Introduction
This essay, in part, reviews an article in the May, 2000 Scientific American (Volume 282, Number 5) authored by Carol Ezzell, staff writer, with photographs by Karin Retief (the article hereinafter is referred to as “Ezzell and Retief”). Titled “Care for a Dying Continent,” it is about the catastrophic AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting scientific research and large-scale educational projects presently underway in Zimbabwe and concluding with suggestions for more of the same.
The scientistic assumptions of the article will be contrasted with Catholic social teaching: personalism and the primacy of a culture open to and ordered to the truth. Human nature is irreducible. Humane health and behavioral assistance recognizes the truth of personal integrity and addresses the need of the whole person. On the other hand, health and behavioral sciences not ordered to the truth about God and man, that fail to affirm that “the Supreme Good and the moral good meet in truth: the truth about God, the Creator and Redeemer, and the truth about man, created and redeemed by Him,” risk transformation into tyranny.
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The Unimaginable Scope of the Tragedy
The Scientific American article is subtitled “In Zimbabwe—where AIDS is prematurely killing a generation of adults—researchers struggle against social customs, viral resourcefulness and despair.”
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This is somewhat misleading. In fact, no attention is paid by the article whatever to “viral resourcefulness and despair.” The article is purely about “social customs”—and
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. . . the inability of big global and national organizations to help the now impoverished nation, once the most prosperous in Southeast Africa, come to grips with a problem so severe that it eclipses the often-used term ‘crisis.’ AIDS is destined to alter the history of Africa—in fact, the world—to a degree not seen in humanity’s past since the Black Death [emphasis added]. 3 |
The toll of victims of the AIDS pandemic is almost beyond human comprehension. There are upwards of 10,000,000 AIDS orphans under the age of 15 in all of Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Nearly forty percent of females in Zimbabwe are now infected with HIV—and their rate of infection is expected to surpass fifty percent by 2010.
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By contrast, ten percent of the males are infected. The overall rate of infection is 25 percent of the population.
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Based on a population estimated in 1994 to be 10,975,000, at least 2,195,000 females and 548,750 males are infected by AIDS in Zimbabwe. This disparity in rates of infection is explained by the author as arising from purely cultural factors, which the article discusses at length.
Ignorance Is NOT a Factor in Surging Infection Rates
Researchers in Zimbabwe have found that the disease is largely transmitted to adults through heterosexual intercourse, and to newborns by childbirth.
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The example of Millicent Tigere is typical of the awareness level of female Zimbabweans. Twenty years old, married at eighteen, mother of a one-year-old baby girl, she is thoroughly educated about how AIDS is spread—and is herself infected. She correctly identifies “unprotected sex, sharing hypodermic needles and childbirth.”
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Lillian Savadye of the support organization AIDS Counseling Trust states that women are especially receptive to learning how to reduce their risk of infection. But learning isn’t enough. “Everybody is well informed, but the aspect of behavior change needs to be worked on,” she asserts. “Everybody knows the risks, but they don’t have the push to ask themselves
to change their behaviors.”
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Nyama Pfeni, the fifty-five years old nurse who manages the Harare clinic I visited, has seen the disconnect between knowledge and behavior too close to home. Her sister and brother-in-law died of AIDS a few years ago, and presently two of her sons, three daughters, five nephews, and twelve nieces have the virus—seventy-two percent of her immediate family. 10 When I asked Nyama Pfeni what she thinks her country will look like in 20 years, she replies solemnly, “I think there are going to be very few people. We are going to be dangerously close to extinction.” If she were in charge of Zimbabwe’s AIDS intervention efforts, she says, one of the first things she would address would be to find out why the ubiquitous AIDS education programs are having so little effect [emphasis added]. 11 |
WHO, Exactly, Is Conducting Those
“Ubiquitous AIDS Education Programs”?
The pun in this section’s title is intended. The article delves at great length into the work of more than thirty national and international organizations that actively disseminate contraceptive information in Zimbabwe. These authors assume that all good scientists share their axiom that there exists a clear connection between contraceptive services and a scientific remedy for the pandemic. Their unstated axiom is, “The scientific remedy is contraception.” Hence, the organizations they find worthy of coverage in their article read like a Who’s Who of the birth control industry and the population control lobby. Mentioned by the article, these include (in order of appearance):
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International Planned Parenthood Federation
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These are not all the organizations involved, for the article also mentions that “a host of [unnamed] organizations are also working” in Zimbabwe on the problem.
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WHERE Is the Catholic Church?
This article is quite long by Scientific American standards. This reflects the importance that the editorial staff of the magazine attaches to the article and to the views it expresses. In an article that runs twelve printed pages, the only mention of the presence and work of the Roman Catholic Church is in the very fine print caption of a tiny photograph of some nuns—clothed in a now well-known habit—tenderly working with the dying at a clinic appropriately named Zheezhee Mashambanzou—“Jesus, Dawn of a New Day”—operated by Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s Missionaries of Charity.
