967. Cuba’s Free-Market Farm Experiment Yields a Meager Crop

By Damien Cave, The New York Times, December 8, 2012

Planting potatoes near Güira de Melena, a productive region not far from Havana. Much farming in Cuba remains low-tech because of a lack of machinery. Photo Credit:  The New York Times.

HAVANA — Cuba’s liveliest experiment with capitalism unfolds every night in a dirt lot on the edge of the capital, where Truman-era trucks lugging fresh produce meet up with hundreds of buyers on creaking bicycle carts clutching wads of cash.

 “This place, it feeds all of Havana,” said Misael Toledo, 37, who owns three small food stores in the city. “Before, you could only buy or sell in the markets of Fidel.”

The agriculture exchange, which sprang up last year after the Cuban government legalized a broader range of small businesses, is a vivid sign of both how much the country has changed, and of all the political and practical limitations that continue to hold it back.

President Raúl Castro has made agriculture priority No. 1 in his attempt to remake the country. He used his first major presidential address in 2007 to zero in on farming, describing weeds conquering fallow fields and the need to ensure that “anyone who wants can drink a glass of milk.”

No other industry has seen as much liberalization, with a steady rollout of incentives for farmers. And Mr. Castro has been explicit about his reasoning: increasing efficiency and food production to replace imports that cost Cuba hundreds of millions of dollars a year is a matter “of national security.”

Yet at this point, by most measures, the project has failed. Because of waste, poor management, policy constraints, transportation limits, theft and other problems, overall efficiency has dropped: many Cubans are actually seeing less food at private markets. That is the case despite an increase in the number of farmers and production gains for certain items. A recent study from the University of Havana showed that market prices jumped by nearly 20 percent in 2011 alone. And food imports increased to an estimated $1.7 billion last year, up from $1.4 billion in 2006.

“It’s the first instance of Cuba’s leader not being able to get done what he said he would,” said Jorge I. Domínguez, vice provost for international affairs at Harvard, who left Cuba as a boy. “The published statistical results are really very discouraging.”

A major cause: poor transportation, as trucks are in short supply, and the aging ones that exist often break down.

In 2009, hundreds of tons of tomatoes, part of a bumper crop that year, rotted because of a lack of transportation by the government agency charged with bringing food to processing centers.

“It’s worse when it rains,” said Javier González, 27, a farmer in Artemisa Province who described often seeing crops wilt and rot because they were not picked up.

Behind him were the 33 fertile, rent-free acres he had been granted as part of a program Mr. Castro introduced in 2008 to encourage rural residents to work the land. After clearing it himself and planting a variety of crops, Mr. Gonzalez said, he was doing relatively well and earned more last year than his father, who is a doctor, did.

But Cuba’s inefficiencies gnawed at him. Smart, strong, and ambitious, he had expansion plans in mind, even as in his hand he held a wrench. He was repairing a tractor part meant to be grading land. It was broken. Again.

The 1980s Soviet model tractor he bought from another farmer was as about good as it gets in Cuba. The Cuban government maintains a monopoly on selling anything new, and there simply is not enough of anything — fertilizer, or sometimes even machetes — to go around.

Government economists are aware of the problem. “If you give people land and no resources, it doesn’t matter what happens on the land,” said Joaquin Infante of the Havana-based Cuban National Association of Economists.

But Mr. Castro has refused to allow what many farmers and experts see as an obvious solution to the shortages of transportation and equipment: Let people import supplies on their own. “It’s about control,” said Philip Peters, a Cuba analyst with the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based research group.

Other analysts agree, noting that though the agricultural reforms have gone farther than other changes — like those that allow for self-employment — they remain constrained by politics.

“The government is not ready to let go,” said Ted Henken, a Latin American studies professor at Baruch College. “They are sending the message that they want to let go, or are trying to let go, but what they have is still a mechanism of control.”

For many farmers, that explains why land leases last for 10 years with a chance to renew, not indefinitely or the 99 years offered to foreign developers. It is also why many farmers say they will not build homes on the land they lease, despite a concession this year to allow doing so.

Mistrust is widespread. To get the growth Mr. Castro wants in agriculture and the economy, people need to trust the government, analysts say. But after half a century of strict control, many Cubans doubt proclamations from officials, who insist that this time, despite previous crackdowns, private enterprise will be supported.

Some farmers still wonder when the government is going to swoop in and take what they have built.

“What concerns me is that in a place like this, after five or six years the state might need the land to complete some kind of project,” said Reinaldo Berdecia, who is raising cows outside Havana.

Cubans also say they worry that the bureaucrats responsible for managing the country’s complex mix of state-run and private agriculture lack the knowledge needed to make the system work. In the fall, there were piles of bananas rotting all over Havana, for example. Farmers say the government guaranteed a price that was too high, failing to recognize that because bananas require less investment and their planting season is short, farmers would overproduce.

