Sir, — Henry Miller and Gregory Conko have put their finger on one of the most pernicious doctrines to make its way into the public arena in some time (“The Perils of Precaution,” June/July 2001).
From food made from genetically altered crops to life-sustaining medical equipment such as blood bags, catheters, and intravenous tubing, no product is safe from the ravages of those intent upon subordinating science to speculation. Sadly, those raising unfounded allegations against some of the finest achievements of modern science and technology want to see the precautionary principle underlie regulatory decisions in the United States. A little-noticed campaign is already underway to enshrine the precautionary principle at the state level. The Massachusetts Precautionary Principle Project is the first such effort. A bill has been introduced in the state legislature that would create a commission on children’s health and safety. The commission’s decisions would be guided by the precautionary principle, which is defined in the bill’s text as separating “threats of harm” from “cause-and-effect relationships.” Promoted nationally by the Science and Environmental Policy Network, the idea is to have the precautionary principle serve as the basis for all manner of public policy decisions in as many states as possible.
Therein lies a real threat to public health and safety.
Bonner R. Cohen
Lexington Institute
Arlington, Va.
Sir, — After reading your article on the precautionary principle, I could not help wondering why proponents of new technologies — ground-breaking, Buck Rogers kind of stuff — have such limited imaginations. How can you possibly equate the risk of withholding a product from the market (out of a sense of precaution) that is in fact not harmful with the risk of unleashing something on the world that has unknown potentials?
How is it that a simple layman can imagine that in the process of “mixing up apples and oranges” with your sophisticated new techniques, you might end up with something you hadn’t bargained for. I fully recognize that all of these products are “tested” and I know that testing is expensive. I also know full well that I will pay for that testing when I buy the new product. But even your testing has limits. Having worked in the medical field I know that drugs are often approved without a full understanding of their side effects profile.
I should insert here that I do agree that conventional technologies do need more oversight when they are used to create something new. And I think that the many examples that come to mind of environmental catastrophes that have resulted from simply introducing a new species into an ecosystem to which it is foreign. It should help you understand why those of us whom you label “activists” feel so strongly. Ask the Australians about the impact of the many new species introductions their continent has faced. Ask anyone in South America or the southern U.S. what they think about “killer bees.”
And how about these new technologies? Did anybody anticipate that Monsanto’s new Bt corn variety was toxic to Monarch Butterfly larvae? Although I don’t imagine that will have the kind of serious environmental significance that I am worried about, it simply points out the “unknown.” Monsanto didn’t even know how invasive the stuff was until it began showing up on other farm fields. Oops.
I want new stuff. I use drugs (medicinal) and other high-tech devices and I recognize that every new step involves risk. But your article condemns those of us who don’t bow down to those in white lab coats and simply trust that “experts” know better and that corporations have everyone’s best interests at heart.
While I am not a medical doctor, I am aware that their Hippocratic Oath
begins with the admonition to “First, do no harm.” It preaches a kind of restraint, even in the face of great risk and dire consequences. Not a bad way to look at technology, new and old.
Rob Muller
Brampton, Ontario
Sir, — I am of the opinion that what Miller and Conko are describing is the age-old problem that people have of not being able to understand the difference between belief and knowledge. It is the underlying reason why religious bigotry, fundamentalist intolerance, and racial prejudice so widely flourished during the past two millennia, and still do in our times.
When one’s view of reality becomes exclusive and ideologically binding on your ability to think logically and plan with compassion, it becomes easy to murder, prohibit, damn, eradicate, etc., based on the flimsiest of factual basis. Human freedom, the basic premise of scientific humanism, must triumph in times to come before we can rid ourselves of this cancer of the human spirit, this self-righteous assumption that I am the center of the universe, the repository of all that is correct and finally true. The thoughts expressed in this article must be more often iterated, on more platforms, and must be embedded in ever-more contexts in order for the message to hit home.
Frans van Zyl Gillitts
Durban, South Africa
Europe’s Future
Sir, — Excellent article on the European Union’s political components and raison d’être (“Europe in the Balance,” June/July 2001). The coming decade, I fear, will see international policy increasingly dominated by European neuroses and use of America as a scapegoat. Due to its economic might, the European Union’s contortions will be far more important than any news coming from, for example. China.
