Cassandra Voices

Tag: George Orwell

  • Cost of Living: Digging for Victory

    Standing outside a Dublin hostelry in the drizzle, I fell into conversation with an Ulsterman who arrived with impeccable republican-socialist credentials. I assumed, this would make him sympathetic to the recently vanquished Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

    I breezily opined that the long-serving MP for Islington had been the first post-War Labour leader to challenge a neo-colonial consensus in British politics, to which I received a surprising response.

    “He’s just like the rest of them,” he said, pausing before almost spitting out the words, “the allotment,” and muttering “that’s how you can tell.”

    Only on reflection do I recognise the origin of a prejudice against anyone holding an interest in the dark arts of composting, training vines, or even the life cycle of the carrot fly.

    He echoed savage criticism of privileged do-gooders with an evangelical zeal for horticulture, from that most quintessential of English writers, George Orwell.

    Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall

    ‘food-crank’

    In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) Orwell dismissed a certain type of socialist ‘food-crank’, ‘sandal-wearer’, ‘fruit-juice drinker’ as ‘a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcass; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.’

    He maintained: ‘The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots.’ But added, revealingly: ‘the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.’

    Orwell articulated an enduring English working class aversion to a New Age paternalism, which my Republican-Socialist interlocuter outside the pub appeared to share.

    Well-intentioned, but often tone deaf, efforts to instil passion for horticulture continues to emanate from aristocratic scions such as Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. His Dorset estate became a TV showcase for sustainable gastronomy in a country more renowned for mushy peas and fried batter, washed down with Irn-bru.

    There is, however, a curmudgeonly quality to Orwell’s critique, reflected in a stated preference for Anglo-Saxon words over those of French or Classical origins in ‘The Politics of the English Language’. In England, and not only among working class, plain food, as well as plain words, are generally preferred over anything sophisticated, complex or, worst of all, French.

    However, in my view, Corbyn comes from an honourable lineage of Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: genuine social reformers that secured parliamentary approval through the 1908 Small Holdings and Allotments Act. This brought 1,500,000 plots into cultivation by 1918, thereby ensuring a steady supply of fresh fruit and vegetables in many metropolitan districts.

    It also led to a wide diffusion of gardening skills, which became a valuable resource during World War II when, denied of imports, the population was urged to Dig for Victory, with impressive results.

    Nonetheless, what Orwell acknowledged as “the peculiar evil” of working class people turning their noses up at healthy produce suggests early industrialisation of food production in Britain – particularly the preponderance of refined sugar – had a lasting effect on the British pallet, and sadly the Irish one too.

    In England today organic is a by-word for posh, and unaffordable: “not for the likes of you and me.”

    Sadly, reflecting the colonial experience, Irish tastes are often just as blinkered. This is apparent in a lasting aversion to cultivating fruit and vegetables, which has informed the state’s agricultural priorities since independence.

    Today just one percent of all Irish farms now produce vegetables – for reasons I explore.

    Irish Food

    Notably, the celebration of specifically ‘Irish’ food did not figure prominently among Irish nationalist at the end of the nineteenth century. Crucially, with the inception of the state, agriculture was identified as a primary source of export revenue.

    This perpetuated a pattern of development that can be traced to the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, when a reduction in the price of grain on the British market created economic conditions in Ireland favouring raising cattle for export, often ‘on the hoof’.

    The potato has long been identified with the Irish people, but it has not become a cherished foodstuff in the same way rice is to the Japanese for example. Early nationalists were more concerned with promoting self-sufficiency in wheat. Moreover, the Great Famine remains a relatively unexplored trauma, at least in terms of the Irish relationship with food, and the land.

    Tony Kiely describes Dublin working- class meals in the 1950s as follows: ‘Family diets were very basic, consisting in the main of bread, tea, oatmeal, cocoa, potatoes, cabbage, herrings and pairings of cheap meat pieces for stews and soups .…’ While: ‘Bread was both a staple, and a constant companion at all meals.’[i]

    Anthony Farmar suggests that an absolute rule among the Irish middle class in the 1960s was never to talk about food: ‘to enjoy eating as such was unbecoming to a serious person’. He quotes an American commentator who claimed cooking in Ireland was ‘a necessary chore rather than an artistic ceremony, and that in restaurants “‘nine out of ten ordered steak every time with nine out of ten ordering chips with it.”’[ii]

    Among the post-Great Famine diaspora, there is little evidence of recreation of native dishes. Panikos Panayi claims that in Britain: ‘Irish food did not have enough distinction from that of the ethnic majority to warrant the opening of specifically designated food shops.’[iii]

    Regarding nineteenth-century Irish-American immigrants, Hasia R. Diner reveals: ‘They rarely talked about food, neither did they sing about it, nor did it contribute to community institutions and rituals.’[iv]

    Self-consciously Irish recipe books emerged only after independence. Most Irish nationalists did not view eating distinctively Irish food as an important cultural marker, except perhaps when it came to eating bread made from home-grown wheat.

    Thus, in a pamphlet addressed to the women of Ireland, the writer and Irish language activist Mary Butler crafted a list of fifteen ways in which to foster authentic Irishness in their homes. Revealingly, ‘no traditional recipes, foodways, food names, or food practices as instruments for building Irish identity were included.’[v]

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Aping the English

    According to Benedict Anderson, ‘by the second decade of the nineteenth century if not earlier a model of the independent nation state was available for pirating.’[vi]

    This is important in the Irish context as the model most readily available was English or British nationalism, a society that prized letters and sporting prowess, and in which a native culinary tradition had been ‘decapitated’[vii] by the end of the nineteenth century.

    In 1880 the surgeon and polymath Sir Henry Thompson observed:

    On questioning the average middle-class Englishman as to the nature of his food, the all but universal answer is, ‘My living is plain, always roast and boiled’—words which but too clearly indicate the dreary monotony, not to say unwholesomeness, of his daily food; while they furthermore express his satisfaction, such as it is, that he is no luxurious feeder.[viii]

    The disinterest exhibited by the English in cookery and the discussion of food was compounded by the nutritional impoverishment of the working class.

    Sidney Mintz estimates that by 1900 nearly one-fifth of average caloric intake came in the form of refined sugar, which was mainly consumed in tea or jam.[ix] Apart from being nutritionally deficient, this diet lacked variety and bred conservatism as older traditions of food preparation yielded to bland industrial products.

    With no sophisticated models of food consumption to compete against, the Irish cultural elite was not drawn to food as an expression of identity; unlike Italians, for example, situated within the domineering cultural orbit of French cuisine.

    An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store by Cork artist Daniel MacDonald, c. 1847

    Poverty

    This was compounded by the virtual extinction of many traditional foods as a result of poverty and changes in agricultural production in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution.

    David Dickson ‘suspects that much of what is today regarded as traditional Irish cuisine—soda bread, barm brack, boxty, champ, colcannon etc—’ was only developed in the nineteenth century ‘in the kitchens of the solid farming class.’[x]

    During the Famine, those unaffected by starvation bore witness to suffering on a scale that is hard for those of us living in contemporary Ireland to fathom. Joseph Lee likens its effects to the Jewish experience of the Holocaust and explores a psychological legacy:

    They will have seen corpses, if not in their own dwellings, then on the roads and in the ditches. Many are likely to have felt a degree of guilt, of the type that often afflicts survivors of tragedies, not only of the Holocaust, but of events like earthquakes and mining catastrophes. Why did you survive when others in your family did not? A sense of guilt can simmer below the surface, to perhaps breakout in uncontrollable and, to uncomprehending outside observers, in apparently inexplicable ways.[xi]

    Crawford and Clarkson concur, suggesting that survivors carried psychological scars and that their physical and intellectual developments were stunted.[xii]

    Image (c) Daniele Idini.

    Alternative Crops

    The dominance of the market generated a snobbery directed against foraged foods, which according to Louse M. Cullen acquired a ‘stigma.’[xiii]

    Kevin Myers once mused in his Irishman’s Diary that: ‘It’s almost as if those who live on the land here are culturally and emotionally disengaged from its essence as a living thing.’[xiv]

    The impact of colonisation cannot be overlooked. According to John Feehan: ‘it seems more than likely that the loss of the Gaelic tradition of farming was accompanied by a decline in the lore of wild plants and animals as food or medicine.’[xv]

    Furthermore, the absence of a native ‘improving’ gentry, especially after the Act of Union in 1801, limited experimentation in and demand for ‘alternative’ crops: fruit and vegetables varieties with limited market value.

    By the eve of the Great Famine three million (out of a population of eight million) were living on a mere one million acres of land, which represented just 5% of a the total acreage of 20 million.’[xvi] It is remarkable that until the blight arrived, without modern machinery or chemicals, so many were able to subsist on such small plots .

    Moore Hall, County Mayo.

    Lack of Variety

    Writing in 1971, Rosemary Fennel bemoaned the demise of country markets, saying a ‘frequent complaint in Ireland is the lack of variety of in vegetables for sale and the high prices charged.’[xvii] Media coverage of the subject of food in the form of recipes, reviews and features only really took off in the 1990s.

    It may be that the enduring absence of alternative agriculture and gastronomy owes something to the rejection of the ‘Big House’ in whose walled gardens, orchards and hothouses horticultural experimentation had occurred prior to independence, which precipitated the departure of a significant proportion of what remained of the landlord class.

    In an independent state dominated by a petit -bourgeois farmer class, the Big House, was despised. In 1944 the Minister for Lands Sean Moylan condemned them as ‘tombstones of a departed aristocracy’ remarking ‘the sooner they go down the better. They are no use.’[xviii] More recently Nuala O’Faolain admitted: ‘We cannot, or at least I cannot, look at the Big House without some degree of rage.’[xix]

    Certainly, since independence the focus of the state has been on securing export revenue from agricultural produce. In her history, Mary Daly argues that ‘it is evident that the Department [of Agriculture] has traditionally looked at agricultural matters from the perspective of the producer rather than the consumer.’ She cautions that the identity of interests between farmers and the Irish nation ‘does not necessarily apply on issues such as food policy, or the environment.’[xx]

    Securing land has never been easy. Frank Mitchell and Michael Ryan observed in 1997: ‘In Ireland it is still next to impossible to rent land on a lease of sufficient length to make improvements and where land can be bought it is often in small parcels at too high a price.’[xxi]

    The Irish Breakfast Roll.

    Changing Habits of a Lifetime

    Pierre Bourdieu claims that ‘it is probably in tastes in food that one would find the strongest and most indelible mark of infant learning.’[xxii] Developing a taste for brown bread and carrots perhaps does not come easily if white bread and jam have been childhood staples.

    One way to bring about a shift in Irish tastes could be through increased participation in small scale agriculture. This might lead to wider agricultural reforms, as people gain an appreciation of seasonality and even terroir ­– the unique flavour imparted by the growing environment.

    A gastronomic awakening could lead to the cultivation of gardens across suburban and rural Ireland, and in more built-up areas public allotments – yes “allotments” – ought to be developed, but this will require state intervention.

    More public land should be set aside for allotments given the importance of consuming sufficient fresh fruit and vegetables in our diets; not to mention the potentially huge savings if people were able to grow more of their own. Recall that on the eve of the Great Famine three million were subsisting on a mere one million acres of land!

    My own district of Dun-Laoghaire Rathdown, which contains vast under-utilised parklands has just two public allotment sites available for a population of over two hundred thousand. One at Goatstown with 136 plots and another in Shankhill with 95 plots. Unsurprisingly, both are over-subscribed.

    Meanwhile in the more congested Dublin City Council region, where there is still ample public land availabe, some zoned Z9 for Lands/Green Network, there are nine, again over-subscribed, sites.

    Until there is an adequate distribution of land, horticulture will remain a privilege of property owners with gardens. This has important implications for the endurance of the perception that fresh fruit and vegetables are ‘posh’ food.

    [i] Tony Kiely, “We managed”: reflections on the culinary practices of Dublin’s working class poor in the 1950s’, in Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Eamon Maher (eds) Tickling the palate, gastronomy in Irish literature and culture (Oxford, 2014), p.108.

    [ii] Anthony Farmar, Privileged lives: a social history of middle class Ireland 1882-1989, (Dublin, 1989), p.180-2

    [iii] Panikos Panayi, The multicultural history of British food (London, 2008), p.43.

    [iv] Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish foodways in the age of migration. (Cambridge, 2002), p.114.

    [v] Ibid, p.84.

    [vi] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, (London, 1991), p.81.

    [vii] Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Taste: eating and taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the present (Oxford, 1996) p.214.

    [viii] Ibid, p.296.

    [ix] Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the place of sugar in modern history, (New York and London, 1985) p.6

    [x] David Dickson, ‘The potato and the Irish diet before the Great Famine’, in Cormac Ó Grada (ed.), Famine 150 commemorative lecture series (Dublin, 1997), p.19.

    [xi] Joseph Lee, ‘The Famine in Irish history’, in Cormac Ó Grada (ed.), Famine 150 commemorative lecture series (Dublin, 1997), pp.168-9

    [xii] Leslie Clarkson and Margaret Crawford, Feast and Famine, (Oxford, 2001), p.134.

    [xiii] Louse M. Cullen, The Emergence of Modern Ireland 1600-1900 (London, 1981), p.173

    [xiv] Irish Times, 30 January 2001.

    [xv] John Feehan, Farming in Ireland, (Dublin, 2003), p.201.

    [xvi] Raymond Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production: Its Volume and Structure, (Cork, 1966), p.63

    [xvii] Rosemary Fennell, ‘The domestic market for Irish agricultural produce’, in Baillie and Sheehy, Irish agriculture in a changing world, p.106.

    [xviii] Terence Dooley, ‘The Big House and Famine memory: Strokestown Park House’, in Crawley, Smith and Murphy, Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, p.625.

    [xix] Ibid, p.628.

    [xx] Mary Daly, The First Department: a history of the Department of Agriculture, (Dublin, 2002), p.428

    [xxi] Frank Mitchell and Michael Ryan, Reading the Irish Landscape (Dublin, 1997), p.356

    [xxii] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste, trans. by Richard Nice, (London, 2010), p.71.