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WHO Pays the Freight for Those
“Ubiquitous AIDS Education Programs”?
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Only 20 percent of the government’s $54 million annual budget for combatting AIDS derives from the Zimbabwean treasury. Most of the rest of it comes from the International Monetary Fund [with money that originates largely from U. S. taxpayers], World Bank [again, largely backed with money from the government of the United States], the United Nations, direct grants from the governments of the United States and Great Britain, the David S. Rockefeller Trust, the [George] Soros Open Society Institute, and the [George] Soros Charitable Foundation, in that order. 14 |
WHAT, Precisely, Do Those
“Ubiquitous Education Programs” Teach?
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Scientists [funded by the organizations listed above] are conducting clinical tests and educational programs in all these areas right now . . . Male condoms 15 . . . female condoms 16 . . . nonoxynol-9 gel 17 . . . birth control pills 18 . . . Depo-Provera 19 . . . microbiocides 20 . . . BufferGel 21 . . . diaphragms 22 . . . cervical caps 23 . . . voluntary optional hysterectomy 24 . . . [and] hormone therapies. 25 No method affording some real hope 26 is being neglected in the all-out scientific effort to find some way to bring the pandemic under control. 27 The Zimbabwe National Family Planning Council alone distributes 50 million male condoms a year, the highest number of any IPPF [International Planned Parenthood Federation] affiliate on the African continent. That is over four condoms per year for every person in Zimbabwe, perhaps 31 for every sexually active male over the age of fourteen. That is not nearly enough. For cultural reasons, men want to have sex at least once a day. 28 |
What, Precisely, ARE Those “Cultural Reasons”?
Zimbabwe is a male-dominated society with a continuing ongoing tradition of polygamy—“this very day, there was a cartoon joke in the nation’s most popular strip about which of eight wives the main character would be staying with tonight.”
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Polygamy in Sub-Saharan Africa today takes many different forms, and very high status is accorded to men who practise it—the more girls he keeps, the higher a man’s social status and self-esteem. But it is not a practise solely relegated to men. “The national tradition of having a ‘girlfriend’—of course, she tells her family and friends they are really ‘married’—one husband who pays the rent, one who buys groceries, one who pays the phone, one who pays the utilities, one who gases the car—you get the picture.”
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“Girlfriend relationships” where one girl is shared by many men can last for years, “and the women usually call themselves wives.”
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Moreover, it is socially acceptable even in “monogamous” relationships for the wife to sell sex occasionally—“especially right before their children’s school fees come due, for example.”
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If adult women have a difficult time lowering their risk for HIV infection, it is even tougher for girls and young women because of what might be called the “sugar daddy” phenomenon: older men who look for teenage, and even younger, girls for sex. The men know that the youngest girls are less likely to have had sex at all—and encountered HIV. Also, over half the men in this country actually believe that having sex with a virgin can cure them of HIV infection or active AIDS. As a result, the HIV infection rate among 11- to 15-year-old girls is eight times that of boys the same age, according to WASN’s [Zimbabwe Women’s AIDS Support Network] Musen Gezi. 33 |
Then, there is the tradition, “deeply rooted in culture,” of a practise called “dry sex”:
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Women by custom use their fingers, cloth, paper, or cotton balls to scrub the vagina walls immediately before and even during intercourse to achieve so-called “dry sex” which is very highly prized by Zimbabwean males. Women also insert dry dish and clothes detergents and substances obtained from traditional healers—many different types of herbs, but especially favoring soil on which a baboon or even another woman (often a paid traditional healer) has urinated—to induce an inflammatory reaction that dries, warms and tightens the vagina. In the February issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases of the American Medical Association, Janneke H. H. M. van de Wijgert—who is now at the Population Center in New York City—Michael Chirenje, Nancy Padian [of the David S. Rockefeller Trust] and their colleagues reported that these traditional techniques disrupted the normal balance of healthy bacteria in their vaginas, and that “dry sex” greatly increases condom breakage and causes microtears in the vagina wall through which HIV gains faster access to the bloodstream. In the study group, 50 percent of the women use the contaminated soil technique, 20 percent douche with household detergents, and 17 percent insert or douche with herbs they obtain from traditional shamans or other healers. “Basically, in our country, they ALL use something,” Caroline Maposhere [of the UN NGO International Council of Women, which conducted the study for IPPF and David S. Rockefeller Trust] says. 34 |
Whether it is even fair (not to mention, statistically valid) to extrapolate to an entire nation the behavior of a small selected sample of women actively suffering from AIDS is a statistical issue not discussed by the article. This is at once puzzling and disappointing. The magazine’s readership, in overwhelming proportions, is trained to read and to assimilate just such an in-depth statistical analysis, after all. What is clear is that the authors of the Rockefeller study share the axiom that culture is sacred—and its effect on individual personal behavior is inevitable and inexorable. Another axiom they share is the view that sexual practise (“culturally reinforced” and supported by “long-standing traditions”) is a personal prerogative and right, and will be indulged anyway—again, inevitably and inexorably.
