Bring on the Apocalypse E-Book

George Monbiot

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

'A dazzling command of science and a relentless faith in people... I never miss reading him.' -- Naomi Klein In these incendiary essays, George Monbiot tears apart the fictions of religious conservatives, the claims of those who deny global warming and the lies of the governments and newspapers that led us into war. He takes no prisoners, exposing government corruption in devastating detail while clashing with people as diverse as Bob Geldof, Ann Widdecombe and David Bellamy. But alongside his investigative journalism, Monbiot's book contains some remarkable essays about what it means to be human. Monbiot explores the politics behind Constable's The Cornfield, shows how driving cars has changed the way we think and argues that eternal death is a happier prospect than eternal life.

Leseprobe

Bring on the Apocalypse

George Monbiot is the author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, The Age of Consent and Captive State. A celebrated ecoactivist, he was presented with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement by Nelson Mandela. He is currently Visiting Professor of Planning at Oxford Brookes University.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2008 by AtlanticBooks on behalf of Guardian Newspapers Ltd.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2014by Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © George Monbiot, 2008

The moral right of George Monbiot to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All articles used by permission of the author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission both of the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

ISBN 9781782396529

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Atlantic Books Ltd.Ormond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Bring on the Apocalypse

Contents

Introduction:

Four Missed Meals Away from Anarchy

Arguments With God

Bring on the Apocalypse

The Virgin Soldiers

Is the Pope Gay?

A Life With No Purpose

America the Religion

Arguments With Nature

Junk Science

Mocking Our Dreams

Preparing for Take-Off

A Lethal Solution

Giving Up On Two Degrees

Crying Sheep

Feeding Frenzy

Natural Aesthetes

Bring Them Back

Seeds of Distraction

Arguments With War

Thwart Mode

One Rule for Us

Dreamers and Idiots

The Moral Myth

The Lies of the Press

War Without Rules

A War of Terror

Back to Front Coup

Peace Is for Wimps

Asserting Our Right to Kill and Maim Civilians

A War Dividend

The Darkest Corner of the Mind

Arguments With Power

I’m With Wolfowitz

Still the Rich World’s Viceroy

On the Edge of Lunacy

This Is What We Paid for

Painted Haloes

The Corporate Continent

The Flight to India

How Britain Denies Its Holocausts

A Bully in Ermine

Lady Tonge: An Apology

Arguments With Money

Property Paranoia

Britain’s Most Selfish People

Theft Is Property

Expose the Tax Cheats

Bleeding Us Dry

An Easter Egg Hunt

A Vehicle for Equality

Too Soft On Crime

Media Fairyland

The Net Censors

Arguments With Culture

The Antisocial Bastards in Our Midst

Driven Out of Eden

Breeding Reptiles in the Mind

Willy Loman Syndrome

The New Chauvinism

Notes

Introduction

Four Missed Meals Away from Anarchy

I am writing this on a train rattling slowly down the Dyfi valley. It is April and the oaks are twitching into life. A moment ago I saw a lamb that had just been born. Afterbirth still trailed from the ewe like scarlet bunting. The Dyfi is lower than it should be at this time of year; its pale shoulders have been exposed. On its banks is the debris of the winter storms: sticks and leaves trapped in the branches of the sallows; trees like the picked skeletons of whales dumped in the grass. It is hard to believe that the river could have mustered such force.

It has not taken me long to adjust to my new home. When I travel to London, I can think only of the rivers and the hills. It is strangely peaceful here, almost as if the cruelty of nature has been suspended. But so, in its way, is every landscape I have travelled through. The houses lining the railway canyon north of Euston look like prisons, but no one riots. In the West Midlands the demolition of our industry takes place without ceremony or panic. Machines stack and sift the rubble; property developers park their Audis and stroll around the remains. There are no mobs; no fires; only the occasional bomb. The country is slumbering through a deep and unremarked peace.

