On a wing and a prayer
As a head of state, to end up in a slick French hospital on your deathbed has to be the ultimate vote of no confidence in your own country’s healthcare system. Zambia’s Levy Mwanawasa was shipped off to Paris after his stroke in June this year.
At least North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il was suitably taken in by the cult of his own personality to stay at home for treatment after his recent brush with the other side. But rumour has it that a French neurosurgeon was imported to treat him. Pyongyang denies this emphatically, but then they would, wouldn’t they?
What is it about the French and their medical prowess?
The point, Jacob Zuma, is that we don’t need pious school leavers; we need ones who are developing razor-keen skills so that they can keep this country on the road to modernity. I’d like some of them to become super-healers, the kinds of doctors, nurses and medical researchers who are so good at what they do that the ruling party won’t have to suffer the indignity of sending its ailing leaders off to the hospitals of former colonisers to get decent medical treatment. So let’s leave the teachers to do their jobs—teach—and spare them the distraction of daily incantations.
Zuma’s comments to religious leaders at a meeting outside Polokwane last week were historically myopic: let’s yank South Africa’s flagging morals up by the bootstraps, he said, by instilling the fear of God in us through daily prayer at school, “as it was in the past”.
Half a sec? As I recall, the same administration that used to make us pray in school “in the past” was somewhat morally ambiguous regarding how it treated any darker-toned people living under its rule. There were a lot of people suffering mysterious injuries in the showers and stairwells at John Vorster Square because of the National Party’s moral uprightness.
Second, there are plenty of ways to instil moral sensitivity without invoking anyone’s notion of God. You could start with our own Bill of Rights or any playground lesson on doing unto others as you’d like done unto you (which, incidentally, is a principle predating the canonical text that we quote so widely these days).
Third, sometimes personal belief systems can get in the way of advancement — and, in this case, good medicine.
The late astronomer Carl Sagan - my all-time favourite proponent of rational thought - was always keen to note that 2 500 years after Hippocrates of Cos adopted an evidence-based approach to medicine, he is still celebrated for his efforts to “bring medicine out of the pall of superstition and into the light of science”. Yet, as Sagan pointed out in Demon-Haunted World, the knowledge of anatomy and surgery was lost to Europe for hundreds of years after the fall of Greek and Roman civilisations as the region descended into superstition and religious fervour.
“Reliance on prayer and miraculous healing abounded,” he wrote. “Secular physicians became extinct. Chants, potions, horoscopes and amulets were widely used. Dissections of cadavers were restricted or outlawed so those who practised medicine were prevented from acquiring first-hand knowledge of the human body. Medical research came to a standstill.”
I know, that’s probably an extreme example, but the point is that modern medicine has raised the average life expectancy of people in developed communities to nearly 80 years. Hunter-gatherers living more than 10 000 years ago wouldn’t expect to reach 30.
I can believe in the power of supernatural communion all I like, but it’s the antibiotics that will save me from the kinds of infection that would have killed me just 300 years ago.
The famous Harvard prayer experiment applied the scientific method to test the efficacy of prayer. Up to 1 800 patients recovering from heart bypass surgery, at six different hospitals, were divided into three groups: a) those who were prayed for and knew it; b) those who were told they might receive prayer, but didn’t; and c) those who were told they might receive prayer and did.
Group A performed the worst, possibly because of performance anxiety. The other groups showed no marked difference in their recovery.
This is where the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J Gould would have turned to his idea about the “non-overlapping magisteria”, a verbose way of saying that the realms of faith and science can’t make statements about the other. I disagree, because a scientific understanding of the human condition explains so much about our spirituality as an animal.
Whatever the case, our schools may need many things, Mr Zuma, but prayer isn’t one of them. Let’s save our classrooms for learning about things this-worldly. The rest of it can stay at home.
