In light of recent developments, not least, the announcement of Michael McGrath as the next EU Commissioner, it is timely to look again at the infernal plight of workers of conscience – those noble people who blow the whistle on wrongdoing, and who strive to keep a corroded system from descending further into the abyss.
Until 2022, Michael McGrath was Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform (referred to henceforth as DPER). Under his Ministry, new EU protected disclosures legislation of 2014 was advancing, and also EU Directive number 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and of the Council of Europe of 23 October 2019 was set to be transposed into Irish law.
This provision was, however, effectively sabotaged long before it was transposed, and Minister Michael McGrath was central to that. The entire Protected Disclosure Act is under the remit of DPER.
Cynical Collusion
The now sinister OPLA – Office of the Parliamentary Legal Advisor was exposed on these pages before in November 2022 and again in March 2023. Its rapid expansion appears to have been in anticipation of the significant effectiveness of this EU Resolution on Protected Disclosures to stem corruption and protect whistleblowers. Two things happened to neutralise and sabotage this EU provision before it was transposed:
The vast expansion of OPLA involved OPLA being placed, unconstitutionally, on the statute books in December 2018, just as the Dail was rising for its Christmas recess. It occurred with no committee stages, or debate. This was in defiance of the Dunning Capacity Report, into OPLA which was not sent back to the sub-committee on Dail reform for consideration in December 2016 by the Dail Clerk who received it from Dunning. Thus, Dunning’s report was effectively suppressed. The integration of the OPLA into the Houses of the Oireachtas as rank-and-file civil servants, under the Dail clerk(a civil service appointee) in the Executive Arm of Government, is, as pointed out, a violation of the constitutional Separation of Powers. The discovery that OPLA was secretly involved in the investigation of Protected Disclosures in defiance of the provisions of the Act since 2013, and that it was all set to escalate as per Dunning, exposes a sleight-of-hand to virtually cut the legs out from under whistleblowers, striking a lethal blow at an integral part of democracy.
The unlawful appointment of the Ombudsman by the civil service body – the PAS (Public Appointment Service) – is a violation of the Ombudsman’s Act 1980, and subsequent amending acts. The Ombudsman Act specifically disallows the Ombudsman from being appointed by the civil service. The Ombudsman was also appointed as Commissioner for Protected Disclosures, another canny moved within DPER while Michael McGrath was Minister. The Ombudsman knew full well that the OPLA – since 2018 a civil service body – was already involved in the investigation of Protected Disclosures since 2013, and that this was considered the main area of “growth and challenge for OPLA.”
I have been in email contact with the CEO of the PAS about this unlawful appointment of the Ombudsman. I accused her of stepping outside of her remit in the appointment of the Ombudsman and pointed out that the Ombudsman’s Act 1980 specifically excluded it as a civil service appointment. To this she replied that it was done by PAS as “sanctioned” by the then Minister, Michael McGrath.
He has no power to unilaterally alter legislation. The competition for the Ombudsman’s job was held by the PAS in August 2021, when the Dail was in recess and during the holiday season. The only Irish applicant was Ger Deering. On the appointment board was David Moloney, SG in DPER who was central to the entire legislation, as it was progressing at Committee stages in the new Protected Disclosures Act. David Moloney merely continued what Robert Watt, whom he replaced, had commenced.
Both David Moloney and the Ombudsman appeared before the Finance Committee, which was responsible for the deliberations into the Protected Disclosures legislation, and which met several times in 2021 and 2022 to discuss the enhanced the Protected Disclosure Bill 2014, and the EU Directive about to be transposed.
David Moloney effectively misled the Finance Committee in failing to inform the Chair and members that the PAS, with the apparent collusion of Minister Michael McGrath, after unlawfully taking over the appointment of the Ombudsman, whom it was also decided would become the new Commissioner for Protected Disclosures.
Ger Deering’s appointment is a Constitutional one, and it thereby had to be ratified by the Dail before he went to the Aras to get his seal of office from the President. Mr Deering appeared before the Finnance Committee and made a speech on his appointment in December 2021 for the purpose of his appointment being ratified by the Oireachtas.
I contend that Deering also misled the Committee, whose members and Chairman seemed to have been unaware that the Ombudsman should not have been appointed by the civil service body – the PAS – by law. Deering knew that he would be using the unconstitutional OPLA as new Commissioner for investigating Protected Disclosures, but he never revealed that at the Finance Committee despite the fact that John McGuinness, the Committee’s chairman, discussed the plight of whistleblowers with him fairly extensively and name checked a number of better known ones.
McGuinness and his committee approved Deering’s appointment on behalf of the Oireachtas and he duly went to the Aras to receive his seal of office from the President.
Whistleblowers – The Walking Wounded
The dual strategies of the newly expanded OPLA – an unconstitutional entity since 2018 – and the sabotage implicit in the appointment of the Ombudsman utterly neutralised the provision of the EU Directive on Protected Disclosures, even before the full transposal of the EU Directive in January 2023.
It was all done by DPER under Michael McGrath as Minister. The senior civil service have dealt a mortal blow to democracy, with full ministerial collusion and, above all, have commenced the ongoing campaign against whistleblowers – the walking wounded in a deeply corrupt system.
In 2022, at a meeting of the Finance Committee, which McGrath attended with his senior civil servants, including David Moloney, and where a number of whistleblowers were also present, the civil servants backed by McGrath managed to get the provision of the EU Directive on PDs known as ‘The Presumption of Causation’ excluded from the EU Directive as transposed.
This had provided for the presumption of victimization of a whistleblower, who reports wrongdoing without the whistleblower having to prove victimization is as a result of whistleblowing. This, of itself, was a significant blow to the effectiveness of the EU Directive.
Democracy Under Threat
Democracy depends on five major planks:
A free, robust and independent press.
A free and independent judiciary.
A robust and independent police force.
Robust whistleblower legislation.
A functioning democratic parliament where issue of major public import can be raised under privilege.
The combined forces of the OPLA and the unlawfully appointed Ombudsman has dealt a direct, mortal blow to at last three of the five planks listed above. OPLA is unlawfully involved in Protected Disclosures and in the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) and the Labour Court – both courts are subordinate to the High Court and a significant number of whistleblowers prosecute their claims, or aspect of their claims, in the WRC/Labour Court.
Above all, OPLA has dealt an absolute mortal blow to the Dail itself. Arguably it has paralysed our parliament: there are numerous examples of OPLA muscling in, in a very heavy handed way on Dail Committee, especially in cases brought under privilege by whistleblowers to the Committees.
The Committee Chairpersons are gormlessly allowing this, and are being bullied by the Committee Clerks who, in turn, are taking their instructions from the Dail clerk, Peter Finnegan, himself the chief architect of the draconian new OPLA in December 2018.
In a case I had with the CPPO Committee, the OPLA took over the case from its clerk designate. I pointed out to the head of OPLA that no Standing Order (SO) of the Oireachtas allowed for it and asked what allowed it. I received no reply from Melissa English, the Chief Parliamentary Legal Adviser, whom I have accused of unlawfully and unconstitutionally trespassing into the sacrosanct area of the Oireachtas and the Ceann Comhairle, in a violation of the Separation of Powers, and a blow to the prudent use of Dail privilege.
As OPLA operates in secret in addition to its listed function in Dunning’s capacity report of December 2016 as listed below, it may well be involved with the Gardai, and indeed with media enquires as fielded by the more robust elements in the media. I know from personal experience that the Gardai co-operate with the Ombudsman, attempting to sideline one complaint of a criminal nature I made to the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman cannot investigate suspected crimes.
The table below from Dunning’s Capacity Report (Dec 2016) includes all the secret areas OPLA are involved in where they have no jurisdiction:
OPLA, and indeed its boss, Peter Finnegan (Dail Clerk) have no remit in at least four areas of growth as listed above. OPLA’s remit is ostensibly confined to the tripartite functions of 1) Advices to the houses of the Oireachtas and its staff, 2) Defending the Houses of the Oireachtas in Court and 3) Help with drafting Private Members Bills (PMBs). Enhanced Protected Disclosures legislation and the whistleblowers who rely on it have been taken out with military precision.
I have raised the OPLA and the unlawful Ombudsman appointment with John McGuinness, Chairperson of the Oireachtas Finance Committee unsuccessfully. I have also made a complaint to the Relevant Section in the EU, responsible for the transposal of the EU Directive on Protected Disclosures into Irish law, backed by a number of other whistleblowers. The EU passed the buck back to the Irish courts. As if any whistleblower can afford to go to Court!
