Pope makes common sense observation

namely, flinging condoms at Africa hasn’t done a damn thing to stop AIDS and has often persuaded fools that if they wear a condom they are safe from getting or giving AIDS. It’s a perfectly reasonable observation, backed by people like Dr Edward Green, Director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at Harvard.

“The best evidence we have”, he says, “supports the Pope’s comments. There is a consistent association shown by our best studies between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV infection rates.”

This is, however, radically at odds with some of the most cherished beliefs of our Chattering Classes, who cling desperately to the hope that if we treat sex as a plumbing problem and not a moral question, we can dodge Catholic moral teaching and the uncomfortable demand God puts on human sexuality. That unfortunately involves the project of talking as though the Pope’s common sense observations constitute him speaking out of turn about science, as well as marginalizing potential heretics in the Chattering classes themselves who might give aid and comfort to the Pope when he challenges the most cherished beliefs of the Chattering classes. So we get things like this. So when Green speaks with such dangerously heterodox sympathies about the futility of condoms in the anti-AIDs campaign, it is necessary to minimize his tentative endorsement of the Pope’s point by a) declaring it “out of the mainstream” (i.e. not reflexively and mindlessly given to the assumption that condoms will save us all) and b) timid enough that Green does not commit himself to saying “If we actually obeyed Catholic sexual morality instead of trying this hopeless short cut we’d all be better off.” :

He told me:

In epidemics that are population wide, where most HIV is found in the general population, for whatever reason we can’t get people to use condoms consistently, and when they use them at all, that seems to have the effect of disinhibiting people’s behaviours so they end up taking greater sexual risks and cancelling whatever risk reduction they have gotten from the technology they’re using.

Importantly, however, he is not against the promotion of condoms: “I’m not against making them accessible, I’m not against promoting them, it’s just that as responsible public health planners, we should admit to ourselves that 50 years into promoting condoms – and the last 25 years have been mostly promoting them for AIDS prevention – they haven’t worked in the generalised epidemics of Africa. We should be putting our resources into things that do work.”

The self-contradiction in Green’s words are no mystery to me: His social circle is the Harvard Faculty. He has, after all, parties and faculty meetings to attend. Wouldn’t want to commit social suicide. Of course he’s going to hedge his acknowledgement of the Pope’s common sense with all sorts of language which communicates to his social circle, “I’m still one of you. Don’t ostracize me. I remember what you did to Larry Summers when he offended against the pieties. I promise you. I’m harmless.”

Me: I think that when the Pope addresses moral issues, he actually knows what he’s talking about. More, even, than newspaper editors and talking hairdos with sonorous voices and teleprompters. We’ve been flinging condoms at African for years. AIDS is everywhere on that tragic continent. The problem is with a disordered approach to sex and the human person, not with plumbing. But our technological culture treats every problem like a nail, because all it has is a materialist hammer. Africa has been screwed over by Euro imperialism for more than a century. This is just a continuation of the same thing by different means.

I suspect Webb means well. His concluding remarks seem to reflect a certain sympathy with the Pope’s remarks. But there seems to me to be too-easy habit of mind in taking the easy NOMA (No Overlapping Magisteria) route of saying “Condoms are a Science Matter. The Pope has no competence in Science and therefore no right to speak on the question of whether condoms reduce AIDS”. I think some corners have been cut here in order to get the old man off the stage, an embarrassing remark papered over, and the Catholic faith rendered harmless to outraged members of the Euro Chattering Classes. It is taken for granted that when the Pope basically agrees with Green that we’ve been throwing condoms at Africa for decades and things are far worse, then he committed some sort of major faux pas that polite members of the Chattering Class don’t want to hear. It’s a common sense remark supported by obvious fact: a continent flooded by 50 bazillion condoms, filled with AIDS and rampaging sexual disorder. Treating people like plumbing problems just makes everything worse.