Editor’s Note: Previously Frank Armstrong reviewed Michael Pollan’s journey through the use of psychedelics. Here ‘Desmond O’Brien’ recalls a recent psilocybin treatment at a clinic in the Netherlands, which he found ‘a hugely emotional and profoundly beautiful experience, interspersed with frequent moments of absolute hilarity.’
‘my life had come to an end’
I recently went on a psilocybin (so-called magic mushroom) retreat in the Netherlands – a form of psychedelic therapy for anxiety and depression. To the uninitiated this may sound like quackery, but there’s a good deal of solid scientific evidence pointing to its potential for treatment of mental illness, especially long-term depression.
Prior to going through with it, I had concluded that I was doomed to an endless cycle of frustrated unease and pessimism. What I went through has made me more optimistic that I have a lot more time left, and that chapters remain to be written. But it is still early days, and I am not saying it will be easy.
The retreat was quite a journey. Three days, with a trip in the middle day, bookended by powerful group therapy conducted by trained professionals, all in a tranquil setting with access to a garden.
I found it a hugely emotional and profoundly beautiful experience, interspersed with frequent moments of absolute hilarity. At no point was I scared by what was a wild ride that brought tremendous catharsis, and involved deep bonding with fellow participants.
For a long time beforehand I was at the bottom of a dark, deepening well, clawing helplessly at the walls. I am still in that pit in practical and material terms, but the light at the top doesn’t seem quite so far away. It’s as if a rope has been dropped down for me to climb towards the opening.
By the end of the experience I felt more relaxed than I have done in years. Only time will tell how capable I am of integrating what I have learnt into my day-to-day life.
I must persevere with therapy, meditation, writing, communicating, yoga and just breathing. Contending with horrific, insidious and relentless anxiety, as I have done, I need constant reminders to slow down so as to avoid those terrible spirals.
“Cosmic Pocahontas”
The ‘trip’ began with geometric patterns emerging from the darkness, creating quite a pleasant show. It brought neither anxiety nor nausea, as affected a few other participants.
Indeed, one poor fella’s vomiting cut through the air in Dolby Surround Sound reminiscent of The Exorcist! But he was gently taken care of by the facilitators, and emerged after a while into the bliss we all felt, and was utterly untroubled by that phase in retrospect.
Slowly, the doors of the library of memory opened and I was brought on a tour, over which I had considerable control. This featured many moments of my past, such as running out to play in my grandparents’ garden, and being tucked into bed by an au pair.
It was all from a first-person perspective. I never saw myself. There was an overwhelming feeling of love as I observed these scenes, and many friends and family appeared – or perhaps it is more accurate to say I had chosen to bring them to mind – all enveloped in this infinite affection.
“Love is the glue”, I said to myself after discovering a wonderful sense of oneness with the universe. I had the sense of us all, young and old, alive and dead, as helpless babies in the eyes of an omniscient presence, tumbling in eternal clumsiness through space, bouncing off each other while she, and it did seem a nurturing, reassuring maternal figure (the “Cosmic Pocahontas”, as the other Irish fella there referred to her in his Cork accent), observing us all with a benign smile, having seen it all before.
Most of the time, rather than looking around and getting my jollies with visuals – and especially during the first few hours – I wore eye covers to heighten the inward therapeutic journey. This deepened the tour of the unconscious.
I experienced tears of joy, sadness and laughter that ran down my face for a great part of the journey. Emotional inhibition was lost and at one point with the prompting and hug from a facilitator, I sobbed uncontrolably and breathlessly like a child.
Returning to a pleasant normality
At a certain point I removed the eye covers. After that, at all times, I knew exactly where I was, and who I was with. I experienced no auditory or visual hallucinations, but amplified senses, a curious fuzziness to everything, changes in texture and a mildly swirling fractalization of surfaces and objects; no pink elephants!
Looking around, we resembled infants in a crèche, smiling warmly at each other, in mutual knowing. Towards the end we sat up, ate the sliced fruit and pieces of chocolate provided for us, and began to reflect in pairs and small groups on our experiences.
Finally, we took off our jackets and shoes, creating another amusing kindergarten-scene-of-chaos, and then strolled and chatted in the garden. Returning to a pleasant normality, we endeavoured to articulate our individual experiences.
The analogy that came to my mind is this: that we are, as adults, swimming in lanes defined over time by the influences of our environments. The psychedelic experience lifts up those lane dividers, allowing us to roam freely in the pool. By the end of the experience, we had developed an awareness of how we are stuck in those lanes, but that they are not as fixed as we had perceived. And that is freedom.
The experience brings us back to our younger, more joyous and playful selves, peeling away, at least for a while, the rigid constraints of our adult selves, to reveal the child that we were, and still are.
And little kids, as I’m sure you are aware, trip up all the time.
To contact the author of this piece email: admin@cassandravoices.com
‘The interesting thing is that they’re protesting against themselves. There’s no enemy out there. They know they are the enemy.’ J.G Ballard, Millenium[i]
The 2019 Reuters Institute Digital News Report points to increasing de-politicisation across the Western world. This accompanies a seemingly inexorable rising tide of ‘identitarian’ Populism, globally led by Steve Bannon. The movement channels latent anger into cynicism towards central governments and supra-national institutions such as the E.U.; just when we require solidarity to address climate chaos.
Symptomatic were Conservative Party tactics during U.K Election 2019 – under the influence of Bannon – promising nothing beyond ‘getting Brexit done’; in other words a negation of the country’s institutional ties with other states – rather than a vision for improvement. This recalls Donald Trump’s ongoing pledge to ‘DRAIN THE SWAMP’ of Washington politics.
In a climate of suspicion, roguish buffoons like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson have lied and cheated their way to high office. The moral landscape has altered to a point where the truth doesn’t seem to count for much anymore; in contrast to a cosy relationship with Big Data, and plenty of campaign dosh, which is more vital than ever.
Delving deeper, these political trends are tremors from a seismic Internet Revolution radically re-shaping our societies and very brains. This new medium has proved a fruitful ground for the advancement, and enrichment, of varied corporate entities and human beings. Those benefitting include Canadian psychology Professor Jordan Peterson, arguably the first public intellectual of the Digital Age – with many of his lengthy YouTube lectures hitting numbers associated with music videos.
It is instructive that Steve Bannon targeted Peterson’s online devotees before the last Presidential election. Peterson came to prominence especially through the so-called culture wars, contributing to a ‘woke’ caricature, which really should be attributed to the liberal centre, given the emphasis leading lights such as Tony Blair, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton placed on political correctness and multiculturalism.
Peterson’s cult status brings adulation of a type associated with Pop stars, drawing huge audiences to venues across the English-speaking world. A predominantly male audience has been impressed by a refusal to pay the usual fealties to political correctness, and offered the kind of sound, fatherly advice that many seem to lack, but Peterson abuses his power by peddling climate change denial, while demeaning collective institutions, and governments.
Politicide
In 2003 Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling published a book called Politicide, which charted the destruction of the Palestinian nation as a political entity. He claimed the state of Israel was transforming Palestinians into a leaderless community struggling for an identity – as had previously been the case.[ii] Thus in 1969, then Prime Minister Golda Meir questioned the existence of a distinctive Palestinian people, an inquiry that might soon be aired again.
Israel’s erosion of Palestinian identity has been achieved through collective impoverishment, targeted assassination of key leaders and the age-old technique of divide and conquer. Now the Palestinian voice on the international stage has been reduced to a barely audible whimper.
A similar, though less overtly violent, campaign of Politicide is being waged by Steve Bannon, Dominic Cummings and other unelected political advisors across the Western world. Democracy is being corroded by sophisticated technology, including from the notorious Cambridge Analytica, mining data from social media and other online interactions to develop advertising specific to targeted groups in key marginals.
The old left that forged bonds both within countries and internationally, especially through working class solidarity is the immediate target of attack ads that are having an effect. In this respect, Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 comment ‘And you know, there is no society’ recalls Golda Meir’s aspersion of Palestinian identity. Lacking sufficient resources for social media campaigns, and pilloried by journalists increasingly beholden to conservative billionaires such as the Koch brothers, socialism is on the decline across Europe and beyond.
Drawing support away from the old left, so-called Populists – who really have little in common with the agrarian-radical originals of the late nineteenth century led by William Jennings Bryan – are incubating acceptance of a global corporate order, directing oppositional energies against what they characterise as a corrupt state – which of course is being hollowed out by those same corporations, through lobbying and regulatory capture.
An important component of Politicide is for growing numbers to be turned off news content altogether. Thus the Reuters Digital News Report for 2019 found an average of 32% across a large number of countries actively avoid it, up from 29% the previous year. In the U.K. that figure reached 35% in the election years of 2019, a striking 11% increase on the previous poll. Such shifts do not occur by accident. Turning people off trusted news sources increases susceptibility to fake news arriving via political ads.
The success of the Bannon formula is not measured purely in terms of increasing vote share, but also in opponents losing support through apathy and despair. The most important social media platform remains Facebook, still the dominant player by quite a margin, especially for older people. There we find the kind of attack ads long a feature of U.S. political culture targeted precisely at voters in marginal or swing constituencies or states.
Both Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings are clever political operators, they are not, however, geniuses. But the project of politicide, working distinctly to the advantage of large corporations, is the product of broader cultural currents. The first wave of the Internet Revolution is fraying old systems of thought, and recasting political discourse. The Jordan Peterson phenomenon is instructive.
The rise of the ‘Petersonites’
Notably, Steve Bannon mined the data of the followers of Jordan Peterson before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election as ‘they were looking for a father figure to tell them what to do,’ according to a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower.[iv] Apparently they possessed ‘the big five traits’ of easily manipulatable men: frustrated economic opportunities; an estranged father; enjoyment of word salad; not showering on a regular basis; and ranking in the top quartile for the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Jordan Peterson is not, however, a political extremist – by North American standards at least. Nonetheless, his generally compelling talks – with ideas distilled in particular from the archetypes of C.S. Jung and Aristotle’s virtues – have been adopted, and glossed, by a legion of far-right digital warriors. He also represents a successful formula for the entrepreneurial pursuit of an online personality in this neo-liberal zeitgeist that has been copied more broadly.
Peterson’s fame, or notoriety, derives mainly from impressive public speaking performances and televised debates rather than through books. Indeed, his literary output is a relatively modest two publications[v] – the most recent a self-help bestseller.