Several whistleblowers (myself included) have appealed to mainstream media outlets to expose the OPLA in its unconstitutional reconfiguration since 2018 and its unlawful involvement in PDs. They have all refused to act.
Transparency Ireland have become a quangoistic arm of state, which now fully funds the organisation. Dr Lauren Kierans, the Maynooth academic in the area of PDs who wrote the new Protected Disclosures Act for DPER has been informed that her act was sabotaged as outlined above. She passed the buck to Transparency Ireland and is now on maternity leave.
The retaliation against and destruction of whistleblowers is all set to escalate as OPLA continues to expand. As Transparency Ireland expands too, and academic departments and units on whistleblowing mushroom in Maynooth and Galway Universities, whistleblowing has now become a lucrative industry, where everyone is well-remunerated bar the destroyed whistleblowers themselves – for whose welfare these organisations ostensibly exist.
Whistleblower, Shane Corr (where OPLA also interfered) was suspended as a Principal Officer by Robert Watt in the Health Department. Watt was himself central to the creation and the funding of the OPLA since 2018 when he was SG in DPER until replaced by David Moloney in 2021. Corr was threatened by Watt with a criminal breach of the Official Secrets Act after OPLA deemed his submissions to the PAC were not covered by privilege.
Whistleblower and very senior official, John Barrett, the Garda Head of HR according to a Village Magazine article some time ago, was subjected to tyrannous retaliation by Drew Harris for exposing the Templemore Garda slush funds scandal. He is awaiting a hearing in court. This is to name but two of an army of destroyed whistleblowers.
In a deeply compromised, dysfunctional democracy, everyone will be rewarded bar whistleblowers. The Finance Committee is in a state of paralysis and the Minister who colluded all the way, Michael McGrath becomes an EU Commissioner in circumstances where he actively incapacitated the EU’s own Directive for the protection of whistleblowers.
The irony of this cannot be overstated. What part the early announcement of his departure has to do with my rigorous challenged to the CEO of the PAS in recent days, Margaret McCabe, is anyone’s guess.
After all, the vacancy for the EU Commissioner does not arise until October. Meanwhile, whistleblowers will continue to be condemned, vilified and relegated to the ranks of public pariah, while endless amounts of public money will be thrown at the industry and the army of persons who have colluded to destroy them. Foremost among these is OPLA and the Ombudsman. According to theLaw Society Gazette in July 2018 OPLA’s Melissa English believes she’s worth it. Our democracy meanwhile, which can always be measured by the treatment of whistleblowers, was never more undermined.
To comprehend, regard the brutal wilderness to hand.
More than most, the burrow-broken vagabonds
recall the living tune. In remoter reaches
of the Wicklow hills, they live where a sodden soul
could barely pass, and look out all the year on unimpeded
barriers of heath. In every season, heavy sleets of freezing water
descend interminably, so the roof-thatch drips a colour
peaty-blue, and the cottage-floors are sinking,
boggy in the wet. The wide skies rock in hellish
storminess: by dawn the ragged larches that endure
are bent and twisted, bowing bleakly to the rim
where sunlight somehow rises in the summer.
Down the beggar-glens the churning wind, as well,
comes whirling with a river-roar that time
to time will lessen, of a sudden, giving way
to hush – enough, that is, to sow a tension
in the listening body, neck and limbs, of anyone
who waits, crouching with an ear ajar
for the mournful cries of country-dogs
that prowl among the crags. The elder-folk
who keep and carry on the memory, the quenchable
tradition, of risen insurrection, raising fire in the guts,
are dwindling today, a disappearing army, blown afar –
though here and there, disguised among the lonely
and the low, I’ve met them as I passed along,
and gathered up their words. To see these Irish men
and Irish women sunken, unrepenting, their leather-
skin and ageing eyes ablaze again, condemned for good
not to the viscerating gibbet, but to the slow obscurity
of dying-out, forgotten but by dreamers and the fey –
it’s been enough to wring me with the pang of isolation,
an echo of that dumb, determining distemper, impossible
to heal, of unredeemed deracination… a share, perhaps,
of the desolation mixed in every region of the land
with the waterfalling beauty of experience itself, the luminous
cascade we all have known, elusive, controvertible, but actual
and active to the penetrating mind. I raise my hungry fist
in health – to the ferocity and wonder of the world.
Some viewers have noticed the numberplate on the Ford Cortina in That They May Face the Rising Sun, the recent film based on John McGahern’s 2002 novel of the same name. The plate reads ‘OZU 155’. Surely this is a reference to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu? In interview, the director, Pat Collins, has said that the coincidence of the number plate was unplanned, but deliberately retained.
Ozu is not well known in the West now, but he is certainly a canonical name among people, like Collins, who know their cinema history. Ozu is celebrated for an observational, restrained style of storytelling, with minimal music or camera movement and, indeed, minimal plot. Collins’s admirable adaptation of McGahern’s final novel bears more than passing resemblances to key Ozu films, such as Late Spring from 1949, Early Summer from 1951, Tokyo Story from 1953 and An Autumn Afternoon from 1962. Like Collins, these all share a concern with the gentle unfolding of inter-generational time, with subtle domestic interactions, and with the challenge (sometimes welcome, sometimes not) posed by the visitor from outside.
What is most pertinent about this playful reference, however, is the common take on Ozu that he addressed ‘universal’ themes, and that his appeal is ‘universal’. Similar observations litter the reception of That They May Face the Rising Sun, and of another recent Irish breakthrough hit that I consider a companion piece to this, 2022’s An Cailín Ciúin, directed by Colm Bairéad. Both of these films are set in isolated, unnamed rural locales, with ordinary folk as lead characters, and have plots that are not besmirched by the concerns of urban existence (crime and punishment, politics, violence, money, addiction, social isolation, class conflict), which tend to dominate the stories we watch on screen. As with Ozu, paring away as many specific plot details as possible makes these films feel, to reach for vocabulary favoured by reviewers, ‘timeless’, ‘classic’, ‘profound’, ‘dreamlike’, ‘beautiful’, ‘delicate’.
It has been a long-running complaint that Irish cinema was dominated too long by questions of national and/or sectarian identity, that its narratives were tediously populated by priests and hysterical IRA men running around in ill-fitting leather jackets. Why couldn’t we just have a ‘normal’ cinema that would tell non-political stories that would have a universal appeal? The embarrassment of a liberal commentariat, and academy, at our political backwardness means that any Irish film that is not about the British question in some form or other is greeted with praise for having achieved some kind of postnationalist maturity. The two recent Irish films that we are concerned with here are therefore feted, as evidence that we have grown up.
It is true of any film set in the past that it is as much about the time it is made as the time it depicts. That They May Face the Rising Sun is set in the early 1980s, but the couple at the heart of the story, self-exiled from the city, are recognisably from our times. The period details are minimal, and the sense of being in the past is achieved mostly by the omission of digital devices, screens and disposable homeware. The fashion and hairstyles, so often an important guide to period, are neutral enough to belong either to the 1980s or to the present, especially if we regard Joe and Kate as ageing hipsters. (All the other characters are timelessly old-fashioned in their appearance.) As for what they do, they are engaged in what we now call remote working and the back-to-basics simplicity of their existence, with its mix of intellectual life, light agricultural activity and overpopulation-conscious childlessness, has a whiff of prepperism.
A very memorable sequence dwells on the wake, hours after the unexpected death of the lonely Johnny, who has been marooned in a life of drudgery in London for decades. In the crowded kitchen of Johnny’s brother’s family, a woman leads the group of country people in reciting a decade of the rosary, keeping track with a set of beads on her lap. Everybody participates in the ritual, responding to her as she cycles through the prayers. We linger on the faces and voices for longer than a more distractable film would allow. In the midst of all this, our protagonists Joe and Kate remain silent. For all of their integration into the community and the vital welcome that they offer to all comers, they are nevertheless not fully part of it.
The tone of this separateness is carefully judged; the silence of Joe and Kate is not hostile, nor is it received badly, as the story is one of tolerance. But, whereas in the novel, it is the community that kindly tolerates the blow-ins who have landed in their midst, in the film the flow of tolerance has switched, and now it is the liberal couple who tolerate the traditional, conservative values of the community. The contemporary characteristics of Joe and Kate align them with our 2024 values. The vast changes that have taken place between the early 1980s and now are palpable in this difference.
