| Responses:
September 29, 2002
It strikes me that this piece is guilty of some of the sins of anti-science it charges others with.
First, it lumps together a large number of independent movements and tries to tar each with the sins of the other. That commits the twin sins of overgeneralization and underinstantiation. My general understanding is that substantial majorities of people in all industrialized countries fail to understand science and are not easily persuaded away from pre-existing beliefs by scientific evidence. It stands to reason that political movements of all kinds are likely to make pigheaded scientific errors. That is very different from showing that all movements share the same small number of occult beliefs. I think they probably don't.
Second, some of the claims are debatable or based on bad reasoning or unsupported. A good scientist would be more measured and less sensationalistic in his prose:
No evidence of vitalism in the organic movement is given. I attended an IFOAM conference (the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements) two years ago in Basel, and all of what I heard tried to be scientific, and in my opinion much of it succeeded. You can call the organic movement vitalist in a metaphorical sense, but that is just a debater's trick. Lots of people in the movement believe, for example, that GMOs will eventually be acceptable, but they oppose them now on precautionary grounds. A vitalist couldn't possibly believe that.
The attack on Consumers Union has a point (they should look at natural toxins as well as artificial ones), but that is mainly an evasion of what CU showed: Commercial produce really does have artificial chemicals in amounts that often violate government guidelines, and organic produce almost always doesn't. Moreover, it is legitimate to separate the two questions, on the grounds that artificial chemicals present the greater a priori risk. Natural toxins really are different from artificial toxins in at least the following sense: We reliably know that real ecologies can co-exist indefinitely with a continued production of naturally occurring toxins. We have no such knowledge about any artificial toxin.
As to vaccines, there really is a (selfish) case to made against accepting at least some of them. For example, when most people are vaccinated against polio, the risk of getting polio is so tiny that getting the vaccine is more risky (because of rare complications) than the risk from not getting it. Moreover, since many medical doctors routinely mislead people on this point (in the name of the higher good of public health), uneducated people are rational not to trust what the doctors say about vaccines.
David Burress Associate Scientist/Research Economist Policy Research Institute Blake Hall University of Kansas
DeGregori replies:
Dear David,
Thank you for your observations on my posted piece on "Rejected Knowledge." Needless to say, I disagree with your observations. I assure you that my attribution of vitalism is not a passing observation but the result of extensive study of the development of the practice. Below I give you a greatly condensed version of my historical study of the subject. I could also give you any number of quotes from contemporary defenders of organic agriculture and/or opponents of g.m. food who frequently refer to "vital properties" that are unmeasurable.
The revolt against science in agriculture had its origins a century or more before synthetic pesticides became an issue. Cut away all the rhetoric and the argument was simply that inorganic minerals and synthetic fertilizer lacked the vital properties of manure. I do not have time to organize some of my juicier quotes on contemporary vitalism, but I just happened to encounter an article that I would argue is indicative of my reading on the movement. (And I trust that your observations on organic agriculture are not based on conversations in Basel.) I happen to have agricultural experience around the world and have written on the subject (check my vita for details).
As an economist, I am aware of the free-rider problem. There is a big difference between a situation where every other kid in town is getting immunized and you decide not to bother getting your kid immunized and an organized movement against immunization. For the former scenario, your kid and the others in town are safe (it is called herd immunity) at least until another unimmunized kid comes to town or your kid goes off someplace. In the other scenario, lives are put in jeopardy, as I show in my article. To be honest, I found your defense of those opposing immunization glib or worse. A set of beliefs is leading to the death of infants and children, and you wish to brush it aside. As an active civil libertarian, I would do nothing to muzzle those advocating such heinous ideas, but I am certainly going to speak out forcefully against them. You are simply silent on the harm being done to innocent people by ideas to which you appear to be sympathetic.