Like Donald Trump, Peterson is a master of the new digital medium. While the U.S. President specialises in cutting brevity – ‘show me someone who has no ego and he is a loser’[vi] – Jordan Peterson represents the opposite pole, opting for grandiloquent expression; dazzling audiences with a flurry of references; fluently recalled using streams of synonyms ‘maxing out’ any SAT Writing and Language test. He reaches a crescendo of self-righteousness when laying waste to scruffy woke opponents.
The Digital Age
We are in the early stages of a communications revolution reconfiguring human societies, and perhaps rewiring our brains.[vii] This Digital Age is characterised by a ‘secondary orality’ conveyed through video, podcast and memes that still depends on an inheritance of books.[viii] As the pace of change accelerated with the arrival of affordable smartphones from 2010, the quality of political journalism declined in tandem.
The great U.S. reporter Seymour Hersh recently offered a withering assessment of contemporary media to the effect that ‘We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.’[ix]
It is perhaps unsurprising that abandonment of books in favour of digital ephemera should herald a cultural decline. On social media the image is king, and language, as Richard Seymour argues in the Twittering Machine, is increasingly reduced to its effects, like all manipulative communication, from marketing to military propaganda.[xi]
These developments are unravelling a profound cultural inheritance. Walter Ong contends that ‘More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.’[xii] ‘By separating the knower from the known’, he says, ‘writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the objective world quite distinct form itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set.’[xiii]
It is through textual records, passed down and renewed by each generation of scholars, that the wide-ranging dialectics required for scientific research and philosophical enquiry occur. The development of writing allowed us to determine and convey facts.
The increasing dominance of a ‘secondary orality’ of video and podcast is shifting political debate away from philosophic “articulate intropsectivity”, and also bringing celebrity veneration, as “the knower” (or quickfire know-all such as Jordan Peterson) merges with what is “known.”
Moreover, unlike public intellectuals of the recent past, who conveyed facts and ideas in books, the output of a digital-era leading light arrives in a stream of video, more challenging to parse, or counter, than the venerable medium in print form. Thus, previously agreed upon facts are more easily dismissed as we enter an era of post-truth.
‘An explosion in identity talk’
Alongside devotion to vacuous celebrity, Richard Seymour observes that over the course of the last decade, as the numbers regularly accessing Twitter and Facebook grew into billions, there has been ‘an explosion in identity talk.’[xiv]
Jordan Peterson is perhaps the intellectual apotheosis of this trend. Thus, in 2016 after igniting controversy for refusing to adopt gender-neutral pronouns, he released a series of videos justifying his positions.[xv] Soon he had emerged as a global conservative champion in the culture war, ‘destroying’ interlocutors with well-rehearsed, and often, it must be said, reasonable arguments.
Peterson railed against a woke-ish political correctness that many on the left already acknowledged had lurched into absurdity, to the exclusion of more pressing discussions of climate change, ecological collapse, spiralling inequality and unaccountable digital platforms.
Amy Chua identifies acute problems with identity politics ‘on both sides of the political spectrum,’ which she says, ‘leaves the United States in a perilous new situation: almost no one is standing up for an America without identity politics, for an American identity that transcends and unites all the country’s many subgroups.’[xvi]
Peterson has amassed a reasonable fortune in the process of emerging as both hero and villain in the febrile culture war. Knowingly or otherwise, he has served the interests of Bannon and his ilk.
Narrowing Debate
Jordan Peterson is broadly correct that the parameters of debate in Anglophone so-called liberal – or ‘woke-ish’ to use the term de jour – media such as The Guardian and TheNew York Times have narrowed. The phenomenon of no-platforming outspoken thinkers such as Germain Greer for questioning whether a transgender individual should be considered a woman is disturbing. The media’s obsession with celebrity sex scandals often amounts to little more than clickbait.
Harvey Weinstein believes he can rebuild career if cleared of charges https://t.co/CJbsye1pIR
Moreover in America, and elsewhere, a range of media from Fox News to Breitbart have picked up the slack, accommodating so-called conservative, increasingly far-right, standpoints.
Similarly, right-wing views are well represented in U.K. media by established players such as The Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express as well as newcomers like Spiked, whose founders’ journey from Marxism to the alt-right is symptomatic. The traditional viewpoint that Peterson purports to represent is far from being marginal across the Anglophone world.
A shift towards identity politics can be traced to the fissuring of the political order at the end of the Cold War, as mainstream centre-left parties in the U.S. and U.K. pivoted to the centre-right.
Thus in the U.S., Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama essentially ignored spiralling inequalities attending the rise of the digital behemoths, assuaging discontents by endeavouring to roll out state-funded medical care that has done little to break the dominance of Big Pharma and an epidemic of legal drug addiction. With identity politics centre-stage, Obama’s victory – that ‘Audacity of Hope’ – was mistakenly viewed as the harbinger of a tolerant and inclusive society.
Then stories such as the ‘birther’ controversy– an unfounded rumour that Obama had not been born in the United States which, if true, would have debarred him from the presidency – generated endless columns in the liberal media,[xvii] to the exclusion of reporting on social and environmental issues highlighting the despoliation of the Earth by large corporations.
Focus on identity politics, from race to feminism and same-sex marriage, not to mention abortion, diverted attention from the long-standing exclusion of the poor of all ‘races’, with real wages stagnating for decades,[xviii] while extraordinary wealth and privilege has been concentrated in increasingly few hands.
Donald Trump tapped into economic insecurities – offering up poor Latino immigrants as a scapegoat to blue collar workers – to win the Presidency of 2016. Hilary Clinton and her handlers persevered with identity politics, emphasising the importance of a female candidacy, and focusing on her opponent’s philandering, rather than addressing entrenched poverty and social exclusion, let alone the excesses of the military industrial complex, and lost.
In the U.K., the Labour Party also settled in the centre, or even centre-right, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997-2010). New Labour essentially accepted Margaret Thatcher’s (1979-90) market deregulations and privatisations to the satisfaction of the newspaper barons that tend to decide elections. ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’ read Rupert Murdoch’s Sun after John Major’s come-from-behind victory in 1992 – a cheeky headline masking a sinister political reality.
The Sun newspaper, April 11th, 1992.
As Mark Fisher memorably put it: ‘Blairism has consolidated and outstripped the ideological gains of Thatcherism by ensuring the apparently total victory of PR over punk, of politeness over antagonism, of middle class utility over proletarian art.’[xix]
Later David Cameron and his fellow ‘modernisers’, or ‘One Nation’ Tories, rebranded the Conservative Party in the dress code of New Labour, embracing non-economic issues such as marriage equality and increasing the visibility of female and ethnic minority representatives, while pursuing Thatcherite, austerity policies in the background.
This approach yielded electoral success in 2010 and 2015, before Brexit derailed the formula. Similar to Trump’s victory over Hilary, Brexit bubbled up, dialectically, inside the cauldron of identity politics first stirred by the centre-right.
It is disingenuous therefore for Jordan Peterson to bemoan the excesses of identity politics given it was the centre-right he claims to support that has promoted ‘woke-ish’ causes. Grandstanding on controversies over transgender identity simply gives oxygen to debates that are of little consequence, at least by comparison with fundamental issues of human welfare and climate chaos.
Logos
As a psychologist with extensive clinical experience Jordan Peterson is acutely attuned to what makes a primarily male target audience tick. Skillful rhetoric taps into the concerns of essentially Anglophone or Nordic males, perturbed by suggestions they should be ashamed of privileged upbringings, another unhelpful idea that entered debates around identity politics.
Importantly, Peterson also gave intellectual credibility to belief in God after decades of sustained attacks from evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins, and, following Jung, identifies the role of spirituality in recovery from mental illness. His appeal to mythology also presented novel insights to an audience jaded by a dominant discourse of scientific materialism.
More problematically, however, Peterson also styles himself a philosopher and scientist. But as James Hamblin pointed out in The Atlantic what Peterson is really selling is a sense of order and control. Thus, while science is about settling questions and determining facts, self-help is concerned with supplying immediate answers to the question of how to live in the world. Hence, a recurring idea in Jordan Peterson’s book is that humans need rules as ‘an antidote to chaos.’[xx]
A crucial concept that Peterson has pronounced on is ‘logos’, which the Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice Which Rationality describes as follows:
To engage in intellectual enquiry is then not simply to advance theses and to give one’s rational allegiance to those theses which so far withstand rational refutation; it is to understand the movement form thesis to thesis as a movement towards a kind of logos which will disclose how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such.
Essentially, logos, in contrast to moral relativism, permits us to pronounce on moral ‘truths.’ In the wrong hands, however, it leads to moral absolutism, and is a sinister recipe for totalitarianism of a sort the Catholic Church institutionalised through the idea of a Pope speaking ex cathedra.
In our time, where celebrity veneration increasingly equates the knower with the known, real danger lurks in vesting any individual with a singular authority. We should instead assess the merit of their ideas on a case-by-case basis.
Jordan Peterson makes compelling arguments regarding the excesses of political correctness, and even in assessing virtues necessary for a good life, but he should certainly not be considered omniscient, or even competent, in fields beyond his ken.
The ‘Lion Diet’
Notably, Peterson has revealed himself as a climate change denier having argued before the Cambridge Union that views on climate change are inseparable from political orientations,[xxi] an assumption no doubt resting easily with a conservative fanbase, or market. It would certainly have pleased Steve Bannon.
Here we can see the contradiction that lies at the heart of Peterson between the scientist and the charmer, with the latter winning out. One may speculate as to why he holds these views that are at variance with scientific orthodoxy. Perhaps adherence to a ‘carnivore diet’ led to the distortion and departure from science, and logos.[xxii]
The edifice of Peterson’s ideas starts to crumble when we examine the ‘Lion Diet’ he has adopted on the advice of his daughter Michaela. James Hamblin recalls how:
On the comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, Jordan Peterson explained how Mikhaila’s experience had convinced him to eliminate everything but meat and leafy greens from his diet, and that in the last two months he had gone full meat and eliminated vegetables. Since he changed his diet, his laundry list of maladies has disappeared, he told Rogan. His lifelong depression, anxiety, gastric reflux (and associated snoring), inability to wake up in the mornings, psoriasis, gingivitis, floaters in his right eye, numbness on the sides of his legs, problems with mood regulation—all of it is gone, and he attributes it to the diet.
Bannon
Trump’s victory and the Brexit Referendum are products of a profound, and arguably justifiable, disillusionment with the political status quo. Washington and Brussels are both seen as corrupt centres of power. Many of the arguments against these institutions are valid, but ignore the essential functions federal and supranational institutions still perform, with the baby being thrown out with the bathwater in the case of Brexit.
Of more importance to Populist success, however, has been the growing sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’, derived from identity politics. Mistakenly characterised as ethnic pride, it diminishes solidarity between human beings. Thus we enter the third decade of the millennium increasingly lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive and dependent, to quote Erich Fromm.