At a recent visit to the market near the Havana airport, these frustrations, hopes and fears were on view. From the backs of trucks as old as retirees, sunburned farmers in black rubber boots tossed onions, lettuce and other items to colleagues who weighed them for sale, as a crush of buyers approached. Every truck that arrived was immediately surrounded, mostly by young men shouting and elbowing for access.

It was a sign that demand still outpaces supply, and in the middle of the rush to buy wholesale, not everyone seemed certain free markets were the way to go. Wary government inspectors watched for sales occurring before the official start time of 6 p.m. Jose Ramón Murgado, 40, a member of the farmers union, said the government had introduced too much chaos into the system.

“Capitalism means higher prices,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

But high prices were also leading to adaptation and efficiency. Some farmers from eastern Cuba said they held back loads of onions, a chief ingredient in sofrito sauce, a basis of Cuban cuisine, until after harvest season, because they could earn more per pound. Other farmers watching nearby seemed ready to follow their lead.

For Mr. Castro and his government, the success or failure of the reforms with agriculture and other parts of the economy may come down to these innovators who inspire others to greater productivity — people like Mr. Toledo, the owner of three small stores that he supplies with produce from the market.

He spent a decade driving trucks in Florida and Spain, and with confidence, a few extra pounds and some money saved, he returned a year ago to take advantage of Cuba’s new opportunities.

He has his own truck now, along with six employees scouring the market for deals. Agriculture has given him a boost, as it has others who have taken a chance on private farming. But the question many across Cuba are asking is: How far will Mr. Castro’s socialist government let them rise?

966. Where Do Complex Organisms Come From?

Stuart A. Newman

By Stuart A. Newman, Huffington Post, December 4, 2012

Although evidence is all around us of a deep geological past, and of multifarious genealogical relationships among ourselves and the organisms we currently share the planet with, scientists still have only sketchy ideas about how complex living forms arose in the course of evolution. As James Shapiro described in a recent Huffington Post blog entry, there has been good progress in understanding how complex cells arose from simpler ones by cell mergers, or "symbiogenesis." But even "simple" cells are quite complex, and the origins of cellular life (aka "chemical evolution"; read more here), are far from settled.

What about the complex bodies and organs of animals and plants? This is what primarily concerned the nineteenth century naturalists Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin (neither of whom knew anything about the internal intricacies of cells, including the nature of their genes), as they pondered the transformations of life throughout its history. Their solution was "natural selection," the acquisition of new forms and functions in populations of organisms by small increments, over long times, with each gradual change being subject to the sieve of "adaptation." Was each heritable variation better suited to some pre-existing task? If so, its exemplars increased and multiplied. If not, their kind faded away.

While it may be an adequate scenario for the refinement of some already-existing characters -- the beaks of finches, color intensity of moths -- the "microevolutionary" process envisioned by Darwin and his successors does not account in any plausible way for "macroevolutionary" patterns such as the differences between oysters and grasshoppers, fish and birds. In fact, adaptationist gradualism, though still popular in some scientific circles, is increasingly questioned and found wanting by evolutionary biologists working in an expanded set of disciplines.

By incorporating embryonic development and its underlying physico-genetic processes into evolutionary theory, investigators are learning that abrupt alterations in body plan and other aspects of organismal form can occur in response to environmental change or gene mutation in ways that affect multiple members of a population and exhibit consistent patterns of inheritance. Furthermore, there is increasing emphasis on the resourcefulness of organisms and their ability to construct their own niches. Having a "phenotype" (the outward manifestation of biological identity), very different from that of one's progenitors is no longer considered disqualifying for survival.

Although the writings of Wallace and Darwin's predecessor Jean-Baptiste Lamarck anticipated some current ideas about the morphologically prolific processes of embryo generation ("Le pouvoir de la vie") and the active strivings of organisms for survival in their environmental settings ("L'influence des circonstances"), Darwin's less speculative approach encouraged readier acceptance of his ideas by other scientists and the educated public. (The playwright George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to Back to Methuselah, put it more sharply as "Why Darwin converted the crowd.") By specifying that the variations in organismal form and function sorted out by natural selection were entirely incremental, Darwin's theory could side-step any questions about how the altered forms actually arose. It also created an incentive to deny the relevance of the more profound changes (Darwin called them "sports") that were well known to arise in natural populations. This may have been the best that could be done circa 1850, but its retention in the so-called modern evolutionary synthesis a century later was a scandalous legacy of the banishment of developmental biology (embryology) from the synthesis, and the indifferent attitude of biological education regarding the physical sciences.

