I've been thinking about religion a lot lately. Not because of the Koran burning threat but because I've been watching my child struggle to reconcile religious belief systems with everything else she has learned about the world. Trying to be a responsible parent, and trying not to undermine her devout mother, I emphasized that there are both good and bad people that identify themselves as religious. I told her about the designation, Christianist, for those people that affect the trappings of religion for their own ends. I admitted that the teachings of Jesus were about the only part of the Bible I ever cared for - the rest seemed authoritarian and harsh.

I ran into the same issues at her age, but it was too late for me. Despite understanding a mechanistic view of the universe, I already had inculcated into my mind the belief that some larger but unseen personality was calling the shots. When good or bad things happen to me, there is no escaping the feeling that I am being rewarded or punished.

My daughter gave me a copy of Hitchen's book, God Is Not Great, and has nagged me into reading it. I have never much liked Hitchens, but he is a good writer and makes a solid case about the evil that often accompanies religion. But I don't think he quite nails it. I don't think society can turn off religion. Even if we abandoned all the standard religions and took up atheism, the urge towards conformity and control that characterizes religion would seep into society somehow. And to be fair, the good facets of religion, such as the fellowship and mutual support, would also find another outlet.

A great deal of religious effort concerns control of sex, hence breeding and property. Under religion, a great deal of sexual behavior becomes ritualized, hence regulated. The WEIRD people study in the Behavior and Brain Sciences Journal of Cambridge Journals, which I mentioned before, opened with a discussion of sexual practices in New Guinea that diverge wildly from what we WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) consider normal. Having written that last sentence, I wonder whether the elders would even consider their rituals to be sex:

In the tropical forests of New Guinea, the Etoro believe that for a boy to achieve manhood he must ingest the semen of his elders. This is accomplished through ritualized rites of passage that require young male initiates to fellate a senior member (Herdt 1984/1993; Kelley 1980). In contrast, the nearby Kaluli maintain that male initiation is only properly done by ritually delivering the semen through the initiate's anus, not his mouth. The Etoro revile these Kaluli practices, finding them disgusting. To become a man in these societies, and eventually take a wife, every boy undergoes these initiations. Such boy-inseminating practices, which are enmeshed in rich systems of meaning and imbued with local cultural values, were not uncommon among the traditional societies of Melanesia and Aboriginal Australia (Herdt 1984/1993), as well as in Ancient Greece and Tokugawa Japan.

This paragraph was obviously intended to show a great disparity between these tribesmen and our Western mores, but I have to recall that older boys at Western boarding schools do sometimes bugger the younger boys, that Western male prisoners do sometimes rape male prisoners and that Western male soldiers do sometimes rape female soldiers, so perhaps the only difference is that the Etoro and Kaluli rituals are performed out in the open while our deeds are done behind closed doors.

Authoritarian religion despises free choice of sexual partners and as this sad article by Robert Fisk for the Independent lists, religious authorities will not shrink from wielding rape as a punishment:

Outrageously, rape is also used as a punishment for "honour" crimes. In Meerwala village in the Punjab in 2002, a tribal "jury" claimed that an 11-year-old boy from the Gujar tribe, Abdul Shakoor, had been walking unchaperoned with a 30-year-old woman from the Mastoi tribe, which "dishonoured" the Mastois. The tribal elders decided that to "return" honour to the group, the boy's 18-year-old sister, Mukhtaran Bibi, should be gang-raped. Her father, warned that all the female members of his family would be raped if he did not bring Mukhtar to them, dutifully brought his daughter to this unholy "jury". Four men, including one of the "jury", immediately dragged the girl to a hut and raped her while up to a hundred men laughed and cheered outside. She was then forced to walk naked through the village to her home. It took a week before the police even registered the crime – as a "complaint".

... though they are more likely to torture and kill the defiant ones:

Through the dark veil of Afghanistan's village punishments, we glimpse just occasionally the terror of teenage executions. When Siddiqa, who was only 19, and her 25-year-old fiancé Khayyam were brought before a Taliban-approved religious court in Kunduz province this month, their last words were: "We love each other, no matter what happens." In the bazaar at Mulla Quli, a crowd – including members of both families – stoned to death first Siddiqa, then Khayyam.

