Feeding the Hungry

Matthew 25:34 “Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, my Father has blessed you! Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat… Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you… The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

By the time 2050 rolls around, the population of the world is estimated to reach 9 to 10 billion.  How, especially in the developing countries, are all those people going to be fed?  Are the dire prophecies of Thomas Malthus finally going to come to pass?  Some sobering stats :

• Although the number of undernourished people has dropped by over 20% since 1992 (216 million fewer than in 1990-92) today there are 795 million people – or one in nine people in the world – who do not have enough to eat.
• 98% of the world’s undernourished people live in developing countries.
• 50 percent of pregnant women in developing countries lack proper maternal care, resulting in approximately 300,000 maternal deaths annually from childbirth.
• 1 out of 6 infants are born with a low birth weight in developing countries.
• Nearly half of all deaths in children under 5 are attributable to under-nutrition. This translates into the unnecessary loss of about 3 million young lives a year.
• Every 10 seconds, a child dies from hunger-related diseases.

What’s the answer?  Apparently the answer is Holland.  In the September 2017 edition of National Geographic  there is an amazing article about how tiny Netherlands has become the world’s giant in sustainable agriculture.

Despite its size (Indiana is 2.5 times larger than Holland) and dense population (1300 people per square mile), the Netherlands is world’s number two exporter of food as measured by value, second only to the United States.  And they have done it in a sustainable, energy efficient, and nearly pesticide-free manner that has the potential to be put in practice around the world.

What looks to be huge mirrors stretch across the countryside, shining like mirrors when the sun shines and glowing with eerie interior light when night falls. These are Holland’s extraordinary greenhouse complexes, some of them covering 175 acres.  These climate-controlled greenhouses enable a country located only a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle to be a global leader in exports of a fair-weather fruit: the tomato, as well as the world’s top exporter of potatoes and onions and the second largest exporter of vegetables overall in terms of value. More than a third of all global trade in vegetable seeds originates in the Netherlands.

The Dutch do this by means of what they call “precision farming”.  For example, the global average yield for potatoes is 9 tons per acre, the Dutch average 20 tons per acre.  They carefully measure and monitor soil chemistry, water content, nutrients, and growth down to measurement of a single plant.  They’ve almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides and since 2009 have cut their use of antibiotics by as much as 60 percent.

An example is the Duijvestijns farm, outside of Delft.  Since relocating and restructuring their 70-year-old farm in 2004, the Duijvestijns have declared resource independence on every front. The farm produces almost all of its own energy and fertilizer and even some of the packaging materials necessary for the crop’s distribution and sale. The growing environment is kept at optimal temperatures year-round by heat generated from geothermal aquifers that simmer under at least half of the Netherlands.  There are ranks of deep green tomato vines, 20 feet tall. Rooted not in soil but in fibers spun from basalt and chalk.  The only irrigation source is rainwater.  Each kilogram of tomatoes from their fiber-rooted plants requires less than four gallons of water, compared with 16 gallons for plants in open fields. Once each year the entire crop is regrown from seeds, and the old vines are processed to make packaging crates. The few pests that manage to enter the greenhouses are eaten by Phytoseiulus persimilis, a predatory mite that shows no interest in tomatoes but gorges itself on hundreds of destructive spider mites.  No pesticides are used.

The most promising aspect of what this article reported was that none of the science and technology used by the Dutch is too advanced to be used by any developing nation.  And this model of sustainability has been used in the poorer nations.  For example look at the island of Bali.  For at least a thousand years, its farmers have raised ducks and fish within the same flooded paddies where rice is cultivated. It’s an entirely self-contained food system, irrigated by intricate canal systems along mountain terraces sculpted by human hands.  Of course such high-tech agriculture cannot be immediately implemented in the developing countries.  But the Dutch are well into introducing medium-tech solutions that can make a vast difference.  From the article:

The brain trust behind these astounding numbers is centered at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), located 50 miles southeast of Amsterdam. Widely regarded as the world’s top agricultural research institution, WUR is the nodal point of Food Valley, an expansive cluster of agricultural technology start-ups and experimental farms. The name is a deliberate allusion to California’s Silicon Valley, with Wageningen emulating the role of Stanford University in its celebrated merger of academia and entrepreneurship…

Ernst van den Ende, managing director of WUR’s Plant Sciences Group, embodies Food Valley’s blended approach… Hunger could be the 21st century’s most urgent problem, and the visionaries working in Food Valley believe they have found innovative solutions. The wherewithal to stave off catastrophic famine is within reach, van den Ende insists. His optimism rests on feedback from more than a thousand WUR projects in more than 140 countries and on its formal pacts with governments and universities on six continents to share advances and implement them.