The physical science of Darwin's time, which provided a backdrop to his thinking, was dominated by Newton's concept that material bodies only change course in proportion to external forces that act on them. It also included the often more pertinent notion (e.g., for the molding of pliable materials) from Aristotle of matter changing position or shape only to the extent that it continues to be pushed. These ideas, however, did not pretend to account for the sudden reorganizational changes (freezing, melting, phase separation, compositional change) seen in complex chemically and mechanically active materials. We now recognize that the tissues of a developing embryo are indeed such non-Newtonian, non-Aristotelian materials. By the end of Darwin's life new physical theories were being put forward to explain abrupt and large-scale changes in such materials, and by extension, the character and transformations of organisms and their organs.

Here is a partial list of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century physical concepts that have proved relevant to developmental processes (with the phenomenon they explain, at least partly, in parentheses): dynamical systems (ability of cells having the same genome to switch between different "types"), phase separation of liquids (capacity of embryonic tissues to form several non-mixing layers), chemical oscillations (propensity of embryonic tissues to organize into tandem segments), "Turing-type" reaction-diffusion systems (the formation in tissues of regularly spaced structures like feather and hair buds, pigment stripes, or the bones of the limb skeleton). All or most of these processes (termed "mesoscale," being most relevant to objects the size and texture of cell clusters), along with several others, are harnessed and mobilized by the secreted products of specific genes during embryogenesis in every one of the animal phyla (e.g., arthropods, mollusks, nematodes, chordates and so forth).

What can the existence and action of such protean generative processes tell us about the origin of organismal complexity? First, let's look at some of the expectations of the natural selection-based modern synthesis: (i) the largest differences within given categories of multicellular organisms, the animals or plants, for example, should have appeared gradually, only after exceptionally long periods of evolution; (ii) the extensive genetic changes required to generate such large differences over such vast times would have virtually erased any similarity between the sets of genes coordinating development in the different types of organism; and (iii) evolution of body types and organs should continue indefinitely. Since genetic mutation never ceases, novel organismal forms should constantly be appearing.

All these predictions of the standard model have proved to be incorrect. The actual state of affairs however, are expected outcomes of the "physico-genetic" picture outlined above. Briefly, we now know that complex multicellular organisms appeared rapidly (on a geological time scale, i.e., two episodes of no more than 10-20 million years each), employing for developmental patterning not newly evolved genes, but genes that had evolved for entirely different functions in single-celled ancestors. Generation of novel complex forms was able to happen so rapidly because the genetic ingredients were already at hand, but in addition because the mesoscale physical processes described above also did not require an incremental sequence of steps to come into existence. Everything was in place for an organismal "big bang" once simple multicellular clusters had appeared.

Unlike the presumption of the standard model, however, the physico-genetic scenario for the origination of complex multicellular forms is not open-ended and limitless. As with any material organizational process (think waves and eddies in liquid water), the relevant physics can only elicit those structural motifs inherent to the material in question. Thus we should not expect to see, and indeed don't, the "endless forms" that Darwin invoked in The Origin of Species.

With a 19th century notion of incremental material transformations no longer relevant to comprehending the range of organismal variation that has appeared throughout the history of life on Earth, the other pillar of the standard model can be discarded along with it. Specifically, if, as affirmed by niche construction theory, phenotypically novel animals or plants can invent new modes of existence in novel settings, rather than succumbing to a struggle for survival in the niches of their origin, there is no need for cycles of selection for marginal adaptive advantage to be the default explanation for macroevolutionary change.

Additional reading

Newman, S.A. (2012). Physico-genetic determinants in the evolution of development. Science 338, 217-219.

Müller, G.B. (2007). Evo-devo: extending the evolutionary synthesis. Nature Reviews Genetic 8, 943-949.

Forgacs, G., and Newman, S.A. (2005). Biological physics of the developing embryo (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press).

Odling-Smee, F.J., Laland, K.N., and Feldman, M.W. (2003). Niche construction: the neglected process in evolution (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press).

Stuart A. Newman is Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy at New York Medical College.

965. Waning Relevance of Marxism

Saral Sarkar

By Saral Sakar, November 5, 2012

Sandip Bandyopadhyay's article "Interest in Marxism Waning?" (Frontier, Autumn Number, 2012) attracted my attention, because I am one of those whose interest in Marxism has waned. It has been waning since the mid 1970s, i.e. since before the CPI(M) started its second and long innings in power in West Bengal and long before socialism was wound up – first in China and then in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It has therefore nothing to do with the betrayal of Marxism or socialism by the CPI(M) or the CPSU(B) or the CPC, nor has it much to do with the cruelties of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union or of the CPI(M) cadre in West Bengal. Marxism, the ism, is not the same as the policies and praxis of the above mentioned parties in the countries where they ruled, just as socialism is not the same as the policies of the Socialist Party of France or that of Spain.

