The Elephant in the Room
(July
8, 2005)
Bob Geldoff and his Live 8 bands have been
performing on the doorstep of the G8 conference in Scotland, urging the
world's richest nations to take pity on Africa and do more to alleviate
its profound and growing poverty. The media have been covering the
event and have bombarded us with commentary on the African crisis. In
all of this expressed opinion on radio, television, newspapers and
magazines which I have seen, heard or read, one aspect of the crisis
has remained unaddressed, one monumental elephant ignored. On this
particular subject, a vast silence reigns.
First, let's see what the media are saying. My own city's daily
newspaper was probably representative, with a series of articles and
Op-Ed pieces on Wednesday, July 6. In a reprint of an article from the
London Times, the British treasury minister was quoted: "It makes you
angry because there's nothing in science or technology or medicine that
should prevent us from tackling poverty. It's a lack of political
will." So what are the impediments? What exactly is that lack of will?
The same article itemized some of the more
obvious
problems: "But the failure of African leaders to set out explicitly how
they plan to make their governments accountable, combat corruption,
halt conflict and respect human rights will be cause for concern,
especially for the U.S." Another article, by John Williamson of the
Canadian Taxpayers Federation, referring to Graham Hancock's 1991 book Lords of Poverty which exposed "the
many failures of the multi-billion-dollar government aid business,"
puts it bluntly: "[G]overnment aid programs more often than not worsen
the conditions of those they are meant to help." Itemizing the vast
increase in foreign aid between 1950 and today, Williamson observes:
"If foreign aid works, shouldn't the poor be doing better today than
before the dollars started flowing? Instead, Africa remains an economic
basket case while millions of people have escaped the poverty trap
elsewhere....Africa lacks the basic conditions to better the lives of
its citizens, and more money will not change that....Handing billions
more to corrupt governments will drive up Mercedes-Benz sales, but do
nothing to help the poor." The latter may be a veiled reference to the
situation in impoverished and AIDS-ravaged Swaziland whose king
bestowed a luxury car on each of his 10 wives and two fiancées.
There is no question that corruption and poor
governance have contributed to the failure of foreign aid to much
of Africa, but this problem should be largely solvable by holding
African leaders accountable and linking aid to the elimination of
corruption, civil war and human rights abuses. Who, except for some
of those African leaders themselves, would argue with such a strategy?
But to what degree would this solve the entrenched poverty? There would
still be left an even bigger contributing problem to tackle, and here
the
will, along with a willingness even to acknowledge it, is profoundly
lacking, with ultimate responsibility lying at doorsteps outside Africa
itself.
In the same issue of my newspaper, a pair of
front-page articles were written by a journalist and his photographer
who had just been to Nigeria. They called it "A scene of utter
despair." They visited "the filth, despair and chaos of a Lagos slum,"
though they pointed out that Lagos as a whole is "a slum with scattered
islands of functional city life within it." The principal economic
activity of the hosts of Lagos poor is the scouring of the city dump, a
vast area ankle-deep in a filthy brown slop with huge piles of rotting
waste. Amid "a smell that would knock you over," thousands try to earn
a living by plundering the dump for
recyclable and saleable debris; many live on the site itself. There are
women and men, young and old, mothers with children tied on their
backs. Many even of the city's well-educated have been reduced to this.
The entire city of Lagos is deteriorating
rapidly.
Power outages happen daily, roads are terrible, street lighting at
night no longer functions. One article states: "Lagos wasn't always
like this. There used to be order. Buses came on time. There were stop
lights, the power worked, the university graduates had their pick of
jobs. Instead today...jobs are few. There seems to be no middle class.
There are a few people driving around in Jaguars and, it seems to me,
the majority are hustling at anything they can, just to
survive—whether
it's selling corn, picking garbage, or hawking their
wares by the roadside....As each day passes here, I see another 10
people living in a single room, using a hole in the ground as a
bathroom and having to share even that with neighbours...."
The companion article looks at the larger
picture. "Estimates of the city's population range from nine or 10
million up to 15 million or more, but this is really guesswork. The
only certainty is that the city has exploded over the last several
decades and continues to swell at a terrifying rate—and that
almost
all this growth consists of shacks, shanties and single-room apartments
crowded with the extended families of unimaginably poor people....If
Lagos were unique in Africa, it would be horrifying. But it is more
than horrifying because it is far from unique.... [Elsewhere it was
pointed out that 10% of the earth's population now lives in sub-Saharan
Africa.]....People aren't being pulled into the cities with the promise
of something better, but are instead being pushed from the
countryside by the threat of something worse. Africa's swelling slums
are reason only to despair, not hope....
