Beyond Rivalry

Not sure why Booker-prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan (Amsterdam, Atonement, Saturday) was asked for his opinion on climate change policy and the new U.S. administration, but in this piece in the WSJ (8 Nov. 2008), he wrote this lovely bit:

 

"The contest for the presidency, like all elections, had the self-enclosed quality of a squash game, a chess match, a post-modern novel -- and this one was far better than most. While the candidates appeared to address an external reality, they were bound by strictly ethereal requirements: to cast spells on large crowds while seeming ordinary, to trample their opponent into oblivion while seeming pleasant, to be inspirational yet sensible, to avoid offending a score of sensitive constituencies, and, an old wizard's touch, to promise the electorate various gifts without further borrowing or raising taxes. ...

 

btw, McEwan argues that Obama must act decisively on climate change, taking advantage of the "unearthly powers" now attributed to him.

 

 

If you need to make a choice, don't worry so much about eating local food as about eating less meat, says this study (pdf), reported at Marketplace, and cited at Marginal Revolution, where Cowen offers his suggestions for non-meat meals:

 

"Maybe you don't like tofu but sardines are delicious, or use Goya small red beans with shredded Mexican cheese (even the Kraft package is decent) and ground chile on a corn tortilla.  Don't forget the lime on top."

 

 

We have long rented DVDs from a local independent source (semi-local: a 20-mile round trip) but a few weeks ago began renting through NetFlix as well, for videos the local store doesn't have and won't buy -- notably, Julia Child's "The French Chef" episodes, which our local DVD provider considers a "How-To" DVD and which I consider instructional humour. Julia Child is a trip. (How about a last-minute dinner party for 300 people?)

 

Anyway, in case you wonder whether it's more sustainable to rent locally or from a company like Netflix that mails DVDs direct, Slate's got the answers (although they compare NetFlix with Blockbuster, a chain). They look at transportation, packaging, and computer use.

 

Transportation: "Even just a two-mile drive to the video store will consume a few hundred times more energy than the Netflix delivery from a distribution center 200 miles away [ours is about 35 miles away]."

Computer Use: "30 minutes spent reordering your queue -- in a well-lit, climate-controlled room with the computer running -- will use far more energy than the actual Netflix delivery and about as much energy as it would take to drive your hybrid to a store a half-mile away." Does anyone spend 30 minutes on their queue?

 

Packaging: "It takes a significant amount of energy to make the lockable polypropylene case that you might get at a video store. ... And compared with a mail-order Tyvek sleeve, a video-store case takes up more space when it's shipped from the main distribution center."

 

(Previous posts on this topic: here and here.)

 

I'm into chapter 5 now (page 173) and have read chapter 3 twice. A lot of it still eludes me (the last time I read The Origin of Species was in high school), but here's what I've noticed:

 

Chapter 3, The Symbolic Species

 

This chapter, more than the others, is directly related to Darwin's theory of evolution, and concerns how the mimetic theory of culture parallels Darwin's theory of genetics as it also explores the evolution of mimetic theory and culture itself, the order in which things have occurred.

 

** "The theory of evolution seems to me quite powerfully sacrificial. ... Darwin ... stresses the importance of death just as much as the importance of survival. In some sense it is representing nature as a super-sacrificial machine...."

 

Girard agrees with sociobiologist E.O. Wilson that religion is adaptable: "I claim that religion protects men and societies from mimetic escalation. Religion has an adaptive value. But this is not enough: it is also the source of hominization, of the differentiation between animals and human beings, because ... through sacrifice it creates culture and institutions."

 

"One can argue that many groups and societies perished and were destroyed by lethal infighting, by the explosion of mimetic rivalry being unable to find any form of resolution. The scapegoat mechanism provided a fundamental contribution to the fitness of the group. This is the reason why such a practice is found throughout the world. This is the result of a form of systematic selection, which lasted thousands of years. It was the scapegoat mechanism, and subsequently religion, which provided that fundamental instrument of protection against natural instraspecific violence that any group of hominids [primates] is bound to trigger at some point for purely ethological [behavioural] reasons."

