experiences of the patient’s which have operated in a traumatic fashion and which are being introduced in his psychical life in the form of mnemic symbols (pp. 192-193, Freud’s italics).

What do these statements of Freud’s reveal? One, that a central part of his clinical procedure involved the symbolic interpretation of patients’ symptoms to analytically reconstruct the supposed unconscious ideas or memories that lie at the root of the symptoms. Two, that as a generality, Freud arrived at his analytic reconstructions while having “to do without any [direct] information” from the patient. It is in this light that one should consider the “masturbating foot” assertion. There is not one jot of evidence that such an experience actually occurred in the infancy of one of Freud’s patients. (Recall that in the paper in question Freud is writing of unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse.) Yet such was the level of discourse among the participants in this programme, highly doubtful claims like the “masturbating foot” episode were taken as historical fact without demur; in fact with eager assent in the case of Mitchell.

One fact not brought out in the discussion is that in his 1896 “Aetiology of Hysteria” paper Freud reported that the sexual abuse material he had uncovered in all his patients occurred in “the earliest childhood” (SE 3, p. 202), namely, in “the third or fourth, or even the second year of life” (p. 212). In other words, Freud was claiming to have uncovered unconscious memories (“with our patients, those [sexual abuse] memories are never conscious” [p. 211]) of sexual abuse from the ages of one, two and three. Were anyone to make such claims nowadays, they would be treated with considerable reserve, not to say great scepticism. Yet the guests in the studio discussed such ‘findings’ of Freud’s with no mention whatsoever of any of the facts I documented above. In other words, they treated these purported historical events not unlike the manner in which fundamentalist Christians take as given the stories of the miracles of Jesus.

To get some idea of the mythological world inhabited by the participants in this programme, here is Kahr’s description of how Freud’s “cohort” of seduction theory patients typically produced the material Freud adduced. According to Kahr, Freud “let them into his consulting room, lie down on a couch, put their feet up, and have a conversation”. Compare this with how Freud himself described how he obtained the preconceived infantile “sexual scenes” that he “warned” the patients they would “reproduce” during the application of his “pressure procedure”: “Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce [the patients] to embark on a reproduction of them”. Moreover, “they have no feeling of remembering the scenes” and “assure me emphatically of their unbelief.” (SE 3, p. 204.) Not quite the cosy picture painted by Kahr of Freud’s women patients stretching out on his couch and freely recounting their childhood experiences.

Kahr said of a schizophrenic patient he had once treated that “in psychotherapy we were able to discover that he had had a fellatio trauma as a young boy and that an elder male member [of the family] had orally assaulted him.” It is extraordinary that none of the participants raised the crucial issue of what it means when Kahr confidently tells us that “in psychotherapy we were able to discover” a trauma from the early childhood of a patient. Has it not been all too apparent in recent times that, at the very least, many such ‘discoveries’ are highly dubious? How is it that, although the apparent recovering in therapy of memories of sexual abuse from childhood has been a contentious issue on the very forefront of debates in psychotherapeutic circles, and highlighted in newspaper articles, not one of the participants felt the need to enquire further of Kahr on this point?

Kahr talked with sublime confidence about what Freud “found” in his patients, and about what he himself had “discovered” to be at the root of his patients’ symptoms. Unfortunately no one pointed out that psychoanalysts almost invariably find that the causes of symptoms of their patients are in accord with their preconceptions (in line with whatever psychoanalytic school their ideas are associated with). And when in the course of time some claims cease to be fashionable (or are subsequently explicitly renounced), there is never any explanation of how they came to be analytically ‘confirmed’ in the first place.

One of the most revealing moments in the programme came when the case of Elisabeth von R., from Studies on Hysteria, was discussed. Here is Kahr’s account: “Elisabeth von R. had a huge passion for her brother-in-law but that couldn’t be expressed, and she developed all kinds of symptoms as a result, and when Freud eventually got her to put these frustrated desires into words, into language, the symptoms began to abate.” What are the facts. There is no good evidence that Elisabeth had any amorous feelings towards her brother-in-law, let alone a “huge passion”. Not even Freud suggested that any symptoms other than her intermittent leg pains were related to the feelings he surmised that Elisabeth had for her brother-in-law. And far from putting her (supposed) desires into words, it is evident from the case history that it was Freud who expressed the idea he had surmised to be the “solution” for which he was looking: “She cried aloud when I put the situation [i.e., his own surmise] before her with the words: ‘So for a long time you had been in love with your brother-in-law’.” Nowhere does Freud write that Elisabeth accepted his explanation, or that she put this particular idea into words, though there are tendentiously and artfully composed passages that insinuate that this was the case. (Later in life Elisabeth told her daughter of the “young bearded nerve specialist” who had “tried to persuade me that I was in love with my brother-in-law, but that wasn’t really so.”) Nor is there serious evidence that the leg pains abated as a result of Freud’s confronting her with his “solution” and the discussions in the sessions that followed. All Freud says about her symptoms at this point is, “This process of abreaction certainly did her much good”, with no mention of her leg pains having abated. Some weeks after the termination of the treatment Elisabeth’s mother reported she was suffering from “severe pains once more”. Whatever her subsequent progress, which remained vague in Freud’s account, there is no evidence that Freud’s confronting her with his belief that she was unconsciously in love with her brother-in-law had any effect whatsoever on her intermittent leg pains. (SE 2, pp. 157-160) What is evident here is something I have found repeatedly in reading the literature on Freud, that one cannot trust the accounts of his clinical experiences provided by psychoanalysts and other commentators sympathetic to Freud. (Incidentally, one cannot trust Freud’s own accounts either. In an allusion to Elisabeth von R. in an earlier paper he referred to another young man “who had made a slight erotic impression” on her. In the case history in Studies this was sexed up considerably, and Freud wrote there of the “hopes” that Elisabeth attached to her relationship with the young man, that she was “firmly determined to wait for him”, of the “blissful state of mind” she experienced in his company, and of the “hurt” she felt whenever she thought of him after he moved out of her life [SE 3, p. 48; SE 2, pp. 145, 146].)

The unreliability of psychoanalysts’ accounts is illustrated again by Mitchell’s contribution immediately after the discussion of Elisabeth von R. She mentioned “Katharina”, a young woman with whom Freud had a lengthy conversation one afternoon when he was on holiday in the mountains. According to Mitchell, “her sister is having an affair with her father, and she’s jealous.” This is an extraordinary report on this “case”. The facts, as reported by Freud, are that Katharina told Freud of an occasion when she had come across her father in bed with her older sister, and that he had made a drunken sexual advance towards her [Katharina] when she was fourteen. Nowhere in the case history is there any suggestion that Katharina was jealous of her sister’s sexual relationship with her father. A clue to the anomaly lies in the subject of Mitchell’s latest theorising. Her most recent book is called Siblings, in which she advances the view that sibling rivalry must be considered alongside the traditional Oedipus complex. Evidently she has superimposed her own ideas onto the Katharina case, and has decided that Freud missed that Katharina was jealous of her sister’s relationship with the father. Let me run that one by again. The unique contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding of this case by Juliet Mitchell, Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, is that Katharina was jealous of her sister’s incestuous relationship with her drunken father. Leaving aside the enormity of the implications of this ‘insight’, not only do we have commentators presenting tendentious accounts of Freud’s already tendentious reporting of his cases: beyond that Mitchell has imposed her own interpretation of a case in such assured terms that listeners almost certainly would assume she was reporting factual information that is to be found in the original case history. To the (adapted) adage that there are lies, damned lies, and psychoanalytic case histories must be added a fourth category: psychoanalysts’ reports of Freud’s case histories.

What was especially interesting about Mitchell’s saying that Katharina was jealous of her sister’s having an incestuous “affair” with her father is that no one in the studio reacted to it in any way. At such moments it’s almost as if they realise at some level that the subject matter of their discourse exists in some kind of parallel universe. No doubt Mitchell would explain that the jealousy she imputes to Katharina was based on unconscious Oedipal desires that we all have well below the level of our awareness. In her discussion of the Oedipus complex she spoke of “the massive societal taboo on incest at the foundation of society itself. So there’s always a prohibited sexuality in us somewhere.” Shades of Freud’s description of the unconscious as a seething mass of repressed desires, “by preference [for] incestuous objects”, namely, “a man’s mother and sister, a woman’s father and brothers… These censored wishes appear to rise out of positive Hell.” (“Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis”, SE 15, pp. 142-143) You should keep such Freudian accounts in mind next time you read some neuroscientist insisting that current research confirms Freud’s theory of the unconscious.

Other items in the programme relating to Mitchell include that she said in relation to the lifelong paralysis of the legs of Alice James, sister of Henry and William, that “it had no organic basis whatsoever”. How can Mitchell possibly know this is the case, and that there were not organic causes of the paralysis which doctors at that time could not identify? Again, Mitchell alluded, with evident approval, to Freud’s psycho-historical analysis of Dostoevsky, but failed to mention that it was fatally undermined in an Appendix devoted to Freud’s paper in Joseph Frank’s book Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849.

Another point on which listeners were misled is the false impression given, especially by Kahr, that Breuer and Freud were lone pioneers in treating patients with supposed hysterical symptoms by psychological means. In fact other physicians around that period, for instance Benedikt, Féré and Janet, were treating somatic symptoms they regarded as hysterical by their own form of psychotherapy prior to Freud.

That should be enough to demonstrate the extraordinarily circumscribed and misleading nature of what should have been a wide-ranging discussion of the whole idea of hysteria as understood as a clinical entity, including the doubts many people have expressed about the validity of its diagnosis in a high proportion of cases. But, it has to be said, this is par for the course as far as Bragg’s treatment of Freud is concerned. One has only to recall his radio programme on Freud some years ago as part of his series on “The Great Scientists”, a programme replete with inaccuracies on a similar scale. (See On Giants’ Shoulders, M. Bragg, 1998.) To take one example, Bragg discussed Freud’s early interest in hysteria that followed his attending Charcot’s lectures in Paris in 1886, and introduced Susan Greenfield, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University, “a neurologist with a special interest in Freud”, to take the historical story further. This is how Greenfield did so:

Initially, he thought hysteria was due to a specific cause, a specific idea, but he gradually realised that, under hypnosis, some of the things his patients were telling him were actual fantasies, they were not real facts. He, himself, when he underwent analysis, realised that this Oedipus complex that he had identified was in fact identifiable in himself, even though it had no immediate cause — there was no history in his childhood of his mother seducing him — but nonetheless he had it. And that made him realise that these seeming-fantasies were part and parcel of the human mind and therefore one did not just have an abnormal cause, one simple cause like something terrible happening to you, a very clear-cut thing happening to you that caused a neurosis, but it was rather more complex than that. (On Giants’ Shoulders, pp. 220-221)

It would take several pages to disentangle all the errors and confusions in this one short passage, but it is immediately evident that it is incoherent. One has the impression that Greenfield was informed she would be asked about this period in Freud’s early psychoanalytic career, so she mugged it up from a psychoanalytic source and regurgitated it as best she could. What she produced would be unacceptably inadequate from a student, let alone from an Oxford professor. But Bragg was content to treat her utterly confused account as if (a) it made sense, and (b) it was historically accurate, neither of which is the case. So what was Greenfield doing on the “Great Scientists” programme on Freud, when it was immediately evident that her knowledge of his clinical experiences and of his writings was minimal? I think there is no doubt that she was chosen (along with Oliver Sacks, who thinks that Freud’s adventures in the underworld of the unconscious are analogous to Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos Islands [p. 233]) to buttress the contention that Freud was a scientist. This is perhaps the most fundamental of Melvyn Bragg’s many delusions about Freud and psychoanalysis — the beginnings of which he dubbed, poetically, “the golden dawn”.

http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html

The May 2004 issue of Scientific American carries an article on Freud and some recent research in neuroscience with the title “Freud Returns”. Below are some comments on the article by Allen Esterson.

I never cease to be astonished at the confidence with which erroneous assertions about Freud are made in articles such as “Freud Returns” in the May 2004 issue of Scientific American, written by Mark Solms, psychoanalyst and neuroscientist. For instance, Solms writes: “When Freud introduced the central notion that most mental processes that determine our everyday thoughts, feelings and volitions occur unconsciously, his contemporaries rejected it as impossible.” This piece of psychoanalytic mythology has been shown to be false by historians of psychology since the 1960s and 1970s, yet it is still being propagated in popular articles by pro-Freud writers like Solms. Schopenhauer had posited something akin to the notion Solms ascribes to Freud before the latter was born. Francis Galton, writing in Brain in 1879-1880, described the mind as analogous to a house beneath which is “a complex system of drains and gas and water-pipes…which are usually hidden out of sight, and of whose existence, so long as they act well, we never trouble ourselves.” He went on to discuss “the existence of still deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of consciousness, which may account for such phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained.” (Incidentally, Freud subscribed to Brain at that time.) The historian of psychology, Mark Altschule, wrote in 1977: “It is difficult – or perhaps impossible – to find a nineteenth century psychologist or medical psychologist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.”

Solms cites the cognitive neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel among an increasing number of neuroscientists who are reaching the conclusion that the current model of the mind as revealed by neuroscience “is not unlike the one that Freud outlined a century ago.” Is this the same Eric R. Kandel who wrote in 1999 that “the neural basis for a set of unconscious mental processes” provided by current discoveries in neuroscience “bears no resemblances to Freud’s unconscious”? Kandel continues: “[This unconscious] is not related to instinctual strivings or to sexual conflicts, and the information never enters consciousness. These sets of findings provide the first challenge to a psychoanalytically oriented neural science.” (Am. J. Psychiatry, 155:4, p. 468) (Solms implicitly alludes to the title of this very article [“A new intellectual framework for psychiatry”] when he cites Kandel a second time later in Scientific American piece!)

That Solms is well-versed in Freudian mythologies, but ignorant of the facts that have been documented to refute them, is confirmed by his writing that when Freud argued for the existence of “primitive animal drives” in humans his ideas were received with “moral outrage” by his Victorian contemporaries. This account purporting to give an overall picture of the situation at that time has been refuted so many times by scholars who have researched the period that one despairs that the actual facts will ever penetrate the hermetically sealed world of psychoanalytic traditionalists.

Solms presents (in the usual imprecise fashion of such descriptions) Freud’s notions of the id and ego as having correlates in current brain research. But, as the British psychologist William McDougall pointed out seventy years ago, the notion expressed by Freud that the ego stands for reason and circumspection and the id stands for the untamed passions goes back to “Plato’s doctrine of Reason as the charioteer who guides the fierce unruly horses, the passions, which are the motive powers.” Sometimes it seems that there is almost no psychological insight in the history of the human race that Freudians do not ascribe to Freud.

Supposedly in support of Freud’s notions of infantile development (highly bowdlerised, as is the nature of such presentations) Solms writes that one would be hard-pressed to find a developmental neurobiologist “who does not agree that early experiences, especially between mother and infant, influence the pattern of brain connections in ways that fundamentally shape our future personality and mental health.” There are several comments one might make in regard to this statement. How could it be otherwise than that life experiences influence the pattern of brain connections in a baby, growing into infancy, in a way that is crucial to the future development of the brain? The idea that we owe the origination of such notions to Freud, or that to accept them is to credit Freud’s highly specific notions of infantile psychosexual development, is absurd. Whether it can be said that such experiences “shape” the future personality and mental health partly depends on what precisely is meant by the word “shape” in this context. That they have considerable influence on the future personality and future mental health of the individual is without doubt the case, but the extent to which they are a determining factor is a matter of dispute.

Solms writes at this point that “It is becoming increasingly clear that a good deal of our mental activity is unconsciously motivated.” Yes, indeed, as has been implicit in the writings of Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, Trollope, Austen, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and so on, and explicitly spelled out by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche well before Freud wrote about this notion. The only remarkable thing about this passage in Solms’s article is that he is so determined to credit Freud with this commonplace.

Solms writes of a “basic mammalian instinctual circuit” recently discovered in the brain that it is a “seeking system” which “bears a remarkable resemblance to the Freudian ‘libido’.” He later refers to a statement by the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp in an article in Newsweek (11 November 2002), and it happens that this very article provides more details of the “libido” claim. It reports some recent experimental research by Panksepp on the ventraltegmental area of the cortex of the brain. The author of the article, Fred Guterl, writes:

“When Panksepp stimulated the corresponding region in a mouse, the animal would sniff the air and walk around, as though it were looking for something… The brain tissue seemed to cause a general desire for something new. ‘What I was seeing,’ he says, ‘was the urge to do stuff.’ Panksepp called this seeking. To Mark Solms of University College in London, that sounds very much like libido. ‘Freud needed some sort of general, appetitive desire to seek pleasure in the world of objects,’ says Solms. ‘Panksepp discovered as a neuroscientist what Freud discovered psychologically’.”

Note the steps in this argument. A neuroscientist discovers a region in a mouse’s brain which, when stimulated, causes it to walk around as if it is seeking something, described by the neuroscientist as an “urge to do stuff”. Solms associates this directly with Freud’s “libido” concept, and proclaims the new research as the neuroscientific correlate of Freud’s psychological ‘discovery’. And then in Scientific American he unequivocally calls the “seeking” brain circuitry the “neural equivalent” of Freud’s libido. What nonsense! We didn’t need Freud to tell us that human beings have an innate propensity to explore the world, and to endeavour to intensify their sensual and emotional experiences. That Solms is at pains to identify this basic behavioural characteristic of many mammals with Freud’s ill-defined, highly elastic concept of “libido” tells us more about his devotion to Freud than about the subject matter in question. Such is the sycophantic attitude that many such magazines in the United States still retain towards Freud, the “Newsweek” report on Panksepp’s research on a mouse’s brain was titled “What Freud Got Right”!

On the theme of “what Freud got right”, Solms cites the notion supported by brain research that dream content has a “primary emotional mechanism”. But more accurately he should have said that this is what Charcot, Janet, and Krafft-Ebing got right, because, as the Freud scholar Rosemarie Sand has documented, such a view of the content of dreams was postulated by these psychologists (among several others) before Freud wrote a word on the subject. This includes Krafft-Ebing’s view that unconscious sexual wishes could be detected in dreams, i.e., essentially the wish-fulfillment theory of dreams, alluded to in his article, that Solms is itching to claim as another triumph for Freud – if (and it’s a big if, in the view of the dream researcher J. Allan Hobson), an hypothesis he has put forward concerning the results of recent dream research and their interpretation, is correct. As Hobson has argued, Solms’s broad assertions that imply that current brain research validates the specific content of Freud’s theories of dreaming and dream analysis do not withstand close examination.