  • The Importance of Public Debate

    At a recent debate organised by the English-Speaking Union (ESU) at its HQ, Dartmouth House in London, we considered whether the British government’s response to Covid placed too great a priority on security rather than liberty. Naturally I took the liberty side of the argument.

    I expressed the fear that such a public forum as the ESU had convened could represent an interregnum, or lull in the storm, but hope springs eternal.

    A central hallmark of a democracy is freedom of speech. In terms of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, Anthony Lewis argued free speech should act as a search engine for the truth. Ronald Dworkin argued that free speech is a condition for legitimate government, and a counterweight to hysteria and unreason. Stephen Sedley, an eminent English judge, called it the lifeblood of a democracy. Freedom of speech also opens government and private enterprise to intense scrutiny. Above all, it encourages diversity and tolerance.

    Christopher Hitchens.

    Right to Ridicule

    It is not for the faint of heart. Christopher Hitchens remarked that freedom to speak inoffensively is meaningless, while Dworkin insisted on a right to ridicule.

    The overarching argument for speech rights was expressed beautifully in extremis by Hitchens when he said, ‘if you disagree with me that is your prerogative, so stand in line while I, rhetorically, kick your ass.’

    Conflict is resolved best through argument with the truth sacrosanct, ideally via open-ended public debate.

    This should not merely be rhetoric, but include arguments of substance. And the ESU provides, or can provide, that forum. Perhaps uniquely so. Indeed, it was heartening to encounter a multi-generational debate that included insightful youthful interventions.

    In retrospect, Hitchens represents the tail end of a tradition beginning with his hero Thomas Paine, mediated through his other great hero George Orwell, and culminating in him through a rich tapestry of public intellectuals and journalists, who fundamentally believed the pen to be mightier than the sword: that speech and words matter.

    Alas today speech has degenerated in the popular press into public titillation and gossip. It is also noticeable that the great traditions of investigative journalism, evident during the golden era of the Washington Post under Katherine Graham and The Times under Harold Evans, is in serious decline. Today most investigative journalism is a sham. The intellectual culture of the press has been degraded beyond belief.

    Social media is now a form of speech-driven pornography, where legitimate and illegitimate expressions of speech are proving impossible to disentangle. Character assassination and casual defamation have become the order of the day. The Internet may be a force of liberation in some respects, but also permits public display of ever more bizarre and outlandish commentaries. Mark Zuckerberg has unleashed a Promethean conflagration that remains untamed.

    Today’s emphasis on brevity and soundbites in politics conceals how the truth often requires explanation, as it is often nuanced.

    Aneurin Bevan talking to a patient at Park Hospital, Manchester, the day the NHS came into being in 1948.

    Like paying a visit to Woolworths…

    Aneurin Bevan, as good an orator as Churchill, once remarked that listening to a speech from Labour leader Clement Atlee was like paying a visit to Woolworths: ‘everything was in its place, but nothing was above the value of sixpence.’ To be convincing speech should have the necessary brio to rouse an audience.

    From Jeremy Bentham’s Speech Acts, Jürgen Habermas, develops the crucial idea of Ideal Speech or Communicative Action. This is an idea that speech should be formal, and not tainted by an unthinking recourse to ideology. He also suggests that such dialogue in the tradition of the Enlightenment salon will provide technical outcomes that are also morally purposeful.

    In Communicative Action he wrote: ‘Speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals based on a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit worthy.’

    It succeeds:

    insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behaviour. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilise the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.

    Although not all speech should have to be taken seriously, it is important that a forum such as Dartmouth House is maintained for popular shibboleths to be dismantled in public debate.

    George Orwell.

    Doublespeak

    So, propaganda should not be taken seriously, nor modes of advertising, without close and detailed inspection. The opinions of many putative experts fall under the same category. Certainly, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

    The use of language – however cloaked in notional expertise – to undermine freedoms is a very worrying development. The employment by officialdom of complex legal discourse and manipulation of language may represent the onset of what George Orwell referred to as ‘doublespeak’. This can be exposed in civilised public debate in a neutral forum.

    A certain degree of puff and blow will always be found among business-people. Advertising lubricates the wheels of commerce, but when almost non-existent standards permit multinational corporate entities, including the pharmaceutical sector, to fabricate, falsify and frankly lie, thus precipitating financial and environmental collapse, this may represent a return to the dark ages.

    Sadly, mainstream political debate has disintegrated. Notably, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton engaged in a travesty of a public debate before the US Presidential election of 2016. It was more like a staged reality TV show. Its nearest equivalent was the format of a farcical game show, such as the Jerry Springer Show.

    Thus politics has become part of the entertainment industry. Despite his Classical education, Boris Johnson invokes Peppa Pig before business leaders.

    So, an unconditional respect for freedom of speech should be offset by an understanding that certain speech does not warrant protection. Nonsense is best resolved by forensic debate – cutting through crap in common parlance.

    Surveillance Capitalism

    The criminalisation of unpopular opinion is a worrying feature of our times, and it is ‘subversives’ such as Julian Assange – along with those who dared to hold a referendum in Catalonia – that are accused, prosecuted, and convicted of treason. It is these dissidents that need protection.

    Under the Facebook and Google dispensation people become products to be profiled and mined, a point made brilliantly in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

    Moreover, political correctness has also led to the intensification of extremism. I would argue that this includes attempts by the transgender lobby to ban esteemed academics from the airwaves or campuses. ‘No platforming’ undermines public debate, as do unsubstantiated complaints to academic authorities that lead to the removal of a radical professor.

    So, when in Georgetown University certain radical professors indicated they were far from unhappy at the death of the arch conservative Judge Scalia, their conservative colleagues sought their removal on the basis that the ‘snowflake’ generation of easily upset students would be offended at the disrespect.

    We must maintain a right to protest, engage in civil disobedience and crucially – in an increasingly controlled and technocratic age – the right to offer truth-bearing, fearless and independent criticism.

    KKK rally near Chicago in the 1920s.

    The Limits of Freedom of Expression

    Speech has its outer limits, where there is a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action. This tension is explored in Snyder v Phelps, where a fundamentalist Christian group demonstrated outside a gay serviceman’s funeral.

    Upholding speech rights, the Court concluded that:

    Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.

    Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.

    Moreover, in Brandenburg v Ohio 359 U.S 44, the Court went so far as to protect even racial abuse at a Ku Klux Klan ‘rally’ held at a farm in Hamilton County.

    One film showed twelve hooded figures, some of whom carried firearms. They were gathered around a large wooden cross, which they burned. No one was present other than the participants and the newsmen who made the film. Most of the words uttered during the scene were incomprehensible when the film was projected, but scattered phrases could be understood that were derogatory of African-Americans and, in one instance of Jews.

    The Supreme Court concluded that this was speech protected under the First Amendment on the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation, except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

    In contrast, the ECHR will not protect either racist speech or Holocaust denial. And even the ESU may feel the Americans went too far.

    But the detailed US decisions show how far the US courts are prepared to travel to protect speech. It is an important point that it is the speech we most dislike and most disagree with that needs the most protection.

    Village stocks in Bramhall, England c. 1900.

    Enemies of the People

    Whistle-blower legislation protects those who want to expose official corruption and protects speech. However, as I have found, the spectre of criminal prosecution under Official Secret’s legislation is always a suspensive and possible threat. Anyone blowing the whistle must evaluate the risk of prosecution, including the almost inevitable consequence of job loss and ostracism.

    Henrik Ibsen’s Enemies of the People – perhaps uniquely in his oeuvre – was overtly political. The premise is simple: a prominent and well-connected local engineer whose brother is the town mayor is asked to conduct a survey of the waters of the town. The town in question has become famous as a spa resort attracting a great deal of tourism, but when he tests the waters, he finds that they are polluted and informs the town and indeed his brother.

    It is the reaction to this that is interesting. Rather than lauding him and complimenting him for his finely attuned sense of ethics and correct analysis, they turn on him with ever-increasing ferocity. A storm of hatred is unleashed.

    He will destroy the local economy. Their livelihoods will be affected. The industry of the town will be negated. He is shunned, ostracised, victimised. His family is torn apart, and he becomes an ‘Enemy of the People’. The mob descend in all their unfettered glory. Sound familiar?

    Thus, we must protect freedom of speech as it vitalises a democracy, but we must also recognise the rules of civic discourse.

    Yet I fear that a great tradition of oracy, public communication, rationalist discourse and generalist interest is in decline: usurped by the purveyors of false information, false speech acts and blandishments.

    If the English-Speaking Union can revitalise the young with a passion for genuine public communication, it will be performing a great service, training a new generation of professionals in the essential and transferable skills of advocacy, public communication and, above all, respect for the truth.

    Feature Image: Presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon for the 1960 election in the United States.

    The English-Speaking Union (ESU) is an international charity and membership organisation underpinned by Royal Charter working to give all young people – regardless of background – the speaking and listening skills and the cross-cultural understanding to enable them to thrive.  

    Our programmes are underpinned by over 100 years’ expertise in the field of debate and public speaking delivery, policy and research. 

    Founded in 1918 by the author and journalist Sir Evelyn Wrench, the ESU brings together and empowers people of all cultures and nationalities by building confidence and shaping communication skills, so that individuals can realise their full potential.  In our 36 branches in England and Wales and 54 international branches, the ESU carries out a variety of activities such as: competitions, debating, public speaking and student exchange programmes, teacher training, classroom outreach, research and scholarships. All of these encourage the effective use of the English language around the world.

    To find out more about our work, please go to: https://www.esu.org/ and so consider joining the ESU: https://www.esu.org/support-our-work/become-a-member/.  Please contact Matthew Christmas, Head of Engagement, if you would like to know more or to volunteer with us: matthew.christmas@esu.org.

    Dartmouth House, in the heart of Mayfair, is our International Headquarters and, as Covid recedes, we are delighted to be re-starting our regular public debates where we encourage civil discussion and informed debate where all ages can get involved. 

    The next Dartmouth House Debate is on Monday 09 May 2022 at 1830 hrs to debate the motion that “This House believes that cryptocurrency and NFTs are a hyped-up fad.” 

    We hope that will want to find out more and get involved with the ESU.

  • Lessons from the Great Depression III

    Don’t you ever read the papers? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’ ‘Well, I’m blowed!’ I was astounded at my keenness of perception. The moment I had set eyes on Spode, if you remember, I had said to myself ‘What Ho! A Dictator!’ and a Dictator he had proved to be. I could not have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham. ‘Well, I’m dashed! I thought he was something of that sort. That chin…Those eyes…And, for the matter of that, that moustache. When you say “shorts,” you mean “shirts,” of course.’ ‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’ ‘Footer bags, you mean?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How perfectly foul.
    P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (1938).

    The above quote may offer a certain hope for those of us who see in each crisis a foretaste of worse to come; that hope is that Fascism can be undermined by ridicule – even while it is gaining traction – as long as a Dworkinian right to freedom of speech abides.

    But I next turn to a writer not noted for his sense of humour, George Orwell, who is central to our understanding the Great Depression, at least from a British vantage. His 1946 essay ‘How the Poor Die’ is a also crucial text for this austerity period, when social supports are being steadily withdrawn and a public health crisis looms large. Such are the consequences, unintended or otherwise, of an awful ideology that has put the NHS into freefall, and the Irish health service into near collapse.

    Animal Farm and 1984, with their simplification of language and distortion of truth from 2 =2 =5 to Newspeak – or in present parlance News International – are curiously prescient for our age. The Communist dystopia Orwell envisaged is not what we have now. Our own is of a different character altogether.

    Lowry, Laurence Stephen; Coming from the Mill; The L. S. Lowry Collection; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/coming-from-the-mill-162324

    Army of Managers

    The great painter of the Depression-era L.S. Lowry once remarked:

    A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

    This is the kind of Stockholm Syndrome that we have witnessed throughout the pandemic, when even left wing parties previously noted for their resistance to corporate authority, rolled over to have their bellies tickled, as the one percent almost doubled their wealth.

    Lowry, as much as Grosz and Dix, chronicled working-class existences in painting, but as a prose artist he also captured the era beautifully in Coming From the Mill (1930). ‘As I left [Pendlebury] station I saw the Acme Spinning Company’s mill,’ Lowry would later recall. Describing:

    The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out hundreds of little pinched, black figures, heads bent down. I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture.

    His matchstick men and women are best seen in the Lowry Gallery in Salford near Manchester, an area much gentrified now but still recognisably working class. And if you turn away from the main paintings, one still finds the bitter fruits of economic depressions: drunken brawls and young children in virtual rags.

    Brave New World!

    Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a core text of our time. The soma-induced compliance replicates our non-critical consensus of disinformation. Bernard the anti-hero wishes to leave for Iceland, a psychological state many of us wish to flee to now. Like Wittgenstein, I have a preference for a good Fjord.

    In mainland Europe the contradictions of the European Depression are well etched by the greatest of all American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was an incurable alcoholic by the time he penned his second masterpiece Tender Is the Night, to mixed reviews, in 1934. The lead character Diver is redolent of a lost parvenu generation, a parable for how many of a certain class lose their way on the French Riviera.

    It is cautionary tale of a loss of relevance, context and credibility. In a way, we all must resist a decadent urge to act like Tory grandees on the fiddle amidst the booze at Number 10.

    And what about other European literature for those who want us to “stay safe by staying apart”? Well, the antisemitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline is responsible for at least two prose masterpieces of the Great Depression that lay bay his own hypocrisy.

    His 1932 Journey to The End of Night is a phantasmatic horror story chronicling the Great Depression. It contains a piquant quote that goes some way towards explaining his own moral descent: ‘I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.’ We ought to be wary of artists that achieve great success in their own time, or journalists for that matter.

    He also refers to the “necessary” distance the rich must develop from the sufferings of the poor:

    I hadn’t found out, yet that humankind consists of two quite different races, the rich and the poor. It took me … and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

    Jean Renoir

    More than Céline, along with Albert Camus, the greatest French intellectual artist of that period was the film director Jean Renoir. His most significant film ‘La Règle du jeu’ is situated at the precipice of collapse.

