Whether the Anti-GMO movement realizes it or not
Thomas Robert Malthus 1798 book, Essay on the Principle of Population, is today the guiding light for most of the opposition to GMOs. Malthus vision in 1798 was of a future world wracked by famine, disease, pestilence, warfare, and environmental catastrophe like the world that existed before the Enlightenment, all of the new disasters brought about by an increased human population. He saw humans in Biblical terms meaning humans were imperfect and unable to rise to the challenges facing society.
Never underestimate the power of the Motion Picture Industry and its effect on human beings, or misjudge the movies ability to stop humans from thinking critically and encourage us to just sit down on our backsides and “emote.” Today there is a whole genre of disaster films predicated on some version of Malthus' vision of a future filled with warfare, pestilence, starvation, and environmental disaster.
The 1973 flick Soylent Green first comes to my mind but there are others like the “Planet of the Ape” movies as well as my all time favorite, the 2006 film Idiocracy from 20th Century Fox. Idiocracy is a tail of the Earth 500 years in the future where Political Correctness has run amok leading to the Earthlings in 2494 irrigating their crops with a sport drink called Brawando, a Gator Aid like concoction whose salt content is killing the Earth's food crops and threatening a mass die off from starvation. It sure sounds to me like something that a scientific ignoramus would think to do because in the thinking of a scientific ignoramus, “If Brawando is good for you then Brawando irrigated food crops are even better than pure water because you derive the benefit of the Brawando sports drink when you eat your Wheaties.”
The Anti-GMO movement is so sure of their ability to predict 500 years into the future that they are helping bring The Reverend Malthus' prediction of catastrophe and mass starvation to full fruition or fulfillment by opposing the most important break through in agricultural science since the domestication of farm animals. That breakthrough is Transgenic Crop Science also known as Genetic Engineering. Just like 100 years ago when the movie “Birth of a Nation” ushered in a rebirth of the KKK, Malthus'
“Essay on the Principle of Population” is used in the 21st Century to revive a forgotten and largely discredited doomsday and scientific illiterate vision of the Earth's future. Maybe some of you should check out the Sokal Hoax or Sokal Affair for a little more unbiased information about how deeply many of today's academics actually think. After reading about the Socal Hoax it is abundantly clear that most of the “scientific” opposition to GMOs comes from Leftist English Professors. In Sokal's article pointing out that his scientific paper on quantum psychics was a fraud one day after a respected university printed it, Sokal also had this to say:
“My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of
lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. . . . There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless, or even counterproductive.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Hoax
Other things that Alan Sokal warned against in the Social Sciences.
- Using scientific or pseudoscientific terminology without bothering much about what these words mean.
- Importing concepts from the natural sciences into the humanities without the slightest justification, and without providing any rationale for their use.
- Displaying superficial erudition by shamelessly throwing around technical terms where they are irrelevant, presumably to impress and intimidate the non-specialist reader.
- Manipulating words and phrases that are, in fact, meaningless.
- [Franken Foods is one example]
- Self-assurance on topics far beyond the competence of the author and exploiting the prestige of science to give discourses a veneer of rigor. [The false statements that GMOs lead to more pesticide use not less is one example as are all the web sights (and there are thousands) which seek to cash in on the scientific fraud that surrounds Anti-GMO activism]
The ecstasy that one Malthusian poster has already expressed here over an impoverished Hindu girl loosing her eye sight because of her inability to have GM rice should serve as a chilling wake up call to the rest of us. I encourage all of you to either buy, rent, beg, borrow, or steal a copy of Idiocracy and then compare this movie to the approaching scientific dark-age represented by Anti-GMO sentiment. Look around, do you really want to undo 1,000s of years of agricultural scientific advancement because your morning glass of orange juice has a tiny microscopic fragment of spinach in it?
