Category: Politics

Politics both in theory and in terms of party politics, mostly focused on South Africa.

Freedom’s just another word for “not allowed to choose”

As submitted to the Daily Maverick

Stronger evidence makes for stronger arguments. We all know this, and also know that it’s often difficult to discard our belief in some supposed facts that aren’t as well justified as we might think. Where this becomes an acute problem is with regard to moral claims, notably those that involve human equality and are aimed at eliminating discrimination.

Consider two examples. First, I’d imagine that most of us believe there is no scientific basis for discriminating on the grounds of race. Some of us might say that is too weak a claim, and that there is no scientific basis for even the idea of race. Second, it appears to be a widely-held notion that rape is about power, and not about sex.

For both of these examples, consensus serves a powerful rhetorical and political function. If we agree on the substance of these claims, we are able to construct arguments against racial discrimination and against victim-blaming (for instance, that  what a victim of rape was wearing or doing can be disregarded as irrelevant to the perpetrator’s crime). But what if we’re wrong?

It’s not good enough to simply assert that we cannot be wrong, or to hurl some academic paper or book in the direction of someone who dares to question an orthodox view. In the case of these two examples, dissenting voices exist, and you can often tell that they’d really prefer to not be dissenting. Treating propositions like these as axiomatic serves a useful function, whether or not they are true.

On both of these topics, there is ongoing research activity – lacking any obvious bad faith – which brings the consensus view into question. While we might prefer for both research projects to fail, we should also be prepared for their success. And if they do reveal that our common wisdom is faulty, my concern is that we’ll be ill-prepared to continue being able to mount robust defences against these forms of discrimination.

In other words, perhaps our most strident campaign against the wrongness of generalised discrimination should not be premised on facts (insofar as we know them), but rather on other aspects of the wrongness of discrimination. For race, we could say that even if racial differences exist, they are immaterial to the wrongness of generalising when it comes to individuals. For rape, we can say that regardless of the balance between the competing causes of sexual desire and asserting power, violation of consent is always the worst sin.

This is not to say that the evidence we have isn’t important, or worth emphasising. Instead, I’m arguing against exclusive reliance on it, carried by a form of evangelical zeal that assumes the facts to be fixed, and assumes those facts to be sufficient to carry the argument. Not only because our zeal could be misguided, but also because it can come with independent costs.

A recent example demonstrating this is provided by Cynthia Nixon, who you might know from all those Sex and the City episodes you didn’t watch. In Slate, she’s quoted as saying “I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice.”

It’s true that the scientific consensus is that homosexuality has a biological basis. But the other relevant fact is that the fight for social and legal equality for homosexuals has been premised on the “fact” that your sexual orientation is not a choice. It’s the latter detail that means Cynthia Nixon, in revealing her preference for women as sexual partners, can somehow be construed as an enemy of the gay-rights cause. And this is because a genuine scientific fact is not treated as merely that, but rather also, and arguably mostly, as an ideology or statement of evangelical faith.

In Brian Earp’s superb analysis of the Nixon issue, he points out that various factors influence sexual attraction, and that we can usefully separate the question of who or what you’re programmed to find attractive, in general, from who you happen to find attractive in reality. For many people, attraction operates on a continuum in any case, making labels such as ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ unhelpfully crude.

For Nixon to point out that in her case she’s decided to tend towards one end of that continuum says nothing about the extent to which others can make similar choices. If LGBT activists choose to make a dogma out of lacking choice they’ve picked a short-sighted strategy, and Nixon can hardly be blamed for not toeing the orthodox line.

There is a significant emotive context to this, not to mention a reality in which people are assaulted – whether physically or emotionally – as a result of a sexual orientation they have no control over. So it’s an important message that we send by saying that for most people, sexual orientation seems to involve little to no choice. But we also send a message when we say something like “you’re not allowed to call yourself gay, because we’ve decided that it can only mean one thing”.

The root of our concerns regarding discrimination in all of its forms could arguably be described as a conviction that people should be free to express themselves and pursue their good in whatever way they please, without society imposing any limiting generalisations on them. How sadly ironic it is, then, that a gay woman finds herself criticised by defenders of equality and freedom for daring to have an independent opinion.

And Rasool (allegedly) bribing journalists is okay

In January, I was quite pleased to read reports of ANC sources claiming that Ebrahim Rasool might be recalled from his ambassadorship in the US. Not simply because of a lack of fondness for him, but rather because it’s not outlandish to suggest he should never have been appointed as ambassador to the US until the investigation regarding the Brown Envelope scandal was completed.

For those who aren’t familiar with the case, the issue is this: Rasool was alleged to have indirectly used public funds to help incentivise two Cape Argus journalists to write stories that favoured him, and that presented his Western Cape ANC opponents in a negative light. These bribes were (if these stories are true) paid in cash, placed in brown envelopes.