I could go on, but I’ll conclude with Solms’s statement that “Today treatments that integrate psychotherapy with psychoactive medications are widely recognized as the best approach to brain disorders.” What he doesn’t say is that, in the UK at least (and Solms until very recently resided there), it is widely recognized that the most effective form of psychotherapy for this purpose is cognitive and behavioural therapy, not psychodynamic therapies that are based on Freudian concepts. That he then attempts to associate the aforementioned “psychotherapy” with (by implication, psychoanalytic-style) “talk therapy”, and thence to “brain imaging”, is more than a trifle disingenuous. For Solms, it seems, all roads lead to Freud, and one gains the impression that whatever the results of current brain research he will continue to write articles seeking to show they are “consistent with” some or other contention of the Master.

Allen Esterson is the author of Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud

allenesterson@compuserve.com
http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html

Modern agriculture is increasingly being used as an all encompassing category of evil by critics of globalization and transgenic (genetically modified) food crops, and by street protestors and their mentors and organizers. Implicit in the protest rhetoric is a dichotomy between modern agronomy (assumed to be large corporate enterprises either farming or selling to farmers) and small self-sufficient farmers, who replant their own seeds from year-to-year and have little or no reliance on the market for inputs.

The difference between the two presumed types of agriculture could not be more stark in the minds of the believers. The enemy is the monopolistic seed corporations and industrial farms that are mechanized, use purchased inputs including synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides, and are by definition “corporate polluters.” In using commercially acquired industrial inputs, modern agriculture has removed some vital essence from our foodcrops and become divorced from the natural ecological environment. In contrast, the small scale traditional agriculturalist follows more benign practices, substituting labor for technology, and otherwise using more natural time-tested practices and inputs that preserve the soil and do not pollute the environment. Commercial “organic” farmers in developed countries are seen as a permitted exception to the agribusiness category, as they are assumed to be following a regimen that is the larger scale environmental equivalent of traditional agriculture. Even here, among the “organic” enthusiasts, there are purists who bemoan the take-over of the movement by large corporate enterprises and advocate buying from small local producers even if the price is significantly higher. To these purists, “organic food is being openly accused of selling its soul” (Vidal 2003). Most of us who grew up in the United States assumed that “soul food” was an expression used by Black Americans to describe home cooking, not to be taken literally and definitely not an appellation reserved exclusively for food grown with manure.

SAVE THE SEED has become the slogan of choice for those opposed to modern agriculture in general, and genetically modified crops in particular. The claim is made that the vast majority of the world’s farmers plant only seeds from their previous harvest, as those who went before them have been doing for the several millennia since agriculture began in their region. The FAO indicates that there are 1.4 billion farmers who save seed for planting from harvest to harvest. Unfortunately, FAO does not distinguish between farmers who never have bought seeds, and farmers who go into the market one year and replant it for one or more years until a new higher yielding is available, or a new disease-resistant variety becomes necessary. Nor does it identify the very common practice of poorer farmers in many regions who in replanting their seeds will mix with it anywhere from 40 to 60% of a purchased variety. Even more affluent farmers have for the last 4 decades been crossing modern varieties with local ones, providing the Green Revolution seed package with far greater diversity than the critics seem to be aware.

The idea that agriculture can in any way be “natural” or in “harmony with nature” is silly if not downright pernicious. This does not mean that we are free to do whatever we wish and not be concerned with the consequences. It does mean that in transforming nature we have to acquire a scientific understanding of as many dimensions of agriculture and the environment as possible, and then devise and continually revise rules of the game so that we can grow and raise our food sustainably. In agriculture, we are concentrating nutrient that is also nutrient for birds, rats, insects, fungus, bacteria and viruses. In a word we have to protect the plant which historically has required a “pesticide” of some sort or another in addition to the plant’s natural defenses. When we grow a plant in one location and eat it in another, we are mining and transporting soil nutrient which has to be replenished. If nature doesn’t provide sufficient nutrient in usable form, as is the case with nitrogen, then humans have to produce it (Smil 2000 and 2001). The question then is – who owns nature – particularly when an ownership claim is made by those who oppose patenting life forms (Brown 2003).

My first encounter with agriculture in a developing country was four decades ago in 1962 in the Gezira scheme in the Sudan in Africa. There the farmers in an agricultural scheme irrigated by the Blue Nile were required to buy cotton seeds that were grown over a thousand miles away in a delta on the Red Sea. Farmers not only did not replant their own seed, they were not allowed to do so; they were even required to dig up the roots of the cotton plants in rock hard soil and burn them in the blistering sun, in order to keep disease under control. This requirement was not out of any bureaucratic or authoritarian impulse, but a necessity to prevent an outbreak of a disease which had the potential to destroy the entire crop for everyone in the project.

Some of the reasons that farmers do not replant their own seed or would prefer not to do so if an alternative were available:

• Disease is carried over from one crop to another as are the seeds of competitors. Ironically, commercial farmers in developed countries are often more able to save seed from year to year because of better disease management and safer storage – see point 8 below.
• Post harvest losses – Nobody as far as I know has trained rats, insects and microorganisms to distinguish between the crop that farmers store to eat and that portion which will be saved for replanting the next year, providing all of them with continuing life sustaining nutrients.
• Genetic deterioration – Even without an understanding of all the mechanisms of replication, most farmers recognize that inbreeding a crop can lead to its deterioration over time (Heisey and Brennan 1991 and LSN 2003). Even some farmers who might fit the SAVE THE SEED definition of “traditional” will exchange seeds among themselves.
• Where the climate permits, farmers will plant a succession of crops, sometimes different varieties of the same crop. They may plant an IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) variety of rice when irrigating, and a domestically bred variety for a monsoon crop. And they may have a third crop of an entirely different food crop. Saving the seeds for three different crops plus possibly those for the kitchen garden is not always easy or convenient.
• Contrary to the slogans of the urban white European and North American males who dominate the activists’ movement, farmers are not naive simpletons in need of the protection of those who know nothing about raising food. Farmers actively seek crop improvements such as higher yields, disease resistance, or improved quality and marketability. Remember the doomsday predictions about the Green Revolution? Even the most techno enthusiasts among us (like myself) were surprised at the speed and extent to which farmers defined as “traditional” adopted the Green Revolution technological package when credit was available.
• Many farmers in Africa (if farmers anywhere fit the activist definition, it would be in sub Saharan Africa) have switched to hybrid maize, making it a major food crop (Byerlee and Eicher 1997). Hybrid maize essentially requires annual purchase of seeds, as hybrids do not breed true to form in the field. In East Africa, new banana trees are grown from tissue cultures to break the cycle of fungal infestation while research is conducted in creating transgenic disease-resistant varieties.
• Cleaning seeds and coating them with pesticides is often the most efficient form of pest control and it can be done better and more safely by professionals.
• Ironically, saving seed from harvest to harvest is on the increase in Europe where many of the urban SAVE THE SEED activists live. European farmers have a higher level of crop protection, which reduces the possibility of carry-over diseases, and they have access to mobile seed processors who can do the necessary on-the-farm seed preparation which is impossible in most poorer regions. In the region with militant advocates for the immutable farmers’ right from time immemorial to replant their own seeds, farmers are required to pay fees for using their own seed where that seed is protected by plant breeders’ rights. The 1994 European Union’s legislation allowed farmers to pay a “sensibly lower remuneration” for the use of farm saved seed. These fees are collected in the United Kingdom by “farmers’ unions and mobile seed processors, who are contracted to collect the farm saved seed payments. Mobile seed processors move from farm to farm cleaning and treating farm saved seed for farmers” (Turner 2003).

The specialization of some farmers (or farmers in some regions) in seed production for planting by other farmers has a much longer history than most of us realize. According to Tripp, “trade in seed is literally as old as agriculture” while “formal commercial seed trade is hundreds of years old” with a least one recorded instance as early as 1296 in the England and Scotland (Tripp 2001, 36).

By the middle of sixteenth century markets and shops in London were supplied with a range of vegetables and pulse seeds by growers who specialized in seed production. A pamphlet from a seedman in 1732 describes seed imported from Italy, Turkey, Egypt, France, Holland and Brazil (Tripp 2001 36).

In the post Civil War period, the US Department of Agriculture and land grant agricultural institutions were providing new varieties of many important crops while state extension services were encouraging the formation of agricultural associations. Private and public research using the emerging knowledge of biological replication and evolution were producing improved varieties. Before then, the US government had gone overseas to seek varieties of wheat that would grow in the new territories which were being settled. By the 1890s, the US government was sending out millions of packages containing packets of several different seeds each year. The era of commercial seed companies came to the forefront with the development of hybrid maize (Tripp 2001, 36-37).

Going into the market to buy inputs generally but not always means going into the market to sell some output. It does not take a great deal of time in the field to realize that there are not many farmers who fit the activist’s definition of a “traditional farmer.” One finds farmers in Africa who wish to plant a better, higher yielding variety but are uncertain whether the credit or fertilizer or pesticides will be available to them in time. Even without the additional inputs, the farmers recognize that the improved seed would give them a better crop, but not enough better to warrant the expenditure for the seeds. To the extent that the oft-described traditional farmers exist and are committed to saving their seed, they would clearly not be the prime target to sell genetically modified seeds.

As this is being written, changes are underway that are rapidly diminishing the numbers that fit the romantic category of traditional farmers. In India and China, an increasing percentage of their rice output is the result of a new complex and sophisticated form of hybridization, while farmers in the Punjab in India who have been growing high yielding varieties of wheat are now growing even higher yielding hybrid varieties; wheat farmers in China are expected to follow with new hybrids produced by their government. And may we add that there is greater genetic diversity in the wheat planted in the Punjab today than was the case a half century ago prior to the Green Revolution.

Hybrid maize has become an increasingly important crop, with maize production expected to exceed that of other grains sometime in the next twenty years. Of the roughly 200 million maize farmers in the world, circa 98% are in the developing world. In many developing countries, hybrid maize has become “the predominant seed type … for example 84% of the 105 million Chinese maize farmers buy hybrid seed, and 81% of all maize seed used in Eastern and Southern Africa is hybrid” (James 2003).

Some of the farmers who most closely fit the idealized concept of “traditional” are engaged in agricultural practices that are anything but environmentally benign. The author’s experience with upland rice farmers in a Southeast Asian country is indicative of some of the complex problems facing “traditional” farmers and those seeking to encourage more environmentally sustainable practices. Throughout Asia, farmers are planting upland rice on cleared hillsides that are subject to rapid erosion and with yields that have changed little over the last forty years, while those of their lowland neighbors in paddy farming have seen their annual output at least triple. Those with whom the author has been involved were gaining a very meager subsistence from their plot, which they supplemented with two to three days labor in the local village or nearby town. Most if not all were aware that their farm was rapidly eroding, with their very modest yields declining as their farm would eventually be totally denuded. Their response was simple and logical – the farm fed their family and their off-farm employment provided for school fees for their children and other necessities. By the time their land was no longer arable, their children would be grown and employed elsewhere, they could then get by on the income from the occasional paid labor. (Over half the farmers in Java obtain more than half their real income off-farm. This is increasingly the case in the United States also.) When an aid development worker proposed substituting a bush or tree crop such as papaya that would protect the soil, their negative response was equally simple and logical. Like the vast majority of the world’s agriculturalists, the farmers lived in a village apart from the farm. Night raiders are unlikely to try to harvest a rice crop but they could clean the trees of their entire output. Anyone who travels in the Third World will see the fruit trees and kitchen gardens tightly packed around the village households for precisely this reason.

Clearly for the upland farmer, yield was a critical factor. It is low yields and low incomes and limited opportunities which force the poor to farm the hillside or cut down rainforest or otherwise bring land under cultivation – land that is marginal for agriculture. Low yields perpetuate themselves in a vicious cycle of low yields and continued poverty and environmental degradation of all kinds.

A variety of new agricultural technologies and techniques, both high and low tech, hold significant promise to make agriculture more sustainable and environmentally friendly. Some are more likely to be associated with agribusiness but they need not be. No-tillage agriculture in which farmers use a drill for planting or lightly disc the field, and then use herbicides to protect the crop, has several advantages. By maintaining ground cover, soil moisture is preserved and soil erosion is prevented, and greater biodiversity is preserved from year-to-year. The “organic” agriculture alternative to using herbicides is to deep-plough the field to turn the weeds under so they cannot regenerate and/or to hand weed with low paid migrant labor once the crop is growing (Lee 2003, Henshaw 2003, Fulmer 2003 and Roane 2002). Added to the widely practiced conservation-tillage or no-tillage agriculture, is what is now called precision agriculture, which combines the best in a variety of techniques. Using GPS (global positioning systems) and other technologies on their combine, farmers can measure the precise output from each and every area of the farm so that they can more precisely regulate the next year’s planning in order not to use too much or too little of any inputs, including fertilizer and chemical pesticides. Contrary to some critics, no farmer, corporate or individual, wishes to destroy the land in which they have invested, nor do they wish to waste money using excess amounts of inputs of any kind. By means of a high tech form of IPM using computers with expert systems software and access to online data sources, and a variety of technologies for taking temperature, humidity and other measures including soil moisture, farmers can monitor their fields (“scouting”) for insects etc. and plug in the data into their expert system program to learn whether they should apply a pesticide and more important, whether they should refrain from doing so. The result is greater output obtained with fewer chemical inputs and less disruption of the soil.

References

Brown, Michael F. Who Owns Native Culture?. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Byerlee, Derek and Carl K. Eicher, editors. Africa’s Emerging Maize Revolution. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997.
Fulmer, Melinda. “Advocates for Farm Laborers Seek a Ban on Hand Weeding: Cal/OSHA Will Decide on a Request to Prohibit the Practice in the State’s Commercial Agriculture, But Growers Say It Is Vital to Many Crops.” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2003.
Heisey, Paul W. and John P. Brennan. “An Analytical Model of Farmers’ Demand for Replacement Seed.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 73 (November 1991):1044-1052.
Henshaw, Jake. “Committee Votes to Ban Hand Weeding.” Tulare AdvanceRegister, September 11, 2003.

James, Clive. Global Review of Commercialized Transgenic Crops: 2002; Feature: Bt Maize. ISAAA (International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech Applications) Briefs 29, November 4, 2003.

Lee, Mike. “Advocates Renew Fight to Limit Hand Weeding.” The Sacramento Bee, April 30 2003.
Roane, Kit R. “Ripe for Abuse: Farmworkers Say Organic Growers Don’t Always Treat Them as Well as They Do Your Food.” US News & World Report, April 22, 2002.
Smil, Vaclav. Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.
Smil, Vaclav. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
Tripp, Robert. Seed Provision and Agricultural Development: The Institutions of Rural Change. London: Overseas Development Institute; Oxford [England]: James Currey; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001.
Turner, Dr. Roger G. 2003. Personal Communication, 12 December.
Vidal, John. 2003. Analysis “Chinks In The Organic Food Chain As Sales Reach A Record 1bn Annually.” The Guardian (London), November 7.

Thomas R. DeGregori is a Professor of Economics, University of Houston and author of Bountiful Harvest: Technology, Food Safety and the Environment, Cato Institute, 2002 and the recently published book, Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate, Blackwell Professional (formerly – Iowa State Press), 2003.

Martha C. Nussbaum’s new book, “Sex and Social Justice,” makes a case for liberal feminism.

More than a generation ago, women’s rights established a foothold in U.S. politics. Women’s rights included primarily, though not exclusively, a concern for equal treatment under the law; this in turn focused down to two areas of central concern: equality in access to educational opportunity and equality in compensational structure and career opportunities.

Persons, male as well as female, who supported and campaigned for women’s rights were, and are, feminists. There are few persons today who would openly oppose the general principles of equality that drive feminism.

Feminist political theory has since developed apace. Feminists who believe in the power of legislative and case law to promote equality are known as “liberal feminists,” an apt label owing to their concern for the promotion and protection of individual rights, and their belief that a focus on individual women’s rights via legal reform will ultimately achieve equality.

Perhaps surprisingly, liberal feminism is opposed – and, by feminists. The opposition is multivaried, but it advocates the generic feminist agenda that would promote women’s rights and so is “feminist,” but it rejects the notion that legal reform will achieve women’s rights and so it is “radical.”

One of the most provocative aspects of radical feminist argumentation is the way in which it highlights what it calls women’s special capacities for caring, nurturing and attachment, and a communitarian focus.

Radical feminists argue that the individualistic politics that are championed by liberal feminism thinly mask male-oriented social and political aims, and that these predominant aims block a genuine, positive transformation in political goals and social organization that affect both women and men.

Liberal feminism, so the argument goes, merely parrots the very sort of political agenda that legitimizes and perpetuates less than equal status for women; feminist theory should set an agenda that ceases to use the “male voice” from women’s mouths.

As famously said by one radical feminist, “take your boot off our necks and then you’ll hear women’s voice!”

Into this rather contentious milieu steps Professor Martha C. Nussbaum with her newest book, a collection of essays on the joint topics of being female and striving for social justice.

Nussbaum defends liberal political theory as the best political and social agenda for achieving feminist aims.

Happily, Nussbaum’s book amounts to far more than jottings by an old guard feminist on the present state of women’s rights. Nussbaum carefully details the main tenets of liberalism and then argues the case-sometimes at the level of political theory, more often by means of carefully detailed real life circumstances-for allegiance to liberal principals and practice. Perhaps less happily, Nussbaum tries but is unsuccessful at meeting theoretical challenges against liberal political theory itself.

So, for example, against radical feminists Nussbaum persuasively argues that the very politics of caring and communitarianism that is central to the radical feminist should entail an allegiance to the liberal principles of individual rights.

This is because, Nussbaum points out by means of a look at real cases, when political theory is refocused onto the group then the group runs roughshod over women’s interests and obscures internal hierarchies that exist in any group. Both of which outcomes are anathema to the radical feminist stance. That all of this is so, Nussbaum asserts, remains the case, no matter how strongly professed is the communitarian nature of any group.

However, while Nussbaum may land a swift blow against anti-liberalism, the thorny question about how to resolve, on the basis of liberal theory, a clash of individual desires and goals with the predominating goals are left without answer. But, definitive answers are not always the only good thing that an essay can provide. Of equal importance is clarification of issues and implications.

Nussbaum does a remarkably good job at detailing what it will mean for feminists to reject liberalism in favor of any anti-liberal political theory.

