The TCD-sponsored public information symposium on genetics at the National Concert Hall this weekend is the very place where the Knew-Age NoKnowthings might well be making their presence felt in their customary manner - with a few highly scientific crop circles maybe, and possibly a sacrifice to Ceres, the corn goddess, perhaps before rounding off their appreciation of science by burning something that they don't understand. Nothing like a bit of sanctimonious destruction to make the heart feel good, as every stained-glass smasher during the Reformation or the French Revolution could assure you.
It was Heine who said where they burn books they will one day burn people. In Heine's time, knowledge existed solely in book form, and the first step in that lethal journey towards public disdain for life is disdain for that knowledge which protects civilisation from the dark and brutish side of our nature. Political nihilism towards books 60 years ago might not seem comparable to political nihilism towards science today: what each has in common is an idealised abstract of human nature, unrelated to the lived realities of human existence.
Pre-Christian
Surely you can't compare the virtuous protests of the self-styled "eco-warriors" with the Nazis? Outward raiments, and that very Germanic desire for forceful, singular leadership aside, have they not got a great deal in common? Do they not revere the pre-Christian, the pagan, the gods of woodland and of tribe? Do they not put their political agenda before the lives of others? Do the eco-fascists want to stop world hunger, or would they prefer to pander to whatever primal, science-hating urges are within their souls?
The precedent commonly argued against GM foods is the damage done by DDT. This is a classically first-world piece of racism, a parity-of-speciesism which regards the welfare of the honey buzzard on a par with that of a human being. DDT is not regarded in India or Africa as an evil: it is seen as the first of many scientific blessings, which, to be sure, had many unpleasant side-effects; but none of them remotely compared with the unspeakable horrors of those numerous insect-borne diseases which trapped entire civilisations in a culture of chronic illness, philosophic despair and mass premature death.
Science, blunderingly at first, but with more accuracy as time went on, has enabled entire continents leave truly blighted pasts behind them; and in enabling vast populations to survive the ravages of insect-related diseases, it was then faced with the moral duty for those people to be fed. This challenge it faced and met with the Green Revolution, a miracle which eco-fascists now denounce because its effect has been to favour the large producer over the small one.
Peasant existence
The idealised peasant is pretty standard political fare for zealots this century, as if the peasant existence intrinsically contains virtues the rest of us can only aspire to - such as, oh, rickets, impetigo, cyclical famine and every now and then a touch of infanticide as primitive population control.
Peasant food-production, like artisan production of fabrics or metals, is both primitive and inefficient. Can it be right that an inefficient class is guaranteed an existence and a market for its goods, even as vast populations regularly perish because those goods are not assuredly available when they are needed? And is not the exaltation of a peasant producer class at such a price not a semi-passive imitation of what totalitarian regimes did with their active extermination of particularly inconvenient tribes or classes?
What about Monsanto? Will it not have the world monopoly on this crop or that crop? You might have well asked in 1975 how on earth was IBM's control of the computer industry to be ended. Why 1975? Because that was the year Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft. Certainly, Monsanto are in it for the money - as I am writing this for the money. When we deny the profit motive, we return to the idealised deadly definitions of mankind, which invariably end in famine or war.
As for GM foods or medical products, I have no strong opinion either way, though I favour anything which will reduce human suffering; and were I a victim of diabetes, I would be heartily in favour of any genetic modification which enables human insulin to regenerate itself.
But purists ask: is it natural? Of course it's not. Was injecting pus from infected cows into early cases of smallpox (now an extinct disease) natural? Was it natural for Louis Pasteur to have injected tissue from the medulla oblongata of a rabid dog into nine-year-old Joseph Meister 114 years ago last July? The dog it was who died. Joseph did not.
Scientific inquiry
So, within the framework of the law, with the assent of law and our political institutions, and with all possible safety consonant with realistic scientific inquiry, reasonable people cannot object to investigation into both the advantages and the perils of GM. I know next to nothing about the entire process - as, I imagine, do all those fine people who have destroyed virtually our entire stock of GM-modified sugar beet. No doubt they, like everybody else, will be welcome at the international symposium, "Genetics: Its Impact on our Society" at the National Concert Hall next Sunday, October 10th. It lasts from 10 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., admission a mere £2. But please, eco-loons: this time, no petrol all the place.