The internal ANC investigation into these allegations was terminated in 2006, but the matter was nevertheless considered serious enough for ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe to confirm that Rasool was fired as Western Cape Premier in 2008 partly as a result of the allegations: “Rasool was removed as premier of the Western Cape all because of this case, among other things”.

Now, it’s true that Ashley Smith never appeared to be the most credible of witnesses. Perhaps Rasool was indeed falsely accused. But some within his party seemed to think the allegations true. They are also serious enough that it’s welcome news that Gasant Abader’s (current editor of the Cape Argus) access-to-information application to compel the ANC to release their report on their investigations has been successful.

The relevant parties are still studying the report, and we’ll no doubt hear more on this as time passes. But in the meanwhile, Rasool continues in a high-profile ambassadorial post, despite not only the Brown Envelope scandal, but also further allegations of corruption made in 2010 to the police commercial crimes unit. You’d like to think that allegations of significant corruption matter – not only in party deployments, but also with regard to our international representatives abroad.

Some ANC leaders agree that these matters are serious. In 2011, one of them said:

One issue that constantly cropped up in the elections research, even among our staunchest supporters, is that the ANC is soft on corruption and looks after their own. This requires a system for processing such allegations that will send a message of an ANC that is intolerant of corruption.

Today, an ANC leader is quoted in the Cape Times as saying that he didn’t think the Brown Envelope investigation needed to be completed, because “Ebrahim (Rasool) is no longer premier, he has gone on with his life”.

The first quote is from ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe. The second? Also Gwede Mantashe. I suppose that’s another allegation “processed”, then.

#TwitterBlackout

As submitted to Daily Maverick.

It’s sometimes difficult to escape the feeling that we’re living under the tyranny of the perpetually indignant. Taking the time to think things through and developing a measured response to some hot-button issue is a luxury we’re infrequently allowed. Not only do media outlets thrive on sensation, but readers are also often eager to be the first to express outrage at some new conspiracy, malfeasance or instance of ineptitude.

And so those hot-button issues can get generated out of thin air, then recycled and amplified in the echo-chamber of Twitter and other social media. Last week, Twitter itself became the latest subject of hysterical misinterpretation when they announced their new policies for blocking tweets. As of January 26, tweets (or Twitter accounts) can be blocked on a country-by-country basis rather than globally, as was the case before software refinements made selective blocking possible.

The Forbes’ headline “Twitter commits social suicide” summed up many of the responses, which made accusations of charges of censorship and complicity in killing free speech trend under the hashtag #TwitterBlackout. Some even suggested that the once-plucky underdog had now sold out, and was caving to the (purported) illiberal demands of their new investor, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

But bin Talal only purchased a 3% stake in Twitter, and we have no evidence that he has any interest in dictating policy. We also have no evidence that Twitter’s policy change is a bad thing for free speech. In fact the opposite seems a far more plausible reading, which makes it more the shame that most of the indignant seem to not have bothered to read the policy itself.

It is not the case that Twitter will be monitoring your delight at having found your car keys (in the last place you looked!) or your #occupation of some patch of suburban scrubland. Any blocking (or censorship, for that is what it amounts to) will be reactive rather than proactive, where a party with legal grounds for requesting a takedown of tweets or an account lodges an application with Twitter to do so.

This has always been Twitter’s policy. For example, evidenced claims by film studios of copyright infringement have led to tweets being deleted. The difference between the old policy and the new is that, instead of those tweets being deleted globally, they will only be blocked in the country where that tweet violated the law. If you tweet some pro-Nazi sentiment in Germany (where doing so is illegal), Germans won’t be able to see the tweet but the rest of the world will.

In other words, more people can now see the tweet than was the case before. And if you’re planning a revolution on Twitter, you could always tell your fellow Bolsheviks to simply follow Twitter’s own instructions for changing your country settings to “worldwide”, thereby allowing you to see any tweets, no matter how repressive your situation might be.

What’s more, users in countries where tweets have been blocked will be able to see that something or someone has been blocked. And here Twitter has again done its best to increase rather than decrease transparency, by committing to posting the details of who requested the censorship at Chilling Effects. The “Streisand effect” shows us how exposing attempts at censorship will tend to increase the dissemination of the undesirable material – here made easy not only by changing your Twitter settings, but also by the fact that the same undesirable material, if originating outside the censoring country, will not be blocked by Twitter.

In short, then, Twitter has done nothing to increase the likelihood or frequency of censorship, but instead attempted to obey the laws pertaining in certain jurisdictions without affecting information flow in others. It’s a positive move, and is being conducted in a fully transparent and defensible way. On balance, there’s good reason to suppose it could result in increased protection of free speech.