    Set in an aristocratic milieu just before the outbreak of the Second World War, it is decidedly jittery, with a real sense of fin de siècle. We find attractive though silly people on the brink of a calamity. It seems now quite relevant as we face unprecedented times, where chaos and uncertainty rule.

    Renoir views the characters sympathetically with Octavia – the voice of moderation – central to the film. Renoir was acutely conscious of being on the brink of disaster, and expressed  an objective humanism with the famous line ‘that everyone has his reasons.’

    In the subjectivity of our time that quote remains a clarion call for a heightened perception of danger, especially as moral relativism gains traction.

    Renoir elaborated in commentary on the film that all cultures are cliquish and have their own rules and protocols of dealing with those who do not observe the rules of the game, or the rule of law. But that is prior to seismic change where brute force supersedes civility.

    Renoir touched a raw nerve. When it opened a right-wing French audience went berserk, in a way similar to the reception in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of The Western World in 1907.

    Renoir’s acid comment was in effect that these people were doomed, and that the audience reaction showed that ‘people who commit suicide do not do so in front of witnesses.’

    The film has an astute sense that class or poverty more than race or ethnicity is the ultimate determinant of social division. That idea remains vitally important in these absurd politically correct times, and indeed victimhood or assumed victimhood as it is now. Our priorities should be to maintain access to housing, health care and legal representation.

    Welles and Buñuel

    Another of the greatest creative artist of the twentieth century toured around Ireland at the end of the Depression, before taking a job at The Gate Theatre. Later, in ‘The Third Man’ (1949) he made a guest appearance as Harry Lime. One, less celebrated speech. captures the existential dilemma of our time

    If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.

    This is a logic that appears to have been adopted by pharmaceutical companies in recent times.

     

    The great surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel was another of the great anti-fascist artist of the Depression-era.  He attacked the prevailing mores of clerics, sexual repression and state authoritarianism with utter clarity and savage wit. This led, unsurprisingly, to periods of exile from Spain and a final hideaway for eighteen years in Mexico.

    The stunning and very brave 1950 film about poverty and child criminality in Mexico ‘Los Olvidados’ (the Forgotten Ones) caused a sensation at the time. Its theme reflects a drift into criminality among the youth in many parts of London and Dublin. Today’s child poverty, exploitation, crime and even slavery were also a feature of the Great Depression era.

    Tell Me Why?

    How does Fascism come about? Well it’s a product of inequality and poverty. You could say: “It’s the economy dummy!” In the period we can find evidence of this emerging among the workers in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, or the disenfranchised on the streets of Weimar, or the representations of Orwell and Céline who suffer most due to the naked expropriation “adults in the room.”

    Economic depressions create conditions for fascism, or even the new-fangled corporate fascism of our age which represents a triumph of demagoguery and disinformation. So be wary of manipulation and stay flexible, if not unsafe. Facebook and the mass media augment Orwellian tendencies and a campaign of compliance and of induced consent is creating serf capitalism and a potential Malthusian population cull.

    Alas, there is no New Deal or Marshall Plan on the horizon. World leadership is lacking and often far from benign and corporate-led. Apart from resisting manipulation, what all of us at the sharp end of the stick can do is protest to avoid obliteration and not be participants in our own self-abnegation.

    Resist decadence if you can. Survive the new depression: this Great Reset Depression. It will require optimum coping skills not to be culled. And if all else fails, poke fun at the fascists and observe how uncomfortable they become.

  • Happy Birthday Mr Yeats

    In Ireland literary deities hover over us like U.S. Presidents carved into Mount Rushmore. It is a stirring thought that it isn’t philosophers, engineers, scientists, painters or even composers that summoned the Irish nation and gave us international renown, but poets, novelists and playwrights. Yet conversely these looming presences barely register in contemporary discussions; just as most contemporary Florentines scurry below Brunelleschi’s dome, with precious few looking to the sky in awe.

    Poets build bridges of a more indeterminate kind than engineers. As W.H. Auden writes in a poem occasioned by the death of Yeats in 1939: ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. / Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, / For poetry makes nothing happen.’

    Auden goes too far with that dismissal of poetry – whatever about his contemptuous view of Ireland – but corrects this by acknowledging a few lines later: ‘it survives / a way of happening, a mouth.’ This ‘way of happening’ is in the realm of quantum uncertainty where the extraordinary occurs: coincidences beyond logic, or the ill-defined emotion generated by a sight of great beauty. Poetry does not fit with empirical renderings of reality, the routines of life and the seemingly static laws of nature are defied. It is unsurprising that poets then – Yeats foremost – should dabble in mysticism, scouring every system of thought for explanations for the mysteries they encounter.

    June 13th 2020 is the 155th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats. Born in Sandymount on the Ballsbridge side of the DART tracks he spent much of his adult life in London, before moving permanently to Ireland after the War of Independence, purchasing a former tower house Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway where he ‘paced upon the battlements and stared’ at the birth pangs of the Irish state.

    Thoor Ballylee

    County Sligo

    Yeats will always be identified with County Sligo, the home of many of his ancestors. Innisfree on Lough Gill, Lissadell, ‘far off Rosses’, Knocknarea and Ben Bulben under which he is buried, form the mythical backdrop to his Romantic musing. The stunning landscape triggered romantic verse perhaps unsurpassed in the English language during the twentieth century: ‘Come away oh human child / To the waters and the wild / With a fairy hand in hand / For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.’ The enchanting surroundings engendered Yeats’ poetry but simultaneously he bestowed poetry on that landscape.

    When we view stunning Ben Bulben we are, to some extent at least, honouring the Songlines that brought its majesty into being. But for all his evocations of that county, in his descriptions the people are more ethereal than real, moulded in the fairy-realm of his imagination. A far cry from the gritty characters in Joyce’s Dubliners.

    Image (c) Daniele Idini

    Staying Put

    Like rebellious children questioning the authority of a cruel parent, most of the Irish literary pantheon have had a difficult relationship with their homeland, often preferring exile and ruminating on it from afar. Samuel Beckett went so far to write in French to escape the excesses of Irish speech. But Yeats stayed and grew embittered that the nation did not accord him the accolades he felt his due. Politics is the art of the possible, its grubby affairs a torment to the idealist.

    Long before independence Yeats was bemoaning a Romantic Ireland dead and gone and castigating those that fumbled in their greasy tills. But the lofty aspiration he had for the nation were always doomed to failure, like his enduring affection for Maud Gonne that he finally consummated in later life before proposing to her daughter soon afterwards. Independent Ireland could never match his expectations, as a relationship based entirely on romance has failure encoded in its DNA.

    Crucially Yeats came from the Protestant Ascendancy ‘the men of Burke and of Grattan’ and to many among the ascendant Catholic nation who inherited the independent state his claim to being Irish were shallow. This separation worked both ways as the poet who initially embraced and breathed life into Irish nationalism through the cultural revival and plays such as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, later identified himself with an aristocracy that he saw as a natural leadership for a Creole nation.

    Here he fought a losing battle against the enduring tradition of republicanism that rejected aristocracy and prized equality and democracy. He also contended with the powerful force of sectarianism. Many would have considered it unacceptable for someone of Yeats’s background to be in a position of authority. For many hard-bitten Catholics who retained a collective memory of the privations of the Penal Laws and the Famine, independence was an opportunity to build a Catholic state for a Catholic people.

    Fascist Leanings

    The inter-war period (1918-39) were terrible years of fear, poverty and continued conflict in Europe that foreshadowed the cataclysm of World War II. In the immediate aftermath of World War I Yeats wrote prophetically: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,’. In the end, in response to what he perceived as the failings of democracy, he chose a reactionary Right as opposed to a levelling left which – as he saw it – would brutally sweep aside an aristocratic elect and usher in a doomed era of materialism. This made Yeats sympathetic to fascism and perhaps even Nazism.

    In his exploration of what is the ill-defined ideology of fascism the historian Roger Eatwell writes:

    Fascism has become a latter-day symbol of evil, like the Devil in the Middle Ages. Demonising all aspects of fascism, a founding form of Political Correctness, has its uses. But dismissing anyone associated with fascism leanings in the 1930s makes it impossible for us to understand how fascism still attracts a significant following.

    We might therefore talk of fascisms, and see it in historical context: a reaction to the chaos unleashed by the Great War and the responsibility of rampant capitalism for the Great Depression, as well as the shocking excesses of triumphant Marxism in Russia.

    To many inter-war intellectuals democracy was on the brink of collapse and there existed a stark choice between fascism and Communism, which had just as little respect for human rights. Also, in its early stages, it should not be conflated with anti-Semitism, especially the genocidal character this assumed, which had a far longer history and was not initially a feature of Mussolini’s approach in Italy.

    One recent biography of Yeats Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats, The Life, The Death, The Politics by W.J. McCormack outlines aspects of Yeats’s fascist sympathies. He provides details of Yeats’s letter of thanks to Freidrich Krebs, Oberburgmeister of Frankfurt, acknowledging receipt of an award in 1934, his public approval of Nazi legislation depriving Jews of their property in 1938, and other aspects of his anti-Semitism. McCormack concludes that Yeats was a fellow traveller: ‘on occasion. He did not travel early, and he did not travel often’ but he ‘gave comfort to democracy’s enemies, to decency’s enemies.’

    Yeats can justifiably be excoriated for this, but he shouldn’t be judged on what happened subsequently, but instead on the Europe of the 1930s, where he saw a stark choice between the extremes of right and left.

    Benito Mussolini, Rome, 1939.

    Orwell’s Assessment

    There were other intellectuals such as George Orwell who rejected the extremes of both. It is instructive to consider his views on Yeats, which we find contained in a review of an early biography written in 1943, at the height of the war.

    Orwell is surprisingly unimpressed by Yeats’s poetry, and we hear similar anti-Irish prejudices to those found in Auden’s writing. He says that ‘one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech’.

    This criticism may be attributed to Orwell’s affection for sparse, attenuated language which he expresses in his seminal essay The Politics of the English Language. The attitude is encapsulated in his evaluation of one poem that: ‘It would probably have been deadlier if it had been neater.’

    Nonetheless, even Orwell swoons at some poems: ‘Yeats gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is often irritating, it can also produce phrases (“the chill, footless years”, “the mackerel-crowded seas”) which suddenly overwhelm one like a girl’s face seen across a room.’

    Not surprisingly, Orwell lambasts Yeats’s occult dabbling: ‘As soon as we begin to read about the so-called system we are in the middle of a hocus-pocus of Great Wheels, gyres, cycles of the moon, reincarnation, disembodied spirits, astrology and what not.’ These he links to reactionary leanings: ‘if everything is indeed cyclical then the kind of society based on equality and democracy that Orwell prized was in some sense Sisyphean, a doomed effort. Orwell concludes that ‘Yeats’s tendency is fascist.’

    A poem has a life of its own

    For any devotee of Yeats it is difficult to confront the fairly compelling body of evidence for this tendency, but as has been stressed these sympathies came at a time when the horror of Nazism was not apparent; when Communism might have seemed more contemptuous of human life, and when the few surviving democracies at the time were in the grip of the Great Depression. Yeats was wedded to archaic notions of aristocracy and fascism appeared to fit with his prescriptions. He failed to recognise the genocidal evil that lurked there.

    He was never, however, implicated politically in any fascist movement. In fact the political campaigns that Yeats became involved in during his lifetime: the Irish Cultural Revival in the early 1900s and the campaign to retain divorce in the Irish Free State of the 1920s were progressive in character.

    We find a flawed character in W.B. Yeats, like Orwell himself who informed on his associates, but one who produced verse perhaps unsurpassed in the English language in the twentieth century. His political leanings do not diminish the greatness of his poetry. We may still bask in his words without subscribing to his fluctuating political ideas.

    Once a poem is written, the chord attaching it to the author is broken, and it assumes a life of its own.

    A version of this article appeared in Village Magazine in 2015.

  • Covid-19: A Simple Moral Calculus

    Introduction

    There are still many unresolved questions regarding the pathogenesis of this disease and especially the reasons underlying the extremely different clinical course, ranging from asymptomatic forms to severe manifestations, including the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). SARS-CoV-2 showed phylogenetic similarities to both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV viruses, and some of the clinical features are shared between COVID-19 and previously identified beta-coronavirus infections. Available evidence indicate[s] that the so called “cytokine storm” an uncontrolled over-production of soluble markers of inflammation which, in turn, sustain an aberrant systemic inflammatory response, is a major [factor] responsible for the occurrence of ARDS.
    Francesca Coperchinia, Luca Chiovatoab, Laura Croceab, Flavia Magriab, Mario Rotondi, ‘The cytokine storm in COVID-19: ‘An overview of the involvement of the chemokine/chemokine-receptor system’ (2020)[i]

    For the first time in the post-war history of epidemics, there is a reversal of which countries are most heavily affected by a disease pandemic. By early May, 2020, more than 90% of all reported deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been in the world’s richest countries; if China, Brazil, and Iran are included in this group, then that number rises to 96%.
    Richard Cash and Vikram Patel, ‘Has COVID-19 subverted global health?’ (2020)[ii]

    The evidence of Hitler’s as well as Stalin’s dictatorship points clearly to the fact that isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the top of the whole structure.
    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

    All this hate and violence [in the world] is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.[iii]
    Sacha Baron Cohen, speech, (2019)

    Comment is free, but facts are sacred.[iv]
    John Scott, editor of The Guardian, (1921)

    In March, 2020 a simple moral calculus seized Western consciousness. Prompted by grim epidemiological assessments, and distressing accounts from emergency doctors in Northern Italy, a call to #flattenthecurve resounded across social media. The global force of hashtag activism led millions to renounce meeting friends and family in an extraordinary display of solidarity with vulnerable older people.