For her U.S. readers, Nussbaum considers women’s issues on a heretofore unmatched global scale. Her arguments are especially important where she attempts to show that there are reasoned grounds to either condemn, or support, cultural practices from an outsider’s perspective.

According to Nussbaum, we can do more than have a negative emotional reaction to cultural practices such as forbidding widows to support the surviving family, effectively condemning the family to death. We can, she argues, present reasons that condemn these practices, and such reasons ought to constrain individual choices no matter what the culture.

Nussbaum’s claims concerning cross-cultural critique are of course in sharp contrast to certain other arguments that would foreswear reasoned grounds to praise or condemn the practices and mores of a different culture.

Nussbaum fails to advance the debate concerning cross-cultural critique at the fundamental level. For example, despite the theoretical side of her arguments, she ignores the abiding problem of how to delineate culture.

Nussbaum is not uniquely remiss in failing to clarify these kinds of theoretical matters, but readers should be on the alert that she rather blithely ignores them altogether. in truth, readers will find that throughout the book, Nussbaum has an unaccountably high level of confidence in social science.

The powerful parts of Nussbaum’s book are where her essays wield the tenets of political liberalism against flawed reasoning in recent legal decisions, and in the manner in which she shows that whatever merits political liberalism ought to enjoy within the U.S. for matters of sex and social justice, consistency demands its extension on an international scale for women everywhere.

So, while there may not be new theory to mine in the essays, the book is a sound, entry level critique in favor of liberal feminism.

Reviewed by Cassandra L. Pinnick, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Western Kentucky University.

This review first appeared in the “Daily News” Bowling Green, Kentucky, Sunday July 18, 1999, p9-C, and is reprinted by permission of the author and that newspaper.

Cassandra L. Pinnick’s book (edited with Noretta Koertge and Robert F. Almeder) Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology, has recently been published.

In China, people of a certain generation will tell you stories about an era that might as well be a millenium ago. There are thousands of children, amassed in Shanghai’s train station, waiting for the beginning of what feels to them to be a big and important adventure. Their parents are weeping, watching their children bound towards the carriages on their way to the countryside, where – as part of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – they will spend their formative years learning from the peasants.

The kids who participated in this vast exodus are now in their forties and fifties, and most complain of the gap in their education and the wasted decade lasting from 1966 to the death of Chairman Mao in 1976. Others, usually slightly older, have been forced to live with their complicity in the Cultural Revolution, and their part in the Red Guard movement.

Those in the next generation are also the products of the Cultural Revolution. Many Shanghai residents, now approaching thirty, were born in the remote farms of northwestern and southwestern China after their parents were forced into exile. While many are reluctant to talk about it, or even unaware of its main precepts, the Cultural Revolution remains a central fact in their lives.

Near the Three Gorges Dam, there is a mausoleum to Zhang Fei, a general who fought in the Three Kingdom era about 1,700 years ago. On the first floor of the mausoleum, visitors wander through the burning incense into a room lined with lacquered wooden blocks covered in gold inscriptions. Turning the banners around, you see that the blocks have been painted red, and chipped into the paint are the litanies of the Cultural Revolution and the quotations of Mao himself. When the Red Guards marauded through the Temple in 1966, the curators sought to pre-empt them by disguising the antiquities as revolutionary documents. They sought to vandalize the relics to prevent them from being destroyed. Those were the choices that had to be made.

The items at the Zhang Fei Mausoleum survived, but many did not. Matching anything the Taliban did during its reign of terror, a swarm of revolutionaries sacked and destroyed temples, smashed sculptures to pieces and drove writers – including the great Lao She – to their deaths. This was the bonfire of bourgeois vanities, and Mao was its Savonarola. Righteous anger – the sense that you are inflicting damage and committing violence in the name of a higher good – emerges in all societies and in all ages. But why, on occasion, does it spread so widely? Why does the lynch-mob become the pogrom, or the unmarked grave become the killing field?

Much of the Mao era was dominated by unfathomable economic hardship and unbreakable political hallucination. In the higher echelons of the government, mass man-made famines were overshadowed by a surreal alternative world designed by state planners and their faked statistics. The planners were desperate to convince each other, and their superiors, that black was white and red was true and that the Revolution, by harnessing the will power of nearly a billion people, was working. The old slogan of Chinese pragmatism, “seek truth through facts”, was subordinated to the higher truth of Chairman Mao himself, the morning sun of the Chinese people. It didn’t matter that the lessons drawn from centuries of agricultural production were based on empirical experience because Maoism referred to something bigger than mere experience.

After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, that harebrained attempt to galvanize the economy and overtake the West through the establishment of thousands of communes capable of producing steel as well as grain, Chairman Mao was gradually elbowed out of the reckoning by a clique of Communist Party pragmatists led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Mao, still the symbol of the revolution, was reluctant to go, and the pragmatists no doubt hoped that if they allowed Mao to do his thing in the world of books and plays and newspapers – a purge here, a criticism there – they could then get on with rebuilding the nation’s economy after the devastating Great Leap famines. It proved, however, to be their undoing.

On the sidelines, Mao had grown frustrated. Over the next few years, and using culture as his weapon, the quintessence of the Chinese Communist Party had somehow transfigured himself into the rebel par excellence. By 1966, he had gathered thousands of students on Tian’anmen Square with the clarion call, “It is right to rebel!” The forces of counter-revolution are everywhere, he said, even in the highest levels of the Party itself, and so, he set in motion one of the biggest and most disastrous political struggles in history. Schools and hospitals were forced to close, temples and relics were destroyed, “capitalist roaders” and counter-revolutionary “cow demons” were hounded and tortured and forced to sweat out their sins doing years of back-breaking correctional labour. No one could objectively confirm what a revisionist or poisonous weed was, and so, as a result, everyone was a potential target. You might have joined every rally, destroyed every monument, and condemned every manifestation of reaction, but you might still have been denounced as a “rightist in essence”, as Mao put it.

Expertise – in any field – became a sign of decadence and “revisionism”. In the new reality, only Mao Zedong Thought could produce results. Only Mao Zedong Thought – the exaltation of pure revolutionary spirit not only above practical economics but above even nature itself – could triumph. The general will of the people – described as the Mass Line but echoing Rousseau in its assumption that a society was One – could overcome the “paper tigers” of science, nature, and truth itself. Contemporary documents show a world turned on its head, a world where Mao Zedong Thought is used to cure tumours, improve rice yields and defy gravity.

After the launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao’s supporters sought to outshine everyone else in acts of revolutionary fervour, violence and vandalism. Civil society and all its institutions had essentially collapsed, and the communist state had, paradoxically, become atomized, with marauding bands of Red Guards engaging in street battles in order to prove the strength and uniqueness of their allegiance to the Great Leader. They would compete to tear down government buildings, rip art galleries to shreds, and hold impromptu show trials for local Party officials, teachers or intellectuals. All concepts of sense or best practice went out of the window, as did many teachers, thrown through the glass by dozens of bitter but suddenly empowered adolescents. The Red Guards, desperate to emphasize their zeal, would even turn on each other, as they did at the famous battle in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in 1968, which prompted the army to intervene and restore order.

Mao’s motives were ambiguous. There was self-interest, of course, but like the old Crusaders who robbed and looted Antioch and Jerusalem in the name of the Church, Mao had managed to persuade himself that his own interests and those of the State were identical. Some authors, like Simon Leys, believe that the chaos was a smokescreen that allowed Mao and his cohorts to engineer a coup d’etat against Liu Shaoqi (arrested and left to die) and Deng Xiaoping (purged and exiled to the countryside). In any case, what proved crucial was the large swathes of Chinese youth, suddenly given the go-ahead by the biggest cheese in the land to act upon their resentments against authority figures. Mao had lost control, had let loose a force beyond even his reckoning, and by 1968, the army had to be deployed to put an end to the rioting, the looting, the mass demonstrations.

It needs to be said that the irrationality wasn’t just confined to China. While the idea that revolution could be achieved through sheer force of will was, strictly speaking, a violation of classical Marxism (with its emphasis on the transformation of productive forces), there were – according to many idealistic Leftist academics and China hands writing during the period – genuine ideological reasons behind the Cultural Revolution. The revolution had stalled, an inchoate political bureaucracy had been created, and the inexorable logic of dialectical materialism required that the new ruling class be overturned. All this was, of course, superstitious in itself, and rested on the primacy of Marxist truth. In China, however, the situation was different, and rested not even on the primacy of Maoist truth, but on the primacy of Mao himself – that irrepressible, libidinous, all-consuming Monkey King of Chinese politics. What he said, went, and what happened was extraordinary.

Not long ago the television show Biography aired a documentary on the life of Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company. Midway through the film came the obligatory two minutes concerning Ford’s anti-Semitic rantings, his Nazi medal, and his anti-Jewish newspaper The Dearborn Independent. When it came time to put Ford’s anti-Semitism into perspective, the film-makers explained that Ford’s views were part and parcel of growing up on a Reconstruction-era farm in southeast Michigan, and as such the great man was no different than anyone else of his time and place. The film-makers didn’t go into the reasons why the good folks of southeast Michigan should be naturally anti-Semitic. There were after all no Jews to speak of in rural Michigan in the late 19th century. Ford would later blame the Jews for jazz, communism and immoral moving pictures, but in turn-of-the-century Michigan these were as unheard of as antiperspirant. The important thing, the film-makers seemed to suggest, was that we didn’t judge Henry too harshly, him being simply a product of his backward time and culture. And, as everyone knows, judging historical figures, particularly a nation’s heroes, by contemporary moral standards is unfair. Among many historians it is not only unfair, it is an academic abomination known derisively as whig history.

The term whig history—also known as presentism—was first coined by British historian Herbert Butterfield in his 1931 study The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield’s criticisms were aimed largely at Lord Acton (1834-1902) and Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), whose History of England from the Accession of James III was an exercise in “present-minded” history and a hymnal to what Macaulay saw as British physical, moral, and intellectual development (apparently unable to practice what he preached, Butterfield applied twentieth-century standards of historical scholarship to nineteenth century historians). The gist of Butterfield’s critique was that because modern moral and ethical standards are superior to those of the past, it is unreasonable to impose such standards on historical figures. Better to leave right and wrong, and judgments about winners and losers out of the history texts altogether. After Butterfield many historians began to make wildly evasive maneuvers to steer clear of moral judgments. Thus it wasn’t long before we began to hear dubitable dons mouth such palpable absurdities as communism wasn’t good or bad—just different.

Accusations of presentism have long been employed by apologists to rationalize the depraved behavior—in particular the anti-Semitism–of historical figures from Martin Luther to Louis Farrakhan. Luther’s present-day disciples are particularly outspoken on the subject of whig history, though few would recognize the term. The Great Reformer, it is repeatedly alleged, was but a product of his time and place, i.e., a typical superstitious, Jew-hating, Medieval Saxon, and as such modern society cannot hold him accountable for beliefs, ideas and actions that only today in our hypersensitive, morally advanced times are thought sinful. This scarcely corresponds with our innate need to hold our ecclesiastical heroes–men like Luther, Augustine of Hippo, and the numerous contemporary Muslim clerics thought to have God’s ear–to a higher standard of moral accountability than the rest of us mere laypeople. Indeed, in each case a close examination of the man and his moral ideas proves disappointing. Hence supporters have but one recourse to justify the vile behavior and the sinful pronouncements of their leaders: Allegations of presentism. Yes, Luther was an ultra-nationalist who loathed Jews, Anabaptists, Catholics, peasants, the Renaissance and reason, but didn’t everyone? And yes, Augustine advocated burning heretics and advised that the Jew “suffer and be continually humiliated,” but then in his day that was simply par for the course. Taken to its logical conclusion, then, we must concede that Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler were but products of their time and national character. Thus if Martin Luther’s anti-Semitism is excused on grounds that it was normal for his place and time, are we to absolve the Nazis of the Holocaust since their anti-Semitism was similarly common in twentieth-century Duetschland?

I will concede that critics of presentism are correct in one respect: only a beetlehead would blame the ancients for the lack of scientific knowledge extant in their day. Socrates believed in a preposterous pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses. Does this make Socrates’ views on government any less insightful? Does the fact that Aristotle was a slave-owner who judged the sun to move round the earth diminish the genius of his poetic theory? Because of the then scarcity of scientific evidence (fossil records, geological deposits) it would seem proper to make allowances for those pre-Darwinians who accepted the existence of gods and godlings. And when one allows for gods, one is open to all sorts of the superstitious manifestations. Post-Darwinian man, however, does not get off quite so easily, and may explain why many humanists regard the pre-Darwinian skeptics–thinkers on the order of Diderot, Paine, Shelley, Voltaire, and Wollstonecraft—to be the greatest intellectual heroes of their age, in particular those who thrived in a repressive Christian age whose monotheism, admittedly, was rather easier to swallow than the Roman and Greek deities. If we regard Columbus as a hero—despite the ongoing attempts of some to turn him into a genocidal maniac—it is because in the midst of the repression and persecution of the Spanish Inquisition, he courageously sought to discover the truth about the physical world. The same goes for Abelard, Copernicus, Galileo, Servetus, and countless more medieval martyrs.

It is easy to see why presentism is held in such contempt, for without an uncompromising belief in the evolution of right and wrong many of our historical heroes would come off looking no better than a Senator Joe McCarthy or a Slobodan Milosevic. Anti-whig historians must then accept that morals and values, rather than being fixed like the vast and immovable stars, are as changeable as a bi-polar sufferer’s disposition.

I, for one, am not convinced. Generally speaking, wrong has always consisted of inflicting injuries on other people, whereas “right wrongs no man,” to quote the Scottish proverb. It follows then that murder, hatred, exploitation, intolerance, and bearing false witness have always been wrong, and have always been known to be wrong. Doubtless, the Christian rabble-rousers of the Middle Ages who led the persecution of “witches” and “Jewish devils” were fully aware of the viciousness of their acts, despite the blessings of Mother Church. If one were legitimately in doubt as to the ethics of such persecutions, one had only to recall the commandment of Jesus of Nazareth: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you…”

Anti-Semitism and slavery remain two of history’s popular moral benchmarks, though most modern historians grant dispensations to historical heroes for their Jew hatred and slave-owning. Difficulties arise, however, when one recalls men, even in Medieval Europe, who condemned the heinousness of anti-Semitism and slavery. One of these was the theologian Pierre Abelard, who, in the tenth century, wrote in defense of the Jews:

No nation has ever suffered so much for God. Dispersed among all nations, without king or secular ruler, the Jews are oppressed with heavy taxes as if they had to repurchase their very lives every day. To mistreat the Jews is considered a deed pleasing to God. Such imprisonment as is endured by the Jews can be conceived by the Christians only as a sign of God’s utter wrath. The life of the Jews is in the hands of their worst enemies. Even in their sleep they are plagued by nightmares. Heaven is their only place of refuge. If they want to travel to the nearest town, they have to buy protection with the high sums of money from the Christian rulers who actually wish for their death so that they can confiscate their possessions. The Jews cannot own land or vineyards because there is nobody to vouch for their safekeeping. Thus, all that is left them as a means of livelihood is the business of money-lending, and this in turn brings the hatred of Christians upon them.

We know what Abelard received for his pains: murder attempts, condemnation and castration. Meanwhile Luther’s excuse was that Yahweh expected too much from sinful man, that there was no way in hell mankind could keep God’s rigorous commandments. May as well then toss Holy Writ down the crapper.

What then shall we make of men like Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia and pre-eminent slave-owner? Do we topple him from his pedestal and T.P. his monument, or do we rather accept that he was a normal eighteenth-century Virginia planter? To be sure, Jefferson was in no way a “normal” Virginian, not by any stretch of the imagination. But he was a human being, born in original sin, and acquiring a good deal more along the way. Voltaire said that “every hero becomes a bore at last.” I take this to mean that every hero becomes a human being at last, with all the failings, stupidities, prejudices and inconsistencies of our damned human race. Luther, a passionate believer in Heaven and Hell, was correct when he said we are all sinners–himself in particular. Fortunately for Luther–and many another historical hero–he will not be subjected to the flames and agonies of his imaginary Inferno.

Christopher Orlet’s homepage is www.christopherorlet.net

The Underlying Belief System

Gail Omvedt speaks of a “a distorted image of farmers held by a section of the urban elite” in India as well as in developed countries. This mythic image:

depicts them romantically but demeaningly as backward, tradition-loving, innocent and helpless creatures carrying on their occupation for love of the land and the soil, and as practitioners of a “way of life” rather than a toilsome income-earning occupation. These imagined farmers have to be protected from market forces and the attacks of multinationals, from the seductions of commercialization and the enslavement of technologies (Omvedt 1998).

Modern agriculture and the food supply it provides, along with modern medicine and the pharmaceuticals and technological devices it uses and the science on which it is based, have become a villains of choice for many who find the trends of the last half of the 20th and beginnings of the 21st century to be a danger to human health and well being, as well as ecologically destructive. Given that the 20th century witnessed the greatest increase in human life expectancy the world has ever experienced, while accommodating a roughly 350% increase in population, there is a strange and almost perverse irony to this anti-modern mania, since it is generally accepted that improved nutrition and such medical interventions as immunization and anti-biotics are major factors for human health and longevity. Other important factors contributing to the expansion of human life such as chlorination of water, use of pesticides to reduce or eliminate disease vectors, refrigeration, pasteurization and other forms of sterilization and preservation are all products of modern science and technology. Most of these have also had their critics, and still do.

Not all of those who oppose one or more of these aspects of modernity necessarily oppose them all, but many do, as there is an underlying belief system that links them together. It should be made clear at the outset, that we are not talking about critics who seek to improve upon food production and medical care but those who consider our current ways of doing things to be so fundamentally flawed that they have to be overthrown root and branch. A further irony is that as critics of modern science, technology and agronomy become more vehement, the public level of knowledge about these subjects has not fared as well as the endeavors themselves. Maybe it is not so ironic, as one increasingly wonders what was learned about the disciplines of modern inquiry by those who have degrees under the rubric of Science and Technology Studies or Critical Inquiry. I have colleagues in my own university who wouldn’t know a cow patty from a rice paddy if they stepped in one but nevertheless claim expertise in “sustainable agriculture.”

Harvesting and eventually transforming plants means that we have to act to maintain their continuity by some form of compensation. According to Wood and Lenné:

Harvesting of plant parts – particularly the reproductive parts – for human food would decrease the competitive ability of targeted plants. Unless there was some compensation for this, the population of the food plant would decline in competition with non-food plants; there would be less food for gatherers the following season…Simply, if we eat the plant’s reproductive strategy, it will not be able to compete with less useful species. To maintain the food supply, we need to compensate the plants in some way. With compensation, the food species could expand at the expense of non-food plants, giving us a more assured food supply (Wood and Lenné 1999a, 20-21).