The Internet Revolution has brought opportunities for a few, particularly the first corporations to optimise social media, and aggressively pursue audience share through acquisition of kindred platforms in Facebook’s case. It has also allowed human beings of varied intelligences to thrive, from Donald Trump to Jordan Peterson, and more encouragingly, Greta Thunberg.
Peterson is the reigning conservative intellectual champion, who has used an undeniable talent to deflect attention from the real challenges confronted by humanity. His strawman of the left is really a creation of the liberal centre. Peterson may prove to be a dangerous guru whose eccentric tastes have brought climate denial.
The intellectual decay associated with Peterson provides the soil wherein Bannon’s seedlings germinate. Peterson informs his legions of fans to stand up straight and ‘own’ their prejudices (whether against transgender individuals or supranational institutions), while Bannon’s software prowls online preferences for signs of alienation.
We are only slowly coming to terms with a Digital Age reshaping our reality. The rise of a “secondary orality” is fraying our allegiance to the older print medium of books that acted as a conduit for facts. Video and podcast are easily accessed but content is not easily parsed. Moreover, as we retreat into a solitary cyberspace the view of the world is often jaundiced, and Bannon wins.
Feature Image by Gage Skidmore/wikicommons: Jordan Peterson speaking with attendees at the 2018 Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Hyatt Regency DFW Hotel in Dallas, Texas.
[i] J. G. Ballard, Millennium People, Fourth Estate, London, 2003, p.109.
[ii] Deaglán de Bréadún, ‘Contemplating Politicide’, Irish Times, August 9th, 2003, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/contemplating-politicide-1.369096
[iii] Dominic Cummings, ‘‘Two hands are a lot’ — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos…’ Blog Post, January 2nd, 2020, https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/
[iv] Andrew Hall, ‘Steve Bannon Targeted Jordan Peterson’s Followers Because They Were ‘Easy To Manipulate’’, Laughing in Disbelief, November 4th, 2019, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/laughingindisbelief/2019/11/steve-bannon-targeted-jordan-petersons-followers-because-they-were-easy-to-manipulate/
[v]Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, Abingdon, 1999 and 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Penguin Random House, New York, 2018. Peterson has also authored or co-authored more than a hundred academic papers.
[vii] Hilary Bruek, ‘This is what your smartphone is doing to your brain — and it isn’t good’, March 1st, 2019, Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-smartphone-is-doing-to-your-brain-and-it-isnt-good-2018-3?r=US&IR=T
[viii] Walter Ong, ‘Orality and Literacy – The Technologisation of the Word METHVE and co. London, 10982 p.2
[ix] Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York, Random House, 2018, p.3.
[x] Untitled, ‘Leisure Reading in the U.S. is at an all time low’, Washington Post, June 29th, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisure-reading-in-the-u-s-is-at-an-all-time-low/
[xi] Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine, Indigo, London, 2019, p.118
[xv] Jessica Murphy, ‘Toronto professor Jordan Peterson takes on gender-neutral pronouns’, BBC News, November 4th, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37875695
[xvi] Amy Chua, ‘How America’s identity politics went from inclusion to division’, The Guardian, March 1st, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/01/how-americas-identity-politics-went-from-inclusion-to-division
[xvii] Michael Calderone, ‘Fox News Gives Donald Trump A Pass On Birther Crusade It Helped Fuel’, Huffington Post, August 23rd, 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fox-news-donald-trump-birtherism_n_57e54a06e4b08d73b830d54e
[xviii] Drew Desilver, ‘For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades’, Pew Research Centre, August 7th, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
[xix] Mark Fisher, K-Punk – The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 -2016), Shepperton, London, 2018, p.61
[xx] James Hamblin, ‘The Jordan Peterson All-Meat Diet, The Atlantic, August 28th, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/the-peterson-family-meat-cleanse/567613/
[xxi] Jordan Peterson at the Cambridge Union: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBbvehbomrY
[xxii] Adam Gabbatt, ‘My carnivore diet: what I learned from eating only beef, salt and water’, The Guardian, September 11th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/10/my-carnivore-diet-jordan-peterson-beef
2019 has taught us all we need to know about Mortality. So many writers, musicians, and actors that we loved passed away this year. Some left us far too soon and others bowed out with a fine stash of years under their wings. I suppose, all we can learn from this, is that our time is now.
The best way to remember and honour the dead is to live our own lives to the fullest; pull up the anchors of dreaming and set out with our sails full of doing and reach out beyond ourselves. It’s only in the doing that things get done. 2020 Ahoy! Here I find a few old words of mine on the seductive dangers of not doing.
Procrastination is a very cunning mistress. She masquerades so expertly at being a muse; seducing me with an ever expanding array of tantalizing tasks that acquire greater urgency with her every whisper and sensual suggestion.
“Hey, Boy … why not tidy the kitchen, it’ll look great when it’s done,” she coos.
Slipping her deliciously slow fingers into mine she continues to tempt me. Her voice and reason are pure alchemy, transforming the meaningless and mundane into pure, vital essence.
Procrastination’s devastating twin sister is OCD. When they both conspire against me, I loathe myself for being unable to resist their time wasting charms.
They sprawl decadently on my sofa, dressed in the most time-consuming lingerie, all is slow with these sisters. Sister Sirens, time suckers, flunky cleptos, robbing hours, days, minutes, always adding to their secret stash of stolen years.
They annihilate calendars with their every breath and dine on menus stuffed with meticulously squandered weeks, dessert is a slow century drizzled with wasted opportunity. From the lethargic folds of my sofa they sink into a Valium trance of speech and so begins another game of Fifty Shades of Delay.
My self-loathing comes to a boil, then slowly simmers as yet again I obey. We have no “safe word,” me and the Sirens so our sessions can last for months at a time and they are cruel task masters.
OCD whispers and giggles into Procrastination’s ear, “No, no you tell him…” she drawls in her finest coquette snail voice.
“Billy (both syllables stretched to breaking point so as to make me sound almost Chinese, Bi-Lee), it’s been such a long time since you rearranged all those vinyl LPs into any meaningful order,” she points her tired languid fingers towards my unruly collection. “How about alphabetically or even by genre … we love it when you do it by genre as you get lost and start over and over again with all the persistent denial of completion so beloved of a perfectionist like you … we’ll flash you a little stocking if you do it, the ones you like, the ones weaved from broken clocks and stitched with stolen moments and studded with frozen minutes plucked from every unfinished thing you ever touched … just think of us and learn to forget that task that’s begging to be done … Good boy … and when you’ve done that, come lie with us here and meditate on how clothes dry, and feel us warm by your side, the three of us sinking in the moment, watching the wind drag its heavy cargo of clouds from day to night … don’t move, don’t say a word … stay with us from here to eternity…”
Five predictions for 2020: The Trump Card, an analysis of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019, CES 2020, implications of 5G rollout and a Republican climate change pivot.
The Trump Card
For all the talk of a fading U.S. Superpower since President Trump came to office, there is one statistic firmly in his favor. The U.S. remains the world’s most powerful global economy in absolute terms, and home to the largest stock market.
In truth, economic indicators have rarely looked better. Corporate taxes have been cut and red tape slashed. As a result, the stock market has surged to an all-time high[i] and unemployment is hovering at levels last seen in 1969.[ii] Sure there is still serious inequality, and poverty, but at least there are employment opportunities for those willing to work.
The big question for 2020, then, is whether the bull market continues. As ever, we’re feeling Bullish, but not as much about the political ramifications.
Whatever the latest polls are saying in the wake of the Impeachment, when the economy is in this state, it’s hard to see an incumbent President losing an election.
Over the course of 2020 we anticipate billions of dollars being spent on influencing the American electorate which way to vote. All of this will be keenly watched by a global audience, who are aware that where the U.S. travels, others follow.
The outcome has a sense of inevitability, hinging as it does on the health of the stock market. As Bill Clinton, another President who faced Impeachment, famously said: ‘it’s the economy, stupid!’, and this still holds true. Barring a dramatic stock market crash, or a natural disaster, Trump is going to be re-elected.
Patriot Act
In the event of the stock market crashing, Bull Moose predicts Trump will wrap himself tightly in the star-spangled banner, much in the way his one-time mentor Roy Cohn did whenever he faced trouble.
The big question is whether appealing to patriotism will be enough to save him. After all, this approach can be replicated by the Democratic opposition, even if Republicans have owned the story in recent times.
Enter another iron law of U.S. politics: whenever the nation is involved in a military conflict, Presidents don’t lose elections.
‘whenever the nation is involved in a military conflict, Presidents don’t lose elections.
Much in the same way as other ‘strongman’ leaders have done – Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin and Kim-Jong Un spring to mind – Trump is likely to develop a rallying cry, awakening fears of an external threat beyond anything the Democrats are serving up to him – just like the Bush administration used the War on Terror to galvanise its base.
He’s sure to deploy the usual rhetoric about the dangers of socialism and the ‘woke’ left, epitomized by ‘The Squad’, a group of four Congresswomen (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan), all from so-called ‘minority’ backgrounds. But against a more centrist Democrat candidate, such as Joe Biden, this might not prove to be enough. Trump needs a scarier prospect, an enemy to make mainstream Democrats quake.
Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez
The drone-strike assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January 3rd was aimed at a domestic audience as much the Iranian regime. Much remains to be said, but henceforth every decision taken by this President should be viewed in the context of a single-minded preoccupation: to win re-election for another term.
Reuters Report
Hot off the press, The Reuters Institute Digital News Report[iii] makes for interesting reading about the state of news journalism in the world. Perhaps the most important takeaway is this:
There is no sign that the majority of people are about to pay for online news, although many recognise that information on the internet is often overwhelming and confusing. Younger audiences in particular don’t want to give up instant, frictionless (and ideally free) access to a range of diverse voices and opinions. They don’t want to go back to how the media used to be.
The global media landscape has changed forever. There is no going back.
Specific to the United States, the report reflects our view that ‘audiences remain deeply polarised, much more so than most other countries.’ This reflects what we said back in July: ‘Among the least discussed, but perhaps most important influence of the Digital Age is our tendency to live in bubbles. We no longer have to be rich to live in the equivalent of gated communities.’ A near total absence of communication between the two sides is a clear and present danger to democracy itself.
It should also be noted that many media organisations are still struggling hugely in the digital era, despite the rosy economic picture overall. Nonetheless, a few leading companies continue to do well, in effect consolidating their market dominance – think Washington Post, New York Times & Fox News.