Having gone to your webpage and read some of your posted articles, along with your e-mail to me, it seems to me that you operate with a set of comfortable assumptions about the world for which you demand no supporting evidence. Nature is benign, you believe, and evil comes from the hand of man. Are you even remotely aware of the "natural" pesticides that are approved for use in organic agriculture, in addition to those regularly in use before the emergence of synthetic pesticides in the post-WW II period? (Check page 85 of my book: DeGregori, Thomas R., 2001. Agriculture and Modern Technology: A Defense, Ames: Iowa State University Press.) Rotenone is a precursor to Parkinson's disease, while copper sulphate and pyrethrum are carcinogens. There is simply no excuse for saying organic agriculture involves no pesticides. If it is put on the plant to kill a pest, it is a pesticide. One can argue whether it is benign or not, but by any reasonable definition of pesticide, it is a pesticide. Consumer Reports is doing a disservice to its readers and to its own integrity by failing to inform its readers of these dangerous "natural" chemicals on their "organic" produce.
Enough!
Thomas R. DeGregori
P.S. If your "organic" farmers in Basel were talking about growing g.m. crops, they will have to either change the rules governing the "organic" label in the U.S. (or "biodynamic" label in Europe) or call it something else. You need to check your facts for a number of your posted papers. For example, there is no evidence of desertification in Africa, though you and others seem to believe it simply must be true. That claim was challenged from the beginning. I have used in class at least two books that refute it. New Scientist has an article and an editorial on it in a recent issue. (My only disagreement with the article is that it makes it sound as if the refutation has just been discovered.)
P.P.S. A LENGTHY NOTE, WITH CITATIONS, ON THE BIZARRE HISTORY OF VITALISM OUTLINED IN THE ARTICLE ABOVE:
Although organic agriculture dates back to the very origins of cultivation, since that is all humankind had until recent times, the ideology of contemporary "organic" and biodynamic agriculture can be traced back about two hundred years as a form of "vitalist" dissent against Lavoisier, Woehler, Liebig, Kobe, and the emerging sciences of chemistry, biology, medicine, and agronomy.
1) It was long believed that "organic" compounds could not be artificially synthesized and were solely created by life and contained a "vital" property that was unique to life. Woehler (in 1828) and Kobe showed that "organic" compounds could be synthesized.
2) It was long believed that only the product of living forms, such as manure, could nourish other life. Liebig showed that minerals could be used to help grow plants.
3) Quantitative methods in chemistry following Lavoisier were, by the last half of the nineteenth century, making medical practice more scientific.
When it became clear that organic compounds _could_ be synthesized and that minerals could be used in agriculture, the dissenters retreated to the position that you could grow food that way but it would lack a "vital" property. In other words, it filled the belly but it did not nourish the body, let alone the soul. This "vitalism" has continued to be the fallback position for the cultist believers in "organic" and biodynamic agriculture and in homeopathy.
So much for the nineteenth century origins. It is clear that twentieth-century "organic" and biodynamic agriculture rose (or actually continued from the nineteenth century) in opposition to the Haber-Bosch process for the creation of synthetic fertilizer, what Vaclav Smil has called the greatest invention of the twentieth century. Steiner was a major figure in this revolt and continued in the tradition of vitalism.
In many ways, it is frightening to realize that Steiner could have followers today, with Waldorf schools around the world based on his teachings. Some of his followers go to great lengths to deny anti-Semitism, but none to my knowledge deny his beliefs in the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria and the other cultic beliefs that he got from Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and her Theosophy cult, the German branch of which he headed until he broke off and formed his own cult of Anthroposophy.
Any contemporary movement has the right to draw ideas from any historical source and discard others from that same source without having to defend the ideas that they reject. The problem with the contemporary cultists is that they prefer to deny the past espousal of such beliefs rather than frankly reject them, since many of these cultic beliefs are so deeply intertwined.
