Cassandra Voices

Tag: Naomi Klein

  • The “Strawman” Conspiracy Theorist

    In two hundred years doctors will rule the world. Science reigns already. It reigns in the shade maybe – but it reigns. And all science must culminate in the science of healing – not the weak, but the strong. Mankind wants to live… to live.
    Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907), p.263

    This article charts the origins and development of what often appears to be a strawman conspiracy theorist over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially through “fact checker” initiatives operating at the behest philanthrocapitalism. This appears to have insulated regulatory agencies long prone to capture from adequate journalistic scrutiny, leading to a groupthink amidst an effective censorship of alternative, and scientifically valid, assessments of the danger posed by COVID-19, and the optimal humanitarian response.

    Losing Our Grip?

    In May, 2020, veteran Guardian journalist John Naughton explored the origins of Plandemic a “documentary” video ‘featuring Dr Judy Mikovits, a former research scientist and inveterate conspiracy theorist who blames the coronavirus outbreak on big pharma, Bill Gates and the World Health Organization.’ Naughton relates how the video migrated from mainstream social media into the dark recesses of the Internet.

    As he put it: ‘The cognitive pathogen had escaped into the wild and was spreading virally.’ Ultimately, the New York Times ‘traced it back to a Facebook page dedicated to QAnon, a rightwing conspiracy theory, which has 25,000 members.’ All this Naughton said: ‘confirms something we’ve known since at least 2016, namely that conspiracy theory sites are the most powerful engines of disinformation around. And when they have a medical conspiracy theory to work with, then they are really in business.’

    In May, 2020 The Atlantic’s Jeff Goldburg announced that conspiracy theorists were winning, and that America was ‘losing its grip on Enlightenment values and reality itself.’ Thus a 2014 study estimated that half the American public ‘consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory,’ a proportion that had risen to 61% by 2019, suggesting the Internet was accelerating the trend. Another survey indicated that 60% of Britons were wedded to a ‘false’ narrative.

    Adjudicating on the falseness, or otherwise, of a narrative is not always, however, a straightforward exercise. Indeed, it will be argued that justifiable concerns around recent impugning of expertise have been weaponised to create another layer of disinformation over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The “wild-eyed” conspiracy theorist – often referred to as “members of the tin foil hat brigade” – has become a widely derided figure. This appears to be a belated response to so-called “post-truth” accounts, associated with supporters of Donald Trump in the U.S. and proponents of Brexit in the U.K., dismissive of expertise. This challenged a board consensus around such issues as the importance of mitigating climate change. But in confronting genuine disinformation it appears that many on the left, in particular, failed to interrogate vested interests during the pandemic.

    “Totalizing Discourse”

    Charles Eisenstein defines conspiracy myths as ‘a totalizing discourse that casts every event into its terms.’ He traces these overarching explanations – relying on observed phenomena only insofar as these fit with a preordained pattern – to the first century Gnostics, who believed that ‘an evil demiurge created the material world out of a pre-existingdivine essence.’

    The “totalizing” nature of such an approach has previously been dismissed by Karl Popper since ‘nothing ever comes off exactly as intended.’[i] Oliver and Wood (2014) identify three facets to an approach that has traditionally pointed to Freemasonry –an “illuminati” – Jews and Jesuits, and, in more recent times, intelligence agencies such as the CIA, KGB, MI5 or Mossad:

    First, they locate the source of unusual social and political phenomena in unseen, intentional, and malevolent forces. Second, they typically interpret political events in terms of a Manichean struggle between good and evil … Finally, most conspiracy theories suggest that mainstream accounts of political events are a ruse or an attempt to distract the public from a hidden source of power (Fenster 2008)

    In her seminal 1951 text The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identifies such a tendency as a precursor to mob rule, describing how a conspiracy theorist ‘is inclined to seek the real forces of political life in those movements and influences which are hidden from view and work behind the scenes.’[ii]

    Yet certain conspiracy theories in our time, such as suggestions the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 in order to plunder oil resources rather than decommission weapons of mass destruction, or that the fossil fuel industry deliberately sowed confusion over climate change, remain plausible, even if we lack clear documentary proof.

    A problem lies in how individuals with minimal academic attainment treat conspiracies as objective truths rather than conjectures based on circumstantial evidence. The likelihood of a conspiracy is often portrayed as “beyond reasonable doubt”, as opposed to “on the balance of probabilities.” A formally educated observer may be repelled by an insistent approach that does not allow for reasonable doubt.

    The intuition relied on by confirmed conspiracy theorists thus generally fails to acknowledge uncertainty, and lacks scientific or historical rigour. Yet these accounts may still occasionally yield insights when empirical methods fall short. After all, suspicions raised by conspiracy theories are often vindicated. Rather than dismissing out of hand such ‘magical thinking’, it is useful to consider these as unproven hypotheses, and not necessarily untrue, simply because an individual is overstating a case.

    For example, over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly persuasive evidence has emerged of a laboratory leak – perhaps from so-called ‘gain of function’ research – giving rise to the pandemic. But in February, 2020 The Lancet published a letter from a number of prominent scientists who ‘strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.’ This had a chilling effect on the scientific debate during the early stages of the pandemic.

    Notably also, the ‘father of economics’ Adam Smith opined that ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’[iii] Smith’s portrayal of commercial calumnies is reflected in a question posed at a medical conference in 2018 by a Goldman Sachs executive: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’

    Previously, a succession of pharmaceutical scandals led Ben Goldacre MBE to take a sympathetic view of so-called “anti-vaxxers”, who are now consistently conflated with “conspiracy theorists”: ‘I think it’s fair to say that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are a kind of poetic response to regulatory failure in medicine and in the pharmaceutical industry. People know that there is something a little bit wrong here.’

    Similarly, Tom Jefferson – editor of the Cochrane Collaboration’s acute respiratory infections – in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2009 in the wake of the Swine Flu pandemic-that-never-was pointed to shadowy pharmaceutical forces: ‘Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.’

    UNESCO’s World Trends Report 2018.

    Journalism Under Threat

    An assumption of malevolent or self-serving – cui bono? – motivations (particularly concerning a Big Pharma industry with a shameful record of distortion and manipulation) is almost a prerequisite for being an investigative reporter. Stories don’t drop out of the air. Unless a journalist assumes wrongdoing – in essence a conspiracy theory – there would be no reason to begin digging.

    The key distinction between genuine journalism and conspiracy theorising is that proponents of the latter tend to blurt out their “findings” without marshalling supporting evidence, with the Internet providing anonymity as required. This, however, makes such accounts easy to ridicule to the detriment of journalism with an evidential basis.

    Journalists have long been deflected from investigating large corporations. In a recent memoir the great American journalist Seymour Hersh fumes at how in the late 1970s The New York Times shut down his attempt to investigate corporate America ’when confronted by a gaggle of corporate conmen.’[iv]

    This challenge has increased significantly in the wake of the Internet. After the “Original Sin” of free online publication, the number of American journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009, a pattern seen across the world. As revenues diminished, workloads increased. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories, discovering the average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. To put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time to do the same job.[v]”

    “Fact Checkers”

    Over the course of the pandemic a strawman conspiracy theorist appears to have been consciously developed to deter valid journalistic interrogation, in particular, through so-called “fact checking” initiatives. It has reached a point where, as Charles Eisenstein observes: ‘“Conspiracy theory” has become ‘a term of political invective, used to disparage any view that diverges from mainstream beliefs. Basically, any critique of dominant institutions can be smeared as conspiracy theory’

    In the absence of adequate journalistic scrutiny during the pandemic corruption has been rife. The executive director of The British Medical Journal Kamran Abbasi described ‘state corruption on a grand scale’ that is ‘harmful to public health’ Abbasi observes how the pandemic ‘has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.’

    This also occurred in the context of unregulated social media, where companies set their own rules. In March, 2020, having previously styled itself ‘the free speech-wing of the free-speech party’, Twitter moved to address concerns around conspiracy theories. In future 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.’

    Nonetheless, free reign was given to “click-bait” alarmists such as Eric Feigle-Ding on Twitter, who saw his following mushroom from just two thousand to almost a quarter of a million. Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist, identified a pattern: ‘He tweets something sensational and out of context, buries any caveats further down-thread, and watches the clicks and [retweets] roll in.’

    Twitter did not act alone in upholding an apparent orthodoxy that often lapsed into an extremism that deterred legitimate questioning. Google took unprecedented steps to erase material violating ‘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.’

    Initially at least, Facebook adopted a more 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. In November, 2021, however, the editors of the British Medical Journal sent an open letter to Facebook in response to “fact checkers” undermining their investigative report into ‘a host of poor clinical trial research practices’ at Pfizer’s original vaccine trial.

    Thus, the approach of the social media giants was bolstered by an unprecedented journalistic effort to “factually” repudiate conspiracy theories during the pandemic; notwithstanding how ‘uncontested facts—things that are ascertainable, reproducible, transferable and predictable—tend to be elusive.’

    Preparations for the “fact-checking” initiative began in January, 2020 when a global #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, comprising more than one hundred “factcheckers” around the world, described as ‘the largest collaborative factchecking project ever,’ was launched by the Poynter Institute, ‘when the spread of the virus was restricted to China but already causing rampant misinformation globally.’ It said that the WHO had classified the issue as ‘an infodemic — and the Alliance is on the front lines in the fight against it.’

    From March 2020, with the support of these “fact checkers”, outlets such as Reuters responded to an anticipated wave of conspiracy theories, taking particular care to address allegations against Bill Gates. He has been described as ‘the world’s most powerful doctor’ despite not having earned a medical degree due to the Gates Foundations being the second largest funder of the WHO, after China. This included allegations that he had apparently planned the pandemic, and wanted to commit genocide through vaccines.

    For example, on May 30, 2020 a BBC article purported to defuse claims the pandemic was ‘a cover for a plan to implant trackable microchips and that the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is behind it’; although it acknowledged Gates had said that ‘eventually “we will have some digital certificates” which would be used to show who’d recovered, been tested and ultimately who received a vaccine,’ and also referenced ‘a study, funded by the Gates Foundation, into a technology that could store someone’s vaccine records in a special ink administered at the same time as an injection.’

    Front building of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.

    Gates Foundation

    When it came to outlandish conspiracy theories around COVID-19 all roads led to Bill Gates and his $47 billion philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – besides a personal fortune of $115 billion, and growing, as of October 2020.

    For many of world’s population under stay-at-home orders the pandemic was viewed through a digital prism – often at a remove from morbidity or mortality itself. At that stage, Gates’s 2014 Ted Talk ‘The Next Outbreak. We’re not ready’ seemed almost prophetic.

    He opined: ‘If anything kills over ten million people in the next few decades it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.’ The failure of Western governments to prepare for such an eventuality seemed to have been laid bare – in particular the Presidential administration of Donald Trump, who according to a Cornell University study ‘was likely th\\e largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation “infodemic.”’

    Gates’s Ted Talk, however, failed to discuss the false alarm of the Swine Flu Pandemic, when the WHO estimated that between 2.0 and 7.4 million could die, assuming the outbreak was relatively mild. This proved a wild exaggeration as less than 300,000 were estimated to have died globally, with Western governments stockpiling millions of dollars’ worth of GlaxoSmithKlein’s Pandemrix vaccine, which  brought an elevated risk of narcolepsy.

    Gates’s main reference point appears to have been the Spanish Influenza (H1N1) outbreak of 1918 – the Ur-pandemic of modern times  – that led to up to fifty million deaths, many of them young men in their prime, at a point when the global population was approximately two billion. In contrast, the infectivity and severity of SARS-CoV-2 ‘are well within the range described by respiratory viral pandemics of the last few centuries (where the 1918–20 influenza is the clear outlier).’

    Neil Ferguson

    “Scientific Groupthink”

    In March, 2020, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson told the New York Times the ‘best case outcome’ for the U.S. was a death toll of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario, a projection that has proved wildly inaccurate. Yet, alternative, and scientifically valid, assessments of the danger posed by COVID-19, and the optimal humanitarian response to the challenge were virtually ignored in legacy media at the time. Thus, an Oxford University paper, which included Sunetra Gupta as an author, countered what the New York Times described as the ‘gold standard’ Imperial modelling underestimated immunity from prior coronavirus infections and posited a far lower infection fatality rate.

    But in March, 2020, the Financial Times warned that Gupta’s group’s modelling was ‘controversial and its assumptions have been contested by other scientists.’ Implicitly, the Financial Times was accepting the “gold standard” Imperial paper.

    Moreover, in November, 2020 an article in the Scientific American describes how Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, wrote a letter about the potential harms of lockdowns which was rejected from more than ten scientific journals (and six newspapers) in April, 2020. Baral recalls, ‘it was the first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere.’