In fact, in the second half of the 1960s, Marxism experienced a rejuvenation in Western Europe. The student movements there were largely inspired by Marxism. Young people, particularly students, again became interested in studying Marxist literature, although they were very well informed about and, therefore, very critical of the Soviet model of socialism and the Soviet understanding of Marxism. In Italy and France, where, in those days, big and strong communist parties existed and hence Marxist literature used to be sold and probably also read, young people's interest in Marxism bypassed the established interpretations of Marxism and took the form of an effort to understand the world of their days. It was a different world, very different from the world in which the classics of Marxism were written. This world, they realized, could not be understood or explained adequately by faithfully applying the teachings of Marx and Engels, which originated a century earlier in very different contexts. What actually mattered was to see whether the Marxist tools of analysis were useful for the purpose, and many found them useful.

Bandyopadhyay writes: "There are valid reasons for questioning the relevance of Marxism in the present-day world." He does not state these reasons. What are they?

    For about 25 years after the end of the Second World War – from about 1950 to 1974 – Western industrialised countries experienced what has been called an "economic miracle". It was a long period of boom, of rapid economic growth and, along with it, rapid growth in prosperity. Also the working class rapidly prospered. Skilled workers, roughly speaking, rose to the middle class level. Revisionism had already gained the upper hand over revolutionary Marxism and lasted till the end of the 1940s. But until then, the organized working class and their parties, the Social Democratic and communist parties, kept up their critique of capitalism and regarded socialism as their long-term goal. But in the 1950s and thereafter, for all practical purposes, they (except the communist parties) openly accepted capitalism as the best or the most efficient economic system. From then on, the only thing the organised working class struggled for was to get a higher share of the cake. In this situation, the vast majority of this class refused to play the role of the grave-diggers of capitalism. Workers of the highly industrialised countries had no good reason any more to fight against the system, to kill the goose that was laying the golden eggs. "Pauperization" of the working class proved to be a myth. The assertion of Marx and Engels that "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains" did not make any sense anymore. Their call to the proletarians "Working men of all countries, unite" fell on deaf ears. The proletarians of the Western industrialised countries had well-paid jobs and some prosperity to lose. And they profited from the colonial exploitation of the working men of the poor countries of the world. No wonder, interest in Marxism waned. Radical leftists understood the new situation, namely that the working class was no longer the agent of revolution. Some of them thought that perhaps the sub-proletariat, the fringe groups, could be the new agents of revolution.

In India today, as far as I can perceive from this distance (I live in Germany), the material living conditions of workers, particularly of those in the organised sectors of the economy, have improved very much. In the wake of India's integration in the world economy, and against the background of high GDP growth rates, the mood has changed. Not many people are nowadays willing to fight for a great cause or ideal. Instead, there is a rush for making money, making career, and consuming the luxuries offered by the world market. Members of the established communist parties are no exceptions. The only people in India who are today struggling against exploitation, oppression, and injustice are the Adivasi forest dwellers. And their leaders and cadre don't call themselves Marxists.

In this situation, can Marxism again have a relevance for the struggle for a better world? In order to be able to answer this question, we must first be clear about what a better world should mean today.

Two Aspects of a Better World

The book "Limits to Growth" (Meadows et al.) was published in 1972. Ever since, the intensifying global ecological crisis, the dangers arising from global warming, declining biodiversity, exhaustion of all kinds of resources, and continually rising world population are matters of great concern for all those who, for whatever reason, are willing to look beyond their own and their nation's particular interests. One can say, imitating Marx: Capitalists, socialists and communists have till now changed the world in various ways; the point today, however, is to save it. I contend that the work of saving the world from the above mentioned crises and dangers and creating a better world has two aspects. Firstly, the economies of the world must be transformed into ecologically sustainable ones, and they must be based mainly on renewable resources, which we should expend at a rate no higher than the rate at which they are or can be replenished. Secondly, the societies must be transformed into egalitarian ones. Egalitarian societies are not only desirable in themselves. They are also necessary for ensuring peace within a society and peace between different societies. A society having these two qualities can be called an eco-socialist society.*

It has become clear that there is an ineluctable contradiction between ecology and industrial economy we know for the last two hundred years. Marx and Engels were very much aware of the ecological degradations caused by the industrial economies of their days. Marx wrote:

"In modern agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; … . The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, … the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production … develops technology and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer" (Marx 1954: 506-507).

Here Marx is speaking of "soil". In place of "soil", we nowadays should read resources and the environment. And Engels, using the negative environmental effects of deforestation as an example, wrote: "… nature takes its revenge on us"(Marx and Engels 1976, Vol.3: 74-5).

