Pelagius and the Pill

Last Monday was my birthday and alongside the greetings from friends scattered around the world, mostly for the first time in my life on Facebook, and the surprise party that was waiting for me in the office (and if any of those present get to read this, yes it really did ambush me!) when I returned from the gym, there was also the additional treat, if that is quite the right word, of finding my name in most of the press cuttings assiduously collected by the press and information department of our office. I am not an important person, so it is a pretty unusual for me to find my name associated with something newsworthy. I must confess to a twinge of that sense of gratified vanity that a pampered bureaucrat is bound to feel when some tedious pronouncement they have made at some non-event is picked up by desperate, probably underpaid journalists, or the warm glow a quasi-human minor celebrity must dimly sense in his or her proto-mind when his or her latest cavortings are publicised in one of the newspapers that uses big letters and short words. But once that little feeling wore off what followed was an acute awareness of just how easy it is to be misquoted, to have ones words fitted to lines of argument that in no way correspond to the point one was trying to get across, and so on. In short, it was the rude awakening of the neophyte. What they were writing about was and is important enough and the general gist of what the various articles were saying was sufficiently in line with what I would have liked that I decided it did not matter and was happy to drift back into the warm birthday glow. However, since the subject does matter, I want to take it up now. That subject is reproductive health, or, if you prefer, family planning.

To my mind this is an important issue. In fact it is one of the issues that matters most in development. The first thing I want to say on this should not need saying, but unfortunately it does, because in the Philippines, where I work and where this is a crucial issue (which is why my remarks got into the press) those, led by the more conservative elements in the Roman Catholic church hierarchy, who remain resolutely opposed to the introduction of legislation to make the provision of modern family planning easily available to poor women have cynically and openly resorted to blurring the lines between the two. The point in question is this: family planning is NOT abortion and abortion is NOT a form of family planning. Abortions, other than those that are carried out for medical reasons, the ethics of which are complex and subject to different legal provisions from country to country, are overwhelmingly the result of the unavailability of and lack of knowledge about modern family planning or contraception. The thousands of mostly very young women who resort in their desperation to abortions, all too often in far from salubrious circumstances and all too often with fatal consequences, are not practicing family planning, they are reacting desperately and tragically to unbearable circumstances they end up in because family planning was never available for them.

Of course the moralists will jump in here now and say: 'Well they had it coming to them. Shouldn't have let their passions get the better of them!'

Funny how hollow and hypocritical that sort of remark sounds, isn't it?

Anyway, enough of that. The press were good and fully understood my point and having raised the issue of abortion briefly at the beginning of the interview, they let it drop and did not bring it up in their articles. The second point is more difficult, but I do want to make it clear. A lot people are now making the point in the Philippines that the population has got very big, too big in fact, and the current growth rate is not one that will enable poverty reduction. The maths is very simple. One cake growing at a certain speed, hungry mouths wanting a piece of the cake multiplying at a faster rate. Result: ever smaller slices of cake (mine's the one with the glace cherry on it, please!). Of course the 'I'm a macro-economist, or should I say macho-economist, and I know about these things' types all scoff at the naivety of this view. They point to the need for a steady supply of new members of the workforce to support growth. Yes, sir! When can I have a starvation-wage job in your sweatshop, please, and is it ok for my wife to go and work as a slave for some serial rapist in a country which shall be nameless, but which is, of course, a long way overseas?

Funny how the macho-economists seem to positively relish the 'dark satanic mills' of the world they believe in. And they're not very good economists, anyway, because their model is ultimately even more naive than that of the primitive malthusians, since it does not take into account that peculiar phenomenon that certainly exists throughout nature but which has never been properly accounted for, the business cycle. Even mighty civilisations wax and wane according to it. Besides there are an awful lot of us now. The World Bank is seriously worried about food commodity prices and supplies. And climate change is a reality. Suddenly our planet looks kind of small. The last word I'll say on this is that the macho-economists tend to view demographic transition as something that is going to happen anyway. Somehow one day we all wake up and people are having less children. A bit like believing in the tooth fairy. Actually the small print in the text books tends to say that governments facilitate demographic transition through making family planning available...

Anyway, the point is that people have started to talk about the population issue in the Philippines. In fact it even features quite strongly in the new Philippines Development Plan  of the Government. And that is what the press picked up on. Which is why I am writing this now, because it is NOT what I said to them. Quite the contrary, in fact. I made it clear that the issue of population growth and association of family planning with trying to slow it was a contentious issue (because of the macho-economists), but that there was a reason to support making modern family planning available that in my mind is not something that can be argued against and that is HUMAN RIGHTS. Everyone seems to have forgotten the clear commitment expressed in the Cairo Declaration of 1998 to make modern family planning available to all women. It is one of the two targets for achieving the 5th Millenium Development Goal, or MDG, moreover, the one which all over the world is least likely to be achieved.

What is the 5th MDG? Reducing Maternal Mortality.