The report points to jobs cuts affecting a variety of lesser publications, from the venerable Cleveland Plain-Dealer to digital-platform First Look Media. Notably, in January 2019, BuzzFeed laid off 15% of its worldwide workforce (a total of 220 positions). That very week Verizon Media Group, which owns HuffPost, announced a 7% reduction across its media properties, totalling about 800 positions. Gannett, the leading U.S. news publisher, also announced layoffs at local newspapers across the country.
The Report says this is ‘stoking continued concerns about the future of local news,’ although perhaps more reassuringly viewership on local television news has remained steady.
Podcasts are bucking the downward trend, however, with the U.S. leading the world in listenership, including daily news-focused offerings. The New York Times’ ‘The Daily’ began broadcasting in 2017 and now averages 1.75 million daily downloads. It is joined by the Washington Post’s ‘Post Reports’, Vox’s ‘Today Explained’, Slate’s ‘What Next’, ABC News’ ‘Start Here’, among others. Another notable development is VICE News partnering with Spotify to produce the bilingual podcast series ‘Chapo.’
While these may seem like the usual suspects, a host of small players are also succeeding in this space. This trend is likely to continue in 2020, increasing the depth and breadth of coverage around the world and inviting people to step outside their news media bubbles. This bodes well for micro-operators, such as the Joe Rogan podcast and our own Cassandra Voices, that offer fresh angles.
CES 2020
January is the time of year that for the great and the good to gather in Vegas for CES 2020 and discover the latest news and hands-on reviews from the world’s biggest tech show.[iv] Well over 200,000 people attended this year’s event, providing a useful bellwether on where the digital economy is headed in the years to come.
Amid heightened concerns about infringements on personal data, the headline panel featured representatives from Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, to discuss privacy.
Alarm bells should be ringing that measures are being taken by the conglomerates themselves, rather than restraints being imposed on them by democratically elected representatives. While most Americans are interested in protecting their privacy, an unspoken consensus seems to have developed, where convenience is the trade-off for the loss of personal data. The question is how long the truce will last, before consumers start to object to being told what they desire.
Bull Moose had some cause for concern himself over the holidays after being surprised to receive a data usage warning from his latest model Galaxy smartphone – unusually all 64GB of storage had been used up. On top of all that, the photo and video file cache was empty.
Facing a choice between asking his young nephew to figure out how to delete the files, Bull Moose plugged the phone into his computer to explore what was happening. Lo and behold, he came across a cache of external sites that had been collecting data on the phone’s activities – involving all manner of companies and apps.
Collectively, these were using 32GB of storage, and after deleting these nothing was lost in terms of functionality. Presumably this data was there for companies to access relevant information at their time of choosing.
Let’s be clear, the primary reason data is collected is to allow companies to profile you in order to sell you goods and services, which they believe you will want.
On the surface, a limited amount of this is ok – advertising is often a bit of a shot in the dark after all – and people are ultimately free to make up their own minds. It’s just about fine provided there is government oversight to prevent identity theft or malicious use of data. The problem is there isn’t any.
It’s only really the relatively toothless and tedious GDPR, enacted by the E.U. in 2018, and California’s new Consumer Privacy Act[v] that are attempting to curb the data free-for-all.
The Rise of 5G
Enter 5G technology, which is likely to alter the way our societies interact with technology. 5G-enabled technologies and networks are characterized by delivery of ultra-high-speed bandwidth, ultra-low latency, and ultra-high reliability of service. It is believed this will lead to connection speeds up to one hundred times faster than we are used to. But it will also generate greater possibilities for tracking and data collection.
CES 2020, then, will be an opportunity for tech makers to demonstrate that 5G will be an actual thing this year, and they’re not going to hold back. Some of these announcements will be around specific devices, like Dell’s 5G-ready Latitude laptop. Others will be around chipsets: MediaTek, for example, plans to roll out a premium 5G chipset for phones at CES, and Qualcomm will likely expound upon the announcements it made at its annual Hawaii summit back in December. Most importantly, expect infrastructure updates, as the US carriers continue to expand their 5G networks and show off how the fifth-generation of wireless will transform healthcare, “smart” cities, and autonomous vehicles.[vi]
While most consumers view 5G much like the arrival of 3G or 4G, i.e. as just another smartphone upgrade, in fact it will have a transformative impact on the technology we use ever more in our daily lives.
Besides privacy questions and public health issues (5G requires a great number and more integrated cell-phone towers), there are also concern around China’s, and specifically Huawei’s, lead in this new technology. As Linsday Gorman in the Atlantic puts it:
Policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, from European economics ministers to President Donald Trump, have viewed the 5G dispute first as a trade issue … the West has ample reason for caution about Chinese 5G suppliers. For one, the recent Chinese National Intelligence Law requires these companies to comply with Communist Party demands to turn over data or otherwise engage in snooping or network-disruption activities.
… recent revelations about how China’s ruling party exploits the full panoply of personal information it has amassed about its citizens—facial-recognition images, mandatory DNA samples, 24-hour GPS coordinates, and search-history and online-activity tracking, as well as plain old eavesdropping—to quash religious freedom and basic rights should give major pause to Western governments and wireless carriers alike.[vii]
Taken together – trade, security, changing interaction with technology, tracking and personal health – the issues that came to the fore around 5G in 2019 seem likely to gain traction.
Five Predictions for 2020
The stock market run will finally come to an end, forcing President Trump to play his remaining card. Military involvement in the Middle East will escalate as the President wraps himself in the flag to counter ‘unpatriotic’ Dems.
News fatigue and mistrust will reach all-time highs. On the positive side, however, the demand for reliable information and fresh content will see people exploring beyond their news bubbles.
Trump will be re-elected. Each one of the four realistic Democratic Presidential candidates, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg has weaknesses that will be mercilessly exploited.
The roll out of 5G will bring renewed scrutiny of Big Tech, with fears over data intrusion becoming a political issue.
Global warming will continue to hog the headlines as fires and other disasters occur around the world. Here we may see a Republican pivot, with denials giving way to acknowledgement and the identification of opportunities, just as Putin’s Russia is looking ‘to use the advantages’ brought by climate change.[viii] Notably, Trump has recently acknowledged that climate change is no hoax.[ix] Watch this space.
Featured Image: Tampa, Florida, USA 24th Oct, 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump hugs an American flag as he takes the stage to speak at a campaign rally at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre in Tampa, Florida, the third of five cities Trump is visiting during a two-day campaign swing through Florida. (Paul Hennessy/Alamy)
If you appreciated this argument please do us a favour and share it. Also, feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts on what you think are the big issues that will affect the U.S. in 2020 to bullmoose@cassandravoices.com.
[i] Yun, Li, ‘Here’s what happened to the stock market on Tuesday,’ CNBC, December 24th, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/24/what-happened-to-stock-market-tuesday-new-all-time-high-for-nasdaq.html
[ii] Untitled, ‘U.S. Unemployment fell to 3.6%, lowest since 1969,’ Washington Post, May 3rd, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/03/us-economy-added-jobs-april-unemployment-fell-percent-lowest-since/
[iii] Reuters Institute, ‘Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019,‘ Oxford University, December, 2019, http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/
[v] Cohen Coberly, ‘California’s Consumer Privacy Act has taken effect, bringing GDPR-like data protections to the US,’ Techspot, January 2nd, 2020, https://www.techspot.com/news/83385-california-consumer-privacy-act-has-taken-effect-bringing.html
[vi] Untitled, ‘The 8 Things We Expect to See at CES 2020,’ Wired, January 4th, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/ces-2020-preview/
[vii] Linsday Graham, ‘5G Is Where China and the West Finally Diverge,’ The Atlantic, January 5th, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/5g-where-china-and-west-finally-diverge/604309/
[viii] Agence-France Press, ‘Russia announces plan to ‘use the advantages’ of climate change’, The Guardian, January 5th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/05/russia-announces-plan-to-use-the-advantages-of-climate-change
[ix] Rachel Frazin, ‘Trump says ‘nothing’s a hoax’ about climate change,’ The Hill, January 9th, 2020, https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/477548-trump-says-nothings-a-hoax-about-climate-change
Today it is shameful to be unemployed and regarded as an achievement to sell oneself into part-time slavery, meekly accepting as natural that one is not free for half one’s waking hours. Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life – A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future (2015).
With an Irish general election looming, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has again appealed to early risers.[i] Thus the early bird, rubbing sleep from his swollen eyes, is promised an array of tax cuts. This is compensation, we assume, for the long commute and attendant sleep deprivation involved in living in a ‘starter home’ in a peripheral zone, all to the ultimate benefit of a minority in an increasingly unequal society.[ii]
I am a champion for the self-employed & people who get up early in the morning and nobody gets up earlier than the Irish farmer! As long as I am around self employed people will never be taken for granted #IFAAGM
As David Graeber put it: ‘The real question is how to ratchet down a bit more toward a society where people can live more by working less.’ He further opines that the non-working poor may be ‘pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-annihilation.’[iii]
The Tedium of Work
Neo-liberalism is predicated on a shaky assumption that success, measured in money, sex or fame, derives from a single-minded focus on hard work, and paying off one’s debts. It has led to Leo’s misplaced veneration for the alarm clock, and political scapegoating of ‘welfare cheats,’ and others among the ‘undeserving’ poor.
It is a grand delusion that early rising and hard work make dreams a reality, at its extreme recalling the banner greeting Concentration Camp inmates: arbeit met frei ,‘work will set you free’. A devotion to labour for its own sake is misplaced. In fact, an excess can dull the mind.
Detail of the main gate at Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
Adam Smith, the father of Classical Economics, argued that the tedium of monotonous industrial tasks would render anyone ‘stupid and narrow-minded.’ He maintained that the torpor of repetitive labour renders an individual incapable ‘of relishing or bearing a part in rational conversation’, or ‘conceiving generous, noble or tender sentiment;’[iv] asserting this would come in the way of ‘any just judgment concerning even the ordinary duties of private life.’
Over the course of the last century especially, workers, including those engaged in monotonous ‘unskilled’ work, joined forces to win a series of improvements to their conditions. These included a five-day week and eight-hour working day, along with a living wage. It brought scope for many, if not most, among what has been pointedly referred to as ‘the working class’ to enjoy a reasonable standard of living across the Western world.
Steadily rising standards of living in Post-War U.S and Europe brought a profusion of recreational activities including sports, and unprecedented access to the arts, especially film – the defining cultural form of the twentieth century – along with access to higher education for the children of the poor.
La Dolce Vita
With a decent life available to most of the population, the decades after World War II are known as Les Trente Glorieuses in France and Il Miracolo Economico in Italy, as salaries kept pace with labour productivity. In large part down to the political clout of the left, including Communist parties.