By peace, I mean not just an absence of war. I also mean an absence of the competition for resources encountered in any place or at any time in which the necessities of life are short. Whenever I read about the fighting in Iraq or the massacres in Congo and Darfur, or the torture and repression in Burma or Uzbekistan, or the sheer bloody misery of life in Malawi or Zambia, I am reminded that our peace is a historical and geographical anomaly.

It results primarily from a surplus of energy. A lasting surplus of useful energy is almost unknown to ecologists. Trees will crowd out the sky until no sunlight reaches the forest floor. Bacteria will multiply until they have consumed their substrate. A flush of prey will be followed by a flush of predators, which will proliferate until the prey is depleted. But we have so far been able to keep growing without constraint. By extracting fossil fuels, we can mine the ecological time of other eras. We use the energy sequestered in the hush of sedimentation – the infinitesimal rain of plankton on to the ocean floor, the spongy settlement of fallen trees in anoxic swamps – compressed by the weight of succeeding deposits into concentrated time. Every year we use millions of years accreted in other ages. The gift of geological time is what has ensured, in the rich nations, that we have not yet reached the point at which we must engage in the struggle for resources. We have been able to expand into the past. Fossil fuels have so far exempted us from the violence that scarcity demands.

There are a few exceptions. Some of the troops sent abroad to secure and control other people’s energy supplies will die. Otherwise we have outsourced the killing. Other people kill each other on our behalf; we simply pay the victors for the spoils. Oil wars have been waged abroad ever since petroleum became a common transport fuel. Columbite-tantalite, a mineral of whose very existence we are ignorant but upon which much of our post-industrial growth depends, has been one of the main causes of a conflict that has led to some 4 million deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We pay not to fight.

One phrase, picked up in the rhythm of the train, keeps chugging through my head. “Every society is four missed meals away from anarchy.” I heard it at a meeting a fortnight ago.1 Our peace is as transient and contingent as the water level in the Dyfi river.

Some of the accounts of the violence in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina were exaggerated, but not all of them. The slightest disruption in the supply of essential goods, coupled with the state’s failure to assert its monopoly of violence, is sufficient to persuade people to rob, threaten, even to kill. A violent response to scarcity affects even those who are in no danger of starvation. Look at what happens on the first day of the Harrods sale. Prosperous people, aware that bargains are in short supply, shove, elbow, scramble, sometimes exchange blows, in their effort to obtain one of a small number of dinner services or carriage clocks or other such symbols of refinement. Civilisation, so painfully maintained by their hypocritical British manners at other times, disintegrates like the china they tussle over at the first hint of competition. We take our peace for granted only because we fail to understand what sustains it.

Order, in such circumstances, can be quickly restored through the superior force of arms. But order in times of scarcity is not the same as order in times of plenty. It is harsher and less flexible; the realities of power are more keenly felt. There have been instances where the superior force intervenes to try to ensure a fair distribution of resources. This happened, for example, in Britain during the Second World War. More commonly, it intervenes to protect those who still possess supplies from those who do not. It is not always the state that performs this role: the rich also arrange their own security, paying other people to fight.

Look at the compounds and condominiums in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Mumbai and Jakarta. The rich live behind razor wire, broken glass, dogs and armed guards. It is, to my eyes, a hideous existence. But only one thing is worse than living in a gated community in these cities: not living in a gated community. Without guards, you sleep with one ear tuned to the breaking of your door.

Yet even here there is, most of the time, no absolute shortage of any essential resource. In all these places you can buy whatever you want. There is no shortage of food or fuel or clean water or any other commodity, if you have money. Money is the limiting factor the absence of which keeps people hungry. But the situations I would like you to consider are those in which not money but the resources themselves become the constraint.