Hey ho, am I surprised that the MDG that is above all for women is the least likely of all to be achieved? Sadly, I am not. In case you are wondering what family planning has got to do with maternal mortality or maternal death, ask yourself which women are the most at risk in childbirth. The answer is those who are too young, those who are too old and those who have already had too many babies. Then go and tell an impoverished woman in a rural community anywhere in the Philippines that even though she has already had seven or eight babies, we're shooting for nine or ten and, with any luck, even more! What's that you say? - She and her husband should simply practice abstinence. Yes, sure, I'll see you back at the institution when it's time to give you your pills and tuck you in for the night. Meanwhile, back in the real world...Eleven women die needlessly every day in the Philippines, according to campaigners, from causes directly associated with their inability to access family planning.

Whether this figure is exactly right or not, I don't really care. I do think it is essential that we think of them as people, not simply as the commodities that women so often seem to be reduced to in debate and in the world. I am not talking about the rich 'Eats, something-or-other, loves' jet-setters, by the way, who are pretty nicely 'empowered' in a solipsistic sort of way. I'm talking about the real world of female genital mutilation, child marriage and trafficking of women and children for commercial sexual exploitation, in which I seem to have lived and worked most of my life. I once worked out that based on the Unicef definition of childhood being up to the age of 18, then well over half the men in the world could be classified as paedophiles, but that is a bit extreme, provocative, etc, so let's not go there.

In the end I would like the press to have focused more on the issue of basic human rights, not population control. But, far more important than that, I do hope that things continue to move in the right direction and the responsible parenthood act gets passed into law in the Philippines. A lot of good people have dedicated a lot of time and effort towards that end.

Today, as I write this, I'm in England, looking out over a beautiful early spring morning scene, a green meadow surrounded by tall trees freshly in leaf and decked with blossom. I listened to Melvin Bragg's discussion programme on the radio, which this time around was on the subject of Pelagius. Early church history is probably as good a subject as any to listen to as Good Friday dawns, the most serious day in the Christian calendar. The discussion took me back (further than I like to consider) to my university days and the study of Dostoievsky, in particular his 'Brothers Karamazov'. In those days, young and ignorant as I was, my main concern was the formal aspects of the polyphonic novel, as propounded by Bakhtin in what was probably just a wizzard wheeze to keep the master clear of the Stalinist censors, but now, listening to the excellent exposition of the arguments between the Celtic ascetic from my own little corner of civilisation and the worldly wise Saint Augustine of Hippo, I realise not only the real fundamentals that Dostoievsky was setting out, but something that may have a wider relevance - in an old-fashioned structuralist sort of way. Ivan Karamazov handed back his ticket to paradise because he rejected the notion that innocent children could be considered to be tainted by original sin (and therefore in someway deserving of the suffering inflicted on them deliberately by sadists or indifferently by nature). In this he was expressing the views of Pelagius and these views, to my mind, continue to be the philosophical standpoint of those who work idealistically for the good of others, whether working as humanitarian or development professionals or in any other walk of life, and whatever religion or non-religion they may believe in. Idealistically, it is good to underpin what we do with a belief that human beings can of themselves be good.

Ivan's antagonist (in the life of the book's hero, Alyosha Karamazov) is of course the saintly Father Zosima, whose name is highly symbolic, for it was Pope Zosimus in real life who exonerated Pelagius after one of those innumerable Church Councils they used to have. Pelagius's great rival, who eventually triumphed over him in the western if not the eastern church, was Augustine, and his views have underpinned the official, establishment view of things ever since, including in the end the doctrinal opposition to family planning. In this world everything is subjugated to dogma,  even common humanity. Augustine himself firmly believed that if you were not baptised you would go to hell when you died. Hey, Ivan, wait for me! I just handed back my ticket too.

Zosima, however, is far more than just an avatar of Pope Zosimus. In a way that aspect is just incidental. More importantly he is linked to the Bogomils, that fascinating popular sect whose origin goes back to the Manichaean religion, which Augustine had in fact followed before the fear of persecution drove him into the Christian church. The Manichaean religion has had a long and shadowy history alongside mainstream Christianity from its heyday in the dark ages when it dominated a wide swathe of central Asia. Its rigid division between light and dark, good and evil forces, infusions of Buddhism and other influence, gave it a wide appeal, including later on to extreme Calvinists and others who see evil all around them especially in the souls of their neighbours, as well as to the all the strange gnostic sects that eventually saw their expression in the weird and whacky rosicrucian-inspired world of William Blake and, more recently, the somewhat less highbrow, but no less ridiculous realm inhabited by the likes of Dan Brown.

I think there is a touch of the dark vision in all of us. I find it in my pessimistic moments when I look at the Dark Satanic Mills - I'm right with you there, William! But at other times, there is the optimistic side and that tends to come out when something good is happening  - if I'm lucky enough to be there when a very poor community is feeling good about itself because it has managed to establish a meaningful, livelihood-enhancing project, or something like that. I'm glad there is a balance in life and on the whole I think it is better to be positive. My Christmas Blogg was the product of one of the dark moments.

Of course, one of the interesting things about the Manichaeans is that their prime text was the weird and wonderful Book of Enoch, the only full version of which to have survived is the Ethiopian version in the liturgical language Ge'ez. Ethiopia, is the country where I have lived and worked more than anywhere else, though I have not been back since I left in 2002. I really got seriously into linguistics there. But now I seem to be heading going down a completely different road from where I started, so I'd better stop. Thank you for reading this.