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The document discusses how pollutants and industrial wastes are agents rather than causes of disease. While they are immediate physiological triggers, the root causes are social factors like prioritizing profit and efficiency over human welfare. As long as economic systems trap people into unsafe production and consumption, new pollutants will replace old ones. True causes lie in changing social relations, not blaming inanimate substances. The transfer of causal power from social to physical is a major oversimplification.
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Richard C. Lewontin - Biology Ideology--The Doctrine of DNA 41
The document discusses how pollutants and industrial wastes are agents rather than causes of disease. While they are immediate physiological triggers, the root causes are social factors like prioritizing profit and efficiency over human welfare. As long as economic systems trap people into unsafe production and consumption, new pollutants will replace old ones. True causes lie in changing social relations, not blaming inanimate substances. The transfer of causal power from social to physical is a major oversimplification.
The document discusses how pollutants and industrial wastes are agents rather than causes of disease. While they are immediate physiological triggers, the root causes are social factors like prioritizing profit and efficiency over human welfare. As long as economic systems trap people into unsafe production and consumption, new pollutants will replace old ones. True causes lie in changing social relations, not blaming inanimate substances. The transfer of causal power from social to physical is a major oversimplification.
It is undoubtedly true that pollutants and industrial
wastes are the immediate physiological causes of cancers, miners' black lung, textile workers' brown lung, and a host of other disorders. Moreover, it is undoubtedly true that there are trace amounts of cancercausing substances even in the best of our food and water unpolluted by pesticides and herbicides that make farm workers sick. But to say that pesticides cause the death of farm workers or that cotton fibers cause brown lung in textile workers is to make a fetish out of inanimate objects. We must distinguish between agents and causes. Asbestos fibers and pesticides are the agents of disease and disability, but it is illusory to suppose that if we eliminate these particular irritants that the diseases will go away, for other similar irritants will take their place. So long as efficiency, the maximization of profit from production, or the filling of centrally planned norms of production without reference to the means remain the motivating forces of productive enterprises the world over, so long as people are trapped by economic need or state regulation into production and consumption of certain things, then one pollutant will replace another. Regulatory agencies or central planning departments will calculate cost and benefit ratios where human misery is costed out at a dollar value. Asbestos and cotton lint fibers are not the causes of cancer. They are the agents of social causes, of social formations that determine the nature of our productive and consumptive lives, and in the end it is only through changes in those social forces that we can get to the root of problems of health. The transfer of causal power from social relations into inanimate agents that then seem to have a power and life of their own is one of the major mystifications of science and its ideologies. Just as pollution is the most modern and up-to-date version of the external hostile forces of the physical world that are said to confront us, so simple internal forces, the genes, are now held responsible not only for human health in its normal medical sense but for a variety of social problems, among them alcoholism, criminality, drug addiction, and mental disorders. We are assured that if we could only find those genes that underlie alcoholism or the genes that have gone awry when we get cancer, then our problems will be over. The current manifestation of that belief in the importance of our inheritance in determining health and disease is the human genome sequencing project, a multibillion-dollar program of
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