But this awareness did not influence the theory of Marx and Engels. The ecological degradations they described were merely presented as an extra point of criticism against capitalism. They remained growth optimists. So they also saw a way out, a way of avoiding nature's revenge. Engels wrote:

"… all our mastery of [nature] consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.

     … with every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these laws and getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise and hence to control even the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities." (ibid).

In principle, this optimism cannot be flawed, except that Engels forgot to say, firstly, that there are also limits to the possibility of this control – limits that are also inherent in the laws of nature – and, secondly, that this control involves costs and that such costs might be too high for a society to pay. We also know today that some of the negative ecological consequences of our production activities may also become irreversible.

Despite his very fundamental critique of capitalism –  namely, capitalism "saps the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the labourer" – Marx assigned this system a world-historic role in preparing the conditions for future human emancipation: "The development of the productive forces of social labour is capital's historic mission and justification. For that very reason, it unwittingly creates the material conditions for a higher form of production." (Marx 1981: 368). That means, Marx considered modern industrial production to be a precondition for the future communist society. In the quote further above, however, we see that Marx criticized not only capitalism, i.e. the relations of production capitalism, but also the forces of production, i.e. "modern agriculture", "urban industries" and "modern industry".

Such contradictory positions in Marx's writings allow some Marxologists, such as John Bellamy Foster, to take pains to prove that it is "possible to interpret Marx in a different way, one that conceived ecology as central to his thinking, …" (Foster 2000: vi, emphasis added). After painstaking study, Foster even "came to the conclusion that Marx's world-view was deeply, and indeed systematically, ecological (in all positive senses in which that term is used today), … " (ibid: viii). This is nothing but an effort to defend Marx in an age in which many of his basic positions have become indefensible. But it is not the duty of socialists to defend Marx. It is their duty to strive to create a socialist society, with or without Marx.

Most Marxists, communists, and socialists have failed to take cognizance of the fact that in the years since 1972 a great paradigm shift has taken place in the areas of economic, political, and social thinking. It is a shift from the then prevailing growth paradigm to what I call the limits-to-growth paradigm. One may also call the latter the ecological paradigm. Those who have carried out this paradigm shift in their thinking now see the necessity of a gradual and orderly, in fact planned, retreat from the growth madness of the economies of the world. The socialist societies of the future will either be built in the framework of a hugely contracted world economy, or they will not be built at all. Obviously, that will be a newly conceived socialism, much different from what has been conceived by the great leaders – Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao up to Castro and Che.

One Marxist, Michael Löwy (2003), who belongs to the Trotskyite stream of Marxism, appears to have partially carried out the paradigm shift mentioned above. He sees the necessity of a convergence of socialism and ecology. He writes: "This convergence is only possible under the condition that Marxists critically analyze their traditional conception of 'productive forces' and ecologists break with their illusion of a true market economy." Löwy wants to "free Marxism from its productivistic slag". But he too wants to save (the rest of) Marxism, i.e. he wants to integrate the rest into his brand of eco-socialism.

Another aspect of the present-day world situation that reduces the relevance of Marxism for a socialist society of the future is the fact that the world, especially the less developed countries, are overpopulated and that the populations of such countries are still growing. Another great flaw in the thoughts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and their followers has been that they totally rejected the views of Malthus. Today, when the absolute availability of important resources in the world is dwindling fast, population growth results first in falling per capita resource availability, and then in conflicts, including war-like conflicts, over resources. No amount of technological development, which itself depends on availability of abundant and cheap resources, will be able to overcome this problem.

Some other aspects of Marxism are however still relevant and will, I think, remain relevant and important: historical materialism, dialectical thinking, stress on class analysis, and thinking in terms of base and superstructure. But the vision of socialism/communism that shines through the works of Marx and Engels and has often been elaborated by their followers is no longer convincing. If they were alive today, Marx and Engels would surely revise their vision and become eco-socialists. And they would not think that the working class would be the main agent of transformation of capitalist society into an eco-socialist one. Marx himself once said: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist" And that was, according to Bettelheim, "no mere witticism" (Bettelheim 1978: 503).

    The question as to which kind of people would then lead the transformation must remain undiscussed in this short article.

----------OOOO-----------

Notes

* For my detailed argumentation, see: (1) Saral Sarkar (1999 & 2000) and (2) Saral Sarkar and Bruno Kern (2004/2008)

Literature

Bettelheim, Charles (1978) Class Struggles in the USSR – Second Period,     1923–1930. England: Hassocks.

Foster, John Bellamy (2000) Marx's Ecology –Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly

    Review Press.