    Twitter, which had previously styled itself ‘the free speech-wing of the free-speech party’[v], allowing all manner of unmoderated content to appear on controversial subjects such as climate change – as well as hate speech from President Donald Trump – abruptly changed policy on March 16th saying it would be:

    Broadening our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information. Rather than reports, we will enforce this in close coordination with trusted partners, including public health authorities and governments, and continue to use and consult with information from those sources when reviewing content.[vi]

    Problematically, however, there is no canonical response to the global pandemic and significant debate has occurred between authoritative sources, as different governments pursue varied policies, with mixed results. This has created potential for national authorities to impugn or disqualify reasonable criticism by grafting health warnings on accounts at variance with a particular government’s guidance, or wider political objectives.

    Twitter has not acted alone, Google has taken unprecedented steps to erase material that violates ‘Community Guidelines’: ‘including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.’[vii]

    Typically, Facebook adopted a laissez faire approach, although users who had read, watched or shared ‘false’ coronavirus content received a pop-up alert urging them to go the World Health Organisation’s website.[viii]

    Whatever one’s view on the importance of social distancing, our readers may recall Ronald Dworkin’s pronouncement that ‘free speech is a condition of legitimate government.’ He argues that the universality of speech as a mode of rational discourse and scientific inquiry could act as truth-seeking counterweight to mass hysteria, negating unreason and prejudice.[ix]

    Moreover, Stephen Sedley, the great English judge, called freedom of expression ‘the lifeblood of democracy;[x] or as George Orwell put it in the introduction to Animal Farm (1945): ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’

    Accepting Covid-19 represents an extraordinary challenge requiring a concerted response, censorship by Big Data in such a blanket form, including of recognised academic authorities, surely only lends credence to conspiracy theories, fomented by the far-right in particular. Disregard for freedom of expression casts doubt over the integrity of scientific inquiry and inhibits rational debate.

    Reappraisal

    The English-speaking world was led to believe in early March that Covid-19 had a mortality rate of between 2% and 3% [xi], and that its spread would be exponential, with a reproductive (R) value of 3 (i.e. one person would infect another three), compared to an R value of 1.28 for seasonal influenza.[xii] Moreover, based on Lombardy’s experience, it seemed the death toll would include hundreds or even thousands of health service workers tending to the sick.

    As the weeks passed the assessment of the mortality rate was scaled back to 1.4%,[xiii] but by then the virus seemed to be moving through Europe like a forest fire at the height of summer. Soon the number of daily mortalities from the disease was dominating news headlines.

    Insofar as possible, most reasonable citizens abided by the popular injunction to #staythefuckathome, entrusting governments with emergency powers to guard against errant behaviour.

    As time passed, however, we learnt that early projections on the infection fatality rate seem to have been significantly wide of the mark. Lone Simonsen professor of population health sciences at Roskilde University in Denmark recently said she expected a infection fatality rate ‘possibly as low as 0.2% or 0.3%’, while Professor Emeritus at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm Professor Johan Giesecke has suggested an even lower figure of 0.1%.[xiv] The U.S. Centre for Disease Control’s best estimate implies a COVID-19 infection fatality rate below 0.3%.[xv]

    Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford has gone lower still estimating an infection fatality rate of between 0.1% and 0.01%.[xvi] She bases this on an assumption the virus has been in circulation far longer than initially assumed, an argument gaining traction, with satellite data suggesting the pandemic hit Wuhan in China a far back as October,[xvii] while France’s ‘first known case’ was in December.[xviii] In truth, however, the infection fatality rate appears to depend hugely on the nature of any society, and not simply its age profile, for reasons to be discussed.

    An aggravated perception of danger is also likely to have occurred through media reports juxtaposing confirmed cases, with mortalities. Thus The Guardian reported on May 16th that, ‘According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker there are 4,531,811 confirmed cases worldwide. The number of people who have lost their lives is 307,001 according to official tolls, but the true number is likely to be much higher.’[xix]

    On a cursory examination, one might assume a infection fatality rate of 6-7%, or “much higher”. Little wonder then that people have been jumping out of the way of one another on footpaths.

    This infection fatality rate may well prove to be considerably higher than a seasonal flu mortality rate of 0.04%, but it is instructive that during one such outbreak in 2017-2018 that there were 61,000 influenza-associated deaths in the United States alone.[xx] Yet these preventable deaths hardly registered on the national consciousness, unlike like the victims of Covid-19.

    As Simon Jenkins, one of the few Guardian commentators who has kept the pandemic in perspective put it: ‘When hysteria is rife, we might try some history.’[xxi]

    Epidemiological Modelling

    Based on a infection fatality rate of 0.9%, in late March an Imperial College team led by Professor Neil Ferguson predicted that unless stern measures were taken there would be half-a-million deaths in the U.K. and over two million in the U.S.:[xxii]

    But as early as March Nobel-prize winning bio-physicist Michael Levitt was identifying common sense flaws in prominent epidemiological modelling, saying:

    In exponential growth models, you assume that new people can be infected every day, because you keep meeting new people. But, if you consider your own social circle, you basically meet the same people every day …. You can meet new people on public transportation, for example; but even on the bus, after sometime most passengers will either be infected or immune.[xxiii]

    Levitt assumed the R rate would decline once reasonable steps were taken, such as social distancing and removing the possibility of close confinement in pubs, at sporting events and other so-called ‘super-spreader’ events. [xxiv] In March Levitt told Ferguson that he had over-estimated the potential death toll by ‘10 or 12 times.’[xxv]

    Moreover, given only one branch seems to have closed its doors over the course of the outbreak in the U.K.,[xxvi] it appears early panic about contagions occurring in supermarkets, which is still leading to people disinfecting their shopping, were largely unfounded.[xxvii]

    Mistaking Flu for Coronavirus

    Mortalities from novel flu viruses tend to be among individuals under the age of forty. This is because ‘emergent viruses resembled those that had circulated previously within the lifespan of then-living people.’[xxviii] This means older peoples’ immune systems are generally better equipped with antibodies to fight off such novel infections.

    As yet it is still unclear whether exposure to other coronaviruses, including the ‘common cold’, provide greater immunity to Covid-19, although one recent paper does suggest, ‘cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating “common cold” coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.’[xxix]

    It remains to be seen whether the death toll from Covid-19 will scale the heights of the ‘Asian’ Flu (H2S2) of 1957, (with a an estimated median R value of 1.65[xxx]) which led to 1 million deaths around the world, including 80,000 in the United States; or the ‘Hong Kong’ flu (H3N2) of 1968 (with an estimated median R value of 1.80) that was responsible for between 1 million and 4 million[xxxi]; let alone the Spanish Influenza (H1N1) outbreak of 1918 that carried off an astonishing fifty million people[xxxii], (with an estimated median R value of 3 [xxxiii]), most of whom were in the prime of their lives.

    Hugh Pennington emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen recently took an optimistic view on the prospect of avoiding a dreaded ‘second wave’ of infections:

    The idea of a second wave comes almost entirely from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The first wave occurred in June and July and the second in October and November. The first was mild, the second was lethal. It is yet to be explained why the infections occurred in waves and why the virus faded away after the first and then returned.

    ‘Flu is very different from Covid-19’ Pennington says, ‘Although both are commonly spread by the respiratory route, and both have infected prime ministers, the more we learn about Covid-19, the less its biology and epidemiology resemble that of flu.’

    He further contends, ‘In the absence of controls, flu has an R rate of seven [presumably he means at the height of a pandemic]; Covid-19’s is between two and three [lower seemingly than the earlier assessment]. And far more than with flu, Covid-19 cases have very commonly occurred in clusters.’

    Conflation with flu modelling may also be discounting wider “imperviousness” than assumed. UCL Professor Karl Friston famously drew on astrophysics to explain Germany’s low infection rate relative to the U.K.:

    it looks as if the low German fatality rate is not due to their superior testing capacity, but rather to the fact that the average German is less likely to get infected and die than the average Brit. Why? There are various possible explanations, but one that looks increasingly likely is that Germany has more immunological “dark matter” – people who are impervious to infection, perhaps because they are geographically isolated or have some kind of natural resistance. This is like dark matter in the universe: we can’t see it, but we know it must be there to account for what we can see.[xxxiv]

    The curious case of Japan also indicates that certain societies – or nations – are considerably more impervious than others. As the country in the world with the oldest population in the world, and with heavy urban densities, one would have expected the virus to have had a devastating impact there, yet:

    No restrictions were placed on residents’ movements, and businesses from restaurants to hairdressers stayed open. No high-tech apps that tracked people’s movements were deployed. The country doesn’t have a center for disease control. And even as nations were exhorted to “test, test, test,” Japan has tested just 0.2% of its population — one of the lowest rates among developed countries.[xxxv]

    Japan’s population of over 125 million experienced less than 1,000 deaths from Covid-19.

    Nonetheless, apart from underlying exacerbating factors such as population density and an ageing population – relative to its Irish neighbour at least[xxxvi] – as well as a high obesity rate,[xxxvii] the U.K.’s high death toll can, at least in part, be attributed to Boris Johnson’s government’s ‘sleepwalking’ through the beginning of the crisis,[xxxviii] almost wlilfully ignoring the threat, and putting out highly inappropriate messages, including on shaking hands.

    Nevertheless, the suggestion aired on an episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches that 13,000 deaths would have been avoided if a lockdown or stay-at-home order had been introduced at the beginning of March came from a health analyst, George Batchelor, rather than a recognised academic authority, and should be treated with caution.

    Revealingly, in Hong Kong where 90% of cases were contact traced, ‘the number of individual secondary cases was significantly higher within social settings such as bars and restaurants compared to family or work exposures.’ In time it may be determined that Boris Johnson’s hesitation in closing pubs was his most costly mistake.[xxxix]

    QALY

    In Italy, where average life expectancy is approximately eighty-three-years-of-age, the average age of mortality from Covid-19 was approximately eighty years-of-age.[xl] This figure includes over one hundred health care workers.[xli] Many of these premature deaths occurred in the clusters that Hugh Pennington refers to – perhaps from heavy ‘viral load’[xlii] encountered in poorly ventilated hospitals and care home facilities.

    The overall loss of life years from the Covid-19 pandemic may prove minimal, however, compared to novel flu viruses, which have mainly afflicted the young over the past century.

    This is not to diminish the value of any life, but public health interventions are conventionally given a comparative value (QALY – Quality-adjusted Life Year), ‘which is routinely used as a summary measure of health outcome for economic evaluation, which incorporates the impact on both the quantity and quality of life.’ The financial cost of any intervention, including a lockdown or stay-at-home order, must be measured against its impact on both quantity and quality of life.

    There are now serious question marks around the efficacy of lockdowns. Using ‘Bayesian’ modelling a team led by Professor Simon Wood in Bristol University supports Michael Levin’s assessment that early epidemiological models were flawed, suggesting that ‘the number of new daily infections in the UK peaked some days before lock down was implemented, although it does not completely rule out a slightly later peak.’[xliii]

    Furthermore, a quasi-experimental study carried out by the University of East Anglia concluded that stay at home orders, or lockdowns were ‘not associated with any independent additional impact.’[xlvi] Another recent study in Nature, however, offers a different assessment, but includes data from China, which may be unreliable, and where the extremity of the measures are  incompatible with democratic norms. Lockdown advocates also generally assume a higher infection fatality rate than recent reappraisals.

    During lockdown, across Europe and beyond, cases and deaths occured in clusters: within enclosed spaces such as care homes,[xliv] hospitals and meat packing plants,[xlv] but also households. Hashtag activism informed the public in most Western countries about the pandemic, who were refraining from unnecessary social encounters, and travel, already.

    This may be why the Norwegian Institute for Public Health has recently called for the government to avoid such a far-reaching measure if the country is hit by a second wave.[xlvii] Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg also bravely admitted before a national television audience: ‘I probably took many of the decisions out of fear.’[xlviii]

    The adverse consequences of lockdowns – including a spike in domestic violence[xlix], its effect on children[l] and unprecedented economic impacts, especially on SMEs and casual workers, also cannot be discounted.

    Worst of all has been the effect of draconian lockdowns on developing countries, such as India. Vikram Patel and Richard Cash (both of Harvard University) wrote in The Lancet:

    we suggest that countries must let people get on with their lives—to work, earn money, and put food on the table. Let shop keepers open and sell their wares and provide services. Let construction workers return to building sites. Allow farmers to harvest their crops and to transport them to be sold on the open market. Allow health workers to do their daily work as before, with sensible precautions such as use of gloves and masks to minimise the risk of exposure to the virus. And allow the average citizen to travel freely with restrictions only applied to clusters where lockdowns are necessary. Livelihoods are an imperative for saving lives. Some will say such an approach, which runs the risk of spreading disease, implies that the lives of poor people are not as valuable as those in wealthy countries. Nothing could be further from the truth. The policies of widespread lockdowns and a focus on high-technology health care might unintentionally lead to even more sickness and death, disproportionately affecting the poor.

    These arguments also apply in wealthier societies, as many among the poor do not have the privilege of being able to work from home, and may participate in the black economy. Government supports are generally inadequate and do not last indefinitely.

    The preceding points are not a definitive argument in favour of Sweden’s policies during the pandemic, faults in which have been acknowledged by its chief architect Anders Tegnell. But it is important for policy makers to recognise the cost of lockdowns, especially for extended periods. Also, importantly, handing discretionary powers to police forces in such circumstances establishes a dangerous precedent.

    Fatalism

    In solitude we have been consumed by a story that feeds into pressing contemporary dilemmas, including on the role of scientific expertise. This can be situated within a long-standing division in Western culture between rationality and intuition, evident during World War II in the conflict between Communism and Fascism.

    As Martin Glover put it:

    Stalin, as a version of the Enlightenment idea of redesigning society on a rational basis, shared the catastrophic implications of carrying out such a project without moral or human restraints. Nazism was against the universalism of Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers. It was tribal: not rights of man, but the German right to lebensraum … Stalinism shows what can happen when Enlightenment ideas are applied wrongly, Nazism shows what can happen when unenlightened ideas are applied rightly.[liii]

    A form of this has spilled into the so-called Culture Wars, including identity politics, that have raged in particular since the 1990s, culminating in Brexit and President Trump, but it is also perhaps evident at a psychological level within most of our personalities. Importantly, excesses of rationality can be as destructive as Fascism, as we saw under the guise of Communism.