WHY Are the Following Questions Too Delicate to Ask?
The scientists cited by the authors Ezzell and Retief each had to ask a number of deeply personal and embarrassingly delicate questions of their correspondents. I trust that the following, which I pose, are not more so. Yet, these people of science shrank from asking them. WHY?
WHY are sixty percent of the females in Zimbabwe not infected with HIV? WHY are ninety percent of the males in Zimbabwe not infected with HIV? WHY has no one considered the possibility that a study of the culture and long-standing traditions that affect the sexual behavior of the uninfected might be the key to discovering a way to stanch the hemorrhaging rate of HIV infection in Sub-Saharan Africa?
IS using condoms equivalent to “safe sex”? A recent article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association
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presented the results of a study conducted for the Gates Corporation, the largest manufacturer of origin of latex male condoms in the world.
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The study found that over 21% of the condoms tested for the Gates Corporation were unable to prevent the passage of particles the size of the HIV virus.
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“Calling this ‘safe sex’ is like calling Russian Roulette ‘safe gambling’,” quipped one of the peer reviewers.
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Other studies, conducted for the U. S. Agency for International Development (the largest purchaser of condoms in the world),
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found HIV permeability ratios ranging from a low of 15%
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to a high of 32%.
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The rate of leakage is virtually 100% under the circumstances described in the article by Ezzell and Retief.
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Studies conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa have confirmed this high rate.
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Lethal Consequences of Scientistic Prejudices in Human Behavior
The term scientism is used in philosophy to designate philosophical opinions that masquerade as scientific truths. The article by Ezzell and Retief is replete with them.
MECHANISM
An example is universal mechanism, also called physical determinism, which expresses the fundamental scientific axiom that “the final goal of all natural science is to reduce itself to mechanics.”
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The cosmos is simply a gigantic clockwork in which part interacts with part to determine the movement of the whole: “Ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.”
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Universal mechanism, when adapted to anthropology, manifests itself as pessimism with regard to the will of man, a certain deterministic scepticism with respect to the human capacity for intelligently choosing in favor of the good, and the perennial search for mechanical solutions that eschew inviting persons to work out thoughtful and relevant solutions in harmonious concord and concert with other people. The scientist proffers the vacuum cleaner with the promise of increased leisure, but is unable to tell us what to do with the resulting free time. The inventor presents us the automobile, but does not foresee the air and water pollution, deaths caused by inattentive drivers, and the advent of a new social institution, the junk yard. After premising that every cultural good is relative, the health worker pushes a box of condoms into our hands, a mechanical solution that is deemed a good in the culture of the health worker, but alien nonetheless in the cultural context of the recipient:
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Husbands resent being asked to use condoms because they have paid lobola, the bride price, for a wife 46 . . . Women express shock when shown how to use male condoms at the clinic, out of a false and culturally conditioned sense of modesty and because, so they claim, they are not used to seeing depictions of an aroused penis 47 Women dislike the female condom, which the clinic offers free, because they claim it’s ugly and unnatural. 48 |
REDUCTIONISM
Another example of scientism in the Ezzell and Retief article is reductionism. This axiom hinges upon an epistemological assumption that asserts that the act of sense perception terminates, not in an external real object as we commonly believe, but in a subjective interior representation of some kind. The red apple we see is a merely subjective image, a fantasy at base, mistaken for a real physical object. Rèné Descartes, who established the philosophical foundations of modern science, sought to “correct” the mistaken notions concerning perceptible entities by distinguishing between the external object, which he termed the res extensa, and its subjective representation existing in the mind or so called res cogitans. What was previously conceived as a single integral whole, a real object, from the time of Descartes came by scientists to be split in two: “Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.”
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Of the two objects, scientism avers that only the res extensa may be known with certainty. It is the apple of the physicists, one of quarks, muons, pi-mesons. It is the psyche of the behaviorists, one of brain, neural functions, spinal chords. It is human sexuality reduced to genitals, orgasm, and status. It is blood and spit, musk and semen reduced to lethal poison, the antidote (a cure worse than the disease) reduced to mechanical interference with a condom reducing the passage of vile and foul “vectors of contagion.” It is the human sex act reduced to a dance with death.