But these developments have given way to a sustained global period of widening inequality,[v] associated especially with Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K.. Henceforth according to David Graeber, ‘we were all to think of ourselves as tiny corporations.’[vi] This has worked to the detriment of the bulk of the population ill-equipped to understand the complexities – or just uninterested – in financial transactions. Above all it has brought a veneration of property ownership, with speculation encouraged by unscrupulous banks, leading to the property inflation that culminated in the Financial Crash of 2008, when the bubble burst in Ireland and elsewhere.
Far from bringing wealth to the many, since the 1970s real wages have stagnated, while private, and public debts spiraled, with the wealth of a few expanding grotesquely, especially in recent times.
U.S. Productivity v Real Wages (source https://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/productivity-inequality-poverty/)
Tellingly, whereas in the 1950s the CEO of General Motors, then the model of a successful US business, was paid 135 times more than assembly-line workers, fifty years later the CEO of Walmart earned 1,500 times as much as an ordinary employee.[vii] In recent times, the efficiencies enabled by new technologies, often protected by exclusionary patents, are enriching those at the apex of corporations.
Unions, which were vital for bringing workers’ rights, are now in retreat. Those that remain often only represent employees in privileged positions. A chasm below an unemployment cliff looms in front of us, with little opposition to the new world order.
Automation
These developments are a feature of a technological revolution, especially in communications with the advent of the Internet, shattering an apparent post-Cold War consensus, and now shifting the political substrate. The world wide web has rendered words, video and music virtually uncommodifiable, wreaking havoc upon the livelihoods of independent-minded writers, musicians and others artists, who struggle to share their revitalising visions for life.
Automation now beckons in a host of industries which will further enhance ‘labour productivity’, at the expense of labour, and to the benefit of capital.
Our present disorder is comparable to the expansion of the Roman Republic in the first century BCE, when territories to the east and west fell to generals such as Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. These charismatic consuls pillaged unprecedented loot, generating an early form of welfare populism and eventually an oligarchic triumvirate. This gave way to the Roman Empire in 49BCE, under the first Emperor Julius Caesar.
The First Triumvirate of the Roman Empire: Caesar, Pompey and Crassus.
Today, we have our own benign despots within Big Data, whose loot would make an emperor blush. Their algorithms convey us from purchase to purchase, intruding ever more into our inner-most thoughts. Most worryingly, the independence of voting intentions are being severely tested by sophisticated (anti-) social media platforms.
At the outset of a dizzying technological revolution a small number of individuals wield unaccountable power, and as time passes the freedom of the Internet recedes. Just as the Celtic tribes of Gaul cowered before the ingenuity of Roman legions, structures of democratic government – states and transnational bodies – melt before the tortoise formations of the corporations, and their often solipsistic commanders.
As in another age where the value of men was assigned in battle, a capacity to appeal to a wide public with a new Internet tool, whether useful or not, has brought mind-boggling fortunes to the founders and shareholders of Google, Facebook, Instagram and the rest. There is little to prevent villainous characters developing unassailable political power through vast fortunes. The descent of the Roman Empire into corruption and excess should serve as a warning.
Moreover, just as Johannes Gutenberg was buried in an unmarked grave while others profited from his invention of the printing press, opportunism rather than ingenuity tends to be rewarded; as with the phenomenon of the real estate speculator Donald Trump, who recalls the fiddling Emperor Nero himself. This acknowledged master of the soundbite is the product of inherited wealth, and the redoubtable political nous of Steve Bannon, who preyed on the insecurities of the American worker.
One such liberal centurion, Leo Varadkar, offers no opposition to the current economic order. Indeed, he unashamedly promotes dominant corporations in Ireland, through a low, or non-existent, corporation tax regime, long justified simply from the perspective of national self-interest. We had an ‘Ireland First’ doctrine here long before Trump invented America’s.
The Irish state has been reduced to the role of croupier at a casino table where the super-rich trouser their winnings without being required to even tip the attendants. So obsequious has the Irish government become that the award of an enormous windfall to the exchequer of the Apple tax bill is resisted: ‘Would sir like to cash his chips in now or later?’
Fuller Flourishing
The impending obsolescence of much unskilled work may provide an opportunity for a fuller flourishing of homo sapiens. Liberation from tedious tasks, such as driving and manufacturing, should provide scope for the development of the “generous, noble and tender” sentiments referred to by Adam Smith. This wealth ought to be shared with the Global South too that was ravaged by the imposition of unfair loans during the 1970s and 1980s.
A powerful remedy to our present difficulties could be for a wealthy country such as Ireland to provide a legal guarantee of a basic standard of living for all citizens. This could offer an opportunity for individual fulfillment in various domains, to the ultimate benefit of society at large. It requires additional funding to educational and cultural facilities, and depends on the state regulating the housing market.
An often parasitic financial services industry should be regulated and taxed effectively, while life’s essentials: especially a roof over one’s head, nutritious food, and public transport, must all become affordable; if not the cheap air travel to which we have grown accustomed. This may seem a Communist ideal, but greater distribution of wealth can work to the benefit of the small-time entrepreneur and lead to a thriving local market.
The Financial Crisis from 2008 originated in failings within the banking system, unconnected to what were, in fact, increasing efficiencies simultaneously occurring in the real economy. Rethinking economics in its wake involves questioning theoretical limitations on fiscal stimuli. The value we attribute to money is a product of the human imagination, and governments possess a singular capacity to generate more of it through expenditure, as exponents of Modern Monetary Theory demonstrate.
Magical money.
Thus George W. Bush’s administration spent its way out of recession without generating inflation. On the other hand, the austerity measures characterising the response of E.U. member states brought prolonged recession, which disproportionately affected the poorest.
This was not only unnecessary, but economically counter-productive as those on low incomes tend to spend money on day-to-day goods, generally patronising local businesses. Whatever else one may say in favour of the E.U., the Growth and Stability Pact, enshrined in Treaty, represents an obstacle to any member state’s capacity to adopt a fiscal stimulus in periods of recession, and needs to be done away with.
Aligning policy to the basic needs of the population should be the role of democratic government, but this is often derailed by special interests. Socio-economic rights could ultimately be enshrined in European treaties so as to avoid a repeat of the disgraceful impoverishment of ordinary Greeks and Irish after the 2008 Crash. But generous government expenditure must avoid the bureaucratisation and careerism often found in the state sector, where many seem to stay in jobs through fear of the alternative.
Intoxication
Objections to ideas such as basic income and other socio-economic rights, often stem from a pessimistic assessment that if not spurred by the need to work, most of us will indulge our vices, especially excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol. Yet it is apparent that the oblivion of intoxication is associated with the end of the working week in jobs that do not inspire. It is also clear that feelings of worthlessness generate excessive, and often self-destructive appetites.
A legal right to economic security would take much of the fear, and even boredom, out of life, while affording the possibility for many of us to follow our dreams, and engage in the kind of blue-sky thinking from which innovations arrive. The pursuit of money as an end in itself, is a lust for power held in common with the warlords of yore. Billionaire moguls are a rare breed requiring containment (who in their right mind would have the motivation to earn more than a billion?), and perhaps even compassion.
Naturally, many of us enjoy the regularity and community of daily work. There is nothing wrong with that and numerous roles will survive the technological onslaught, preserving the satisfaction many derive from a regular schedule.
Home-makers, farmers, carers, and teachers of all kinds will always be required. The satisfaction of craftsmanship and independent enterprise should be enhanced, so as to generate greater pride and commitment in a chosen field. Goods produced in an ethical and sustainable manner could be encouraged through education, and targeted subsidisation aimed at a diminished carbon impact and reduced waste.
Technology professionals are particularly prized in our economy, and their continued usefulness is assured. Many wish to devote their talents towards altruistic goals, however, rather than work for vampire corporations, which exploit people and the Earth. The model of the open source Linux operating system – such as I avail of in this software – shows how a spirit of cooperation endures to make technology a collective resource.
Open-source Linux operating system.
Company Law
We might also contemplate a radical shift in company law. The inherent danger of profit-seeking corporations was once widely recognised. Thus, between 1720 and 1825 it was a criminal offence to start a company in England, during a period of rapid economic expansion.
In the United States until the nineteenth century there were two competing ideas regarding the purpose of companies: the first involved those with charters restricted to the pursuit of objectives in the public interest, such as canal building; the other regime issued charters of a general character, allowing companies to engage in whatever business proved profitable.[ix]
The latter category emerged triumphant, divorced from responsibility to fellow citizens; an unaccountable abstraction with separate legal personality established in the landmark 1897 case of Salomon v. Salomon. By altering the nature of the company under law we may continue to harness the thrusting energy of entrepreneurship, but for positive ends.
Acquisition of wealth is not the be-all and end-all for most of us, especially if basic needs are met: we may still have a real dedication to what we do and the drive to achieve it without the promise of untold riches. Changes in company law requiring any enterprise to have a public interest purpose contained in articles and memoranda of association could prove hugely beneficial to society at large.
Human creativity is manifest in a wide variety of fields. We may discover different vocations throughout our lives, some economically productive, others seemingly desultory, but perhaps crucial to individual development, and sanity, at particular junctures in life. How many criminals – a huge financial burden on any society – are the product of unhappy careers?
The technologies we have developed should allow many of us to indulge our passions, which can ultimately be to the benefit of all.
For some of us, the orthodox structure of the working day is unsatisfactory, and diligence occurs in pursuit of self-ordained objectives, rather than via external imposition This may seem like the privilege of an avant-garde, who tend to have enjoyed educational privileges, but many are increasingly imperiled by current economic structures, and wish to stand apart from what amounts to a conspiracy promoting the purchase of property.
We might draw wisdom from the lifestyle of the early modern craftsman, who was not beholden to a dictatorial clock, which has cast its shadow over the working day since the Industrial Revolution. Households would retire for a few hours after dusk, waking some time later for an hour or two, before taking what was referred to as a second sleep until morning.
During this interlude, people would relax, ponder their dreams, or perhaps make love. Others would engage in activities like sewing, chopping wood, or reading, relying on the light of the moon, or newly invented oil lamps.
Nor was the working week set in stone, and the seasons would dictate the extent of one’s labour. Naturally, the number of burghers who dragged themselves out of a generalised misery at that time was limited, but those managing to do so could operate in tune with their own bodies and the rhythms of nature, rather than the demands of the omnipotent factory owner who emerged ascendant after the Industrial Revolution.
The Factory Clock.