To Wood and Lenné, “compensation is the key to the coevolution of food plants and human exploitation” (Wood and Lenné 1999a, 21). After describing the compensatory mechanisms of agriculture, they conclude that “agriculture is therefore a combination of ways in which we help food-providing species to compete making more and more plants dependent on our `sufferance or favor’” (Wood and Lenné 1999a, 21).

The Green Revolution in agriculture has to be seen as one of the great achievements of our time. It has been the driving force behind the spectacular increases in global food supply over the last half century. Yet a variety of myths have arisen about it that have become so deeply imbedded in conventional wisdom that one does not need to be a Luddite or mossback reactionary to accept them as unchallenged fact. What is truly extraordinary is that each of these myths is exactly contrary to what can clearly be demonstrated was the case. There still remain some like Vandana Shiva who either deny the gains in output or who maintain that they are achievable with a reversion to earlier, more “organic” forms of agriculture. But to deny the output gains of the Green Revolution is so contrary to fact that only the most extreme zealots believe it. Most accept the fact of the increases in output but claim that they came at an unacceptably high price. Of course, we can always counter that the price of not increasing yields would have been a combination of massive famine and environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale as a result of attempting to bring ever more land under cultivation.

The presumed costs of the Green Revolution are that the HYV (high yielding varieties) of seeds “require” more fertilizer, water and pesticides (when in fact they outperform the traditional varieties at nearly any level of inputs) and that they have given rise to a dangerous monoculture leading also to a decline in non-grain products with a resulting worsening of the nutrition of poor people. Part of the anti-globalization mythology is that the Green Revolution gave rise to greater inequality of income and possibly even left the poor worse off. The data on the Green Revolution and the growth in global food production generally has accumulated and been frequently analyzed and it is clear that each of these beliefs is egregiously wrong. Let us examine each of these beliefs, starting with the issue of water needs.

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 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). Even Europe with its obscene agricultural subsidies and the environmental problems resulting from over-use of fertilizer, has seen yields rise faster than fertilizer application (Fresco 2003). Imagine the potential increases in efficiencies that could be realized if the agricultural subsidies in Europe and the United States were removed. In other parts of the world such as Latin America and Africa, the problem is not too much fertilizer but not enough. Genetic engineering offers further opportunities for more efficient fertilizer use by increasing the photosynthetic efficiency of plants.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the “nutrient balance is negative for most crops and cropping systems.”

The end result is not just loss of soil fertility. The physical and biological structure of the soils will also be degraded including reduction in soil organic matter levels and hence of carbon sequestration, lower moisture holding capacity and greater vulnerability to erosion (Norse 2003).

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer costs money, so as one would expect, farmers attempt to become more efficient in its use. The best measure of this is the ratio of nitrogen in the fertilizer applied to the nitrogen in the crop. This ratio fell for American farmers by 2% a year from 1986 to 1995. Further, there is no evidence that bulk deposition of nitrogen, which is of environmental concern because of run-off into rivers and streams, has been increasing (Frink et al. 1999). Another measure of increasing efficiency in nitrogen use is the feed-to-meat ratio. As we have just shown, the synthetic nitrogen-to-nitrogen in the crop has been falling and now, in turn, the “calculated feed to produce a unit of meat fell at an annual rate of 0.9%” from 1967 to 1992 (Waggoner and Ausubel 2002). With increasing crop yields per acre, “cropland for grain-fed animals to produce meat for Americans shrank 2.2% annually” (Waggoner and Ausubel 2002).

It is important to note here that the global demand for animal products – meat, milk, cheese, eggs, chicken etc. – is increasing at a faster rate than population and the basic demand for food. For example, while grain production was increasing 2.7 times over the last forty years, production of broiler chickens increased slightly more than six times from 8 billion to 49 billion. More efficient cultivation of maize as an animal feed will be an essential component for continuing to provide the nutrients that are improving the health for much of the world’s population. As an historical note, the diffusion of maize into Europe following its maritime contact with the Americas, is credited with providing the yield necessary for expansion of animal production and consumption which in turn is considered an important causal factor in the expansion of life expectancies that followed (Scott and Duncan 2002).

India’s need for synthetic fertilizer long predates the Green Revolution’s increased use of it. Historically there was a large difference between the nutrients extracted from the soil in India and the “organic” nutrients available to be returned to it. In the 1960s, each year cultivated crops in India were removing:

3 million tons of nitrogen, 1.5 million tons of phosphorus oxide and 3.5 million tons of potash…8 million tons of plant food. The organic sources of the plant food returned to the soil is hardly 1.8 million tons of nitrogen, 0.60 tons of phosphorus oxide and 1.8 million tons of potash…4.2 million tons of plant food (Randhawa 1983, Vol.3, 314-317, using data from Agarwal 1965, 7, 12, 13, 14, 214, cited in DeGregori 2003b)

Randhawa adds: “Even allowing for the biological and other natural processes for recuperation of fertility, the balance ie tremendous” with nearly twice as much nutrient being withdrawn from the soil as was being returned to it (Randhawa 1983 317, cited in DeGregori 2003b).

Similarly for Africa: Soil fertility depletion on smallholder farms, together with the concomitant problems of weeds, pests and diseases, is the fundamental biophysical root cause for declining per capita food production in sub-Saharan Africa (Kelemu et al. 2003, see also Sánchez et al. 1997).

The annual loss of nutrient in Africa is “equivalent to US $4000 million in fertilizer.” These are rates of nutrient depletion that “are several times higher than Africa’s (excluding Rep. of South Africa) annual fertilizer consumption, which is 0.8 million t N, 0.26 million t P and 0.2 million t K” (Kelemu 2t al. 2003, see also FAO 1994 and Smalling et al. 1997). The “traditional way” of overcoming soil nutrient depletion by applying mineral fertilizer is rendered difficult by fertilizer cost which is “2 to 6 times as much as those in Europe, North America or Asia” (Kelemu et al. 2003). Thus there is a need to use the tools of modern plant molecular biology to develop cultivars that are more efficient in nitrogen use (Rao and Cramer 2003, see also ECA 2002).

Disease Resistance

The Green Revolution seeds turn out to be more disease resistant (as plant breeders have added multiple disease resistant genes – gene stacking), requiring less pesticides. “Increasingly, scientists breed for polygenic (as opposed to monogenic) resistance by accumulating diverse, multiple genes from new sources and genes controlling different mechanisms of resistance within single varieties (Smale 1997, 1265, see also Cox and Wood 1999, 46). The coefficient of variation for rice production has been steadily decreasing for the last forty years which would seem to indicate the new technologies in agricultural production are not as fragile as some would have us believe (Lenné and Wood 1999, see also Wood and Lenné 1999a&b and Evenson and Gollin 1997). This has also been the case for wheat. “Yield stability, resistance to rusts, pedigree complexity, and the number of modern cultivars in farmers’ fields have all increased since the early years of the Green Revolution” (Smale and McBride 1996).

Modern “monoculture” is central to the unverified claims about modern varieties being less disease resistant (DeGregori 2003c). The “natural ecosystems” from which important cereals were domesticated were often moncultures – “extensive, massive stands in primary habitats, where they are dominant annuals.” This includes the “direct ancestors of our cereals Hordeum spontaneum (for barley), Triticum boeoticum (for einkorn wheat) and Triticum dicoccoides (for emmer wheat)” which “are common wild plants in the Near East” (Wood and Lenné 1999, 445). This was not unique to the Near East but was a prevailing pattern of the time. In the transition from Pleistocene to the Holocene, “climatic changes in seasonal regimes decreased diversity, increased zonation of plant communities, and caused a shift in net antiherbivory defense strategies” (Guthrie 1984, 260, cited in DeGregori 2003c). The “ecological richness of late Pleistocene” in many of the areas that humans were first to develop agriculture, gave way to “relative ecological homogeneity during the succeeding Holocene” (Guthrie 1984, 251, cited in DeGregori 2003c).

Critics of modern agriculture who fear the susceptibility to disease from monculture, continually hark back to the southern corn-leaf blight in the U.S. in 1970 since they cannot come up with any other comparable loss in the last half century in corn or wheat or rice, the staples that provide about two-thirds of the world’s food production. The $1 billion in losses of about 15 to 25% of the 1970 corn crop was substantial, but these loses should be considered against the fact that corn yields had more than doubled over the previous two decades and that the crop year following the blight was one of record yields. When not using the corn blight, the critics go back over 150 years to the Irish potato famine. And they simply ignore the crop losses and famine that have been the lot of humankind since the begining of conventional, largely “organic” agriculture.

The Utility of the Genome

Targeted genome sequencing by methylation filtration offers a lower cost method for gaining valuable information about food crops for plant breeding where the more expensive approach of sequencing the entire genome might not be financially warranted (Palmer et al. 2003 and Whitelaw et al. 2003).

If one seeks to understand plant diversity at the genomic level, an argument can be made for increased diversity. “Some modern varieties of rice and wheat have very comprehensive pedigrees and can be highly genetically diverse. For example, `IR 66′ has 42 landraces in its parentage with multiple disease and pest resistances, drought tolerance and earliness” while another variety has 49 landraces including multiple disease and pest resistances (Hargrove et al. 1988, cited in Polaszek, Riches and Lenné 1999, 288). Thanks to modern plant breeding, wheat has a diversity which it previously lacked. “Wheat lacks diversity because it evolved through a natural genetic bottleneck. It has always teetered on precariously narrow genetic base” (Cox 1998, cited in Cox and Wood 1999, 44-45). Bread wheat was the accidental “unnatural” crossing of einkorn and then emmer wheat with another species. The latter, tetraploid emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum) somehow crossed with a weedy diploid goatgrass (Aegilops tauschii) (Cox and Wood 1999, 45). What was done by nature could not be done by humans until we could grow rescued embryos in an artificial medium. Modern wheat now has a number of resistant genes that have been derived from other species, giving it a greater diversity and vastly greater disease resistance. And this increased resistance has produced results.

In their study of the “wheat’s origins and the flows of germplasm between various regions of the world,” Smale and McBride examine “patterns of bread wheat diversity in farmers’ fields and evidence of genetic variation from breeding programs.”

Findings suggest that the often-invoked dichotomy between the gene-poor North and the gene-rich South has little validity for wheat. Findings also suggest that yield stability, resistance to rusts, pedigree complexity, and the number of modern cultivars in farmers’ fields have all increased since the early years of the Green Revolution (Smale and McBride 1996, Abstract, see also CIMMYT (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo). 1996, Rice et al. 1998, Smale 1997, Smale, ed. 1998, Smale et al. 1996 & 2002 and Gollin and Smale 1998).

In the Indian Punjab in the 1950s, “the area planted to a single cultivar was high. … In the high potential zones, semidwarf wheats generally replaced the tall cultivars that had been released by the Indian national breeding program from the early 1900s … if any long term trend is observable since 1947, it has not been upward” (Smale 1997, 1261). Citing Howard and Howard, Smale adds that “according to government records, Indian landraces, which were planted to millions of contiguous hectares, were notably susceptible to rust. Average annual losses were estimated in one document at 10% of the value of the crop” (Smale 1997, 1261).

If the myths about the alleged “failure” of the Green Revolution were simply about the past, there would be little need to expend much effort to refute them except to set the historical record straight. The fact is that the “failure” of the Green Revolution has become one of the axioms of those opposed to the continued use of science and technology to improve our food supply, particularly using biotechnology for what has been named as the “double Green Revolution” and as a basis for promoting alternate forms of agriculture.

Safety of the Food Supply

Our food supply remains safer than it ever has been. Proponents of “organic agriculture” and many consumers believe that “organic agriculture” is “pesticide free” even though there is a USDA website for approved pesticides for “organic agriculture” including synthetic pesticides (USDA 2002, http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop/NationalList/FinalRule.html). Purists who oppose “transgenic” plant breeding because it is somehow “unnatural” nevertheless have yet to raise any objections, to the best of my knowledge, to plants that are the result of mutation breeding using carcinogenic chemicals or gamma rays or the use of techniques such as altering the ploidy or chromosomal structure by crossing diploids and haploids, tissue culture or somoclonal variation, embryo rescue, protoplastic cell fusion etc, etc. Of course, if they did object, they would have problems finding anything to eat. And we must never forget that these mutation-bred plants are very much a part of the crops of the “organic” farmers whose supposed opposition to synthetic pesticides requires them to use varieties that are more resistant to disease infestation. Yet these same farmers oppose the transgenic plants (particularly when used in conjunction with conservation tillage) that have most effectively provided pest resistance, increasing output and reducing pesticide use as well as reducing fuel use, water loss, and soil erosion, and conserving biodiversity.

Critics argue that inserting a gene from one species into another is “unnatural,” but then worry that the transgene will in nature jump to other species. (We should add that the restriction endonucleases and ligases [both are enzymes] used to cut and re-ligate the cohesive ends of DNA for recombinant DNA technology were first observed in nature as were the plasmids [circular pieces of DNA outside the chromosome] as a means to encode a gene. They were not the product of mad scientists.) What basis then in fact or theory is there to call gene flow from transgenic crops, “contamination?”

There is the fear that transgenic resistance genes will outcross with the non-food crop plants or transfer resistance genes to a bacteria (“jumping genes”). Breeding in genes for resistance by means other than transgenics seems to arouse no fears that these same genes will outcross with weeds, creating so-called superweeds that are no longer deterred by the pesticides. (For the last 40 years, hundreds of millions of hectares have been planted in modern varieties of wheat and rice and yet there is not a single verifiable case of a dwarfing gene migrating to neighboring species.) Without question, gene flow from transgenic crops will happen in one form or another as it has happened with planted crops since the beginning of agriculture.

“Defying the expectations of scientists monitoring transgenic crops such as corn and cotton that produce insecticidal proteins derived from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), target insect pests have developed little or no resistance to Bt crops thus far, according to US Department of Agriculture’s funded scientists” (Fox 2003, 958, see also Tabashnik et al. 2003a&b and Mendelsohn et al. 2003). Ironically, the diamondback moth “evolved resistance to Bt sprays used by organic growers, but no pest has evolved resistance to transgenic Bt crops in the field” (Fox 2003, see also DeGregori 2003a, 115-116). The irony is of course that it is the organic growers who have vociferously complained that the transgenic Bt varieties would lead to the emergence of super bugs resistant to their Bt spray.

Then there is the fear that transgenic genes will move about the genome, land in the wrong place or interact with other genes leading to the expression of other characteristics (called pleiotropy) such as a dangerous toxin or allergen. Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her discovery of chromosomal instability fifty years ago. Plant geneticists have yet to observe any greater chromosomal instability in transgenics but they have in the products of tissue culture which has been absolutely essential, particularly in developing countries for breeding plants resistance to a particular disease.

The use of tissue culture in plant breeding has also often resulted in somaclonal variation of plant lines and irregular phenotypes or field performance. Somaclonal variations are mutational and chromosomal instabilities of embryonic plants regenerated from tissue cultures (Haslberger 2003).
Unfortunately, these “chromosomal instabilities” persist for some time not only in the original crop but in future crops in which it is part of the breeding stock.
These instabilities may result from activation of dormant transposons in the chromosome. The consequent genetic variability is known to persist for many generations and is difficult to eliminate by backcrossing (Haslberger 2003).
It is interesting to note that in searching for the possible “unintended consequences” of rDNA. a committee of the Codex Alimentarious found the most serious unintended outcomes were in crops from “traditional breeding.”
a traditionally bred squash caused food poisoning, a pest-resistant celery variety produced rashes in agricultural workers (which was subsequently found to contain sevenfold more carcinogenic psoralens than control celery) and a potato variety Lenape contained very high levels of toxic solanine (Haslberger 2003).

These varieties are no longer cultivated (Kirschmann and Suber 1998, Ames and Gold 1990, Beier 1990 and Prakash 2001). 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” were 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 we rarely worry 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 “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).

Transgenic crop breeding is the most predictable form of plant breeding ever devised by humans and is therefore the safest. Yet it is also the only form of plant breeding that is regulated, largely because it is the only form of plant breeding for which it is reasonably possible to test prior to widespread use. (Using rDNA to create plants that express a vaccine or pharmaceutical has tremendous potential for benefiting those most in need. However, given the many possibilities of harm, those producing a vaccine or pharmaceutical via transgenic breeding must operate in terms of strict protocols, careful segregation in growing, and careful oversight and regulation.)

In spite of vociferous opposition, the planting of transgenic crops is increasing worldwide, more in developed countries than developing countries, as farmers find that higher final output from either increased yield or reduced crop loss or both, makes it worthwhile to pay a premium for commercial transgenic seeds.

Other Environmental Hazards

After the furor over the alleged threat to the Monarch butterfly from transgenic maize was shown to be a tempest in a teapot, it is clear that the most serious threat to the Monarch butterfly is from the destruction of its winter forest habitat in Mexico by poor farmers clearing small plots to raise crops to feed their families. Higher sustainable yields on existing farms including the use of transgenics and/or more rewarding non-farm employment would greatly aid the protection of the forest habitat and the preservation of the Monarch butterfly.

Whatever the environmental problems of the much maligned Green Revolution technologies in wheat and rice, and they are real, the increased yields from these and related gains from modern agronomy in other crops such as hybrid maize have had the effect of minimizing the amount of land that had to be brought under cultivation. It is widely understood that the single most important cause of species extinction is loss of habitat. In the last forty years of the twentieth century, the world’s population slightly more than doubled from about 3 billion to over 6 billion people while global food supply increased to about 270 percent of its 1960 level, resulting in a 30 to 40 percent increase in per capita output. This was achieved even though the land under cultivation increased from 1.4 billion hectares to only 1.5 billion hectares.

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 foodgrain 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).

Impact on Poverty

The most important contribution of technological change in Indian agriculture since the mid-sixties consists in making Indian agriculture progressive and dynamic by making farmers increasingly conscious of science and technology (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 51).