"Living in hell, the people of Lagos are
perhaps not surprisingly looking for God. Everywhere there are banners,
billboards and posters touting the latest evangelical crusade and
church services look like rock concerts as 30,000 people sing and cheer
and shout to the heavens. There is probably no higher concentration of
passionate believers on the face of the earth. [Nigeria is roughly
equal parts
Christian and Moslem.]
"So where is God? Good people by the millions
cry out his name, but still they are afflicted. One might think that
Lagos is proof that a benevolent God who bestows blessings on the
faithful does not exist. The faithful of Lagos are not shaken, though.
They are steadfast. 'I am covered in the blood of Jesus!' is the
ecstatic cry of so many people who have nothing else to shout about."
Now we can speak the word that dares not be
spoken, either in the halls of government, at conferences like the G8
summit, in churches, in the media. It is: "overpopulation"—the great
lumbering obscene elephant in the room of today's political
correctness. Everyone pretends that it is not there. Or that it is
a phantom, a conspiracy, a cover for nefarious intentions. Who could
view
the misery and disintegration of places like Lagos and dismiss such a
beast, burying their heads in the sand—or in the
muck of the city's
dump? We all know the answer to that, even if most seem afraid to
voice it. While there are certain misguided brands of secular
ideological activism which oppose population controls, the great and
implacable enemy to those who would confront this elephant is religion,
and specifically Christianity, mainly in its Catholic and evangelical
expressions.
Our journalist and photographer called Lagos "hell
on earth." More and more places on earth are descending into this kind
of hellishly overcrowded poverty and misery. Following in Africa's
footsteps, India and other nations
of south-east Asia have started down the same road; parts of Central
and South America are not far behind. As population increases
exponentially, many governments good and bad find themselves with
little
ability to cope with their jobless and impoverished masses; all the
foreign aid in the world will not make a difference, and will simply
encourage corruption by the elite in the face of an overwhelmingly
hopeless situation. Nigeria alone, not a large country, now contains
about 140 million people, a good portion of them destitute. It can be
no coincidence that the change in Lagos from order to chaos over a
generation or two which the above articles mention has coincided with a
dramatic increase in population. Other parts of
Africa are in the same state.
What creates a mindset that not only fails to
see such catastrophe but the factors responsible for it? I have no
doubt that if the Pope himself were to visit the Lagos dump, he would
offer his blessing to the faithful, encourage them to believe in Jesus,
and return to Rome still steadfastly adamant in his refusal to
countenance
birth control and abortion. I have no doubt that the evangelicals who
visit places like Nigeria preach their personal Savior with great
fervor, offering the blood of Jesus without ever encouraging their
converts to have fewer children, let alone giving them the means to
achieve that. Several recent evangelical- and Catholic-driven U.S.
administrations have curtailed or cut off foreign aid to governments
and ground-level organizations which offer women family planning and
birth control or include information on abortion as part of their
counseling services; at the same time those administrations continue to
give aid to
corrupt governments who pass on few of these dollars to those who need
them. By refusing to aid those who supply condoms—even as a
measure
against sexually-transmitted diseases like AIDS—or who
provide
abortion services to women who want them, past and present U.S. policy
has been actively
contributing to the spread of misery, illness and death, as well as to
the
number of self-inflicted abortions, many of which end in disability or
death for these women, orphaning their existing children. A recently
published report described how many African
rivers are increasingly carrying a new floating discharge out to sea:
personally aborted fetuses.
What makes possible such mind-numbing myopia,
such fanatical insensitivity to suffering, to social, economic and
environmental degeneration? There is one simple answer. The perceived
word of God. Faith, by definition, shuts down the mind, and where the
overriding will of God is concerned, shuts down human compassion as
well. What gets substituted is a kind of ersatz compassion, in which
aiding or giving charity to the unfortunate is an expression of one's
own religious self-image or commitment to faith; it is anything but
altruistic. It is directed toward
the imagined soul of the recipient, not his earthly self, and anything
which
conflicts with that faith will not be allowed recognition or input.
When Pope Paul VI and his circle of advisers decided in 1964—a few
years after science had developed the tool which could check the
world's growing population explosion—that God
wanted and
would allow no artificial birth control, this became the driving force
in Vatican politics which leveled all before it. No consequence of the
unchecked fecundity of the human race was of any importance. If human
suffering, the deterioration of nations, the destruction of the planet
was the result, it mattered not. Souls—apparently
as many as
possible—destined
for a heaven in the sky is all that does matter, and
if they have to pass through a hell on earth to get there, so be it.