Winners and Losers
The level of poverty we permit in our superficially developed societies is, simply, unconscionable. Insecurity and fear afflict far more than those living in destitution, and are the silent forces that drive addiction and insanity. We have our winners and losers, but the number in the former category has declined considerably in recent decades, as the technological race stretches out the field.
Just as the Roman Empire grew out of economic imbalances resulting from conquest, our own societies confront unassailable capital, which feeds a delusion that chosen people can be saved from barbarian hordes.
The possibilities for homo sapiens are boundless. But we require basic safeguards to flourish. Companies can operate for the benefit of society as a whole, harnessing the dynamism of the entrepreneur, and working cooperatively as the craftsman once did. Let us avoid the fate of the Roman Republic, and prosper together.
An earlier version of this article appeared in February, 2018.
[i] Fintan O’Toole, Varadkar’s vacuous slogan reveals a mean streak,’ Irish Times, December 31st, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-varadkar-s-vacuous-slogan-reveals-mean-streak-1.4127418?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Ffintan-o-toole-varadkar-s-vacuous-slogan-reveals-mean-streak-1.4127418
[ii] Elaine Edwards, ‘Irish inequality blamed on ‘unusually high’ levels of low pay and weak protections’, Irish Times, February 19th, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/irish-inequality-blamed-on-unusually-high-levels-of-low-pay-and-weak-protections-1.3798081
[iii] David Graeber, Debt – The First 5,000 Years, Melville, London, 2011, p.390
[iv] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life – A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, Maclehose Press, London, 2015 p.77
[v] Ted Knutson, ‘Income Inequality Up In Every State Since The 1970s, Says New Report From Liberal Think Tank’, Forbes, July 21st, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedknutson/2018/07/21/income-inequality-up-in-every-state-since-the-1970s-says-new-report-from-liberal-think-thank/#3f0e83a023e9
[viii] Gabriel Sherman, ‘“I Have Power”: Is Steve Bannon Running for President?’ Vanity Fair, December 21st, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/bannon-for-president-trump-kushner-ivanka
In these times it is perhaps inevitable that people will want to write poems about climate change, or Twitter and politics. But poetry knows in its heart, what has already ended inside your consciousness, to which you and the world are gradually catching up.
In the greatest poems I have read, an old man or great lady has already died, to be reborn inside my imagination at the dawn of a new reality. That essentially linguistic act, or border experience, at the heart of poetry, means that this art is perennially relevant, or always ahead of its time.
The poems to which a few will continue to return must be in some way about the experience of being able to write to them from out of eternity, which is always to be found in the future.
And it is in times like these that we need to listen to a still small voice that speaks from that revelatory moment when poetry completes the eternal act of creation in its own last judgement. Like the ancient scripture of different traditions, the poet knows we are living in an iron age, or Kali Yuga, and in his or her work, we come to withstand the day or night when the son of man is revealed.
As W.B. Yeats declared in The Tower (1928), ‘Death and life were not | Till man made up the whole, | Made lock, stock and barrel |Out of his bitter soul’; the world can only end were we to vanish from it; ‘And further add to that | That, being dead, we rise, | Dream and so create | Translunar Paradise.’
Thoor Ballylee in County Galway, Ireland: Yeats’s ‘Tower.’
New Year
At the beginning of 2020, I’d still stand by those high-sounding words, but I would like to add that we have plans to make recordings of the poems we publish.
Poetry may well be all that I have said it is, but it is also a deeply compelling, sometimes scandalously illogical, thing that exists in the ear as much as on the page.
A revelatory moment for me in my twenties was listening to W. B. Yeats read ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and other poems on a 1930s radio broadcast. The slightly cantankerous old poet said that he would begin with this poem from his youth ‘because if you know anything about me, you will expect me to begin with it.’
One senses here a Yeatsian slight disdain for a modern radio audience. Or could he have felt as George Orwell imagined the poet feels ‘On the air’: ‘that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something’? Surely, Yeats cannot have hoped that his ideal reader or audience would be listening, that freckled fisherman in grey Connemara cloth whom he imagined in ‘The Fisherman’(1919): ‘A man who does not exist, | A man who is but a dream’.
What struck me most about Yeats’s reading was its incantatory style. Before he started, he was careful to explain: ‘I am going to read my poems with great emphasis on their rhythm and that may seem strange if you are not used to it….It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse, the poems that I am going to read and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.’
I can’t imagine that many poets today would read with quite Yeats’s emphasis on the rhythm, and even a hundred years before Yeats’s reading, William Hazlitt in 1823 could express suspicion of ‘a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment.’
That said, I was at first somewhat disappointed when I heard Seamus Heaney read out his poems in such a casual, almost faltering, manner, at a literary festival to which I was once taken in my youth. It didn’t quite match my expectations from the work I had read alone to myself, and it was certainly nothing like the crackly elevated recordings I had heard of Wallace Stevens, or even Tennyson and Browning, which retain something of that still, small voice I seem to hear in the poems I love.
It was also something of a revelation working with Paul Curran a couple of years ago, making a recording of him reading out some poems of mine for a radio documentary. As we sat under duvets in the improvised studio of a back bedroom of the producer’s house, I was taken aback by the care with which Paul was able to draw out nuances of meaning during repeated takes of the same poem. I knew I would have to smarten up my act at future poetry readings.
But, then, Paul Curran is an actor as well as a poet. You should be able to hear him read a couple of his poems on the Cassandra Voices website soon.
To be honest, I am slightly suspicious of the strongly performative element of a lot of contemporary poetry. Poetry is not quite rap or folk song. And why get some actor to read out your poems, when it’s so endlessly fascinating to hear the poet herself read her work?
I would say that my work’s shape on the page is as important as its shape in my ear as I mumble it out during the often-long hours of composition. Its heritage is, after all, a literate and courtly one, when manuscripts might be passed around a small readership, to be read aloud perhaps in coterie groups. Of course the roots of that tradition are ultimately in folk song and ancient incantation.
All poems are complimented by compelling imagery, mostly from the photographic library of Arts Editor Daniele Idini, and I am looking forward to hearing many of these poems, hopefully, read out or recited by their poets so that we can make audio files available for you too.
Edward Clarke is Poetry Editor of Cassandra Voices. To submit a poem for consideration e-mail Edward@cassandravoices.com
They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.
John Milton, ‘An Apology for Smectymnuus with the Reason of Church-Government’ (1642)
Unfortunately I just missed out on meeting one of the totemic figures of our time in Noam Chomsky. In 1997, as a Boston-based Harvard student, I was taken to visit an unprepossessing office inside an apartment block, only to find the veteran M.I.T. professor and author had left the building.
What remains to be said about the darling of the radical anti-imperialist left?
In my previous account of Michel Foucault, I touched on Chomsky’s revulsion towards post-modernism and moral relativism, and his acute anticipation of the post-truth zeitgeist. He was the first I think to point out that Jacques-the-lad-poseurs such as Derrida and Lacan were saying little of substance, and what they were holding forth on was nonsense on stilts.
Chomsky anticipated how post-modernist mumbo-jumbo would be appropriated by neo-conservatives to sow a culture of disinformation. Perhaps a scientific background in formal linguistics armed him with the rigour to cut through the morass. He has frequently spoken of his dislike of deceit, and adherence to Cartesian common sense.
Chomsky shares with George Orwell – another of our public intellectual subject-matters – a commitment to the truth and an almost mystic-like perception of how propaganda operates. This leads him into a degree of bemusement at popular culture that may come across as elitist. But he understands how a spectator democracy and a free-fall in journalistic standards has lead to Populist demagogues.
Manufacturing Consent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuwmWnphqII
The effectiveness of political propaganda is managed by hegemonic media and other vectors of public opinion, which undermine democracy and promote a corporatocracy. This brought us Donald Trump rather than Bernie Sanders.
It is what Chomsky has termed Manufacturing Consent, borrowing a term from Walter Lippmann, whose Public Opinion (1921), argued for democratic control through a specialised class or cool observers to control the agendas, manipulating public opinion by means of clever illusions and simplification.
Chomsky borrows this insight to demonstrate how the media works through diversion and dumbing down. Popular energy is dissipated and voters infantilised.
Interestingly, a recent highly critical account by Chris Knight called Decoding Chomsky (2016) points out that for much if not all of his career Chomsky’s science, eminently debatable, has been totally disconnected from his political engagement.
From the outset of his career he has effectively relied on the promotion and funding of the military industrial complex, through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.).
Why? Well it seems they quite like the idea of an anti-establishment token radical on their payroll. It gives them a degree of legitimacy, at least as long as his voice is not heard too widely. Indeed, in other countries he might be regarded as a class traitor.
Moreover, his ground breaking hypothesis of human beings possessing an innate syntactical language of deep structure, contrary to the claims of behaviourism assisted the Pentagon in an ultimately fruitless search for a computer encoded Esperanto. They were seeking a common dumbed down language that could be used for commercial and corporate purposes: a precursor to the patois of social media perhaps.
It is important to recall that as an American academic he has had to navigate a snake pit of careerist in order to make his mark. One should recognise the constraints of working within a uniformly commercial culture that encompasses the universities.
Knight maintains that psychologically his ab initio common-language-from-nowhere linguistic theory, and advocacy, promoted isolation, and led to a form of cognitive dissonance that influenced his political beliefs. In effect, Knight alleges, he became a neurotic at odds with the rest of society. The accusation thus is one of hypocrisy, or like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, he has been living an alternative life.
A Picture of Dorian Gray
Knight also maintains that when his critics maul his ideas on linguistics he reverts to ad hominem tactics, dogmatism, with counter evidence dismissed in favour of his own mystical vision, which is precisely the kind of self-evident-genius-argument I despise.
So I am certainly not fully persuaded by his linguistic theories but convinced indeed, unlike Knight, that the institutional support has brought him unique intellectual influence and responsibility – perhaps manipulated for his own ends – but for the good of humanity: as Chomsky is a principled man.
The Public Intellectual
One of his very early pieces, much modified, is brilliantly written on a theme close to my heart: the responsibility of the public intellectual.
Chomsky draws a clear distinction between the ever more prevalent academics who sing for their suppers, and parrot for promotion, and those who take the difficult path of what Albert Camus would call engagement.
Today, value-orientated intellectuals are likely to be dismissed as troublemakers in our short term universe of disposability. The generalist is lost in the mix.
Chomsky in fact is very conscious of how, ever since Jimmy Carter, right-wing, Christian conservatives in America have warned against the radicalisation of the young, and are now hell bent on purging radical thinkers from citadels of learning.