There are three major commodities whose supply, in many countries, could become subject to absolute constraints during our lifetimes: liquid fuels, fresh water, and food. Over the past three years there has, at last, been some public discussion about “peak oil”, the point at which global petroleum supplies peak and then go into decline. I have come to believe that some predictions of its imminent arrival have been exaggerated, but it is clear that it will happen sooner or later, and probably within the next 30 years. In a sense, the date of peaking is irrelevant. Once infrastructure that depends on the consumption of petroleum has been established, demand for this commodity is inelastic: if you live in a distant suburb, you cannot get to work or to the shops or to school without it. This means that absolute scarcity can occur before oil peaks, as demand outstrips supply. Some of the likely consequences are discussed in the article Crying Sheep.

The greater purchasing power of the rich nations means that they will be the last to be affected by an absolute shortage. They will pay far more for petroleum, but they will still be able to buy it. In poorer countries, by contrast, it will become a scarce and precious commodity, and a constant source of conflict.

Supplies of both fresh water and food are threatened by climate change. Scientists at the UK‘s Meteorological Office believe that a temperature rise of just 2.1oC above pre-industrial levels will expose between 2.3 and 3 billion people to the risk of water shortages.2 The glaciers and snowpack that supply many cities are melting rapidly. Rising sea levels threaten coastal aquifers. In many places, rainfall is decreasing. One study suggests that, on current trends, by 2090 the land area subject to extreme drought will increase thirtyfold.3 This also affects food supply. Initially, while food production falls in many hot nations with increasing temperatures, it rises in temperate places. This causes regional suffering, but total global food supplies are sustained. But beyond a certain level of warming – perhaps 4°C or so – there is a danger of an overall decline in production, even as the human population continues to rise. At that point, to use the mild term employed by ecologists, an “adjustment” must occur. This means that hundreds of millions must die to bring population into line with food supply.

All over the rich world, where we have forgotten what collective suffering means, there are people who appear to be perversely determined to accelerate these processes, and to shatter the peace we have become too comfortable to enjoy. The most obvious examples are the politicians, noisily assisted by their court journalists, who forced us into war with Iraq. It was as obvious in 2002 as it is today that they decided to go to war before they had developed a justification for it. As two of the essays in this collection show (Thwart Mode and Dreamers and Idiots), they deliberately shut down the opportunities for peace. Whenever Saddam Hussein offered to negotiate, they slapped his hand away. The same approach was used against the Taliban in Afghanistan (as Dreamers and Idiots also shows). When politicians have achieved elected office by scaring the living daylights out of the electorate, they correctly perceive an outbreak of peace as a threat to their interests. Journalists support them partly because they celebrate power regardless of its complexion and partly because war makes better copy than peace.

There are also those who perceive war as a desirable end in itself, irrespective of any political advantage it might confer. These are the people whose story is told in the first essay in this book, Bring on the Apocalypse. It is a remarkable and chilling tale, which shows how strange a world you can create for yourself when you are insulated (by your wealth and the force of your government’s arms) from reality.

But all of us appear to some extent to be willing these catastrophes to happen. The extreme examples come from the United States. People arrive on the beaches of Florida in enormous motor homes. These disgorge a pair of sports utility vehicles, which are then raced across the sand. The environmental writer Clive Hamilton reports that people in Texas have begun to install log fires in order to make their homes seem cosy. To enjoy them, they must turn up the air conditioning.4 But these examples simply represent an exaggeration of the way we all live. The central quest of our lives appears to be to find new ways to use fossil fuels.

The enhanced efficiency of our machines makes no difference to our consumption: we use any savings we make to power some other delightful toy. The internal combustion engine is far more efficient than it was a century ago, when the Model T Ford travelled 25 miles on a gallon of petrol.5 Yet average fuel economy in the United States today is 21mpg.6 Greater efficiency has been used to enhance the engine’s performance, to carry more weight, to power more gadgets. We exchange our light bulbs for less hungry models, then buy a flatscreen TV almost as wide as the house.

The environmental activist George Marshall has a term for this behaviour: “reactive denial”. It is as if, by enhancing our consumption of energy even as we become more aware of the dangers of climate change and peak oil, we are persuading ourselves that these problems cannot be real ones. If they were, surely someone would stop us?