    Responses to the pandemic have also been conditioned by prior faith in, or suspicion of, the Western medical system – including from so-called anti-vaxxers – with Populist right-wing politicians dismissing concerns about a bad flu,[liv] and offering to take it on the chin.[lv] In contrast, some on the left seem to have viewed the crisis as an opportunity to enlarge the role of the State, leading to countervailing scientific authorities to be dismissed on ideological grounds.

    There may also have been a tendency, evident in The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere, to heighten outrage against the administrations of Donald Trump in the U.S. and Boris Johnson in the U.K. by front-loading mortality statistics.

    Another explanation for the extreme response of individuals who consented to prolonged periods of self-isolation – including those of an age profile suggesting they had little to worry about themselves – is an evident fatalism haunting a globally dominant capitalist system. As David Graeber put it:

    Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other has, yet at the same time, capitalism seems to be uniquely incapable of conceiving of its own eternity. Could these two facts be linked?[lvi]

    An understandable fatalism in the face of climate change and mass extinctions, perhaps spilled into reactions to this pandemic, with self-isolation a form of repentance.

    Moreover, the idea of plague as representing divine retribution may operate at an unconscious level. Apart from Biblical episodes such as that visited on Egypt, it is found in ancient epics such as Homer’s Iliad. Thus, when King Agamemnon makes a war prize of Chryseis the daughter of Chryses a priest of Apollo, the sun god takes revenge by unleashing poison-tipped arrows against the Greek army, many of whom succumb to plague.

    More recently, films, such as Outbreak (1995) starring and Dustin Hoffman, and novels such as Jose Saramago’s Blindness (1997), have played on these fears.

    What was Covid-19 but God or Gaia punishing us for our consumerist sins?

    Guardian Angle

    The so-called hashtag activism that prompted civil society to take preventive measures against Covid-19, and which led to many governments to adopt draconian suppression policies, including lockdowns, has been led in the U.K. and Ireland in particular by The Guardian newspaper

    The free digital site with an estimated 42 million monthly visitors[lvii] devoted unrelenting rolling coverage to Covid-19, emphasising the simple moral calculus with a banner across its home page. This has been to the almost complete exclusion of all other content for the months of March, April and May.

    The Guardian’s loss of proportion, and nuance, has been particularly damaging as it is the most trusted newspaper brand in the U.K., including, importantly, among readers aged 18 to 29.[lviii] This may be traced to its position as a global news provider of free content dependent on maintaining an enormous click rate to derive a profit.

    In a recent memoir the former editor Alan Rusbridger describes how: ‘Only by going for reach could you make up for … the ‘frightening disparity’ between the yields in traditional and online media.’[lix]

    He reveals that by mid-2018:

    The Guardian was reaching 150 million browsers each month and a billion page views per month. There was no talk of paywalls: even so, reader revenues had overtaken advertising. And digital revenues – at £109 million – had, for the first time, overtaken the £107.5 million of print revenues. The paper was confidently talking of hitting break-even in 2018/19.[lx]

    The difficulty is that once you have reached such a high threshold, and have taken on hundreds of staff, you have to keep that readership transfixed.

    The Guardian’s increasingly monopolistic position has come at the expense of journalistic diversity, as smaller publishers cannot compete with its reach. Moreover the perceived reliability of its reporting creates a difficulty for competitors wishing to mount a pay wall without significant marketing investment. In such a squeezed field alternatives are increasingly the preserve of billionaires, such as Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers, Mike Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos. This is having a corrosive effect on democracy, as many of these publications are ideologically tainted, and support vested interests.

    Underling all this, the number of American journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009,[lxi] This pattern has been seen all around the world as revenues diminish and workloads increase. In the U.K. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories. They discovered the average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. Or, to put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time they used to have to do their jobs.[lxii]

    This results in what Nick Davies has described as ‘churnalism’, whereby most journalists are passive processors of ‘unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve a political or commercial interest.’[lxiii]

    Hyperbolic Coverage

    An exhaustive assessment of Guardian coverage is beyond the scope of this article, but two examples of their unsatisfactory reporting throughout this crisis should hopefully suffice.

    On Friday, May 15th an article ran under the headline: ‘Dying to go out to eat? Here’s how viruses like Covid-19 spread in a restaurant’.[lxiv] It referred to a video experiment simulating ‘how quickly germs can be spread across a variety of surfaces in environments such as restaurant buffets and cruise ships.’

    To begin with, one guest of 10 at a restaurant buffet is shown with the substance on his hands meant as a stand-in for the coronavirus. Over the course of a typical dining period, the rest of the guests behave in predictable fashion, selecting utensils from serving stations, enjoying their food, checking their phones and so on.

    At the end of the experiment the black light is turned on and the substance is revealed to be smeared everywhere: plates, foodstuff, utensils and even all over some of the guests’ faces.

    A few paragraphs into the article, however, a second experiment demonstrates the positive effect of improved hygiene techniques, after ‘the “infected” person and the other diners take the simple precaution of washing their hands, and utensils and other implements are cleaned or replaced.

    The first difficulty with the study itself is that it is conducted in a canteen-style restaurant – a worst case scenario where cutlery and plates are exposed to many hands. But the most obvious problem is that the headline feeds into a narrative of fear and paranoia, to the detriment of anyone struggling to keep a restaurant afloat.

    Another headline from May 26th paints a lurid picture: ‘Global report: ‘disaster’ looms for millions of children as WHO warns of second peak’.[lxv] Yet it soon apparent that the “disastrous” consequences for children, who are more likely to die after being struck by lightening than from a dose of Covid-19 and barely register as mortalities from the virus,[lxvi] is from increased vulnerability to forced labour and underage marriage. The “second peak” warned of by the WHO in the headline is a non-sequitur that has nothing to do with any elevated danger to children,

    Choice of headline is crucial as many browsers simply scan news sites. A 2010 Pew analysis found that the average visitor spent only 3 minutes 4 seconds per session on the typical news site. That compared with a 2005 survey showing about half of U.S. newspaper readers spent more than thirty minutes reading a daily paper.[lxvii]

    What has gone wrong?

    Clay Shirky writes in Here Comes Everybody (2008):

    When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to a bee … The hive is a social device, a piece of bee information technology that provides a platform, literally, for the communication and co-ordination that keep the colony viable. Individual bees can’t be understood separately from the colony or from their shared, co-created environment. So it is with human networks.

    He asserts that the ‘Web didn’t introduce a new competitor into the old eco-system, as USA Today had done. The Web created a new ecosystem.’[lxviii]

    The Guardian embraced a form of ‘collaboration media’, which companies and politicians rapidly learned to respect, and fear. Former editor Alan Rusbridger recognised that ‘social media would disrupt conventional politics and transform the speed at which it happened.’ He acknowledges, however, that, ‘It was, obviously, not necessarily good at complexity – though it could link to the complexity. It could be frustratingly reductive. It didn’t patiently and painstakingly report, in the way a good new organisation still did. It was to some extent parasitical.’[lxix]

    Rusbridger also quotes former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans to the effect that ‘an investigation only really began to count once the readers and even the journalists were bored with it.’[lxx] But in an all-consuming demand for clicks, and in the frenzied political era of Trump and Brexit, balance has been lost. Lacking detached and independent journalism we have walked into a prolonged social experiment that will take considerable unravelling.

    A New Hashtag

    On May 25th, 2020, George Perry Floyd, a 46-year-old black man was killed when a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck during an arrest for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. His death brought a wave of demonstrations in major U.S. cities that have spread to other countries, with many protestors donning masks as protection against the virus.

    The hashtag generation has discovered another noble cause in #blacklivesmatter – to be clear #flattenthecurve was certainly well motivated – but let us hope balance and nuance is not lost, and that a deadening conformity does not ensue in debates over race, poverty and the ambit of the state.

    The extraordinary scenes witnessed around the world could also be interpreted as a proxy for societies throwing off the heavy knee of lockdowns, containing a basic human impulse to interact with one another, honouring the exuberant Dionysian element in our nature that had been contained by Apollonian rationality.

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s unnamed narrator from Notes from the Underground (1864) seems to envisage the poles of this division. First, he describes the archetypal rationalist that ‘scientifically’ predicts all outcomes in society:

    All human actions will then of course be calculated, mathematically, like logarithm tables up to 108,000, and recorded in a calendar; or even better, well-intentioned publications will then appear, like the present-day encyclopaedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and recorded that there will no longer be deliberate acts or adventures in the world.

    But he suggests this would create a reaction:

    I, for example, wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the midst of all this reasonableness that is to come, suddenly and quite unaccountably some gentleman with an ignoble, or rather a reactionary and mocking physiognomy were to appear and, arms akimbo, say to us all: “Now, gentlemen, what about giving all this reasonableness a good kick with the sole purpose of sending all those logarithms to hell for a while so we can live for a while in accordance with our own stupid will![lxxi]

    Thus an excess of rationality may create conditions for profound irrationality, or even absurdity in the case of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s felicitous calculus.

    What Next?

    We still have to address the public health crisis of a pandemic, requiring substantial reforms in healthcare, architecture and spatial design to contend with a disease that should not be treated as a flu pandemic.

    Once unsustainable lockdowns ease, Western societies with susceptible populations must adapt to life with the virus. A policy of elimination is unrealistic and even cruel, unless we essentially exclude entrants from the outside world, as in New Zealand, or become a police state like China.

    Like a thief in the night, Covid-19 discovered weaknesses in the wealthiest countries in the world that also happen to be among the most unequal. Most obviously it found its way to older individuals, many weakened by increasingly poor diets and sedentarism that is behind a pernicious obesity pandemic.

    It has already been argued that life expectancy is declining in the United States,[lxxii] after two centuries during which it climbed steadily. Our lives, and diets, are simply unsustainable, and perhaps Covid-19 is nature’s (God or Gaia’s?) way of telling us so. The question is whether we are prepared to adopt the environmental approaches to lower the risk of further zoonotic episodes that lead to viruses.

    On a more basic level we need to retrofit buildings – embracing the idea of a healthy home[lxxiii] or workplace that diminishes viral load – and redesign transport systems to prevent contagions. As a priority we require hospital design for better infection control as ‘Building ventilation, whether natural or mechanical serves to dilute droplets nuclei in the air and is the single most important engineering control in the prevention of transmission of airborne infections.’[lxxiv]

    Yet surely we cannot lose the joy of social interaction, or turn romance into an online transaction controlled by algorithms. Great gatherings of people are still the lifeblood of politics, the arts and sport. For these to become historical curiosities, outlawed indefinitely as “super-spreader” events, would be lamentable.

    We have to shake the trauma off somehow, or dance it off perhaps. Above all children cannot be confounded by the fear of their parents and other adults, and have natural inclinations to play frustrated indefinitely. Let us restore the friendly hug or kiss in time. We have to accept a measure of death in exchange for the expression of lives we all value. Society cannot be broken by social distancing.

    Another vital lessons from this pandemic is that we require greater freedom of expression and media diversity. It is unacceptable for unaccountable corporate bodies such as Twitter, Google and Facebook to control narratives indefinitely. In truth, people may have to get used to paying for journalism once again, or at least acknowledge that without payment you are (mostly) getting clickbait.

    In writing ‘the first draft of history’ on Covid-19, The Guardian may be excused for making errors, but nor should the publication be viewed as a neutral conduit of facts either, unmotivated by profit, and without a seat at the highest tables of power. As Rusbridger reveals in response to the Edward Snowden and Julian Assange accounts: ‘I once remarked to a senior intelligence figure that the British and American governments, instead of condemning our role, should go down on their knees in thanks that we were there as such a careful filter.’[lxxv]

    All Images © Daniele Idini

    [i] Francesca Coperchinia, Luca Chiovatoab, Laura Croceab, Flavia Magriab, Mario Rotondi, ‘The cytokine storm in COVID-19: An overview of the involvement of the chemokine/chemokine-receptor system’ (2020)https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359610120300927

    [ii] Richard Cash and Vikram Patel, ‘Has COVID-19 subverted global health?’ May 5th, 2020, The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31089-8/fulltext

    [iii] Untitled, ‘’Greatest propaganda machine in history’: Sacha Baron Cohen slams Facebook, other social media companies’, NBC November 22nd, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/greatest-propaganda-machine-history-sacha-baron-cohen-slams-facebook-other-n1089471

    [iv] Simon Rogers, ‘Data journalism in action: what is Facts are Sacred about?’ April 4th, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/apr/04/data-journalism-facts-are-sacred

    [v] Josh Halliday, ‘Twitter’s Tony Wang: ‘We are the free speech wing of the free speech party’’ March 22nd, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech

    [vi] Vijaya Gadde and Matt Derella, ‘An update on our continuity strategy during COVID-19’,  https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/An-update-on-our-continuity-strategy-during-COVID-19.html

    [vii] Jon Levine, ‘YouTube censors epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski for opposing lockdown’, New York Post, May 16th, 2020,   https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/youtube-censors-epidemiologist-knut-wittkowski-for-opposing-lockdown/

    [viii] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Facebook alters virus action after damning misinformation report’, BBC, April 3rd, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52309094

    [ix] Ronald Dworkin ‘The Right to Ridicule’, March 23rd, 2006, The New York Review of Books, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/03/23/the-right-to-ridicule/, accessed 26/4/19.

    [x] Stephen Sedley, Law and the Whirligig of Time, London, Hart Publishing, 2018.