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Scientistic Anthropology: Scientific Insight Reduced to Magic
Science, rightly or not, is presently held in the highest esteem by our society. And why not? Through science, we landed our men on the moon. The Hubble Deep-Space Telescope pushes the range of our vision to the deepest past, the farthest spatial limits, of the universe we live in. Great strides have been made in medicine—we can yet hope for a cure for AIDS, maybe even a vaccine. We have harnessed the power of the atom, discovering in the process that matter is neither eternal nor stable. The thing is, though, that for those who are not themselves scientists, those who practise science are held in much the same awe as magicians and witch-doctors of so-called primitive cultures.
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We deny emphatically that there are “accidents” of history. So, it is no accident of history that the Witch Craze arose, not in Catholic Europe (neither in the “Dark Age,” nor in the Mediæval, nor in the Renaissance), but in Protestant strongholds at the height of the Scientific Revolution—see Jensen, Witchcraft, pp. 390-393. It is likewise no accident that Jensen treats of witchcraft in the section following his discussion of the Scientific Revolution. Jensen’s book is, after all, a history. One expects histories to be written in chronological order. Witch and scientist both seek to exercise dominion and power over the forces of nature, seen and understood by both only murkily. The indicated selection in Jensen’s book contains an excellent discussion of the relationship between mechanical reductionism and its effect on the popular imagination—which in turn terminated logically in, and produced, the infamous “witch hunts” of the Scientific Revolution era.
In the present AIDS crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa, scientific insight is substituted for magic. Were it not the fruit of so much wretchedness, we might consider to be ironic and dark comedy the juxtaposition of two mechanical reductions: “The mechanic has figured out the problem. Here, use a condom . . . The mechanic has figured out the problem: here, use an 11-year-old virgin.” The leap from the former kind of mechanical reduction to the latter is very small, differing only in matter and not in form. Substantially, they are identical.
The mechanic takes apart the matter of a problem, then carelessly forgets to reassemble the parts onto the original form. An old Model T doesn’t run that way, and neither does a human being. So it becomes more and more clear every day that “what is needed is an understanding of everyday things, concrete wholes, the basic integrity of the experiences of life as they come to us.”
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Religion—so long as it has not degenerated into a social convention or mere sentimentality—demands the whole person. Holiness and wholeness are inseparable: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
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It is absolutely false to maintain, with reference to the truths of our faith, that what we believe regarding the creation is of no consequence, so long as one has an exact conception concerning God; because an error regarding the nature of creation always gives rise to a false idea about God.” 54 |
Scientistic, not scientific, errors beget more flawed philosophical ideas:
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The truth is that the Catholic Church has been confronted by the most formidable problem a religion can encounter: the scientistic disappearance of the universe of symbolic forms which enable the Church to express and manifest itself, that is to say, which permit the Church to exist . . . That destruction has been effected by Galilean physics, not as one generally claims, because it has deprived man of his central position—which for St. Thomas Aquinas is cosmologically the least noble and the lowest—but because it reduces bodies, material substances, to the purely geometric, thus making it at one stroke scientifically impossible (or devoid of meaning) that the world can serve as a medium for the manifestation of God. The THEOPHANIC CAPACITY of the world is denied. 55 |
What Borella terms a “reduction to the purely geometric”
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consists precisely in the reduction of the corporeal to physics. Scientism is an idea that would obliterate “the theophanic capacity of the world.”
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The scientistically prepared mind, therefore, has become increasingly insensitive to what Borella terms “the universe of symbolic forms,”
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to the point where that universe has become, for it, all but invisible. It is in that sense that the “theophanic capacity of the world”
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has been obliterated. The consequences of this are tragic in the extreme. In his denial of essences, forms, and substances scientistic man has destroyed the very basis of the spiritual life. As Borella points out, he has obliterated the domain “which enables the Church to express and manifest itself,” and hence “permits it to exist.”
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The refutation of scientism, therefore, is not an optional matter for the Church. It is rather a matter of urgent necessity, a question ultimately of survival.
A MORTAL DANGER TO SOULS
A DENIAL OF HUMAN DIGNITY AND PERSONAL INTEGRITY
The bishops of the world together presciently and prophetically affirmed the mortal dangers to souls that scientism brings:
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There is no doubt that modern scientific and technical progress can lead to a certain phenomenism or agnosticism; this happens when scientific methods of investigation, which of themselves are incapable of penetrating to the deepest nature of things, are unjustifiably taken as the supreme norm for arriving at truth. There is a further danger that in his excessive confidence in modern inventions, man may think he is sufficient unto himself and give up the search for higher values. 61 |
It is also a matter that bears great relevance to the article by Ezzell and Retief. Scientism finding expression in anthropology reduces human beings to mechanism, instrumentality, raw material available for instrumental use and manipulation by other persons. The road traveled by behavioral and health science from Auschwitz to Harare is not a long one.