    The article also recalled that, ‘highly anticipated results of the only randomized controlled trial of mask wearing and COVID-19 infection went unpublished for months.’ The authors concluded that the ‘net effect of academic bullying and ad hominem attacks has been the creation and maintenance of “groupthink”—a problem that carries its own deadly consequences.’

    In the absence of access to authoritative, diverging scientific accounts, opposition to lockdowns could easily be dismissed as being the preserve of conspiracy theorist cranks associated with “anti-vaxxers” and even a “far-right” fringe.

    “Screen New Deal”

    Apart from offering pharmaceutical companies the huge financial incentive – grasped within open arms – of developing a vaccine for universal application, lockdowns and social distancing measures also brought soaring profits for major technology corporations. Moreover, restrictions provided a testing ground for the Gates Foundation’s long advocacy of technological approaches in education.

    In May, 2020 Naomi Klein identified collusion between state and Big Tech interests in what she described as ‘A Screen New Deal.’ She referred to New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s courting of Google and the Gates Foundation: ‘Calling Gates a “visionary,” Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he asked, apparently rhetorically.’

    Remote learning technology permitted extended school closures around the world, despite the chance of death from COVID-19 being ‘incredibly rare’ among children. Research now suggests many students made little or no progress while learning from home, and that learning loss was most pronounced among disadvantaged students. As a consequence, up to 20,000 children in the U.K. went missing from school rolls during the pandemic. Nor is it apparent that teachers faced any greater risk compared to the wider population in fulfilling classroom teaching.

    Media Funding

    Popular consent on a global scale for lockdowns, particularly from those identifying on the left, seems to have been manufactured through vast ‘philanthropic’ funding of journalism, in particular of publications associated with progressive outlooks.

    By June 2020, the Gates Foundation contributed $250 million to journalism, which according to Tim Schwab in The Columbia Journalism Review, ‘appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity.’

    A theme of ‘we are in this together’ inhibited criticism and enquiry. This quiescence has been criticized by the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris who wrote: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’

    Tim Schwab calculates that $250 million had been devoted to journalism by the Gates Foundation for the six months up to June, 2020,. Recipients included BBC, NBC, Al-Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as the BBC’s Media Action and The New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund.

    Schwab adds: ‘In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate.’

    As a result, he says:

    During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.

    ‘Undermining Scientific Creativity’

    The Gates Foundation’s pivotal role in funding global health has long raised concerns. In 2008, Dr. Arata Kochi, the former head of WHO’s malaria programme argued the Gates Foundation was undermining scientific creativity in a way that ‘could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policymaking process in world health.’ He worried that Gates-funded institutions – including Imperial College London (MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis) – were adopting ‘a uniform framework approved by the Foundation,’ leading to homogeneity of thinking: ‘Gates has created a ‘cartel,’ with research leaders linked so closely that each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of others. The result is that obtaining an independent review of scientific evidence (…) is becoming increasingly difficult.’

    GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, is the most obvious example of the Gates Foundation’s engagement. GAVI has successfully immunized large numbers of children, but been criticized by other NGOs for inadequate funding of health system strengthening.

    One of GAVI’s senior representatives reported that Bill Gates often told him in private conversations ‘that he is vehemently ‘against’ health systems (…) he basically said it is a complete waste of money, that there is no evidence that it works, so I will not see a dollar or cent of my money go to the strengthening of health systems.’

    As of 2017 only 10.6 percent (US$862.5 million) of GAVI’s total commitments between 2000 and 2013 had been dedicated to health system strengthening, whereas more than 78.6 percent (US$6,405.4 million) have been used for vaccine support. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) states that, while GAVI has helped to lower prices of new and underused vaccines for eligible countries, the cost to fully immunize a child was 68-times more expensive in 2014 than it was in 2001.

    According to long-time Gates critic James Love, Gates ‘uses his philanthropy to advance a pro-patent agenda on pharmaceutical drugs, even in countries that are really poor.’

    Safe Treatment?

    This article makes no bold claims regarding the efficacy of any treatments, but the overwhelmingly negative reaction of legacy media to research pointing to the efficacy of the off-patent drug Ivermectin suggests that vested pharmaceutical interests wished to undermine public confidence in any scientific arguments regarding its efficacy.

    In June, 2020, a laboratory study demonstrated it was ‘an inhibitor of the causative virus’ (Caly, 2020). Later, a Systematic Review, Meta-analysis that included twenty-four randomized controlled trials said: ‘Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin.’

    In a predictable example of “fact-checking” where an outlandish claim is used to discredit a compelling hypothesis, the Poynter Institute quoted a social media post ‘rating’ the claim that Ivermectin basically ‘basically obliterates’ as ‘false.’

    The Guardian’s dedication to discrediting the meta-analysis also suggested vested interests were at work, and contrasts with a failure to report on the British Medical Journal’s account of a whistle blower alleging serious data integrity issues during Pfizer’s vaccine trial.

    It should hardly be controversial – let alone dismissed as a conspiracy theory – to argue that the weight of evidence points to a ‘Gates-Approach’ lying behind ongoing adoption by most Western governments of unprecedented suppression measures in support of universal vaccination – notwithstanding potential treatment alternatives – leading to the introduction of vaccine passports, as Gates “predicted” in April, 2020. This also occurred alongside a familiar ‘rhetoric supportive of ‘holistic’ health systems.’

    It is now clear that consent for lockdowns, especially in the Anglophone world, was manufactured through wildly inaccurate epidemiological assessments of an infection fatality rate of 0.9% in the notorious Imperial College paper. This estimate has since been adjusted to 0.2% (available on the WHO website), a figure which Joffe argues is likely ‘a large over-estimate.’

    It is also clear that globally mortality statistics for COVID-19 have been systematically exaggerated. This manipulation can be traced to a WHO document from April, 2020 entitled ‘International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (Coding) of COVID-19 as Cause of Death’. It set out strict rules for the registration of COVID-19 deaths, which differ fundamentally from registration for other causes. The guidelines define a COVID-19 mortality as ‘a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma).’

    It is revealingly that in a country such as Ireland since the pandemic began the mean age of death from COVID-19 has been eighty years of age (eight-two being the median age), just two years younger than the average age of death, and that level of mortality through the years 2018-2020 (2018: 31,116; 2019: 31,134; 2020: 31,765) show little difference.[vi]

    For most people COVID-19 is a virus that poses little danger. Prior to the arrival of a vaccine, a U.K. study from October, 2020 found 76.5% of a random sample who tested positive reported no symptoms, and 86.1% reported none specific to COVID-19. Moreover, an article from Peter Doshi in the British Medical Journal in September, 2020, stated: ‘At least six studies have reported T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to the virus’; apparently vindicating Sunetra Gupta’s “controversial” paper, over which the Financial Times cast doubt.

    It should not be controversial to argue that morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 ought to have been weighed against the global impact of lockdowns. On that score, a new paper jointly by authored by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in the US, Lund University, in Sweden and the Centre for Political Studies, in Denmark concluded that lockdowns in Europe and the US decreased COVID-19 mortality by a measly 0.2% on average.

    Conclusions

    A “totalizing” discourse of a COVID-19 conspiracy theory identifies a preordained plan being set in motion by malicious actors, wherein the pandemic culminates in a dangerous vaccine being foisted on a brainwashed population. This might lead to an assumption that such vaccines invariably give rise to severe adverse reactions that are systematically covered up. Such an account does not demand evidence as events are simply unfolding “as planned.”

    In reality, however, events rarely follow a preordained pattern, and even in circumstances of regulatory capture state agencies are never entirely bereft of integrity. Moreover, such accounts divert attention from probing interrogation of the efficacy of vaccines and the desirability of universal uptake of a medication that does not block transmission, especially one rushed to the market, and which may cause unforeseen adverse reactions.

    It is also apparent that public perception of the efficacy of vaccines has been distorted by the media’s reporting of relative risk reduction, as opposed to absolute risk reduction, which is just 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.

    Moreover, importantly, in January, 2021, Peter Doshi and Donald Light in the Scientific American objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’

    This came after Pfizer pleaded an “ethical responsibility” to unblind its trial and offer the vaccine to those who received a placebo. The authors argue that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’

    In terms of any actual conspiracy or contrivance to raise prices along the lines of tendencies that Adam Smith pointed to among gentlemen of commerce, the role played by Bill Gates has been, doubtless, more complex than many conspiracy theorists allow for. However, in circumstances where a billionaire with a history of monopolistic aspirations promotes an agenda aligning with his financial interests it should come as no surprise that colourful theories abound; especially with many journalists seemingly inhibited from enquiring into his Foundation’s activities.

    Indeed, ironically, the aforementioned Guardian journalist John Naughton recently described Gates while Microsoft CEO as having acted like ‘a mogul who is incredulous that the government would dare to obstruct his route to world domination.’ Does such a leopard ever change his spots?

    Sadly, the amplification of the outlandish claims of conspiracy theorists by so-called “fact checkers” could be causing reputational damage to genuine expertise, and allow demagogues reliant on angry mobs to say: “I told you so.” The propagandist role of “fact checkers” has undermined genuine investigative reporting, much of which already occurs on the margins.

    In the early stages of the pandemic especially, difficulties in reporting were compounded by deficits in scientific understanding among overworked journalists in precarious employment, who were encouraged to justify unprecedented lockdowns as a form of social solidarity. The assumption that by “following the science” a journalist is adequately performing his or her role is a dangerous fallacy, which does not take account of how diverging scientific arguments may be concealed.

    In the absence of sufficient independent journalism, and amidst censorship of alternative scientific opinion, troubling questions remain unanswered as the pandemic draws to a close. Perhaps we will never know the full story. Nonetheless, it is vital that adequate cost-benefit analyses (including with access to full trial data) are conducted on all pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions in future.

    Feature Image (c) Daniele Idini: The Burning of “the Witch of Winter” in Cardano al Campo, Lombardy, Italy.

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    [i][i] Karl Popper (1972). Conjectures and Refutations, 4th ed. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. pp. 123–125.

    [ii] Hannah Arendt (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, p.140

    [iii] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book 1, chapter 10, par. 2).

    [iv] Seymour Hersh, Reporter, 2018, p.247.

    [v] Rusbridger, Alan, The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters, 2018, p.163-181

    [vi] Worldometre attributes 1,736 deaths to COVID-19 by December 31st, 2020.

  • Gradations of Evil: Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism

    Since the 1970s, the consistent presence of neoliberalism in politics alongside short, sharp bursts of neoconservatism have shaped our planet to a greater extent than any other ideologies. This has been to the detriment of all but a shrinking cast of billionaires that profit in periods of crisis, even during the pandemic. The prognosis is not good, even if the pandemic provides a porthole for the possibility of a realignment.

    Distinct Ideologies

    At one level, neoliberalism is extreme libertarianism, purged of its earlier socialist or anarchist underpinnings that were ultimately communitarian. Neoliberalism has had a tremendous influence on conservative thinking in recent times. Yet it is not conservatism in a traditional Burkean sense of conserving and preserving that which is good. Neoliberals do not advocate moderation, restraint, anti-extremism, perspective, nuance or that ill-defined word ‘balance,’ save in terms of conventional political rights such as liberty, privacy and freedom of movement.

    Contemporary neoliberals are not supporters of little people, and in effect operate against the interests of the ordinary working person in the name of economies of scale or other workplace rationalisations. It is unbridled free market extremism, engendering a tragedy of the commons.

    It did not begin this way. In its first iteration, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek warned against the excesses of socialism in The Road to Serfdom (1944). This was witnessed in Britain of the 1970’s with the three day working week, refuse on the streets, and the stranglehold of government by the unions. Many of Hayek’s points were valid, and I suspect he would be horrified at the political trajectory his ideas have taken. Similarly, Karly Marx was not responsible for and would have been horrified by Stalin.

    The initial idea behind libertarianism was for a combination of unregulated laissez faire economics, and the legitimation of a hedonistic lifestyle through laws and social policies. I see nothing wrong with hedonism per se – or for tolerance of human frailties more generally – and indeed have spent much of my professional career as a barrister upholding the rights of an accused to due process.

    Neoconservatism, on the other hand, is hardly even capitalist in outlook. It is really an offshoot of a more authoritarian leftism combined with a fundamentalist, morally self-righteous neocolonialism informed by ‘Christian’ values. It is associated in particular with the administrations of George W. Bush, with Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle its most prominent ideologues.

    Left to right: Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush.