Furthermore, due to demographic trends, a lower growth rate, and other reasons, the European Union will probably only be able to have a truly “superpower”-sized voice in world affairs over the next 10 or 15 years. After that, growth trends in other parts of the world will ensure that the U.S. and other Western hemisphere powers, as well as China and India, have a greater say. Europe’s voice — though combined in the eu — will be proportionally weaker even than it is today.
James Shankles
Columbia, S.C.
Sir, — This is a superb and cogent analysis of the historic roots of the European Union’s perceived role in governance. It is a natural outgrowth of Europe’s evolution since the end of the Cold War — when your neighbor threatens to kill you, you lay aside your misgivings about your armed ally, until your nutty neighbor bankrupts and collapses. Actions speak louder than speeches, however, and the last century poses severe problems for eu proponents. Two world wars were caused by eu nations; both were ended by American intervention.
eu cohesion is a myth. The horror in modern Yugoslavia stripped nato’s fig leaf away and revealed deep divisions in Europe. Since the inception of nato, Europe has told the U.S. it wants us only when the bear attacks, but to otherwise butt out of European conflicts. When genocide reappeared on European soil, who could act? Germany agonized over reinvading the Balkans, France mumbled about every air strike, Scandinavia was useless, Italy was furious that our dumb jet jockey broke a ski gondola cable, the former Warsaw Pact was broke, and the Swiss held everybody’s money. General Clark fought a war he could not win again. America should never have gotten involved. We are stuck in entangling alliances, which helps no one and drains our wealth.
The eu will survive, primarily to control European customs. The Union is useful as a European debating society, aka the un in short pants. They may form a 60,000-man military, useful in crowd control. Many of their elite despise American values and, with our socialists, attempt to co-opt us, with a strong dominant federal government. The future is ours to lose; it is not the eu’s to win. America’s lethal enemies lie in Asia and if they destroy us, the eu will be swept aside. Europeans know this.
R.L. Hails Sr.
Olney, Md.
China’s National Character
Sir, — Lloyd Macauley Richardson ably and admirably reviews Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (“China, Taken Personally,” June/July 2001). He rightfully highlights Hessler’s uncommon ability to describe, with depth and insight, the stories of a broad cross-section of ordinary people in a rural Chinese village. Indeed, I find Hessler to be one of the few Western observers of China to have acquired the Chinese language, then to have used that gift to build non-monetarily based relationships with Chinese people. Thus Richardson accurately states that Hessler’s gradual integration into the society helped to make his Sichuan portrait both “vivid” and “personal.”
Richardson’s conclusion badly misses the mark, however, in drawing sweeping generalizations from Hessler’s book about the Chinese “national character.” Hessler over-emphasizes the static “traditional” forces of China to the exclusion of obvious examples where the Chinese national character could be conceptualized as one of change driven by recurring patterns of dynamic conflict. One gets the sense in reading Mr. Richardson’s review that China is enduringly “rural,” adherent to “traditional” Confucian values, “rigid” in social relationships, and that religions are inconsequential since “religions traditionally effected little or no social or political change in China.” All are vast oversimplifications. China may be presently and historically rural, with 75 percent of the population toiling as farmers or peasants, but such may have been said of the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century when 80 percent of the workforce was agriculturally based on family farms or in sharecropping. Like the United States, the rural character of China is changing dramatically, with revolutionary potential. China may be “Confucian,” but certainly no more stagnantly and traditionally than Americans remain traditionally “Christian.” Confucianism is a malleable concept as has been shown in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore. But we do not consider the national character of Korea to be Confucian any more than we consider the national character of the United States to be Christian. Social relationships in rural China may be rigid, but social relationships in the rural countrysides of all nations tend to be rigid and only comprise a part of the national character. Those who value dynamic social relationships go to the cities, i.e. Shanghai, Zhuhai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Tiensin.
Finally, the notion that “religions traditionally effected little or no social or political change in China” is simply untrue. Religion has and will have a profound effect on China. Jonathan Spence has recently written an outstanding book about the Tai Ping rebellion of the nineteenth century, an explicitly religious social and political movement that killed millions and briefly instituted a rival Chinese government replete with an army, currency, and a capital in Nanjing. Buddhism was a powerful force for social and political change — influencing and overthrowing dynasties during the Sung and Tang Dynasties. And Christianity strongly pervaded the ruling class of China at the turn of the century, contributing to the rise of Sun Yat Sen’s May 4th Movement in the early part of the twentieth century.
