Meeting of 27 March 2003
Jane Buchanan: Population and Sustainability
Jane Buchanan of the Optimum Population Trust (http://www.optimumpopulation.org) spoke of the urgent need to curtail population growth if our earth is to sustain an acceptable life style for future generations.
She supported her arguments by producing those rather alarming statistics which have become so familiar to us in recent years: rising sea levels, diminishing agricultural land, over-use of natural resources, a perpetually expanding economy, overproduction of greenhouse gases etc. The population in the UK stands at 59 million and is expected to continue rising until 2040 by which time it will reach 64 million with most of the increase being due to net immigration.
The ecological footprint, measured in global hectares (gh), is the current way of assessing the impact of populations on the limited resources of our planet. On average, each human being throughout the world appropriates 2.1 gh of productive land and shallow sea for food, water, housing, energy, transport, waste absorption etc. In the developing world this footprint is about 1.0 gh and in the United States it is 9.6 gh. In order to achieve the present US levels throughout the world the human race would require four more planet earths!
In the UK our ecological footprint is 5.35 gh compared with a biological capacity of a mere 1.64 ha. Thus, in order to maintain our life style we make excessive demands on world resources.
The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) claims every nation should have a sustainable population policy and would like to see the UK take the lead. Many of the problems we are now experiencing and which we expect to be much more pronounced in the future could be contained, claims the OPT, if the UK had a population policy with an initial target of no more than 30 million by the year 2130. A sustainable population might be achieved in the UK if the net immigration could be reduced to zero.
Jane Buchanan’s talk raised a lot of provocative issues and stimulated a lively discussion. The topic was of sufficient interest to those present that they hardly wandered off the subject throughout the debate – an unusual occurrence in the EHA.
ARC
Editorial: Truth, Spirituality, etc. - technical terms for the subjective thinker; and more
In an article1 published last Christmas by the British Medical Journal the writer a Consultant Psychiatrist concluded "Many see religion and medicine as peripheral to each other, yet spirituality and clinical care belong together. The time is thus ripening for doctors to recall, reinterpret, and reclaim our profession's sacred dimension".
Others though would see a religious counsellor and a medical one as fulfilling separate functions. Certainly they have distinct terminology ('true' rather than 'evidence-based'; 'spiritual' rather than 'psychological') and distinct purposes (conviction of sin and seeing a need for forgiveness rather than remaining non-judgemental) and so on.
Two replies to the article from an atheist and from a Christian are juxtaposed in the BMJ of 19 April, as reproduced below.
A separate article2 immediately preceding the first-mentioned one is relevant to a controversy in the EHA over the significance of sense organs, for animals in general. It starts out by comparing the Cartesian division of mind and body, of res cognita and res externa but contrasts that with the recognition that it is the environment which makes for a difference - between human and non-human animals, in particular. I quote: "It is difficult for us to imagine what sort of world "opens up" to a fruit fly, a fish or a bat. We are simply not "in" a world that is separate from ourselves. Rather we allow a world to be by our very presence and through our physical bodies. But these also depend on the sociocultural context in which this opening occurs".
For humans this mind (which may be described as 'collective') is coded into the universe of human artefact. It is a true res externa or thing outside of us. In our present computer age this mind becomes capable of initiating action as well as of storing information. For humanists who can be sufficiently objective it may well have taken the place of God.
1 Culliford L Spirituality and clinical care BMJ 2002;325:1434-5. 2 Bracken P, Thomas P Time to move beyond the mind-body split. The "mind" is not inside but "out there" in the social world. BMJ 2002;325:1433-4.
Selected Reproduction from: The British Medical Journal
Editorial: Homer, the Iliad and European Culture
For many if not most humanists global human culture has displaced God, in consequence an adoption of fully scientific requirements. Sometimes though in also being concerned with religions - mostly Christianity, anti-Christianity and now Islam - in modern Europe we tend to forget our literary traditions. It is true of course that the Bible forms a part: but that fact has been allowed to overshadow recognition of the Greek and Latin pre-Christian classics.