    Many neoconservatives made an ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist left to the camp of American conservatism during the 1960s and 1970s, with its intellectual roots in the magazine Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz. But anti-Stalinist does not imply a respect for human rights or the rule of law; its followers’ ambitions were simply global rather than limited to a particular country, as was the case with Stalin’s approach.

    Neoconservatism adopts the unregulated free market, but not libertarian permissiveness or due process or a respect for international law: the ends would justify any means. That is what makes it distinctly evil. It attracted money from Christian fundamentalist and the rapture movement and cohabited with authoritarian academics.

    Thus, there is a world of difference between former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, a defender of human rights and free markets, and Tony Blair, the UK’s foremost neoconservatives. Blair is a fundamentalist Christian, a self-deluding mediocrity, who exported a destabilising jihadist war based on an absurd world view and sold it as a humanitarian intervention. He cannot really be described as a socialist – although state bureaucracies expanded massively under his New Labour – but nor is he a genuine conservative. He is simply a telegenic opportunist who became drunk on power.

    His neocon influencers were Bush and Irish-American pseudo intellectuals like Daniel Moynihan, who fused Christian jihadism with racist fundamentalism and veneration of a deregulated market. The worst of all possible worlds.

    Neoliberal Permissiveness

    While neoliberals cock a snoop at Christian fundamentalism, some perhaps even going so far as to oppose the war in Iraq, an inbuilt resistance to state intervention means neoliberals such as even Barack Obama, did nothing to heal the wounds, or address the causes of discontent in the developing world.

    I suspect the neoliberal endorsement of liberties and indulgence has in one sense been counterproductive. It may have not started with bad intentions. All were in favour of lifestyle ‘choices’: gay and transgender rights, sexual freedoms and shifting the agenda of equality towards formal equality rather than substantive equality. This involved superficial gestures such as including sufficient mixed race women in boardrooms but keeping the cleaners in the poverty trap.

    The gender equity and transgender lobby now often act in a sinister way, and represent a branch of neoconservative in all its puritanical absurdity. ‘No platforming’ esteemed academics like Germaine Greer steers young people into sexual confusion and away from political engagement. It is a disaster emanating from a preening devotion to political correctness.

    The sponsorship of the gender equity agenda by corporate America negates the real human rights agenda. These companies do not tend to fund advocates of social and economic justice, including rights to housing, healthcare and a clean, safe and aesthetically pleasing environment.

    The privatisation of healthcare and even the Bismarckean welfare state began largely under Nixon in the U.S., where neoliberalism first evolved. It was replaced by an insistence that people exercise personal and professional responsibility, which masked a dismantling of social supports.

    ‘Even Richard Nixon’s Got Soul’ (but not William F. Buckley)

    Nixon, a more sympathetic figure in hindsight – at least by comparison with latter day Republicans – was forced into healthcare privatisation by lobby groups from the medical profession, bringing into being the anti-health care system of America, where in 2018 over 17% of the country’s resources devoted to healthcare, yet it has one of the lowest life expectancies in the OECD. Moreover, industry sponsors regularly renege on private health care entitlements, through the machinations of unscrupulous lawyers. The fact of having a health care plan in the U.S. is no guarantee it will pay out.

    Nixon had his doubts and did not buy into the ideology wholesale, but by the time of Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 the neoliberals were firmly in the ascendancy, with disastrous consequences for Americans, as Reagan’s advisor David Stockman describes in The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (1986).

    A crucial neoliberal mastermind was William F. Buckley, the satanic ideologue of modern U.S. conservatism, who ostensibly venerated Edmund Burke, but subverted Burkean conservatism. Buckley helped establish the new philosophy of neoliberalism through texts such as God and Man in Yale (1953), and through his editorial of the Republican Party intellectual rag The National Review.

    Buckley moved conservatism away from the spirit of Burke’s community of souls, towards naked self-interest. This has led to the undermining, and now the actual buying of the state apparatus by the corporatocracy. Thus, under Buckley’s stewardship conservatism mutated into a form of individualism tat undermined states.

    Buckley’s brilliant rhetoric was only matched by his repulsive qualities as a human being. This is all-too-evident in the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies made about his media punditry alongside the almost equally contemptible Gore Vidal during the 1968 American election. Buckley had an enormous, understated, influence in moving the Republican Party, via Reagan, towards libertarianism, and the disaster capitalism now in vogue. Buckley in fact co-opted Russell Kirk, the Burkean conservative author of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953) onto The National Review, seemingly in order to get him ‘on message.’

    Yet the Republican Party and indeed much of the present Conservative party in the UK are not conservatives in the Burkean sense as aforementioned. They have become neoliberal fanatics, which is far from the origins of the paternalistic conservatism that emerged in Britain the late eighteenth century.

    Why Edmund Burke Provides a Counterweight

    Edmund Burke was a moderate conservative in the Benjamin Disraeli mould, who sought to preserve traditions he believed worth maintaining. His career was an idiosyncratic mixture of radicalism and abiding by conventions, and he believed in the desirability of change but not change for its own sake. Change should come about incrementally he believed, and with due regard to tradition; his antennae were attuned to unintended consequences.

    Edmund Burke.

    Contemporary neoliberalism has engendered a form of corporate fascism that mandates extreme conformity in working days that stretch into long evening. I doubt Burke would endorse its excesses. He believed in a form of market capitalism favouring small enterprise, as do I too. Burke was also anti-monopolist and would see dominant multinational firms, and perhaps the European Union, as anathema to the capitalism he favoured.

    Neoliberalism should not therefore be equated with traditional conservatism. Indeed if Edmund Burke was around today he might pen a text entitled: Reflections on Imminent Social and Economic Breakdown!

    Burke of course, unlike adherents of neoliberalism believed in the concept of a community, involving associative obligations and reciprocal interactions. A moral and networked community in other words. The neoliberal mentality, on the other hand, leads towards social atomisation and fragmentation, or as Margaret Thatcher famously put it: “There is no such thing as society only individuals.”

    Thatcherism is contrary to the Burkean ethos. I suspect that in modern times Burke would be regarded as a Keynesian capitalist, which is precisely what Buckley was attacking in God and Man in Yale. Burke ideas also align with environmentalists as he had a sense of community as inter-generational:

    Society becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

    He held a defined sense of the public good that was not just where the dice landed in the casino capitalism of the market. Further, though a passionate advocate of rights and liberties he was also a passionate advocate of restraint and moderation. He believed that the extension of rights should not extend to untrammelled liberties and licentious anarchy.

    Although a conservative in terms of his invocation of habit, tradition and social order, and also with his belief in institutional contribution and preservation – as well as measures of fiscal rectitude – he was, conversely, also its opponent of in other respects.

    One drawback to Burke as an intellectual, in my view, was his devotion to religion. Born in Ireland to a Protestant father and Catholic mother, noxious Irish Catholicism shaped him, diminishing his contribution; although one cannot say that he had the religious zealotry of a neoconservative.

    The Beginning of the End of History

    The Bushman-Blairite wars were an exercise in duplicity in shocking breach of international law. There were no smoking guns or development of nuclear weaponry in Iraq. It was Christian jihadism led by a latter-day Crusaders, including telegenic Tony that most lightweight of British gentlemen.

    Neoconservatism is a nefarious dysfunctional ideology that suits the interests of the powerful, which tragically became the consensus. A Dictionary of Received Ideas. There would be no comeuppance for Tony or George Dubya, who now blithely paints portraits of migrants, with all irony seemingly lost on him.

    In Britain, Brexit may lead to the gradual dismantling of the Blairite welfare state, even after the Johnson health care crisis, with the chronic under-resourcing and deregulation of the NHS now laid bare by the pandemic. This applies to all other countries, Italy most obviously, which diverted resources from essential services under neoliberal austerity measures. Meanwhile we see America on the brink of anarchy and civil insurrection due to the triumph of these ideas with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, who is the symptom of a very deep malaise.

    The combination of neoconservatism and neoliberalism is a far more deadly virus than Covid-19, which has simply exposed the soft underbelly of societies afflicted by its ravages. From a neoliberal point of view healthcare or a clean environment are not rights but entitlements and part of a libertarian agenda.

    The lack of regulation of spiraling accommodation and rental costs in the US and elsewhere brings a situation where, for the vast majority, outright ownership of property is a myth. Ostensibly, high salaries are hoovered up in hyper-inflated rents and mortgages subject to repossessions by vulture funds.

    The cost of living is prohibitive, and cramped accommodation makes the possibility of a decent family life almost impossible for most, engendering a dysfunctional humanity. Inequalities, short term contracts, and punishingly long working hours destroy mental health, decrease productivity and render family life – save for a privileged few – a thing of the past. The long-term effects on children are potentially catastrophic.

    This leads to short-termism and prevents even a modicum of forward planning for most people, who must live from one pay cheque to the next.

    Lacking objectivity and perspective, as we struggle for survival in subhuman working conditions that undermine the quality of life, decline arrives in increments. This leads to petty corruption and greed, in a dog-eat-dog universe where the elderly are replaced once they have outlived their usefulness. Their fate is increasingly to be place in decidedly uncaring privatized nursing homes, or spend their last moments on a trolley in an underfunded hospital.

    Nozick the Great Ideologue of Neo-Liberalism

    Anarchy, State, Utopia (1974) by Robert Nozick was a subversive reaction to John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice who had promoted a theory of economic justice. It became a neoliberal bible. Nozick suggested that government intervention, meaning taxation, beyond the enforcement of contracts and the control of crime is akin to slavery or theft. I own my body, he argues, so I therefore own everything my body produces, and if the state takes that which I produce away from me it enslaves me or – more elegantly – ‘socialism forbids consenting acts between capitalist adults.’

    The egregious fault with his argument is that it does not follow that because you own your body you own everything you produce. Inequalities are inbuilt into capitalism as David Ricardo’s Labour Theory of Value demonstrated. It also does not allow for any understanding of the human condition, other than one informed by radically disaggregated and individualistic behaviour, devoid of co-operation and community.

    At the time many thought that him daft, and that his ideas could not be implemented as they would lead to a socially dislocated society. It was even suggested that Anarchy, State; Utopia was an elebatorate joke, or part of an intellectual game. Indeed, Nozick was fond of scholarly conceits and subsequently wrote a book with a radically different thesis. So perhaps he did not take what he said seriously. Others did unfortunately.

    The consequences have been economic collapse and surging inequality, the gradual destruction of the middle class, and the privatisation and diminution in healthcare as a right, as well as homelessness and mass evictions

    The University of Chicago with its two highly placed judges in Easterbrook (dangling for a Supreme Court judgeship) and the truly nefarious ‘most cited’ legal scholar in the world Richard Posner, have also been responsible for much of the damage.

    Here we have the perfect reductio ad absurdum: all of human activity is reduced to the wealth maximisation thesis. Thus rape arises out of scarcity of resources: it is expensive for men to purchase sex so we should have a de-regulated prostitution market according to Posner; or adoption should be de-regulated to deal with a competitive baby market where the product can be purchased by the consumer. Such nonsense is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729) in which he satirizes an earlier version of neoliberalism, with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it would serve the polity to kill excess babies for economic gain.

    The Middle Way

    Keynes fell out of fashion because of the stranglehold of unionism and the imposition of socialist dogma in the 1970s. This created ‘a market’ for the work of the Chicago School and trickledown economics characterised by fetishist privatisation, deregulation and the elimination of state subsidies. In the late 1970s a retreat by the state made some sense, but the correction turned into an ongoing campaign. The market may have seemed like a score counter that could be tamed for human purposes. No longer. It is the recipe for inequality

    Naomi Klein in her bestseller The Shock Doctrine (2007) analyses the growth and development of neoliberalism across the world. She dubs the economic paradigm ‘disaster capitalism’, homing in on how these crises and others are used to justify further disaster prescriptions. She quotes Hayek’s disciple Milton Friedman:

    Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

    Naomi Klein.

    That is precisely where neoconservatism and neoliberalism coincide. Proto-neoconservatives remove the democratically elected Allende regime and replace him with Pinochet, before neo-liberal reforms open up the country for exploitation, washing their hands of any blood.

    Yet all the best evidence indicates that stable growth occurs in Nordic and Middle European social democratic countries. There is a tangible link between Keynesian economics and sustainable redistributed growth. Neoliberalism does not generate sustainable growth, as opposed to wealth for the few, and does not provide for redistribution. In effect it is a recipe for diminished human welfare, less good for the greatest number.

    Where Are We Now

    The Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stieglitz famously described our present state of affairs as ‘Socialism for the rich capitalism for the poor’. And the new era of state and corporate feudal control and terror we have entered into will accentuate these trends. Thus during this pandemic some of the wealthiest individuals in the world have actually increased their wealth.

