The pamphlet from Hampshire College about overpopulation introduced some new perspectives to me in a very simple and thought provoking way. I think it is a cool current example of the kinds of critiques that can help the scientific community stay on top of present day dogmas and the effects they have on society. Yes, as always, you have to keep the source in mind and take the information with a grain of salt, but it's never a bad idea to stop and reconsider your assumptions. If I've learned anything from this course so far, it's that I should take advantage of every opportunity to call my reasoning into question. In the back of my mind, I often automatically attribute poverty and hunger and all the rest of it to an ever-growing population that is more or less eventually going to overrun the world. Now that it has been brought to my attention that overpopulation might not be a valid explanation for some of our environmental and political concerns, I can't help but feel like I have basically been using it to console myself about human suffering. Why do some people have to suffer, while others don't? Because there just isn't enough room for everybody. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I've never been entirely reassured by that rationale.
With regards to human rights, I do think that the fear of running out of resources plays a huge role in creating an "us" and "them" mentality. If people feel like their way of life is being threatened by other people, somebody has got to go. It can't be "us", so it has to be "them". Those with more resources have a sense of entitlement over those with fewer resources, at least in a capitalist way of thinking. Keeping resources away from "them", taking their resources, and exploiting the people themselves can be justified by considering "them" lesser than - either in subtle ways or going so far as to consider them inhuman, making the violation of human rights socially acceptable under certain circumstances. It's extremely difficult for me to begin to admit that many aspects of my lifestyle are made possible by taking advantage of other people (I'm thinking specifically about all the human experimentation, past and present, that has made my healthcare what it is today). But I'd rather accept partial responsibility for their suffering than fool myself into thinking I haven't benefited from it.
2 comments:
I can completely agree that we need to recognize that we are all at an advantage today because someone suffered for us (whether willfully or not) previously. I would love to accept any responsibility at all that is warranted to me regarding human suffering that has made my lifestyle what it is today. However, I have to wonder how much time it would take a drug to reach the market without the shady tactics that go on even today (such as testing in third world countries for incentives such as money). I found this article that says that drugs today take "fewer than four years" between development start time and reaching the general population. If drug trials were more strictly regulated, how long would it take a drug to develop and be marketed?
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/39161.php
This blog post, now that we have gone through the entirety of the class, draws my attention to the articles that we read about environmental racism. When thinking about resources, who has them and how they are distributed makes me think of the opposite end of the spectrum; at waste and what we do with that. It feels like as much as the heterosexists make decisions about access to medicine and the government, they are manipulating the distribution of resources and waste.
We talk about the American way of life and the resources around the globe but something to think about is the cost of this resource monopoly in our own country. The waste that comes from using the resources is toxic and disposed of many times unjustly. There is always a balance between international policies and those here at home, but I believe that until we clean up the toxic racism within the US, we will never be able to address the resource racism elsewhere.
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