The Organic Game

I think I'll skip the pleasantries for this post, and cut to the chase. The word 'organic' has become a powerful tool for asserting that the oh-so-special person who possesses 'organic' possess the true and real as opposed to the false and disingenuous 'fake.'

Who is appropriating the terminology?

I mean, seriously, why do the scientists get stuck with all the crappy terms? What, so the 'inorganic' scientists are out there to kill the natural, harmonious mother earth? The same could be said for the word 'atheist.' Great, lovely, thanks for putting us on one side of YOUR DAMN BINARY. Why is the term 'atheist' even be in use? Because the theists are constructing the debate and the terms used therein. There should be no need to identify oneself as atheist. After all, as Sam Harris points out, ' "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist.'

In the case of organic farming, the same terminology game is astir, and employing 'organic' has already skewed our impression of the debate. It does this in two principle ways. Firstly, the explicit and implicit assumption is that anything natural is better than something artificial. Secondly, there is this idea that food not grown through organic farming is 'inorganic.'

In regards to the second assumption, this idea is rubbish. We are all organic. You are an organic human. I am organic. Fruit that is not grown through organic farming is just as organic as fruit that is. Saying something is 'organic' is deliberately misleading in so far as it implies that the rest of food is inorganic and constructed artificially in some dank, dark place where apples don't grow on trees but in test tubes (even if this proposition were true, it overlooks the fact that there is no difference at the molecular level of these foods. There would be no difference in the content of what you would be consuming, even if it was truly inorganic, which it isn't.)

Now, of course, their use of 'organic' refers to the absence of inorganic pesticides, fertilizers and so on when farming, and I do endorse organic farming's concern for soil conservation. But my initial point is that when we throw the word 'organic' around this is not the idea being presented at all. Referring to yourself as an organic farmer subtly makes it appear as if your farming is genuine and natural, pitted against that fake food inorganic farmers make. Moreover, this terminology game is playing off the second, and by now virtually ingrained assumption, that natural is better.

What is important about these types of terms, and the connotations implicit within them, is that they create a false sense of neutrality, a neutrality that is actually not present at all.

As a result of such clever word plays, organic food has become a huge industry with commensurately little evidence to justify the some 19 or 20 billion dollars (a sum rapidly growing) it rakes in by catering to the North American and European market. I have no doubt the intentions were good, and like I said, I do respect the small business and small farm mentality of organic farming, but it has little to do with the 'organic' part of it. No-till has done more for soil conversation than 'organic' farming.

However, I decided to get out of my academic journals and see what the public impression of organic farming was on the web, and I found one study on wikipedia claiming that organic farming has done more than no-till for soil preservation and is, for that reason, the best solution. I clicked on the reference and was linked to a agriculture online magazine that was not even third-party reviewed! This is not solid research, and it is important to bring it up because it reflects the way this argument for organic farming is being carried out.

Organic farming has been given prominence when it never had the data to be so respected in the first place, and it achieved this prominence by playing on implicit biases and assumptions. As a result, what people do not realise is that organic farming 1) harms the environment 2) hurts third world farmers and 3) is actually in the pocket of multinational corporations.

Before getting into the facts, let's take a look at some choice rhetoric. Below is an exact reproduction of a little blurb on the box of an 'organic' sandwich I picked up the other day:

Why go organic? We make all our sandwiches ourselves, in our kitchens , every day, using the best organic ingredients that we can find from our certified suppliers. No nasty additives or preservatives are put into the food that we make for you. Organic farming applies the highest standards of animal welfare--no artificial growth promoters are allowed and routine use of antibodies is prohibited. Organic chickens & eggs are always free range. The use of artificial chemical fertilizers and pesticides is severely restricted and in the organic world we say NO to GM foods. Is organic food better for you? Studies have shown that organic food contains more Vitamin C, calcium, magnesium and iron and organic milk is super rich in Omega 3 so it's bound to be better for you!

They make all their sandwiches all by themselves in their kitchen. How nice! That makes me want to buy it. Notice the assumption that natural is better when they write 'NASTY ADDITIVES AND PRESERVATIVES. ' Are they saying that all preservatives and additives are nasty by virtue of what they are, or are they implying that only some are? I tend to think the former, but, once again, very vague and confusing phrases are floating around.