    [xi] Sharon Begey, ‘Lower death rate estimates for coronavirus, especially for non-elderly, provide glimmer of hope’, March 16th, Stat, https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/

    [xii] Matthew Biggerstaff, Simon Cauchemez, Carrie Reed, Manoj Gambhir & Lyn Finelli, ‘Estimates of the reproduction number for seasonal, pandemic, and zoonotic influenza: a systematic review of the literature’ BMC Infectious Diseases, September, 2014, https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2334-14-480

    [xiii] Ibid, Sharon Begley, Ihttps://www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/lower-coronavirus-death-rate-estimates/

    [xiv] Justin Fox, ‘The Coronavirus is worse than the flu, bro’ Bloomberg, April 24th, 2020 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-24/is-coronavirus-worse-than-the-flu-blood-studies-say-yes-by-far

    [xv] Jacob Sullum, ‘The CDC’s New ‘Best Estimate’ Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%’, Reason, 24th of May, 2020, https://reason.com/2020/05/24/the-cdcs-new-best-estimate-implies-a-covid-19-infection-fatality-rate-below-0-3/

    [xvi] Freddie Sayers,  ‘ Sunetra Gupta: Covid-19 is on the way out’ Unherd, May 21st, 2020, https://unherd.com/2020/05/oxford-doubles-down-sunetra-gupta-interview/

    [xvii] Kaitlyn Folmer and Josh Margolin, ‘Satellite data suggests coronavirus may have hit China earlier: Researchers’, ABC News, June 8th, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/International/satellite-data-suggests-coronavirus-hit-china-earlier-researchers/story?id=71123270

    [xviii] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: France’s first known case ‘was in December’, BBC, May 5th, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52526554

    [xix] Guardian staff and agencies, ‘Global report: US House passes $3tn stimulus as experts track Covid-19-linked syndrome’, The Guardian, May 16th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/global-report-democrats-push-for-3tn-stimulus-as-experts-track-covid-linked-syndrome?fbclid=IwAR1tpHpfNr_3zdSY68Yw6BUpUfAM6S56Dke8VANSk21Fhx2OQZO9pRDzFug

    [xx] Center for Disease Control, ‘Estimated Influenza Illnesses, Medical visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths in the United States — 2017–2018 influenza season’, https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

    [xxi] Simon Jenkins, ‘Why I’m taking the coronavirus hype with a pinch of salt’, The Guardian, March 6th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/06/coronavirus-hype-crisis-predictions-sars-swine-flu-panics

    [xxii] David Adam, ‘Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19’, Nature, April 3rd, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

    [xxiii] Graig Graziosi, ‘Coronavirus: Nobel Prize winner predicts US will get through crisis sooner than expected’, The Independent, March 24th, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-michael-levitt-china-italy-a9422986.html

    [xxiv] Richard A. Stein, ‘Super-spreaders in infectious diseases’, International Journal of Infectious Diseases, April, 2011,  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971211000245

    [xxv] Tom Morgan, ‘ Lockdown saved no lives and may have cost them, Nobel Prize winner believes’, 23rd of May, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/23/lockdown-saved-no-lives-may-have-cost-nobel-prize-winner-believes/

    [xxvi] Amelia Winn, ‘Lidl becomes first supermarket chain to CLOSE a UK store after staff catch coronavirus – but shoppers are told doors will reopen on Monday’, Daily Mail, May 3rd, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8281995/Lidl-supermarket-chain-CLOSE-UK-store-staff-catch-coronavirus.html

    [xxvii] Emily Holden, ‘Do you need to wash your groceries? And other advice for shopping safely’, The Guardian, April 2nd, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/do-you-need-to-wash-your-groceries-and-other-advice-for-shopping-safely

    [xxviii] Tom Reichert, Gerardo Chowell & Jonathan A McCullers, ‘The age distribution of mortality due to influenza: pandemic and peri-pandemic’ BMC Medicine, December 12th, 2012, https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7015-10-162

    [xxix] Alba Grifoni, Daniela Weiskopf, Sydney I. Ramirez, Davey M. Smith, Shane Crotty, Alessandro Sette, Cell, ‘Targets of T Cell Responses to SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus in Humans with COVID-19 Disease and Unexposed Individuals’ May 14th, 2020, https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30610-3

    [xxx] Matthew Biggerstaff, Simon Cauchemez, Carrie Reed, Manoj Gambhir, and Lyn Finelli, ‘Estimates of the reproduction number for seasonal, pandemic, and zoonotic influenza: a systematic review of the literature’, BMC Infectious Diseases, September 4th, 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4169819/

    [xxxi] Mark Honigsbaum, ‘Revisiting the 1957 and 1968 influenza pandemics‘,The Lancet, May 25th, 2020,  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31201-0/fulltext

    [xxxii] Center for Disease Control, ‘1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus)’ https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html

    [xxxiii] Emilia Vynnycky, Amy Trindall, Punam Mangtani, ‘Estimates of the reproduction numbers of Spanish influenza using morbidity data’, International Journal of Epidemiology, May 17th, 2007, https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/36/4/881/667165

    [xxxiv] Laura Spinney, ‘Covid-19 expert Karl Friston: ‘Germany may have more immunological “dark matter”’’ The Guardian, May 31st, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/covid-19-expert-karl-friston-germany-may-have-more-immunological-dark-matter

    [xxxv] Lisa Dua and Grace Huang, ‘Did Japan Just Beat the Virus Without Lockdowns or Mass Testing?’ Bloomberg, May 22nd, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-22/did-japan-just-beat-the-virus-without-lockdowns-or-mass-testing

    [xxxvi] Nicola Davis and Rory Carrol, ‘ Experts divided over comparison of UK and Ireland’s coronavirus records’, The Guardian, April 13th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/experts-divided-comparison-uk-ireland-coronavirus-record

    [xxxvii] Untitled, ‘ Obesity crisis: The UK’s weight problem in seven charts’, Sky News, August 20th, 2019, https://news.sky.com/story/seven-charts-on-the-uks-obesity-problem-11583981

    [xxxviii] Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Leake, ‘Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster’, The Sunday Times, April 19th, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh

    [xxxix] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Prime Minister Boris Johnson orders pubs, restaurants and gyms to close across the UK’ March 21st, 2020, Sky News, https://www.skysports.com/more-sports/other-sports/news/12040/11961096/coronavirus-prime-minister-boris-johnson-orders-pubs-restaurants-and-gyms-to-close-across-the-uk

    [xl] ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in Italy as of June 3, 2020, by age group’, Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deaths-by-region-in-italy/

    [xli] Untitled, ‘Italy says number of doctors killed by coronavirus passes 100’ France24, April 9th 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200409-italy-says-number-of-doctors-killed-by-coronavirus-passes-100

    [xlii] Marta Gaglia and Seema Lakdawala, ‘What we do and do not know about COVID-19’s infectious dose and viral load’, The Conversation, April 14th, 2020, https://theconversation.com/what-we-do-and-do-not-know-about-covid-19s-infectious-dose-and-viral-load-135991

    [xliii] Simon Wood et al, ‘UK Covid-19 infection peak may have fallen before lockdown, new analysis shows’, May 7th, Bristol University, May 7th, 2020, https://www.bristol.ac.uk/maths/news/2020/peak-lockdown.html?fbclid=IwAR2g2Mr0IudkXCnQo8leIdVBueq-fdkLNGk9lQjPYrrrO7GW2jfMT19Hg1Q

    [xliv] Observer Reporters, ‘Across the world, figures reveal horrific toll of care home deaths’, The Guardian, May 16th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/16/across-the-world-figures-reveal-horrific-covid-19-toll-of-care-home-deaths

    [xlv] Megan Molteni, ‘Why Meatpacking Plants Have Become Covid-19 Hot Spots’, Wired, May 7th, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/why-meatpacking-plants-have-become-covid-19-hot-spots/

    [xlvi] Press Release, ‘New study reveals blueprint for getting out of Covid-19 lockdown’, May 6th, 2020, University of East Anglia  https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/-/new-study-reveals-blueprint-for-getting-out-of-covid-19-lockdown

    [xlvii] Untitled, ‘Norway could have controlled infection without lockdown’, The Local, May 22nd, 2020, https://www.thelocal.no/20200522/norway-could-have-controlled-infection-without-lockdown-health-chief?fbclid=IwAR1jJTUpQLXLgONVqWmLJHQ2-rd-FG7794lONTsaquGaw0DJmhIUEOqWLwk

    [xlviii] Richard Orange, ‘Coronavirus: Norway wonders if it should have been more like Sweden’, The Telegraph, May 30th, 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/coronavirus-norway-wonders-should-have-like-sweden/

    [xlix] Emma Graham-Harrison, Angela Giuffrida in Rome, Helena Smith in Athens and Liz Ford, ‘Lockdowns around the world bring rise in domestic violence’, The Guardian, March 28th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/28/lockdowns-world-rise-domestic-violence

    [l] United Nations Sustainable Development Group, ‘Policy Brief: The Impact of COVID-19 on children’ April, 2020, https://unsdg.un.org/resources/policy-brief-impact-covid-19-children?fbclid=IwAR35l8582cnFgE_sWLurILYXeGWyg_PYSo8BApmmsarSwa_8_FQGzafxoI0

    [li] Johan Giesecke ‘The invisible pandemic’, The Lancet, May 5th, 2020, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31035-7/fulltext

    [lii] Jon Henley, ‘We should have done more, admits architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy’, June 3rd, 2020, The Guardian,  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/architect-of-sweden-coronavirus-strategy-admits-too-many-died-anders-tegnell

    [liii] Jonathan Glover, A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Pimlico, London, 1999, p.394

    [liv] Oliver Milman, ‘Seven of Donald Trump’s most misleading coronavirus claims’, The Guardian, March 30th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/28/trump-coronavirus-misleading-claims

    [lv] Michelle Cottle, ‘Boris Johnson Should Have Taken His Own Medicine’, New York Times, March 27th, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/boris-johnson-coronavirus.html

    [lvi] David Graeber, Debt – The First 5,000 Years, Melville, London, 2011, p.357

    [lvii] ‘Top 15 Most Popular News Websites | February 2020’, http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/news-websites

    [lviii] Jim Waterson, ‘Guardian named UK’s most trusted newspaper‘ The Guardian, October 31st, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/oct/31/guardian-rated-most-trusted-newspaper-brand-in-uk-study

    [lix] Alan Rusbridger, The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2018, p.145

    [lx] Ibid, p.348

    [lxi] Ibid, p.163

    [lxii] Ibid, p.181

    [lxiii] Ibid p.181

    [lxiv] Luke O’Neill, ‘Dying to go out to eat? Here’s how viruses like Covid-19 spread in a restaurant’, The Guardian, May 15th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/15/how-coronavirus-spreads-in-restaurant-video

    [lxv] Guardian Staff and Agencies, ‘Global report: ‘disaster’ looms for millions of children as WHO warns of second peak’, The Guardian, May 26th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/global-report-disaster-looms-for-millions-of-children-as-who-warns-of-second-peak

    [lxvi] Statista, ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in Italy as of June 3, 2020, by age group’  https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105061/coronavirus-deaths-by-region-in-italy/

    [lxvii] Rusbridger, Ibid, p.275

    [lxviii] Quoted in Rusbridger, Ibid, p.135

    [lxix] Ibidp.143

    [lxx] Ibid, p.161

    [lxxi] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground, Alma Books, London, p.23-24

    [lxxii] S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., Douglas J. Passaro, M.D., Ronald C. Hershow, M.D., Jennifer Layden, M.P.H., Bruce A. Carnes, Ph.D., Jacob Brody, M.D., Leonard Hayflick, Ph.D., Robert N. Butler, M.D., David B. Allison, Ph.D., and David S. Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D. ‘ A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century’, The New England Journal of Medicine, March 17th, 2005,  https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr043743

    [lxxiii] Kate Hamblet, ‘How to Design a Healthy Home ~ An Architect’s Blueprint’, HealthyGreenSavvy, January 5th, 2019, https://www.healthygreensavvy.com/healthy-home/

    [lxxiv] Fatimah Lateef, ‘Hospital design for better infection control’, Journal of Emergencies, Shock and Trauma, 2009, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776365/

    [lxxv] Ibid, Rusbridger, p.250

  • I Do Not Consent

    I didn’t particularly want to write this article.  I didn’t want to get involved in the whole online social media circus of opinion and rebuttal, triggering and offense. But I feel like I have something to say, and what I have to say is important. So I’ll speak my truth.

    About a month ago, I completely removed my attention from the hysterical world of 24-hour news cycles, social media, the conspiracy theories, the craziness, the arguments and rebuttals, the fear, projection and lashing out. So I stopped watching the news and left Facebook, and very liberating it was too.

    The collective process the world was going through as a result of Covid-19 (Coronavirus) was taking its toll on me. I had never experienced such fear and anger online before. People were literally lashing out, blurting their unprocessed emotions, fear and anger, all over social media, mirroring perhaps, conversations that were occurring in family homes all around the world.

    Instead, I put my energy into the world around me: learning new skills, fishing, growing food, renovating a cottage. Putting my energy and vision into creating a new reality. But something is making me speak out at this time.

    I would like to preface what I am saying by acknowledging that Covid-19 is a real threat that has caused great loss and suffering to many families all around the world.

    The collective hysteria resulting from it, however, is every bit as damaging as the virus itself.

    On the nature of fear

    My background is as an outdoor guide. I spent two decades guiding in remote and sometimes dangerous rivers and mountains on four continents. During that time I became very familiar with the nature of fear. A large part of the psychological aspect of guiding in adventurous environments involves managing people’s fears.

    Solo seakayaking around Ireland, 2014.

    One lesson I learnt beyond any doubt is that fear is contagious. Just like a virus. If one person in a group becomes fearful, it spreads like wildfire throughout the entire group, a legacy of our evolutionary heritage, and the fight or flight mechanism.

    What we have witnessed, in the past few months, is the entire human species in fight, flight or freeze mode. It is collective anxiety on a global scale, amplified by social media and hysterical media coverage.

    Our political leaders, for the most part doing their best and responding to an unprecedented situation, were pressured by a fearful media and hysterical public to do something, anything, and naturally they reacted from a place of fear.

    As anyone with a background in adventure sports will know, good decisions are never, ever made from a place of great fear or hysteria.