But for the #TwitterBlackout crowd, evidence takes a back-seat to indignation. Some indignation is of course justified – it shouldn’t be the case that governments attempt to censor speech (arguably, outside of some narrowly-defined cases). That they do so is not Twitter’s fault, and there is nothing that Twitter can do about it. Taking a stand against censorship by refusing to obey local laws would simply result in the complete unavailability of the service, as is the case in China.

Us advocates of free speech, and those campaigning for other causes, can forget that our idealised version of the world collides with the real worlds of politics and pragmatism. It’s not Twitter’s job to share your or my ideological commitments, and to run the risk of being shut down in more places than only China. Here, it’s governments that are censoring, and Twitter is doing is best to minimise the effects of that censorship while spreading its global reach for the sake of profit. That’s their job.

So now non-racialism is racist too

The Democratic Alliance Student Organisation (DASO) have launched a new advertising campaign. Here’s what many South Africans on Twitter and Facebook have been talking about today:

And in the curious place that is South Africa, this poster is somehow racist. It’s one thing to criticise the very idea of non-racialism – you can argue that a political party that is trying to encourage us leave race out of our analysis is naïve, and you can even argue that non-racialism can’t serve as an antidote to racism because we need to focus on race. But if you believe that race shouldn’t matter, as I do, then highlighting the fact that some people are still inclined to see relationships between different races as wrong – or even simply remarkable – is perfectly consistent with a commitment to non-racialism.

That’s what this poster does. It simply highlights the fact that some people would look twice at an inter-racial couple, and reminds viewers of the poster that in the ideal DASO future, this wouldn’t happen. As I pointed out in a Twitter exchange, my regular interactions with students at the University of Cape Town confirm that it’s simply not true that South Africans don’t need to be reminded that inter-racial relationships are okay. Yes, they (they meaning the DASO target audience, ie. youth) might be well aware that the Immorality Act has been repealed, but this doesn’t mean that social pressure to date people with similar pigmentation has disappeared. It’s still a very real pressure, which I hear about (or overhear people talking about) on a regular basis.

This is perhaps again simply an instance of the Twitterati imagining that they are the only arbiters of good sense and reason, imagining that they speak for everyone. And one is sometimes fearful of that possibility, seeing as the Twitterati can say some profoundly stupid things. I was told, for example, that it’s “racist to presume non-racialism is about who you have sex with”. As I said in reply, this poster is but one example of what non-racialism would entail – namely that nobody would care if people were having an inter-racial relationship.

Was the poster meant to include depictions of every possible instance of non-racialism to avoid being racist? It seems that it should have, which would have made for a pretty large poster. And even if it had tried to, someone would still have come up with something that’s wrong with it. Perhaps the art direction was racist, or perhaps it’s somehow sinister that the DASO logo covers the black woman, and not the man (this is not a joke – someone did say that. It does so happen that the black woman has breasts, which is a more likely contender for why the logo was placed where it was).

Should DASO’s poster have featured two white people? Of course not – that would be racist. Should it have featured two black people? Of course not – that would have been described as desperate. Should it have featured a gay couple, whether inter-racial or not? Perhaps (although that would also have been described as desperate) – but one can understand that they did not, partly because the majority of the market is heterosexual, and partly because they might have been cowed by the amount of (obviously unjustified) offence that would have caused.

What this sort of thing goes to show is that if you want to find a problem, you’ll do so – regardless of the intellectual contortions necessary. As I said at the start of this post, it’s entirely possible that non-racialism is misguided, even impossible. But making the claim that this poster is racist – in the context of inter-racial relationships being an actual issue for some – is an entirely unsympathetic, and unjustifiable, analysis.

UPDATE: The stupid doesn’t stop there. The African Christian Democratic Party say the poster is “shocking” and promotes “sexual immorality”. Furthermore, “in a country with high levels of Aids and an overdose of crime, especially the high incidence of farm murders this year, this poster sends the opposite message to the country than needed”. (Apologies to the ACDP for initially mis-attributing these quotes to them.)

The ‘Protect Life Act’ and Republican conservatism

As submitted to the Daily Maverick.

While President Obama could be accused of trying to curry favour with moral conservatives in rejecting the FDA’s recommendations on the “morning-after pill”, liberals can find some comfort in the fact that he’s at least pro-contraception, and isn’t planning to criminalise abortions just yet.

This puts him at odds with nearly every (plausible) Republican candidate with the exception of Mitt Romney who, while having changed his mind and become pro-life in 2004, is at least not a signatory to the regressive “Personhood Pledge” that has to date been signed by Santorum, Gingrich, Perry and Paul.

Ron Paul’s case is complicated by the addendum to his signing of the pledge, in which he disagrees with the Pledge’s assertion that the 14th amendment (which protects individual liberties from state encroachment) has a role to play in defending the interests of the unborn. While the addendum has led to some questioning of the sincerity of his commitment to the Pledge, he is nevertheless clear that “life begins at conception”, and that “it is the duty of the government to protect life”.