But the good news is that this nasty junk isn't in the food that they make FOR YOU! It gets better though. They say something that most of us should appreciate as a fair concern: Organic farming applies the highest standards of animal welfare. But what are the highest standards of animal welfare? Hmmm, that wasn't defined for me, but based on the sentence following the dash, the highest standard of animal welfare is the prohibition of artificial growth promoters and routine use of antibodies.

To clarify again, I abhor the industrial abuse of animals in mass farm corporations, but there is not a clear and established link between that issue (which is a legitimate concern) and the justification for organic farming's insistence that they do not use artificial growth promoters and antibodies on their animals. Yet, this assertion is not really related to animal cruelty, or arguably, maintaining the quality of the food produced from them, but to the hyped hysteria that you are eating a genetically altered chicken (i.e. chicken that was on steroids etc.).

Well, to be frank, insisting that synthetic drugs and the use of antibodies on animals cannot be beneficial ignores the most basic elements of chemical truth and overlooks the fact that many natural viruses are deadly, and meat infected with such natural viruses is far more of a concern that your consumption of trace chemicals, especially when there is no evidence that there is real danger from these trace amounts.¹ Of course, it is the 'routine' use of such antibodies they forbid, another hopelessly vague statement, reflecting an argument that is purely rhetorical in nature.²

At this point, there is the more important question of why organic farming is rather a bad thing and probably not the most efficient way of battling environmental issues and corporate control. Notice that the blurb I copied above said that organic food must be better for you because it contains more Vitamin C, Magnesium, Omega 3 and so on. This is because it is typically fresher produce, which is a result of management and size, not of system. In other words it has to do with a small farm versus a factory farm.³

Moreover, and this is the real problem, organic farming is grossly inefficient and requires at least twice the land, forcing many of those small farmers you believe you are helping by buying organic produce to burn forests for land, which does not help the environment, not to mention, the soil erosion and stripping that takes place through organic farming.⁴

We are not helping word poverty through organic farming, but making it worse by setting arbitrary and, ultimately, silly standards for these farmers. Why force them to grow organic? If you really wanted to help the small farmer, you would drop the organic game once and for all. Of course, this organic game is now in the interests of corporations who realise that whimsical, spoiled North Americans and Europeans are willing to pay substantially more for something that is organic. Keep the consumer happy is the motto in this situation.⁵

Also, rejecting GM crops is one of the cruelest things you can do to third world countries, and that will be the subject of its own blog at some point in time. For now, keep in mind that through GM crops, not only can we implement plans to solve world poverty effectively, but we can also modify these crops—like we did with Rice—to contain vitamin supplements that local populations are deficient in.⁶

I think it's time to say goodbye to the market for 'organic' food.

1www.foodstandards.gov.uk/science/sciencetopics/organicfood/

2For a thorough debunking of the argument about consumption of carcogenics and organic farming, see A.J. Trewavas, 'A Critical Assessment of Organic Farming-and-Food Assertions,' Crop Protection 23 (2001), pp. 757-81; E.J. Calabrese and L.A. Baldwin 'Hormesis: U-shaped Dose Responses and their centrality in Toxology,' Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, 22 (2002), pp. 285-91; 'Applications of Hormesis in Toxicology, Risk Assessment and Chemotherapeutics,' Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, 23 (2003), pp. 331-7; 'Toxicology Rethinks its Central Belief,' Nature, 421, (2003), pp. 691-2; J. Kaiser, 'Sipping from a Poisoned Chalice,' Science, 302, pp. 376-9.

3See S. Higginbotham, A.R. Leake, V.W.L. Jordan, and S.E. Ogilvy, Aspects of Applied Biology, 62 (2000), pp. 165-72; A.J. Trewavas, 'Urban Myths of Organic Farming,' Nature, 410 (2001), p. 409.

4Trewavas, 409.

5Ibid., 410.

6Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 'The use of genetically modified crops in developing countries,' January 2004.

From the perspective of a scientist

Great weather today! As you can see from the photo, we've been on a little backpacking journey across Dover, and it was fantastic!

