Stop!
[Kathryn Jean Lopez  02/22 01:44 PM]

Todd Seavey from the American Council on Science and Health e-mails:

Dear Kathryn,

I don't know if you'll even have time to read this note, but this
crunchy eruption is beginning to seem like a nightmare to me, not least
because the "sensibility" underlying it all is founded on lots of false
assumptions — false assumptions of exactly the sort that people never
check if they prefer intuition and aesthetics to empirical fact.

(1) It should not surprise me that the quasi-hippie crunchies are in
love with organic food, but it might be worth noting (as we often do at
ACSH.org and HealthFactsAndFears.com) that there is no evidence that
organic food tends to be healthier than conventional food — and
indeed, since organic agriculture avoids many chemical fertilizers, it
is actually _more_ likely that one will get a sick-making microbe from
organic food (much the same could be said of hippie-beloved bottled
water vs. chemically purified and fluoride-fortified tap water).

(2) Similarly, the idea that "sustainable," old-fashioned farming is
somehow more "responsible" is nonsense — industrial agriculture may
seem less "pretty" to hippies, but its radically increased efficiency
means it has a _smaller_ environmental footprint for the amount of food
produced — and feeds a helluva lot more people — than the
"sustainable" methods that kept humanity on the brink of starvation for
most of the past 10,000 years.

(3) Worst of all, one commentator on the Crunchy blog has — not
surprisingly — come out against vaccines, a position that is common
among these folk (I'm friends with one man interviewed in Rod's book
who now has six unvaccinated kids) and that is based on nothing more
than conspiracy theories and alternative-medicine scaremongering, of a
sort that is leading to lower vaccination rates and thus renewed
outbreaks of whooping cough and polio in a world where (thanks to
modern technology, people!) those things could/should easily be a thing
of the past. People who claim to care about the children should not be
discouraging vaccinations.

(4) _Of course_ the "local farmers" resent big-time industrial
agriculture — nobody likes competition, whether they're lazy union
members or inefficient old-fashioned farmers (picturesque farmers can
be selfish, too, you know). That's why, thank goodness, we have a
market and most people feel free to shop where they please for the
lowest prices and best value instead of trying to prove their
allegiance to the Old World or the ghost of Joseph de Maistre.

(5) What seems virtue-promotingly quaint in this world — especially in
this admirably high-tech and progressive nation — is often just
yesterday's innovation. Have you just purchased a 120-year-old home
out of a desire to be traditional and crunchy? Well, if the stairs
have metal in them instead of rotting, rickety wood, you're walking on
something that was considered a major innovation in the go-go late
1800s, and something that probably saved more than a few precious tots
from bad, family-values-unfriendly tumbles. If virtue is such a good
thing, I think it should be adaptable to shopping malls and
centrally-heated homes, not just Farmer Joe's egg stand and an Amish
hearth.

A serious conservative movement ought to value the _accomplishments and
gains_ of the past, science and global capitalism chief among them, not
just the past for its own sake or its imagined greater wholesomeness.

Indeed, the crunchy eruption is sufficiently alarming and irrational
that I think it ought to call into question not just the value of
crunchiness but the worthiness of _conservatism as a whole_. Put in
perspective, nothing has created more human happiness and well-being —
and allowed more counterculturalists to indulge their agrarian
fantasies — than industrial capitalism, and if all it takes is an
appeal to religion or tradition for some conservatives to forget that,
I say perhaps it's time to jettison the whole _mainstream conservative_
sensibility, with its overconfidence in the power of tradition and
religion to keep society going, and start far more explicitly defending
instead the capitalism and science that the ingrate crunchies so
eagerly assault.

Yours,

Todd Seavey