Nobody knew better than McGahern the tightness of the stranglehold that the Catholic Church held over the life of the country, especially in rural areas and in the schools. (He lost his job as a teacher because of the content of earlier novels). It is apparent to us now that the church was in fact at an unsustainable peak of dominance, triumphant in the abortion referendum of 1983 and in the defeated divorce referendum of 1986. But events such as the outcries at the death of Ann Lovett and the persecution of Joanne Hayes would set in motion the church’s reputational freefall in the intervening decades (rapist priests, slave laundries, death camps for children of the unmarried, the list goes on) and the blanket implementation in recent times of what was in the past quaintly known as ‘the liberal agenda’.
That They May Face the Rising Sun is a document of the final years of the previous dispensation, before the enormous transformation that has brought us to the liberal consensus that now prevails. When did this change take place, and how? Certainly the election of Mary Robinson in 1990 is a milestone, and in and around that date we could also include the Maastricht Treaty, Sinead O’Connor ripping up a photo of the pope (both 1992), the rise of globalisation and neoliberalism (Clinton, Blair, the World Trade Organisation), the 1995 referendum that introduced divorce (by a margin of 0.28%), and the world wide web.
One other, admittedly cosmetic, landmark event was the switch in 1987 to the standard European style of car numberplates, where the numbers and letters actually mean something. ‘OZU 155’ stands for the Japanese filmmaker, whose work is celebrated for the vacuous virtue of being about everything and therefore about nothing — in other words, for being politically inoffensive. Any edge of critique present in Ozu is blunted on contact with a commentariat in search of liberal universalisms, hungry to understand ‘story’ as a virtue and ‘context’ as an embarrassment.
McGahern similarly needs to be pruned of embarrassing excrescences. The problem is that in all his books he is a border writer, constantly conscious of the Troubles, the aftermath of the Civil War, the problem of political-institutional legitimacy and the family dysfunctions that flow as a result. He presents the awkward vista of rural communities that to this day persist in voting for political gombeens, seemingly unable to adapt to the fact that people in Dublin and Brussels know what is best. The film adaptation of his final novel forgives these errors by the device of celebrating the tolerant humanism of the educated outsider, stand-ins for viewers who crave forgiveness for despising the backwardness of pre-liberal Ireland and its uncomfortable, unresolved politics and its quaintly non-rational numberplates.
The launcher of this book in Dublin, translator Pierre Guglielmina, gave a speech in The Little Museum of Dublin, in which he managed to nickname the text with the accurate acronym HIT IT – like a piece of modernist wordplay. Pierre described it as a panorama of French literature from the Commune times of 1870 to the Great War (1914), a study that “hit [him] hard”. “The movement of HITIT, from Mallarmé to Proust through Apollinaire…[he said] is a triumphant one, and I have been trying to understand why.”
As the founder of the now seemingly inactive Irish Innocence Project, and co-founder of The European Innocence Network, I staunchly oppose the death penalty, with exceptions for certain Crimes Against Humanity. I have personally visited and represented individuals on death row in Kenya and the U.S.. This underscores the critical need for our legal system to exercise caution, and precision, to avoid wrongful convictions.
Recently, I have condemned in a Cassandra Voices Podcastthe inhumane prospect of Julian Assange enduring indefinite incarceration. This stance does not, however, imply a belief in universal innocence, or countenance a dismissal of deserved punishment. Rather, I advocate for a measured approach to justice, echoing Shakespeare’s notion of ‘measure for measure’ in determining appropriate consequences for actions.
Following an ethical determination of guilt, the central question revolves around what form of punishment is suitable. But before delving into punishment, we must first address the concept of guilt, and whether the guilty evade accountability.
Unfortunately, instances abound of individuals with power or wealth evading justice through various means. Examples include former President Trump and Clinton’s long list of pardons on leaving office, and instances of state officials abusing their authority, as depicted in literature such as Klima’s 1991 novel Judges on Trial. These cases underscore the danger posed by those entrusted with upholding the law manipulating it for personal gain.
David Langwallner begins a two-part series on why people are found guilty of crimes they did not commit dealing with confirmation bias, leading questions etc.https://t.co/N2k7bKiiUI#HateCrimeAct#HateCrime
A state or judicial criminal is often the worst criminal. They have subverted the Rule of Law and the processes they were appointed to uphold. They are professional hypocrites.
In his 1971 detective novel Equal Danger, Leonardo Sciascia demonstrates how in Italy judges may become, by stages, complicit in murder. Chillingly, the President of the Supreme Court intimates to the investigating detective that in condoning murder the judiciary are incapable of error.
Sciascia also documented the complicity of the mafia and Christian Democrats in the murder of God’s banker Roberto Calvi in 1982, and of course the kidnap and murder of the progressive, or incorruptible, Christian Democrat Aldo Moro in 1978.
In Ireland the incident that primarily gave rise to Conor Cruise O’ Brian’s immortal phrase GUBU (grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented) was the murderer of the nurse Bridie Gargan and the farmer Dónal Dunne in 1982. The murderer Malcolm McArthur was discovered on the private property of then Attorney General Patrick Connolly.
Not uniquely in Ireland, the powerful avoid and do not accept responsibility for their actions and may resort to framing others. Voltaire, the earliest expert in miscarriages of justice coined the phrase per encourager les autres, to deal with the scapegoating of Admiral Pyle by the establishment.
Political criminals also enact laws to protect their interests. The new Hate Crimes Bill in Ireland is finally being opposed by SF as they have recognised the danger it poses.
The legal principle of ‘presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt,’ as established in the case of Woolmington v DPP (1935), serves as a foundational tenet. Yet, challenges arise, particularly regarding the interpretation of evidence and credibility of assessments.
In every case I have recently conducted the same question is asked by jurors: “is sure the same as beyond all reasonable doubt?” Judge rightly say yes, and try to avoid further questioning to avoid being buried in semantics.
Of course, the crucial point is that unless someone tells a defence lawyer he or she is guilty – in which case you either withdraw or can only defend by challenging the prosecution evidence without asserting innocence – you cannot know definitively.
Cognitive bias cuts all sorts of ways. A defence lawyer should be timorous about getting a client to plead guilty if there is any doubt. Not least, many clients are vulnerable and inclined to please authority and, as has happened in my experience, defendants may seek to change their plea.
The intersection of morality and legality further complicates matters. It is essential to caution against conflating moral judgment with legal culpability. Instances of moral condemnation influencing legal proceedings – as seen in the admission of bad character evidence – highlight the need for a nuanced approach.
A feature of my speeches is to caution a jury not to confuse morality with legality. Moral condemnation is often used by the prosecution to smear the accused, and the previous bad character admissions ushered in by Blair in the U.K. opens that gateway.
In Ireland, however, the exclusion of bad character is not a good idea. Evidence of bad character is only inadmissible in certain defined exceptions, such as if one puts one’s good character in evidence. There should be more of a halfway house.
Despite efforts to discern guilt, the process remains fraught with challenges. Guilty individuals often resort to elaborate tactics to obfuscate the truth, necessitating a vigilant approach from their lawyers. Additionally, societal biases and institutional pressures can influence witness testimony and judicial outcomes.
In the pursuit of justice, it is crucial to distinguish between genuine miscarriages of justice and rightful accountability. While liberal objections to wrongful convictions are warranted, there are instances where the punishment must align with the severity of the crime. The case of the Moors Murderers 1963-65, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, serves as a poignant example of criminals rightfully facing lifelong imprisonment.
Reluctantly, it must be conceded many are guilty. And it is sometimes very difficult to get them to accept their guilt. Even my great hero Clarence Darrow ‘Attorney for the Damned’ represented Leopold and Loeb, who in a nihilistic fashion attempted to kill another young man simply to prove they could get away with it. As in the Jamie Bolger case. Darrow knew they were guilty and avoided an insanity plea. Instead, he made the greatest plea in mitigation in the recorded legal annals to avoid the death penalty. But they did do it.
Lucy Letby mugshot.
Nurse Letby Case
The recent case ofNurse Lucy Letby who was found guilty of murdering seven infants in Manchester crown court in 2023 is instructive.
She is not the first Mancunium serial killer. Between 1963-65 in Saddleworth Moor near Manchester Mancunians Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murdered innocent children. It is noticeable that they were also influenced by the film ‘Compulsion‘ documenting the Leopold and Loeb case.
Working on a recent case in Manchester, I resisted the temptation to visit the moors, but did pass by Market Street, Cheshire where another notorious murderer, the serial killer and doctor, erstwhile respectability known as Harold Shipman had his surgery. In this case a later inquiry revealed the police should have acted sooner. So, one should not always attack the police.