 

In other words, I think he's saying, the groups that didn't make it were those that didn't successfully scapegoat. Those that made it, did. Therefore, scapegoating persists as a behaviour, because it rendered groups that used it successfully fit enough to survive. 

 

The authors talk at some length about Konrad Lorenz's animal studies, which I do remember from college studies. The most interesting one to me here concerns geese behaviour:

 

"When two geese approach each other, showing signs of hostility, most of the time the common aggression is redirected and discharged against a third object. This redirection of aggressiveness has been 'crystallized' by evolution in an instinctual pattern which can create a bond ... through a kind of incipient scapegoating mechanism, even if it isn't proper to call it scapegoating since the third element often is an inanimate object. One can see here the first sketch of future scapegoating, very much in the sense of redirecting violence onto a third party. This observation, if correct, could account for the emergence of a bond among individuals who together scapegoat a third party, a victim. The redirection of the inner aggression of a specific group against an external element (or an internal element perceived as external which is expelled) creates a strong cohesion within the group itself." 

 

Soon afterwards, Girard reinforces this idea: "To have a common symbolic or real scapegoat is the most efficient mechanism to reinforce friendship."

 

There is much back and forth about whether animals truly scapegoat, whether they exhibit the complete mimetic mechanism. In general, Girard says no -- though I'm not sure if it's because animals' brains aren't large enough, or they don't operate with symbols, or they didn't experience the crisis (the "centre of signification") necessary to trigger it all (all three ideas are given some play, it seems) --  though Girard admits that "there are forms of collective violence present in these groups [of chimpanzees]. There are also forms of hunting with ritual aspects. Therefore, there are clearly signs of the emergence of the scapegoat mechanism. This is another stage of the long evolutionary process that led to the scapegoat mechanism."

 

There is some discussion on the movement from the violent, crisis event to the symbolicity (their word) of it in ritual -- went over my head for the most part.

 

** Then discussion of language and whether language precedes myth or myth language.

 

Girard's feeling is that "[L]anguage and the symbolic sphere could only be generated by a systemic 'catastrophe' .... One cannot explain taboos, prohibition and the complexity of symbolic exchange systems simply via biological explanations of the emergence of unselfish behaviour. There must be that upheaval there, which forced the change in behaviour. ... The same reasoning can be applied to language. The only thing that can produce such a relational structure is fear, fear of death. If people are threatened, they withdraw from specific acts .... Prohibition is the first condition for social ties and the first cultural sign as well. Fear is essentially fear of mimetic violence; prohibition is protection from mimetic escalation. All these incredibly complex phenomena were triggered by the founding murder, by the scapegoat mechanism."

 

Much of the rest of this chapter and the next  is Girard's defence of the founding murder as the only possible trigger.

 

** Next, they tackle the origins of animal domestication, which Girard, apparently in contrast to everyone else, says came about through sacrifice and not the other way around (people didn't first domesticate animals and then think to sacrifice them): "I believe that one starts treating animals like human beings in order to sacrifice them. [Doesn't bode well for my dog.] ... [T]here is no incentive directly related to domestication and its advantages since no one knows about them at the start, and they will only become evident as time goes by." Worse, to begin with, animal domestication is anti-economical. Girard concludes that "[d]omestication could not have been foreseen, nor even planned!" In parts of the world where there were no animals that could be domesticated (apparently some culture tried polar bears ...), "there were also massive ritual killings of human beings, because the process of animal substitution in ritual sacrifices never occurred." 

 

The animal makes a good ritual substitute for the human because the best sacrificial victims are both insiders and outsiders. Domesticated animals are not quite humans but are enough insiders to work.