Of those who have not signed the Pledge (Huntsman and Romney), both want to repeal Roe vs. Wade, and Huntsman supports the introduction of a right to life amendment to the Constitution. While Romney thinks that current legislation has “cheapened the value of human life”, his stated intentions are to put abortion legislation in the hands of the state, rather than the Federal government.

Broadly speaking, then – because the details are, well, very detailed – all the candidates are pro-life to varying degrees of commitment. And while Romney and Paul can be credited with at least attempting to introduce a level of sophistication to their positions instead of simply appealing to the emotive fervour of a conservative base, the rest of the contenders speak of pre-born humans in terms that assume that the debate has an obvious conclusion, where a woman’s rights over her own body, and what to do with it, are significantly weakened.

As in most emotive issues, language is important here. A bias is immediately introduced in using terms like “pro-life”, given that it suggests an anti-life stance on the part of those that support abortion. Speaking of “unborn” or “pre-born” children introduces a similar bias, in that it encourages us to think of blastocysts, zygotes, embryos and foetuses as if they already had desires and aspirations capable of being dashed by those callous “anti-life” Democrats.

It is in the Personhood Pledge that these biases come to the fore in all their glory, where “every human being at every stage of development must be recognized as a person possessing the right to life”. While the Pledge’s opposition to assisted suicide and euthanasia increase the intended threats to individual liberty, it’s the language on abortion that is of most concern here.

Because it’s not only this pledge, but also a legislative move that should be seen as a concern. It should be concerning to Americans – most directly American women – but also to the rest of us, in that these sorts of developments can easily serve as example and inspiration to those who want to undermine South African liberties in this regard. It’s not only the ACDP that might want to do so – President Zuma’s visit to the Rhema Church during campaigning in 2009 included a reassurance that he’d be willing to entertain changes to legislation permitting both abortion and same-sex marriages.

The (American) legislation at issue is H.R.358, the Protect Life Act, which passed the House of Representatives in October 2011. The bill is considered unlikely to pass in the Senate, and President Obama intends to veto it even if it does. But in the hypothetical absence of the current Democratic Senate and President, the bill gives a clear insight into the how dedicated the current crop of Republicans in the House are to defend the unborn human, no matter how nebulous its form.

The first version of the bill submitted to the House by Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) called for a modification of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to only allow for health plans to cover abortions in cases of “forcible rape or, if a minor, an act of incest”. Women who fall pregnant as a result of gentle rape – or adult victims of incest – must presumably have had it coming.

That language was removed in the bill that passed the House (you can see each version here), which now allows for coverage in the event of “an act of rape or incest”. But this concession to the reality of women sometimes needing an abortion through no fault of their own does not address some of the worst aspects of the bill.

The Protect Life Act, if signed into law, would prevent women from buying even a private insurance plan through a state health care exchange (these are not insurers themselves, but entities that attempt to promote insurance transparency and accountability) if that plan covers abortions – even though most private insurance plans currently cover abortion.

It would require any insurer that operates under an exchange and covers abortion to also offer otherwise identical plans that exclude abortion coverage. The administrative costs of managing two near-identical schemes – where one would do, save this conservative agenda – might well result in many insurers thinking it’s simply not worth the trouble to offer a plan that covers abortion.

Of course, consumers can join a plan that isn’t offered through an exchange. But because of the extra visibility of plans offered under an exchange, and the consumer protections ensured by these exchanges, it seems likely that the only women who would do so are those who are well-informed and financially advantaged – raising the possibility of this bill introducing a bias against the poor, who need more protection than most.

Perhaps worst of all, the bill opens up an avenue for softening current requirements under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), signed into law by Reagan to protect poor and uninsured patients who need emergency care. The Protect Life Act would allow hospitals that are morally opposed to performing abortions to withhold treatment in cases where a woman requires an emergency abortion in order to save her life.

As Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) says of her own experience in this regard: “I was pregnant, I was miscarrying, I was bleeding. If I had to go from one hospital to the next trying to find one emergency room that would take me in, who knows if I would even be here today. What my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are trying to do is misogynist”.

Nobody should be required to die for the sake of someone else’s religious beliefs. And while I can understand the desire for abortion to be treated as a non-trivial matter, we shouldn’t satisfy this desire at the cost of eroding an existing and thinking person’s rights over her own body. While life might begin at conception, individual rights do not. This is the sort of case in which we might hope that public representatives attempt to fight the tide of populist sentiment, rather than allowing the most reactionary forms of that sentiment to stand the chance of influencing policy.

Ritual sacrifice and the ANC centenary

As submitted to the Daily Maverick.