And there is some evidence in Nurse Letby’s case that the NHS, in collective group think, buried their heads in the sand as the evidence accumulated. They were protecting the guilty through cognitive bias. A consultant who gave evidence in her case said lives could have been saved if there was not a cover up to preserve institutional reputation. Thus, in fairness, state officials, doctors and police officers are often hit from both sides: damned if they do; damned if they don’t.
I have represented clients in several cases where due to witness reluctance or external pressures, the police have taken the action of NFA (No Further Action), which they have come to regret.
The cheaper the crook…
So, what are the hallmarks of guilt? It is surprisingly difficult to work out. One crucial sign is perhaps, as the American actor Humphrey Bogart said: ‘the cheaper the crook the gaudier the patter.’ Overly complex explanations are often a sign of guilt.
The patter includes: convoluted challenges to police evidence gathering and exercise of due diligence on instruction; excessive casting of doubt on overwhelming expert evidence; elaborate excuses for extreme violence based on self-defence; and inappropriate allegations of police misconduct.
Now the process must be tested and many wish to save their skins. Those who are desperate will often resort to anything, and the defence lawyer on instructions often must facilitate this.
I remember how both myself and Adrian Hardiman were tarred with damnation, overlooking constitutional niceties, in the constitutional challenge to The Proceeds of Crime Act as lawyers for Gilligan by the Sunday Independent.
A trial process weighs up whether evidence is relevant or not, and whether there is a case to be answered. The question of whether a case should have been brought in the first place is a different matter.
Legal representatives may also argue over whether there has been an abuse of process through non-disclosure, non-compliance or a fit up. In this respect the absence of video or phone evidence is crucial. Once confronted, a guilty person may tangle themselves up in lies, which affects their credibility when giving evidence
A witness who is lying must avoid the truth and is often lulled by persistent questioning into the trap of telling the truth by indirection.
Thus, the prosecuting barrister Edward Carson, after listening to days of Oscar Wildes’ ridicule at his trial for gross indecency in 1895, popped the surprise question – a deadly weapon to be sparingly used in the barrister’s art – about the boy Grainger.
Did you Kiss him?
The answer which leads to the Reading Gaol and early death in Paris was:
Oh no he was far too ugly.
It must be stressed that the credibility of a witness must be read in the context of the vulnerable person they may be. Some suffer from addiction and mental health issues, which is not to say they are not telling the truth.
Sadly, in a world of increasing subjectivism and loss of truth those who lie may have been telling the truth as they see it, or as they remember it, but not as a fact. Witnesses for defence and prosecution also have intellectual masking to justify in their own mind what they have done. Everyone, as Voltaire indicated, has their reasons.
Anti-social Media
In our time, text evidence from social media and other digital uploads such as chat lines are often very incriminating. The utilisation of social media can have disastrous consequences as historic texts and chats can come back to haunt you. They might demonstrate a propensity as a prelude or aftermath to an incident, and they often show planning, ostensible grooming or worse still acceptance. But comments of a salacious nature in isolation can be magnified by unscrupulous prosecutors.
Scurrilous tactics are never justified, but tarnished evidence is often admitted. I am no fan of racist vigilante groups or engaging in quasi entrapment, but I recognise that sometimes they catch people who are guilty, or, more ambiguously, exhibit certain traits.
Video evidence often confronts someone with what they really did under the influence and normally leads to a quick acceptance of responsibility.
What happens next has been characterised by Oliver Wendell Holmes as the ‘bad man’ of law:
If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, and not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.
The legal process is often unforgiving, albeit this is necessary at times.
I do not believe in punishment as denunciation, or retribution where guilt and sin are confused, such as occurred in the sentencing of Roger Casement to death.
With respect to what the British call just and proportionate punishment, I had the privilege of inspecting a Norwegian prison when attending a death penalty conference in Oslo. The tennis courts, swimming pools, private rooms discourage recidivism and potentially rehabilitate criminals.
The Court of Appeal in the UK in R v. Ali (2023) is actively discouraging judges from sending people to prison, not least in congested post-Covid times. Most come out not wiser, but weaker.
But let us also be conscious of the appropriate punishment for the massacre of the innocents. Not all who claim a miscarriage has occurred are victims. There is a time for a liberal objection to a miscarriage of justice, and a time for when the punishment should fit the crime. Even the Norwegian prison system struggled with the serial killer Anders Breivik, who they had to build a special facility for.
I wonder will certain lawyers, businessmen or lawyers ever see justice? Not likely, apart from a few subordinates thrown to the wolves. This was the pattern of our banking prosecutions. The rich can retain the best lawyers and engage in plausible deniability, and a chain of command.
Thus, corporate lawyers, judges and businessmen, as well as puppet politicians, have the justice game rigged, up to the point where they commit murder. Then of course the system must react? This may become a pertinent question for Ireland in the coming months.
Rationalism is a psychosis; a dissociation of intellect and feeling; the suppression of our intuitive, emotional, and sensual being (the heart’s domain). Enlightenment thinkers wished to replace the credulity of religious compliance with reason. They put their faith in human progress and an expansive intellect – and some, it should be said, in a deeper and more natural spirituality.
They thought they could reform society, but radical social reform has rarely, if ever, been generated by external pressure. It arises when an established worldview reaches the limit of its credibility and its possibilities.
For all the fine words and egalitarian instincts, what emerged was a restricted and abstracted rationality, blinkered by the narrow focus of scientific empiricism: a civilization devoid of core significance that was to become a kind of megalomania. Mathematical abstraction, reductionist precision and the crushing urgency of capital accumulation could never have generated a benign culture.
Without consent to meaning and an imaginative response to the innate feelings that evoke a deeper sense of being, Western civilization will continue its fragmentation and decline until it succumbs to incompetence, overreach, and inner contradiction.
At this point, Goya’s Capricho 43 comes to mind once more. There he sits, Goya himself, slumped over a table, looking like he has the whole world on his shoulders and wishing it would all go away.
However, the words on the panel are stark: “The sleep of reason produces monsters”. And the owls, bats and lynx are generally presumed to symbolize a resurgent irrationality always watching for reason to lower its guard – a clear expression of Enlightenment values. It is balanced somewhat by the caption for the print: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders”.
This is fine so far as it goes, but it ultimately amounts to the same thing. It implies that you can’t trust imagination without reason to almost police it. But in art – so in life generally – the imaginative impulse is primary. It is not going to lead you down the road to ruin as in some Victorian morality tale.
Imagination is the indispensable quality, a benign compulsion in an unfolding life. A creative leap, the capacity to conceive the new, is essential if life is to evolve rather than merely repeat.
Even mathematics, the very rock on which the rational world is built, is itself a brilliant act of imagination; an original, symbolic system, independent of life as lived, and that may in turn be applied to our practical engagement with its process.
Reason elaborates the idea in a kind of inner dialectic that bridges the gap between inspiration and cultural expression, between the imaginative realm and the everyday. In practice, this is an indivisible, spontaneous process – not linear and mechanical – and its accomplishment is a sensitive art.
However, we can’t really be sure what Goya meant. He was unhealthy, overworked and disillusioned. But the sleep of reason is not loss of control; the sleep of reason is rationalism, reason without heart.
"The peremptory watchword "believe in God" has been superseded by “trust the science”. Its dogmatic purpose is no different and it was used to effect during the pandemic as a marketing slogan for social compliance and pharmaceutical profit."https://t.co/QtqRvZn2Co
Looking at Capricho 43 with the Covid pandemic at its height, the bats were insistent. Their association with the new disease was a topic of speculation. A global panic was underway; the threat index was rising, and we were at war with a virus. The response to this “existential” threat (yet another) was employing the standard rhetoric of the war machine. Civil liberties were suspended; a crusade was launched; “trust the science” was on the banners; and facts and figures were deployed like heavy artillery.
If your attitude to the world is purely rational, your actions – both the action itself and the manner of its effect – will reflect the sense of separability and isolation that characterizes it.
Notwithstanding the fact that we humans have co-evolved with viruses, that their presence is vital, even if some are potentially harmful, a program of total suppression was begun. At least until a vaccine (a “magic bullet” that would stop Covid dead in its tracks) could be developed, we were told.
Since the time of Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century it has been known that a small piece of a virus or bacterium can stimulate an immune response. The technique has been used to prevent many common diseases ever since.
A corona virus tends to generate variants liberally and is not so susceptible to a traditional vaccine. For the biotech industry, which had struggled after the financial expectations of The Human Genome Project were not realized, and the difficulty of meeting regulatory requirements, its moment had come. They were now cast as world saviours and the whole force of a global pandemic was behind them.
