Read more at The Daily Maverick.

It’s not simply your food that’s imperiled, but also your drinks, your toothpaste, and your shoes (I’m not sure about the last one). And judging by the alarmist rhetoric of people who like to talk about this sort of thing, it’s likely to kill you, while simultaneously supporting something referred to as the “nutritional-industrial complex”, thanks to subsidies given to American farmers to grow even more corn from which to make our shoes. I’m sure there are real issues here, and that many of the political and economic concerns people have around food production are legitimate. But underlying those concerns is perhaps a broader concern – that of H.Sapiens once again finding someone to blame for their choices. Whether it’s Laura Ripley, who eats plenty of crisps and chocolates because she “emotionally [doesn't] always feel like eating an apple“, smokers who want to sue tobacco companies for their cancer, or morons who spill hot coffee on themselves and think it’s someone’s fault that the coffee was hot, resulting in all Americans now having to drink lukewarm coffee.

On the food side, Michael Pollan is of course the high priest of the campaign against high-fructose corn syrup. I must confess to having read, and enjoyed, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but judging by snippets from a couple of interviews in Democracy Now, corn syrup must also either rot your brain or turn you into a marketing uber-guru. His new book, Food Rules, is currently number 7 on Amazon’s sales charts, despite it being (by all accounts) a rewrite of his In Defense of Food, but with a larger font and more whitespace. But that has not stopped hundreds of thousands of disciples queuing to pay to read homilies like:

• Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
• Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can’t pronounce
• The whiter the bread, the sooner you will be dead
• Don’t buy any food you see advertised on television

Of course, many of his principles have an underlying justification, and the 64 rules offered are meant to provide heuristics for a healthier life – but they still sound really stupid. The second rule I’ve quoted, for example, includes an injunction that would prohibit illiterate people from eating anything at all. As for my great-grandmother, I have little idea what she may or may not have recognised as food, but imagine I’m safe if I stick with lamb, steak, bread and potatoes. Who knows.

More concerning – and this should be a concern for Pollan also, seeing as The Omnivore’s Dilemma encouraged us to think more critically about what we eat – these principles are far more likely to lead to a slavish worship of rules rather than a thoughtful engagement with what we eat. I doubt, for example, whether most Pollan-ites would wonder why it is that lifespans in the developed world are increasing, despite the fact that we are apparently poisoning ourselves with corn syrup and other nasties.

Another (presumably) unintended consequence of Pollan’s interventions has been that some products are now marketed as actually being healthier because they contain real sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup as a substitute for sugar. He admits to feeling somewhat responsible for this, and tells us:

So I came up with a rule to avoid all these schemes, which is, don’t buy any food you see advertised on television. That is the only way to avoid their marketing cleverness. And that rule captures most processed food, because two-thirds of ad budgets go to heavily processed food. Only about five percent of ad budgets go to, you know, prunes or walnuts or real foods. So I’m hoping that your common sense will not—you know, will allow you not to tar them with the same brush.

I’m hoping that your common sense, and mine, will allow us to not feel the need for a book titled “Eating for Dummies” – although perhaps that very book is on the desk of a publisher somewhere, with an endorsement from Pollan himself. Because not everything can be controlled, and everything is not always someone else’s fault. In general, I think we have a pretty good understanding of what’s good for us and what’s not, and sometimes choose to ignore our better judgement in favour of flavor or convenience. Emotionally, we may not always feel like eating an apple, but that doesn’t mean that we currently believe it’s actually healthier to eat a cheeseburger.

If they went ahead and added such a channel, Hodgson says, they would be fueling the “fires of sexual abuse and exploitation“. The statement released by CAN reminds us of the high incidence of sexual violence against (especially) women and children, and claims that in this context, it is unacceptable for DSTV to introduce a porn channel. So Taryn is suggesting a causal connection here – that pornography is likely to increase sexual violence. She goes on to say that those “who ignorantly believe that there is no evidence that porn is harmful have imbibed the lies of the porn industry”, and that porn “violates women’s constitutional rights to dignity and equality”.