In my recently posted piece "The Deadly Perils of Rejected Knowledge," I use James Webb's apt phrase "rejected knowledge" to describe this stream of ideas dissenting from the emerging body of scientific understanding that has formed the basis of the contemporary anti-biotech and other movements. Whether it be children dying because of homeopathic opposition to immunization or famine taking a greater toll of lives in Southern Africa because of the storm of controversy over transgenic corn, we pay a high price for the widespread cultic beliefs in "rejected knowledge."
As a form of documentation, I offer some selected paragraphs with citations from a just-completed manuscript of mine. I present the history of organic agriculture (and homeopathy) as part of a larger "vitalist" reaction against the rise of modern science over the last two centuries:
ORIGINS OF ORGANIC CHEMISTRY (AND THE END OF VITALISM?)
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the "apparent uniqueness of life" led to the reasonable belief at the time that there was "something mystical about it, some ineffable force that set it off from the nonliving world." The term vitalism was coined in the eighteenth century by Georg Ernest Stahl (1610-1734) (Wills and Bada 2000, 11-12). Stahl's animistic vitalism was no more incompatible with the science of his time than were his theories about phlogiston and combustion prior to Joseph Priestley's (1733-1804) isolation of oxygen. Priestley's work was followed in 1828 by the first laboratory synthesis of an organic compound, urea, by Friedrich Woehler (1800-1882), a chemist and founder of organic chemistry (Wills and Bada 2000, 12). He demonstrated that chemistry could create organic compounds even without organic molecules. The prevailing vitalist belief argued that organic molecules could only be formed from other organic molecules. Justus Baron von Liebig (1803-1873), a founder of agricultural chemistry, in his essay "Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology," refuted the theory that only organic material (specifically, humus) nourished plants. Following Lavoisier, Liebig recognized that "respiration involves oxidation of substances within the body for the production of heat" and concluded that the "carbon dioxide exhaled by the body was an index of its heat production" (McCollum 1957, 93).
Among Liebig's most important discoveries was the demonstration that minerals could fertilize soil. The nineteenth and twentieth century application of this discovery has allowed a human population six times greater than in Liebig's time to be better nourished than ever before. Liebig used quantitative analysis in the study of biological systems and demonstrated what had been deemed "vital activity" could be fully understood in physicochemical terminology. His 1840 book, Thierchemie, integrated chemistry and physiology. He showed that plants manufactured organic compounds using atmospheric carbon dioxide. Though the atmosphere has an abundance of nitrogenous compounds, plants could only use those found in the soil. In 1845, one of Woehler's students, Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe (1818-1884), accomplished the first synthesis of an organic compound (acetic acid) from its elements, which to some observers sounded "the death-knell of vitalism in chemistry" (Toby 2002).
THE VITALIST REACTION TO LIEBIG, HABER AND BOSCH
To Lady Balfour, a proponent of "organic agriculture" and a founder of the Soil Association in England, Liebig's "naive theory" that inorganic material could be used in plant production may have resulted in increased food production but was nutritionally inferior (Balfour 1948, 50-51 and Balfour 1976, 56). It lacked a "vital quality," since the modern world, "largely ruled by chemistry," had neglected the "continuity of the living principle in nature" (Balfour 1976, 25).
Before modern chemical pesticides were an issue, the foundation of organic agriculture for Rudolf Steiner was opposition to synthetic fertilizers, since they were "man-made" and alien to the environment and most of all because they were "dead" (Bramwell 1989, 20, also, Steiner 1958, Ferguson 1997). In origin, "organic" or "biodynamic" agriculture was part of the continuing advocacy for the exclusive use of organic matter for plant nutrition. Opposition to the use of synthetic fertilizer beginning in the 1920s was a continuation of the vitalist dissent from Woehler and Liebig and from the foundation of organic chemistry a century earlier. Cut away the contemporary rhetoric from the opposition to synthetic fertilizer and one finds a vitalist argument for the superiority of manure. The widespread use of synthetic pesticides arose well after the beginnings of the biodynamic movement in agriculture and could not have been the cause of it. Paeans in praise of manure are uttered by its advocates, and it is claimed that "organic" agriculture can be conducted without "fertilizer" and that such practices can be used to feed the world. The beliefs about the alleged superiority of organic produce among the general public are generally quite vague, though even among the least-passionate, most marginal believers, there is a hint of vitalism. There almost has to be a vitalist core, since there is no scientifically verifiable evidence for any nutritional benefit to "organic" produce.