However, I came home to more and more anger over the blog on reason versus faith (which I perhaps foolishly posted on here as well as on my personal web page). Let me mention, for the record, that NEVER before has any blog I wrote generated this kind of anger and criticism. It is truly amazing. I once again offer sincere apologies to those of you who viewed this blog as a personal attack. Keep in mind that it is just a blog, and it is just one person's opinion and reasoning. I barely scratched the surface of what I hoped to say, and, like I said, it is time to start thinking about why we are reacting the way that we are reacting, and what can be done, if anything, to remedy the sense of hostility and mistrust present in this discussion.

At the moment, I propose, as I mentioned this morning, writing a blog that explains some of the pragmatic social and political concerns related to my how I am looking at this conversation.

Let me start by mentioning that one of the most troubling things I witness in almost every conversation I have with theists is a mistrust of science. There is a tendency to look on science as the enemy to nature and God's world. There is an implicit desire to return to a perceived golden age of simplicity, an age before technology spoiled the idyllic world of nature. Yet, this golden age never existed. I can say that with full confidence, and I can show you the life expectancy rate, the infant mortality rate, and the constant starvation and undernourishment of previous times to prove it.

Like it or not, when you start to attack science in the name of faith, you are biting the hand that (literally) feeds you. Yes, science is not a god. Yes, science can be used for good or for ill, but forgetting what science is doing every minute of every day for your life is foolish. Is it your prayers or medical technology that saves lives? You may believe prayer, but history contradicts you. With all its unideal flaws and failures, with its non-sexy history, science has still transformed and saved countless lives. Maybe, that is why God answers the prayers of someone living in the West more than the prays of the thousands of people dying in Africa every day?

There is so much to do, and religion, among other groups, must stop rejecting science if we hope to do it. In third world countries, such as Africa and India, the green revolution has all but passed them by. These counties are in need of viable solutions for their economies, and in the next fifty years, if we don't solve these problems, far more than the 'mere' 16,000 African children currently dying a day are going to die. While you pray to God for a raise or whatever, these people are dying, and no amount of romanticizing and pretending you live in some sort of halcyon natural world is helping. The answer is genetically modified crops. There is so much evidence in peer-reviewed, third party journals, revealing that in contrast to the media's portrayal (especially in the US), these crops can do countless good for ending world hunger, while also saving the hassle of trying to cross-breed, and thus inheriting the bad genes along with the good.

Christians and other fundamentalists, why is it usurping the role of God to take a gene out of one plant and insert it into another? Why, in relation to this, do you rise up in a fury and outlaw stem cell research? How is it wrong to experiment on a blastocyst? It has, at best, 100 or fewer cells in it. Insects often have 70,000 to 120,000 cells. Don't you realise that by using our research on the blastocyst, we can find a cure for various cancers? How many people, and let's not forget children who are normally considered innocent, must die from a disease that is perfectly preventable? Yet, you fight us every step of the way. This is not a pity party, but, in truth, not only do scientists draw very modest salaries for the endless (often more than 90 hours a week) labour they do for these causes, but they are utterly dependent on research funding, and guess where that comes from? Public and government support! This means we are at the mercy of the public perception of researchers.

Sadly, people have this idea that scientific research is grounded in some sort of eugenics movement. For the record, eugenics and the atrocities committed by the Nazis have an undisputed ideological birth in German Romanticism, and have nothing to do with Natural Selection and Evolution. The very phrase 'blut und boden' (blood and soil) reflects a view of nature that is equivalent not to today's scientists, but to today's religious communities, and those who support the homeopathic, back to nature cures, which favour lack of evidence and willfully disregard evidence.

So, the problem is that while many people of faith might reject an attack on science, and some middle-of-the-roaders even support evolution, as long as you continue to foster and allow the mindsets that are shaping and framing this religious discussion, we are going to end up regressing and moving backwards when we could be moving forwards. It is time that faith--in whatever belief structure--loses its exemption from evidence. I am advocating a return to the Enlightenment values of evidence and empiricism. This is not to say I support a world run by the 'cold,' 'calculating' machines of reason. Quite simply, it means that at the end of the day, just like Natural Selection, it is better to remember that progress is not a romantic, high ideal. It is climbing Mount Everest one step at a time. It is realising that no perfect, or absolutist, dream can dictate what we do, but that it must have concrete, pragmatic grounding in the here and now and in individuals, communities, cities, countries etc.