After surveying a wide range of crops in India, Sawant and Achuthan conclude that there is “evidence in support of a wider, greater diffusion of technology in recent years to a large number of crops not benefited in the early phase of the green revolution” (Sawant and Achuthan 1995, A-7). “Another distinguishing character of agricultural growth in the 1980s has been its wider dispersal over regions” with the “fact the foodgrains outgrowth picked up in many less developed areas” (Sawant and Achuthan 1995, A-13). Since the mid-1970s in India, there has been a “significant” decline in “inter-state disparities in real wages” caused by labor migration from poorer areas, the “decline in the relative prices of foodgrains,” poverty alleviation programs and the “pick-up in agricultural growth” in poorer areas (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 43). In addition, gender disparities have diminished as female wages have been rising as “traditional semi-feudal relations in agriculture” have been weakened under the impact of the improved agricultural technology (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 43, 51, 55-58, 60-63). The Green Revolution-driven global decline in the relative price of foodgrains has been a major force for poverty reduction, particularly in Asia, for the obvious reason that the poor spend a much higher portion of their income on foodgrains than other income groups. Hanumantha Rao vividly describes the “miserable” working conditions for migrant labor in India, their exploitation by employers and middlemen, and their declining income share in “areas undergoing rapid technological change.” However, “despite the hardships and exploitation, the incomes of migrant labour are higher than they would have been able to earn without migration” (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 52 & 54). In the “process of migration, the labour has become more skillful, enterprising, and has considerably improved its staying power on account of rise in its income. This has enhanced its capacity to fight against injustices” (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 55).

It is important to note that “among initial conditions conducive to pro-poor growth, literacy plays a notably positive role” (Datt and Ravallion 1999). Datt and Ravallion found that “the same variables that promoted growth in average consumption also helped reduce poverty” (Datt and Ravallion 1996). The higher agricultural yields of the Green Revolution were pro-poor in that they “reduced absolute poverty in rural India, both by raising smallholder productivity and by increasing real agricultural wages.” These benefits were not “confined to those near the poverty line — the poorest also benefited” (Ravallion and Datt 1995). Thanks to the efficiacy of these agricultural technologies, economic growth did not have to be sacrificed in order for there to be benefits for the poor. In fact, “there was no sign of tradeoffs between growth and pro-poor distribution” (Datt and Ravallion 1996). On the debate on whether there has been rising inequality as a result of globalization, Martin Ravallion is often seen as one who supports the view of increasing inequality. However, he also finds that “from the point if view of the poor,” income distribution “has not been deteriorating in the 1990s” (Ravallion 2001, 1807).

Population Growth

One hates to imagine all the famine, disease and death that would have resulted if these spectacular yield increases had not happened, or the destruction of wildlife habitat from desperately hungry people trying to grow food for themselves and their families (Hanumantha Rao 1994, 161-163, 189). “Some estimates of land savings due to all past research efforts and agricultural intensification amount to more than 400 million ha. Mineral fertilizers may have provided 30-50% of these savings and have therefore made a major contribution to the preservation of tropical rainforests and biodiversity” (Norse 2003, see also Pinstrup-Andersen, 2003).

It is generally recognized by demographers that regularized and improved food supply is one of a constellation of development outcomes which lead to low infant death rates which in time lead to lower fertility rates. For about thirty years after World War II, death rates fell faster than birth rates – the population growth rate is the difference between the two, birth rates minus death rates – causing population growth rates reaching about 2.3% per year by the early 1970s. Since the mid-1970s, birth rates have been falling faster than death rates, slowing population growth which will likely lead to a leveling of population at about 9 billion by the mid twenty-first century and possibly even initiate a long term decline. Whatever environmental problems (as well as those of poverty and hunger) we face today, they will be greatly compounded unless modern agronomy is able to continue to facilitate sustainable increases in yields using the technologies that are increasingly being opposed in the name of protecting the environment.

Decrease in Hunger, Increase in Height

The Green Revolution technology in rice involved HYVs (high yielding varieties) of rice with a significantly shorter growing season, allowing the farmer to plant more than one crop per year, thus increasing output both by higher yields and more crops. The seeds generally came as part of a package, along with fertilizer and pesticides and often with access to water. Plants, like all living organisms, need nutrients to grow. Higher yields require more nutrient input no matter what the crop is. In effect, the Green Revolution turned tens or even hundreds of millions of peasant subsistence agriculturalists into mini agribusinesses buying inputs and selling outputs to pay for inputs and to secure a small profit. There were environmental costs from more intensive, sometimes year-round planting and population growth. For example, in an island like Java, with 120 million people in an area the size of Wisconsin, soil erosion and pesticide contamination of the groundwater were and are problems. IPM (Integrated Pest Management) programs using a variety of strategies for pest control, including the use of predator insects such as spiders to help to control crop-eating insects, have helped to reduce pesticide use in many areas, but the task is often difficult and not always successful. Disease resistant varieties of rice have probably been more effective in protecting the crop than IPM, but a multiplicity of strategies for crop protection has merit. An IPM program for cabbage in central Java was teaching farmers to “scout” for bugs, count them and only spray when they reached a certain density instead of once a week. When I asked a farmer not in the program and spraying by the calendar, what he would say if I told him that a farmer across the valley was spraying less than half the number of times that he was and getting the same output, he responded that he wouldn’t believe me. The very success of the Green Revolution package of technologies has made it difficult to make even minor adjustments that benefit the environment. The speed at which “tradition”-bound small farmers adopted the HYVs in paddies literally everywhere it could be grown, surprised even the most optimistic among us. The farmer, having experienced the lower yields and more frequent crop loss of traditional agriculture, was not easily convinced to even slightly modify the technology package that had so dramatically transformed the local food supply and decreased hunger and malnutrition. Those of us who have witnessed this transition in Asia and through time, have little doubt about the overall accuracy of the statistics which show an absolute and proportional decrease in hunger and malnutrition and increase in height that is readily observable throughout most of Asia (for example, see Morgan 2000 for China).

Central to the anti-modern agronomy mythology is the belief that the Green Revolution technologies have led to a vast increase in mono cropping, worsened the nutritional quality of the human diet and fostered a mentality which has been pejoratively called “monocultures of the mind” (Shiva 1993). If Shiva thought about what she was saying and checked the data on health in India, she might have trouble explaining the following data cited by Nanda:

Annual Life expectancy went from 44 years in 1960 to 61.6 years in 1995. Infant mortality rate declined from 165 to 73 per 1000 births from 1960 to 1995. Percentage of underweight children declined from 71 in 1960 to 53 in 1995. Adult literacy went up from 34 percent in 1960 to 52 percent in 1995 (Nanda 2003, 272 citing UNDP 1998).

Rice has had an association with monoculture long before the Green Revolution. It might therefore come as surprise to many that “rice harvested area (hectares under rice multiplied by the number of croppings per year) has declined as a percentage of total crop harvested area in nearly all Asian rice-growing economies since 1970” (Dawe 2003, 33). For example, rice in China went from a 0.24 share of total crop area harvested in 1970 to 0.18 in 2001 while Vietnam went from a 0.75 to a 0.62 share in 2001 in the same period in becoming the second largest rice exporter in the world to Thailand which went from 0.64 share to 0.57 share. “Thus, if some farmers increasingly specialized in rice, others must have diversified into other crops — and done so over a larger harvested area. Despite a near doubling of the total rice harvest, rice is now less dominant in Asian agriculture than it was before the Green Revolution” (Dawe 2003, 33). Stated differently, “overall cropping diversity — the variety of different crops planted — also seems to have increased since the beginning of the Green Revolution … farmers in most Asian countries plant a wider variety of different crops today than was the case in 1970” (Dawe 2003, 33). Contrary to popular misconceptions and consistent with our analysis above, Dawe finds that these increases in production have resulted in a decline in child malnutrition. “While the incidence of child malnutrition still stood at a dismal 31% in 1995, this reflected a reduction of one-third from the 46.5% recorded in 1970” (Dawe 2003, 33, see also Smith and Haddad 2001).

We have a variety of technologies to make all forms of agriculture more environmentally sustainable if we have the right incentives to promote them and can continue the research necessary to increase output without bringing large amounts of new land under cultivation. The task of development economists is to find lower cost affordable ways of adapting these technologies to allow the poorer farmers of the world to both feed their families and preserve their environment.

# There other less expensive ways of using genomics for improved plant breeding. “In 2002, the National Plant Genome Initiative introduced the concepts of `reference species’ and of using the revealed commonality of life to spawn `translational agriculture.’” Namely “focusing mapping resources on a few carefully chosen plant species could yield information and clues that are transferable to many other plant species.” Once again, there is benefit and understanding from the fact that “the genetic sequences common to all plant genomes do not need to be mapped repeatedly. With the concurrent advent of computer networks and coordination, the work of plant genome mapping can be decentralized across many labs and reconstructed in shared databases. Verification and testing across species for shared genetic traits can further advance understanding and subsequently plant improvement” (Gardner and Payne 2003).

Thomas R. DeGregori is a Professor of Economics, University of Houston and author of Bountiful Harvest: Technology, Food Safety and the Environment, Cato Institute, 2002 and the recently published book, Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate, Iowa State Press: A Blackwell Scientific Publisher, 2003 from which much of the material here is taken.

References and Further Reading:

Agarwal, Radha Raman. Soil Fertility in India. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1965.
Ames, Bruce and Lois Swirsky Gold. “Chemical Carcinogenesis: Too Many Rodent Carcinogens.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 87 (October 1990):7772-7776.
Beier, R.C. 1990. Natural Pesticides and Bioactive Components In Foods, Review of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, 113:47-137.
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.
Borlaug, Norman. The Green Revolution, Peace, and Humanity, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, December 11, 1970.
http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1970/borlaug-lecture.html
Brown, Michael F. Who Owns Native Culture?. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003.
CIMMYT. CIMMYT 1995/96 World Wheat Facts and Trends: Understanding Global Trends in the Use of Wheat Diversity and International Flows of Wheat Genetic Resources. Mexico, D.F.: CIMMYT (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo – International Center for the Improvement of Wheat and Maize), 1996.
Cox, T.S. “Deepening the Wheat Gene Pool.” Journal of Crop Protection 1 (1998):1-25.
Cox, T. S. and Dave Wood. “The Nature and Role of Crop Biodiversity.” In Agrobiodiversity: Characterization, Utilization and Conservation edited by Dave Wood and Jillian M. Lenné, pp. 35-57. Wallingford, UK.: CABInternational, 1999.
Datt, Gaurav and Martin Ravallion. “Why Have Some Indian States Done Better Than Others at Reducing Rural Poverty?,” Working Papers — Poverty. Income distribution, Safety Nets, Micro-credit. No. 1594, Washington: World Bank, 1996.
Datt, Gaurav and Martin Ravallion. “When Is Growth Pro-Poor? Evidence from the Diverse Experiences of India’s States,” Working Papers — Poverty. Income distribution, safety nets, micro-credit. No. 2263, Washington: World Bank, 1999.
Dawe, David. “The Monoculture Myth: The Green Revolution Neither Monopolized Farmers’ Fields Nor Impoverished Nutrition.” Rice Today (IRRI) 2(October 2003):33.
http://www.irri.org/publications/today/pdfs/2-2/facts2-2.pdf.
DeGregori, Thomas R. The Environment, Our Natural Resources, and Modern Technology. Ames IA: Iowa State Press: A Blackwell Scientific Publisher, 2002 & 2003.
DeGregori, Thomas R. Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate. Ames IA: Iowa State Press: A Blackwell Scientific Publisher, 2003a.
DeGregori, Thomas R. Shiva the Destroyer?, Butterflies and Wheels: Fighting Fashionable Nonsense, April 16, 2003b.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=17.
DeGregori, Thomas R. The Anti-Monoculture Mania, Butterflies and Wheels: Fighting Fashionable Nonsense, July 14, 2003c.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=281.
DeGregori, Thomas R. The Plant Protection Racket, Butterflies and Wheels: Fighting Fashionable Nonsense, September 11, 2003d.
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Gardner, J.C. and T.L. Payne. A Soybean Biotechnology Outlook, 2003. AgBioForum, 6(1&2), 1-3. http://www.agbioforum.org.
Gollin, Douglas and Melinda Smale. “Valuing Genetic Diversity: Crop Plants and Agroecosystems.” In Biodiversity in Agroecosystems, edited by Wanda W. Collins and Calvin O. Qualset, Chapter 13. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1998.
Guthrie, R. Dale. “Mosaics, Allelochemics and Nutrients: An Ecological Theory of Late Pliestocene Megafaunal Extinctions.” In Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution edited by Paul S. Martin and Richard G Klein, pp. 259-298. Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1984.
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Meera Nanda’s book Prophets Facing Backward is an extraordinary and compelling book. Few in the West are aware of the alarming confluence of ideas arising out of the contemporary nationalistic politics of India with its endorsement of ‘Vedic science’ and the dominant postmodernist, social constructivist and sociological trends in science studies in the West. Nanda’s book is an intellectual bombshell dropped on this potent combination. No one interested in the ways in which science and culture can interact should ignore this book and the challenging case it makes against the prevailing orthodoxies of much that passes for Western science ‘studies’. It should serve for years to come as a reference point for what can go wrong in science studies when it is allied with fashionable but wrongheaded, and even deeply perverse, manqué ‘epistemologies’, such as those provided in postmodernism, social constructivism and their ilk.

Nanda describes a phenomenon in India that strongly resembles what Jeffery Herf calls ‘reactionary modernism’ in his study of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This is an outlook that enabled Germans to accept modern scientific technology while at the same time they adopted politically illiberal and reactionary policies and rejected much of the rationality of the enlightenment that informs science. Her thesis is that contemporary India is in the grip of a version of reactionary modernism in which political nationalism is accompanied by technological advance; but the science that informs it has been stripped of its enlightenment context and relocated within the context of nationalistic religion, ‘Vedic Science’. The stripping and relocation fits admirably with doctrines from Western science studies that claim that all knowledge is ‘local’, that scientific belief is culturally caused, that power and knowledge are one, that there is no universal rationality to science and that all scientific belief and its rationality is relative to its socio-political and cultural context.

It is not as if the advocates of ‘Vedic Science’ are avid readers of Foucault’s writings on ‘power/knowledge’, or the sociologists’ advocacy of the Strong Programme for explaining scientific belief, or Latour’s advocacy of might over the possibility of being right in science, and so on for many other such claims in postmodernist and ‘social constructivist’ writings about science. But Nanda tells us that they do cite some Kuhn and Feyerabend, and they do know that in the West there are those who decry modernity and debunk the enlightenment pretensions of defenders of the rationality of science. For such nationalists this is enough to justify their separation of science from broader aspects of enlightenment rationality and its relocation in a different socio-political and religious setting; in so doing they create a distinctive ‘Vedic Science’.

Nanda’s (and Herf’s) analysis challenges the widespread belief that science with its potential for a critical approach to all our beliefs would lead to a more humane and free society liberated from the shackles and superstitions of its past. But there is no necessary connection here; it may do this only sometimes, and other factors can intervene. As both amply illustrate, it is possible within some cultures to accept the technological advances of science while either debunking claims about the superiority of science as a mode of knowing, or reducing the force of such claims by relocating the conception of science within a quite different cultural or religious tradition. Postmodernist doctrines, and much that passes for cultural studies of science, assist in these processes through their own debunking of science and its universal character; science merely becomes another aspect of the effusion of culture, including religion.

Meera Nanda brings to her book a unique combination of background scholarship. She has doctorates in both microbiology and science studies, and a first-hand acquaintance with current Indian politics, its intellectual traditions and its religions. She describes the liberating influence that the study of science had upon her while in India and how it enabled her to reject many of the traditionally held beliefs about religion, the status of women, social and political relationships, ideas about purity and pollution, and the like. But she mentions with dismay her encounter with science studies in the West, dominated as it is by the relativism of postmodernism and the anti-realism and anti-rationality of social constructivism; she became acutely aware of the ways in which it spins its own illusions about itself and the subject it purports to study.

Her initial research that lead to the book had two goals. The first was to show why the prevailing doctrines in science studies, including its feminist and postcolonial epistemologies, did not do justice to science, particularly as a means for enlightenment in non-Western countries. The second was to examine the actual track record of alternative postmodernist approaches to science in non-Western countries, using India as an example. In her view, the old Mertonian norm of ‘organised scepticism’, which bids us to critically examine all beliefs, ought to be institutionalised not only in science but also in the epistemological standpoint of the oppressed.

This project is more fully developed in the book. It contains a strong and brave critique of current Hindu nationalism, its politics, its associated religious doctrines, and its promotion of “Vedic Science”. To this has been added a sustained critique of much that passes for science studies. But in a more positive vein she draws on strands in Indian thought that are closely akin to pragmatism to present an alternative view of science and knowledge. The dalit (untouchable) Ambedkar (1891-1956) developed an account of reason, naturalism, science and humanism that was strongly influenced by Dewey. She advocates Ambedkar’s work as a source for Indian Enlightenment that can pierce through the dark doctrines of Hindu nationalism with its unholy alliance with postmodernist epistemology. He is a prophet facing forward.

In ultimately turning to science journalism she says in retrospect: ‘Without knowing it then, I was speaking the language of the Enlightenment’. But as is well known, these very Enlightenment values have been rejected by postmodernists. So what is ‘Vedic Science’, and what is its connection with the postmodernism that infuses contemporary science studies?

In the West we are familiar with the way in which creationists have co-opted the word ‘science’ to give ‘creation science’ wider credibility. Creationists conduct no experiments, make hardly any observational investigations, do not investigate hypotheses in relation to experiment and observation, and publish their results in no journal that is even vaguely scientific – except their own publications. Their programme of ‘creation science’ has not discovered one novel fact, the discovery of genuine novelty being one of the features of nearly all sciences. Finally, creation science is in conflict with theories of evolution, but fails to show in what way it might be superior either on grounds of evidence, or by offering better explanations, and the like. In these respects it exhibits all the features of a speculative hypothesis that is maintained not by anything that might be vaguely deemed scientific, but by other, extra-scientific interests. In these respects it is certainly a non-science, and there are good grounds for declaring it a pseudo-science.

This is not to say that all speculative doctrines have no scientific value. As Popperians are fond of pointing out, there are doctrines which are advanced on grounds other than those accepted in the sciences, the prime example being Ancient Greek atomism. This was arrived at by philosophical considerations; but it remained a piece of influential metaphysical speculation that had no empirical basis until one was provided towards the end of the 19th century. So even Popperians who are fond of demarcating science from non-science, and from pseudo-science, leave room for a doctrine such as atomism which is non-scientific but not necessarily pseudo-scientific. Of course, one of the things rejected by all postmodernists, and some other approaches in contemporary science studies, is any attempt to draw up such lines of demarcation. But given these broad demarcations, a close comparison can be drawn between ‘Vedic Science’ and ‘creation science’ that sets both at odds with ancient Greek atomism. All three doctrines share the feature of being non-scientific, but atomism left itself open to becoming scientific while the first two doctrines do not, thereby exhibiting all the features of a pseudo-science. Yet both are touted by their advocates as scientific.