There’s plenty that’s wrong with this response, besides its hysterical tone. The first, and perhaps most obvious response, is to accept Hodgson’s premises for the sake of argument, and then to ask whether DSTV’s introduction of a porn channel would make any difference to the rates of sexual violence. Given that porn is freely available already, and that DSTV’s channel would require an extra subscription amount to be paid (which “perverts” could otherwise spend on a porn DVD or download), it seems unlikely that this channel will result in any significant increase in the amount of available porn. So the attack on DSTV is somewhat opportunistic, in that her focus should be on lobbying government to ban porn entirely, rather than railing against DSTV for trying to maximise its profits by giving viewers content that they may want.

Leaving aside the niceties of accepting her claims for the sake of argument, a related point to highlight in the above is that this channel will be operated on a strictly opt-in basis, meaning that it’s only people who want to watch the porn that will be able to, after having paid the required fees. Again, they can already spend that money to get porn. And if the response is that “innocents”, however defined, may be caught in the porn crossfire, well, that’s already the case as well. Rather rail against parents who leave their porn lying around, or who fail to use the existing parental controls on their DSTV decoders to block content they don’t want their kids to see.

Then, as for the claims regarding “constitutional rights to dignity and equality”, these same women (and men) have constitutional rights to freedoms of various sorts, including the freedom to (mostly) make their own moral judgments. If Hodgson wants to argue that the freedoms should step aside for her version of “dignity and equality”, she’ll first have to convince me that her version has any intellectual merit, rather than simply being derived from a bunch of Bronze-Age mythology.

Lastly, on the causal claims she makes: yes, some people may indeed have swallowed the claims of the industry, and have perhaps ended up believing that there is nothing problematic about the porn industry. And there are problematic things about the porn industry, as there are in any industry. We need evidence that the porn industry is intrinsically or necessarily harmful, rather than harmful in ways that can be limited or eliminated by robust legislation and enforcement of that legislation. And a generous respondent would say that the evidence for this is far from clear. But any sensible respondent would know that there is genuine evidence to be had here, and that we don’t have to rely only on porn industry “lies”. A cursory look at some of this independent research quickly reveals that the data suggest a negative causal relationship, ie. that the availability of porn may even decrease sexual violence.

I don’t think that porn is without its dangers, and agree with quite a bit of what Naomi Wolf says in New York magazine, where she argues that porn may be responsible for “deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as ‘porn-worthy’”. But to approach this complicated problem from the point of view that Christian values will save us from various social ills is stupendously naive, in that it ignores other data we have suggesting that the religious are no better off in terms of protecting what Hodgson refers to as the “basic building block of society” – the family. In fact, census data in the US tells us something quite contrary to that, in revealing significantly higher divorce rates among conservative Christians “than for other faith groups, and much higher than Atheists and Agnostics experience”.

Any Christians out there who want to try and save their marriages via porn, don’t be alarmed if DSTV don’t go ahead with this channel. There’s more than enough porn for you on the interwebs, along with all sorts of interesting stuff they call “science”.

I suspect that UCT student Chumani Maxwele might disagree, following the unlawful harassment and intimidation he was subjected to on the evening of February 10, when Jacob Zuma’s security detail thought they spotted him giving the finger to the presidential convoy. Maxwele allegedly had a bag pulled over his head, before being driven to a police station and interrogated as to his political views, and which side of the fence he was on at Polokwane, where the populist JZ dethroned the philosopher king Mbeki.

Fortunately for Maxwele, he could at least report that he was an ANC member, and thereby save himself from the waterboarding and fingernail extraction that might have befallen him if he had confessed to supporting one of the opposition parties. But his support for the ruling party could not save him from interrogation, nor from the day he spent in a prison cell and the raiding of his house by plain-clothes police officers, who went through his personal diaries and university notebooks looking for incriminating details.

This hypersensitivity to perceived (Maxwele claims that he just “waved them away”) criticism is deeply troubling, as it demonstrates a lack of commitment to free speech, and to allowing dissent from the “official” view. And seeing as the official view seems to tolerate homophobia, and is not particularly sensitive to crime or HIV/AIDS, the criticism is likely to keep on coming.

Moments like these provide an opportunity for JZ and the ANC to demonstrate that South Africa is not just another country in Africa, where stereotypes (unfortunately, all too often true) regarding thug rule, cronyism and a lack of respect for democratic processes come easily to mind. In the case of the letters protesting crime rates and a lack of response from Government, the statement could have indicated concerns regarding crime, while still making the point that the letters need to be delivered in a way that meets security and other concerns. In the case of Maxwele, a statement condemning this sort of behaviour on the part of police would be welcome, and would go a long way towards damage-limitation.