Faith, especially right now, is, in so many ways, the antithesis to this approach, and as long as it is untouchable by logic, it will continue to sabotage the very macro and micro level organizations that need an infusion of logic and reason most.

So this is a short attempt to give a pragmatic answer for why I feel hostility towards faith, and why I think it is altering adversely the political climate in today's world. Yes, this is just an example. There are many more topics that come to mind, and I do feel that I still need to understand why--what kind of reasoning--is influencing individuals so strongly to reject science, even to the point of marking it off as a faith.

Mr. Logic: Addendum

Things are a little unsettled in my life (more than a little actually), making it quite hard to find a chunk of time to get the stuff written I have been wanting to touch on for some time now. When I do get the chance, I feel the need to present a more nuanced approach to my religio-political positions. Primarily, it has become clear after several very lengthy emails I received regarding my most recent blog that my reaons for not believing are not important at all, but, rather, the fact that I chose not to believe is deeply disturbing. However, I am beginning to fully realise, for the first time, that these visceral responses are speaking to some fairly deep and genuine anxieties on the part of the believers, not just a determination to be irrational. As soon as I get a chance, I would like to look at these anxieties in a little more depth in an effort to understand why such polarization is occurring, and the ramifications for the socio-politico scene inherent in this polarization. So, as soon as possible, this discussion is going to take place.

For now, onwards and upwards...

Faith versus Reason?

With some recent exchanges in mind, I thought I would do a blog on the subject of my atheism and, if possible, briefly touch on why I have some reservations regarding the assumption that faith should not be held up to questioning and logical analysis. I do not, however, wish to spend an inordinate amount of time on the subject of atheism, as there is more to my life than what I don't believe in, and I have noticed that once you open this can of worms, it tends to simply devolve and regress, with little being accomplished. On the other hand, I am always aware that there are people out there who are genuinely using their minds and thinking, and do benefit, possibly, from these ideas.

To begin with, it is important that the increasingly touted claim that atheists are rival fundamentalists is disregarded. First off, atheism, as I have argued before at great length, is not a positive belief system. It has no cognitive or truth content per se. In fact, the only way in which atheism has a 'truth content' is to the extent that it does not accept the truth claims of theists and those believing in supreme beings and gods and all that sort of thing. However, the obvious jump that the mind makes is to associate atheists with atheistic scientists. But, no, this is not, strictly speaking, acceptable.

I have known atheists who were not even familiar with the basic tenets of evolution, and who had some very strange reasons for their atheism. That being said, there is no doubt that evolution and science have convinced many of us that, critically speaking, religious belief crumbles at the first touch of common sense or empirical evidence. Yes, science does tend to destabilize one's religious belief, and, if it doesn't, I have some sincere doubts about your intellectual honesty and/ or rigour of thinking.

I can at this point venture into the well-trodden fields of Natural Selection versus Intelligent Design to provide a rational and factual basis for why science discredits religious belief in a creator God, but I do not wish to spend too much time giving a technical explanation yet again, especially since people are usually not interested in thinking about empirical evidence. If it becomes apparent that I do need to go into a technical diatribe on Natural Selection, then I shall gladly rehash it for the umpteenth billionth time, and I'll continue to do so if people genuinely want to talk about it. For this blog, I shall skip over it though.

So, if science does indeed challenge faith, then is it a rival fundamentalism or belief structure of its own? I would say no. Firstly, science must not be understood as absolute. It develops all the time. Just recently, I amended, not discredited, a scientist's research from a few years earlier. I have also had to revise my own work when evidence to the contrary arose. In other words, science will never give you an absolutist sense of the universe. It is not an immutable, unchangeable body of information (such as certain religions' holy books). In this sense, you can't look to it for comfort in the same way that you look to religion. It will not allow you to be content with taking the day off from thinking (an easier, but not necessarily desirable option for a number of reasons).

Most importantly, if evidence to God's existence or to disprove evolution came along, I would change my position, and I would not feel like an 'atheist apostate' for doing so, as there is nothing wrong with changing one's mind when rational evidence compels one to do so. Indeed, that is entirely my point. Atheism is a rejection of a set of beliefs, and scientific inquiry is not the antidote to religious belief. It cannot really fill that sort of gap. However much it may appear that it does, this is a complete misunderstanding of science.

