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You can listen to this while you read this post.
It all started innocently enough. I have a little blogette in the community project called Kitchen Gardeners International. I saw a nice two-page spread in the Independent this morning on seed saving, so I thought I would post about that in KGI. Unlike this blog, or at least, unlike this blog used to be, KGI is meant to be a rant-free zone. But in the course of looking for extra links on seed saving, I uncovered an atrocity. That is to say, it would be an atrocity if it were being enforced, but given the state of things in Iraq, I somehow doubt that it is. After all, what do religious fanatics and neighbourhood warlords care about either seed heritage or Monsanto's profits?
The slowest motion train wreck in history is the unfolding horror show of GM technology. (Disclaimer: I am not a Luddite, nor am I opposed to all "tampering with nature", nor am I an ill-informed granola-cruncher with knee-jerk oppostion to "evil GM". This is serious stuff here, and I am quite serious about it.) The reality of GM testing and its commercial deployment is so far from the cynically glib pronouncements of its deluded proponents that it leads one to begin to doubt literally every word they say. They mouth platitudes about careful testing and scientific consensus about safety, when they know that no such things exist or could even be faked up if required. The thing is, they probably won't be required. This is because the main community relations effort of the giant headless chicken corporations that produce the actual GM products consisted of a very effective pre-emptive smear of anyone who opposes GM technology for any reason. Now we have a scenario where they roll out GM rapeseed to a few willing UK farmers (surrounded by a small horde of vociferous protesters and a vast, worried but quiescent public) blandly assuring us that gene transfer to create "superweeds" is a billion-to-one improbability (note the scientific precision of that; they obviously did tests far too sophisticated for us to understand.) Within a mere three years there is the news of the discovery of a GM superweed that herbicides cannot kill. It rates a few anxious paragraphs and the world goes back to its nap. Meanwhile, in the jungles of South America, GM trees are the latest untested and almost unimagineable threat to the vital rainforest.
The UK government is ignoring all the overwhelming negative reactions from the so-called great GM Debate and is set to approve the first commercial plantings next week. This blog is very interested in the GM issue in the context of the wider concern that we call "food politics" (see Deborama's Kitchen for more information about that.) Previous posts here and here have covered the sham that was called the Great GM Debate.
Emily Wilson in the Guardian sums up the story thus far on whether or not the UK is about to lift its moratorium on GM food crops. (The debate is over; let the discussion begin.) The findings of the focus groups were by far the most interesting outcome of the Great Public Debate on GM:
"These were made up of people who had no links with biotech or anti-GM groups, plucked from across the social spectrum and deposited in workshops. After they had spent time learning about GM, their views evolved from uncertainty to concern.
As the official report puts it: 'When people in the general population become more engaged in GM issues, and choose to discover more about them, they harden their attitudes to GM.'"
Here's another one. Every British blogger, without exception, that I have read, has expressed disgust about this so-called Debate on GM Crops. (And if you think that's bad, you should read the comments on the organic gardening mailing lists.)
I just had a most annoying interface with the UK government. We are in the first week of the lightening-quick one-month Great National Debate On Genetic Modification of Crops. What a joke! They are holding six or seven public forums, not advertised. They have also a website with the "points" of the "debate" set out in a very condescending way. No points are actually made, no information is given, no knowledge is imparted. The language is so Doublespeak that poor Mr. Orwell has surely disinterred himself by now with all that spinning around in his grave. If one is of the subsection of society that does most of its business on the internet (as I am) one is meant to read all this drivel, and then, freshly "informed", register ones views through a multiple choice radio button form. The questions on the form are a lot better than the debating points, I'll give them that. But then that means there is even less of a connect between the "facts" upon which to "decide" and the views that you register. And of course, after reading all this weasel-sh**, one is not likely to believe that ones views, once registered, will make any difference anyway. Oh, it just makes me spit.
By the way, I am not going to put a link here, but if you are British and can convince me of it, and can't find the site on your own, e-mail me at the link above and I'll tell it to you.
I have a philosophical theory that has been in development for about three decades. It's nothing new, really, the only added value I can claim is, perhaps, emphasis, and a few original applications or examples. The nugget of the theory is : ignorance causes more suffering than malice. Yeah, that's not very original, it sounds sort of Buddhist, but I came to this belief by a route entirely independent of Eastern systems (in fact, within the context of pious but humanist Christianity.) There is a corollary : the main cause of ignorance is the learned tendency towards binary thought patterns. That sounds a bit more technical. Other names for binary thought patterns : black-and-white, either-or, (false or not) dichotomy or "diabolical reasoning." This last one is courtesy M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled, etc.) and stems from a day-long lecture of his that I attended in the mid-1980s, posing as the wife of my Methodist pastor. (Yes, it is an interesting story but I don't have time to go into it here.)
I was reminded of this line of thought when I read this very good commentary about the GM food controversy by Nick Cohen. Not necessarily conscious of following my philosophy but essentially guided by its spirit, I find myself without a side to be on in the GM controversy, just as I have been in the US abortion-rights controversy for many years before.
I like to think of myself as a believer in reason, of a sort of 17th or 18th century type, to be sure. Because it appears to me that sometime in the 20th century, reason, in the popular sense, became irreversibly polluted by diabolical thinking. Now, I happen to believe that genetic modification, after appropriate testing, might be OK in the case of golden rice. I would even eat it myself, not that I need it, being in no danger of nutritional deficiency. But I believe that no amount of testing (not that there has ever been any) will make Monsanto's Round-up Ready soybean, or a terminator gene in any food crop, ethical. By the same token, as a pro-choice partisan in 1970s and 1980s America, I was not allowed to say that late-term abortions do have harmful psychological effects on many who have them. And in the matter of training doctors to perform abortions, there were only two allowable positions: pro-choice - all doctors should be forced to be trained, regardless of their beliefs (and of course training means performing abortions as a student); or pro-life - student doctors will be discouraged from taking the optional training in abortion by the handy and effective means of death threats (which is just one of the many ironies implicit in these people calling themselves "pro-life").
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