    A return to the methodology of neoconservatism can be seen in the emergency legislation that has passed through the parliaments of U.K. and Ireland. In theory these are designed to confront an immediate emergency, but will become embedded, and spiral out of control just as we have with counter terrorism legislation. Enforcing self-isolation and ‘track and trace’ become new norms inflicted by neoconservatives and consented to by neoliberals, many of whom with notable exceptions such as Lord Sumption, forget their libertarian origins as long as the dosh keeps rolling in. Notably Tony Blair is awake to new opportunities.

    The very phrase ‘social isolation’ is problematic and euphemistic – like ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘military intelligence,’ a contradiction in terms. In fact self-isolation suits a silo bubble of social atomisation and dealing with people or problems one by one by state authorities. We risk a descent into a new barbarism not least due to the pernicious effects of decades of privatization.

    The Indian activist Arundhati Roy demonstrates how neoliberalism and environmental damage have gone hand-in-glove in her book Capitalism: a Ghost Story (Verso 2014). There are the mass evictions in India of ‘surplus population’ (a truly evil capitalism coining). The street vendors, rickshaw riders, the small shops and business people, and not least the suicide of 250,000 farmers.

    This forced displacement, often from rural areas to cities, augments the channelling of wealth towards the one percent plutocracy controlling India.

    It has been suggested by John Gray and Roy herself that the pandemic may lead to a rethink. I fear not. In fact, rather than becoming, as Roy puts it, a porthole to a sustainable and fair existence for all, I fear increased atomization, semi-permanent social distancing, diminishing social supports and the insidious undermining of civil liberties, supported by a scared and soma-induced population.

    We are now entering an age of corporate feudalism and of mercantile state control with sub Malthusian ideas gaining traction. It is an age of extremism nourished by religious fundamentalism. It is a time for the convergence of Burkean conservatism with Habermasean moderate socialism to implement ideas informed by traditions of decency and the green agenda. It is a time for sustainable personal and societal living to be realised.

  • Enforcing Environmental Rights

    Introduction

    However scant the support provided by the legal process, as a lawyer I am drawn to rights-driven considerations. In terms of recent context – blinkered by the present over-reaction – Obama’s climate change initiative has been overturned by Trump, who effectively tore up the Kyoto Accord.

    The internal U.S. solution to climate issues is to endorse such market-driven approaches as ‘Cap and Trade’. For example the Law and Economics movement allows and encourages individual U.S. States to permit, through legislation, permission to purchase the right to pollute. Obviously what happens is that once a corporation’s pollution credit is exhausted in a given State they simply move on. It is, in short, a polluter’s charter.

    A pollution or carbon tax is justified on the basis that it will promote efficiency but little account is taken of the externalisation of environmental meltdown, or on whether it is regressive or not. China’s ongoing disregard for pollution controls and restraints on consumption is well documented. The excuse given is that the U.S. is doing worse. So there seems to be little hope of the Big Two changing course.

    Nonetheless, as we will see, such ‘environmental rights’ as there are can be divided into three distinct categories: environmental procedural rights; the right of environment and the right to environment.

    A Consensus of Crisis

    Discourse on the status of the Blue Planet is varied and complex. On the one hand it is quite clear that it will survive climate chaos even if humankind does not. Gaia, as James Lovelock conceives her, has an infinite capacity for renewal and regeneration. But the scale and imminence of the impending disaster is being carefully manipulated in the vectors of public opinion. Trump, Bannon and others should be indicted for the crime against humanity of ecocide.

    The science is saying – the work of Elizabeth Colbert in particular – that without radical action, within sixty years the remaining wild mammals may be extinct. In these circumstances human extinction is likely to occur by increments.

    Various parts of Earth will be rendered uninhabitable through plant and animal die outs, destroying natural habitats and accelerating ecological meltdown. Raised temperatures will foster further mass migrations, with no clear destination, or pity, emanating from the privileged few, as quarantining of refugees in secluded detention centres becomes the norm.

    Radical inequalities in wealth and assets will diminish life expectancies through poverty and an under-resourced and undermined welfare system. Death on the Instalment Plan, as Louis-Ferdinand Céline put it after the Great Depression awaits for many of us. So in the medium term a mass extinction seems unlikely. More likely there will be significant population culls as a cost-benefit analysis to human life is applied.

    A crucial consideration, flagged in detail by John Gray, is that the top soil on which agriculture rests is being rapidly eroded. Furthermore, of even greater concern perhaps, is that chemical inputs into agriculture are wreaking havoc with natural ecosystems.

    Gray has previously argued in favour of an alliance between moderate conservatism and the green agenda, conserving venerable institutions while enhancing environmental and civic health. This is a variant on sustainable growth or development. Unfortunately, this admirable ideal appears to have little chance of success in the real world of power and money.

    Besides, the post-truth plague has put wind in the sails of climate change denial, as inaccurate and self-serving ideas are peddled by the likes of Michael O’Leary. These are accepted as valid points of view, as part of a misplaced notion of balanced coverage.

    The agenda is clear. The far-right prizes its assets and its riches, and prefers to pillage the Earth, rather than protect the planet.

    Collapsing Glaciers, Arundhati Roy and Indian Precedent

    According to the Geophysical Research Letters the ongoing melting of the glaciers of Antarctica is expected to be exacerbated by the collapse of the greatest canyon on earth: the Denman Glacier. By now the glacier is mostly cut off from the sea due to the level of glacial ice piled inside and atop the ravine.

    As the glacier’s edge continues to retreat down the slope, however, warm ocean currents will pour into the canyon, battering bigger and bigger sections of the glacier and gradually turning the Denman trough into a giant bowl of melt water, with nowhere to go. This scenario could have a runaway feedback loop of melt that ultimately returns all of Denman Glacier’s ice to the sea — risking a nearly 5 feet (1.5 m) rise in the planet’s sea level.

    This could lead to significant migrations from South to North – a mass exodus in fact – as overheating increases, joining the ever prevalent boats arriving in Sicily and elsewhere on the Mediterranean. I fear increasingly draconian measures to control migration and effectively dispose of fellow human beings.

    The developed world is not immune however. The environmental crisis, coupled with inevitable pandemics to come, is likely to precipitates a global financial collapse. The recent Financial Crisis has already brought ‘strong man’ leaders, and an increasingly oppressive jackboot state in so-called democracies.

    Assets need to be preserved, and those who threaten the status quo and the inward rapacious march of unchecked capitalism may be disposed of. As John Gray remarked in a different context: ‘The quickening advance of science and technology in the past few centuries has not gone with any comparable advance in civilization or human rationality.’

    Many human rights organizations reliant on funding and sponsorship from right-wing think tanks are becoming less than eager to confront the hard issues, as the consequences for doing so is a withdrawal of funding. The priorities of the Ford Foundation and others, who fund NGOs, brings a devotion to identity politics rather than the crucial issue of climate change.

    Those therefore, such as the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who challenge rapacious capitalism around the world, or have the temerity to object to its nefarious agenda will be murdered, imprisoned or simply disappeared. This goes hand-in-hand with sectarian repression in India where, ‘people are graded and assessed according to their faith.’

    Naomi Klein has offered a powerful critique in a series of books ever since The Shock Doctrine (2007). The important point to grasp is that the Chicago School approach of enforced shocks and distractions occlude sinister power grabs. The Covid-19 pandemic is a perfect sideshow in this respect for a shake down by large corporations. Over-reaction and mass hysteria about a virus becomes another distraction from a bigger picture of environmental, and social, meltdown.

    In India and beyond, Arundhati Roy demonstrates how neo-liberalism and environmental damage go hand in glove in her Capitalism a Ghost Story (2014).  Since the publication of The God of Small Things (1997) she has channelled her energies into political activism against the growing environmental and economic calamity being perpetrated on her native land, through the depredations of neo-liberalism. It is that political conscience that is the primary interest of her new awareness.

    In Capitalism: a Ghost Story there are all sorts of resonances to her new work of politicized fiction The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness. There is the mass evictions of India’s ‘surplus population.’ The street vendors, rickshaw riders, the small shops and business people, that brought the suicide of 250,000 farmers. This forced displacement, often from rural areas to cities, augments wealth of the one percent of plutocrats who control India. A graveyard, or simply being simply dumped in a river bed, is often the fate of the displaced, or the disappeared.

    It is clear in both books that this is the product of  a society where corruption is endemic. Inequality works to the benefit of monopolistic corporate interests, involving crossover interests of transnational corporations and law firms. Even the NGO sector won’t cut it as Roy saliently points out: ‘charity douses anger with pity.’ It can even silence criticism of neo-liberal atrocities by deflecting attention to ‘safer’ human rights issues such as gender equity.

    Roy has suggested that Covid-19 offers a portal that may allow us to mend the error of our ways. I hope she is right.

    https://vimeo.com/426871719?fbclid=IwAR2MMWAdI_jbI1ASvY78K-XBh-QxPMrgWIUTdjuclsedx-wWv5CHtLP-XEo

    Dissent from Sweden

    This brings us to Greta Thunberg, our only child public intellectual. Aged just sixteen, Time Magazine saw fit to make her its person of the year for 2019. She became famous for not attending school to demonstrate against her government’s inaction over climate change, leading to a spate of copycat demonstrations.

    Her recent short text, available in any decent book store for £2.99, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (2019), provides a summary of her speeches. She questions, given an imminent mass extinction, whether attending school is a terribly worthwhile idea, and identifies a cathedral solution. This is a brilliant analogy as we need deep structural and integrative thinking, and the leadership of the just and the wise. She might also have noted that serfs and slaves built the cathedrals, just as wage-slaves constructed those great cathedrals of capitalism: the skyscrapers.

    Greta Thunberg sees the world through black and white lenses. Good and evil. This provides a refreshing clarity, demanding action to be taken now, or her generation has no future. She is right insofar as the overwhelming majority of scientists are to be believed.

    Fortunately she is Swedish and retains a comparative freedom to speak her mind, despite the chastisements of Mr. Trump. The writ of neo-liberal justice does not extend to that Nordic country just yet.

    Little wonder also that anarcho-syndicalist groups such as Extinction Rebellion have gained traction when the political process has failed. The dangerous vista of extra-legal tactics, beyond civil disobedience, is on the horizon. The beast is slouching towards Bethlehem.

    Applying Sustainability in Our Daily Lives.

    There are also environmental considerations about the quality of civic life. Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness (2006) argues that the kind of buildings we inhabit and work in make a profound effect on our wellbeing. The poet Kathleen Raine pointed to a sense of homecoming when we encounter cities ‘where in architecture, sculpture and painting, the needs of the spirit are met.’ She attributes a growing alienation in the Britain of the 1960s to the architectural fashion of the time.

    It is self-evident that operating in an aesthetically pleasing home environment will raise the spirits, and yet this idea is often dismissed. Placing people in Bauhaus tower blocks creates battery hens. America is the paradigm of the skyscraper mentality, with Chicago’s Louis Sullivan ‘the father of the skyscraper.’

    I have visited perhaps the seminal modernist or rather brutalist example of sustainable living apartments. Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation (1952) is the perfect expression of his idea of ‘a machine for living in.’ Although wonderful in principle, in application it is a bastardised disaster.

    East elevation of Unité d’habitation Marseille in 2019

    How can you function properly, or think straight, while raising a young family living in an overpriced tenement which chews up most of your salary? Commuting to work compounds the problem, as you spend your spare hours on a train going to and from an ‘open plan’ panopticon of a workplace that generally diminishes your wellbeing. Sedentarism and a lack of exercise will shorten your life span and diminish a capacity to think freely. Failures in Irish urban planning, such as Ballymun Tower Blocks, lay behind the heroin epidemic of the 1980s.

    Yet there is good urban planning that raises the spirit. Paris was a crime and slum invested medieval city until the Baron de Haussmann developed a prototypical grid system, after Napoleon III instructed him to bring air and light to cetnre the city, to unify the different neighbourhoods with boulevards, and to make the city more beautiful. Yet today beyond the city limits, the architectural depredation of les banlieues has engendered the social dislocation and La Haine.

    Camille Pissaro, Avenue de l’Opera

    In Ireland Mary Robinson spearheaded an attempt to preserve the Viking Wood Quay settlement many decades ago, which was an early intimation of her ongoing attempts to raise global conscience, and force environmental regulation and climate change awareness in Ireland.

    It should be noted that great businessmen – which is not entirely an oxymoronic idea – think long-term and in terms of fundamentals of life. Benevolent capitalists, such as the Adriano Olivetti and John Cadbury, had regard to the quality of life of workers and housed them appropriately, endowing long obsolete privileges such as pensions and benefits.