I wish we knew the value of peace. I wish it were a daily marvel to us, as it must be to people who have just emerged from conflict. I wish we understood that without it everything else we value is at risk. I wish we possessed the imagination to grasp the horror of war. But because peace is an absence of events, it is not felt. We throw it away before we have understood what it is worth. I hope that some of the essays in this book will encourage people to consider the alternative.

Arguments With God

Bring On the Apocalypse

To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state’s Republican party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.1

The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters: homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; “any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns” should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric fences.2 Thus fortified, they turned to the real issue: the affairs of a small state 7000 miles away. It was then, according to a participant, that the “screaming and near fistfights” began.

I don’t know what the original motion said, but apparently it was “watered down significantly” as a result of the shouting match. The motion they adopted stated that Israel has an indivisible claim to Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Arab states should be pressured to absorb refugees from Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it wishes in seeking to eliminate terrorism.3 Good to see that the extremists didn’t prevail, then.

But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people of a state that is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign affairs? The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we still have some difficulty in taking it seriously.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative, stating that Jesus will return to earth when certain preconditions have been met.4 The first of these is the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel’s occupation of the rest of its “Biblical lands” (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the Antichrist will then be deployed against Israel and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all “true believers” (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation that will follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000 three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there,5 sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/European Union/France, or whoever the legions of the Antichrist turn out to be.

The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their efforts. The Antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat, or, more plausibly, Silvio Berlusconi.6 The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast.7 By clicking on www.raptureready.com you can discover how close you might be to flying out of your pyjamas. The infidels among us should take note that the Rapture Index currently stands at 144, just one point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled with floating nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather, and Israel are all trading at the maximum five points (the EU is debating its constitution, there was a freak hurricane in the South Atlantic, Hamas has sworn to avenge the killing of its leaders), but the Second Coming is currently being delayed by an unfortunate decline in drug abuse among teenagers and a weak showing by the Antichrist, both of which score only two.

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American pollsters believe that between 15 and 18% of US voters belong to churches or movements that subscribe to these teachings.8 A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans.9 The best-selling contemporary books in the United States are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a “fictionalised” account of the Rapture (this, apparently, distinguishes it from the other one), with plenty of dripping details about what will happen to the rest of us. The people who believe all this don’t believe it just a little; for them, it is a matter of life eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset that “there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking”.10

So here we have a major political constituency, representing much of the current president’s core vote, in the most powerful nation on earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation 9:14–15 maintains that four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates” will be released “to slay the third part of men”. They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers. When Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002 he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.11

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this. Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue and therefore of secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it’s a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don’t get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.

April 20 2004

The Virgin Soldiers

The flame of sexual liberation may soon have to be kept alive by us geriatric delinquents. A US evangelical group has announced that next month it will be recruiting British teenagers to its campaign against sex before marriage. In the United States, over a million have taken the pledge. “Great Britain”, the organiser insists, “is fascinated with the idea of sexual abstinence.”1 In my day the fellow would have been horse-whipped. Yet young people are flocking to him. Is there no end to the depravity of today’s youth?

Not if the US government can help it. The abstinence campaign that hopes to corrupt the morals of our once-proud nation – a group called the Silver Ring Thing – has so far received $700,000 from George Bush, as part of his campaign to replace sex education with Victorian values.2 This year he doubled the federal budget for virginity training, to $270m.3 In terms of participation, his programme is working. In every other respect, it’s a catastrophe.