Can those whose single-minded focus is on a life after death be
expected to concern themselves with the life before death, to make
rational and humane decisions about it? How does the Papacy's "respect
for life" work in the slums of Lagos? If a destitute couple is forced
to have as many more children as their natural sexual activity will
produce, how does this impact upon the lives of those already born,
already living in squalor, already struggling for survival? How much
more sickness and death will be created in those crowded slums by the
birth of more human beings, with stretched or non-existent resources
for food, medicine, clean water, working sanitation facilities and
other necessities of life? What stress, family breakdown and sheer
human misery must be endured for the sake of "God's will"? Does God
himself smile down on all this? Is he no more perceptive and
compassionate than his representatives? Did he truly inspire his
infallible vicar to forbid artificial birth control? Is abortion really
the 'evil of evils' which Catholics and evangelicals make it out to be
(except when it involves their own daughters)? If ever there was a
clear example of the harm caused by religion's focus on the
supernatural, its fixation on dogma and the so-called word of God, it
lies before us today.
Bob Geldoff and his Live 8 were appearing in
the wrong venue. They should have been in St. Peter's Square, playing
to shame the Catholic Church into ending its gaiacidal veto on the
control of population. Though other cultures and religions have been
equally blind and obstinate, such a move by the Papacy would do more to
cure Africa's ills, and those of many other countries, than a tripling
of foreign aid—although
by now it may be too late. We should
all have been there in front of the Vatican, and long before this,
together
with a world media not afraid to speak common sense for the good of
humanity and the planet we live on. In any other context, with any
other government or agency that had managed its mandate so
incompetently, with such cruel and devastating results, populaces would
have risen up, revolution would be in the air. Not so with religion.
This world truly needs salvation, but it is salvation from the
purveyors of superstition and ignorance, who promise all but deliver
nothing, who take away our rationality, our good judgment, our
self-esteem, our joy of life. As we watch the earth descend into hell
around us, we acquiesce with hardly a murmur. Well—except for
a few of us.
*
By way of an 'epilogue' one might ask what the
ministers of religion are concerning
themselves with these days in regard to our lives on earth. On the same
front page of my newspaper, the headline read: "Church shuns MP for
backing gay marriage." A federal Member of Parliament was
ostracized by his parish priest for voting last week in favor of making
marriage for gays and lesbians a matter of Canadian constitutional
right. The
good Reverend, backed by the regional Archbishop, refused any longer to
give this MP communion, driving both himself and his family away from
church attendance. Few issues on the North American scene have
generated so much righteous and fanatical opposition over the last
generation than extending
equal human rights in all aspects of life to gays and lesbians. Despite
a quarter-century of progressive thinking in medical and psychiatric
research that same-sex attraction is a natural—if minority—expression
of human sexuality, neither 'sinful' nor a matter of choice, these
dinosaurs, which includes a sizeable portion
of the faithful, have completely shut their minds to such developments,
devoting unlimited time and energy to derailing social progress and
keeping gays and lesbians at the level of second class citizens, or
worse. It has become the new racism, with all the bigotry and
discrimination of the older forms. And on what basis? Again, the
perceived word of God.
There are no other grounds. No heterosexual
marriage is threatened, devalued or rendered obsolete by the extension
of the principle of human commitment, religious or secular, to gay and
lesbian couples. No heterosexual married couple is any more likely to
divorce, to mistreat their children, to abandon social commitments, to
become psychopathic, to bring down the sky on all of us, by virtue of
the extension of marriage rights to homosexuals. Rather, it is
religious mania and indoctrination which has created division, discrimination
and social strife, turning human beings against one another, in some
cases leading to assault and murder. These are effects far more real
and serious than anything the opponents of same-sex marriage, or of
homosexuality in general, can claim
for their bugaboo. Supposedly on the grounds of an obscure line in an
ancient primitive book, they are willing to rend society in two. (The
book of Leviticus has mostly to do with prescriptions for animal
sacrifice to God, along with other directives and prohibitions which
are so arcane and obsolete not
even the most diehard fundamentalist devotes an iota of attention to
advocating them—despite
their equal status as the supposed "word of God.") Actually, one
wonders if this biblical chapter and verse are really just a mask for
the instinct for bigotry and exclusivity which seems to infect much of
the religious mindset.
There is something surreal in the sight of entire
hierarchies of various world Churches and evangelical Assemblies,
dutifully followed in lemming-like ignorance by their congregations,
mounting a rabid campaign against same-sex marriage as though it will
spell the end of civilization as we know it. Come to think of it, maybe
it will—and good
riddance. Maybe in a couple of generations, a more rational society
will look back and see it as simply one feature of a period in which
the insanity of religious dogma and fanaticism took over the minds of
so many of the world's people, to such destructive and inhuman effect.
That is, if we survive that long.
Earl Doherty
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