MAN REDUCED TO DESPIRITED MATTER
Too many of our contemporaries think of the human body as raw material available for instrumental use and manipulation by persons. They think that man is at liberty to impose on the body, or abolish from it, whatever meaning he wants: not only has man lost his vision of the “theophanic capacity of the physical universe,”
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but also of the “anthropophanic” capacity of his own body. One can see what results when they apply this disparagement of the body to our subject of man and woman. They can think of the gender difference only as an evolutionary product which just happened to come about as it did. Compared with the fact that all human beings are persons, the gender difference reduces to the level of the accidental. Man and woman are properly studied in an empirical way by the natural and social sciences, they believe, so that all that can be known about man and woman is of a neutral, factual nature. There is no metaphysical nature expressed in man and woman, nor any intrinsic value and personal meaning. We persons can make of man and woman whatever we like. We can take the physical givens of male and female and can construct masculine and feminine any way we like. The “reduction to the purely geometric”
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which consists precisely in the reduction of the corporeal to physics, in turn has led to a view of man that reduces him from his real nature, that of a living reasoning body (a substantial, a corporeal, spirit whose form is soul and whose matter is body) to what might be properly and best termed despirited matter.
Catholic Personalism Affirms the Truth of Personal Integrity
While no Catholic teacher could accept such an account of man and woman, John Paul II is distinguished by the depth at which he has overcome it and by the originality with which he has unfolded the truth: made in God’s image,
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man is a reasoning living body, really a spirit that subsists in the substantial union of matter with soul.
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Our personhood is embodied, and embodied as man and woman, so that all kinds of personal meanings are inscribed in our sexuality. He has given a personalist rereading of the truth that the body is not just something physical but something sacramental: a sign, an expression of the person.
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From the beginning the body in all its masculinity and femininity participates in the life of the person. Indeed the body is a dimension of the being of each human person.
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In scientific analysis, it is common to take a whole apart in order to more closely examine the ways in which the scrutinized parts interact with each other. In their haste to come to grips with the worldwide AIDS epidemic, the scientific community (supported by money from notorious sources having a vested financial interest in contraceptives trafficking) divides ejaculation from its procreative function. Having so divided human sexuality, they forgot to reintegrate the parts with the whole human person. But “what therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”
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The result has been a scientistically driven catastrophe that actually eclipses the Black Death in its toll of human misery. One is God, and one also is the precious and beautiful gift of sexuality He has bestowed on human beings. It is indeed true that “what is needed is an understanding of everyday things, concrete wholes, the basic integrity of the experiences of life as they come to us.”
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It remains each man’s duty to preserve a view of the whole human person, a view in which the values of intellect, will, conscience and fraternity are preëminent. These values are all rooted in God the Creator, and have been wonderfully restored and elevated in Christ. 70 |
The Primacy of Culture
It is the task of culture to reintegrate what scientism has rent asunder in its mechanical reduction of the whole human person, for culture consists precisely in the enduring efforts of man “to bring the world itself under his control by his knowledge and his hard labor.”
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Notice that this is the task of culture, not that of scientists, not that of witches, not that of shamans, nor that of witch doctors, nor magicians, nor wizards. It is solely the task of culture.
Numerous real world examples of what the Pope and the bishops are talking about might be cited. The transformation of European culture that occurred as the pagan Romans adopted Christianity over the course of three centuries comes immediately to mind.
In two hour’s time, the Communist Empire that had gripped Eastern Europe and most of Asia came to an end. Two million people crowded Red Square that day, and all the paid apparatchiks and secret police and armed military might of the Soviet Union could not resist them. Each of those two million people had made a firm individual and personal commitment not to yield. The Cold War was over — without a shot being fired.
In both these cited instances, the operative principal is the same: individual choice in the concrete situations of life.
On January 21, 1998 Pope John Paul II spoke with the Cuban people, but what he said might as aptly have been addressed to the whole human race, and most especially those peoples afflicted with the scourge of the AIDS epidemic: “Do not think of yourselves as victims. You are and must be the principal agents of your own personal and national history.”
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Casting politics and economics as the engines of change is a post-modern fantasy. “Culture is the driving force of history.”