No one could dispute that thousands of teenagers in Britain and the United States are suffering as a result of sex before marriage. Teenage pregnancies are overwhelmingly concentrated at the bottom of the social scale; the teenage daughters of unskilled manual labourers are ten times as likely to become pregnant as middle-class girls.4 According to the United Nations agency Unicef, women born into poverty are twice as likely to stay that way if they have their children too soon. They are more likely to be unemployed, to suffer from depression, and to become dependent on alcohol or drugs.5

The prevalence of both teenage pregnancy and venereal disease in this country and the US is generally blamed on lax morals and a permissive welfare state. Teenagers are in trouble today, the conservatives who dominate this debate insist, because of the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 70s, and the willingness of the state to support single mothers. On Sunday, Ann Widdecombe maintained that sex education has “failed”; those who promote it should now “shut up” and leave the welfare of our teenagers to the virginity campaigners.6 Denny Pattyn, the founder of the Silver Ring Thing, calls this “the Cesspool Generation – suffering the catastrophic effects of the sexual revolution”.7 These people have some explaining to do.

Were we to accept the conservatives’ version, we would expect the nations in which sex education and access to contraception are most widespread to be those that suffer most from teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The truth is the other way around.

The two western countries at the top of the disaster league, the United States and the United Kingdom, are those in which conservative campaigns are among the strongest and sex education and access to contraception are among the weakest. The United States, the UN Population Fund’s figures show, is the only rich nation stuck in the middle of the Third World bloc, with 53 births per 1000 teenagers – a worse record than India, the Philippines and Rwanda.8 The United Kingdom comes next, at 20 births per 1000. The nations the conservatives would place at the top of the list are clumped at the bottom. Germany and Norway produce 11 babies per 1000 teenagers, Finland eight, Sweden and Denmark seven, and the Netherlands five.9

Unicef’s explanation is pretty unequivocal. Sweden, for example, radically changed its sex education policies in 1975. “Recommendations of abstinence and sex-only-within-marriage were dropped, contraceptive education was made explicit, and a nationwide network of youth clinics was established specifically to provide confidential contraceptive advice and free contraceptives to young people . . . Over the next two decades, Sweden saw its teenage birth rate fall by 80 per cent.”10 Sexually transmitted diseases, in contrast to rising rates in the UK and US, declined in Sweden by 40% in the 1990s.11

“Studies of the Dutch experience”, Unicef continues, “have concluded that the underlying reason for success has been the combination of a relatively inclusive society with more open attitudes towards sex and sex education, including contraception.” Requests for contraceptives there “are not associated with shame or embarrassment” and “the media is willing to carry explicit messages” about them which are “designed for young people”.12 This teeming cesspool has among the lowest abortion and teenage birth rates on earth.

The US and the UK, by contrast, are “less inclusive societies” in which “contraceptive advice and services may be formally available, but in a ‘closed’ atmosphere of embarrassment and secrecy”. The UK has a higher teenage pregnancy rate not because there is more sex or more abortion here, but because of “lower rates of contraceptive use”.13

The catastrophe afflicting so many teenagers in Britain and America, in other words, has been caused not by liberal teachers, liberated parents, Marie Stopes International and the Guardian, but by George Bush, Ann Widdecombe and the Daily Mail. They campaign against early sex education, discourage access to contraceptives and agitate against the social inclusion (economic equality, the welfare state) which offers young women better prospects than getting knocked up. Abstinence campaigns like the Silver Ring Thing do delay the onset of sexual activity, but when their victims are sucked into the cesspool (nearly all eventually are), they are around one third less likely to use contraceptives (according to a study by researchers at Columbia University), as they are not “prepared for an experience that they have promised to forgo”.14 The result, a paper published in the British Medical Journal shows, is that abstinence programmes are “associated with an increase in number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants”.15 You read that right: abstinence training increases the rate of teenage pregnancy.

If all this were widely known, the conservatives and evangelicals would never dare to make the claims they do. So they must ensure that we don’t find out. In January, the Sunday Telegraph claimed that Europeans “look on in envy” at the US record on teenage pregnancies.16 It supported this extraordinary statement by deliberately fudging the figures: running the teenage birth rate per 1000 in the US against the total teenage birth rate in the UK, so leaving its readers with no means of comparison.