To put it very simply, gene-based vaccines cause your own cells to produce a spike protein – essentially a piece of the virus – which, like a traditional vaccine should then provoke an immune response. All very well if you “trust the science”.
In this case it meant trusting a pharmaceutical industry with a long record of disregard, deception and harm and allowing them to manipulate, or ‘program,’ your own cells.
But no scientist can assure the outcome of speculative interference in the elusive and dynamic process at the heart of, and common to, every living system. A cell is a cell: nucleus, cytoplasm, membrane, and the tiny world within continuously generating growth. All cells share the same structure; all life is cellular; and all life is interconnected. What could possibly go wrong?
Just to add that claims for efficacy went all the way from “magic bullet” to balm and Covid is still with us, vaccinated or not. And, I almost forgot, a few more billionaires now grace the earth.
In our latest podcast Sunetra Gupta recalls her role as the "anti-lockdown Professor" & explains her work on developing a universal influenza vaccine. She's still awaiting an apology from her opponents such as George Monbiot. Listen to the Full Pod on https://t.co/56pM7rEj94pic.twitter.com/DJp1JuaUaH
The publication of Los Caprichos marks the opening of the nineteenth century. In Spain, the war with France and years of political upheaval would follow. Goya reflects the disorder in his strikingly expressive work of those years until his death in exile in 1828.
By this time Europe and North America were on the verge of a world that would seem very familiar to us now. Both electrification and the internal combustion engine arrived in the 1880’s, and the subsequent years are known as La Belle Epoque in Europe and The Gilded Age in America.
The conspicuous affluence these terms betray rested on a period of intense industrialization and exploitation, during which the British Empire was the great world power. By the year of Goya’s death economic liberalism was about to reveal its most brutal aspect.
In Britain the new poor laws were enacted to starve masses of the underclass into wage slavery. Without support millions more were plunged into sea of destitution. Included in this purgatory of despair were tens of thousands of women and girls forced into prostitution and an early grave. This was the social catastrophe confronted by Charles Dickens and Karl Marx.
Across the seas, India and China (and countries in between), two ancient and distinct civilizations – their history, social structures and trading patterns rent – were forcibly conscripted into a global trading and financial system to their utter detriment, and to the enrichment of an elite group of financiers, industrialists and Western powers who controlled it.
Further south, the scramble for Africa would soon open the gates to yet another prolonged exhibition of colonial barbarity.
One appalling outcome: the instability and structural disintegration wrought by this interference in traditional systems of land use, production and trade left them unable to deal with the consequences of a prolonged drought in the 1880’s. (A phenomenon not unknown and provided for by tradition). As in Ireland a few decades earlier, famine ensued. It is estimated that between Asia and Africa perhaps as many as fifty million may have died.
The unspeakable horror of all this is chronicled in detail in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis, in so far as words or even pictures can convey the terrible suffering of fellow human beings on such an immense scale. Its full effect requires an imaginative capacity typically repressed in the cultivated mind by the assumption of superiority.
In the words of Mike Davis, ‘What seemed from a metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century’s final blaze of imperial glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant funeral pyre.’[i]
Listen to our podcast with Toby Green as he discusses the effect of Covid lockdowns on Africa, which was largely unaffected by the disease, and the intellectual failure of many on the left. https://t.co/EsbBdkq4xr@toby00green@battleforeurope @SunetraGupta @KevinBardosh
For all the achievements of Western civilization in science and the arts the dark side of our history is actual. Moreover, it still resonates around the world in conflict, poverty, migration, and debt.
It is critical that we should acknowledge our defects now that, so we are told, we are once again standing at the edge of fundamental change. The transition to a post-carbon future will not forestall dire predictions without a radical shift in perspective and it remains ‘business as usual’.
Unrestrained capital accumulation, open-ended economic growth, finance capitalism and the rigged marketplace are entrenched. Bacon’s slogan “knowledge is power” still drives and validates the scientific ideology that underlies it all. Together they perpetuate a toxic system to which the question of how it is fuelled is almost incidental.
In addition, the corporate sector now has the ‘sustainable’ technology supposed to save us firmly in its grip; ‘saving the planet’ is a heaven-sent marketing strategy; and the promise of a ‘just transition’ has becomea sickly green joke.
A cursory analysis of the crisis we are facing would reveal the dynamic driving it. That it has done so for almost half a millennium is why the crisis is so acute and why its cause should be so obvious.
That there are limits to growth is axiomatic. And it should also be apparent that renewable technologies could never equal the energy potential of fossil fuels. The dispersed energy of wind and solar and the second-hand energy of biofuels, even without the problem of intermittence, could only possibly match the concentrated energy of fossil fuels – discounting the growth imperative – by an expansion of its technologies on such a scale that this factor alone would be problematic.
In any case, highly complex renewable systems present their own difficulties. Every method of energy production requires energy to support it: for mining coal, pumping oil, or the massive resource extraction demand by renewables and the ‘smart’ technology that enables it. This requirement has initiated yet another round of colonial exploitation and despoilation.
Also, known reserves of many essential minerals are deficient. And resource scarcity is insurmountable; what doesn’t occur cannot be conjured into existence. A finite world has bio-physical limits: as its resources are subject to exhaustion, so our ambitions are subject to restraint. Our centuries long escapade is being constricted and the problems of over-development and over-complexity cannot be solved by more of the same – more regulations, more laws, plans, targets, goals, reproof, and penalties.
Image: Aleksandar Pasaric
What use is a carbon-free future if our rapacious civilization continues as is? Biodiversity loss, degradation of soils, deforestation, plunder of the oceans, toxic pollution of every kind: all these are just as malignant, if not more so. Degradation and degeneracy cannot be ameliorated by new technologies. And it is delusional to hope that ‘sustainability’ can somehow allow us to defy some of the most fundamental realities of being.
All this prowess we’ve engineered over time seems to have convinced too many of us that men are gods. And challenging the Gods never ends well. Hubris is followed by nemesis – inexorably if we can’t break through the bounds of scientific rationalism. And the stimulus for such a profound shift in consciousness cannot be prescribed; it can only arise organically. Whether from disillusionment, decline, crisis, chaos, or common sense remains to be seen.
The ground of this dilemma was prepared during that long period of transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world: when the dominance of capital was extended, scientific inquiry established the mechanical worldview, and the hegemony of humanity over nature began its destructive course in earnest. If only Galileo could have seen the future through his telescope.
It was at that time of change, about the year 1605 – just five years after Giordano Bruno was tied to the stake and the breadth of his perception went up in flames with him – that Don Quixote first set forth. Caught between these worlds, his adventure in a sense exemplifies dilemma. The changing conditions were presenting a choice: between faith and belief – and the new belief; between metaphor and fact; between self-realization and passivity; between the individual subject and the social object; and for Don Quixote himself perhaps – depending how you read it – between the way of a (wise?) fool and the way of conviction.
Adventure is a disorder, a disruption of the everyday. The quest is, in part, a dissatisfaction in the everyday, a compulsion to discover its deeper reality. In the mediaeval epic the hero and the epic plane are coincident, so to speak. “The men of Homer belong to the same world as their desires”, to quote Jose Ortega y Gasset.[ii]
But Don Quixote is at odds with his world. In this he is probably the first hero of the modern age – an anti-hero, if you will – not borne by the established manner of a chivalric tale, but impelled by his own will, along “the trackless way”, in Joseph Campbell’s words,[iii] of his unfolding life; and creating in his wake his own ‘mythology’, by his own heroic self-realization in a world at variance with his inner being and feeling – as individual integrity will be in an abstract world of facts and figures.
Capital and the new science were breaking the world apart. The organism was torn from its environment, but the soul craves reconciliation and unity. The pathology of progress – distraction, addiction, obsession, emotional disorder, and mental distress to the point of psychosis – all those cries of pain and anguish resound because the world is no longer whole.
And when the prevailing culture is a secular, socio-economic state and no more, to which art and philosophy are peripheral (and largely commodified), it cannot set the terms for a necessary transformation.
To be convinced – whether by religious or scientific dogma makes no difference – is to set yourself at naught and passive in a world always active and renewed. Self-realization, the search for meaning within a prison of abstraction and global assent is, in consequence, only possible in the individual psyche and through the daily heroism of each one of us.
The reign of Gods, Goddesses and our own Christian God was over, or coming to an end. If, on the other hand, the cosmic mystery is implicit in every individual existence – plant, animal, or human – then the poetic imagination, art in its broadest sense, out of which the mythic realm was born and which gave form to its cultural expression, could turn its gaze to the metaphysics – indeed the miracle – of being in every one of us.