Happy birthday, African National Congress. Congratulations on your centenary, and thank you for your tireless efforts to liberate South Africa from the unprincipled inequality that the majority of our population suffered under. As you enter your second century of existence, please consider eliminating various items of your own cultural baggage that are themselves unprincipled, and that become increasingly offensive within a modern democracy.

Besides the most obvious and most toxic tendencies, such as a patriarchal disposition that often seems inseparable from misogyny (as with President Zuma’s statements in his 2006 rape trial), or the apparent desire of some of your members to introduce new forms of racial nationalism, you could perhaps start with something small.

Small, but still meaningful, in that it would demonstrate not only a concern for the suffering of sentient creatures, but also an awareness that actions should be justifiable on objective evidence and impartial reasoning – and that nothing can be justified by an appeal to cultural traditions alone, no matter how longstanding those traditions are.

Please think about whether the 21st century is still an appropriate time to be slaughtering animals in rituals such as ukweshwama. I do understand that killing a bull or an ox with a spear is a deeply symbolic act, and that these non-human animals are not simply meat, but are instead signifiers of things like prosperity, or devices by which you attempt communication with ancestors.

My understanding here is of course not a lived one, and is no doubt incomplete. But you surely know as well as I that prosperity begins with gainful employ, and that the bread and circuses nature of some of what went on in Mangaung are a time-honoured (and no doubt useful) way of distracting those who don’t have jobs from that uncomfortable truth. These rituals unite, placate, and give hope for a future that might escape resembling the past.

Hopefully, you’re also aware that your ancestors are in fact dead and no longer capable of interceding on your behalf, no matter how many animals are slaughtered. Again, paying one’s respects to the dead is something we can all understand – but causing another animal to suffer as a method for doing so requires a justification beyond the simple assertion of cultural habit.

As I’ve said before, defending a practice on grounds of culture alone offers a slippery slope towards not being able to condemn anything at all. And we’d like to be able to condemn some things that are part of some cultures, like racism or sexism. We’d like to be able to say they are wrong – not simply illegal or unconstitutional.

So what else stops outsiders such as myself from saying that it’s wrong for President Zuma to have participated in the ritual killing of a black bull earlier this month, during the ANC’s centenary celebrations? The argument can’t end with silencing any opposition, simply on the grounds that they aren’t themselves part of the culture in question.

Perhaps those of us on the outside can’t say it’s wrong to stab a bull with spears, or (in more enthusiastic versions), to rip out its tongue and tear out his eyes. At least Zuma didn’t attempt to have sex with the bull, as Swaziland’s King Mswati is recently alleged to have done. Not simply because we don’t understand, but because we’re being inconsistent.

Or so one claim goes: those of us who eat meat cannot judge these rituals as wrong, because of our own complicity in needless suffering via the industrial farming of non-human animals for food. But this appears to privilege the relativistic defence of the argument from culture, in that it is possible to be a less or a more compassionate meat-eater, whereby those who are concerned with suffering can attempt to source their meat from farms which try to minimise it.

And even for the suffering that can’t be avoided in an omnivorous diet, there is still a noticeable difference between killing something slowly, tormenting it with the pointed end of a spear in a drawn-out ritual, and putting a bolt through its brain for the purposes of securing dinner. The former exhibits a bloodlust, the latter a dietary preference.

Wally Serote was quoted in the Mail&Guardian as saying “We spill the blood of these animals in the hopes that our ancestors will help us prevent spilling human blood in the future”. But what will stop us from spilling human blood in the future cannot be our deceased ancestors. It can only be the examples that they have set, and the lessons we can learn from those examples.

Perhaps we can best avoid spilling human blood in the future by continually moving toward a future in which needless suffering is always to be avoided, and in which we make our choices based on reasons that would be considered defensible, if not always acceptable, to any impartial observer. The ritual slaying of non-human animals, by contrast, is an artefact of the past.

Cultures can and frequently do change, even though these changes are sometimes slow to occur. And attempts to change them from the outside are typically doomed to failure, especially because they might be difficult to understand from a distance. In the 2009 case brought against King Goodwill Zwelithini, KwaZulu-Natal Premier Zweli Mkhize and others by Animal Rights Africa, Judge Nic Van der Reyden said it was difficult for him to rule on the matter of ukweshwama as the ritual went to the heart of Zulu tradition.

And so it does, as evidenced again in Mangaung last week. But the fact that these rituals are not proscribed by law does not mean we should endorse them, simply through a desire to appear politically correct. For those who engage in these rituals, their legality means they are permissible – not that they are necessary, or even appropriate.

If they are not appropriate, discovering this requires giving it some thought – not simply asserting the privilege of culture, but rather, debating the issue in order to determine which cultures happen to have gotten this one right, and whether the others shouldn’t consider changing their minds.