The universities and the media engage in self-censorship to suit corporate paymasters. The polite-paper-paradigm meets with incredulity at the nuclear explosion of true dissidence. I discovered this under martial law-like conditions when giving a Rule of Law paper in Trinity College Dublin. On offering robust opinions I was told there would be no circulation of the paper, and another invitation was unlikely.
In Manufacturing Consent (1988), Chomsky demonstrates how market forces and the neo-liberal agenda compel colleges and the media to select topics within defined parameters. This restricts debate and brings the nonsense of ‘balanced’ coverage, and the filtering of information with an over-emphasis on tone. Appropriate tone. Authorities fear upsetting corporate sponsors, leading to the rule of political correctness by the banal.
More to the point, Chomsky is attuned to the independent stance of public intellectualism, which we have all but lost.
Henry Kissinger
Chomsky has also written about Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, a dangerous war criminal still in our midst, and how he exterminated or was complicit in the extermination of East Timor, which was absorbed into Indonesia during the American-backed Suharto dictatorship, with tremendous loss of life and Crimes Against Humanity.
Still in our midst. Henry Kissinger.
In the documentary Manufacturing Consent, like George Orwell, Chomsky is attentive to the misuse of language to justify atrocities. Thus in East Timor the invasion was code-named Operation Clean Sweep. More sotto voce language distortions to justify ethnic-cleansing, itself a term sanitising Genocide that only came into being during the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s.
The book Manufacturing Consent sets out clearly how American foreign policy, from Vietnam to the Bush wars, moulded the message and demonised the Other. Even if we are wrong we are right, and embedded reporters will exonerate any wrongdoing. If, like the claims of weapons of mass destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq, the truth is damaging, we ignore it.
Thus a world is divided into worthy and unworthy, with the lenses of the powerful never turned on themselves. Enemies are reduced to vermin to be exterminated, and democratically elected socialists like Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 are, if necessary, removed from office. That’s because democratic socialism is contrary to American values. Better to have a son of a bitch, so long as he’s our son of a bitch. If our boys are engaged in terrorism, it is not really terrorism. If we murder vast numbers of civilians it is hardly Genocide.
As Chomsky reminds us, democracy has to be subverted to purge the average citizen of consciousness, and the critical faculties necessary for it to function.
‘Socialism is contrary to American values.’
Hegemony and Survival
Another crucial text, Hegemony and Survival(2003) demonstrates how the elite regard democracy as, in effect, a spectator democracy. To paraphrase Alexander Hamilton, the ordinary person must be deemed irresponsible and kept within strict confines. He should not be allowed to vote in his interests, or even consider them.
From Vietnam to the present day U.S. Imperialism has dismissed unworthy races. Those who are not a part of the twenty percent who control the planet are to be excluded and disempowered. A culture of dissent is expurgated.
In Hegemony and Survival he sees clearly the beginning of what Stieglitz called The Great Divide (2017), and development of a lunatic neo-liberal hegemony. That divide now has led to the destruction of the middle class, and the cartelisation of wealth into ever decreasing hands
The corporations control the press, leading to self-interested non-reportage by job preservers, reporting beyond the neo-liberal straightjacket is not permitted. The Irish Times in Dublin is a totemic exemplar of the decline of independent media.
As he mentions in his book on propaganda Media Control (2002) state propaganda is used and supported by the educated classes in order to exclude those less fortunate from the discussion. The responsible people, which Yannis Varoufakis would call the Adults in the Room, exclude the herd from infecting their decision-making. Thus people are atomised, segregated and alone. Scholarship becomes conformist and lies beget and compound lies. Scholars who show an independence of spirit are de-frocked.
That which the media excludes is dictated by corporate ownership and advertising paymasters, bringing stories that focus on less central issues, or infomercials masquerading as news.
Thus the thinking public á la Cambridge Analytica is fed disinformation, dictating and influencing popular misconceptions, problems and prejudices.
Ten facts about media control
Chomsky summarises the ten facts of media control which I further synopsis:.
Distraction: compel the public to focus on irrelevance and chatter in our Brave New World. Overload them with nonsense. Press control from Murdoch to social media augments this.
Generate Problems that do not exist and do not need solving: Bail out the banks to enforce fiscal stabilisation and impose austerity on those who have no responsibility for the mess. Reinforce the message, TINA (there is no alternative) but fiscal stabilisation.
Gradualism: Brexit is likely to lead to the slow death of the NHS. First deny it to non-nationals, then to the socialists… Once the British public is conditioned to the idea, pull the plug out altogether and fully privatise.
It will be better in the long run if you take your medicine now. The short sharp shock of austerity. No it will not.
Kill people’s critical faculties and infantalise them. The Greeks and Irish are merely children anyway. Appropriate adults in the room, in the form of the IMF, have arrived to tell you what to do.
Appeal to Emotion, frenzy, hysteria and not rationality. Thus our world is being torn apart by mob orators pulling at the heartstrings.
Disinform and create a sideshow. The public are being fattened up by bread and seduced by circuses of the absurd, causing us to lose sight of the real point.
Pander to bland consumerism. Assure people constantly that they have never had it so good. Brexit will create unlimited prosperity. Drug people with disinformation like soma from A Brave New World.
If we have acted criminally and are powerful then it is your fault and your responsibility. You are derelict because we are criminals, but we never acknowledge that.
Play the person not the ideas. Then if the person is troublesome go after their relationship structure, or just make them disappear.
Chomsky cuts against the salon culture of the Enlightenment, championed by Jürgen Habermas. The challenge lies in counteracting the disconnected memes and silo bubbles of self-interest that the world’s elite direct at us.
Data retention
Orwell’s idea of double speak from Nineteen-Eighty-Four dovetails with Chomsky’s significant observation that it is much more important to have less data, but to have greater understanding or indeed comprehension of what we do hold on to.
That requirement for nuance, judgement and perspective is dissipating rapidly. We are addicted to useless information and data retention, not comprehension or understanding. We are now bombarded with a deluge of superfluous information by social media. More to the point the useless data and bricolage condition our judgment, as it must in order to survive.
How many now join up the dots as Chomsky has and bring them into common sense utterance in simple plain speech and with social engagement? Very few. Very few from the academic community at least. Chomsky is right that the time servers and corporate drones of academia are deliberately or intellectually missing the Big Picture.
One point he has not addressed is how the current neo-liberal rewarping of human identity is creating social atomisation and political disconnection. We are now so embroiled in what we do that we hardly ever question it or fully understand the machine behind it. We no longer have time to consider what we are doing.
Chomsky quotes Robert McNamara in Manufacturing Consent to the effect that all the power brokers are interested in is quiescent serfs dedicated to personal wealth maximisation, not a culture of dissent.
McNamara, a brilliant but non-deviant character, was an ultra-competitive and narrow-minded technocrat which made him complicit in the carpet bombing of Tokyo and the Vietnam war. He even acknowledges that had he been on the losing side he could have been prosecuted for war crimes. If only McNamara had slightly wilder college days.
So the masses are duped by propaganda and caught by a Social Darwinist cult that Chomsky despises. Paradoxically, Chomsky is himself a survivor in that world, and has had to make his compromises, as we all do. ‘You’re going to have to serve somebody,’ as Bob Dylan sang.
Optimism Over Despair
Nonetheless, as Chomsky argues in his new book, we need Optimism Over Despair (2017), perhaps a social-democratic New Deal, checking unbridled capitalism.
As creatures of bounded rationality in an increasingly over-specialised world the Big Picture is a luxury perhaps, reserved for a corporate- and military-funded former M.I.T. Professor. He now operates from a salubrious post-retirement position in Arizona – the greatest quality of life retirement home in America – which is not to be in the least dismissive of Chomsky’s staggering achievements.
Chomsky rightly regards the U.S. as a terror state that acts without restraint, while accusing others of the same crimes. Thus the labels of terrorism and counter-terrorism conceal a multitude of agendas and doublespeak, while permitting the basest acts.
I am unconvinced by the evidence for a common nascent language of universal and deep structure. Chomsky has never explained adequately the idea of recursion, a kind of infinity of deep structure, and thus the linguistic ideas appear counter-intuitive and perhaps fundamentally incorrect. But I claim no expertise in this domain. Nonetheless, I cling to the belief that there is a common universal of pragmatic compunction, though varying in context and time.
Of course none of that is to gainsay or contradict the clear speech of his inter-subjective and all-encompassing journalism and political tracts, for which he deserves great praise.
Responding to Chomsky
Here I summarise the injunctions I have gleaned from Chomsky’s work:
Think independently and do not buy into the mass media consensus. Remain acutely vigilant to doublespeak technobabble. Hearing euphemisms such as ‘politically impossible,’ ‘fiscal stabilisation,’ ‘military intelligence’ or ‘known unknowns’ should sound off alarm bells.
Question how implausible nonsense is considerable acceptable, and campaign, if at all possible, for freedom and justice.
Assert the importance of historical memory, as Milan Kundera emphasised. In laughter all evil is compacted as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. If we fail to remember, we’re sure to repeat the same obscenities.
Oppose fascism in all its current incarnations, including corporate fascism. Do not sympathise with your captors or enemies.
Recognise true hypocrisy for what it is. The hypocrite is someone who applies to others standards they refuse to apply to themselves, of which American foreign policy is a paradigmatic case. Remain flexible and non-puritanical however.
Understand that the definition of terrorism is manufactured by a terrorist corporate and state elite. Just as the French tortured in Algeria, the Americans did the same in Guantanamo Bay. Yet both claimed the high moral ground. Terrorism is only what they do to us.
Resist the rise of moral relativism, which is part of a triage of evil (joining post-truth and neo-liberalism) that Chomsky identifies in the U.S. Republican Party, which he has singled out as the most dangerous political organisation on Planet Earth.
Acknowledge how the cost-benefit analysis of neo-liberalism is turning us into homo economicus, making us lose compassion for one another, besides generating environmental catastrophes.
Embrace the educational tools necessary to defend oneself, and develop communities of resistance within rapidly atomising societies.
Interrogation carried out in Guantanamo Bay.
*******
Perhaps the most disturbing idea that comes through in Knight’s book about Chomsky does not apply to him directly, but relates to how the political ground has moved so far to the right that Richard Nixon, who supported environmental initiatives, Keynesian economics and state-funded medicine, might now be labelled a Communist.
If Chomsky manipulated the corporatocracy to achieve and advocate his political views I would tend to applaud rather than condemn him. To penetrate the orifices of the establishment and to subvert from within is surely a great achievement in itself. It’s always better to be pissing out than pissing in, for as long as you can anyway.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film ‘Dr Strangelove’ dramatizes the still not-altogether-remote scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It begins with a deranged U.S. Airforce General, Jack D. Ripper, overriding Executive Command and ordering a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The Russians, unbeknownst to the Americans, have developed a deterrent – the Doomsday Machine – that automatically detonates, with devastating global effect, if a nuclear device explodes in Soviet territory.