And would it be too much to hope that it could then transform everyday life through the reconciliation of the spheres of night and day, of the timeless, or momentous, process of creation and its manifestation in time – and so of reason and authority, the heart, and the head.
But now the giants are on the march again; thousands of them ranged across land and sea. Transformed into windmills, not now by the necromancer, Freston, as Don Quixote once suspected, but by vicissitude and the main chance. Aloof, pristine, impertinent, enormous, their alien presence and baleful monotony is an affront to the vibrant landscape – each one a great counter calculating a return. For every turn another dollar.
The old gods would be in turmoil: the wind harnessed to the strategic avarice of a corporate machine. For what? To ‘save’ a world that the Megamachine (to borrow Fabian Scheidler’s term) has itself constructed and put at risk?
And so also the sun: once raised variously to the status of God or Goddess, powerful mythological symbol, the vivid nucleus of a living cycle that would every dawn dispel the dark. It, too, is to be committed to the same end. That their potential falls short I have already discussed; that even the most critical demands of our current over-consumption can be met is doubtful. But it must now also power the banal syllabus of cyber mania.
Socially destructive global monopolies are eager for every megawatt to propel their program of corporate dominance. The digitalization of the world is an imperial project of unprecedented ambition. A counterfeit world is being prepared. Uniformity of thought, action, experience, and expectation is promoted – autonomy would disturb the shallow manner of digital exchange.
The pioneers of science would be amazed. After all their hard work the earth is becoming flat again. The individual is fading away. Apparently, our lives are to be run by corporate favour and AI. Wow! Our common heritage, from the production of food to our very biology, is to be appropriated by an affected concern and handed over to ‘experts’.
Thankfully, an authentic humanity will not easily be overcome by technocratic pedantry, and we should all have enough experience of bureaucratic and executive stupidity to expect the project is delusional and self-defeating. After all, if they kill the goose, what then?
Unfortunately, it has the potential to further the cause of technocratic governance by a coterie of corporate behemoths who have made no secret of their anti-democratic and anti-social resolve, even as they cloak it in the sweet-sounding words of beneficial intent. And there appears to be no limit to their field of operation, or the level of enforcement through sophisticated systems of surveillance and control.
The intemperate pushing of AI omnipotence has some of the characteristics of mania about it. With any luck it may be destined for the same fate as other notable examples of this recurrent phenomenon. In the meantime, let’s be clear: artificial intelligence is what it says on the tin. It is fake in the same way that artificial flowers are fake. In other words, it is no more than an imitation of intelligence; or rather it purports to be since its proponents have a much- reduced understanding of intelligence in the first place.
The only way a digital system could seem analogous to intelligence is if human beings have been persuaded that they themselves are analogous to machines.
For all the accomplishments of computer science, computers still lack resolve. No computer can make an autonomous decision and no idea can arise unbidden in its electronic circuitry. The data it contains has been handed to it and its operative rules are pre-programmed in algorithms and codes. So-called ‘generative’ AI, so far as I understand it, is simply an intensification of the basic on-off electronics and the yes-no, if not this-that, and, or, both, neither, binary mathematics of existing systems.
To assert that the voluntary and boundless nature of mind and intelligence can be fully represented by a symbolic mathematical system of 1’s and 0’s is absurd – to any thoughtful person. But, of course, if in the first instance you define ‘intelligence’ by what can be contained in its restrictive code then you have AI.
The computer is an ingenious machine, without doubt, a remarkable tool as it stands, but for some reason its potential has been dressed in vainglorious exaggeration from the outset. The haughty claims for AI are no different today than fifty years ago, although confident prophecies of omnipotence still await fulfilment.
That more and more aspects of living and our thought processes can be formulated digitally, and that the programs (the preset rules of the game) are run at breakneck speed is what makes it so impressive. But whereas endless variation and repetition are possible, and answers (largely based on past conclusions) can appear as if by magic, without a non-material imagination, new ideas cannot emerge from old data.
There has been much excitement over the ‘existential’ threat of AI. Indeed, in the hands of the corporate sector, it is busy constructing its own reality with the callous logic of the machine. But there is nothing new here either: apocalyptic alarms have always been associated with the disruption of custom and loss of confidence. If it comes to it, wild forecasts of digital conquest can be countered by simply pulling the plug. The real worry is what on earth has humanity come to that it can so easily imagine subordination to its own technology, to the extent of its own obsolescence – that some would even welcome its approach.
That it is already secondary, to some extent, has nothing to do with the superiority of AI, but is entirely due to our significant distance from the profound coherence of being.
But with so much money at play, the industry is oblivious to either temporal limits or harm. And the next step in the construction of an omniscient computer system – always a goal – follows sensibly enough in the reasoning of scientific materialism.
If the mind has been reduced to the brain, and the brain itself is analogous to a data-processing, memory storage device, then why not build a ‘cognitive’ system that exceeds the intellectual capacity of any human; that would, in turn, design a new improved machine and so on. An “intelligence explosion”, until hey presto! the Singularity is reached – ultra intelligence, omniscience, omnipotence, virtual Godhood!
As fantastical as all this might seem to anyone with their feet still on the ground, there’s more. The geeks among us don’t rest easy. If you’re interested in fantasy, it’s all gathered under the acronym Tescreal. Just be aware that the principal actors here are over-exalted, self-regarding white males in the main, and a forceful eugenicist agenda (a ‘more enlightened eugenics’ apparently) runs through it.
If partisans of AI infallibility were left to stew in the juice of these absurdities within the techno-utopian compound of Silicon Valley, and certain university departments, they needn’t trouble the lives of ordinary decent people. But unfortunately, they command limitless capital and the insatiable dreams of monopolists. Ah, but their intent is to save the world. It’s more likely that an unholy pairing with messianic pretensions will pave the road to hell.
And not only do they appear to be living on another planet, they actually think we can. In this respect, it is a point worth making that no man ever set foot on the moon, and no man or woman ever will, unless they want to bring their life to a painful conclusion. Man reached the moon by bringing his earth environment with him in a spacecraft. An ingenious accomplishment, undoubtedly, but a miss is as good as a mile. And because what is contained in the spacesuit, spacecraft, or space colony for that matter, is clearly partial rather than whole, prolonged existence in it is simply impossible, either physically or psychologically – unless, of course, you’re a machine, or a posthuman!
Given the wonder of existence in the first place, the greatest marvels of being are mind and consciousness, memory and ideas. Any degree of self-awareness should open us to the profound mystery from which they arise. That anyone could make of this ineffable experience nothing more than a mechanical process to be downloaded into a plastic ‘chrysalis’ full of semi-conductors, switches, and silicon chips; and to then emerge as a kind of super-intelligent, posthuman immortal shows just how far from any real sense of our creative presence some of us have drifted.
Every day now, it seems, we are subject to reproof. Signs of crisis are insistent and portents of doom pressure us in a seemingly chaotic world. This essay has attempted to set a wider context; to highlight the critical issues; and to point to the obvious fact that if the corporate/political/ideological covenant responsible for our present state is being relied upon to provide solutions we are going nowhere.
For all its achievements to date, it is now becoming clear that scientific materialism and the single-minded logic of its methodology is reaching the limits of its efficacy; even as materialist anticipation is reaching for its apotheosis in the extravagant representations of AI – the ultimate expression of its reductionist worldview.
And it is possible to see on the wildest shores of this ‘promised land’ a kind of hysteria in the face of diminishing returns, and the desperate resuscitation of a fading ideology.
But the piling on of the past will not work. With increasing complexity every solution begets more problems. It’s a vicious circle, such that at this point many of us might be beginning to feel Sancho Panza’s reproach – windmills in the head is right! How to step off the treadmill is the crux of the problem, although it is also all too clearly the solution. And in the absence of another world to step on to we are hooked by a kind of compulsion neurosis.
A more benign world will require a new morality in its broadest sense; it will not arrive ‘off the peg’, so to speak. ‘Smart’, ‘sustainable’, ‘clean’, ‘green’, the defining terms of our post-carbon future, are a cruel deception if their only purpose is to keep the machine in gear.
Strangely, the very ideology that defines the world will not recognize its material constraint. It still relies on the illusion of superabundance and the invocation of technological superiority in a world struggling for breath.
And where – is it ever asked – is our humanity in this brave new world? The whole drama of a single life, a sort of flourish upon the oceanic well of time and creation; and the billions of us marooned in an abstract world of facts and figures. How do we dignify our lives in a world in which fire has been quenched?