But what we get is silence, or contemptuous hatemongering from the likes of Malema. As the cliche reminds us, respect needs to be earned – and in this case, not only is there little effort in that regard, but there has also been a steady erosion of any goodwill we might otherwise feel towards JZ, seeing as he seems to be constantly surrounded by scandal. A commenter by the name of Leopold has this to say, on Pierre de Vos’s Constitutionally Speaking:

Let’s start a movement in support of our constitution called the Civil Rudeness campaign, based on Ghandi’s idea of Civil Disobedience. Citizens will regularly line the president’s route to and from parliament and show his cavalcade the finger as they drive past. It will blossom into a national salute to any politician screaming past with his entourage as a civil assertion of our inalienable right to express ourselves freely.

He might just be on to something there.

UPDATE (19 Feb): According to the police, Maxwele has confessed and apologised for disrespecting JZ. Minister Nathi Mthethwa has said: “Let us lay this matter to rest, as the person concerned has now apologised.”

That’s not the point – Maxwele may have been rude, but the response by police constituted a worrying abuse of power. Whether or not Maxwele believes himself to have been in the wrong has no bearing on the wrongfulness of the actions of the police, and we still await an apology from them.

religion, particularly belief in a deity, is an incredibly useful concept the human mind uses to funnel its understanding of many issues into language which is not only powerfully symbolic, but also compact and economical. Finally, religion tightens the concept of duty due to the psychological implications (a la Pascal Boyer) of a personal god in relation to our intuitive psychology of each other.

In this way, atheist morality, at least all the one’s which I’ve seen, can get it right on the “rationality” part, but cannot gain in the public sphere due to lack of persuasiveness, and for very good reason: lacking the religious funnel means atheist morality cannot be used in quick and dirty situations where one person doesn’t necessarily know a great deal about the other person. This may be the reason why many regular people have a hard time even conceiving of morality without religion.

Sure, you can sub in some washed out humanism in place of religion, but again, I think to many people, even many education people, this concept just doesn’t provide all the pros of religion in funneling morality.

1. There’s a fair amount of descriptive truth to what Tom is saying. Many people do use religion in this way – this is of course an entirely separate issue from whether they should do so. The latter question would be answered by knowing which was the most optimal way to derive moral rules (in terms of their intelligibility, motivational force, outcomes, sustainability, coherence, etc.).

2. On his claim that religion provides us with a “compact and economical” way to understand issues: this seems false if we understand religion as a particular religious system, rather than a religious outlook more generally. Even within religious circles, endless debates occur around how to interpret sacred texts, and what the “right” way is of being a Christian, Jew, etc. So it’s not so much religion as what people understand by a given religion, in other words their interpretations of those scriptures, etc. So it’s the idea/structure/foundation of religion, rather than a particular religion itself that seems best connected to moral notions.

3. In cultures where religion is almost entirely absent from civic life, such as Scandiwegian cultures, people seem to have little difficulty in relating to each other on a moral level – in fact they often seem to do a better job of it than more religious cultures. So there seems to be no evidence that we lose any of these abilities when we drop the religious talk.

4. The religious foundation may still be there, in that religion used to be a strong cultural force in such nations. But it’s being sustained (effectively) non-religiously. Plus, we have plenty of evidence of moral interaction amongst non-human animals, with very limited cultures compared to ours, and presumably no religion at all.

5. The phrase “some washed-out humanism” is misleading and uncharitable. I don’t see any evidence that it’s been difficult to ground our standard moral beliefs in secular concepts like reciprocity, fairness, desert, etc. Of course, “washed-out” belief systems or ideologies exist, and they can be intellectually bankrupt whether religious or not. But this claim is too general.

6. Tom speaks of “all the pro’s” of religion in “funneling morality”. While I’m not dead sure what he intends “funneling” to mean, the pro’s are perhaps easily outweighed by the cons. First, for the obvious reason that religion rests on a (almost certainly) false belief in the existence of god, and second, because the various religions disagree with each other in offering moral guidance – so we can’t know which one to pick, and therefore we can’t know what to do morally. By contrast, grounding morality in evolutionary biology (or something else that we can use to test competing moral propositions) does allow for universal agreement (even if we never get there).