“What does our work mean for developing countries? That question is always raised here,” says Martin Scholten, who directs WUR’s Animal Sciences Group. “It’s part of every conversation.”

The Bible says, “Isaiah 58:10 If you give some of your own food to feed those who are hungry and to satisfy the needs of those who are humble, then your light will rise in the dark, and your darkness will become as bright as the noonday sun.”  The thing about the Netherlands is that they are on the same secularizing trend as the rest of Europe.  Less than a third of Dutch people have a religious faith and nearly one in four describe themselves as atheists, according to the latest census of belief in the Netherlands .   The trend towards secularization also saw a decline in the number of people describing themselves as spiritual, which dropped from 40% 10 years ago to 31%. The number who believed in the existence of a higher power fell from 36% to 28% over the same period. Overall 25% of people identified themselves as Christian, while 5% were Muslim and 2% belonged to another faith group.  And Amsterdam’s reputation as “sin city” where drugs are tolerated (technically not legal) and prostitution is legal is well known.  De Wallen, the largest and best-known red-light district in Amsterdam, is a destination for international sex tourism, with its infamous “window prostitution”.

So which is it?  Shining city set on a hill, feeding the world, or the whore of Babylon with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication.  I doubt there is any less prostitution in the United States and the Dutch do have a very pragmatic approach. The men and women get to choose their clients safely, they do have legal protections, they have access to health care… It is really much better for sex workers than to risk being prosecuted yourself if you want to report abuses. Also the police does check for human trafficking, so it does limit that.  Of course, by any measure, America is certainly one of the most generous nations on the planet as well.

Perhaps Luther’s famous “Simul justus et peccator” applies here.  Or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s quote that: “The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.”

So what do you think?

Is this the future of agriculture?

Are the Dutch acting in a “Christ-like” manner in regards to feeding humanity?

The Emergence of Personhood: Lessons from Self and Identity by Roy F. Baumeister

After reviewing “Minds, Brains, Souls and Gods: A Conversation on Faith, Psychology and Neuroscience” by Malcolm Jeeves (first post here), I noticed he was editor of a book that explored the emergence of personhood.  In this book fourteen distinguished scholars — including humanist, atheist, and theist voices — address the question as they explore how and when human personhood emerged. I am reading through it now, and won’t blog the entire book, but as certain essays pique my interest; I’ll share them here.

The third essay is Emergence of Personhood: Lessons from Self and Identity by Roy F. Baumeister. Roy F. Baumeister is currently the Eppes Eminent Professor of Psychology and head of the social psychology graduate program at Florida State University.  Baumeister’s research spans multiple topics, including self and identity, self-regulation, interpersonal rejection and the need to belong, sexuality and gender, aggression, self-esteem, meaning, and self-presentation. He has received research grants from the National Institutes of Health and from the Templeton Foundation. He has nearly 400 publications, and his 20 books include Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, The Cultural Animal, and Meanings of Life.

Baumeister points out that it is tempting to think the self is located somewhere in the brain.  That has drawn a lot of attention from what he calls “assorted brain laboratories” who have failed to settle on any one place.  That has led some researchers to conclude the self is an illusion.  Baumeister believes the self is real, but is not localized in a particular brain site or process.  The brain may be the central controlling unit of the human body, but the brain itself does not have a central controlling unit.  Instead, it seems organized on the basis of multiple sites and systems that operate in parallel and interact in mysterious and complicated ways not yet well understood.

The brain apparently does not need a “self”—or indeed any kind of central controlling unit.  Baumeister notes that this is highly revealing.  The brain doesn’t need the self for its workings, but when the body has to deal with other persons, suddenly selves become important, if not indispensable.  He suggests that research into the “self” will prove to be elusive as long as it is focused on single beings in isolation i.e. your typical research situation.  He says:

More broadly, it is instructive to consider how little a solitary creature would need any kind of self.  A solitary being would not have much use for a name, address, job title, or other designation.  Ownership would have no meaning nor utility for it.  It would have no reputation to build or protect.  Moral responsibility, and hence moral agency, would be minimal.  Self-knowledge would be sketchy at best, insofar as much self-knowledge comes by way of interacting with other people.  Moreover, a solitary being would not have language, so its knowledge of self could not be articulated in symbolic form…

The implication of this line of argument is that selves are needed more for social life than for the interior functioning of the brain and psyche.  To understand the self, therefore, we must look outside the person and the brain—at the social environment.  In a sense, a human infant is not born with anything but the most rudimentary self.  It acquires the self by means of socialization and by becoming part of a social group.