Corbusier’s ‘machine to live in’ is realized in the technological dependence and the spick and span aspect of the all-electric house. But there was a time when the hearth was symbolic of the Navel of the Earth; when fire, the Goddess of the hearth, symbolized the presence of the divine. The hearth and its home were explicit symbols of implicit unity: the invisible or immaterial realm made visible in the material culture.
Such sensibilities are long gone, of course, and unity and meaning must be sought in the human heart – as they should be at this stage of our cultural evolution. But what if the heart itself is cold? What if the material culture is destructive or merely bland?
We now live in a manner without discernment or reserve, informed by opinion and the ubiquity of the market. Jesus drove the moneylenders from the temple; a second coming would be welcome in the face of an ill-considered, commercial culture of unprecedented shallowness. Its dominance and its demands, and its impression upon all is turning hearts to stone and our world into a wasteland.
It is true that most people’s lives are enriched and gain meaning in the ordinary communion of family, friends and community; and perhaps in the practicalities of daily life. But there is a wider world, and in the minds of capitalists the end always justifies the means. In their calculations you don’t count – the phenomenon of your being, that is, not your efficiency in the economy of capital accumulation.
In the everyday language of economics. the economy appears to be an almost perfect mathematical system independent of human history – an abstraction isolated from reality as a whole. In the extremism of neo-liberalism its jurisdiction has neither moral, social, or cultural bounds and it now regulates the global like a detached and senseless Victorian viceroy. To the extent that our lives are decided by it, the social context will be inhumane, and inadequate to our potential and imaginative capacity.
Life in the shallows of economic determinism soon exhausts itself. There is an emptiness at the heart of contemporary culture that will not be filled by the ‘green agenda’. The post-carbon future, as currently outlined, exemplifies the metaphor of the machine no less than its antecedent. Technological solutions will only perpetuate our insulation from the vibrant process of creation. And ‘smart’ technology, let us be clear, does not run on fresh air. On the contrary the magnitude of its energy demand may be unprecedented in industrial history.
The real world arises organically as a self-organizing system, whole and complete at every step of its evolution. That is to say, it is incomparable – it’s what it is and what we are – and may be benign or destructive as we might inhabit it. A bio-physical system is ‘limited’ by the very interdependence of its diverse elements, such that individual behaviour is always governed by a superior context.
Scientific materialism and the pathology of dissociation have led us astray. “For there is in the universe neither centre nor circumference”, wrote Giordano Bruno, “but if you will, the whole is central, and every point may also be regarded as part of a circumference in respect to some other central point”.
Each one of us, then, is centre; each one of us manifests the whole, to put it another way. It follows that every identity is ‘I’; and in this sense there is no ‘you’, no other.
In the face of this reality, capitalism rewards one at the expense of another, the few at the expense of the many. In the interest of accumulation, it externalizes costs – to the individual, society, and the environment. It is dehumanizing, anti-social, toxic, ultimately self-destructive, and now global.
We are preoccupied with solutions; but the critical choice is not between fossil fuels and renewables, but between a narrow rationalism and an expanded consciousness, between the sleep of reason and integrity. The crisis we are facing is not, in the first instance, a problem to be solved, but a failure to clearly perceive its cause.
In the words of Jose Ortega y Gasset, “we do not know what is happening to us, and that is precisely the thing that is happening to us – the fact of not knowing what is happening to us”.[iv]
[i] Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, Verso, London, 2001, p 8
[ii] Jose Ortega y Gasset. Meditations on Don Quixote, quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Penguin, London, 1976
Did COVID-19 originate from a pathway connected to China’s trade in wildlife-for-consumption, or did laboratory activity trigger the pandemic? Where do things stand with the so-called Lab Leak Hypothesis? One thing is for sure: in this pressing matter, one of the hardest combined attitudes to take is to be both engaged and polite.
Many combatants, previously capable of professional comportment, have descended into bare knuckle insults of the kind academe has not seen since the world decided one must be on the Left or the Right, or that one should comport oneself responsibly in the face of a Cold War that may become hot. Are you on the right side of history, or involved at all? You are either ready for flak, in this situation, or keep your head down.
Many scientists with an opinion worth sharing are choosing not to do so.
They might be wise. After all, some of this fighting has gotten dirty. Where some engaged in respectable debate before, rivals are now trying to cancel and professionally immolate one another. Direct exchange rather than article or book writing now makes up the majority of this discourse. Peer-reviewed articles on either side of this exchange have been few. Before you say – ‘That’s because there’s no evidence for the lab-leak’, or ‘That’s because there’s no evidence for the wet market/ zoonosis’, consider this: the Chinese government most likely had insight, and most likely destroyed evidence related to one or the other.
Viscount Matt Ridley, our interviewee here, has been both interested and engaged with the question of the virus origin since the start. He has been so without lapsing into ad hominem jibes. Though he has lapsed into Twitter exchanges of fire, his manner throughout has been civil. He stands with scientists, skilled researchers and a majority of the public in thinking that COVID-19 resulted most probably in a misadventure connected to a Chinese lab.
This does not mean he is correct.
Why is it important to point this out? In a context where both sides of a highly contentious argument disagree over all but the smallest of premises, the question of decency – and its cousin attributes honesty and responsibility – does come to the fore. Decency is also a cousin of openness by the way, and as we encircle in our conversation, China’s rulers have been anything but open. Therefore, take a listen to this exchange, and a look at Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book, as a start about posing this question for yourself. For all of us who lived through the pandemic, and in memory of those who didn’t, asking questions about its origins remains a primary part of the aftermath.
It is a notable feature of the prevailing world order that citizens of Western states, in particular, are significantly ill-informed and mis-informed of the past and present contexts of either their disadvantage or their comfort. For centuries the corporate/political/church covenant (imperialism) has sucked the earth of its bounty, dissipated its coherence, shattered communities and brought it to the edge of ruin. It accomplished this through the exploitation, enslavement, dispossession, degradation, starvation and murder of countless millions of fellow human beings.
Upon this base history and its persistence rest our affluence and our inequalities, the persuasive delusions of Western civilization (“our values”), its obtrusive superiority and an unrestrained financial sector that through the extension of rentier/monopoly/surveillance capitalism has all but established a global imperium.
Moreover, this supranational dominance has a forceful ally in its dis-integration of the world in the mis-conceived dogma of scientific materialism that reduces life to matter, minds to brains, whole self-organizing organisms to constituent parts; that effects the enclosure of everything spontaneous, primary, vital, and has generated a bio-tech industry determined to exploit the common process of becoming as if it was just another thing.
During a period of lockdown, I reopened a book on Goya[i] that I hadn’t read for many years. Any study of Goya is likely to reproduce his etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. This was intended as the frontispiece of Los Caprichos, a series of 80 etchings published in 1799 that were a cutting satire of Spanish society at the time.
What gave rise, at fifty-eight years of age to the sudden disillusionment of the successful court painter has long been a matter of speculation. A serious illness in 1792 had left him permanently deaf and he was overworked, trapped by too many commissions. Burdened by demands, constrained by compromise and impelled by a maturing self-realization, creativity and assertiveness, his social position was becoming precarious and the conflict was perhaps too much to bear. Thankfully, he still had thirty years ahead of him and these years freed him enough to become the artist so admired today.
The usual reading of this striking work (published as Capricho 43 and replaced on the title page by a self-portrait) is that without reason we are susceptible to the naivety, superstitions and ignorance of our irrational impulses. It is a common theme of Enlightenment thinking, central to its comforting tale of intellectual and cultural progression, and it underpins the white-supremacist ideology of Western imperialism, as we shall see.
And fair enough, the reforms of Charles III notwithstanding, Spain at the time was the Spain that endured for so long – stuck in its ways, morally enervated and restrained by the barbarity of the Spanish Inquisition. That Goya was eventually appalled at the indolence and hypocrisy of Spanish high society and the regressive influence of a hidebound clergy is not surprising.
However, it is also a simplistic narrative which I’ll return to later, but to be clear, no one can be sure exactly what Goya was trying to express when he conceived the image. In any case, the purpose of this essay is not to put Goya on the couch, so to speak, but to explain why I found Capricho 43 such an arresting image at the height of the COVID panic and to pursue the train of thought that it provoked.
It is not the least of the failings of much social and political commentary these days, especially in the mainstream media, that history begins with the latest headline; that, as it has been said, “it is all text and no context”. To this end we need to go back in time.