 

** On to the origins of agriculture. "What" says Girard "could have given to the human being the idea of putting seeds into the ground? They buried them hoping they would resurrect like the community as a result of sacrifice -- and they weren't wrong." Apparently agricultural societies had a lower quality of life than hunter-gatherers, working harder for the same amount of food, less healthy, prone to famine, etc., so "why was this behaviour reinforced (and hence selected for) if it was not offering adaptive rewards surpassing those accruing to hunter-gathering or foraging communities?" 

 

Girard thinks it "became reinforced because ... it has a sacrificial origin. The hunter-gatherers started to settle permanently because of the increasing importance of ritual sites and the complexity of the rituals of which they were part, and which in turn produced, as I said, the domestication of animals and the discovery of agriculture." While climate change and soil conditions, etc., were also important, discovery around the place of sacrifice was most important.

 

I'm not entirely persuaded. Couldn't a group have another reason for either remaining in one place for a while or for wanting to do so, and couldn't they chance upon the planting of a seed (tossing a seed that plants itself is not an uncommon thing to do), noticed it, and used that knowledge? Maybe it wasn't economical at first, but if the group wanted or needed to remain in this area, for some reason (a bunch of the group sick, someone important disabled, weather or natural barrier creating an obstacle to moving, and so on) they could have developed the practice. I'm more persuaded of the animal domestication hypothesis, which I realise rests on the same foundations, and yet sacrifice seems more directly tied to animals than to plants.

 

** And on to the origin of language. Eric Gans, a former student of Girard's, proposes a theory of human origins in which language -- or the giving of a sign, a given and received communication of designation, to another -- resolves the mimetic crisis rather than sacrifice and scapegoating. Basically Gans posits that at some point, at a moment when all hands reach for the same thing, the sight of the others reaching deters each from grasping it. Thus the desired object becomes a "repellent, sacred force" that "converts the gesture of appropriation into a gesture of designation, that is, into an ostensive sign ... that comes to designate the object rather than attempting to capture it."

 

It sounds plausible until you read Girard's rebuttal, which is simple and experientially verified, at least for me: " In order to believe it, you must believe that there has been violence before.The previous violence has produced fruits of awareness of its consequences," hence everyone hangs back.

 

Girard sees this as another "rhetorical manoeuvre to negate the primacy of religion in human culture."

 

I feel like I'm typing the whole chapter onto this screen but really, there is much more I don't understand or don't have strong interest in, and even the stuff that I'm noting here I'm doing so only cursorily. 

 

Chapter 4 next.

 

 

 

 

 

Katherine Kinkade died on 3 July, at age 77 of cancer (some sources says breast, some say bone), at the commune she founded 40 years ago, Twin Oaks, on 123 acres near Charlottesville, Virginia. She sounds like an interesting woman:

 

"She made enemies. Her impatient style did not always sit well with community members fond of endless discussion and group consensus. Some regarded her as power-hungry and intimidating. In truth, she was more pioneer than hippie, an awkward fit wherever she went, too wayward for conventional society and too managerial for the chaotic 1960s.

 

"'She was a tough cookie,' Leslie Greenwood, a commune member, wrote on a memorial Web site dedicated to Ms. Kinkade. 'She was not fond of group hugs, had no interest in alternative medicine, nature-centered activities or tofu lasagna.'"

 

 

In later years, she briefly lived in Boston and worked as a computer programmer there, returned to Twin Oaks, sang in a church choir (though she's an atheist), and in 2000 moved into a house her daughter bought her in Mineral, Va, where "she rescued stray cats and talked to her flowers," among other things.

 

WaPo obituary.

 

(Photo credit: Twin Oaks Community)

Another idea I have for an occasional series: News stories in which some group is labelled 'the victim' of a group, abstraction, or individual. I think it's educational and interesting to explore who or what are identified as victims and perpetrators in the media.