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And we must add that any culture that does not know, or is for any reason blind to, the truth about human nature is radically incapable of serving the common good of human persons:
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Error consists in an understanding of human freedom which detaches it from obedience to the truth, and consequently from the duty to respect the rights of others. The essence of freedom then becomes self-love which leads to an unbridled affirmation of self-interest and which refuses to be limited by any demand of justice. 75 |
Culture is the medium by which man becomes, through the cultivation of natural goods and values, authentically and fully human. 76 But culture is also proportioned to and commensurate with man’s hard work and wholehearted acceptance of and adherence to the truth:
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The word “culture” in its general sense indicates all those factors by which man refines and unfolds his manifold spiritual and bodily qualities. It means his effort to bring the world itself under his control by his knowledge and his labor. 77 |
and this is why individual persons “are and must be the principal agents of their own personal and national history,” 78 that is to say, the very roots of their own culture. The scientists laboring with international financial and logistical support in Zimbabwe cannot admit this much, but blindsided by disobedience to the truth remain baffled as to “WHY [their] ubiquitous AIDS education programs are having so little effect.” 79 It is because the human heart itself contains the criterion of truth, inscribed there by its Creator, 80 and is the selfsame reason that the heart cannot rejoice in what the mind must reject as false. 81
Germane to any discussion of the primacy of culture: three examples from the annals of medical and behavioral science which point up the radical wrong-mindedness of the present efforts of “all those national and international organizations” operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, trying vainly to come to grips with the HIV pandemic there. All three cases concern incurable diseases and the transforming effect on culture of courageously and humbly bowing to the truth. Two of the cases involve HIV itself.
THE CASE FROM NEW GUINEA: THE FORE PEOPLE AND KURU
New Guinea once was the land of cannibals and head hunters. The Fore people were such, who to this day inhabit the wild and inaccessible south-central highlands of the island nation. Today they number about 8,000 individuals. But half a century ago, they were a dying tribe on the verge of extinction.
Their encounter with truth did not come about as a result of their encounter with Christian missionaries bent on imposing on them Western (or, God forbid, Christian) moral supremacy. No message of fraternal charity brought their “long-standing tradition” (“culturally reinforced”, of course) of cannibalism to an end. And no post-modern deconstruction of history to prove that all cultures are equal was going to convince these people to resume their old ways of life, either. On their own, they unanimously decided they had had enough of the “old ways.”
Eighty percent of the Fore girls and women were dying. It was not a pretty way to go, either. The Fore dubbed it kuru, meaning in their language, “spasmodic shaking or trembling.” Other names they called it included “the laughing” or “the grimacing” death.
Today, we recognize that kuru is a prion disease. “Mad cow disease,” perhaps more familiar to you than kuru, is also a disease caused by prions. A prion is a molecule, a collection of atoms, that is smaller than most proteins and is present in various animal tissues. Prions are not viruses. Viruses are alive, they reproduce by known mechanisms, and they actively infect by destroying the cells in which they live, bursting their host cell’s walls and membranes, and spreading into the surrounding tissues to infect more cells. Prions are not like that at all. They are not even living matter, although all animals produce them. They are fine as long as they remain confined to the animal that produced them.
But, for reasons that we are just beginning now to understand, when prions are ingested by another animal, and the animal does not have the ability to assimilate the prions, those prions settle on the cell walls and membranes. There, they begin to poison and to destroy the surrounding cells.
The specific cells that kuru afflicts are the brain cells. Hence, the odd symptoms that are exhibited, beginning with the grimace, which over a period of months becomes an uncontrollable laugh, which over time degenerates into spasmodic gesticulation of the limbs and extremities, and ultimately (and inevitably) results in the death of the host.
It took nearly thirty years for the shamans and witch doctors to become really aware of what was going on. The epidemic did not start out to be an epidemic at all. It was one case here, two cases there, growing slowly but inexorably into the pandemic it became. Oral traditions among the Fore people relate that the first cases began to appear in the mid to late 1920’s. By the middle of the 1950’s it was clear to everyone that something was dangerously and drastically wrong.
It was also a threatening source of social upheaval. Virtually all the women and marriageable girls were dying. The boys and young men were anxious — and restless. The situation came to the attention of the Australian government — because there was serious talk of war. The Fore needed women to avoid extinction. The kuru epidemic among the Fore was about to break out into social disruption across the entire island of New Guinea. The intervention of an outsider was clearly needed by all the tribes concerned.
The Australians did intervene. They prevented the war everyone feared by encouraging the Fore to barter with the surrounding tribes for the brides they needed, and they brought in medical experts to figure out the kuru problem.
The physicians knew nothing of prions in those days, of course. But, they were expert nonintrusive observers. They observed that it was mostly the women and girls who were afflicted with kuru. They observed that when feasting on human flesh was in order, the men and boys tended to prevent the females of the tribe from eating the tastier meatier parts of the corpse, but generally relegated them to eating the brains. The physicians discussed what they had observed with the tribal elders and the shamans. In no time, these tribal elders decreed an end to cannibalism.
Cannibalism and head hunting, traditions that were tens of thousands of years old, are both now eradicated from the island of New Guinea. So is kuru.