Brief thoughts on Jack Bloom

While I’ve previously commented on the illiberal nature of some of Helen Zille’s recent public utterances, at least she’s mostly kept her personal religious beliefs out of the equation. Sure, they no doubt inform her conservative moral stance, but her arguments and proposed interventions are nevertheless supported by arguments (regardless of your, or my, views on the quality of those arguments).

By contrast, Jack Bloom (DA Leader in the Gauteng legislature) seems to have no qualms in putting God at front and centre as a potential answer to South Africa’s ills, regardless of the diversity of belief among those who voted for his party (not to mention a large number of those who work for his party). In fact, God seems to have been here all along, not only facilitating the “transition from Apartheid”, but also working abroad in spurring the abolitionist movement against slavery, and inspiring people to formulate the “democratic concepts that led to the American Revolution”.

There’s no question that Bloom is sincere, and that he believes religion can play a role in encouraging people to think about their moral obligations. Sadly for those of us who think morality can only be principled if also secular, he’s in agreement with the DA’s general position here, where the party says that religion “should serve as a moral and spiritual inspiration“.

But even this view (the mistaken one, that morality and religion are easy bedfellows) is at least comprehensible, given that our country is mostly religious. Comprehensible, not reasonable, because if we need more prayer and less politics (as Bloom argues), surely the ACDP would have a far higher share of the votes?

What’s most egregious about Bloom’s opinion piece is that he by and large simply makes things up as he goes along, plucking historical events out of the timeline and – without any evidence (unless you count dubious correlations as evidence, which you shouldn’t) – attributes them to prayer and religion. It’s true that Lanphier drove a large Christian revival movement in the US during the mid-1800’s, yes, but to say that it was the Christianity – rather than basic human compassion or economics – that informed the abolition of slavery is an entirely circular argument, which assumes what it purports to demonstrate.

The American Revolution – also offered by Bloom as evidence for the power of prayer – seems more plausibly explained by something like the first 13 colonies revolting against rule by the British Empire, regardless of whether some or many the revolutionaries were religious. Their desire to be free doesn’t need religion to make sense, and it seems entirely spurious – and again circular – to use this as evidence for us needing more prayer and less politics.

And then of course there’s the elephant in the room: namely, that the data overwhelmingly suggest that on any benchmark of morality you care to pick, secular countries usually outperform religious ones. Corruption? Check. Divorce rates? Check. Crime? Check. Do a comparison for whatever measure you like using something like Google’s public data explorer, or read a simple and short book like Sinnott-Armstrong’s Morality without God.

One of the saddest aspects of public utterances like this from DA leaders, for me, is the fact that the DA has one clear advantage over other contenders in the political arena: the effective, and entirely pragmatically motivated, delivery of goods and services. That’s their clear competitive advantage, and the drum they should be beating more loudly than any other. But when a DA official – and a highly placed one at that – tells us that he hopes to outsource his job to God (at best) or collective insanity (at worst), it only reinforces the fear that populism is taking the place of common sense.

Bloom closes his piece with “maybe if we all prayed more the social change we desire will happen”. Seeing as all the existing studies of prayer’s efficacy show no effects (or in at least one case, negative effects), don’t hold your breath.

Edit: This post as well as a reply from Jack Bloom can be found on PoliticsWeb, where you’ll also find some entertaining comments. Also see another Christian perspective from Jordan Pickering.

 

Reasons for optimism in 2012

Earlier this year, I was asked to contribute to Cosmopolitan magazine’s January edition – 50 Things to be Grateful For (or to Look Forward To) in 2012. Here’s what I said:

When we think about the evolution and development of society, we often emphasise competition rather than cooperation. But nature – including our natures – is only partly described by Tennyson’s famous description of it as ‘red in tooth and claw’. We also evolve through cooperation aimed at finding better ways to live, to educate, to govern and communicate. It’s worth highlighting three aspects here of relevance to South Africans.

The first, relevant to all humans, is that we seem to be getting less violent. Kurt Schock’s 2005 book Unarmed Insurrections, and more recently Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels Of Our Nature: How Violence Has Declined present compelling cases for the notion that the past few decades have seen a substantial shift from away from war and towards resolving differences in less destructive ways.

The second, related to the first, is the rise of civil society as a force in accomplishing these resolutions. In South Africa, the Right to Know campaign has reminded South Africans that they can make a loud enough noise for government to be forced to pay attention. Elsewhere, tyrannical regimes are even being caused to fall, partly as a result of this (usually) nonviolent form of people’s power, as in the so-called Arab Spring.

And finally, we shouldn’t forget that a peaceful and prosperous future is only possible if we empower everybody to determine the course of their own lives, and help them develop the resources to do so. A vital foundation for having such control is education especially for women, who have historically suffered a disproportionate share of social inequality – often propped up by high fertility rates and low levels of economic agency. While readers of Cosmopolitan will no doubt be less affected by these factors than many other women, the welfare of our fellow citizens affects us all through impacts on government spending and social harmony (amongst other things). It is thus immensely heartening to note that while still unacceptably high, literacy rates are steadily increasing, and fertility rates are falling.