In Part I of her book, Nanda gives us an account of what ‘Vedic Science’ is and how it has been adopted by Hindu Nationalists. The sacred Hindu texts, which include the Vedas and the Upanishads, are often regarded as scientific texts in that they allegedly contain all the findings of modern science from physics and biology to mathematics, as well as the methods of science. Such claims are hardly credible since ‘Vedic Science’ needs its legions of decoders and interpreters before any connection can be made to any real science. In this respect its claims are of the same order as those made about the writings of Nostradamus which allegedly contain predictions about all future happenings – if only one has the key to ‘decoding’ or ‘interpreting’ what he says. Though ‘Vedic Science’ might not badly infect current scientific research, the long-term damage it can cause is already well under way as it enters into the Indian education system. Here another parallel can be drawn with ‘creation science’ which also attempts to subvert evolutionary biology in the West.

Importantly for Nanda’s account, the alternative framework in which ‘Vedic Science’ is set makes it different from the other naturalistic and humanist conceptions of science. Crude contrasts are drawn in which it is claimed that ‘Vedic Science’ is superior in being “holistic” and antireductionist while ‘Western science’ is often condemned as ‘positivist’, anti-holistic, strongly reductionist and materialist (or physicalist). ‘Vedic Science’ also locates all of material nature within the framework of divine consciousness, and even endows matter with consciousness and agency. Its advocates even claim that the very essence of Hinduism itself is its scientific thinking. One of the problems here is the tacking-on of an adjective before ‘science’. Science is what it is no matter where it is practiced, in the East or West, or by whom; ‘science’ with a prefix such as ‘Vedic’ or ‘Western’ or the like, ought to arouse suspicion immediately.

This is a heady mixture that even outdoes creation science in its pretensions. It also goes some way towards explaining why many Westerners who are disillusioned with the prevailing conception of science in their culture gravitate towards the more religiously oriented ‘Vedic Science’ in which even the domain of observational experience upon which science is commonly based is expanded to include super-sensory mental experience of ‘alternative levels of reality’ that cannot be encountered in normal experience. More disconcerting is Nanda’s account of how even India’s possession of the atomic bomb, and the science behind it, has been linked to God Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita with its reference to a ‘thousand suns’. On a lighter side she mentions ancient texts that report how warriors of the past could fight for a month on a single meal. Such surprising, venerable reports have led the Indian Government to set up a research programme to investigate these dietary claims for their own troops, thereby hoping to revise even Napoleon’s dictum that an army marches on its stomach. To most Western readers unacquainted with details of current movements in India what Nanda says is both amusing and alarming, like its ‘creation science’ counterpart.

The above is enough to capture the flavour of the ‘Vedic Science’ presented by Nanda. It simply helps itself to the findings of genuine experimental science without being instrumental in producing any of these findings. ‘Vedic Science’ relocates all of science and its advances within a religious, and supernaturalist, framework that turns out to be otiose for those advances. Even if ancient texts are suggestive about, say, what rations warriors might survive on, this, as many philosophers of science would point out, is part of the context of discovery or invention and not part of the context of justification, the area in which scientific testing takes place. The more sinister aspect of ‘Vedic Science’ is its use as a political tool to serve extra-scientific interests, but within a society still intent on technological advance.

Overall ‘Vedic Science’ shares all the pseudo-scientific features of ‘creation science’ and none of the features of, say, ancient atomism that made itself amenable to scientific test. And this brings us to the postmodernist, social constructivist, and other doctrines that inform western science studies, which deny that any distinction can be drawn between science and pseudo-science, and provide ‘Vedic Science’ with an air of legitimacy that it would otherwise lack. How does the link come about? Nanda spells out the connection in Part II of the book, thereby providing a forceful critique of the current state of science studies and the postmodernist epistemological doctrines with which they are often associated. With these doctrines the West makes its own contribution to bolstering ‘Vedic Science’. However not all its Hindu nationalist advocates may have been students of Western postmodernist writers; in some cases Nanda suggests that they have developed some of its central tenets independently. But there is nevertheless an important confluence of ideas with potent results.

Advocates of ‘Vedic Science’ say that both it and ‘Western science’ ultimately express ‘the same truth’, but each in its own culturally relative way. Setting aside whether this is coherent or not, it is accompanied by a relativism characteristic of postmodernism; neither kind of science has the epistemological authority to claim that one is right and the other wrong. Postmodernists and Hindu nationalists will agree that it would be ‘oppressive’ for ‘Western Science’ to pass judgement on any non-western system of belief, including ‘Vedic Science’. Here Nanda locates what she calls ‘epistemic charity’ in making local ‘knowledges’ immune from conflict with rival scientific ‘knowledges’ since at some level they allegedly ‘express the same truth’.

Epistemic ‘charity’ connotes condescension towards other systems of belief and an unwillingness to subject them to any critical scrutiny. But for sociologists of knowledge and postmodernists, the status, and even the very existence, of canons of critical appraisal are up for grabs. These are alleged to have no force beyond the local circumstances in which they are endorsed; so the idea of any universal rationality is to be abandoned. Here one has gone beyond epistemic charity, where vestiges of rationality might be recognised even if not exercised, and into the realm of epistemic nihilism, where there are no universally applicable principles of rationality to be found. The epistemic ‘gift’ is of a poisoned chalice.

Nanda locates a number of sources of epistemic charity or nihilism. One is the Strong Programme of the sociology of scientific knowledge. This, correctly, emphasises the socio-cultural context, or the set of socio-cultural interests, that accompanies belief, whether scientific or non-scientific. But it overshoots its proper target when it claims that the very content of scientific belief is always to be causally explained by socio-cultural contexts, or interests in these. Importantly its ‘Symmetry Tenet’ rules out the possibility of any rational explanation of these beliefs. Thus the following situation becomes possible: for one set of believers in, say, Darwinian evolution, one set of socio-political causes prevail, while for a different set of believers in a rival view, ‘creation science’, a different set of socio-political causes prevail. Who has the correct belief? The Strong Programme is powerless to say. It can only limn the way in which beliefs are allegedly formed; it cannot evaluate the epistemic status of the rival beliefs.

If attempts are made to evaluate beliefs rationally, the Strong Programmers will say that the principles to which one appeals are not universally binding but are only locally accepted as binding. The same situation applies to all cross-cultural belief. In Nanda’s view such epistemic charity on the part of the Strong Programme becomes condescending to non-Western cultures ‘in deny[ing] them the capacity and the need for a reasoned modification of inherited cosmologies in the light of better evidence made available by the methods of modern science’ (p. 127). And this is particularly the case over issues of truth that are downplayed by the Strong Programme. In response it is not enough to quip that any member of a non-Western culture who does look to reasoned modification of belief will have jumped out of their locally accepted traditions of belief and evidence-giving and simply adopted those of another tradition. Nanda develops the case for rejecting the ‘dangerous “gift” of equality of all sciences’. It is a veritable Trojan Horse for those in non-Western societies who are struggling, against their ingrained traditions, beliefs and practices, to obtain even the vestiges of enlightenment, largely won in the West against similar traditions, through the growth of reason and science.

The ‘dangerous gifts’ of epistemic charity are made in other ways in recent science studies, such as the anthropologists’ claim that all science is ethnoscience, Latour’s ‘amodernism’, Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ in relation to science, Harding’s and Longino’s feminist epistemology and science, Spivak’s theory of ‘epistemological violence’, the views of multicuturalists, just to mention a few. In some cases she usefully draws parallels between these views and similar views held by Indian nationalists.

Concerning such epistemological ‘gifts’ to Indians, Nanda makes the acute point that the ‘knowledges’ that might appear to be marginalised to Westerners might not be marginal as far as non-Westerners are concerned; they are often deeply embedded in their own pre-secular and pre-scientific societies and serve to reinforce the power relations of the dominant cultural and religious institutions. But her main point still remains that postmodernists and others give support to right-wing nationalists by claiming that science, no matter where it is practiced, and ‘Vedic Science’ are on the same epistemological footing. And thus we are led down the path of what, following Herf, she calls ‘reactionary modernism’. The various strands of argument are admirably set out and make a compelling and disturbing case concerning the pathology of human thought.

But all is not epistemological darkness in India; there are other intellectual traditions to draw upon that come from Buddhism and are most recently encapsulated in the pragmatism of what she refers to as ‘Ambedkar’s Deweyian Buddha’. There is a strand of pragmatism developed by Ambedkar, but played down in the version of pragmatism of Richard Rorty, that wishes to subject the claims of tradition to examination and test using the very methods that are part of scientific practice. This draws on naturalistic modes of thinking in Indian intellectual traditions that are opposed to the enchanted and mystical thinking that finds its way into ‘Vedic Science’. Recently this tradition has been eclipsed by the dominance of Hindu Nationalism, with the ‘gift’ of postmodernism playing a substantial role on the side. Nanda’s book is a long argument in support of those traditions in Indian thought that align themselves with the best of the Enlightenment, and against those who would turn out its light.

The publishers have on the back cover a quotation in support of the book from the sociologist of science, Steve Fuller: ‘This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists’. One can agree about the need for a wake-up call. But why just leftists? Not only leftists can be disturbed by reactionary Hindu nationalism. What this passes over is the fact that far too many self-styled leftists have been responsible for promoting the very postmodernist and social constructivist doctrines that are criticised in Nanda’s book. The wake-up call for leftists and others should be not only about the political consequences of postmodernism, but also the whole ragbag of doctrines that comprise postmodernism itself and its allied doctrines in ‘science studies’.

Nanda’s forceful book is a wake-up call not just about the import of Hindu nationalism with its ‘Vedic Science’ but also a bankrupt system of thought, unfortunately all too prevalent in science studies, that gives credence to it. Nanda argues that the rationality that infuses science can be a liberatory force. This is not to be oblivious to the perils that science has produced for us, though the perils are largely attributable to the political, military and economic context in which science functions rather than the science itself. We all remember the phrase that Eisenhower gave us when he talked of ‘the military-industrial complex’; we forget he also warned us at the same time of ‘the scientific-technological élite’. What we do not need in order to face these challenges is the obfuscating fog of weird epistemologies. The importance of Nanda’s book also lies in its fog-lifting.

Introduction

On 5 January, 2004, the renowned Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune was vandalized by some 150 thugs. Priceless manuscripts and artefacts were destroyed. Those responsible declared themselves to be members of the ‘Sambhaji Brigade’, linked to the Maratha Seva Sangh, a regional organization with anti-Brahmin sentiments. They apparently chose this method to protest against allegedly insulting remarks made against their hero, Shivaji, in a recently published book by the American historian James W. Laine.

The link with the Institute was somewhat indirect: Laine had acknowledged the help of several academics at Bhandarkar with the translation of certain manuscripts. The book concerned, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, has been withdrawn by Oxford University Press, and the author has apologized for any offence caused, stressing that it was wholly unintentional. The Bhandarkar Institute is the repository of many manuscripts of great historical significance and an important source of information on the life and times of Shivaji. It was responsible for the preparation of a critical edition of the Mahabharata in 19 volumes, completed in 1966. News of the attack caused widespread shock, and many students and other concerned individuals rushed to the Institute to help with salvaging what they could and clearing up the devastation the vandals had left behind.

Appalling though it was, this attack does not appear to be part of any political plan of national dimensions. It would seem, at least in part, to be an embodiment of regional tensions between the Maratha and Brahmin communities (the scholarly Institute being perceived as a Brahmin entity). But it serves as a reminder of several points relating to history, historiography, and the current Indian situation.

First, it is a reminder of the fundamental role of irreplaceable material evidence in history. This is a situation broadly shared by historical sciences such as geology and astronomy, which cannot resort to experiment, though the nature of evidence in history, given its human provenance, is rather more complex, intractable to general laws, and in some forms particularly vulnerable to multiple interpretations. Hence history’s unique position as a ‘protean discipline’. Nevertheless, evidence remains its bedrock. Some of what was destroyed at Bhandarkar is destroyed forever, access to it now being limited to the frozen interpretations of previous historians, the original no longer available for consultation and re-analysis.

A second point highlighted by this episode is the special significance of history to the concerns of the present, and especially to identity – the sense of heritage. Indian newspaper reports mourn not only the loss of historical records precious in themselves but of important parts of ‘our heritage’. Heritage is a source of pride (and of tourist revenue) to all nations. To those for whom colonial rule is within living memory, elements of heritage, particularly those perceived as part of a freedom struggle against past invaders, have a strong resonance. Shivaji was a Hindu who successfully fought the forces of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, declaring himself king and establishing the powerful Maratha Confederacy. His story has become legendary.

And therein lies another point. The story of the Hindu Maratha hero’s defiance and success against a Muslim king has captured the imagination. It has taken on its own part-mythical life. Perhaps so much so that the actual historical evidence is somewhat troublesome and inconvenient. It can be treated in a cavalier manner because it must be subservient to the myth. The past is dead and can be manipulated or, if necessary, obliterated; the myth must live.

This brings me to my final point concerning Bhandarkar – the extreme, whipped up response against a Western historian. The history of India has for too long been interpreted, written, and thus, as Said pointed out, in some way owned and controlled, by the colonialists. ‘They’, now widened to all modern Westerners, cannot possibly be trusted to understand or interpret ‘our’ history. There is no doubt that the Orientalists of the 19th century framed and periodized Indian history in accordance with certain assumptions concerning the ‘other’, which coloured and constrained their otherwise impressive achievement in building a vast corpus of knowledge about aspects of Indian history and culture. But Indology has moved on since then. The approach of leading Western scholars of Indian history today is far more self-aware and sensitive to such assumptions, while remaining appropriately rigorous and critical in its analysis. Yet in the intensely Hindu nationalist climate currently pervading India and flourishing in sections of the Indian diaspora, even distinguished Indologists such as Wendy Doniger are attacked in a knee-jerk response for daring to critically evaluate Hindu texts. Those Indian historians who question the agenda of Hindutva or ‘Hindu-ness’ fare even worse. Eminent, internationally respected historians such as Romila Thapar have been threatened and vilified. But these courageous individuals refuse to be silenced.

The origins of Hindutva go back to the early part of the 20th century. The term refers to the Hindu chauvinistic nationalist agenda of a number of interconnected organizations, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, that range from the paramilitary to the ostensibly cultural (even sometimes appropriating the terms ‘secular’ and ‘humanist’). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) forms the broad political front. In addition to being the leading party of the ruling coalition, the BJP is in power in several states, including Gujarat, where they were voted back to power in the climate of fear lingering in the wake of the horrific communal massacres of 2002. The other two major bodies are the cultural arm of the movement, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the openly militaristic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Sangh Parivar has taken to itself the colour saffron. Once associated with renunciation, it is flaunted now as a symbol of Hindu pride and power.

Within the past 12 years or so, as the hold of Congress has declined, the growth and spread of Hindutva has been remarkable. Aided by a powerful propaganda machine and the wealth pouring in from Indians abroad, especially in the US and UK [1], the ‘saffron brigade’ have sought to replace the secular, pluralist vision of Nehru and other earlier nationalists with their own Hindu chauvinist concept of the nation and its past, and to indoctrinate the young with this conception.

I would suggest that as the Nehruvian dream began to fade, as Congress regimes moved away from the project for independent development and some kind of social justice – notably during the Emergency of course – we get the substitution of those commitments with rhetoric. More and more we are taught to look at the nation as something of a myth, as just a map, a cult or a flag. –Sumit Sarkar [2]

Who Owns the Past?

[The] past needs to make the present unfamiliar to itself. History must acquire the power to surprise the present with its differences. –Pradip Kumar Datta [3]

History is deeply interpretive. The immense richness of any human society, the various facets of any culture, the changes wrought upon it by the operation of socio-economic, political, and religious forces, the impact of interaction with other cultures, forms such a complex tapestry that it is unlikely that we will ever have a full picture of any period in the past, especially the remote past. There is plenty of room for interpretation. But does that then mean that the door is wide open for any interpretation, constrained, as the postmodernists would have it, only by intertextuality? Hardly.

The anchoring role of material evidence becomes particularly important in the case of history because of the way in which present political groups seek to legitimize their agenda by taking control of the past. To argue that this is inevitable, that the past cannot be seen in any objective light, that it is a mere battleground of present ideologies in which the most persistent will win, is not only unwarranted but constitutes a dangerous concession to the extreme right. In a climate of postmodernism, of discourses floating free, Holocaust deniers can thrive with impunity, as Richard Evans has pointed out [4].

History, as conducted by professional historians, is a rigorous and objective field, a social science in which knowledge accumulates over time. Both the evidences and techniques used in the modern discipline justify this statement. Historical evidence, it need hardly be said, continues to grow with time, as more materials come to light. But in addition, the forms of evidence used by the modern historian are far wider ranging than in the past, and frequently involve collaboration with experts from other disciplines. As well as from texts, inscriptions, and artefacts, there is evidence available from archaeology, from linguistics, from indications of climate change and alterations to water courses, and nowadays sometimes from population genetics too. Further, certain elements of supportive evidence may be obtained from the study of myths (used, for example by the late distinguished Marxist historian D. D. Kosambi [5] in the interpretation of aspects of early Indian society), and from anthropological work. Techniques of textual analysis have become more rigorous and faster, with much use of computers, while dating methods too have improved. [6]

This is the nature of the historian’s work today. It is an exercise involving interdisciplinary teams of academics from all over the world. It relies on critical evaluation of evidence, and the tradition of open debate. While interpretations continue to be presented and discussed, they will simply not pass muster if they are not grounded in reason and evidence. History, by the nature of its materials and processes (a non-Markovian system, Peter Atkins once remarked to me) may not be conducive to the vigorous honing by experiment and explanatory structures available to science, but it is nevertheless a progressive and rational discipline.

And what has Hindutva to offer in its place? Little more than assertions and poor scholarship, infused with a lavish helping of mythology. The Sangh’s ‘indigenism’ lacks the fundamental characteristics of any reasoned approach to history:

[Indigenism] attempts to invent a “tradition” and retain it as something essentially different from other cultures and societies, and to build an ideology on such a tradition. But it fails to provide a theory of historical explanation or a method of historical analysis. –Romila Thapar [7]

Ironically for a movement anxious to remove all trace of colonialist perceptions, the vision they espouse is one anchored in the simplistic periodization of the 19th century Orientalists: that of an ancient and glorious Hindu ‘golden age’, followed by a ‘dark’ period of crushingly oppressive Muslim rule, and a modern period of less oppressive British rule. They continue the old British colonial view of India as constituted by two essentially antagonistic religious communities, the Hindus and Muslims, a view that, abetted by both the RSS and the Muslim League, led to partition. Of course one of these communities is seen as forever the outsiders.