    We need to discover an ecologically harmonious way of living rather than simply eco-friendly consumer choices, such as one discovers in a fabulous recent book called, Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way.

    Imperfect Legal Solutions

    As indicated, in procedural legal terms the broad notion of ‘environmental rights’ can be divided into three distinct categories: environmental procedural rights; the right of environment and the right to environment.

    Environmental procedural rights include those associated with rights of participation in decision-making, access to information and the ability to access justice, such as is expressed in the Aarhus Convention under European Union Law. But any consultative processes and public hearings are irrelevant if outcomes are pre-determined.

    The right of environment is perhaps the most radical, envisaging as it does a value in the environment beyond mere human benefit. Such an approach assumes that the environment should be held as a good on its own merits, and protected as such. The argument is based on the position that it is arbitrary to restrict justice and rights exclusively to inter-human relationships and to tolerate a situation in which interested parties are deprived of essential values in the distributive process on the basis of morally irrelevant factors – such as their not being human.

    Finally, there is the right to environment. This was first given international expression in the Stockholm Declaration, Principle 1 of which stated that ‘[m]an has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being …’

    The right to environment is conceptualized as a right pertaining to each individual – the environment is valued not on its own merits, but in light of its importance for human existence. The exact description of the right has been framed in various ways. A range of adjectives have been used: decent, healthful, natural, pure, clean, ecologically-balanced, safe (see International Environmental Law and Policy for the 21st Century, Pring and Nanda). Throughout the literature, a common theme is that of ensuring human health is not put at risk by environmental degradation. Obviously, this approach is open to the criticism that it is entirely anthropocentric.

    So do we assess the environment as a benefit to us as humans or as an intrinsic good in and of itself? I would argue in favour of the latter approach. But legal case law and rights are toothless fairies if there is no political will to implement them.

    Coda

    So legislative and constitutional protections exist and lobbying continues apace. This seems destined to fail, although I have not given up hope. In the present circumstances – portals or otherwise – as creatures of bounded rationality, with limited time, what we can do in our own lives is at least try and do as little harm as possible.

  • Repression and Covid-19

    The long march of the locked-down migrants[i]
    (Aadesh Ravi – composer, lyric writer and singer)

    Lyrics

    How are the little ones holding up at home?
    I wonder how and with what my old mother feeds them? 

    We toil daily to subsist
    Forced to migrate to make ends meet

    The nation may be great
    But our lives are miserable

    This wicked disease struck us
    and wrecked our lives 

    What life is this? What life is this?
    a wretched life, a pathetic life
    an abject life, a broken life 

    Is there a disease worse than poverty?
    Is there a solace greater than being with one’s family? 

    Just to be at home in these troubled times would have
    been enough

    At least we would have survived together, on some gravy
    or gruel

    The kids flit and hover in my eyes all the time
    My wife’s laments chase me ceaselessly

    What, what should I do? What am I to do?
    What to do? What can I do?

    No need of buses or trains, O’ saaru
    Just let me go, master! I will walk my way home

    No need of buses or trains, O’ saaru
    Just let me go, master! I will walk home

    How are the little ones holding up at home?
    I wonder how and with what my old mother feeds them?

    How are the little ones holding up at home?
    I wonder how and with what my old mother feeds them?

    Let me go, O’saaru! I will walk my way home!
    Let me go, master! I will just walk home!

    Imagined Communities

    Nations, while possessing points of similarity with others, such as a general ‘reverence’ of their external borders, are each a unique and distinct mélange of dominant and disputed histories, cultural groupings, social identities, economic modalities, political structures and legal strictures. Citizens share a set of collective memories and a sense of belongingness with their wider national community – though this can conflict with localised identities particularly in post-colonial states where different ethnic and religious groups were lumped together – despite only ever getting to know a small minority of its members.

    These ‘imagined communities’, according to Benedict Anderson, possess a number of characteristics. They imagine themselves as ‘limited’, as each nation sees itself as different from others; ‘sovereign’ as they are free to determine their own destiny; and ‘as a community’ in that no matter how unequal the internal social relations might be, ‘the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.’[ii]

    ‘Habitus’ and the State

    The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu uses the term ‘habitus’ to describe how individuals are socialised through the ‘historical and cultural production of individual practices – since contexts, laws, rules and ideologies all speak through individuals who are never entirely aware of what is happening.’ Individuals then reproduce these practices, mediated to varying extents by their own self-interest and interpretation.[iii] This individual concept of habitus can be applied at the level of groups, such as a nation. This ‘collective habitus’ refers to its

    shared perspective on the world, relatively common sets of values and shared dispositions to believe and behave in particular ways. The state partially orchestrates this collective habitus by creating the conditions under which certain things come to be viewed as natural and inevitable… and others unthinkable… But perhaps the most effective way that the state creates an orchestrates this collective habitus is by ensuring that is seen by the people it governs as being ‘the voice of the people’, which gives it legitimate authority to rule us, and even to exercise violence against us.[iv]

    As individual nations have their own distinctive ‘collective habitus’, the political and social contexts within which governments operate will vary. This will impact upon the respective levels of freedom they have to resort to force or repressive measures in advancing specific policies. What is deemed acceptable by the citizens of different polities will largely depend on the history of repression in their states, the restrictions accepted in the past, the tradition of resistance, public confidence in the authorities, the current levels of political freedom and whether the state and its citizens are faced by some form of existential threat.

    An interesting illustration of how the historical experiences and collective habitus of a nation can impact upon how repressive measures are accepted and rejected, can be seen in the reaction of some segments of society and even the political leadership in the U.S. to the lockdown. In several cities, large gatherings of citizens were able to successfully assemble in public to protest lockdowns in defiance of restriction on movement ordinances.

    Paul Becker/wikicommons

    Moreover, not only did the U.S. President Donald Trump state his support for their actions but he even went so far as to encourage them to ‘liberate Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia’, states which are, not surprisingly, ‘election swing states with Democratic governors.‘[v] In many other nations, such acts of civil disobedience, in contradiction of state ordinances enacted to protect citizens from an infectious disease, would have been heavily clamped down upon by the authorities.

    Power, Control and the Use of Force

    In his book on Power, John Scott expounds on modern governmental management of a territory and the political management of nations and their citizens.

    Modern rulers… see their task as one of government in… shaping, guiding, and directing of the conduct of others by using persuasive processes of signification and legitimation to work through their desires, aspirations, interests, and beliefs… Sovereignty over territory also involves the management of the population to regulating the life processes through which they live, work, and relate to each other. This is what Foucault termed ‘bio-politics’… discipline is a control that is exercised over people through systems of rules that are not simply imposed on them but are instilled in them.”[vi]

    Governments can increase their power and control either by direct imposition of repressive measures or through the prohibition of alternative voices and movements, which they wish to suppress. In most instances, a judicious melding of both methods will be applied. The precise mix will depend on the political and social environment together with the historical experiences of the state in question.

    However, it is important to remember, as Max Weber emphasises, that while:

    Force is certainly not the normal or only means of the state… but force is a means specific to the state… the state is a relation of men dominating men [and generally – one should add – of men dominating women], a relationship supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence…[vii]

    As David Held writes ‘the web of agencies and institutions’ of a state find their ultimate sanction in the claim to the monopoly of coercion, and a political order, is only, in the last instance, vulnerable to crises when this monopoly erodes.[viii]

    Covid-19 – Gateway to Repression?

    Confronted by an unprecedented and menacing threat, it is normal for people to feel disorientated and even experience levels of panic disproportionate to the threat itself. It is not surprising therefore that the past few months have seen the imposition of unprecedented restrictions in response to Covid-19 by governments around the world. Emergency powers have been used to shut down large sectors of the economy, enforce movement restrictions, screen and isolate potential carriers, and enforce quarantining.

    Covid-19’s rapid spread around the world has impacted upon people living in a wide variety of political, economic, social and cultural contexts. These diverse contexts have mediated the repressive policies available to governments – facilitating, refracting or impeding the measures they have attempted to impose – the insecurity and fear caused by the pandemic have undoubtedly facilitated the imposition of repressive measures.

    While these measures have generally been implemented in response to scientific guidelines on how to tackle Covid-19, they should be limited to what is required and not used as a means to surreptitiously increase governmental power. Furthermore, as Amnesty International researcher Massimo Moratti warns, while states of emergency are permitted under international human rights law, such restrictive measures should not become a “new normal” and should last no longer than the danger that has necessitated their implementation.[ix]

    ‘Shock Doctrine’

    In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes how this process mimics the CIA method of ‘coercive interrogation’ which aims at breaking ‘resistant sources’ by creating violent ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them. Klein argues that this is how shock doctrine works: ‘the original disaster, the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane – puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. Like the terrorised prisoner who gives us the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.’[x]

    The advent of Covid-19 has led to a situation where people are confronted by an infectious disease, for which there is no vaccine, and global lockdowns resulting in deep and widespread social and economic disruption. This has provided an opportune environment for governments to increase their power and control as well as advancing interests of their more powerful supporters. Repressive policies and measures can be introduced, as the ‘shock’ caused by the Covid-19 pandemic leaves the public less able to resist. In a world where lockdowns, isolation and quarantining have become the new accepted norm, coordinated, active resistance to repressive and inhibiting policies has become more complicated. As Patrick Cockburn points out:

    Autocratic governments everywhere are becoming more autocratic and repressive regimes more repressive. They believe that they can get away with it: frightened peoples are looking to their governments to save them in this time of peril, and do not want to discover that they are ruled by incompetent people determined to serve their own interests and stay in power.

    State Repression

    While most of the measures imposed to fight Covid-19 have some level of scientific justification, emergency and repressive powers entail an inherent risk of abuse. Moreover, it is clear many governments have used the COVID-19 pandemic to push through laws and other measures that impose disproportionate restrictions on public freedom and civic rights.

    Significant international controversy arose with the granting of wide ranging powers to Viktor Orban, the Hungarian PM, and his Fidesz party, which decreed jail terms of up to five years for the intentional dissemination of misinformation that might impede the government’s tackling of Covid-19. While the chilling effect of this legislation was widely criticised, it was the refusal to place any time limits on the powers being abrogated by Orban and his regime that led to the most concern.[xi]

    Viktor Orban

    Writing in late March, Osama Tanous describes how Covid-19 has been used as an excuse by Israel to further repress Palestinians:

    Repression has continued, with the Israeli occupation forces using the excuse of increased police presence to continue raids on some communities, such as the Issawiya neighborhood in East Jerusalem, home demolitions in places like Kafr Qasim village and the destructi‘’on of crops in Bedouin communities in the Naqab desert.[xii]

    Despite initially downplaying the threat posed by Covid-19 and the publics’ ‘hysterical’ response to it, the Philippines President Duterte has subsequently implemented an ‘extreme, militarized approach.’ By early April, the Duterte regime had arrested almost as many people for alleged violations of the Covid-19 lockdown and curfews as had been tested for the virus.[xiii]

    In Colombia, already heavily besieged rural and indigenous communities have come under even greater threat as a result of the Covid-19 measures enacted to prevent transmission. In the week following imposition of quarantine measures in cities across Colombia in mid-March, three social leaders were murdered. Already one of the most dangerous countries in the world for social activists and community leaders, with 271 activists killed since the conclusion of the early 2017 peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), the government’s focus on the pandemic has led to activists saying they are now at even greater risk.[xiv]

    On March 16, a group of United Nations human rights experts warned that,

    emergency declarations based on the COVID-19 outbreak should not be used as a basis to target particular groups, minorities, or individuals. It should not function as a cover for repressive action under the guise of protecting health … and should not be used simply to quash dissent.[xv]

    Furthermore, as the OSCE Right’s Chief, Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir emphasised, a state of emergency must be proportionate to its aim, and only remain in place for as long as absolutely necessary.[xvi]

    Cloaking Repression

    Repression is not just a matter of custodial torture and extra-judicial murder. Mis-governance or mal-governance is repression too.[xvii] Joel Simon, writes about a new face of repression he terms ‘Repression 2.0.‘ This form of repression continues to incorporate imprisonment and state censorship but it also, at the same time, applies new information technologies such as smartphones and social media to give it a softer edge, masking the harsher aspects. According to Simon:

    Masked political control means a systematic effort to hide repressive actions by dressing them in the cloak of democratic norms. Governments might justify an internet crackdown by saying it is necessary to suppress hate speech and incitement to violence. They might cast the jailing of dozens of critical journalists as an essential element in the global fight against terror.[xviii]

    As Patrick Cockburn explains:

    Governments worldwide claim that journalists are impeding their heroic struggle against coronavirus, but their real motive is more often to conceal the inadequacy of those efforts. Political elites everywhere fear that the pandemic will expose their incompetence and corruption, weakening their grip on political power and economic resources.[xix]

    Writing in pre-Covid-19 times, Simon used the ‘fear of terrorism’ as an example how a government might justify repressive actions. Today, similar arguments are being used to validate punitive measures to fight the current pandemic and prevent the dissemination of disinformation. In the digital age, people can access and disseminate information more freely and in real time. However, the technology that enables this unprecedented intensity and extensity of communication has allowed states to devise and develop measures to corrupt information flows by manipulating and influencing the content that reaches people, thus facilitating a new form of censorship. While [This] tactic is commonly used in countries rated as having closed or repressed civic space… [it] has also been seen in all corners of the globe as a subtle tool to silence critics.[xx]

    The aim here is to control the narrative and if this proves impossible to at least prevent a coherent oppositional one. As White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon once said, the story is more important than reality.[xxi] Today, many governments are applying this dictum to their communications on Covid-19.