We have a long, long way to go, but it’s not only Polyannas who dare to imagine that they see light at the end of the tunnel.

There are of course countless reasons for little or no optimism. But seeing as those are undoubtedly all over the news as per usual, I’ll leave it there, and wish you all a good year.

What happened to Plan A, Obama?

As submitted to Daily Maverick.

The man who said “We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost” in his inaugural address seems to have left the building. The building in question is the White House, and the man is of course President Obama.

We can hope that his absence is temporary, intended merely to provide for potential excursions into the hearts and minds of some Republican or undecided voters. But his endorsement of the decision to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to allow “Plan B” (also known as the “morning-after pill”) to be sold over the counter to young teenagers rather than by prescription seems little more than a violation of that pledge to respect science.

Instead, he’s kowtowing to moral conservatives, alarmed at the prospect of their teenage daughters having sex. Seeing as many of these conservatives are equally fond of taking life guidance from religious texts, this is also another step back from the reassuring name-checking of “non-believers” in that same inaugural address.

Plan B is not an abortion pill, nor is it related to RU-486. The 1.5 milligrams of progesterone it contains helps to prevent ovulation and makes the lining of the uterus less hospitable to a fertilised egg. As the New York Times rightly points out, “this latter effect — shared by all hormonal and intrauterine contraceptives — makes it anathema to anti-abortion activists”.

Anti-abortion activists are perhaps unlikely to be voting for Obama in large numbers in any case. This is, after all, the President who shortly after taking office lifted the Reagan, then the George W. Bush, ban on federal funding for international health groups who support abortion rights. (The ban was briefly reversed by president Clinton before being reinstated by Bush.)

Then again, the man who campaigned as a pro-choice candidate did later sign an executive order ensuring that the healthcare law of 2010 would maintain the ban on federal money being used to pay for abortions (except in cases of rape or incest). So while it’s perhaps the case that his stance on abortion ends up evening out in terms of effects at the ballot box, this particular decision nevertheless stands out for its sacrifice of principles for potential political gain.

I say this for two reasons: first, this is the only time that an American Secretary of Health and Human Services has overruled an FDA recommendation. While the Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, is the one who made the decision to do so, it’s clear that the decision was endorsed by Obama himself. A White House statement last week said:

The reason Kathleen made this decision is that she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going to a drug store should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could have an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.

With eleven months to go before the US Presidential elections, the unprecedented overturning of an FDA recommendation is difficult to understand as anything more than an attempt to reassure conservatives that Obama is sympathetic to that nebulous concept of “family values” (which, like the term “neo-liberal”, seems in cases like these to mean whatever you do or don’t like about what the other guy is doing).

Second, the FDA recommendation appears to be well thought-through, making a principled objection to allowing over the counter sales of Plan B difficult to sustain. The need for drugs like this is clear in that the US has the highest teen pregnancy rates of any industrialised nation. Plan B is already available without prescription for women over 17, and by prescription for younger females.

The FDA’s proposal was for the drug to be available without prescription for younger teenagers also. It should of course go without saying that Plan B does not induce teenagers to desire having sex – many or most of them have that desire in any case, and would already have acted on it if they were trying to get hold of the drug in question . Furthermore, while making the uterus less hospitable to a fertilised egg could induce an abortion, the pill only lowers your chances of becoming pregnant to one in 40 (compared to one in 20 for unprotected intercourse), making it implausible that teens will use Plan B as licence for spontaneous orgies.

Sibelius’s claim is that we can’t be sure whether Plan B has harmful effects on eleven-year-olds, who can of course also fall pregnant. And naturally there might be risks. But in this case, we’re speaking of a drug which the FDA’s panel of experts regards as safe, and of which the assistant dean at the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy says: “very few medications are this simple, convenient and safe”.

A double-standard, informed by a moral panic around teens having sex, is clearly at play. Former F.D.A. assistant commissioner Dr. Susan Wood points out that drugs like acetaminophen (an analgesic found in Tylenol and many other over-the-counter medicines) can be fatal, but had not been specifically studied for effects on 11-year-olds, despite being potentially far more dangerous to them. She asks “why are contraceptives singled out every single time when they’re actually far safer than what’s already out there?”

We can of course also ask whether pregnancy itself is riskier to an 11-year-old than Plan B is. We can ask whether any of the people who might be heartened by this overrule, and Obama’s endorsement of it, were ever likely to vote for him in any case. More pertinently, we can perhaps ask what happened to the man who promised to restore science to its rightful place, and how did he become the man who seems willing to play politics with the bodies of the next generation of voters, for the sake of hypothetical sympathies from the current generation?