Löwy, Michael (2003) "Überleben statt Profit", in SoZ, January 2003.

Marx, Karl (1954) Capital, Vol. I. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Marx, Karl (1981) Capital, Vol.3 (Translation by David Fernbach). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1976) Selected Works (in 3 Volumes), Vol. 3. Moscow:

    Progress Publishers. 

Saral Sarkar (1999 & 2000) Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? – A Critical Analysis of

    Humanity's Fundamental Choices. London: Zed Books & New Delhi: Orient Longman.

Saral Sarkar and Bruno Kern (2004/2008) Eco-Socialism or Barbarism – An Up-to-date

    Critique of Capitalism. Mainz: Initiative Ökosozialismus & Hyderabad: Chelimi

    Foundation. (http://www.oekosozialismus.net/en_oekosoz_en_rz.pdf)

Köln, November 5, 2012.

964. The Monster of Monticello: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

Thomas Jefferson

By Paul Finkelman, The New York Times, November 30, 2012 

THOMAS JEFFERSON is in the news again, nearly 200 years after his death — alongside a high-profile biography by the journalist Jon Meacham comes a damning portrait of the third president by the independent scholar Henry Wiencek.

We are endlessly fascinated with Jefferson, in part because we seem unable to reconcile the rhetoric of liberty in his writing with the reality of his slave owning and his lifetime support for slavery. Time and again, we play down the latter in favor of the former, or write off the paradox as somehow indicative of his complex depths.

Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.

Contrary to Mr. Wiencek’s depiction, Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free. His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and status but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through pseudoscience.

There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson: when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the “self-evident” truth that all men are “created equal,” he owned some 175 slaves. Too often, scholars and readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jefferson’s inconvenient views as products of the time and the complexities of the human condition.

But while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution — inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration — Jefferson did not. Over the subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service, Jefferson remained the master of Monticello, and a buyer and seller of human beings.

Rather than encouraging his countrymen to liberate their slaves, he opposed both private manumission and public emancipation. Even at his death, Jefferson failed to fulfill the promise of his rhetoric: his will emancipated only five slaves, all relatives of his mistress Sally Hemings, and condemned nearly 200 others to the auction block. Even Hemings remained a slave, though her children by Jefferson went free.

Nor was Jefferson a particularly kind master. He sometimes punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time. A proponent of humane criminal codes for whites, he advocated harsh, almost barbaric, punishments for slaves and free blacks. Known for expansive views of citizenship, he proposed legislation to make emancipated blacks “outlaws” in America, the land of their birth. Opposed to the idea of royal or noble blood, he proposed expelling from Virginia the children of white women and black men.

Jefferson also dodged opportunities to undermine slavery or promote racial equality. As a state legislator he blocked consideration of a law that might have eventually ended slavery in the state.

As president he acquired the Louisiana Territory but did nothing to stop the spread of slavery into that vast “empire of liberty.” Jefferson told his neighbor Edward Coles not to emancipate his own slaves, because free blacks were “pests in society” who were “as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.” And while he wrote a friend that he sold slaves only as punishment or to unite families, he sold at least 85 humans in a 10-year period to raise cash to buy wine, art and other luxury goods.

Destroying families didn’t bother Jefferson, because he believed blacks lacked basic human emotions. “Their griefs are transient,” he wrote, and their love lacked “a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.”

Jefferson claimed he had “never seen an elementary trait of painting or sculpture” or poetry among blacks and argued that blacks’ ability to “reason” was “much inferior” to whites’, while “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” He conceded that blacks were brave, but this was because of “a want of fore-thought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present.”

A scientist, Jefferson nevertheless speculated that blackness might come “from the color of the blood” and concluded that blacks were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.”

Jefferson did worry about the future of slavery, but not out of moral qualms. After reading about the slave revolts in Haiti, Jefferson wrote to a friend that “if something is not done and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children.” But he never said what that “something” should be.

In 1820 Jefferson was shocked by the heated arguments over slavery during the debate over the Missouri Compromise. He believed that by opposing the spread of slavery in the West, the children of the revolution were about to “perpetrate” an “act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world.”

If there was “treason against the hopes of the world,” it was perpetrated by the founding generation, which failed to place the nation on the road to liberty for all. No one bore a greater responsibility for that failure than the master of Monticello.

Paul Finkelman, a visiting professor in legal history at Duke Law School, is a professor at Albany Law School and the author of “Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.”

963. In Nature, Fatal Attractions Can Be Part of Life

An Antarctic fur seal trying to mate with a king penguin. Photo by Tristan Scott

By Ingfei Chen, The New York Times, November 26, 2012

One day during field observations last year at Marion Island, a remote nature preserve in the southern Indian Ocean, something bizarre caught Tristan Scott’s eye: on a rocky beach, a sleek young male Antarctic fur seal was trying to mate with a king penguin.