As absurd as homeopathic medicine may be, it is topped by what one may call "homeopathic manuring." Steiner and his followers wanted manure to be diluted to the minutest level (in a fashion similar to that used in homeopathic medicine), in preparations made from rain water and cow dung, which had been buried in a cow horn over the winter (Kolisko and Kolisko 1946, 220-236 and Kolisko 1938). In 1919, Steiner founded the mystic cult of Anthroposophy, encompassing anthroposophical medicine, biodynamic farming, and a mode of teaching that stressed art, drama, and "spiritual development." It is still embodied in the Anthroposophical Society's Waldorf Schools. For Steiner and advocates of bio-dynamic organic farming, the crux of organic farming was non-use of man-made fertilizer (Webb 1976, 71). Two assumptions constituted the basis of such non-use: that artificial fertilizer was alien to the environment, and that it was dead.
HOMEOPATHY
Contemporary proponents of homeopathy still follow the spiritualism of Steiner and believe in such things as the "etheric" and "astral" body (Webb 1976, 62-72 and Evans and Rodger 2000). Homeopathy is now part of a largely vitalist movement under the general rubric of "alternative medicine." Sometimes the vitalist principle is expressed in scientific, or more accurately, in pseudo-scientific terms. One author, Candace Pert, depicts polypeptides serving as transmitters of vital properties of the mind to every molecule of the body, with the result that the "brain is integrated into the body at a molecular level" in what she calls "molecules of emotion" that endow all of life (Pert 1997, 187). Fitzgerald likens this idea of the "mobile brain" the "psychosomatic network through which intelligent information travels from one system to another" to the nineteenth-century "notion of the mobile uterus, which was believed to travel around the female body producing hysterical symptoms" (Fitzgerald 2002).
Needless to say, Pert also believes that the MMR immunization causes autism (Fitzpatrick 2002).
These beliefs may seem strange but harmless. We had a recent case in Germany where two homeopathic doctors who opposed the MMR vaccine are being blamed for a measles epidemic involving over 700 children. "Thirty children have been taken into hospital and the authorities fear there could be deaths if the infection rate continues to rise. The thirty children to be treated in hospital so far have ear, lung, and larynx infections brought on by measles." (Hall 2002). That "classical child diseases permanently strengthen the child's immunity and aid progress in the development of the child" is a claim made in a pamphlet circulated in Coberg, Germany by homeopathic practitioners (Hall 2002).
Their stronghold is: "the Waldorf School, which actively encourages people not to have their children vaccinated. Now we have an epidemic." The Waldorf School is a holistic teaching center based on the methods of the late Dr. Rudolf Steiner and "is one of several in Germany that promotes alternative medicine...Anti-MMR letters have also been sent to parents by activists advising them not to vaccinate their children" (Hall 2002).
In the United States, a Waldorf School is among those in Boulder, Colorado where children are not receiving their pertussis and other immunizations with fatal consequences, both for those children not getting immunized and their younger siblings too young to receive theirs (Allen 2002). In the United Kingdom, in a twelve-month period, "eight infants of preimmunization age have required extracorporeal support for intractable cardiorespiratory failure due to Bordetella pertussis infection. Five of them died "despite extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support, and one survivor has substantial neurological disability" (Pigott et al. 2002).