    The Indian philosopher Krishnamurti wrote: ‘Fear of any kind breeds illusion … where there is fear there is obviously no freedom … It makes one tell lies, it corrupts one in various ways, it makes the mind empty, shallow.’

    I am not suggesting that our government in Ireland is consciously part of some nefarious plot to undermine democracy. Not intentionally anyway. But democracy has nevertheless been undermined as a result of the hysterical response to Covid-19.

    In the UK, former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption said: ‘This is what a police state is like, it is a state in which a government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes’. He has called the lockdown ‘the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history’. When great legal minds are telling us that the rule of law is being undermined, we should listen.

    Our civil liberties and civil rights are not something that we be taken for granted. We forget now that Irish independence and the fight for freedom came at a high cost. ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’, is a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson.

    It does not matter whether you consider yourself to be politically on the left, centre, or the right, the erosion of civil liberties that has occurred in most Western democracies over the last few months is something that should concern you. if the there is one thing the history of the last century has taught us, it is that tyranny can take many forms.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

    You may well have great trust in our current government. That is not the point. The point is that future governments may well use the same arguments to repress civil liberties. Consider the possibility of a less benign government with opposing political views to your own coming into power in the future, and using the precedents set at this time to undermine your civil liberties. We do not have to look far back in history to see that such events are very possible. Once a precedent is established, it is an easy path to follow.

    Over two thousand years ago, Plato warned of the dangers of tyranny arising from a fearful and chaotic democracy. The people, when afraid, beg for a strong leader to come to save them. Tyranny can arise, not from a despot seizing power, but through a fearful public demanding protection from an external threat. This threat is real, but is overblown: ‘This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.’

    Many other great political thinkers have expounded on the idea of the tyranny of the masses. The great Irish political theorist Edmund Burke, wrote in a 1790 letter that ‘The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny’.

    John Stuart Mill in his famous essay ‘On Liberty’ (1859) spoke of the need to protect against, ‘the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling … as the majority opinion may not be the correct opinion.’

    We confront a dystopian nightmare of an Orwellian society of constant surveillance, with the government and/or corporations controlling what we can think, what we say, and how we act.

    Militaristic language has become all too commonplace, thereby justifying extreme wartime measures. We talk of ‘front line’ workers. Much as these amazing doctors and nurses are doing a wonderful job and should be commended, there is no ‘front line’.

    This is not a war. You cannot fight a war against a part of Nature. That is like fighting a war against yourself, a mass collective schizophrenia. This is part of the problem with our current rational-materialistic society: in our arrogance we believe ourselves to be somehow separate from Nature. This crisis is showing us clearly that we are not.

    The following liberties have been undermined since the start of the Covid-19 hysteria:

    1. The right to personal liberty and to protest. 

    Article 40.4 of the Irish constitution guarantees a right to liberty, while Article 40.6.1 says you have a right to assemble and to associate freely.

    The right to assemble and to protest is an essential part of any functioning democracy. Remember the mass civil unrest that was occurring in Hong Kong and France before Christmas? This has disappeared without a trace. Are we no longer allowed to march on the streets should the need to protest arise? What is now stopping future governments using the ‘health and safety’ of the public as an excuse to crack down on civil disobedience?

    1. The right to free speech. 

    One of the most important of our human rights, established as early as 1789 in Article XI of the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ – ‘The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely’. Article 40.6.1 of the Irish Constitution guarantees a right to express freely  your convictions and opinions .

    However, this right has come under attack in recent months, with censorship becoming very prevalent. Any questioning of the mainstream narrative quickly gets labelled ‘false news’ or a ‘conspiracy’ theory, thereby stifling debate and discussion. Who has the power to decide what is false news? Do you, or do I? Or does some unelected Youtube or Google content executive?

    The mainstream media and social media companies have unprecedented power to manipulate the narrative. Social media and search engine algorithms can effectively control what we read and see, and therefore control the reality we live in. Who decides what we should think, and who holds this absolute and terrifying power?

    I may not agree with what you are saying, but I absolutely respect your right to say it. Otherwise, one day, we may find that right has been taken from us.

    1. The right to privacy.

    Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.’

    The seemingly benign concept of using a ‘contact tracing’ app could easily be misused by governments to normalise mass surveillance of citizens at all times, in the interests of public safety. Keeping track at all times of where you go and who you are with, a smartphone becomes like a voluntary ankle tag. With smartphones becoming almost essential to function in society, this mass surveillance is constant.

    One of the very worst tendencies this crisis has brought out in people is of of neighbours spying on one another, settling old grievances by informing. Have people forgotten already how secret police, such as the Stasi in East Germany, controlled populations by encouraging this behaviour?

    The French philosopher Michel Foucault believed that: ‘the power of a goverment is co-extensive with its ability to surveil’,  and wrote about the symbolic prison of the Panopticon, in which prisoners never knew when they were being observed, so were obliged to be on their best behaviour at all times. We are living in a digital panopticon, and giving governments unprecedented powers of surveillence.

    Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.

    Moreover, with cash becoming redundant through this crisis, governments and corporations have acquired an even greater capacity to surveil, and therefore control, our lives. In the U.K., Derbyshire police used drones to film hillwalkers in a remote mountain area, while in California police fined surfers a $1000 for catching waves.

    Is this the kind of society you want to live in?

    1. The right to bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty.

    Are we going to give away our right to bodily autonomy to pharmaceutical companies, and the possibility of a mandatory vaccination programme?

    I am neither pro- nor anti- vaccination, but I believe that people should enjoy an absolute right to decide what is put into their bodies, freedom over their own body. A right to bodily integrity has been recognised by the courts as an unenumerated right, protected by the general guarantee of ‘personal rights’ contained under Article 40 of the Irish constitution.

    There is some disagreement in the scientific community around the safety of vaccines, with billions of dollars having been paid out in compensation by the Vaccine Injury Courts over the past thirty years, but any dissent of the mainstream Big Pharma narrative is brutally suppressed and attacked. In the Middle Ages, heretics were burnt at the stake for daring to question the mainstream version of reality. While they are not burnt at the stake today, anyone who questions the mainstream narrative is attacked, vilified, and discredited

    If anyone thinks these concerns over civil liberties far-fetched, I suggest you look at the situation in China at the moment, where the government has used the crisis to strengthen its grip on power, and to crack down on dissent.

    Dmytro Sidashev / Alamy Stock Photo

    What sort of world do we want to live in post-Covid-19?

    I would easily sacrifice an element of safety for my freedom. I want to live in a world where personal liberty and civil duties are both honoured and respected; where personal sovereignty is not given away to unelected global corporations; where political power remains vested in individuals and communities, and a central State does not have unchecked power to interfere in citizens’ lives. Where policing is by consent, and not by coercion and control. I want young children to be able to run freely in the outdoors without fear, or masks.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

    I do not want to die anytime soon, but if I do, so be it. I have long accepted that one day I will die. I would much rather die a free man from Covid-19 than live in a dystopian surveillance society. What we are seeing is a global collective psychological process, the unconscious and unprocessed fear of death. By facing and accepting our own mortality, this fear dissipates.

    I do not want to live in a sanitised, risk-free, nanny-state surveillance world, where the government knows where I am at all times and controls what I think, what I can say, what I put in my body. I do not consent to this version of reality. I will not be part of it.

    The real front line is about personal power and self-sovereignty. Reclaiming our power from the unelected Silicon Valley AI/tech, media and pharmaceutical executives, who have acquired greater power over every aspect of our lives, with hardly any oversight.

    We need to come terms with the immense power that is accumulating in Google and Facebook to influence, manipulate and control what people think. Even that most Machiavellian of realpolitik bureaucrats Henry Kissinger recently wrote: ‘The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order. But that order is now in upheaval amid a new, even more sweeping technological revolution whose consequences we have failed to fully reckon with, and whose culmination may be a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms’. He who controls the algorithms controls the world.

    This is not a world I want to create. I do not consent. For sure this crisis has brought out the very best in humanity, with neighbours helping one another, communities coming together, increasing food security and developing a great sense of solidarity. But we cannot, Pollyanna-like, ignore the potential for the slide into a dystopian surveillance society.

    What sort of society do we want our children and grandchildren to inhabit? This is the real front line. We have had a great opportunity for reflection and collective dreaming, for visioning and birthing a new society and new reality. The birthing process of the new world will be messy and painful, as births always are, but the baby will be born.

    We are not powerless. We have the power to rewrite the story and create a beautiful world for future generations. Let us make our collective vision a beautiful one.

    Image: Daniele Idini (c)

  • The Public Intellectual Series: Christopher Hitchens

    Hardly a week goes by without someone asking me about my connection to Christopher Hitchens. Such enquiries are clearly predicated on our common concerns. I suspect at one level my own modest bohemianism and libertarianism has invited comparison. Although we share an unbridled enthusiasm for talking Hitchens was, however, also a great listener, something I am struggling to get better at.

    I had a brief encounter with the man himself one enchanting and admittedly drunken evening. Being then youthful I was somewhat dazzled by his presence, yet more so when the bill for the wine and cognac arrived.

    I found Christopher Hitchens almost preternaturally eloquent, even when plastered. Industrial quantities of booze only seemed to inspire him to new heights, as it does many artists. Nonetheless, he was fortunate to have the constitution of an ox – a unique case and liver to boot. Predictably, it was the cigarettes that killed him in the end.

    Despite a dreadful personal lifestyle in conventional terms, his achievements and outputs – to use a terms whose origin in economics he would have despised – as the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of over thirty books, were nothing short of phenomenal. Lifestyle excesses did not undermine his craft or genius.

    Non-compromised Intellect

    As a man of letters, Hitchens is the last in the line of a Belle Époque tradition requiring a confidence trick that Voltaire, George Orwell, Gore Vidal, Albert Camus and, truthfully, few others have pulled off. These were all men who operated in a space of utter independence and autonomy; as journalists not beholden to anyone; as non-compromised intellects, projecting intelligences greater than any academic-for-hire.

    Hitchens himself was a generalist and synthesiser, a man of substance, far removed from the letter writer to a newspaper dismissed as a crank by those who control the message and form the opinions in our dumbed-down zeitgeist.

    He played a role for which there is no job description, as it really does not exist, for he himself defined it through sheer force of will. Self-selected and self-ordained, he was truly a law unto himself.

    It helped that the power brokers adored his transgressive presence. Walking on the wild side, he was a unique, larger than life character. Albeit toadying up to the powerful ultimately mars his legacy.

    He was fortunate to receive the adulation of Americans, and of course he panhandled to them. They loved to debate with this antichrist of an atheist.

    Perhaps they believed such a troubled human being seemed ripe for religious conversion, which of course he never succumbed to. In fact, the very religious doctor who supervised his dying days was anxious for a death bed conversion that never came, all of which is splendidly documented in his book Mortality (2012).

    He might not like the comparison, but it seems to me that like many sincerely committed religious people he held an innocent faith that public debate matters: that serious argument around fundamental questions counts, and continues to shape public opinion.

    Support for Invasion of Iraq

    Hitchens’s blinkered support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was based on hatred of religion in all its forms, and Islam in particular. He thus stands complicit by proxy in endorsing U.S. terrorism.

    Hitchens failed to acknowledge that the US was acting as a terror state. When President Bush’s chief legal advisor Alberto Gonzalez described the Geneva Convention to be ‘quaint’ and ‘obsolete’[i] it opened to the door to the torture carried out in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

    Guantanamo Bay.

    Having said that at least Hitchens had the good grace to undergo the torture of waterboarding himself under controlled conditions, that he wrote about in a famous Vanity Fair article, declaring ‘Believe Me, It’s Torture.’[ii]

    I happen to share Hitchens’s hatred of extreme religious fundamentalism and jihadi terror tactics, but am not oblivious to their origins, and the even greater danger posed by the maniacs on the far-right of the Republican Party in the U.S.: that triage of evil, Post-Truth, moral relativism and religious fundamentalism that Noam Chomsky has pointed to.

    U.S. Republican extremists, unlike anarchists or deluded and fragmented Islamic jihadists possess true wealth and power, making them really frightening.

    Moreover, on account of his British upbringing Hitchens was not exposed to the Catholic fundamentalism I have encountered, which is in some respects the worst, and certainly the pettiest, of all.

    Attack on Bill Clinton

    There is much to be said in favour of Christopher Hitchens. He was after all, the great Satan to the religious right, predicting, along with Richard Dawkins, the rise of religious fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic. He saw it all coming.

    He also saw our Post-Truth tendencies coming into being, most pertinently in his diatribe against Bill Clinton, No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (1999).

    Indeed, Clinton was the beginning of the end. Bubba is like a fractured image of Trump and Steve Bannon and precursor to their redneck populism. With his forensic mind, Hitchens knew a spin merchant when he saw one.

    Bill Clinton with Donald Trump c.2000.

    Hitchens recognised Clinton as a Populist vulgarian, and ultimately a betrayer and subverter of the liberal cause. He could see that Clinton’s lack of spine, principle and integrity would allow the Neo-Cons to undermine the liberalism he claimed to stand for.

    Clinton is a hillbilly product of an educational system prioritising policy wonking. Today we see far too much emphasis on graft and data retention along with carefully managed communication, which is the obverse of true argumentation. Thus discussion and debate is confined within ever-narrowing parameters.

    Hitchens’s commitment to the Enlightenment values of reason and truth unquestionably dictated an intense dislike of the purveyors of Post-Truth nonsense.

    Hitchens was not, however, as critical of U.S. neo-liberalism as he ought to have been, and his departure from Marxism led to obsequiousness towards the establishment. This ideology, or ‘false consciousness’ in Marxist terms, is laying waste to the world and Hitchens should have seen it coming.

    Perhaps the cognitive dissonance, can be explained in material terms by this intellectual Marxist being on the neo-liberal payroll. He was where the money was, representing the opposing, other times supportive, viewpoints on Fox News. Yet he remained danger to all comers, a white knuckle ride on an unruly horse.