The fur seals normally hunt penguins and eat them. But this seal was wrestling with the bird, chasing as it repeatedly tried to escape.

Baffled at first, Mr. Scott, a wildlife researcher, realized that the seal “was trying to court the penguin as if it were a female seal.”

When that failed, he “tore the bird to shreds and ate it,” Mr. Scott recalled.

Disturbing as it may sound, such wayward mating behavior is not unheard-of. An earlier episode of seal-on-penguin sexual violence, also at Marion Island, was reported in 2008 by Nico de Bruyn and colleagues at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa, where Mr. Scott is a graduate student.

The phenomenon is called misdirected mating, and it extends to other marine mammals. Wildlife experts say sea lions and sea otters have occasionally been seen forcing themselves on other types of seals and killing them.

Indeed, some researchers say misdirected mating is not abnormal. “These things happen in wildlife,” said Heather Harris, a veterinarian who has studied sea otters in Monterey Bay. “We think that it is within the spectrum of possible normal behavior.”

And Axel Hochkirch, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Trier in Germany, called the behavior “simply a bad mistake,” and added, “nature is not perfect.”

Nor is such mating limited to marine mammals. Insects, spiders, worms, frogs, birds and fish do it, too, Dr. Hochkirch said. The behavior is a form of so-called reproductive interference, in which an animal’s mate-recognition radar is imperfect; the encounters do not necessarily end fatally.

Some couplings between closely related species result in familiar hybrids, like the mule. But when mixed matings result in no viable offspring, scientists say, the behavior is difficult to understand from the standpoint of evolution.

Why, for example, would a fur seal try to mate not just with a different species but with an entirely different class of animal?

Dr. de Bruyn speculated that the episodes started out as normal penguin hunting but that “wires somehow got crossed” and set off a sexual response.

Both incidents happened near the end of the seal breeding season — a time when males experience “huge testosterone boosts” but when mating opportunities are monopolized by a few dominant males, leaving lower-ranking males with no outlet for their sexual excitement. As a result, the researchers say, the two frustrated male fur seals may have turned on the penguins.

Dr. de Bruyn pointed out that sexual aggression was common within many marine mammal species; for instance, male fur seals often bite females on the neck during mating. Sexual conflict occurs to varying degrees across the animal kingdom, and in extreme cases, males’ coercive behavior may spill over to forcing themselves on other species, said Janet Mann, a Georgetown University field biologist.

Another example comes from Monterey Bay, where the local news media give expansive coverage to stranded California sea otter pups rehabilitated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. One graduate of that program had an infamous reputation: Morgan, who was rescued as a pup in 1995, released and then recaptured in 2001 after being spotted forcibly copulating with Pacific harbor seal pups, five of which did not survive.

Observers documented 19 cases of attacks on harbor seals by Morgan and at least two other male otters, mostly in the Elkhorn Slough area 30 miles south of Santa Cruz. The aggressors were “harassing, dragging, guarding and copulating with harbor seals” for up to a week after the pups were killed, according to an analysis published in 2010.

That study, conducted at the California Department of Fish and Game in Santa Cruz, was led by Dr. Harris, the sea-otter vet, who was then a research assistant; Melissa Miller, a veterinary pathologist; and Stori Oates, a biologist at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. Their autopsies of seal corpses found bite marks and lacerations on the nose and face, along with tearing consistent with sexual trauma.

Diagnostic tests found nothing awry in Morgan, who thereafter lived at the Fish and Game wildlife facility; he participated in research conducted by the University of California’s Long Marine Laboratory until he died of old age last March, at 17. (Biologists remember him fondly: Mike Murray, a veterinarian at the Monterey aquarium, said that during 11 years in captivity, Morgan taught scientists a tremendous amount about “what makes sea otters tick.”)

Dr. Harris, Dr. Miller and their colleagues suspect the attacks were fostered by a recent demographic shift that resulted in more male otters than females. The species is polygynous — mating is dominated by a few males, as with the Antarctic fur seals — and Elkhorn Slough had become a bachelor pad for many nonterritorial male otters that were shut out of the mating game. The researchers think that as a result, Morgan and the other misbehaving otters redirected their normal sexual responses toward the harbor seal pups, born at a large rookery in the same area.

That hypothesis is plausible, said Dr. Hochkirch, the German biologist. Something about how the seals looked or moved may have attracted the otters. For a wild male animal, “if you don’t find a good mate, you might try to copulate with something which is as close to a mate as possible,” he said. Sperm is cheap, so wasting it on the wrong species would probably not hurt the male’s reproductive success.