THE GREEN AND OCCULT BELIEFS OF THE NAZIS
Vegetarianism and organic agriculture were an integral part of the Nazi ideology for many of its leading advocates. Hitler was a vegetarian as were other elite Nazis who believed in "organic health" (Proctor 1988, 228, Webb 1976, 299, 312 and Sax 2000, 35). Rudolf Hess demanded that his food have "biologically dynamic ingredients" (Bramwell 1989, 20 and Bramwell 1984, 10). Steiner's influence on Hess and the green wing of the Nazi party was direct while his broader beliefs in the occult may have influenced Nazi theorists such as Alfred Rosenberg indirectly through Russian cultists (Webb 1980, 186 and Webb 1976, 309-312). One pair of writers on the Nazis argued that "Vegetarianism became the symbol of the new, pure civilization that was to be Germany's future" (Arluke and Sax 1992, 17).
Richard Walther Darre, Nazi Minister of Agriculture from 1933 to 1943, promoted chemical-free "agriculture according to the laws of nature" and "farming methods according to the laws of life" (Hermand 1997, 53, first quote and Olsen 1999, 76, second quote). The fetish for "organic agriculture" was part of a larger health preference for the natural and was linked to concerns about environmental carcinogens, environmental toxins, artificial colorings, and preservatives adherents "stressed a return to organic or 'natural' ingredients in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fertilizers, and foods." (Proctor 1988, 241 and 237).
It is extraordinary how many occult beliefs were widely held and even adhered to during the Nazi era in Germany. There is a substantial literature on the occultic beliefs in Nazi Germany and their role in the rise of the Nazis to power, so there is no need to revisit them here in any detail. It is not always clear, in reading this scholarly literature, exactly what Nazis believed and how they let certain beliefs influence their behavior. But one repeatedly finds, in addition to Hitler, Himmler, Hess, Darre, and Rosenberg, that a number of them (Rosenberg in particular in his Myths of the Twentieth Century) believed in the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, which they got from Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (Theosophy) and Rudolf Steiner (Anthroposophy). The Atlantis legend included a belief in a succession of races of mankind, the last of which, the Aryans, arose in the cold north of Atlantis and ended up on mountaintops in the Himalayas of Tibet, from which they spread to other areas (Webb 1976, 315-316, 499 and Spielvogel and Redles 1986). The belief in a Tibetan origin for the pure-Aryan Germans was widespread among the Nazis, even among those who did not subscribe to the Atlantis myth (Goodrick-Clarke 2002, 122-124).
This Nazi fascination with Tibet has given Hollywood filmmakers some good material for movies. Non-Aryan races were seen as mongrel crosses of the Aryans and local populations. Rudolf Steiner and Madame Blavatsky had followers in other countries, so it was not a delusion experienced solely by the Nazis, but one searches in vain to find any other place where these ideas, flowing from "rejected knowledge," had so many followers in power promoting them. However, Steiner has many followers today in the Waldorf schools and beyond. Many who don't know him by name are influenced by his "vitalist" ideas about biodynamic agriculture and "organic" food supply. It is hard to imagine that supposedly educated people today would accept Steiner's belief in Atlantis, based on clairvoyance, or his belief in other lost continents.
Two of the most zealous pan-German and racist, anti-Semitic cults were Ariosophy and the Thule Society (Goodrick-Clarke 1992, 11-16). Jeffrey Goldstein explores the "mystical" cultist origins of Naziism (Goldstein 1979). Though he finds the theosophy of Helena Blavatsky to have all the racist, anti-Semitic nonsense of the Nazis including the belief in Atlantis and the superiority of the Aryans that was later propagated by Rosenberg Goldstein also recognizes that Theosophy never identified the Aryans with the Germans, and though Theosophists were strongly opposed to race-mixing, they never advocated violence, leaving a "gap" between Theosophy and the Nazis (Goldstein 1979, 62). Goldstein proposes that Ariosophy "helped to bridge this gap," and it was the "avenue through which Theosophy influenced Nazi ideology" (Goldstein 1979, 62). "The resulting mixture of occultism, racism, anti-Semitism, and voekisch nationalism was quite volatile, one which offered a lofty 'spiritual' ideal as a justification for practices which eventually led to genocide" (Goldstein 1979 65). The final "relationship between occultism and the Third Reich" was the Thule Society, which had "direct and indirect links with all the groups in Munich which helped the Nazi Party" (Goldstein 1979, 65 & 69). Goldstein is careful not to claim too much but wants the "ideological similarity and the historical connection between certain elements in these groups and Nazism" to be recognized (Goldstein 1979, 73).