Before our regional human culture becomes too fully integrated and absorbed globally let us Europeans take stock. I am led to do that myself just now in writing from Turkey and in having seen Troy. Homer's tale The Iliad, written around 700 BCE3 was shown by Schliemann and his archaeologist followers, from 1873 on4 to be more than just fiction. It was based at their verified site, Troy, of obvious importance5 in the control of sea-traffic between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. This sea route lies at Europe's south-eastern boundary. The border lands, Turkey and its neighbours, are also the source of Homer's written language (Greek), its immediate successor (Latin) and that of all modern European literature, as is well known.
I first read Rieu's translation3 of the Iliad long before this trip but am reading it again, having been lent a copy by a Welsh fellow-tourist (another Welshman, Trefor Jenkins of Witwatersrand University, lent me his copy on the first occasion). Here we might briefly compare the British Celts with the Greeks. They were both of course displaced, the Celts from England and the Greeks from Turkey. Next we could ask what can those humanists who are European do - not for God but - for a new global culture? What about favouring a language which sounds identical to modern English but, for practical simplicity's sake, is written like Latin with slight modern Turkish and Greek additions?
The Turks are historically our latest extension to the European club and may well be considered to have brought in Anatolia with them. In linguistic terms they shot ahead of even German-speakers who it seems write the most phonetic of the major world languages.
In 1928 Kemal Ataturk's new government adopted the present alphabet which is widely understandable for Europeans. With simplicity most in mind here is my own suggestion for Europe, which should at the most I trust need but minor adaptation.
Aa, Bb, Çç, Dd, Đđ, Ee, Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, Jj, Kk, LL, Mm, Nn, Oo, Öö, Pp, Rr, Ss, Şş, Tt, θθ, Uu, (Üü), Vv, (Xx), Zz.
The symbols X and | are left for mathematics. Letters inside brackets represent sounds used in several European languages but not English.
Đis iz ö Long oei from Troi and from Houmör. Ai am θinking đou of đö gLobaL riiders and raiters ov Inglış ouen ai söjest oui oud ouiş tou sii ö mour fiting riijionaL konkLouzion tou đö iira ov Europiian Literaari Languij ouiç Houmör started.
3 Rieu EV. Homer. The Iliad Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950. 4 See, for example, Askin M. A Revised Edition. Troy İstambul: Keskin Colour Kartpostalcılık Ltd, 2002p23. 5 Ibid. p60.
Subjective Humanism is 1) Humane
In Ealing Humanist Association meetings we have many times discussed the importance of being more welcoming to visitors, of showing more concern for whatever problems any of our contacts or members may be facing, and of lending a helping hand wherever possible. These are practical social aims for which Christian churches have striven more successfully; in deed as well as words. It is inherent to their concept of a loving heavenly father who expects no less from his children in their attitudes to each other.
The idea of learning such skills (without the allegiance to a fictional heavenly father) has motivated past invitations to religious speakers from officers of the EHA. Others of us have opposed providing such a platform at a humanist meeting. Repeatedly presentation has been unequal, with the speaker making a succession of unacceptable claims and going home effectively unchallenged.
In defence of this conflict of opinion within the EHA it is now admitted that by staying loyal to humanist atheism we are being objective at the cost of subjective consideration of our fellow humans. Such a conflict is no less than could be expected since the "collective mind" and an individual mind are distinct. Objective and subjective humanist goals are partially incompatible. To be humane we must put subjective goals ahead of our global human culture, which is necessarily scientific and "cold" (unsupportive of the priorities of an individual). When we think it is important that everyone detach themselves from any emotional dependence upon the concept of a loving God, and upon other church members, then we cannot be simultaneously humane. How humanists might nevertheless successfully combine these two goals is the subject of discussion to be reported in later issues.
R.C.
Current situation in Iraq
There was a differing emphasis between discussants who felt that the Iraqis being given FREEDOM OF THE RIGHT OF EXPRESSION was the most significant development (AWA) and those who felt that it was that the way was once more open to countries like the US and the UK to INFLUENCE THE IRAQI ECONOMY to their own advantage, as had been the case under Saddam Hussein (MA).
Education
As an initiation of a new topic of importance, the innovations of the past century associated with the names of Homer Lane, A.S. Neill and Bertrand Russell (MA) were contrasted with the view that traditional teaching and school discipline which was to be preferred in view of children being young animals (AA). [In offering the topic 'The Roots of Antisocial Behaviour' for the Coffee Morning of 10 May I hope that, among other factors, the role of the education system can be further addressed.]