 

Recently,

 

American people are the victims: "The whiners are the leaders. Hell, the American people are victims. ..." [Said by political advisor and former Congressman Phil Gramm, reported today]

 

Palestinians are the victims of Jewish persecutors: "Touring the somber [Holocaust] museum, it occurred to [Israeli-Arab lawyer] Mahameed that 'we Palestinians are the victims of the terrible things that were inflicted on the Jews by the Holocaust.' [8 July; the article is actually eye-opening, moving, IMO]

 

Bass and salmon are the victims of mismanagement: "Striped bass are the victims of gross state and federal mismanagement of Central Valley rivers and the Delta, as are collapsing Sacramento River chinook salmon populations." [8 July]

 

Tuna are the victims of their own success: "Chronically overfished, Mediterranean tuna are the victims of their success with fish lovers, especially with the passion for sushi." [3 July]

 

Sociopathic politicians, celebrities and sports figures are the victims: "For all the public examples of bad behavior set by politicians, celebrities and sports figures, many young people see these individuals for exactly what they are: spoiled, overrated sociopaths who are the victims of an overly indulgent, disengaged society in search of civilization." [7 July]

 

Pakistani college women are the victims of cell phone use: "Mostly intermediate students are the victims of mobile mania"  [8 July]

 

San Diego stores are the victims of shopping cart theft and displacement: "The stores are the victims, Councilman Jack Feller said, and they aren't the ones who should be punished." [12 June]

 

and finally, the word "victim" isn't used but it's sure implied in this odd story [7 July]:

 

"A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.

"County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

"Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections 'has become a black hole' because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

"Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud 'Excuse me!' He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a 'white hole.'

"That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy."

 

wtf? 

 

 

Interactive map to show what's fresh in your state, by month.  How come New Hampshire and Vermont have artichokes in June but Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut don't? 

 

(via Rebecca)

 

>> SACRALISING DRESS

 

This article at Anderson Cooper's 360 Blog by a former female Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint, interested me because it seems to concern sacralising behaviour (related post).

 

"Women lost a lot of rights in 1953. They no longer had any say in who they could marry nor could they choose how to dress. The way this was spun was that since the community had come through the raid so successfully, it was now ready to practice a higher form of God's law. (God is always the explanation when things get more restrictive; change is presented as a prize for being righteous and faithful. We were always told we were worthy of a higher law.)"

 

She reiterates the idea a little further down the page:

 

"The clothing also desexualizes women. Our chests are flattened out and any natural shape is hidden.

"We were always told by Warren Jeffs when the dress and choices became more restrictive that is was a sign that 'God loves you so much he wants you to be more like him.' (We believed Warren received direct revelations from God.) What we were losing were rights and any sense of control over our lives and all individuality."

 

As mentioned in a study of religious and secular communes in the previous blog post,  the study's authors concluded that "ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community -- what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified."

  

>> LIVING CLOSE TO NATURE = POVERTY AND MISERY, or ENRICHING RELATIONSHIPS with earth and others? Or both?

 

"Couldn't God Have Designed A Gentler Universe?" by Jesuit astronomer Guy Consolmagno SJ at Thinking Faith: The Online Journal of the British Jesuits got my attention because I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea for a bookgroup, which is about American Greg Mortenson's mission to build schools in Islamic countries (Pakistan and Afghanistan). Twice in that book there's a sort of teaser for a comparison-contrast argument that never actually happens. Early in the book, the question is raised whether the rural mountain town that Greg is so taken with is a paradise, because the people seem happy, they are welcoming, they smile a lot, they are patient and accepting of what happens, they have leisure time, they have close relationships with each other and live intimately with the land and seasons, or a miserable backwater, because the people have high rates of goiters, cataracts, malnutrition and infant mortality, almost no access to health care, live in frigid temperatures for half the year, and work very hard to survive. Later in the book, there is a moment's musing about a 'hard' but 'pure' life of such people, and what Western technological influences like roads, bridges and buildings will do to the close relationship those people have to their land.

 

Consolmagno's words resonated with that in my mind:

 

"There's an odd divide in Western culture nowadays. We've become separated from nature. We have air-conditioned homes, air-conditioned cars, air-conditioned offices, air-conditioned lives. [In far northern climes, substitute 'well-heated' for air-conditioned.] We spend most of our lives wrapped in cotton wool. If we feel pain, we want it to stop, now.