MEANWHILE, IN SOVIET RUSSIA...
In Russia, Lysenko's views of evolution and plant growth were clearly forms of rejected knowledge. In some respects, we need know little more about Lysenko and Stalin than this to know they would do harm: Disaster would have followed from using Lysenko's "rejected knowledge" in agriculture even in the absence of other murderous Soviet views. It is understandable that Lysenkoism would flourish under Stalin. Those holding to "rejected knowledge" are prone to believe in some conspiracy that is thwarting the acceptance of their beliefs and therefore become more willing to seek out or otherwise accept dictatorial support to put their beliefs in practice. When they fail, as they inevitably will, they can blame those who are conspiring against them and not the ideas themselves. This fits the pattern of authoritarian/totalitarian rulers who attribute all failures to the actions of their enemies. In more democratic regimes, if "rejected knowledge" somehow becomes the basis for policy, those in power have to either change course as it fails or face defeat in the next election.
Clearly, "a campaign against geneticists" in the Soviet Union in the 1930s is vastly different from the various slanderous attacks against those involved in biotechnology today. (Every time we make this comparison, we must very emphatically state that the evils of the Soviet Gulag or the Nazi Holocaust can in no way be ascribed to the contemporary proponents of "rejected knowledge." Unfortunately, many of those promoting "rejected knowledge" have not been so careful in their use of these and other labels.) But to adherents of "rejected knowledge," the idea that there might be an honest difference of opinion based on scientific evidence is unthinkable; there must be some cabal opposing them, a corporate elite and corrupt scientists. This conspiracy becomes a rationalization and justification for using anti-democratic means for achieving objectives.
It is interesting that geneticists were accused of being the "handmaiden of Goebbels' department," since there were considerable similarities between the forms of "rejected knowledge" that flourished in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Rudolf Steiner had many followers in Russia. Steiner's influence on Hess and the green wing of the Nazi party was direct (though contemporary devotees of Steiner are at pains to deny it). Steiner's broader beliefs in the occult may have influenced Nazi theorists such as Alfred Rosenberg (who studied in Russia) indirectly through Russian cultists (Webb 1980, 186 and Webb 1976, 309-312).
The connections between all of these movements are a matter of historical record.
REFERENCES
Allen, Arthur. 2002. Bucking the Herd: Parents Who Refuse Vaccination for Their Children May Be Putting Entire Communities At Risk, The Atlantic 290(2):40 & 42, September.
Arluke, Arnold and Boria Sax. 1992. Understanding Nazi Animal Protection and the Holocaust. Anthrozoos 5(1):6-31.
Balfour, Eve (Lady Evelyn Barbara). 1948. The Living Soil: Evidence of the Importance to Human Health of Soil Vitality, with Special Reference to National Planning. New York: Devin-Adair Co.
Balfour, Eve (Evelyn Barbara, Lady). 1976. The Living Soil and the Haughley Experiment. New York: Universe Books.
Bramwell, Anna. 1984. Was this Man "Father of the Greens?" History Today. 7-13, September.
Bramwell, Anna. 1985. Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darre and Hitler's "Green Party". Abbotsbrook, Bourne End, Buckinghamshire: Kensal Press.
Bramwell, Anna. 1989. Ecology in the 20th Century: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Evans, Michael and Iain Rodger. 2000. Healing for Body, Soul and Spirit: An Introduction to Anthroposophical Medicine. Edinburg: Floris Books.
Ferguson, Kirsty. 1997. Steiner's Philosophy on Compost: The Plot Thickens, The Independent (London), 1 November.