Sometimes we’re just like the rest of us

As submitted to Daily Maverick

We’ve read plenty of opinion in Daily Maverick on Premier Zille and HIV in recent weeks. And while encouraging thinking and debate on HIV and Aids is crucial, emotive topics such as this lend themselves quite easily to caricature – perhaps especially when protagonists in the discussion describe opposing views using hyperbolic labels such as “fascist”.

In Sipho Hlongwane’s column linked above, he asks whether Zille’s followers agree with her views on criminalising HIV and if not, why their opposition is mostly silent. While I reject the implicit association of a political party and its policies with one individual’s views (even if that individual is the party’s leader), I’ve expressed my opposition to those views in a previous column.

A broader issue raised by both the idea of criminalising HIV transmission as well as something like the Get Tested campaign is the extent to which scientific knowledge should inform policy. To put the issue that baldly might lead to some shaking of heads, in the sense that it might seem obvious and unworthy of debate that our scientific knowledge should inform policy.

But judgements often need to be made, and regardless of what the facts might be, we know that many – perhaps the majority – of votes are cast on the basis of perception. This is part of the reason that it becomes plausible to accuse a leader of populism, as some critics of Zille have done in this instance, or for her to accuse critics of fascism or “slacktivism” (itself often a grossly unfair charge, in that the only voice most of us have comes from behind our computer monitors, from where we are typically not able to control the budgets of state organs).

What I mean is this: On the one hand, the issue of whether criminalising HIV is a good idea or not could be regarded as a simple one, answerable though data telling us whether doing so results in fewer cases of transmission. With Get Tested, we could ask whether the campaign results in more people knowing their status, thereby potentially entering the treatment and counselling net. (Briefly, on the topic of Get Tested, I must regretfully withdraw some of my previously expressed support for the campaign, now that we know that baseline figures for testing rates pre-Get Tested are not available – meaning that we have no way of knowing how effective the campaign has been.)

On the other hand, the issues can never be this simple, because even if we all agree that control of the HIV epidemic is our most pressing concern, other values can nevertheless limit our pursuit of that goal. But what if the data did show that criminalising HIV transmission actually worked, or that Get Tested resulted in a 10% increase in the number of people who were tested for HIV? Would opposition to these measures cease?

My suspicion is that they will not, because we seem reluctant to trust the data to inform policy above all else, and because we’re unwilling to regard ourselves as one trivial data point in the aggregate. We’re of course not trivial to ourselves, and justifiably fear (for example) the imposition on our time that mandatory HIV testing would entail. At the same time, we might be perfectly happy for our sexual partners to engage in such testing, and to hypocritically insist that they do so.

In other words, we assign individual agency a greater value than we do the collective good. Which is as it should be much or even perhaps most of the time, at least if you subscribe to broadly liberal principles. But liberal-minded folk are still part of that collective, and can sometimes benefit more as individuals by focusing on the good of that collective, seeing as there are so many more of them (capable of doing you harm or good) than there are of you.

One particularly interesting test-case involving this conflict between perceived impositions on individual liberty versus the good of the collective is blood donation; and in particular the question of whether the South African National Blood Service and their international equivalents should accept donations of blood from homosexual men.

Gay men who have had oral or anal sex with another man in the last six months (whether protected sex or not) cannot donate blood in South Africa. In the UK, the deferral period for this category of donor was recently reduced to one year, while a lifetime restriction still applies in the USA for men who have had any sexual encounter with another man since 1977.

The phrase ‘category of donor’ is key to the issue I am raising here: We don’t easily think of ourselves as belonging to a category, no matter how clearly the data shows that people of type X, or who engage in behaviour Y, on aggregate merit treatment Z. This is the curse that actuaries have to bear: Their models that price our insurance premiums or motivate for medical interventions such as those mentioned above are in constant competition with the Pythonesque reality of all of us insisting in unison that “We’re all individuals”.

But laws or insurance premiums can’t be tailored to individuals. As much as we are individuals to ourselves, interventions intended to work on aggregate have to treat us as belonging to a category – and the question then becomes how those categories are defined. And here, we need to start thinking about the least wrong way of doing this, and perhaps being more willing to tolerate principled ways of treating us simply as a number.

Legislation based on one person’s moral viewpoint, in opposition to the available evidence, is far closer to most wrong than to least wrong. And science utterly divorced from morality offers its own nightmares, as a Twitter friend reminded me in a conversation on this topic. I’ll return to the specific case of blood deferrals for homosexual men – and other “categories” of human – in a future column.

For now, though, the concern is this: Seeing as most of us know little about science beyond misleading headlines, and our understanding of morality is largely subjective, perhaps more of us should be willing to respond as that lone voice in the crowd did in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. When Brian told the crowd “You’re all different!”, and they responded “Yes, we are all different!”, his muted response was simply “I’m not”. And neither, most of the time, are the rest of us.