The Counterproductive Gardener

So I watched "The Constant Gardener" last night. It's entertaining I suppose, but I think its message is grossly immoral and likely to undermine efforts to fight disease in the poorest places in the world.

In short, the message is that evil Western corporations and the government officials they have in their pockets collude to kill poor Africans in pursuit of higher profits. The movie happens to be wildly implausible. The corporation is testing drugs on Africans, and it hides the resulting deaths so that it can get approval for use in Western countries. This is cheaper than re-formulating the drug. In real life, of course, this side-effect would soon come to light in the West and bankrupt the company.

Anyway, despite being implausible, the movie capitalizes on the bad reputation of the pharmaceutical industry and legitimizes ridiculous conspiracy theories. Does this have consequences?

Well, to the extent that anyone takes the movie seriously (or becomes more prone to accept anti-corporate conspiracy theories), yes. As this New York Times article on the drive to eliminate polio makes clear, some people refuse polio vaccine because they believe it contains HIV, or that it is an attempt to sterilize their women, or that it causes more disease than it prevents. Admittedly, these impoverished Africans and Indians probably haven't seen the movie, but these ideas tend to propagate. In the case of polio, Edward Hooper's book The River pushed the idea that HIV was introduced to humans through polio vaccines. This theory was twisted (the book itself doesn't claim that vaccines still contain HIV) and used as an attack on the polio eradication campaign. Similar Western theories led South Africa to adopt policies based on the idea that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

I don't need to spell out the horrible consequences these ideas have had for poor people in Africa and South Asia. I would like to point out, however, that sloppy liberalism has just as much potential to do harm as selfish or religious conservatism. Some liberals loved "The Constant Gardener" because it beat up on pharmaceutical companies and reinforced the liberal view that the problems of the developing world are caused by greedy Western corporations. Similar ideological commitments led Westerners like this asshole to provide the intellectual underpinnings for South Africa's disastrous AIDS policies.

All of this in the name of "having a conscience." Hollywood is almost unique in its ability to turn well-meaning sentimentalism into a force for misery and death. Abandoning our critical faculties whenever it suits our desire for moral superiority is just as irresponsible and destructive as Bush's religious opposition to condoms and HPV vaccines. If you don't like Bush, you should think hard about whether you like "The Constant Gardener."