    Twitter-Gate

    The circulation of conspiracy theories can also be co-opted by governments as a valid rationale for the curbing of the free flow of information, on the grounds they are misleading and may be used, as in their usage by extreme groups, to stir up animosity and violence against targeted groups. However, once these repressive measures they can be used to increase government control over the general flow of information, thus having a chilling effect on communications and alternative narratives, as well as potentially preventing the development and implementation of genuine civil society initiatives.

    An interesting outcome of the struggle to control the flow of information has been that in the U.S., where social media platforms have been caught in the crosshairs of Trump and his administration. Well in advance of Covid-19, governments around the world had been criticising the dissemination of ‘fake news’ and misleading stories being posted and circulated via social media. Incidents such as the burning of phone masts due to false rumours that they were helping to spread Covid-19 and the dissemination of dangerous remedies to fight the virus, the call for social media platforms to monitor content posted has only increased.

    In response, social media companies have started to police posts to a greater extent, purportedly to prevent injurious or false content being uploaded. This increased monitoring of posts led Twitter to fact check a post by Trump over a ‘false assertion that mail-in voting leads to widespread voter fraud.’ In a fit of presidential pique, Trump retaliated by signing an executive order on May 28 that would decrease the protection of social media companies from being sued for content posted on their services.[xxii]

    Failing the Vulnerable

    The development and implementation of measures to reduce the spread of Covid-19 need to take into account the particular needs of the most vulnerable. Unfortunately, as the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston writes, this has not been the case as many countries have blithely ignored the needs of the most vulnerable communities,

    The policies of many States reflect a social Darwinism philosophy that prioritises the economic interests of the wealthiest, while doing little for those who are hard at work providing essential services or unable to support themselves… Governments have shut down entire countries without making even minimal efforts to ensure people can get by. Many in poverty live day to day, with no savings or surplus food. And of course, homeless people cannot simply stay home.[xxiii]

    Tanay barisha (wikimedia)

    During an address to the nation at 8pm on March 24, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that a strict lockdown of 21 days duration would come into force throughout the whole of India at midnight. Every state, district and village were subject to this lockdown.[xxiv] The initial lockdown was to be for three weeks, though it has been extended since, and the people of India were informed they would have to get used to staying at home. Modi warned:

    Do not step outside your house. For 21 days, forget what is stepping outside. There is a Lakshman Rekha[xxv] on your doorstep. Even one step outside your house will bring the coronavirus inside your house.[xxvi]

    Paulrudd (wikimedia)

    Acknowledging that these measures could provoke ‘hard times’ for the poor in India, Modi insisted that draconian lockdown measures were required to prevent the untrammelled diffusion of Covid-19, which ‘spreads like wildfire.’[xxvii] While Modi and the Indian government might argue they had ‘reasonable justification’ for ordering such a harsh lockdown, they could surely have implemented it in a manner which would have relieved the severity of its impact on migrant workers and the impoverished. As Professor of Gender and Development Nitya Rao outlines:

    Half of India’s 1.3 billion people are food insecure which means they lack access to sufficient safe and nutritious food. Around 60% of the poorest people from India’s scheduled tribes and scheduled castes, are also anaemic. This means that a total lockdown, while it may help stop the spread of coronavirus, is likely to have a significant impact on food and nutrition. Deprived of the ability to work, threatened by arrest if they ventured forth to secure their rations, the poor of India risked starvation.[xxviii]

    The Indian ‘Trail of Tears’

    As the lockdown came into force, a serious humanitarian crisis erupted with in excess of an estimated hundred million migrant workers stranded in cities and other locations around India with no work or ability to pay for accommodation.[xxix] Many of these migrants were forced to part with their meagre savings so they and their families could gain places in overcrowded trucks to try and get home. Many more were unable to afford the luxury of transport were forced to make their way home by foot. The traumatic scenes of hordes of migrants of all ages, from babies carried by fatigued parents and siblings to old men and women, struggling along the roads of India in a desperate attempt to return home became a common sight.[xxx]

    One of the many heart-breaking stories that have emerged from this modern ‘Trail of Tears’ is that of Jamlo Madkam, a 12-year-old girl. Her parents, Andoram (32) and Sukamati Madkam (30) had eight children. As Jamlo’s mother Skamati recounts, ‘I gave birth to eight children, and of them four died at the age of crawling. And now Jamlo is dead too.’ Jamlo left her home in mid-February for the first time to work at a chilli farm in Telegana with relatives and friends. When the lockdown was instituted, she was left with no choice but to try and make her way home. Tragically, Jamlo passed away on April 18 from exhaustion and lack of food and water. She was only 11 kms from her home in Aded in Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh, having walked more than 100 kms over three days.[xxxi]

    Bringing the virus home

    Follow-up on the condition and living circumstances of labourers who managed to return to their villages is, at best, minimal. Professor Nitya Rao reports how a local project coordinator witnessed truckloads of migrant families returning from Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Kerala to their homes in Koraput district in the week leading up to March 26th. The economic situation of these returnees was extremely precarious as many had not received their payments and had little prospect of any income in the coming months. In addition, they might have brought Covid-19 with them back to their families and communities, with whom they live in cramped quarters.[xxxii]

    As Arundhati Roy writes:

    The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.[xxxiii]

    The lack of consideration of the impact of these Covid-19 measures on the more vulnerable members of society is not just on the part of governments. Humra Quraishi writes of the ‘wretched mode of thinking’ on the part of ‘upper-middle class people’ who report that the lockdown is causing them no problems as they can access all they need, blithely ignorant to the suffering of the poor as they themselves ‘have never been exposed to hunger.’[xxxiv]

    Of course, India is not the only country that has seen the more vulnerable members of society suffering disproportionately due to repressive measure that that fails to consider or take account of their needs. In Colombia, while the more affluent have isolated themselves in relative comfort during the lockdown, the more vulnerable have experienced severe economic hardship and increased food insecurity. The urban informal sector of small-scale and street vendors comprising the greater part of the Colombian economic system, deprived of adequate support to help them through this period, now face having to choose between letting themselves and their families die of hunger or of Covid-19.[xxxv]

    Repression Post Covid-19?

    The struggle against the Covid-19 pandemic has provided scientific justification for the imposition of repressive methods including quarantining, isolation and lockdowns. Although their design and implementation have been disputed, there was general agreement that action was required to avoid overwhelming the public health services, often already stretched to their limits due to chronic under-funding. However, there is widespread concern governments might keep repressive and increased surveillance measures in place post Covid-19.

    According to the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari:

    My home country of Israel, for example, declared a state of emergency during its 1948 War of Independence, which justified a range of temporary measures from press censorship and land confiscation to special regulations for making pudding (I kid you not). The War of Independence has long been won, but Israel never declared the emergency over, and has failed to abolish many of the “temporary” measures of 1948 (the emergency pudding decree was mercifully abolished in 2011).”[xxxvi]

    Hariri goes on to warn that ‘data-hungry governments’ might try to keep biometric surveillance measures in place on the grounds there might be a second wave of Covid-19. Yuval fears that this could help overcome the resistance of those campaigning for the right to privacy as many might accept this argument given the understandable concern of people in general to place health concerns above those of privacy.[xxxvii]

    Google HQ, Dublin.

    Since May 5th, the U.K. government has been running a trial of a contact tracing app which has been made available on the Isle of Wight for its residents. The NSHX app chosen by the government however presents a number of ‘practical, legal and ethical questions and concerns that need to be answered.’ Primary amongst the concerns raised is the fact that the NSHX app, uses a centralized model. This means that the data collected by this app will not just be retained on your phone but will also be collected centrally on government servers. This is in contrast to the privacy-protective models chosen by most other European countries, including Germany, Italy and Ireland.[xxxviii]  Although, it should be noted that the Irish app is also facing issues with respect to privacy issues in addition to technical concerns.[xxxix]

    Far-Right

    Jumping on the Covid-19 fear bandwagon has become a central plank in the platform of the far-right as it capitalises on the elevated levels of social disorientation due to the pandemic. As Barbara Perry director of the Centre of Hate, Bias and Extremism at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology highlights, ‘[T]here’s nothing the far right likes more … than a crisis.’ Increased online right wing activity during Covid-19 comes under three main rubrics: ‘conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant and xenophobic attitudes and accelerationist rhetoric, which is concerned with trying to hasten the collapse of society and a race war that would lead to a “white ethno-state.‘[xl]

    A report produced by the London-based Institute of Strategic Dialogue documents how ‘far-right communities have started talking about COVID-19 as an accelerant for a second civil war, also known as boogaloo… From Feb. 1 to March 28, more than 200,000 posts on social media contained the word “boogaloo.” The most popular hashtag within those posts was “#coronachan.’[xli]

    Worryingly, Perry warns these narratives are not restricted to the far right anymore, if that was ever truly the case. She notes that ‘[T]here’s a bigger audience for folks for the far right now. So many of us are online… So we’re so vulnerable, I think, to this sort of messaging.‘ [xlii]

    In a recent article, Thomas Klikauer and Nadine Campbell outlined how the Nazi leader Hermann Goering once observed that ‘the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.‘ Klikauer and Campbell then go on to highlight how Neo-Nazis in Germany have adopted a similar approach to that advocated by Goering, by weaving ‘their ideology into the fear of the coronavirus.‘[xliii]

    President Donald Trump talks to senior staff Steve Bannon during a swearing in ceremony for senior staff at the White House in Washington, DC January 22, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

    Staying Vigilant

    There is a need for the public to rest vigilant to the introduction of repressive and enhanced surveillance methods in this time of Covid-19, both to ensure theses measures are appropriate and fit for purpose, and are rescinded with the passing of the pandemic.

    We also need to pay attention to the impacts that repressive measures can have on the most vulnerable in our midst including, inter alia, people on low income with few resources, the homeless, asylum seekers forced to live in direct provision and women at home with abusing partners, and hold our governments to account in this respect. In Australia, experts centrally involved in Australia’s Covid-19 response and the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases have advocated on behalf of immigration detainees and recommended the relocation of those considered no major security or health risk, to safe accommodation in the community.[xliv]

    As the Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Edward Santow, asserts:

    We must… speak up for those whose voices are hardest to hear… If combating Covid-19 is a war, we can be proud of why we got into the fight: to preserve life, especially for vulnerable people. Those are the best of our values. We must now ensure those same values guide how we fight.[xlv]

    [i] These are the lyrics from a song written by Aadesh Ravi, a Hyderabad composer, about the suffering caused by the lockdown migrations across India. You can see the story behind this song and also listen to it at the following link – Aadesh Ravi, The long march of the locked-down migrants, Rural India online, 16 May 2020, https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/the-long-march-of-the-locked-down-migrants/

    [ii] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso (new edition): London/NY, 2006, pages 6-7

    [iii] Jen Webb, Tony Schirato and Geoff Danaher, Understanding Bourdieu, Sage: London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi, 2002, p. 15

    [iv] Jen Webb, Tony Schirato and Geoff Danaher, Understanding Bourdieu, Sage: London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi, 2002, p. 93

    [v] Sanjana Karanth, Trump Defends Right-Wing Protesters Fighting Coronavirus Restrictions: ‘These Are Great People’ Huff Post, 19 April 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-defends-right-wing-protesters-fighting-coronavirus-restrictions-great-people_n_5e9d0ceec5b635d25d6efeb2

    [vi] John Scott, Power, Polity: Cambridge, 2001, page 10

    [vii] David Held, Introduction States and Societies, 1983, The Open University, Oxford, page 35

    [viii] Ibid, page 36

    [ix] CBC News, Hungary’s Orban, Serbia’s Vucic seize greater authority amid coronavirus lockdowns, Canada Broadcasting Corporation, 31 March 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hungary-serbia-coronavirus-authority-1.5515846