7. Tom says that “atheist morality cannot be used in quick and dirty situations”. Why not? Unless we are sure that the people we are having a moral encounter with happen to share the same religious outlook, religion is going to be little help in quick and dirty situations. Atheist morality, by contrast, will be appealing to something common to all humans (or sentient beings), and therefore seems to have the upper hand in these situations. This is of course only true if we care about the good – if we don’t, then religious morals may have the upper hand when treated as dogma, and applied unthinkingly, but then we may not end up doing good (plus we have the problems mentioned above, in terms of religions not necessarily agreeing with each other).

All that said, it’s undeniable that religion provides us with a useful ready-made consensus, and also with various short-cuts to making tough judgement calls, so long as we share the same type of religion. And that consensus, along with those heuristics, can sometimes result in actions that everyone is happy to call “good”. By contrast, it’s certainly possible that if we pull that rug out from under everyone’s feet (or, to use Dennett’s analogy, take away Dumbo’s magic feather), some people may take the absence of god or religion as an excuse to be evil.

But a) some people already use religion as an excuse to do evil, and b) we don’t have any evidence that people start doing more evil once they lose the religious grounding for their moral beliefs. So to the extent that it’s a risk, it seems to be one that’s well-worth taking. Progress is rarely easy, especially when it involves overturning centuries-old mistakes – but the difficult things are often the ones most worth doing.

While it may have been somewhat slow in arriving, the apology is welcome, and appreciated.

As mentioned earlier, there are a number of posts on the topic on Synapses, and you can search for “debate” at the top-right of your screen. For a summary of the essential details, this post would be helpful.
The text of the apology is pasted below:

Dear Mr Rousseau and the UCT Atheist and Agnostic Society

Jordan Pickering (who I understand you are acquainted with), contacted us giving us the background as to your withdrawal from the “blasphemy debate” last year.
I was not aware of the full details that he mentioned.

We apologise for the inaccuracies in our report of the event and for misrepresenting you. We will gladly correct the report.

I will urge Pastor Michael to send you an apology. I do agree with Jordan that Michael’s communication and conduct towards you was often deceptive, rude and unchristian.

However, please bear in mind that he is Congolese and English is probably his third language. He also has probably never had training in good communication skills. He did not communicate any of the points Jordan mentioned to us.

We were only informed of the withdrawal of Jacques Rousseau and Tariq Moosa by Michael from the debate an hour before.

We are open to rescheduling the debate on blasphemy and we are prepared to debate any other relevant issues in a fair and balanced way.

Yours Sincerely,

Taryn Hodgson
National Co-ordinator

Africa Christian Action

1. A statement dated February 3, in which JZ confirms his “love-child”, while berating us for caring about his private affairs (a useful deconstruction of this statement is offered here).

2. The leaking of some “evidence” on the same day which suggests that JZ and Sonono Khoza are in fact married, and that the existence of the most recent child does therefore not suggest JZ was cheating on his 37 other wives.

3. A further statement/apology dated February 6, in which someone finally cottons on to the fact that the man in question was elected without the moral currency or credibility which might otherwise allow us to respect his wishes in this matter, and that an apology might therefore be necessary.

4. Communication from god, reminding us that “faith dictated that he [JZ] be absolved“, and suggesting that we should “leave this episode behind us, regrettable as it is, and move on as a nation”.

God spoke through Ray McCauley’s National Interfaith Leadership Council (NILC), as she has tended to do since they beat out her previous spokespersons, the South African Council of Churches, in what must have been a rather difficult contest to arbitrate. I’ve discussed the NILC previously, and argued against the popular notion that religious groups like the NILC have any special claim to moral knowledge.

But this incident, and this President, is about more than simple moral issues. It’s also not simply about the convoluted definitions of “culture” we can come up with in order to justify doing whatever the hell we want. Normally, I’m a strong supporter of the idea that I don’t want or need my political leaders to be exemplars of moral virtue – their job is to offer political leadership, and I don’t really care what they do in their private lives.

However, cases like these do intrude into the public consciousness, and – when placed alongside rape trials, dodgy arms-deal allegations, shady friends, financial mismanagement, reckless sexual behaviour in a country blighted by HIV/AIDS and so forth – they do provide a fair amount of evidence of a lack of sound judgement, and a poor awareness of voter interests.