Kubrick masterfully conveys the absurd conformism of a military organisation obeying orders to a point of self-annihilation. In the end, Major T. J. ‘King’ Kong, the B-52 commander delivering its payload, straddles the bomb, whooping as he descends to his own, and humanity’s, demise. Despite its apocalyptic message, the film remains enduringly hilarious, reflecting its alternative title: ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’
A recent viewing in Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema left me wondering, though, whether Kubrick derives too much comedy from an appalling vista we still confront. Laughter remains a safety valve, permitting an audience to carry on with business-as-usual, while the ultimate stupidity of nuclear war remains a real possibility. Are we, unconsciously, making light of President Donald Trump’s recent euphemistic warning of an ‘official end’ to Iran?[i] As Friedrich Nietzsche puts it: ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’[ii] Regular doses of humour are one of life’s balms, but sometimes we laugh along to the exclusion of more serious engagement. Fittingly perhaps, the serious work of producing Cassandra Voices generally occurs in a studio above a crowded comedy club in the heart of Dublin, from where laughter often wafts upstairs!
If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!
Millenarian doomsday scenarios have haunted humanity since time immemorial. A ‘Great Survey’ of England and Wales in 1086, used to ascertain the proportion of the national wealth owing to King William ‘the Conqueror’ (also less flatteringly known as ‘the Bastard’), was subsequently labelled the ‘Book of Domesday’ (Middle English for ‘Doomsday’). This accumulation of data in the hands of a monarchy had terrifying connotations at a time when many perceived the end of the world, and its Final Judgment, to be nigh.
Today humanity confronts varied doomsday scenarios – generally gleaned from scientific analysis rather than metaphysical speculation – with anthropogenic climate chaos, mass extinctions and the still unresolved danger of a nuclear Armageddon topping the list. We remain in many respects, in Carl Jung’s phrase, technological savages[iii], operating machinery with capacities far exceeding our wisdom as operators. It just takes one fat finger to push the button, or an unimpeded algorithm.
But perhaps it is not nuclear warheads, or even coal-powered stations, that represent the Doomsday Machines of our time. After all, humanity could quite easily seize control of its fate, elect reasonable leaders, bring about a Green New Deal and decommission nuclear weapons. So what is holding us back from taking the action required for the benefit of the great mass of our species, and the rest of the natural world? Another mechanism, operated by most adults in developed countries, is, I believe, befuddling our wits and deterring a collective shift in consciousness.
Developed simultaneously in the early 2000s by a number of manufacturers, the smart phone is replicating the Book of Domesday by tracking our movements and online preferences to the benefit of vested commercial interests, and shadowy state emanations.
Of greater concern, perhaps, than the hollowing out of our privacy is the addiction the vast majority of us have to the narcissistic, solipsistic and often pugilistic ‘social’ media of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Twitter, conveyed through apps on our smartphones. Staring into the void of communication-without-end from dawn-to-dusk, successive ‘hits’ are delivered, revealing who messages us, ‘likes’ our image or words, or offends us. Notably, Donald Trump is the acknowledged master of the soundbite Twitter update (maximum length two-hundred-and-eighty-characters), heralding the short-attention-span-politics evident in most countries.
Social media is the thief of time and an agent of homogenisation. Writing in the early twentieth century, the
Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa seemed to anticipate the contemporary malaise. ‘Given the metallic, barbarous age we live in,’ he wrote, ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’[iv]
The smartphone provides a simulacrum of varied technologies, such as an automated camera providing the semblance of a real one, but where the necessary application to understand the apparatus is no longer needed. The capacity to share easily what we have created has overtaken the creative process. The necessary isolation of the artist has been abandoned in favour of the instant hit of validation from our peers.
Likewise, through digital attenuation, music is debased and choice diminished when we succumb to the algorithms of Spotify and YouTube that are carried with us everywhere we go on our Doomsday Machines.
Of particular concern is a generation of teenagers who know of no other life other than that mediated by the Doomsday Machines. What is missing from their lives is the crucial ingredient of tedium, which again according to Pessoa is ‘that profound sense of the emptiness of things, out of which frustrated aspirations struggle free, a sense of thwarted longing arises and in the soul is sown the seed from which is born the mystic or the saint.’[v] Being bored can have its advantages.
I would like to say I had the willpower to renounce my own device, but as is so often the case in life, the end of the affair occurred by accident. Fiddling with its AMAZING properties, for the umpteenth time that day, as I double-jobbed playing with my young nephew, the Machine slipped from my grasp and hit a hard stone floor. The glass did not shatter exactly, except in one corner which felt the full impact, and from which a few glittery shards crumbled away. But, faintly detectable, three deathly cracks ran up from where it had landed, strangely mirroring the lifelines on my hand. When I tried to switch it on, all I found was a faint blinking light, which soon lapsed. Still looking sleek and powerful, though now veiled in a black hood of inoperativeness, it appeared to me like the corpse of a young soldier, handsome features intact, save for a bullet wound to the neck.
I felt deflated, angry and increasingly tetchy. How was I going to survive without it after a decade-long reliance? Like any addict, I felt pangs for the addled communication, information-gathering and idle scrolling that had become my early morning ritual, as I lay prostrate in bed.
As it transpired there was still some life in the Machine — I had simply smashed the screen, which I replaced at a reasonable price in a shop on Capel Street. But the liberation of a few days had changed my perspective. I had an unmistakable feeling of a great weight being lifted off me. In the meantime, I had purchased a ‘brick’ phone for next to nothing and now alternate between the two, only using the Doomsday Machine, now shorn of most, though not all, social media apps, when strictly necessary. I am a work in progress.
I know many people, more sensible than I, who have deleted all social media apps from their smartphones save for WhatsApp. This is, however, the Gateway Drug that maintains the addiction, leaving the impression that you cannot live without the Doomsday Machine. In a sinister twist, WhatsApp cannot be used on a laptop, for example, without already being connected to a Doomsday Machine.
Facebook has become the lightning rod for much of the bad press around social media – those pesky Russians again – and its distorted algorithm is a distinct nuisance if one is attempting to share meaningful content, as the cutesy image will always win out. Used strategically, however, it has its advantages, especially as a means of staying in contact with a large number of people, and for the purpose of events. It only really becomes problematic as an app on a smartphone that sends out regular notifications, prompting idly scrolling. I can live with it on my laptop, although I have given up on the hope of using it as a conduit for radical journalism.
As regards the confessional nature of posting our thoughts, I was struck by further prescient words from Pessoa: ‘What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former, it has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible.’[vi] I am coming to recognise that most of the online outbursts I am prone to are perhaps better left unsaid.
Instagram offers a good medium for photographers to display their work, but is overwhelmingly narcissistic, not only through that ultimate expression of Doomsday Machines, the selfie, but also via the look-at-my-beautiful-life imagery that abounds. Planet Instagram is full of beautiful people who overcome life challenges, reveal plenty of tanned flesh and speak in a patois of hashtags.
Selfie by name.
Pessoa would take an uncompromising view:
Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible that that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable either to see his face or to look into his own eyes … he could only see his face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of his seeing his own face … the creator of the mirror poisoned the human race.[vii]
There are times when access to the Internet while on the move is of great value. Google Maps makes travel immeasurably easier. But are we comfortable with all our movements being tracked? Smart-phone maps also reduce the sum total of our interactions with fellow human beings, and makes us less observant of the world around us.
A good rule of thumb is that, unless we are sitting upright, communication is unsatisfactory. The same applies to reading news sites – I had become all-too-prone to only partially reading articles. Indeed, the ‘most read’ articles on most sites tends to be prurient ‘click-bait.’
I suggest you forget about the hurried message and make time for real expression in communication. There is no point attempting to stay in touch with everyone, because it is impossible. Leave more time for reading books, making music, being present to friends and family, and allow space for the tedium that brings daydreaming.
The Internet can open new horizons of knowledge, bringing to fruition Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (d. 1716) dream of a bibliotheca universalis, a ‘universal library’, where expert insight is available to all, everywhere. It could lead us into thinking more globally. But this beast needs considerable taming. Its great potential may be more easily realised by abandoning Doomsday Machines altogether. The wider consequences of a less mediated society could be profound. If enough of us can escape the clutches of the Machines, perhaps we can eventually develop the focus required for collective action.
In October last, I was at a Russian Circles gig in Galway. It gave me a much needed stark reminder of the power of live sound: washing over me, enveloping, reverberating my insides, shaking me out of an internal slumber. Requiring a medium to travel, the body is a conductor for sound. Filtering vibrations moving through it. Sound percolating in time through tissue and sinew, connecting, evading, resonating, confronting, decoding, making pliable.
I emerged from the show a renewed being: sensorially realigned, perceiving things afresh, and happy I made the effort to go. As Rumi says, ‘whatever purifies you is the right path’. It reminded me also of my love for sonically-heavier music.
Through the course of writing my new record last year I studied analogue photographic processes in London. This was an enlightening experience – awakening, purifying, and sustaining. Conversations with Lasse (Marhaug) who produced the album, opened up with us bouncing ideas on developing bath times, film grain, and Japanese post-war photographic processes resulting in layered, high-contrast, noisy, black-and-white imagery.
I was keen to achieve sonic textures on the record similar to those I was exploring in the darkroom. In this way, my journeys in both music and visuals over the past year intertwined and mirrored elements of each another.
During a year largely spent playing catch-up and quietly rejuvenating, another formative experience was my artist residency at CAMP in the Pyrenees, France in the summer. The opportunity to work and nurture friendships with a host of positive and inspirational people – performance artists, sound artists, composers, musical thinkers, electronic producers, creators, actors, poets, playwrights and visual artists – was a pure gift.
At high altitude we shared studio space and meals every evening, helped with each other’s projects as we listened or gave feedback, enjoyed walks and endured the heat, watched films, and shared equipment. It was a welcome respite, having worked on writing my new album in solitude up to that point for about eight months. Much of life as a solo artist is solitary, from writing to touring to persevering with it all, so it is a joy when golden social connections are cultivated beyond that space.
I look forward to the year ahead although it will have a ferocious pace in comparison to its predecessor, with my record due for release in spring. It will feel good to share it. There is always an element of embracing the fear when releasing anything and of learning new ways to live with the vulnerability of doing so. I feel proud of the work I achieved with others in piecing it together, and the giant steps this record required me to take in its writing.