    [x] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin: London, 2008, pages 15-16

    [xi][xi] Shaun Walker and Jennifer Rankin, Hungary passes law that will let Orbán rule by decree, The Guardian, 30 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/hungary-jail-for-coronavirus-misinformation-viktor-orban)

    [xii] Osama Tanous, Coronavirus outbreak in the time of apartheid, Aljazeera, 24 March 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-outbreak-time-apartheid-200324151937879.html

    [xiii] William D. Hartung, Duterte uses Covid-19 response to broaden reign of fear and repression, CNN, 20 April 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/20/opinions/duterte-covid-19-philippines-repression-hartung/index.html

    [xiv] Joe Parkins Daniels, Colombian death squads exploiting coronavirus lockdown to kill activists, Guardian, 23 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/colombian-groups-exploiting-coronavirus-lockdown-to-kill-activists

    [xv] Human Rights Watch (HRW), Thailand: COVID-19 Clampdown on Free Speech, HRW, 25 March 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/25/thailand-covid-19-clampdown-free-speech

    [xvi] OSCE Press Release, Newly declared states of emergency must include a time limit and parliamentary oversight, OSCE human rights head says, OSCE, 30 March 2020, https://www.osce.org/odihr/449311

    [xvii] Ashok Agrwaal, State Repression: Behind the Mask of Democracy, Combat Law, 2002, page 4, https://www.academia.edu/26287742/STATE_REPRESSION_Behind_the_Mask_of_Democracy

    [xviii] Joel Simon, Introduction: The New Face of Censorship, Committee to Protect Journalists, 25 April 2017, https://cpj.org/2017/04/introduction-the-new-face-of-censorship.php

    [xix] Patrick Cockburn, ibid

    [xx] CIVICUS Monitor, People Power Under Attack 2019, December 2019, CIVICUS, Page 8, https://civicus.contentfiles.net/media/assets/file/GlobalReport2019.pdf

    [xxi] Thomas Klikauer – Nadine Campbell, Conspiracies and the Coronavirus in the USA and Germany, Counterpunch, 20 May 2020, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/20/conspiracies-and-the-coronavirus-in-the-usa-and-germany/

    [xxii] David Ingram and Dylan Byers, Trump set the stage for tech’s free speech title fight. Zuckerberg and Dorsey are the main event., NBC, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/trump-set-stage-tech-s-free-speech-title-fight-zuckerberg-n1217666

    [xxiii] OHCHR News, Responses to COVID-19 are failing people in poverty worldwide” – UN human rights expert, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights News, 22 April 2020, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25815

    [xxiv] India Today Web Desk, Coronavirus in India: PM Modi announces 21-day national lockdown, India Today, 24 March 2020, https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/coronavirus-india-pm-narendra-modi-national-lockdown-21-days-announcement-five-points-1659282-2020-03-24

    [xxv] Originally a line drawn by Lakshmana around the residence he shares with his brother Rama and sister-in-law Sita to protect Sita, as recounted in the Ramayana. In modern India, ‘Lakshmana Rekha’ refers to a strict convention or regulation which must be followed.

    [xxvi] The Economic Times (India), India will be under complete lockdown for 21 days: Narendra Modi, Economic Times-India Times, 25 March 2020, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/india-will-be-under-complete-lockdown-starting-midnight-narendra-modi/articleshow/74796908.cms

    [xxvii] Ibid

    [xxviii] Nitya Rao, India’s coronavirus lockdown will hit women and migrant workers hardest, The Conversation, 26 March 2020, https://theconversation.com/indias-coronavirus-lockdown-will-hit-women-and-migrant-workers-hardest-134689

    [xxix] Chinmay Tumbe, In times of a lockdown, support migrant workers, Hindustan Times, 26 May 2020 (updated), https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/in-times-of-a-lockdown-support-migrant-workers/story-A3EglS9L3AHRCCuDA0z4TP.html

    [xxx] Newsclick Report, Why Home Ministry’s Travel Plan for Migrant Workers Will Create More Chaos, Newsclick, 12 May 2020, https://www.newsclick.in/Home-Ministry-Travel-Plan-Migrant-Workers-Cause-Chaos

    [xxxi] Purusottam Thakur and Kamlesh Painkra, Jamlo’s last journey along a locked-down road, Rural India Online, 14 May 2020, https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/jamlos-last-journey-along-a-locked-down-road/

    [xxxii] Nitya Rao, ibid, https://theconversation.com/indias-coronavirus-lockdown-will-hit-women-and-migrant-workers-hardest-134689

    [xxxiii] Arundhati Roy, ‘The pandemic is a portal’, Financial Times, 3 April 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

    [xxxiv] Humra Quraishi, Covid-19: ‘All is Well’ Narrative Slips and Falls, Newsclick, 12 May 2020, https://www.newsclick.in/COVID-19-Pandemic-India-Workers-Farmers-Suffer-Middle-Class-Apathetic

    [xxxv] Colombia Solidarity Campaign, Colombia – Covid 19 Pandemic, Colombia Solidarity Campaign (UK), 13 April 2020, https://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/campaign-media/25-news/657-colombia-covid-19-pandemic

    [xxxvi] Yuval Noah Harari, the world after coronavirus, Financial Times, 20 March 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75

    [xxxvii] Ibid

    [xxxviii] Amnesty International UK, 7 principles that should be guiding roll-out of any COVID-19 contacting-tracing app, Amnesty, 19 May 2020, https://www.amnesty.org.uk/coronavirus/7-principles-contact-tracing-app-rollout?utm_campaign=MEMA2523_UPT_HRUK_COVID19_tracingapp&utm_content=12714&utm_source=amnestyuk&utm_medium=email

    [xxxix] Adam Maguire, Privacy concerns and technical doubts dull hopes of HSE Covid-19 app’s value, RTE, 01 June 2020, https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0530/1143516-covid-app-hse/

    [xl] Andrea Bellamare, Far-right groups may try to take advantage of pandemic, watchdogs warn, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 9 April 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/far-right-opportunistic-covid-pandemic-1.5526423

    [xli] John P. Mello Jr., Far-Right Spreads COVID-19 Disinformation Epidemic Online, Technews World, 5 May 2020, https://www.technewsworld.com/story/86648.html

    [xlii] Ibid

    [xliii] Thomas Klikauer – Nadine Campbell, The Covid-19 Conspiracies of German Neo-Nazis, Counterpunch, 26 May 2020, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/26/the-covid-19-conspiracies-of-german-neo-nazis/

    [xliv] Edward Santow-Australia’s human rights commissioner, We must combat Covid-19 but creeping authoritarianism could do more harm than good, The Guardian, 7 April 2020,

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/08/we-must-combat-covid-19-but-creeping-authoritarianism-could-do-more-harm-than-good

    [xlv] Ibid

  • A Breakthrough to Save Humanity

    In Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1320) we encounter a forlorn Ulysses (Greek, Odysseus) in the Inferno, punished to eternal torments for deceitful stratagems in the Trojan war, and beyond. Dante adds a layer to the Classical myth, where the aged warrior returns to his native Ithaca only to find:

    not sweetness of a son, not reverence
    for an ageing father, not the debt of love
    I owed Penelope to make her happy
    could quench deep in myself the burning wish
    to know the world and have experience
    of all man’s vices, of all human worth.

    He persuades his crew to embark on a final voyage to a: ‘world they called unpeopled’. For five months they sail until, ‘there appeared a mountain shape, darkened / by distance, that arose to endless heights,’ which is the mount of Purgatory. But, ‘celebrations soon turned into grief,’ as a whirlwind wrecks the fleet, consigning Odysseus and his crew to a watery grave. A hero, who dared travel beyond accepted limitations, is doomed to an excruciating hell, even if there is a suspicion that Dante admires his chutzpah for seeking to experience “all human worth.”[i]

    Fear of the sea is an intuitive recognition of the danger it poses, in contrast to an attachment to home ground. As Herman Melville in Moby Dick (1851) puts it: ‘For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not from that isle, thou canst never return!’[ii]

    Odysseus’s sorry fate also reflects a medieval mindset that looked askance at unfettered ambition. This devolved into superstitions deterring voyages to unchartered territories. Thus Laurens van der Post relates a story told to him by Carl Jung, ‘that if one wanted to fix a precise moment at which the Renaissance began, it would be the day when the Italian poet Petrarch decided to defy superstition and climbed a mountain in the Alps, just for the sake of reaching its summit.’[iii] Through a rebirth in Classical ideas that followed in Petrarch’s wake, Europeans opened their eyes to hidden possibilities, leading to the discovery of new continents that relied on a spirit of innovation.

    Poetic Inspiration

    Poetry in its widest sense is a font of ingenuity and invention. Thus Andre Breton in his Surrealist Manifesto saw it as: ‘Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’ Reversing a dictum attributed to Stalin describing poets as engineers of the human soul, Breton attributes scientific breakthroughs to a poetic imagination, arguing: ‘the conquests of science rest far more on a surrealistic than on a logical thinking.’[iv]

    This reinforces Percy Shelley’s proposition that poets, operating in varying capacities, are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ The spark for any new venture comes from an imagination Shelley equates with poetry. He distinguishes this faculty from reason, which he describes as the ‘enumeration of qualities already known’; whereas ‘imagination in the perception of the values of those qualities, both separately and as a whole … Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.’[v]

    Too often governments, corporations and individuals inhibit that poetic ignition. Across society we see reason and logic in constant motion, but imagination is barely nurtured, and often frowned on. We proceed from point A to B, all too often ignoring possibilities arising in the remainder of the alphabet. Yet scientific innovation is predicated on poetically imagining possibilities beyond contemporary restraints. It is notable that, besides his contributions to the understanding of the physical universe, Albert Einstein was a prolific poet.

    Technological advances have diminished our intuitive fear of the ocean. As Melville put it: ‘however much … man may brag of his science and skill … yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him … nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.’[vi]

    Incontestably, a combination of greed and frightening religious extremism motivated the global exploration of the sixteenth century, which rapidly encompassed the whole Earth. But the first voyagers also displayed admirable qualities, including a willingness to set aside a fear of the unknown, the strange and exotic.

    Crossing great stretches of ocean demanded breakthroughs in nautical engineering, including the development of a lighter, more mobile, craft, the caravel. Developed in Portugal under Henry the Navigator (d.1460), this vessel could sail into a head wind. Such innovations occurred because adventurous spirits imagined pathways previously considered taboo. It is only by taking such imaginative flights, overcoming prejudices and applying the required labour, that new inventions are realised.

    Despite the ensuing carnage and destruction of natural environments wrought by European colonisation, there remains an enduring heroism in this original repudiation of orthodoxy. In Dante’s Inferno Odysseus did founder, but we may laud a spirit rejecting preconceived limitations that a medieval mind considered hubristic. Innovation demands an interrogation of established ideas, a rejection of preconception and the embrace of the unknown – like a bird taking flight for the first time in its evolution. How did that feel?

    The Great Adventure of Our Time

    Theodore Zeldin recently considered what the great adventure of our time should be: if in the sixteenth century it was discovering new continents; and scientific enquiry in the seventeenth; or addressing political equality in the eighteenth. Precisely the most valuable quest in our time remained elusive to him, but he argued that giving a new meaning to work could offer a great adventure: ‘so that it is more than the exercise of a valued skill, more than the enjoyment of collaboration with others, more than a price that has to be paid in search of security and status, means using work to redefine freedom.’[vii]

    A revolution in working practices does seem overdue, with technology performing most basic and increasingly complex tasks. A new departure in attitudes to employment should also appeal to anyone disheartened by the irrationality of boundless economic growth. Any new economy ought to harness creativity in different domains, and address the tendency towards homogenisation of large corporations. Still, I fear this aspiration to alter work practices is insufficiently ambitious for the environmental challenges of the twenty-first century, in the shape of runaway climate change and a Sixth Extinction.

    Previously Naomi Klein has pointed a finger at unbridled capitalism,[viii] but simply achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth appears insufficient. Historically at least, socialism has been defined in materialistic terms, apportioning needs within a hierarchy that continues to inflate. There is a moral obligation to furnish all humans with basic necessities yes, but we must also enter into a harmonious relationship with the natural world, which, thus far, most political ideologies and organised religions have failed adequately to take account of. Within an altered ethical framework, encompassing an idea of Wild Law that I have previously expounded on, necessity will be the mother of invention of the tools required for favourable adaptations.