Measured in terms of nature’s harsh criteria for success of survival and reproduction, culture has been a remarkably successful strategy.  Most mammals on this planet have seen their population decline or remain stagnant while humans have gone from a few small groups 200,000 years ago to a projected 9 billion for the middle of this century.  Unlike other animals, humans have tripled their average life expectancy.  You might want to argue that humans have accomplished these things at the expense of the other animals, but, that is what competition is.

One might expect that such a successful strategy as culture would be used by many species, but it has not.  Most other species use culture only slightly, or not at all.  Take cooking for example.  Cooking is beneficial as it improves the quality and caloric intake of food.  Digesting raw food is energy intensive.  Cooking food reduces the amount of energy lost in digestion, and is healthier as it kills pathogens in the process.  Yet humans are the only species that cook their food.  Cooking requires the accumulation of information from multiple sources, and other animals do not share information like that.  A single human starting from scratch would not get very far in developing cooking; but by aggregating the results of many individuals experiments with cooking, human cultures have been able to create healthy and satisfying ways of preparing foods that are without any parallel at all in the rest of nature.  Cooking is therefore a microcosm of the development of culture.  The broader point is that the unique features of human personhood likely reflect the evolution of traits suitable to maintain culture. So Baumeister’s working hypothesis is that most of the distinctive human traits are either adaptations for culture or the side effects of those adaptations.

He says: Therefore, the human self is not present at birth nor even programmed to emerge in development.  Rather, it comes into being in interaction with the social environment.  Each baby is born as a full-fledged animal, but it only becomes a person by acquiring an identity from society.  Subjectivity is not a property in the mind but is only recognized (and indeed only becomes meaningfully real) in distinction to others.

So the human mind and body are designed for communication.  The vocal apparatus and hearing apparatus are unique to humans, with the result that only humans can talk.  The grammatically competent brain is another distinctly human trait; other animals who can learn words mostly cannot string them together, using grammar and syntax to create different meanings, as almost all humans do starting in early childhood.  Did the upright posture of Australopithecus free the hands for communication by gesture?  Once humans began sharing information, the availability of increasing amounts of information would have created an environment that selected for brains that could process and store it.  Thus, what set the evolution of humanity on its distinctive pathway was communication.  Communication led to the rise in intelligence.

Consciousness can be regarded as an adaptation for communication.  Most theories of consciousness struggle with the question of what benefit there is from having thoughts in the mind be conscious.  After all unconscious thoughts can cause behavior, so why would nature go to the trouble of making them conscious?  But consciousness serves communication.  All talking is conscious and people need consciousness to understand other people’s speech beyond single words.  Baumeister concludes that since almost all thoughts can be expressed in almost all languages, the profound implication is that there is one single universe of ideas.  He says:

I have proposed that one viable theory of free will is the incorporation of meaning into the causation of action.  Insofar as meaning is not inherently a physical reality—rather, it is something that physical beings represent and process—then its intrusion into the causal chain represents freedom from purely naturalistic, physical causation.  Put more simply, basing action on meaning entails rising above purely physical causality and thus achieves a kind of freedom from purely physical causality.

Baumeister admits the controversial nature of his hypothesis but says that the gist is that human personhood is a blend of biology and meaning.  Moreover, meaning is not, in the final analysis, a physical fact.  He has come to think that meaning resides at least partly in the universe of concepts that form the basis for all languages.  Human beings are physical animals who reached a level of sophistication that enabled them to use the universes of concepts to inform and improve their interactions.  He concludes:

Human beings are animals who have evolved to the point where they can incorporate consideration of immaterial, nonphysical realities, such as morality and complex rationality, into the causation of their acts.  Such causal processes qualify as freedom insofar as the process of physical events is partly determined by nonphysical realities.  The human person is thus a profound blend of nature and culture, or of physical and biological facts with immaterial, meaningful realities.

If what Baumeister is saying is plausible, then God, through a process that ostensibly seems to be cruel, competitive, and wasteful actually results in meaning, cooperation, and unity.  Even if you don’t believe there is a God who purposed anything, it still seems obvious that, for the human project, we truly are all in this together.  We arose as a species through cooperative culture, and we will continue to survive and thrive by the same.  The rugged individualist who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps is a false narrative, and Ayn Rand is a false prophet; while the true prophet says, “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24)   Or how about:

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

C’mon, Imonkers, let’s all join virtual hands and sing:

Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya
Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya
Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya
Oh Lord, kumbaya

Now, don’t you feel better, I know I do ????

All-righty, then… anyways… Baumeister’s essay did remind me of 1 Corinthians 12…

Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive…

The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance. (MSG)

Sounds like a good next step in our evolution.