Breathtaking as this deception is, it’s not half as bad as what Bush has been up to. When his cherished abstinence programmes failed to reduce the teenage birth rate, he instructed the US Centers for Disease Control to stop gathering data.17 He also forced them to drop their project to identify the sex education programmes that work, after they found that none of the successful ones were “abstinence-only”.18 Bush should also hope that we don’t look too closely at his record as governor of Texas. He spent $10m on abstinence campaigns there, with the result that Texas has the fourth-highest rate of HIV infection in the Union, and the slowest decline of any state in the birth rate among 15–17-year-olds.19

So when this bunch of johnny-come-lately foreigners arrives here next month with their newfangled talk about “virginity” and “abstinence”, I urge you chaps to lock up your daughters and send them on their way. It’s up to the older generation to keep our young whippersnappers off the straight and narrow.

May 11 2004

Is the Pope Gay?

“What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence”, Bertrand Russell wrote, “is an index to his desires – desires of which he himself is often unconscious.”1 The Vatican’s current obsession with homosexuality suggests that something interesting might be going on. Are some of the church’s most powerful cardinals struggling with their sexuality? Could the Pope himself be gay?

On Sunday, the Holy Father launched his fiercest attack on gays, insisting that the World Pride festival in Rome was “an offence to [the] Christian values” of the city.2 Homosexuality, he maintained, is “objectively disordered” and “contrary to natural law”.

Last year, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Church’s sinister enforcement agency, run by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, forbade a priest and a nun from ministering to gays in the United States after they refused to sign a statement testifying that “homosexual acts are always objectively evil”.3 Gays, the Vatican believes, bring their misfortunes upon themselves. “When civil legislation is introduced to protect behaviour to which no one has any conceivable right,” the CDF asserts, “neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when . . . violent reactions increase.”4 Gay rights campaigners maintain that between 150 and 200 gay men are murdered in Italy every year.5

For this reason, if for no other, we should take this papal bull seriously. So let us examine the two main themes of the Vatican’s edicts: homosexuality, it maintains, is both immoral and unnatural.

Morality is surely meaningless unless it refers to the impact we have on other people. Interestingly, even the Vatican appears unable to point to any ill-effects of safe sex between consenting gay adults, other than to suggest that its acceptance might “deprave” or “corrupt” other people. What this appears to mean is that they might be led away from the teachings of the church. Heterosexuality is quite another matter. Reproduction among prosperous people has a demonstrable impact on the welfare of others. Thanks to the depletion of resources and the effects of climate change, every child born to the rich deprives children elsewhere of the means of survival. In a world of diminishing assets, being gay is arguably more moral than being straight.

The claim that homosexuality is “unnatural” is more interesting. This could mean one of two things. Perhaps the Pope is suggesting that it lies beyond the scope of “normal” human behaviour. If so, this has uncomfortable implications for an association of old men who wear dresses and hear voices.

Alternatively, he might be suggesting that homosexual behaviour is at variance with that of the non-human world. Here, too, the church has a problem. Biological Exuberance, a book by the science writer Bruce Bagemihl, documents homosexuality in no fewer than 470 animal species.6 He shows how groups of manatees carouse in gay orgies; how male giraffes start “necking” and end up fornicating, how female Japanese macaques will pair off for weeks at a time, fondling each other and having sex.

As New Scientist magazine records, at the beginning of the last century the embarrassed keepers of Edinburgh Zoo had repeatedly to rechristen their penguins, after they found that the loving couples they observed were not all that they seemed.7 Female roseate terns sometimes mate with each other for life, allowing themselves to be fertilised by males, but making nests and bringing up their young together. I would hesitate to describe what pygmy chimpanzees, orangutans or long-eared hedgehogs get up to, even in a liberal newspaper.

The world’s wildlife, in other words, is depraved. But we would be hard put to call it unnatural. Self-enforced celibacy, by contrast, is all but unknown among other animal species. If any sexual behaviour is out of tune with the natural world, it is surely that of the priesthood.