    ‘By nature free’

    We are in Milton’s words from Paradise Lost (1667): ‘By nature free, not overruled by fate’, but each individual vessel still faces ruin unless we tame the raging waters of our collective acquisitiveness. We require an Age of Empathy elevating symbiosis and cooperation. Thus according to Gandhi: ‘Man is not born to live in isolation but is essentially a social animal independent and interdependent. No one should ride on another’s back.’[ix]

    If we continue to gorge ourselves on the world’s resources – failing to acknowledge the limit of natural capital – we confront death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. Let us hope it does not take another Flood of Biblical proportions to awaken us to this reality. Alas, a shock to the global system seems necessary to shake us out of our collective stupor. We must face up to what the future holds, and aggressively confront sinister and self-serving conspiracy theories.

    The field of science – a term only coined in the 1830s the field having previously been referred to as natural philosophy – alone cannot convey the world as it will appear in the decades to come if we continue on our present course. The arts play a vital role in conveying the apocalyptic scenes awaiting. Science fiction has long plotted dystopian scenarios – going back to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) – and this vision is entering the mainstream of literature.

    In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) a father and son wander through an apocalyptic landscape denied the sun’s live-giving rays. Cannibalism is rife as the last humans compete with one another. In the final paragraph there is a mesmerising ode to a lost Nature:

    Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.[x]

    Verily a Paradise Lost.

    Harsh Realities

    When we face up to harsh realities a change in outlook can occur. Laurens van der Post writes:

    It was only when man looked death full in the face that the mortality which is imminent in the final regard releases him from all excess in his proportions, and in the surrender of egotistical presumption which follows as night in the day, unlocks him for the experience of compassion for all living things, ‘from ant to Emperor, whale to cat’, as the Buddhists of Tibet put it, which is the sign of his conscious return from exile to the all-belonging, which has been his point of departure and is then his Home. [xi]

    Humans are capable of mind-boggling cruelty and selfishness but within our spectrum we possess staggering levels of empathy and compassion. These diverging characteristics may even co-exist in the same person.

    I propose that the great adventure of this epoch lies in the way we relate to Nature, which is all life on Earth, including ourselves. The challenge, as I see it, is to ground ourselves within that diverse ecology rather than placing ourselves above other forms of life, as the Western philosophic tradition has purported to do so. Thus Plato formatively established a hierarchy of beings in his Timaeus (c.360 BCE), proceeding from men at the top down through women to the ‘lower’ animals. Somewhat comically he compares other animals unfavourably to human beings:

    The race of birds was produced by a process of transformation, whereby feathers grew instead of hair, from harmless empty-headed men, who were interested in the heavens but were silly enough to think that the most certain astronomical demonstrations proceed through observation. Wild land animals have come from men who made no use of philosophy and never in any way considered the nature of the heavens because they had ceased to use the circles in the head and followed the leadership of the parts in the soul in the breast.[xii]

    Unfortunately, the lasting impression Plato has made on Western culture with these ideas has been no laughing matter.

    Sentience

    Widening the circle of empathy brings us into communion with all living beings. Even plant life deserves reverence. In Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees[xiii] we discover remarkable species, displaying unaccounted for intelligences. Trees communicate with one another using an array of languages including scent from blossoms, and via electrical signals that travel at a third of an inch per minute. This allows them to warn neighbours if they are under attack. Chemical signals are also passed via fungal networks around root tips, a so-called ‘wood wide web.’

    Moreover, the ability of plants to learn from external stimuli has been exhibited in Dr Monica Gagliano’s experiments on the sensitivity of the mimosa plant. Gagliano released individual drops of water on the plant’s foliage at regular intervals. At first the anxious plants instantly closed their leaves, mistaking the single droplets for the onset of heavy rainfall. After a number of false alarms, however, the plants recognised these to be harmless and kept their leaves open. Remarkably, the small plants learnt from the experience, applying the lessons weeks later.[xiv]

    Thus, in consuming any plant we should be mindful of all its complexity, and prize agricultural systems that permits a wide diversity of life to co-exist. Nonetheless, plant life can be distinguished from animal in terms of sentience: which is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Essentially, we know that other animals feel pain – both physical and psychological – via central nervous systems similar to our own. The precise boundaries between plant and animal life may be frayed, but the evidence for pain in other animals is unmistakable.

    Factory farming may soon be viewed as among the worst crimes in human history. The food writer Michael Pollan referred to a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) he visited as, ‘a place I won’t soon forget: a deep circle of porcine hell.’ In a display of cognitive dissonance he acknowledges the pork sandwich he eats is ‘underwritten by the most brutal kind of agriculture.’ At least he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to the effect that ‘however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.’[xv]

    The effect of animal domestication, especially grazing ruminants and the cultivation of foodstuffs for their consumption, also has a devastating effect on surviving free animals, compelled to make way for a vast expansion of agriculture around the globe. Astonishingly, today humans, our livestock (and pets) account for ninety-six percent of the Earth’s total land vertebrate biomass.[xvi] This has all occurred alongside immeasurable devastation to the plant kingdom.

    It is futile to read a philosophy of veganism back through human history to condemn ancestors who often killed animals for survival – or even to focus on those remaining hunter-gatherer communities living in remote and inhospitable regions. But in Western societies, at least, there are a multitude of healthful and tasty alternatives to animal products, displaying great qualities of human inventiveness in the gastronomic field. We are not obligate carnivores, unlike our near relative homo neanderthalensis that seems to have gone extinct for this reason.[xvii] A global food chain now allows us to overcome seasonal shortages and localized crop failures to provide a nutritious plant-based-diet-for-all.

    New Departure

    In his biographic account of hunting whales on board a Norwegian vessel in the 1920s Laurens van der Post, recites an extraordinary statement on the new departure he considered necessary in our relationship to the natural world:

    I could not deny the excitement and acceleration into a consummation of archaic joy which the process of stalking and hunting, even at sea, had invoked in me, although I was at present now only as an observer. On the other hand, hard on these emotions, came an equal and opposite revulsion which nearly overwhelmed me when the hunt, as now, was successful and one was faced with the acceptance of the fact that one had aided and abetted in an act of murder of such a unique manifestation of creation. The only dispensation of the paradox ever granted to me in the past, unaware as I had been of the immensity of it until revealed to me in this moment at sea, was that in hunting out of necessity, all revulsions were redeemed by the satisfaction one felt in bringing food home to the hungry. That such satisfaction was not an illusion, nor a form of special pleading in the court of natural conscience, was proved to me by the profound feeling of gratitude one invariably felt for the animal that had died in order for others to live … [but]what could this possibly have to do with the necessities which were essential for the redemption of the act of killing … in this increasingly technological moment of my youth, when control of life was passing more and more from nature to man, and when there were already available all sorts of artificial substitutes for the essential oils which animals like the whale had once been the only source of supply, what, I asked myself bitterly, could justify such killing except the greed of man for money … Worse still, I was certain that our imperviousness to the consternation caused by such killing in the heart of the nature could be the beginning of an enmity between man and the life which had brought him forth that could imperil his future on earth itself.[xviii]

    Dietary change may indeed be relevant to the wider transformation of the human person. The legendary gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s maxim ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,’ perhaps overstates the argument, yet the constituents of a diet do exert a profound influence on minds inseparable from bodies. This is ingrained in almost every spiritual tradition, even Christianity. Thus in Western monasticism, going back to the Early Church Fathers and the Rule of St. Benedict, consumption of animal products was considered incompatible with a life of meditation and prayer.

    We are a product of the air we breathe, the fluids we imbibe and the bacteria with which we co-exist, our genetic programming, and perhaps morphic resonances, whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems.[xix] Nonetheless, the vast complexity of food at our disposal makes this arguably the leading variable in that process of growth and atrophy characterising life as we know it.

    Humanity today utilises a mere six hundred out of the hundreds of thousands of edible plants that exist on Earth.[xx] This vast, unrealised potential of unnurtured crop varieties mean we are only skimming the surface of agricultural possibilities, with dramatic implications for the environments that we manage. Untapped potential may also lies in the cultivation of bacteria, that could be conditioned to taste like familiar foodstuffs, including meat. George Monbiot recently argued that lab-grown food could save the planet,[xxi] albeit these technologies are still in their infancy. What we now require is an alliance of farmers, chefs, scientists and gastronomes, unbound by convention, to imagine new possibilities in a Fourth Agricultural Revolution.

    Theodore Zeldin is right to say that: ‘The invention of a new dish is an act of freedom, small but not insignificant.’[xxii] We can all play a part in this great adventure.

    An altered relationship with Nature would be a revolution unlike any other in human history, and it is surely essential for this to occur in the Anthropocene, our current geological age of human impacts, where the accumulated bones of domesticated chickens are a sign of our overweening presence, along with nuclear residues, and climate chaos. Aside from any ethical stance, ecological limits are in sight: we cannot continue slaughtering over fifty billion domesticated animals each year for food.

    Vegan Diet

    As Jiddu Krishnamurti puts it: ‘We haven’t time to fool around anymore – the house is on fire.’[xxiii] The world’s population now stands at over seven billion. At the beginning of the last century we were a mere one and a half billion, with a far shorter life span than today, leading lives far less exacting on the planet’s resources. We have since applied science to the manufacture of all manner of conveniences, culminating in a global obesity pandemic and giant plastic graveyards in the Pacific Ocean. We have waged a relentless war on the natural world that sees no sign of abating. Since the 1970s, when I was born, 60% of all mammal species have gone extinct,[xxiv] mainly through a loss of habitat intimately connected to the foods we eat.

    Scientists are devoting their imaginative faculties to the realisation of a carbon-diminished future, but environmental morality should not be reduced to an exercise in carbon accounting. I would argue that the single most transformative step any person can take in their life is to embrace a vegan philosophy, which entails a cooperative rather than exploitative relationship with Nature. And if you should fail initially, try and try again.

    Projected population growth over the coming decades makes meat consumption even more unsustainable, leading to further, horrific ‘efficiencies’ in factory farming. The whole edifice of animal agriculture ought to crumble, perhaps bringing an expansion in human consciousness. Thus Charles Darwin argues that the history of man’s moral development has been a continual extension of the objects of his ‘social instincts’ and ‘sympathies’ writing:

    Originally each man had regard only for himself and those of a very narrow circle about him; later he came to regard more and more not only, the welfare, but the happiness of all his fellow men; then his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals.[xxv]

    Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’

    Five hundred years after Dante’s Divine Comedy in 1833 Alfred Lord Tennyson published his poem ‘Ulysses’, where he develops the epic tale of Odysseus further. Again we find a frustrated Odysseus in Ithaca before a final voyage bemoaning:

    How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
    To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!’
    To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
    Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

    In the spirit of his age of expansion Tennyson hails an ambition ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,’ and so might we adopt such an approach to confront impending environmental crises. As a species we are entering unknown and decidedly choppy waters, and now require imaginative capacities to take flight. This is an ominous, but ultimately heroic quest that requires us to cross new moral frontiers.

    [i] Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Mark Musa (Translator), New York, Penguin, 2003, Canto 26

    [ii] Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Wordsworth Classics, London, 1992 p.262

    [iii] Laurens van der Post, Yet Being Someone Other, The Hogarth Press, London, 1982, p.18

    [iv] MANIFESTO OF SURREALISM BY ANDRÉ BRETON, 1924.

    [v] Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821)

    [vi] Melville, 1992, p,261

    [vii] Theodore Zeldin, The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, MacLehose Press, London, p.313

    [viii] Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2014.

    [ix] Anthony Parel, Gandhi, Freedom and Self-Rule, Lexington Books, London, 2000, Washington, p.109

    [x] Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, p.287

    [xi] van der Post, 1992 p.223

    [xii] Plato, Timaeus and Critias, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Penguin Classics, London, 2008, p.90

    [xiii] Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, Jane Billinghurst (translator), Black Inc., Carlton, 2016

    [xiv] Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant, North Atlantic Books, New York, 2018

    [xv] Michael Pollan, Cooked – A Natural History of Transformation, Penguin, New York, pp.49-51

    [xvi] Olivia Rosane, ‘Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass’, EcoWatch, 2018, https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html

    [xvii] Tim Flannery, Europe – A Natural History, Allen Lane, London, 2018, p.177

    [xviii] van der Post, 1982, p.88

    [xix] Rupert Sheldrake, https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance

    [xx] Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity, Harper Perennial, London, 1994, p.93

    [xxi] George Monbiot, ‘Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’, The Guardian, January 8th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet

    [xxii] Zeldin, 1994, p.94

    [xxiii]  Jiddu Krishnamurti, ‘Knowledge and the transformation of man,’ https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/knowledge-and-transformation-man

    [xxiv] Damian Carrington, ‘Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds’, The Guardian, October 30th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds

    [xxv] From The Descent of Man.