But while Fisk maintains the term, "honour," killings, I tend to think of them as control killings. The family kills for their honour, but this honour is really a marker for their place and survival within the group. And when the group is a tightly-knit, agrarian-based, authoritarian society, there are no places for unsanctioned lovers. When I ask myself why do these village elders care so much who marries who, I can only assume it has to do with property and status in a society where a good piece of land is the difference between life and death.

Which brings me to soil. Raj Patel notes that the World Bank has released a study with the deceptively simple name, Rising Global Interest in Farmland (large PDF). As discussed in dag over a year ago, South Korea was drawing some flak for trying to obtain long term leases for half the arable land in Madagascar.

With the rise in food prices many more countries have been concerned over food insecurity. In the forward, Juergen Voegele, Director of the Agriculture and Rural Development Department writes, "smallholder productivity must be increased." To me that phrase is code for, "taken over and farmed by a large foreign combine." This would be a shame not only because it would dispossess agrarian people, with enough troubles already, to feed people elsewhere, but because, as Sharon Astyk has often noted, these smallholder farms represent the most sustainable farming on the planet. Large combines rely on massive inputs of petroleum (diesel fuel), natural gas (fertilizer) and water, to keep the green revolution going.

The math of the World Bank report is simple. If farmed intensively, the land can yield far more food than it is yielding right now. The report is very clear that the small farmers should be replaced one way or another:

Whether and how land is transferred to investors will have potentially far-reaching impacts on the dynamics of farm size distribution. .. Land-abundant African countries have a choice between establishing an agricultural sector founded on broad-based ownership of medium-sized farms (much larger than those currently operated and expanding over time) or a dual structure where a few mega farms coexist with [or dominate] many small producers.

"Improvements on land governance" must be made before the "savvy investor" will find these opportunities cost-effective. I feel like I'm reading a brochure for a time-share condo.

On his blog, Raj Patel notes that

The report itself is far more scathing still. It’s a bit watered down from the version leaked earlier this year. The leaked version mentioned that “investors failed to follow through on their investments plans, in some cases after inflicting serious damage on the local resource base”. In this version, the investors have become victims: “sometimes investors encroach on local lands to make ends meet”. Aw, poor starving investors scrambling on other people’s land just to get ROI above the S&P 500.

Patel writes: "Finally, who loses out? In perhaps the most candid and straightforward paragraph, we learn that:"

Many of the projects studied had strong negative gender effects, either by directly affecting women’s land-based livelihoods or, where common property resources were involved, by increasing the time required of women to gather water or firewood and take care of household food security. In many cases, it was presumed that land rights were in the name of men only, and consultations were limited to males in the community, leaving women without a voice. Bargaining power within the household was affected in unpredictable ways. In some cases, negative distributional and gender impacts arose because consultation, if conducted at all, had very narrow outreach. Vulnerable groups, such as pastoralists and internally displaced people, were excluded from consultations in an effort to override or negate their claims. Without proper safeguards, they then became aware of pending land use changes too late to be able to voice concerns. Females and other vulnerable groups are also less likely to obtain employment from investors or be included in decision-making processes surrounding the investment. Even if land was fairly abundant, reduced access to land and associated natural resources was a frequent concern. Potential distributional impacts on food security were also raised as some people lost control over food production and acquisition.

Just as there is no place for unsanctioned love in the authoritarian community, there will be no room for the sustainable, but lower-yield smallholder farm in the arable land market. Small farmers will probably fare as well in the great game of world resources as the defiant lovers in their own communities.

The irony is that these strict and conservative farm communities, while loathsome to our sense of freedom and self-determination are environmentally preferable to the corporate mega-farms. As a WEIRD person, I was raised to expect both free choice in life partners and the prospect of being more than a serf to a conglomerate of foreign investors. I wonder if my daughter will have the same expectations.