"Well-lit streets at night that mean that most people never see the Milky Way -- or at least not until the lights go out. After the Northridge earthquake in southern California in January 1994, the phones at the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles started ringing off the hooks as people wanted to know why the earthquake made the sky look so scary. The earthquake struck at 4:30 a.m., while it was still dark outside. When people rushed through their blacked-out homes to the outdoors, a million people saw something in the skies over Los Angeles they'd never seen before: stars. And they were terrified. ...

I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Africa.I saw there how we used to live, back before flush toilets and neon lights. People lived close to nature, in a way that hardly anyone in America does anymore. And I learned in Africa that there’s a word for people who live close to nature: starving.

Our lifestyle puts a heavy toll on the environment; but so does the lifestyle of the desperate people in Kenya or Haiti, who strip the forests bare in their day-to-day struggle to stay alive. So I don’t necessarily mean to disparage our cotton-swabbed existence. My point is just to point it out, because the shock we experience when a natural disaster hits us is precisely the wrench of being jerked out of our cotton-wool womb and forced to confront nature. Nature can be hostile as well as beautiful; nature gives us food and gives us death."

 

The rest is worth reading, though no answers are given.

 

>> Two articles on the HIGH PERCENTAGE OF IMPRISONMENT in the U.S.:

 

Adam Liptak in the NYT (23 April) writes "Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations'" and Marie Gottschalk writes "Two Separate Societies: One in Prison, One Not" in the WaPo (15 April), both on the same topic.

 

Gottschalk points to a recent Pew Center study which showed "that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison" and one in every 32 adults is or has either been "incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision." The U.S. incarceration rate "is 5 to 12 times that of other industrialized countries as well as being the highest in the world." The rate is ten times higher for African-American men: One in 9 young black men is imprisoned.

 

Liptak elaborates on the stats: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes --  from writing bad checks to using drugs --  that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations."

 

Gottschalk, citing hearings held by Senator James Webb (D-Va) last October, says that the increases in incarceration are not "driven so much by an increase in crime as by the way we chose to respond to crime," with tougher sentencing guidelines. Her main point is that "the leading presidential candidates have not identified mass imprisonment as a central issue, even though it is arguably the country's top civil rights concern."

 

Liptak points to more reasons than simply tougher sentencing guidelines for the high U.S. incarceration rate (which, he notes, seems to have led to decreases in crime, although Canada's crime has likewise decreased with no concurrent increase in incarceration rates), and he discusses each factor separately:

 

"Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime [a murder rate 4 times higher than many Western European nations], harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges -- many of whom are elected, another American anomaly -- yield to populist demands for tough justice."

 

Is this high rate of imprisonment our country's nuanced form of mob justice?

 

Concerning the factor of "American temperament," Liptak notes that "some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates. 'Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,' wrote Michael H. Tonry, a professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota, in Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective (2007).

"'It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,' Mr. Tonry wrote. 'Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.'"  

 

>> WHY BOTHER WITH ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY? 

 

That's what Michael Pollan ask, and answers, in his article titled "Why Bother" in the NYT Magazine (20 April). Pollan examines some of the obstacles and justifications for doing nothing, or very little:

 

Why bother to take any steps in the direction of reducing my footprint on the Earth "when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who's positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I'm struggling no longer to emit." 

 

And even if, for the sake of virtue, "I decide I am going to bother, there arises the whole vexed question of getting it right. Is eating local or walking to work really going to reduce my carbon footprint?" (Pollan points to studies that show they may not. )

 

"If determining the carbon footprint of food is really this complicated, and I've got to consider not only 'food miles' but also whether the food came by ship or truck and how lushly the grass grows in New Zealand, then maybe on second thought I'll just buy the imported chops at Costco, at least until the experts get their footprints sorted out."