Fitzpatrick, Michael. 2002. Put Alternative Medicine Back in Its Box, Spiked-online.com, 26 June.
Goldstein, Jeffrey. 1979. "On Racism and Anti-Semitism in Occultism and Nazism" in Livia Rothkirchen, Yad Vashem Studies XIII, Jerusalem.
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas .2002. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of identity. New York: New York University Press.
Hall, Allan. 2002. Anti-vaccine Town Struck by Measles Epidemic: Homoeopaths Who Reject MMR are Blamed for German Outbreak, The Times (London) 6 March.
Hermand, Jost. 1997. Rousseau, Goethe, Humbolt: Their Influence on Later Advocates of Nature Gardens. In Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century edited by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, pp. 155-186. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Kolisko, Lilly Noha. 1938. The Moon and the Growth of Plants. Bournemouth: Kolisko Archive, 62 Frederica Rd, Bournemouth BH9 2NA.
Kolisko, Lilly Noha and Marna Pease. 1936. (translated by Marna Pease and Carl Alexander Mirbt, The Moon and the Growth of Plants (With 72 illustrations and 28 graphs). London: Anthroposophical Agricultural Foundation.
McCollum, E.V. 1957. History of Nutrition: The Sequence of Ideas in Nutrition Investigations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Olsen, Jonathan. 1999. Nature and Nationalism: Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany. New York: St Martin's Press.
Pert, Candace B., 1997. Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel The Way You Feel (foreword by Deepak Chopra). New York, NY: Scribner.
Pigott, Nick; Vas Novelli; Suneel Pooboni; Richard Firmin and Allan Goldman .2002. The Importance of Herd Immunity Against Infection, Lancet 360(9333), 24 August.
Proctor, Robert. 1988. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sax, Boria. 2000. Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (foreword by Klaus P. Fischer). New York: Continuum.
Spielvogel, Jackson and David Redles. 1986. Hitler's Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources. In Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, eds., Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual (Los Angeles) 3:229-241.
Toby, Sidney. 2000. Acid Test Finally Wiped Out Vitalism, And Yet . . ., Nature 408(6814):767, 14 December.
Webb, James, 1976. The Occult Establishment. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Pub. Co.
Webb, James. 1980. The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers. London: Thames and Hudson.
Wills, Christopher and Jeffrey L. Bada. 2000. The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup. Cambridge, MA.: Perseus.
October 15, 2002
On the part of your article dealing with home births, either the study cited left out some vital variables or you did. The age range of the mothers having home births can have an affect on the complication rate. And what effect do the education level of the midwife and the varying laws governing midwives have? It would seem to me that fatality levels would be higher in states where midwives are not legal, due to their possible lower education rate in those states or to fear of legal repercussions should the midwife or mother turn up in the emergency room when complications arise.
Second, your description of the vaccine issue is one-sided. You do not cite the reasons that some parents choose not to vaccinate, instead implying that such parents just have a wild notion that they should not. Some of them have very real concerns, supported by evidence. If there were never problems with vaccines, our government would not have a special fund just for settling and hushing up such cases. When I have children, their vaccinations will certainly be subject to the closest scrutiny. For example, if thimerosal (a mercury derivative) is dangerous enough to have been removed from contact lens solutions, why is it still being used as a preservative in something that is injected into a small child's body? Why is anything containing formaldehyde injected into a small child's body? These are certainly issues that should be addressed by the pharmaceutical industry.
Some vaccines are being recommended largely because it is inconvenient for adults to have a child ill, rather than because the vaccines are actually in the best interest of most children. The chicken pox vaccine immunity from which tends to wear off just as the child gets to the age where chicken pox becomes a more dangerous ailment than it was when the kid was younger is beginning to be required in some states, largely for the convenience of moms, employers, and day care centers. This is bad policy, in my opinion.