Here, too, the seal abuse is reflective of the sexual violence that is typical among sea otters.

“Everyone thinks they’re cute and cuddly,” said Mark P. Cotter, a biologist with Okeanis, a nonprofit marine research organization in Moss Landing. But when otters mate, he went on, the male bites the female on the face so she can’t get away. Female sea otters often die from mating trauma.

Another sexually aggressive species is the bottlenose dolphin. In the Bahamas, bottlenose dolphins are routinely seen sexually coercing smaller spotted dolphins, Dr. Mann said.

And on the West Coast, from 2007 to 2010, the California Marine Mammal Stranding Network recovered and autopsied 50 dead harbor porpoises that were apparently beaten up by dolphins, said Frances Gulland of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif. In one of three porpoise-bullying episodes in Monterey Bay that they filmed, Mr. Cotter and his colleagues saw a school of male dolphins batter a male porpoise to death.

The “porpicides,” as Mr. Cotter and colleagues called them in a paper last year, are mystifying: they confer no clear advantage to the dolphins, which seldom compete with porpoises for the same prey off California.

But because the observed assaults were perpetrated by young males “not very high up on the social ladder,” Mr. Cotter said, high testosterone levels during the breeding season may have fueled the violence.

He and other experts caution against judging animal aggressors by human standards. “In nature, there’s really no right or wrong,” he said.

But conversely, said Dr. Mann of Georgetown, the mere fact that sexual conflicts are “natural” in wildlife does not imply that they are “moral or justifiable or anything else that has to do with human culture.”

Some biologists, afraid that animal sexual violence will be misconstrued, are leery of discussing it. Wildlife scientists are usually working to protect species, Dr. Mann said, and “they don’t want to jeopardize that by sensationalized stories about their animals.”

Indeed, a few scientists declined interview requests, partly from concerns that animals that engage in misdirected mating would wrongly be perceived as sexual freaks. A case in point was Morgan the otter, who was cared for by protective researchers. His death last March went unannounced — unlike the passing of a female Monterey aquarium otter who was eulogized in local newspapers that same month.

Terrie Williams, a biology professor at Long Marine Lab, declined to answer questions about Morgan. In an e-mail, she wrote: “My program’s involvement with Morgan was strictly as an excellent and willing participant in our diving physiology studies. I’d like to remember him as that.”

962. U.N. Agency Says 2012 Ranks Among Hottest Years

By Nick Cumming-Bruce, The New York Times, November 28, 2012

GENEVA — This year has ranked among the nine warmest since records began more than 160 years ago, continuing a trend for the planet that is increasing the dangers of extreme weather events, according to United Nations meteorologists.

“It confirms the trend towards a warmer planet,” Michel Jarraud, head of the World Meteorological Organization at the United Nations, said in Geneva on Wednesday as he delivered a provisional assessment intended to inform policy makers and negotiators attending the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar.

The final judgment on 2012 will come in March, but Mr. Jarraud said that meteorologists were not observing any major events that would greatly alter the preliminary findings.

“Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” he added in a prepared statement.

Among the most conspicuous evidence of climate change associated with global warming was the “alarming” rate at which Arctic ice had melted during the summer months, he said. The melting this year occurred at a much faster rate than in 2011 and outpaced the predictions of climate experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he said.

By September, the level of Arctic ice was the lowest since satellite records began and had shrunk by nearly half — an area nearly the size of India — below the average minimum level in the 20 years before 2000, the organization reported.

The ice will reform in the winter but will be thinner than before and more vulnerable to further melting, Mr. Jarraud warned. “The trend is not only continuing but accelerating,” he said. “The more it melts, the faster it will melt.”

The ice melt will contribute to rising sea levels that are already 20 centimeters, or nearly 8 inches, higher than a century ago, Mr. Jarraud said, posing added risks in the event of extreme weather. Hurricane Sandy would have had less impact on New York if it had occurred 100 years ago when sea levels were lower, he said.

After a chilly start to 2012, average temperatures from January to October were 0.45 degrees Celsius, or 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit, above the average from 1961 to 1990, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s findings. A rise of only one degree Celsius was sufficient to increase the frequency of extreme weather events, Mr. Jarraud said.

The above-average temperatures experienced in 2012 had been marked by record temperatures in areas like Greenland, Siberia and central China, the World Meteorological Organization reported.

Much of the United States, together with parts of Europe, western Russia and southern China, had suffered severe drought, while parts of West and sub-Saharan Africa had experienced severe flooding.

Meteorologists have been at pains to make clear that no major weather event was the result of a single cause, but research into climate change was establishing clear links, Mr. Jarraud said, citing the results of research into the extreme heat wave in Russia in 2010. “Without climate change, this episode would have been very unlikely,” he said.