The real history of Hindu-Muslim relations in the history of the subcontinent is more complex. As Asghar Ali Engineer has pointed out [8], the relationship of the two has varied not only with ruler, but with the social groups being considered, the particular sects (the Sufis, in particular, became considerably Indianized), and the way in which Islam entered the area. In Kerala, for example, with its strong and ancient trade links with the Mediterranean, the Muslim community grew from Arab traders, and was primarily assimilationist, compared to the undoubted confrontations and military conquest in the north. Yet here, too, cooperation existed, both among the elites, and among the poor of both religions. The situation cannot adequately be described in terms of any simple polarization between two monolithic religions. This is true even during the rule of the notoriously intolerant Aurangzeb, as has been noted in the studies of various Indian historians. K. N. Panikkar has remarked, “Aurangzeb’s chiefs and courtiers were more Hindus than Muslims. And the person who fought against Shivaji was Raja Jaisingh, a Hindu.” [9]

The current sensitivity over this period of Indian history is of course linked to the Sangh’s highly effective campaign to mobilize Hindus under the banner of Ram Janmabhoomi (birthplace of the god Ram). In the words of the President of Maharashtra VHP, Ashok Chowgule, “The Ram Janmabhoomi issue has revolutionised the politics of the country. A fragmented Hindu samaj has been united to an extent unheard of in recent times.” [10] More than a decade after the Sangh incited mobs to demolish the Babri Masjid, built by Babur over, as they claim, a Hindu temple at the supposed birthplace of Ram, the pressure to allow the building of a temple on the site continues. So far, the courts have not relented.

The way in which Hindutva has been able to exploit and promote the image of the god Ram is interesting in itself. By effectively focusing on a single god, and transforming him into a warrior god, they have given the polytheistic Hinduism the sleekness and muscle of a monotheistic faith. India becomes the land of Ram.

The historicization of Ram, his presumed epiphany in historical as opposed to mythical time, has been the mainstay of the Hindutva project. This brazen mixing of history and mythology to suit political ends runs throughout Sangh ideology. To the masses, the mythological elements are simply asserted as history. To the intellectuals, this unholy ‘interpenetration’ is presented with a suitably postmodern flourish: “The fact is that there is often more history in myths and more myth in history.” [11]

Hinduism is, of course, far from the monolithic belief system projected by Hindtuva as enduring through time immemorial. With no founder, no single canonical text, and no ecclesiastical structure (though it has priests), its historical development has been distinct in pattern from that of Semitic religions:

The evolution of Hinduism is not a linear progression from a founder through an organizational system, with sects branching off. It is rather the mosaic of distinct cults, deities, sects, and ideas and the adjusting, juxtaposing or distancing of these to existing ones, the placement drawing not only on belief and ideas but also on the socio-economic reality. –Romila Thapar [12]

This brings us to the other historical period of high sensitivity to Hindutva: the nature of ancient India and the Hindutva assertion of an indigenous ‘Aryan race’. Where does one even begin? The philologist William Jones identified the connections between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek, and first proposed that they all derived from a single language, Indo-European. What should have remained a linguistic category was altered to that of a race in the obsessively race-conscious late 19th century. European scholars, including even Max Müller for a time, built up the idea of an ‘Aryan race’ that swept into India as invaders from the north-west, bringing their language with them, and establishing superiority over, and hermetic separation from, the indigenous ‘Dravidian race’ through the caste system.

With the growth of archaeological evidence, and supporting evidence from linguistics, the story that is emerging is not one of invasion but of gradual migration and settlement of peoples speaking an Indo-European language, following the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization. The subsequent growth of a caste system is also now regarded as having been a rather more complex process than previously thought.

In contrast to this carefully evaluated and maturing view, constantly sensitive to archaeological finds and the implications of detailed linguistic analysis, the assertion of Hindutva is simple: the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans were neither migrants nor invaders, but were indigenous to India. The ancient Harappan civilization is regarded as part of a great Vedic Age, and the dates of the Vedic texts set so far back in time (up to 9000 BCE) as to confirm that India must have been the first centre of human civilization (and even of human origins), with subsequent migration of Aryan peoples into Iran. To stress the Vedic connection, the term ‘Harappan’ is now increasingly replaced with ‘Sarasvati-Sindhu’, a name with a distinctly Vedic flavour. The claim that the Sarasvati, a dried up tributary of the Indus around which many Harappan settlements have been found, was once a mighty river finds no support from the topography and geology of the region.

Needless to say, during this glorious Vedic Age, India was a land of wisdom, peace, and knowledge; a time of the profoundest discoveries in mathematics and science, and boasting a well-knit and harmonious society, with no oppression of women or of lower castes. Irfan Habib comments that

since all later texts are being given exorbitantly earlier dates, and every intellectual and technological achievement pushed to an obscure, sacred past, the later times begin to appear more and more as sheer dark ages. We are being asked to believe that not only did the alleged inventors of writing in the 4th millennium BC forget to write up the Vedic texts, but their descendants too simply forgot writing altogether for a period of 1500 years or so, before the Mauryas came around. We Indians also coolly forgot the great scientific secrets embedded in our texts… [13]

It seems scarcely worth taking the effort to repeat Hindutva’s nonsensical claims, but for the fact that they have been so widely and effectively propagated as Hindu history and culture by the saffron brigade. Astonishing as it may seem, this is the interpretation of the nation’s history that is being perpetrated through the Sangh’s network of sectarian schools and that has even infiltrated in part into the fabric of the country’s national curriculum and textbooks.

The Great RSS Education Project

Modern sectarian Hindu schooling may be said to have begun in 1946, when the RSS leader M. S. Golwalkar set up the Gita Junior Secondary School in Kurukshetra, Haryana. After something of a gap, resulting from the banning of the RSS following Gandhi’s assassination, a Saraswati Shishu Mandir was established in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, in 1952. Since then, RSS schools, run by their education wing, Vidya Bharati, have multiplied and spread into many states. One recent estimate puts the number of RSS-run schools in the country at over 18,000 and further and higher education institutions at over 60. [14] At least several thousand of these are endorsed by state governments in states where the BJP is in power.

The aim of these schools is to ‘evolve an integrated system of education in conformity with the aims of Indian culture and its ideals of life’. [15] For Indian here, read Hindu: the two are used interchangeably in Hindutva-speak. This is apparent from Vidya Bharati’s further stated educational aim to bring up a new generation of Indians ‘fully saturated with the feelings of Hindutva and patriotism’.

What, then, is the educational ethos in these schools, and what do they teach? At first sight, things may not seem so bad. They generally use standard textbooks and cover the standard curriculum. They have to, in order to compete with other schools. No, the Hindutva agenda is spread through aspects of school regimen, through the slant given to the content of the standard curriculum, through the overall ethos and, most explicitly, through a special examined course which forms part of the core curriculum: Sanskriti Gyan (study of culture). An RSS centre and VHP-controlled temple are frequently nearby, and sometimes even directly linked.

The ethos of such schools has been described by Tanika Sarkar:

the walls displayed maps of undivided India as the true shape of the nation, imparting in students a refusal of the historical reality of the Partition and visualising the country as inclusive of the states of Pakistan and Bangladesh… [They] are also festooned with pictures of Hindu heroes like Shivaji and Rana Pratap, visually invoking legends of Muslim tyranny and Hindu royal-heroic resistance.

In school assemblies, principals address students frequently on themes of Hindu patriotism, Babur and his mosque that allegedly destroyed Ram’s temple, the saga of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement and its martyrs. [16]

This is aptly complemented by the chanting of the Sarasvati Vandana (a Sanskrit prayer to Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of learning) and the singing of Vande Mataram, a nationalist song that has become the de facto national anthem in these times. With emphasis placed on the study of Sanskrit (the ‘Hindu language’), and yoga a compulsory part of the curriculum, parents are pleased to send their children to these schools, confident in their ability to inculcate Indian culture and values, and maintain discipline and standards. This may sound familiar: equivalent reasons are given by parents in the West for sending children to religious schools, including creationist academies.

And what of the Sanskriti Gyan textbooks? These special textbooks explicitly set out the Hindutva conception of Indian history described above. ‘Facts’ taught for examination include Aryans as an indigenous people, who subsequently spread to Iran, the position of the destroyed Babri Masjid as the birthplace of Ram, and the claim that Homer adapted the Ramayana to create the Iliad. [17] Ancient India, in short, is the origin of all great things, and the invaders – Muslims, Christians – were responsible for the decline from this utopian Ramarajya. The implications for present-day minority communities are clear:

Muslims and Christians are not simply invaders and conquerors of the past, they are fixed in eternal postures of aggression which, today, translates as insidious and covert gestures of hidden expansionism and conquest, carried on through conversion and terrorism. Histories of communities are not just unchanging and repetitive, they are, moreover, singular. History becomes emblematic, congealed into an array of postures, each summing up a whole community across the ages. The past is a museum of a few signs. –Tanika Sarkar [18]

The RSS is a militaristic, cadre-based organization. It is disciplined, focused, ruthless, and pragmatic. It has systematically politicized education and widened its hold across the country, through regular training camps with campaigners sent out especially to rural areas to organize new cadres. Angana Chatterji describes their approach in Orissa:

The RSS holds month long training sessions across Orissa during summer vacations to attract students and young children. From these sessions, the RSS recruits for the Officers Training Camps (OTC). Held twice a year, the OTC provides schooling in self-defense and leadership. Around 500 people attend each year. On completion, approximately100 join the organisation as campaigners. Graduates take an oath, “I will devote my body, mind, and money (tana, mana, bhana) to the motherland.” For about 10 recruits, this develops into a lifelong, intense and full time commitment. Each December, the RSS organises the Sita Shibir, a 7-10 day winter camp. The families of attendees finance the camps. The growth of the RSS testifies to the success of these camps. [19]

The spreading of their message to tribal areas is a particularly cynical ploy. The RSS argues that it is trying to counter missionary activity. The level of missionary activity in many of these districts scarcely fits with such a position, even had it been justified. This reaching out to the ‘vanvasis’ (forest dwellers – the Hindutva version of history does not allow them to use the usual term ‘adivasis’, or indigenous peoples) is trumpeted as social work in uplifting the poor. In reality, the children are provided with limited education (unlike that in regular RSS schools). The prime purpose is not education but indoctrination. A similar approach is used towards slum dwellers. Some commentators have remarked on the unusual involvement of adivasis in the Gujarat massacres of Muslims in 2002, suggesting that this was directly due to the communal hatred perpetrated by Hindutva-driven organizations.

Thus far, we have only considered private RSS-run schools. Where the BJP is in power, elements of the Hindutva agenda have been adopted into the state education system. Even more alarming have been attempts in the past five years to subvert academic and educational bodies and smuggle Hindutva ideology into the national curriculum itself.

Infiltration of Hindutva Elements into National Education

While the British promoted the Macaulay model for a small minority, for the vast majority, they continued to emphasise traditional models like Toles and Madrasas [religious schools]. In fact, it was our Renaissance leaders like Phule, Rammohan Roy and Vidyasagar who led the battle for abolition of religious and obscurantist education and promotion of English, logic, science, humanities and Western philosophy. Inspired by the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy as found in the French, American and Italian Revolutions, they sought to lay a new foundation for democratic and secular education in India. The classical definition of secularism was not the product of fanciful imagination, but emerged from the historical need to unite a people divided by regional, religious and caste barriers. –Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer [20]

A national system of education which the colonial intellectuals and nationalist leaders tried to evolve was based on a possible synthesis of all that is advanced in the West with all that was abiding in the traditional. In other words the national policy was not lodged in a dichotomy between the indigenous and the western. The impact of such a policy was the internalization of a universal outlook and the location of the indigenous in the wider matrix of human history. The educational policy adumbrated by independent India, even if it faltered on many a count, was informed by an open-ended view… The modern system of education, which they tried to perpetuate, is anathema to the Sangh Parivar, as it is not sufficiently “national” in content. The alternative proposed by the Parivar and now being implemented by the government is an indigenous system, which M.S. Golwalkar had earlier conceived as religious in character, with emphasis on tradition, discipline and military training. Romanticisation of traditional knowledge, celebration of religious beliefs and emphasis on conformism are its chief characteristics. –K. N. Panikkar [21]

Since the late 1990s, national education has become a battleground, drawing in many distinguished historians, scientists, and other academics who have refused to tolerate any move away from a strictly secular education system; who have protested against the mingling of myth alongside history, and pseudoscience alongside science. India has too robust a secular intellectual community to take such measures without a fight. In this, they have been betrayed by postmodernists such as Ashish Nandy [22] and Partha Chatterjee, whose fashionable criticisms of secularism as an elite western conception inflicted on India have helped pave the way for the takeover of academia by the extreme right. “Subalternism,” wrote Aijaz Ahmad, “has had a curious career, starting with invocations of Gramsci and finally coming into its own as an accomplice of the anti-Communist Right.” [23]

The architect of the saffronising of national education has been the BJP Union Human Resource Development Minister Dr Murli Manohar Joshi. A former professor of physics who sees science within a mystical framework, and a fierce nationalist, he has been associated with the RSS from 1944. Since his arrival at the head of the Ministry in 1998, he has spearheaded the takeover of academic institutions and committees by those sympathetic to Hindutva. He himself is a believer in an extremely ancient indigenous civilization, and justifies any points he makes with what he declares to be scientific evidence: “We have proved by our ocean development scientists that there is enough proof of the existence of human activity in the region of Bay of Cambay in 7500 BC. We have proved it. I am saying let us know whether Indian civilisation is 2,000 years old, 7,000 years old, 10,000 years old. These are the results my scientists have shown, this is the result of carbon dating.” [24] Imagine the excitement in the international archaeological community if the results of ‘his scientists’ were shown to be true! But Joshi’s perception of science as well as history is grossly coloured by his Hindutva beliefs. To quote from one of his speeches:

The question is how can science and spiritually reconcile and contribute to make this planet peaceful. Indian philosophy answered this question centuries ago and it would be my endeavour to place before you how modern science is converging on the philosophy of Gita. [25]

It is not difficult to see how a minister with such a worldview and a supportive government might operate to alter the direction of education at every level across the country. While institutions may be nominally autonomous, their reliance on government funding makes them hostages to political change. The University Grants Commission has dismayed many academics in its new-found insistence on giving equal importance in universities to the study of such ‘indigenous knowledge systems’ as Vedic astrology:

The UGC for its part is promoting certificate courses in Vedic rituals, Vedic astrology and Sanskrit. Its Chairman has said that these courses will serve to promote Hindu culture among NRIs and will improve foreign exchange earnings. This is happening in the context of declining grants to universities for science and humanities courses. In short, bigoted, communal and obscurantist ideas which have nothing to do even with Hindu culture and philosophy are finding their way into education. –Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer [26]

Joshi’s particular concern has been to hound out ‘Marxists’ (a term he seems to apply to any anti-Hindutva historian) and to have their textbooks reviewed by committees appointed by his reshaped institutions. He persistently refers to these scholars as being educated along European lines and therefore unable to grasp Indian realities. The best of Indian historical scholarship has certainly drawn from elements of Marxist theory and in recent decades from the Annales School, applying these broader approaches in the Indian context. The result has been an understanding of the social, cultural, economic, and other aspects of Indian history that has vastly enriched the limited histories of an earlier, colonial period which focused primarily on a narrow reading of the Brahminical texts and on the history of the dynasties (a change in the understanding of history that has occurred everywhere). Ironically, it is the Hindutva movement that has followed colonial tradition by emphasizing Sanskrit, the language of the Brahmin elite, and the great Sanskrit texts such as the Vedas, while ignoring other aspects of Indian history and culture. But the relevant underlying point must be this: both science and history are seeking objective knowledge and understanding. As such, they are fundamentally international efforts. Practitioners, whatever their country of origin, must be open to ideas and approaches from other parts of the world. They must then apply these approaches as appropriate to their particular topic of study. There is no special Indian mindset that sees what others well equipped in the necessary analytical techniques and background cannot see. For the saffron brigade, any inconvenient facts concerning Indian history are the product of Western colonial ‘constructs’. Indian scholars engaged in an objective evaluation of the past thus become labelled ‘traitors’. As in the case of secularism, what began as legitimate postcolonial questioning has been extended beyond all reasonable bounds, to the very nature of objective enquiry itself, a point that has been eloquently argued by Meera Nanda. [27]

Soon after Joshi’s arrival at the Ministry, Sangh sympathisers were quickly appointed to the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and the Indian Council of Social Science Research. An almost immediate casualty was the ‘Towards Freedom’ project sponsored by the unreconstituted ICHR – a compilation of archival documents from the final period of the freedom struggle, 1937-1947. The General Editor of the volumes was a distinguished historian of international standing, the late Sarvepalli Gopal. The volumes for 1940 and 1946, edited by historians K. N. Panikkar and Sumit Sarkar respectively, had been approved by the General Editor before his death, and even sent to the publishers, Oxford University Press. But they were declared to be ‘temporarily withheld from publication’ in 2002, and a committee set up to review the supposedly controversial volumes. The move was regarded as unacceptable by the volumes’ editors, who have yet to be told what the problems are, but Sarkar has remarked on the sensitivity of this period for the RSS:

Part of the logic of the volumes, which Prof. Gopal has expounded very well in his general introduction, is that we should bring out the diversities. And the significance of the anti-colonial movement lies not only in the struggle against the British, but in the progressive broadening of the movement – how, in other words, democratic, secular and some kind of federal and social justice aspirations enter the canvas – the background, in short, to the Constitution. [28]

This was a broadening of the independence movement, Sarkar says, in which the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha (a precursor of the BJP) were conspicuous by their absence. The project remains stalled at present.

What, then, of school education? A first attempt to bring elements of the RSS agenda into national education in 1998 was successfully halted under strong protest from a number of State Education Ministers. Joshi’s next move was to appoint J. S. Rajput, his former student and a Hindutva sympathizer, as chairman of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). He did not tarry long in getting to grips with the task of altering the ethos of national education in the country. A new National Curriculum Framework for School Education was drawn up in 2000 to replace the existing 1988 Framework. Secular academics studied its wording with a growing sense of outrage.