THE CASE FROM UGANDA: HIV TAMED BY CHASTITY AND FIDELITY
The HIV/AIDS pandemic is out of control everywhere throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, with one glaring and brilliant exception: predominantly Catholic UGANDA.
According to a press release from the United Nations World Health Organization, “Uganda's success in reducing high HIV infection rates is the result of high-level political commitment to HIV prevention and care, involving a wide range of partners and all sectors of society . . . While the rate of new infections continues to increase in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, [Catholic] Uganda has succeeded in lowering its very high infection rates.” That is the headline. Buried in the article, however, is the real cause: “From the outset, the government involved religious and traditional leaders, and community groups.”
A Harvard study published in June, 2002 reviewed the UN WHO data, and also provided an analysis of data collected by its own survey. It added its own slant on the same good news: “Uganda may be on its way to wiping out AIDS by using a strategy based on chastity and fidelity,” the Harvard study stated in its published conclusions. The Harvard study credits abstinence education with “significant effectiveness in reducing AIDS in Uganda . . . with the HIV infection rate dropping 50 percent between the years 1992 and 2000.” Harvard’s report concludes by saying “Much of the program’s success is due to the nation's willingness to look beyond the sexual revolution to its traditional cultural past, before the adoption of corrupt Western sexual mores.” The study found Ugandan adults reacted to the AIDS epidemic by becoming less promiscuous from 1989 to 2000. Of the groups Harvard studied, for example, of women 15 and older, those reporting multiple sexual partners dropped from 18.4 percent to 2.5 percent.
Uganda uses billboards, radio announcements, and chastity-based curricula to promote abstinence and faithfulness. The result has been a gradual, steady, but nonetheless dramatic, drop in HIV infection rates. Uganda's infection rate has dropped from 30 percent of its population in the 1990s to the present level of just over five percent, an achievement attributed to an aggressive campaign encouraging abstinence and faithfulness to partners. If the Harvard University report is welcomed honestly and with a real commitment to reduce suffering, then Uganda could become a model for worldwide AIDS prevention.
Bowing to the Harvard University study, the U.N. AIDS agency has reported that Uganda's falling HIV prevalence is due “mainly to a number of behavioral changes and that the most important determinant of the reduction in HIV incidence in that country appears to be a decrease in multiple sexual partnerships and the intervention of networks of a personal nature in general.” Read “networks of a personal nature” to mean “NOT all those national and international organizations.”
Ugandans have rejected condoms. “Ugandans really never took to condoms,” said Dr. Vinand Nantulya, an infectious disease advisor to Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni, in the New Republic magazine. Obviously, “all those national and international organizations” have been very active in Uganda, but the Ugandans have courageously bucked the message of the culture of death, and gone with something that actually works.
Hmmm . . . Low condom use equals low HIV infection rate. HOW VERY INTERESTING. But Uganda is not the only nation where this has been true, either.
THE CASE FROM PHILIPPINES: HIV TAMED BY PERSEVERING CATHOLIC TEACHING
This, according to a Cybercast News Service report datelined August 20, 2003 and filed by Patrick Goodenough. Now, Cybercast News is not noted for its love of things Catholic. Just look at the headline: “Pro-Lifers (So-Called) Question Call for ‘Billions More Condoms for Asia.’” Still, Mr. Goodenough does a fairly good job of old-fashioned objective news reporting.
He reports that, “The Philippines is one country where the theory that condom use lowers HIV-AIDS infections has not held up. Condom use is low in the predominantly Catholic country, but at the same time the HIV infection rate is very low. In a country of 84 million people, government figures in 2002 showed that just 1,810 people had tested positive for HIV. Even the U.N. AIDS agency's 2001 estimate for the Philippines - some 9,400 people with HIV infections - is exceptionally low.”
Mr. Goodenough interviewed a number of people for his article, which is really about UN WHO and UN AIDS and their ongoing efforts to make headway in Asia with their campaign that pushes the use of condoms. He is generally sympathetic to condom use as a means of getting HIV under control in Asia, but he honestly states the facts as he sees them: “U.N. officials have been stumped for a reason for the Philippines’ figures. But the reason is actually quite clear: the Catholic Church's persevering and consistent teachings in authentic values of life, love and sexuality.” He then proceeds to talk with people who ought to know what is going on inside the Philippines: Filipinos themselves. Specifically, he reports on his interviews with the head of the organization Pro-Life Philippines and, of all things, an interview with the President of the country.
Listen to what Filipinos are saying:
“Pro-Life Philippines also responded to queries about the WHO and UN AIDS campaigns, criticizing the focus on condom use. The organization’s president, Dr. Myrna Zapanta, said Wednesday that abstinence programs had proven more effective than condom use in the long term in preventing the transmission of sexually-transmitted diseases. Zapanta also called to task organizations and their programs that failed to tackle the causes of prostitution.”