You also do not address the fact that many children, vaccinated or not, are endangered every year because we no longer screen immigrants for ailments that American people have not been routinely subject to for many years. Your work would bear more weight if you paid more attention to detail.
H. James
Editor's note: See ACSH's report on the benefits of vaccination.
May 25, 2003
To my mind, Dr. DeGregori's rebuttal is if anything more dogmatic, more bloated, and less persuasive than his original statement. A full analysis would bore everyone to tears, but here are some main points.
1. I accused Dr. DeGregori's post of over-generalization and under-instantiation or in other words, of practicing guilt by association. He responded with even more extreme examples of the same kind.
In particular, I claimed that many participants at the IFOAM conference I attended did not believe in vitalism, so organic farming cannot be equated with vitalism. Here are some of Dr. DeGregori's attempted rebuttals.
a. "I assure you that my attribution of vitalism [An attribution to whom or what group exactly? He doesn't ever say.] is not a passing observation but the result of extensive study of the development of the practice. Below I give you a greatly condensed version of my historical study of the subject." He then proceeds to do so at length without ever actually mentioning IFOAM.
b. "I could also give you any number of quotes from contemporary defenders of organic agriculture and/or opponents of g.m. food who frequently refer to 'vital properties' that are unmeasurable." However, Dr. DeGregori then fails to give any quotes and also fails to connect it with IFOAM.
c. "I present the history of organic agriculture (and homeopathy) as part of a larger 'vitalist' reaction against the rise of modern science over the last two centuries." He then does so at length again without mentioning IFOAM.
Bottom line: Dr. DeGregori may well be able to show that many critics of biotech in general, and GM foods in particular, do make vitalist arguments though read carefully, he still hasn't given any direct contemporary cases of it. What he can't show is that the IFOAM conference I attended was a hotbed of vitalism.
2. Dr. DeGregori did not take the time to read carefully what I actually wrote. Instead he jumped to conclusions based on straw man arguments.
a. He thinks I oppose immunization and support anti-immunization movements. Actually, I didn't address either point. For the record, I support required immunization where based on good public health evidence, as long as there are opt-out provisions. And I oppose organized anti-immunization movements in those cases. On the other hand I join with many public health officials in opposing the Bush administration's efforts to impose dangerous smallpox vaccinations.
The point I was trying to make which Dr. DeGregori agreed with in a backhanded manner ("As an economist, I am aware of the free-rider problem") is that a refusal to be vaccinated is not necessarily irrational or anti-science.
b. He thinks I believe "Nature is benign...and evil comes from the hand of man." Actually, I believe there is a cold, dangerous universe out there, and that we need all the scientific knowledge we can muster to protect ourselves against it. Where I apparently differ from DeGregori is that I also believe we are in danger from our own technologies, if we implement them rashly. I further believe that we are in fact implementing them rashly, but that is another long debate.
c. He says, "There is simply no excuse for saying organic agriculture involves no pesticides." I made no such claim and in fact specifically referred to "natural toxins." Moreover, Consumers Union made no such claim. Moreover, I heard no one at IFOAM make such a claim.
3. Dr. DeGregori's procedures keep veering into ad hominem attack.
a. The "guilt by association" approach is a cop-out to avoid dealing with specific arguments made by specific individuals. Can a present-day organic farming activist logically be held responsible for two centuries of vitalism? He is attacking such a person for her (alleged) historic associations, not any particular argument she herself made.
b. I am flattered that Dr. DeGregori visited my web page. I thank him for correctly pointing out a weakness in an argument I made there he is right that desertification in Africa is unproven (but he is wrong to say "two books refute it" what has been shown is that the baseline data are inadequate to decide).
But exactly what does that have to do with my letter? Dr. DeGregori seems to be saying that since I was mistaken in that case, my arguments in this case are not worth considering. Again, he is attacking the person, not the argument.
But, as the good doctor said (but did not stick to): enough.
David Burress
Associate Scientist/Research Economist
Policy Research Institute
Blake Hall, University of Kansas | 