Scientific research is understanding and seeking to understand natural phenomena and the monist reality of the universe, mainly in the effort of improving life on earth, which relates it to secular humanism. But this humanism is an ethos, not a religion, and should not be confused with religion, unless we give people a destructively misleading idea of science and secular humanism. It is destructively misleading because it makes people think they are believing in a theory of ultimacy or some absolutist ideal. This is patently untrue. If anything, atheism and science discourage and stand in the face of absolutist visions of reality and view them as deeply harmful. Even those things that are largely substantiated by mountains of empirical evidence are not absolute in the sense that there is, however highly unlikely it may be, the possibility for evidence to the contrary to emerge.

I do not believe in God because there is no evidence and there is a good deal of evidence for Natural Selection. I, however, am strongly invested in the idea of evidence and validation. I distrust faith because it is not subject to proof and validation. To call atheism a form of faith is absurd, as it would suggest that such things as empirical proof and logic do not exist in it.

No Christian, Muslim, or Jew, members of the three religions of the book, would ever say if evidence to the contrary emerged he or she would stop believing in God or Allah. Of course, they would not. As it says in Hebrews 11:1, 'Now FAITH is the substance of things HOPED for, the EVIDENCE of things unseen.' Well, this sentence should be all the evidence of the chasm between reason and faith one could ever need. What is the 'substance' of faith? 'Things hoped for' (i.e. God, afterlife, spiritual realm), and faith is here cited as the 'evidence' of that which can't be seen (the immaterial, spiritual realm). Faith is what we hope exists, and this faith stuff is evidence for the unseen / unknowable stuff (that stuff we really wish existed). Does the term 'circular reasoning' come to mind? Faith=things hoped for=evidence of things hoped for=faith.

In other words, and this really does touch the core of religious thinking, wanting something to be true and making it true are one and the same. This is why belief is so terribly powerful and central to religious faith (to the point that they had to come up with eternal torture as a means of convincing people to believe). When belief ends, so does the evidence for why you believe. In effect, your faith collapses.

Okay, okay, so many people ask me at this point why I should care one way or the other. If people want to believe what they want to believe, why not just allow them to do so, and leave it at that? Well, I agree to the extent that I am not ever going to try and actively persuade or force someone to leave their faith, although when questioned I will explain my positions to them (and even get somewhat passionate and angry if I am having a bad day). However, nonetheless, it concerns me, because like it or not, if you can't argue logically with people, then there is nothing —except perhaps some very interpretable and contradictory passages in holy books—to keep them from doing whatever they want to do in the name of their faith. If someone truly believes what she or he believes, and therefore feels no need to use logic to analyse it (i.e. that homosexual act done in private hurt no one, nor did it harm anything but our faith's moral prescriptions), then how can we argue when a fascist Islamic state does things like this to homosexuals?

It might seem barbaric, but if you have faith and believe, then it is perfectly 'reasonable'. And please don't think I am saying that people don't do equally atrocious things without religious motivation, because they do. The point is, rather, that when people do things in the name of politics, money, power, sadism, then we denounce it and argue against it. But faith has this wonderful way of claiming exemption. More frustratingly, how can we say religious violence, intolerance, bigotry, and religion's obsessive tendency to meddle in other people's private lives is wrong when faith lacks any sort of objective criteria to judge it by (save its holy books and less said about that the better)? I can't argue with them using logic, so what am I supposed to do? Respect their right to hang homosexuals? And on a side note, I am not picking on Islam. I have no doubt the Christians would do the same if they could realise a Christian fascist state.

In the end, since it would be utterly oxymoronic to try and force someone to use reason, what do you do? I tend to think there has to be a massive movement towards reaching my age group and younger with rationalism and secular humanism. I am fairly certain that this is the most suitable way of avoiding the proliferation of faith-based thinking and politics.

The Need to Conform

Pay close attention to the diagram below and try to figure out which line matches the one on the left?

Easy right? No, sadly, it's not easy if you're in a room filled with people who say B. If that was the case, you and I have a 37 % chance of going along with the rest of the group and saying B. And, yes, everyone says they would refuse to give the wrong answer. I know. I know. You're the sole rebel nonconformist in society. Now go find out what all the other nonconformists are doing.