As mentioned earlier, I don’t care who JZ sleeps with, or what drugs he takes, or anything else to do with his real or imagined private life. I do care that political leaders think carefully about what they do, and that they have the intellectual capacity to realise the implications that their choices might have. JZ clearly lacks one or both of these abilities.

So, forgive him if you like. Pray about it if you think that will help, or eat a crystal (I think that’s how it’s supposed to work?). But forgiveness does not mean we should forget about competence – and in this case, have we not already forgiven enough incompetence?

As of January 1 2010, blasphemy is a crime in Ireland, with offenders liable for a €25000 fine. Later in January, Kurt Westergaard – one of those responsible for the infamous “Danish cartoons” – was attacked in his home by a knife-wielding fanatic. Closer to home, some readers of Sax Appeal may still harbour memories of the outrage provoked by the “blasphemous” content of Sax Appeal 2009, and some others (well, the same ones, probably) may currently be choking on their morning tea while trying to process the harms they believe themselves to be enduring as a result of the edition you are currently reading.

Well, good. If they splutter and cough for long enough, the next episode of Egoli or some such may just come along and distract them, and thereby save the rest of us from having to tolerate the harms and headaches of having to process the incoherent claims the faithful like to make, where omnipotent deities are suddenly – mysteriously – under threat as a result of some attempt at humour, no matter how feeble or sophisticated that humour might be.

In wars premised on ideology and dogma, our sense of perspective is often the first casualty. While nobody likes to be offended, having to endure a certain amount of offense is one of the prices we pay for living in a free society – and the same liberties that allow columnists to lampoon a belief that you hold dear are those that allow you to express those same beliefs freely. And given the tolerance awarded to metaphysics in our society, it might be true to say that for every homoeopathist, faith-healer, or quack of another sort, only half a joke is made at their expense – although I expect that this ratio overestimates the number of jokes we allow ourselves in these areas.

While it’s deeply offensive to me that some universities (not ours, thankfully) offer courses in things like homeopathy, or fail to censure staff who contribute to the spread of Bronze Age mythology in lecture halls, I don’t believe that I have any sort of rights or entitlement in terms of making them stop. As David Mitchell recently pointed out (borrowing from J.S. Mill):
“Let the idiots and bullies speak openly and they will be revealed for what they are!” is the idea. It’s a brilliant one and, in confident, educated societies, it almost always works – certainly much more often than any of the alternatives.

It’s true that some of the material published in Sax Appeal 2009 was offensive – given UCT’s professed standards, I would have hoped for the jokes to be cleverer. The concerns were however not about how funny the jokes were, but rather revolved around the idea that the jokes were taboo, in that they attacked some sacred cow or another. But our sense of what is – or should be – taboo cannot be trusted, as the arrogance implied by the position that your beliefs are beyond question eliminates the possibility of personal and social advancement.

When we find ourselves offended by something, we have three basic options. The first – and the one that seemed most prevalent following last year’s Sax Appeal – is to make the claim that the harms you feel are somehow privileged, and that others should respect your beliefs. But this response, if taken seriously, affords extra protection to those who complain the most or threaten the most violence. If the arguments for your position are sound, a more appropriate response might be to simply explain to the rest of us where we are going wrong – you can’t do yourself any favours in terms of persuading us by throwing your toys about.

Second, you can chose to ignore the offense, and simply hope that it goes away. It usually doesn’t, which brings me to the third response, which consists of realising that while people might sometimes be rude or offensive, this is an entirely separate issue from the quality of the ideas they express. Just as I have the option of responding to claims that offend, or simply strike me as bizarre, those offended by mockery of the things they hold dear have the same option.

Exercising this option has two clear advantages. It allows for the possibility of changing your own mind, in that the mockery might provoke debate and discussion about the motivations for causing the offense. It also challenges you to question the motivations for holding the very beliefs that have been mocked. Not allowing for these possibilities amounts to immunising yourself from correction, and that seems (to borrow a phrase from Christopher Hitchens) like “cultural and moral suicide”. It also seems like something that should have no place at UCT, or in the minds of the team who put together this year’s Sax Appeal.

* Having now bought the magazine, my piece isn’t in there – and neither is there much that could be considered offensive to anybody in the 2010 edition. It appears that the censors took their jobs quite seriously this year…