 

His argument for making our daily, individual lives more sustainable is this: 

 

"Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: 'Personal choices, no matter how virtuous, ... cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.' So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle -- of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences. "

 

Pollan cites Wendell Berry, who 30 years ago "was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives -- the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the 'split between what we think and what we do.' For Berry, the 'why bother' question came down to a moral imperative: 'Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.'" 

 

----

 

Much more to Pollan's article (specialisation, hidden energy costs, why we should take individual steps anyway), but where this last bit leads me is back to a perhaps romantic notion of the 'purity' -- or at least the honesty -- of living life close to the land, and that state of being contrasted to the cultural free-floating angst, the urge to crime and urge to punishment (leading to high rates of incarceration and a punitive justice system), the need to sacralise and the need to artificially create meaning that we find widespread in our culture, where we are so much more likely to be living without integrity, living "the best we can," as Berry says, in at least a veiled awareness of our own complicity in unsustainable living, in an unnecessarily harsh 'justice' system, in the war we are waging and its collateral damage as well as its intended damage to humans, other animals, and the Earth, and so on. We can watch reality TV, and it's an almost-but-not-quite successful effort to screen ourselves from Reality, from "our personal connection to what is wrong."

  

 

 

An article in Slate yesterday by Darshak Sanghavi (pediatric cardiologist and professor at U. Mass Medical School) asks why the U.S. and Europe focus our rhetoric and resources on some uncommon and/or unproven causes of cancer rather than trying to prevent and better screen for the many natural causes of cancer.

 

In part, he says, it's because of a popular (but false) motif, that "the natural world is less toxic and more healthful than the industrial one," so that avoiding cancer, it seems, can be accomplished by buying organic, unpasteurized, and more 'natural' foods and cosmetics:

 

"Unwittingly, we've seriously impeded cancer prevention with this not-so-useful distinction between the natural and artificial. It's distracted us from the uncomfortable truth that most cancers are caused by the natural environment around us. As a result, we expend great effort and ink on low-yield strategies to prevent cancer, even though the better ones lie within our grasp."

 

Sanghavi talks about some 'artificial' sources of very few cancers (asbestos, DES, Alar, and folic acid) and a few of the most common natural causes of cancer: UV-A rays of the sun, Helicobacter pylori bacteria, Hepatitis B, the human papilloma virus, and exposure to a mold product called aflatoxin. 

 

He ends by suggesting that we've been approaching cancer prevention as something within our individual control, just another consumer shopping challenge, when actually it's vaccines, large-scale agricultural reform, and regular screening that would reduce cancer deaths:

 

"Our scattershot approach to preventing cancer subscribes to the cult of personal responsibility, albeit with a recent eco-friendly twist: To really help themselves, goes the thinking, people must simply take charge of their health and avoid cancer-causing, artificial products. Somewhat insidiously, we're starting to believe that cancer mostly is prevented by informing individuals to change their consumption habits -- not by proactive, broad-based public-health measures like widespread vaccination or agricultural reform.."

 

 

Nicholas Kristof's column in the NYT today -- "Extended Forecast: Bloodshed" -- connects the killing of witches with the environmental affects of climate change:

 

"Here’s a forecast for a particularly bizarre consequence of climate change: more executions of witches.  As we pump out greenhouse gases, most of the discussion focuses on direct consequences like rising seas or aggravated hurricanes. But the indirect social and political impact in poor countries may be even more far-reaching, including upheavals and civil wars -- and even more witches hacked to death with machetes.

 

"In rural Tanzania, murders of elderly women accused of witchcraft are a very common form of homicide. And when Tanzania suffers unusual rainfall -- either drought or flooding -- witch-killings double, according to research by Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

"'In bad years, the killings explode,' Professor Miguel said. He believes that if climate change causes more drought years in Tanzania, the result will be more elderly women executed there and in other poor countries that still commonly attack supposed witches."

 

 

Kristof also looks at the strong relationship between economic hard times and lynchings, civil wars, and other forms of  violence against 'the other' who is judged to have caused the hardship.