    The Bonfire of the Vanities

    In a sense Hitchens was intellectually mediocre, not unlike Jordan Peterson in that he pandered to the corporate market. The neo-liberal banqueted intellectual, who keeps it safe and ted-talky. Anything can be resolved by one market under god. Well no it cannot.

    Thus, by side-tracking to Islam, supporting the Bushman wars and demonising Clinton he perversely and indirectly served Republican interests. His Marxism twisted and bent like a tattered cover effectively brought endorsement of U.S-led neo-liberalism.

    Hitchens had an opulent and luxurious lifestyle, and I believe it blurred his judgment. Money can corrupt anyone. Indeed, a character in Martin Amis’s book Money (1984) was ostensibly based on him.

    He liked to be indulged, flattered and entertained, and craved an audience too much. The scoop was all important. A neediness to be the centre of public attention was an obviously failing.

    Hichens’s unscrupulous lifestyle, alcoholism and opportunism, some say, is also fictionally documented in Tom Wolfe’s iconic 1980s novel The Bonfire of The Vanities (1987). The fictional character that emerges is far from sympathetic.

    That is not say he was not mostly correct in his arguments. We should judge the ideas rather than the man, who must have been difficult to live with.

    Above all, Christopher Hitchens maintained the idea of public intellectualism, and was a champion of any cause he firmly believed in. He was like a successful Ignatius F O’ Reilly railing against a Confederacy of Dunces (1980), operating in what Gore Vidal termed ‘The Republic of Amnesia.’

    Interestingly, Vidal anointed him as his successor and dauphin. But perhaps unsurprisingly they had a falling out, given there is little of the austere Brahmin in Christopher Hitchens.

    Though he might bridle at the suggestion, Hichens is more like the smooth-talking William F. Buckley, the architect of U.S. neo-liberalism, at least in personality terms. A fractiousness and emotional incompatibility between Buckley and Vidal is also easy to detect in Best of Enemies, a recent documentary about their famous debates and interchanges during the 1968 U.S. Presidential Election.

    Gore Vidal, 2009. Image: David Shankbone

    A One-Off

    Hitchens’s sheer force of personality and will is unlikely to be seen again any time soon. Even his enemies would concede he was a one-off, a public entertainer of such colour and intellect that he was guaranteed to give a performance, and unlike in Franz Kafka’s The Hunger Artist (1922), the public never tired of it.

    But the heroic lifestyle, involving so much booze, and stage fright no doubt, killed him prematurely. We can, however, draw a few lessons from his intellectual legacy.

    First, to be vigilant to public discourse being hijacked by spin merchants, quacks, false expertise and imbeciles that we now seem to be buying wholesale.

    Secondly, to listen carefully to those who speak consequentially and even cause the necessary offence. These kind of people are being obliterated or subsumed by mindless internet chatter, and sound bites. As Hitchens famously said: ‘My own opinion is enough for me and I claim the right to defend it against anybody, anywhere and if you do not like it stand in line while I kick your ass.

    Thirdly, to recognise that our moral compass of truth is being lost to a religous fundamentalism that appears to be winning.

    Fourthly, we must question the pillars of society just as Hitchens interrogated the roles of Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, to devastating effect.

    His book on Mother Theresa is in fact incendiary. The title the Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995) is a pun of true genius containing a veiled attack on Catholic attitudes towards sexuality, and so called charity.

    Hitchens fillets her to show how the ostensible compassion and charity was really a mask for leaving people to die in appalling conditions, without adequate support mechanisms or proper treatment; in short demonstrating that she was a hypocrite.

    Master of the Polemic

    Excessively religious people like to be seen to be good as opposed to doing good. Tokenism holds sway. Many devoutly religious people I knew were all in favour of the Innocence Project I founded in Ireland; that is as long as it did not interfere with their interests, and of course funding was out of the question.

    Hitchens was the acknowledged master of the polemic, and revived the tradition of the public essay. In this sense his easily digested and short books – beautifully written, precise and pungent – are not just in the line of his great hero George Orwell, but owe a debt also to the tradition of 18th century Anglo-Irish letters, encapsulated by figures such as Jonathan Swift or William Hazlitt.

    His work could also be profoundly serious, at which point he ceased to be just a polemicist. His public education text on The Rights of Man (2006), juxtaposing Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke is a perfect summary of the values of the constitutional Enlightenment. It condenses a lot of learning and is far better than many large treatises on the subject that go unread and unremembered.

    I sense that he appealed to his contemporary audience as a generalist confronting legions of specialists. His ranging intellect contrasted with the products of an educational system that no longer permits all-rounders. When he engaged in his ideal forum of public debate he simply knew too much, and was too articulate with a ready supply of historical and literary allusions that dumbfounded his critics, putting the political spinmeisters on the back foot.

    He achieved glory by unconventional methods, to put it mildly, and it must have astounded him that a third class degree, admittedly from Balliol in Oxford University, brought him so far. He bucked the specialist trend.

    One Man Show

    I wonder whether such a ribald, Rabelaisian figure of jollity and deadly accuracy could gain traction with an audience today. Where would his footholds to glory lie? His unruly lifestyle in these censorious times would probably ensure that he never got past first base.

    At one level it was all a kind of performance. A one man show that went on and on. The clown prince. But what a show it was.

    What his opponents lacked, and he possessed in spades, was depth and interdisciplinary context, and above all else a genius for sharp communication and barbed wit. He used words to nuclear effect and with antennae raised to the fraudulence and hypocrisy of our times.

    He is sadly missed, for our real foes of Post-Truth, moral relativism and the repudiation of Enlightenment values hold a vice-like grip over public consciousness.

    I suspect he was also a little big man, a voice that just had to be heard. Perhaps his oversized personality was a compensation for social maladjustment, and even Asperger Syndrome or similar. Like Oscar in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) he banged on for the sake of the marginalised and those classified as deviant.

    It was the transposition of his erudition and learning in a practical sense to the issues of his time that also defined him. Given the context in which he operated, his life was a minor miracle. A last popular gasp of learning and context that gained traction and a mass audience.

    He once said that our lives only have meaning to the extent that we give them meaning, which is not to condone his attitude towards the women or the booze.

    There was a craving for middle class acceptance for which he had to overcome an inherent vulgarity and crassness. America suited him as a pundit and pugilist of an anti-intellectual vulgarity, who could speak at their level. Being of a kind, he recognised the flaws in Clinton.

    He was never quite an English gentleman. Never officer material.

    In America he was one step, in savvy terms, above the vulgarity around him but still appealed at a frat-boy level. For in the kingdom of the blind man the one eyed man is king.

    [i] Roland Watson, ‘Geneva accords quaint and obsolete, legal aide told Bush’, The Times, March 19th, 2004,  https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/geneva-accords-quaint-and-obsolete-legal-aide-told-bush-q2dqw8f3pz9

    [ii] Christopher Hitchens, ‘Believe Me, It’s Torture, Vanity Fair, August, 2008, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/08/hitchens200808

  • Poetry in 2020: ‘Dream and so create’

    At the end of 2019, I wrote:

    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.

    I wonder how much of what I have now said will be applauded or deplored by the poets we have already published on Cassandra Voices. In any case, I am delighted to say that over the course of 2019, we published the following poets: Michael O’Siadhail; J.P. Wooding; Quincy Lehr; Alex Winter; Bartholomew Ryan; Edward Clarke; Sammy Jay; Alberto Marcos; Navlika Ramjee; Nance Harding; Ben Keatinge, Mark Burrows, and Daniel Wade.

    These join a list from 2018 comprised of: Chris Robinson; Ned Denny; Ernest Hilbert; Paul Curran, J.D. Smith, Jamie McKendrick; Anthony Caleshu; Timur Moon and Paul Downes.

    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

    Cassandra Voices Poetry 2018-19:

    Psalm 70 by Edward Clarke

    Psalm 95

    The Firstborn

    Demon Cum

    LA RÉSISTANCE

    Double Take

    From Psalm 119

    On Suicide

    Poetry – Out Walking

    Poetry – Daniel Wade

    Poetry – Mark Burrows

    Poetry – Ben Keatinge

    The Sunset Drive-in Cinema

    White Woman Brown Heart

    Visita de obra

    Carbon Negative

    Forest

    BREXIT – A Poem

    From Psalm 119

    Two Poems

    RAT RUN

    Two Poems

    Twinned

    Nonetheless

    Gitanjali – after Rabindranath Tagore

    B Road Blues

    Visitations

    Blaze

  • The Public Intellectual Series: Noam Chomsky

    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:.

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. It will be better in the long run if you take your medicine now. The short sharp shock of austerity. No it will not.
    5. 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.
    6. Appeal to Emotion, frenzy, hysteria and not rationality. Thus our world is being torn apart by mob orators pulling at the heartstrings.
    7. 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.
    8. 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.
    9. 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.
    10. 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.

  • Is George Orwell’s England Now Home to Fintan O’Toole’s Swivel-Eyed Loons?

    It was flattering to read Fintan O’Toole respond, however oblique, to my criticism of his generally hysterical book on Brexit. In an Irish Times article on February 19th he claims the English eccentricity I praised has morphed into sinister idiosyncrasies, personified by what he impolitely refers to as the ‘swivel-eyed-loon’ Brexiteers. The association of physical disability with an opposing point of view is a low blow indeed in a bigoted article attempting to define apparently timeless national traits.

    As a last throw of the dice O’Toole adduces evidence from George Orwell to the effect that the English have always been, in actual fact, rather a conformist lot, now queuing obediently for the train marked oblivion.[i]

    O’Toole realises you cannot blacken the reputation of all things English, and seemingly as an afterthought, invokes the authority of the English secular saint. Never mind that Orwell actually credited his compatriots with an abiding belief in the Rule of Law and in holding power to account, a trait the once inquisitorial O’Toole seems to have forgotten.

    It is fair to say that Orwell has never been unfashionable, but the spectre of his ideas is much evident in this zeitgeist. Beyond even his novels, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), which define and anticipate the nature of totalitarian rule, Orwell was probably the greatest essayist of all time, foreseeing, like a clairvoyant, so many of the problems we now confront. He still stands for decency and humanism.

    O’Toole, in a spurious impression of radicalism – reminiscent of an intellectual Father Brian Trendy – appeals to the baser instincts towards English-bashing in Ireland; essentially condemning the vainglorious Brexiters for cutting off and undermining our gravy train of inequitable farm subsidies.

    Unlike O’Toole, Orwell respected the common sense of the common man, and never resorted to popular prejudice or vulgar nationalism.

    In ‘The Lion and The Unicorn’ (1940) Orwell claimed that English people held a belief in justice, not a fear of power. He further argues, in ‘Inside The Whale’ (1940), that this stemmed from a lack of experience of government repression:

    With all its injustices England is still the land of habeas corpus and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence and illegality.[ii]

    In ‘Homage to Catalonia’ (1938) he shows how extremism imposed no restraints or boundaries, leading to a descent into lawless banditry. England today is still suffused with moderation, incrementalism, and the population are not generally exposed to licensed thuggery.

    In my experience of living in the country, people commonly still do not understand and do not tolerate the manipulation or abuse of law by Power. In this respect they are increasingly alone in Europe, with Spain mounting show trials against Catalan ‘putschists’ for daring to hold an independence referendum, and fascist taking power in Hungary and Italy.

    O’Toole could profitably read various pieces I have written on the Rule of Law and corruption of state agencies in Ireland.[iii] These are all available for free online – unlike the subscriber-based Irish Times. He should take note of the following points, which might cause indigestion in his pampered readership of retired, or retiring, civil servants.

    1. An Garda Siochana, the Irish police force, has been a criminally-led organisation.
    2. A politically-anointed judiciary have contributed to the undermining of the Rule of Law by supporting this police force, and have failed to build on existing Constitutional rights to alleviate the Housing Crisis.
    3. Government agencies have framed ‘enemies of the people’, who blow the lid on corruption (Orwell in ‘Such Were The Joys’ is remarkably insightful about the manipulation of children, whereas O’Toole, with a unique platform in the Irish media, does nothing to draw attention to ongoing injustices).
    4. Ireland is the perfect neo-liberal shit storm, where high economic growth is an illusion, as evictions continue apace, amid spiralling inequality.

    Without succumbing to timeless stereotypes, I suggest the English still commonly believe, in the confused conversation around our global meltdown, that the underdog should be protected. As a barrister I have found that the obligation to vindicate the Rule of Law against the interests of the powerful, and holding elites to account, is taken seriously. Among the myriad motivations for the Brexit vote was a discomfort among ordinary people with the idea of being undermined by faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.

    In contrast Fintan O’Toole’s Irish Times upholds the obligation of the common man to repay his debts to predatory international financial institutions.

    In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ Orwell also notes how the English instinctively despise miscarriages of justice and hold power to account, believing in the impartial administration of the law by independent magistrates. In contrast, I find little attention being paid to the daily injustices occurring in Ireland in Fintan O’Toole’s current output.

    Orwell is also very attuned to misuse of language. A prevalent theme is how expression should be clear and unequivocal, and in a plain style that emphasising informality and flexibility. He would have no truck with the cheap rhetorical devices O’Toole trades in.

    In ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (1946) Orwell intimates that the enemies of truth and freedom of thought are press lords and bureaucrats. In Ireland today a preening Irish Times sits atop the tree, reassuring all and sundry about what a wonderful creative country this is – and never mind you can’t find somewhere to live.

    O’Toole’s sanctimonious brand of journalism works a treat, offering sufficient distraction to the little people to allow the ‘adults in the room’ to get on with plundering the larder.

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    [i] Fintan O’Toole, ‘The English Love of the Eccentric has Turned Sour’, February 19th, 2019, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-the-english-love-of-eccentricity-has-turned-sour-1.3797907, accessed 22/2/19.

    [ii] http://orwell.ru/library/essays/whale/english/e_itw, accessed 22/2/19.

    [iii] David Langwallner, ‘The Fragile Rule of Law in Ireland’, 18th of February, 2018, https://villagemagazine.ie/index.php/2018/02/unruly-2/, accessed 22/2/19.