Among other things, Doctor Zapanta offered this gem of insightful thinking: “The call for Asian countries to intensify condom distribution, especially among those in the sex industry, is an admission of governments that they are unable to provide decent jobs and protect families of those involved in this dangerous and socially-disruptive means of livelihood and leisure,” she said.
Last March, Philippine President Gloria Arroyo urged Philippine couples to use natural birth control - she cited the Billings ovulation method - rather than condoms. “Natural family planning is internationally known, scientific, practical and 99-percent effective,” she said, adding that it also did not go against Catholic teachings.
WHY THESE THREE CASES WORKED
Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno had “called for respect for the full richness of social life.”
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Man’s nature in its dimension as a social being gives rise to “the need for vital contributions from different human associations”
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that range in scope from the families of which individuals are members, to trade and professional groups, churches, and government. This need “has been classically expressed in Catholic social teaching in the ‘principle of solidarity.’”
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Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help (subsidium) to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them. This need “has been classically expressed in Catholic social teaching in the ‘principle of subsidiarity.’”
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The enunciation by Pope Pius XI of the principle of subsidiarity envisioned reciprocal rights, duties and responsibilities
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beginning with society’s lowest unit, in a hierarchy ordered by successively lower degrees of materiality, or greater degrees of formality, to that lowest unit. What, then, is closest and impinges most on the individual person’s life is most material to it.
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What is most remote and impinges least on the individual person’s life is least material and most formal to it. At the bottom of the hierarchy, then, is the individual and the individual’s family. Next would be associations of love and friendship. In the sphere of economics, the uppermost rungs might be occupied by the employer and government. The role of each form of association is limited by the supreme (one may even dare to say divine) dignity each individual person, created in God’s image,
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has.
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The aim or end, i. e. in and by the very nature of the term 'association', of any particular level of association is “to furnish help” to its constituting members, which in the sphere of employment may include individuals, families, neighborhoods, parishes, employee work groups, trade and professional organizations, labor unions, etc.
The twin principles of solidarity and subsidiarity can be seen working in the way the Australian government intervened with the Fore people to prevent all-out war in the highlands of New Guinea, and also in the way it provided expert medical assistance and research to find a way to end the kuru pandemic that had annihilated the Fore womenfolk. By applying the same principles, the people of Uganda and Philippines likewise were successful in stemming the rising tide of AIDS infection in their countries through grassroots parish-level organizing and personal support.
WHY “ALL THOSE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS” FAIL
What about “all those national and international organizations” that are pushing the use of condoms as the only appropriate means of ending the HIV scourge? It is precisely here, in their concrete examples and policies proposed for implementation, that the structural relationship that ought to obtain between the framework provided by the principle of subsidiarity and its implementation in real world situations becomes lost. For any proposed or implemented policy that fails first and foremost to be framed in the overarching context of the principle of subsidiarity cannot be viewed with happiness by any Christian. Moreover, by running counter to its own nature “to furnish help” to the lower levels of social organization, it is doomed to fall short of that nature, failing to achieve its objectives in the same measure as it is a usurpation of the mutual and reciprocal prerogatives, rights, duties, and responsibilities by nature belonging to the lower echelon, and more material, members of society. This, coupled with the abject rejection of the truth about the whole human person, dooms their efforts to failure, now and in the future. There will continue to be a “disconnect between knowledge and behavior.”
The various spheres of human activity encompass economics, politics, science and technology, philosophy, and religion; collectively, these endeavors are culture, and they are rightly autonomous and separated from each other into their own respective domains.
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This is a truth, summarized as “the legitimate autonomy of human culture and especially of the sciences.” BUT:
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Totalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense. If there is no transcendent truth, in obedience to which man achieves his full identity, then there is no sure principle for guaranteeing just relations between people. Their self-interest as a class, group or nation would inevitably set them in opposition to one another. If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over, and each person tends to make full use of the means at his disposal in order to impose his own interests or his own opinion, with no regard for the rights of others. Thus, the root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate—no individual, group, class, nation or state. Not even the majority of a social body may violate these rights, by going against the minority, by isolating, oppressing, or exploiting it, or by attempting to annihilate it. 92 |
The “road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
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It is not enough to want to help people. Assistance must be ordered to the truth, or it rapidly degenerates into the forms of tyranny now manifested in the human misery in Africa. The interventions of large-scale international organizations (every one of which has a vested financial interest in the proliferating use of contraceptive devices) and political government in Zimbabwe (and all of Sub-Saharan Africa) merely feed the catastrophe of human wretchedness there.
To God and to His Christ, Who was, and Who is, and Who is to come, be all glory, praise, honor, and thanksgiving, now and forever. Amen!