I'll be the first to put myself on the chopping block and say I have many memories of being in class and strongly thinking the entire class was wrong on a question, but becoming anxious when everyone else thought the opposite. Convinced I must be wrong, I would just give the same answer everyone else in class did. Unfortunately, if I had just stuck to my guns, I would often have had the right answer.

My response would be classified as informational conformity. In other words, I really believed my answer must be wrong in calculus class because everyone else got got a different answer on their graft, and I thought I must just be the class idiot. All my insecurities about my math abilities surface (I'm not good at math), and in the space of thirty seconds my brain has decided that a) the majority is against my being right b) I'm definitely not that good in calculus, so I must be wrong.

Very quickly, in cases that are less black and white as obviously shorter lines, we rationalize that it is best to conform, and it seems so damn reasonable to do so and blatantly egotistical to not.

There is also normative conformity, which is similar to informational except that the person knows he or she is right, but craves the approval of the group and goes along with it. Once again, let's think of instances in everyday life and history where it was a lot less clear than simple lines on a diagram. Guess how many people conformed?

Anyway, this whole line experiment was called the Asch Conformity Test, and I've included a short video on it, so you can see how it actually worked on participants ( I'll stop at nothing in these enlightening blogs).

But stepping back from our immediate impulse to believe we are truly different and incapable of absorption into this type of conformity, we see the paradox of human behavior: the need to be different, to be exceptional and stand out from the "masses," coupled with deep anxieties about our personal ability to match the standards needed to belong to the group, and / or a craving for some level of acceptance and approval. Even the most non-sequitur people need this approval and find it through a personal sense of their individuality and ability to rise above "all those stupid people out there."

Think about the very concept of Myspace and how a guy became a millionare playing on this element of the human mind. On one level you have individuality and a place for everyone to cultivate their distinctive personalities, but, on another level, it carefully plays all the time on our need to conform, right down to our blogs, our top friends list, and whatever else. This concept is everywhere at work in society and has been always at work in various forms and manifestations since the beginning of time.

Perhaps we need to do the hard and ugly thing and admit to a biological imperative interwoven with social conditioning that leads us to follow people right off a cliff? Perhaps we need to realize that the one thing that offers us a way of dealing with out biological imperatives is the capacity for self-awareness? As they say (and the man in a white coat must be right), stopping with all the denial crap is the first step forward. After all, while some level of conformity could be argued to be beneficial and required, the situations where conformity spirals into power-tripping sadism and acquiescence to the ugliest sides of human nature are bitter reminders of the worst aspects of our humanness.

How Power Relations Structure the Human Psyche

Ever heard of something called the Stanford Prison Experiment?

There's plenty of research out there on this, so I won't bore everyone with the details, but, basically, a psychologist called Philip Zimbardo decided to experiment on the mental effects of prison on prisoners and guards using a stimulated prison situation in which paid participants joined freely. They were all tested for mental and emotional stability and were all bright college students.

At random, twelve were chosen to be guards and twelve were chosen to be prisoners. The shocking thing was how quickly the guards became genuinely sadistic, an estimated third of them displayed highly pathological behaviors, and things got, to say the least, really, really out of control. What is most striking is the fact that even Zimbardo himself, who was role playing the prison warden, became so absorbed in the reality of the game that he admitted to losing all sense of perspective at times.

These studies have been copied in many different ways. One example involved taking a bunch of blue-eyed children and pitting them against brown-eyed kids, telling them the genetic results proved blue-eyed people were more intelligent etc., and believe it or not, the results were quite similar. The blue-eyed students turned on the brown-eyed students violently (they also tried it in reverse and the same thing happened). I have also heard, but not had a chance to research myself, that an experiment in April 2007 among Texas high school students claims to reinforce the Stanford Experiment.

Incidentally the Stanford Experiment ended after six days when a graduate student, who was also Zimbardo's girlfriend, showed up and was immediately horrified and insisted Zimbardo call it off. Zimbardo's girlfriend was the only one out of everyone, including the parents of the students, who objected after vistiting the "prison."

There is also the famous Miligram experiment, which showed that over 65% of people would obey a strong authoritarian figure directing them to shock a participant, even when the said participant was screaming in pain and apparently on the verge of death.

What is my point in bringing all this up? To prove humanity is really doomed? You can decide for yourself (you were going to anyway).