Littered among the generalities and lofty pedagogical aspirations that characterize such documents are some disturbing elements. It has been remarked that these portions seem disconnected, as though added later. Whatever their provenance, the overall result is that despite professing recognition of diversity and a commitment to the cultivation of a ‘scientific temper’, the flavour of Hindutva bursts through. Nationalism takes precedence over reason and objectivity; national duty over human rights. In a framework document which establishes the guiding principles for teaching in the state sector (and, in effect, in much of the private sector), this is serious cause for concern.

The second paragraph of the preamble to the document makes explicit that it is framed within the context of belief in a glorious, very ancient Indian (Hindu) tradition and heritage:

India had an advanced system of education and the world’s first universities which presented a consummate example of education based on philosophy and religion and at the same time stressed the study of mathematics, history, astronomy, maritime and even the laws of economics and public administration. The Chandogya Upanishad (Chapter VII, Section 1) mentions eighteen different subjects of study including areas such as natural disaster management, mineralogy, linguistics, science of elements, and science of defence. [29]

Certainly this is not to deny that there were vibrant centres of education in early India, in the form of Jain and Buddhist centres (most famously Nalanda in the north-east) as well as numerous centres of Brahminical learning, ghatikas and later mathas. But the points to note are the selective promotion of positive aspects of ancient India, intended to evoke the sense of a ‘golden age’, and the exaggerated impression given of the knowledge of the ancient Indians. Chauvinism and indigenism are woven throughout the document.

There are many sections worth quoting from the Curriculum Framework, but I shall confine myself to just two or three particular examples. Discussion of history itself is limited in the document, very general, and subsumed under ‘social sciences’. But references to ancient traditions and achievements abound. Under ‘Integrating India’s Indigenous Knowledge and India’s Contribution to Mankind’, we have the following:

Today, even more than ever before, there is a world-wide recognition of India’s indigenous knowledge systems. Ayurveda is being increasingly recognised as a holistic system of health and Indian psychology as a more complete discipline than the western. In this context it may be relevant to point out that there are domains of knowledge which could be called ‘parallel’, ‘indigenous’, ‘traditional’ or ‘civilisational’ knowledge systems. These belong to societies in the developing world that have nurtured and defined the systems of knowledge of their own, relating to such diverse domains as geology, ecology, agriculture, health and the like.
…Paradoxical as it may sound, while our children know about Newton, they do not know about Aryabhatta, they do know about computers but do not know about the advent of the concept of zero or the decimal system. Mention may also have to be made, for instance, of Yoga and Yogic practices as well as the Indian Systems of Medicine (ISM) like the Ayurvedic and Unani systems which are now being recognised and practised all over the world. The country’s curriculum shall have to correct such imbalances.
…Equally importantly we need an indepth analysis of the parallelism of insights between the indigenous knowledge systems, on the one hand, and certain areas of modern science and thought concerned with the basics of life, on the other. Indigenousness, obviously, is not opposed to being receptive to new ideas from different peoples, cultures and cultural contexts.

The whole treatment of science in the document shows an awkward effort to combine ancient, unscientific practices with those arising from modern science in a bid to promote the indigenous while retaining the semblance of a modern outlook:

School curriculum has therefore, to help to generate and promote among the learners: …scientific temper characterised by the spirit of enquiry, problem- solving, courage to question and objectivity leading to elimination of obscurantism, superstition and fatalism, while at the same time, sustaining and emphasising the indigenous knowledge ingrained in the Indian tradition.

Spirituality and ‘value education’ form another significant feature. A number of academics have strongly criticized the approach to value education which, while paying lip service to the possibility that religion may not be the only source of values, proceeds to give religions an important role throughout the taught curriculum (the document is careful to use religions in the plural). For Indian state education, formerly secular in tone, this is a serious retrograde step. It leaves the door open for presenting scientific subjects within a mystical framework. It will also potentially lead to the compromising of factual accounts, for fear of upsetting religious sensibilities (the impact it has already had on textbooks is shown below). Overall, this injection of spirituality will only serve to weaken intellectual rigour and independence of mind.

Sanskrit, as would be expected, is given great importance at secondary level, and should apparently be treated as a living language ‘which is still relevant to the general life needs of the people of India, and which has caught international attention because of the global interest in subjects like yoga, vedic mathematics, astronomy and ayurveda’. And finally, what of mathematics, a field in which there have been many eminent Indians? The section on mathematics identifies study of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and the wider applications of mathematics (there is a heavy weighting given throughout to technology – another Hindutva feature [30]), but ends once again with the admixture of pseudoscience:

The history of mathematics with special reference to India and the nature of mathematical thinking should find an important place. The students may be encouraged to enhance their computational skill by the use of Vedic Mathematics.

Meetings, protests, and articles expressed the anger of secular academics and educationalists at this hijacking of educational policy, though NCERT denied any political pressure or the existence of a hidden agenda. The matter was widely reported and discussed by the Indian media. The Hindu newspaper and its associated magazine Frontline have been particularly notable in their consistent, enlightened reporting of threats to secularism. A 3-day National Convention Against the Communalization of Education in India was organized by SAHMAT (Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust) in August 2001 to discuss the Framework document and related educational issues. Drawing more than 500 delegates from across the country, including a number of state education ministers and their representatives, and addressed by leading academics from various disciplines, the Convention was a powerful statement of dissent. At its conclusion, a number of state education ministers endorsed a formal statement against the Centre’s education policy. [31]

At the same time, over a hundred leading scientists and mathematicians led by S. G. Dani, Professor of Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, signed a statement in protest against the efforts to include ‘Vedic mathematics’ in the school curriculum. Entitled ‘Neither Vedic Nor Mathematics’, it points out that the idea of ‘Vedic mathematics’ comes from a book by a swami (religious teacher) published posthumously in 1965 and containing ‘a set of tricks in elementary arithmetic and algebra to be applied in performing computations with numbers and polynomials’, written in the form of cryptic Sanskrit aphorisms (true ancient Indian mathematics, they note, was anything but cryptic). There is no connection with the Vedas, and virtually no mathematical usefulness in these aphorisms. It is worth quoting sections of the statement in full:

In an era when the content of mathematics teaching has to be carefully designed to keep pace with the general explosion of knowledge and the needs of other modern professions that use mathematical techniques, the imposition of “Vedic mathematics” will be nothing short of calamitous.
Nowhere in the world does any school system teach “Vedic mathematics” or any form of ancient mathematics for that matter as an adjunct to modern mathematical teaching. The bulk of such teaching belongs properly to the teaching of history and in particular the teaching of the history of the sciences.
We are concerned that the essential thrust behind the campaign to introduce the so-called `Vedic mathematics’ has more to do with promoting a particular brand of religious majoritarianism and associated obscurantist ideas rather than any serious and meaningful development of mathematics teaching in India. We note that similar concerns have been expressed about other aspects too of the National Curricular Framework for School Education. We re-iterate our firm conviction that all teaching and pedagogy, not just the teaching of mathematics, must be founded on rational, scientific and secular principles.[32]

These efforts make inspiring reading, which is why I have mentioned them in some detail here. But the political climate has not changed, and efforts to declare the Framework legally invalid, through filing a public interest litigation case over communal bias and lack of consultation with the Central Advisory Board of Education, has failed in the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, several history textbooks published by NCERT have been altered (‘corrected’) without consulting their authors and schools told that they should not even discuss the deleted elements. This too has caused consternation among progressive academics, being a move that effectively censors aspects of history, and presents a selective view of the facts.

The elements removed are relatively small, but they are significant. References to the eating of beef by Brahmins in ancient India occurring in textbooks by Romila Thapar and Ram Sharan Sharma have been removed. (The RSS, following Brahminical tradition, gives high status to the cow, describing it in their educational literature as ‘the mother of us all and the abode of gods’.) Another deleted passage from Sharma’s book dealt directly with the historicising of Rama and Krishna:

Archaeological evidence should be considered far more important than long family trees given in the Puranas. The Puranic tradition could be used to date Rama of Ayodhya around 2000 BC but diggings and extensive explorations in Ayodhya do not show any settlement around that date. Similarly, although Krishna plays an important part in the Mahabharata, the earliest inscriptions and sculptural pieces found in Madhura between 200 BC and AD 900 do not attest his presence. Because of such difficulties, the idea of an epic age based on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have to be discarded, although in the past it formed a chapter in most survey books on ancient India. Of course several stages in social evolution in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata can be detected. This is so because the epics do not belong to a single phase of social evolution: they have undergone several editions, as has been shown earlier in the present chapter. [33]

Further deletions include a paragraph pointing out that the antiquity claimed for the tirthankaras of Jainism does not appear to fit archaeological evidence of settlement in the middle Gangetic plain, and passages discussing Brahmin antipathy towards the Buddhist king Ashoka, and the use of the caste system to oppress and control peasants and servants through inculcating fear of breaking the divine law.

Deletions in Satish Chandra’s book on Medieval India relate to Sikh history, and in particular the reasons for the killing, under Aurangzeb, of Guru Tegh Bahadur, whom Sikhs regard as a martyr. Various reasons given for his killing are mentioned, including the Persian version, in which the execution was to end a plunder spree across Punjab, the Sikh tradition that it was the result of intrigue by members of the family opposed to his succession as Guru, and a third version in which the Guru had angered Aurangzeb by converting some Muslims to Sikhism. Of these, only the third escaped deletion.

A final deletion, from the book on Modern India by Arjun Dev and Indira Arjun Dev, removes a paragraph describing the Jats as being involved in plundering raids and court intrigues in Delhi in the 18th century.

The reason given for the deletions, at least in the case of the material concerning Sikh, Jain, and Jat history, was that they upset the feelings of the communities concerned. (The RSS, it should be noted, has sought to draw in Sikhs and Jains under its Hindu nationalist banner, the better to create a monolithic chauvinistic force ranged in opposition to the Muslim minority.) Curiously, the feelings of Muslims are never mentioned. When religions make truth claims that fall in the realm of science or of history, they can and should be contested. Once begin to compromise on this point, and there is no need to spell out the consequences for subjects grounded in empirical knowledge.

The deletion of these passages was intended as a gagging measure for the NCERT books in circulation until new textbooks could be drawn up that were based on the new Framework. The first new textbooks were released in the autumn of 2002, when the Supreme Court stay on their publication was lifted following the failure of the court case against the Framework. Almost immediately, reports spread of elements of bias in the new texts. Soon after their publication, a meeting of Opposition party leaders was called by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)), at which the leaders rejected both the Curriculum Framework and the new texts, and declared that they would not be adopted in states in which their parties were in power. They would not tolerate a change in educational policy driven by the Centre without state consultation and demanded that the Central Advisory Board for Education be reconvened.

The strong stance of Opposition parties leant vital political support to the consistently firm position that has been taken on this issue by the professional body of Indian historians, the Indian History Congress (IHC). The IHC is a very prestigious body. Founded in 1935, and with over 9,000 members, making it the largest professional forum of its kind in South Asia, its primary aim, as defined by its constitution, is the ‘promotion and encouragement of the scientific study of Indian history’.

The IHC set up a committee to review the new official history texts. Its report was published as History in the New NCERT Textbooks: Report and An Index of Errors in 2003. Among the errors noted by the authors, Professors Irfan Habib, Suvira Jaiswal and Aditya Mukherjee, are the assertion that the Indus Valley Civilization was established as early as 4,600 BC. It is also placed under the section on Vedic Civilization. The text on Medieval India portrays the Mughal rulers as exceptionally cruel and violent, without either putting their actions into the context of common practice of other rulers of the period within India, or mentioning positive aspects such as Akbar’s enlightened policies on the slave trade and on the practice of sati. They found the textbook on modern India and the freedom struggle particularly riddled with misleading emphases and omissions. Again, partition is blamed on Muslim separatists without any mention of Hindu communalist activities. The whole independence struggle is described in narrow terms, without emphasizing its underpinning principles of democracy and secularism, or the central role of Nehru, and the early Hindutva leaders are presented as great patriots. The fact that Gandhi was assassinated by Nadhuram Godse, closely associated with the RSS and a friend and admirer of the Hindu Mahasabha leader V. D. Savarkar (whose portrait was unveiled in the Indian parliament last year) is conveniently forgotten. As the report stressed, the problem is not so much factual error, though key errors exist. It is more the overall impression and slant put on Indian history that is of concern.

Despite the efforts of NCERT and Joshi to present this whole issue as ’hystrionics’ by leftist historians, the controversy has refused to die down and in any case, the firm stance of the IHC, representing a wide spectrum of professional historians, gives the lie to such an interpretation. Moreover, in spite of continuing government moves to manipulate research and education bodies (the chairman of the ICHR was recently dismissed for no stated reason), the IHC raises hope and confidence for the continuance of sound historical study in India.

The 64th session of the IHC was held in Mysore, Karnataka, on 28-30 December 2003. With over 1200 delegates, and the presentation of more than 600 papers, it was one of the biggest sessions ever conducted by the body. The official report declares that it was ‘an assertion of academic vigour and rational approach to Indian history’ [34]. The address of the General President, Professor S. Settar, illustrated well the nature of modern historical research. Entitled ‘Footprints of Artisans in History’, it used evidence from epigraphic sources, linguistics, and palaeography to reconstruct the life of artisans and their role in intercultural exchange at the regional level. This is a far cry from history as merely wanton extrapolation from selected Sanskrit texts of a Brahmin religious elite. The session included a special panel discussion on ‘History in School Education’, attended by a number of schoolteachers as well as academics. The IHC report notes that in secret ballot elections for the 20 Executive Committee members for the next year, the RSS put forward 12 candidates, all of whom were ‘soundly defeated’. This news brings a glimmer of hope to an otherwise darkening scene.

Conclusion

It is in this context of whipped up communal feelings and the encroaching hold on the public of narrow, chauvinistic perceptions of history that we must see the wider implications of the raid on the Bhandarkar Institute. The whole curriculum and textbook controversy is not a battle between ‘leftist’ and ‘rightist’ historians. It is a battle in defence of reason and objectivity, the very basis of all scientific enquiry. It is a battle whose consequences spill out far beyond libraries and classrooms. The ultimate cost of Hindutva’s success is measured in lives. Nearly 2000 Muslims, including children and babies, were hacked and burned to death in Gujarat in the riots of 2002. This is what happens when Golwalkar’s ‘children of the soil’ go on the rampage. And it originates in a mindset moulded in the saffron-infused classroom.

Latha Menon is a freelance writer and editor.

Footnotes

1 See for example http://www.stopfundinghate.org/

2 Interview in Frontline, Vol 17, Issue 5, March 4-17, 2000.

3 Hindutva and its Mhystory, Rewriting History Seminar, 2001.

4 In Defence of History. Granta, 1997.

5 See for example, D. D. Kosambi, Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture. Sangam, 1984.

6 A sense of the varieties of evidence used in the piecing together of the history of the subcontinent can be obtained from the Introduction to the newly revised edition of Romila Thapar’s Early India, Penguin, 2002.

7 Interview with Parvathi Menon in Frontline, 1998.

8 Asghar Ali Engineer, Hindu-Muslim Relations Before and After 1947, in Anatomy of a Confrontation, S. Gopal (ed.), Penguin India, 1990.

9 From interview with Indian portal Rediff, 1999. http://www.rediff.com/news/1999/mar/19panik1.htm

10 History and Politics of Ram Janmabhoomi, Hindu Vivek Kendra. http://www.hvk.org/ram/a3.html

11 K. R. Malkani, quoted in Pradip Kumar Datta, Hindutva and its Mhystory, Rewriting History Seminar, 200.

12 Imagined Religious Communities?, Interpreting Early India, Oxford University Press, 1992.

13 The Rewriting of History by the Sangh Parivar. http://www.www.secularindia.net/article6.html

14 Angana Chatterji, Learning in Saffron: RSS Schools in Orissa, Asian Age, Nov 11, 2003. Available at various places on the net, see e.g. http://www.sacw.net/DC/CommunalismCollection/ArticlesArchive/anganaNov2003.html

15 Vidya Bharati official site: http://www.vidyabharati.org/aim.asp

16 Historical Pedagogy of the Sangh Parivar, Rewriting History Seminar, February 2003.

17 A range of such examples are provided by Akhbar magazine under ‘In the Name of History: Examples from Hindutva-Inspired School Textbooks in India’. http://www.ercwilcom.net/indowindow/sad/article.php?child=30&article=31

18 Tanika Sarkar, op. cit.

19 Angana Chatterji, op. cit.

20 Letter from Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, President, All India Save Education Committee, to the Prime Minister, 24 November 2000, in response to proposed changes to the curriculum. Text available in full on http://ncert.nic.in/frame.htm

21 Whither Indian History? Speech delivered at National Convention Against Communalisation of Education in India, New Delhi, August 2001. Text available at http://www.knpanikkar.org/lectures/Whither%20Indian%20Education.html

22 The role of Nandy in easing the takeover of academia by RSS ideologues has been highlighted by many. See for example the comment of social anthropologist Andre Beteille quoted in an article by Neena Vyas in The Hindu, 29 April, 2001: ‘To a large extent, the “ground work had already been prepared by intemperate criticism of modern social theory” by men such as Dr. Ashish Nandy who sought to emphasise indigenous methodologies, rubbishing modern social theory as “western”, Prof. Beteille pointed out. From that emphasis on the indigenous and rubbishing of modern theory, (and thereby identifying all modern theory and thought as of western origin) the next step of eulogising all that was understood or articulated in “ancient India” was an easy step.’

23 Right-Wing Politics and the Cultures of Cruelty, Ved Gupta Memorial Lecture 1998.

24 Rediff interview, 3 November, 2003. http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/nov/03inter.htm

25 Speech at Bharatiya Vichar Kendra function. The full text of the speech is available on Joshi’s official website, which is at any rate worth a look: http://www.drmmjoshi.com/

26Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, Op. Cit.

27 Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, Rutgers University Press, 2003.

28 Sumit Sarkar, Op. Cit.

29 http://ncert.nic.in/frame.htm

30 For a discussion of Hindutva’s devotion to technology, see Meera Nanda, op. cit.

31 The full text of the statement is available online at the CPI(M)’s People’s Democracy site: http://pd.cpim.org/2001/aug12/aug122k1_sahmat.htm

32 The full statement is available at http://www.sacw.net/DC/CommunalismCollection/ArticlesArchive/NoVedic.html

33 All the deleted passages can be found on NCERT’s website, http://ncert.nic.in/frame.htm

34 http://members.tripod.com/historycongress3/mysore.htm