Confucian principles lay at the heart of many relationships in China and Taiwan.
Public policy thinkers who want to ponder the Chinese “national character” must take into account Greater China, which includes not only the character of the rural People’s Republic, but also Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, and the overseas Chinese communities of Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, and Indonesia — who have played such a pivotal role in “China’s” political, economic, and social development. The rural tax and labor unrest reported daily in China’s own newspapers, not to mention 1989, attests to the fact that reform and struggle are as much in the Chinese character as the conservatism of rural Sichuan.
Scott Edmiston
Arlington, Va.
Commerce and Schools
Sir, — I greatly enjoyed Andrew Stark’s thoughtful article “Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and the Public Schools” (August/September 2001). While I am more suspicious of feeding students brand names than Stark seems to be (in fact, I make a distinction Stark doesn’t mention, between materials that emphasize types of products, such as eggs, and materials which advertise particular brands), I think he misses an argument for what he terms the Domino’s-style deal. Stark notes that the Consumers Union and other groups oppose deals whereby private companies reward schools financially in exchange for student consumption of the companies’ products because it leads to students choosing among brands “for all the wrong reasons.” Actually, I would much rather that students learn to make consumption choices based on social consequences and not merely on the product itself. I think teachers should discuss with students whether and when it makes sense to buy a product for such “external” reasons. The result might be a new generation of eventual sweatshop-boycotting, organic-buying consumers.
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
New York, N.Y.
Sir, — Unfortunately this otherwise thought-provoking piece doesn’t once address perhaps the most prevalent intrusion of business into education in U.S. public schools. This is the universally observed practice — one might almost say tradition — of sending out K-12ers as marketing agents of a commercial enterprise to vend on the surrounding captive population all sorts of merchandise from so-called educational publications to junk candy and cookies to Christmas wrap. These deals permit the schools to retain a small percentage of the significant dollars made yet completely ignore the damaging message sent to the whole of America’s student body that it’s ok to huckster all sorts overpriced garbage (that’s where most of it ends up!) as long as you can con your neighbors into the reluctant impression that it is all for a good cause anyway. That this lesson is well-learned by our youth can be seen later on in their life with the proliferation of those publishing house scams and the many other fantastical schemes foisted on the general public — who should rather have been educated well enough to know better.
In fact your article also fails to identify that same damaging message pervading all the promotional schemes mentioned therein — on the acceptability and innocuousness of indiscriminate consumerism as against the development of a healthy, productive life and environment, which is what I thought education was mainly supposed to be about.
John Clarke
..Venice, Fla.
Science v. Alternative Medicine
Sir, — Thank you for Ronald W. Dworkin’s in-depth article, “Science, Faith, and Alternative Medicine” (August/September 2001). I agree that the placebo effect is underestimated. I subscribe to it merely for the fact that in placebo-controlled trials, one can almost count on a 30 percent to 40 percent minimal response to even objectively measurable parameters, such as blood pressure or weight change, when using placebo. Part of the benefit of the placebo effect resides in the confidence a physician has in his patient interactions. To give someone something that is even known to work requires informed consent, which includes the risk that it won’t work as advertised, and this alone can undermine efficacy.
My approach to “alternative medicine” is to inform a patient that there are three main considerations with any treatment: Its efficacy, risks, and monetary cost. Oftentimes, we have no knowledge of the first two, so I am left telling patients that they are treating themselves like guinea pigs while paying a significant monetary price. In addition, herbs often cost the same as, or more than, fda-approved pharmaceuticals. The first is bottled with minimal cost, the latter is developed after 10 years and $250 million of research. My question is therefore: If the alternative medicine purveyors are so altruistic, why do they charge what they do? (Of course one answer is that the naive public will pay the price, not knowing that they are often treating themselves as guinea pigs).
Finally, I will say that they actually are hostile to Western culture. They tend to attack Western medicine and thought as being rude, crude, hostile to body and environment, entrapped in ignorance and lack of rationale, and blind to trying “new ways.” Au contraire, it is Western medicine that can take a new idea and objectively expose it to the light of day; Western medicine created this way of testing theories in the first place. And alternative medicine is no longer even “alternative” once its efficacy and toxicity have been delineated through objective study. It is merely a mystery that has been solved.
Michael March, M.D.
Raleigh, N.C.