Almost exactly two hundred years before Goya published Los Caprichos, Don Quixote de la Mancha rode out like an epic hero of old to confront “at least thirty outrageous giants” that ranged before him and his squire, Sancho Panza, on the plain of Montiel. Impelled only by his own will and disregarding his squire’s assurances that they were windmills, Don Quixote spurred on his horse till he came before his foe. Then, “covering himself with his shield and couching his lance,” he charged, plunged it into the unrelenting sail…..and was tossed aside by the great machine.
“Mercy on me, cried Sancho…did I not tell you they were windmills, and that nobody could think otherwise, unless he had also windmills in his head”. To no avail.
Don Quixote by Honoré Daumier (1868).
Tilting at Windmills
And so his adventures proceed. This celebrated episode, though it only takes up a couple of pages near the beginning of a book of approximately 750 pages sets the tone for the rest – by part tragic, comic, ironic.
Deluded clown, romantic idealist, assertive self-hood: all this and more have been read into the character of the famous knight-errant. That Cervantes intended it as, in some sense, a parody of the chivalric tale seems to be so. But, perhaps most importantly, as the diverse interpretations of the work themselves might indicate, it is a compelling portrait of an individual caught between two worlds.
It was written at a time when the long transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world was reaching a conclusion. The trappings of the centralised state: bureaucracy, social control, militarism and an economy favouring capital accumulation – all so familiar to us now – were being established at this time.
The sixteenth century opened with death, destruction and unparalleled savagery in Central and South America. It was accompanied at home by large land enclosures and dispossession. And witch trials, actually an occasional occurrence in the Medieval Period, proliferated throughout Europe.
The seventeenth century continued the pattern with a huge growth of standing armies; the Thirty Years War that decimated Central Europe; genocide in South and Central America repeated in the North; the transatlantic slave trade; and, crucially, the establishment of the world’s first joint-stock company (forerunner of the modern corporation) in Amsterdam.
As Fabian Scheidler argues in his succinct history of our capitalist civilization,[ii] European economies had developed into what was essentially a circular war economy. European states borrowed enormous amounts of money to finance wars at home and exploitation abroad. The riches they acquired were largely used to repay banks, who, in turn, lent more money and so on.
It was a system that made “entrepreneurs”, war-profiteers, and banks extremely rich, but shattered communities and beggared populations at large. The physical power of the state was indispensable to the project, but the state’s role, it is important to note, was not in the first instance to extend its power, but to facilitate capital accumulation by a privileged few.
This, then, was the social environment in which that other pillar of the modern world arose. The development of science is portrayed as the triumph of rationality over irrationality, verifiable knowledge over superstition, and more. But the actual science that developed resulted from an evolving sense of individual autonomy and mathematical clarity and, for reasons to be discussed, it generated an ideology favoured by the forcible socio-economic power structures of the day.
Furthermore, this type of science did not so much replace religion as the ideological basis of society as extend its dualistic thinking to the relationship between humanity and the natural world – from God versus man to man versus nature.
To be clear, the problem is not with science per se, but with the reductionist worldview that underlies it and the vested interests that support it. That we should look at the world without pre-conceived ideas or doctrinal certainties and let it speak for itself is fine. And it would be ridiculous to disavow astonishing discoveries in every field and technological achievements in engineering, medicine and so much more. While the many social advances that would eventually arrive in the wake of modernity can hardly be disregarded – although we in the West are mostly indifferent to the exploitation on which our complacency rests.
And it might be added that the values of justice, freedom and equality which are the hallmarks of a liberal democracy are routinely circumscribed by class. Laws may be inscribed, but bias is ingrained.
This is not intended to establish some imagined pre-modern, universal state of nature, but the mutual emergence in this period of a strict rationality in both science and a system of market economics, whereby the intrinsic, or use-value, of material necessity and nourishment is subordinated to its exchange-value in the capitalist marketplace, was problematic from the outset.
Since the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping in the fourteenth century, income and expenditure could be formulated mathematically and profit or loss calculated accurately. Increasingly, the focus of trade became profit: to repay lenders if finance had been required and to accumulate money.
Ted Dace has described the outcome of this process clearly: ‘As the basis of economics becomes the trade itself and not the tangible thing exchanged, money is transformed into an all-consuming monster. No longer bound up with the limitations of actual land, people and resources, it springs to life, an abstraction with a will of its own.’[iii]
By now it is our most pressing need and its acquisition has become an urgent necessity for the many, superfluous wealth for the few; it delineates the structural hierarchy of class and serves as a measure of human worth generally. But, as Ted Dace cautions, ‘sooner or later abstraction runs up against reality.’
Meanwhile, the real economy of everyday life has been all but consumed by the predation of finance capitalism and corporate monopoly. And the basic needs of a sustainable life for so many people have become subservient to a parasitic imperative of making money out of money, out of you.
Nicolaus Copernicus.
Like Clockwork
When Copernicus turned cosmology on its head in 1543 he began a process, unimaginable then, that would in time overwhelm God himself. The mathematical precision that astronomy seemed to reveal encouraged the idea that all physical interactions on earth could be so understood.
Thus, Johannes Kepler wrote in 1605: “My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to clockwork ….. Moreover, I show how this physical conception is to be presented through calculation and geometry”.
A few years later Galileo was unequivocal: “When God produces the world, he produces a thoroughly mathematical structure that obeys the laws of number, geometrical figure and quantitative function, Nature is an embodied mathematical system.” And even more emphatically: “Reality is that which can be described mathematically. Everything else is illusion.”
In the Medieval period and, as a general rule, most human cultures that ever existed or survived outside the modern age, the world as a whole was organic and alive, to a greater or lesser extent indivisible, and sustained by an animating principle – God, Spirit, Soul, or the many poetic metaphors of world mythology.
This philosophia perennis, so-called, is an expression of experience rather than ideas. It is a philosophy, or understanding, of our inner nature and the common experience of being. And, perhaps for this reason, the archetypal symbols generated by it are recognizably similar across many outwardly diverse cultures.
And considering that the deep reality of being is beyond intellectual grasp, scriptural certainty, and social constraint, it relies on mythopoetic metaphor and the affective power of ritual to express what is essentially ineffable, and to relate it to the cycle of daily life.
Portrait of Giordano Bruno.
Giordano Bruno
The introduction of the heliocentric model by Copernicus, and its determination by others, so stormed the citadel of belief the full weight of The Inquisition bore down on Galileo – who wavered. The recalcitrant Giordano Bruno supported Copernicus, but his philosophy cut much deeper.
Bruno and others before him had regard for these words from a twelfth century hermetic text, The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, “God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere”. But if the very idea of centre has no meaning, as this suggests, then the fixed framework, a sort of cosmic theatre of space and time in which the universal process unfolds – and on which a mechanistic science depends – means nothing either. With it goes anything fundamental and we are left, it would seem, with no ultimate principle or recourse.
Yet Bruno’s view of the universe was far more profound than anything Galileo could ever have observed through his telescope. All Galileo could see was the inflexible authority of a mathematical system – that must definitively exclude the possibility of an evolving cosmos. And vindication would arrive three hundred years later when Einstein established relativity as a scientific principle.
Nonetheless, we are all here, alive, and conscious of our continuing existence. Being is absolute; our presence is substantial. For all the relativity of physics – and quantum uncertainty – the daylight world of consciousness is whole, it is now, it endures. Life is immanent, some process is generating it, and experience is real.
This, of course, is a great mystery that wells like a spring within each of us and the world in which we live. At the same time, it is beyond us, beyond apprehension and the linear logic of language. The mystery is us; for which reason we cannot know it objectively.
Bruno had much else to say about doctrinal matters, the function of a church and its undesirable interference in philosophical or scientific inquiry. Refusing to recant and pursued around Europe, he was eventually cornered in Venice and spent eight years in the dungeons of the Inquisition in Rome. Still obdurate, condemned and consigned to a foretaste of the flames of hell, he spoke these telling words: “You pronounce sentence upon me perhaps with a greater fear than that with which I receive it.”
In this tumultuous period, the authority of Catholic dogma was losing its grip as science and philosophy advanced, and no amount of bible thumping could secure it. An existent mythology or set of beliefs cannot prevail when there is no consent to meaning. In fact, no established canon can remain consistent with the evolution of experience and understanding. Although the dead weight of its persistence can overwhelm the embodiment of a new sensibility at the heart of an emergent culture.
Bruno’s pointed accusation largely explains the deranged reaction to his ideas and the science of Galileo and others. The suppressive resolve of the Inquisition was frantic and irrational, but the leading lights of the Reformation clung even more tightly to the Bible. Martin Luther let go of it occasionally to fling his ink pot at the devil but was otherwise unrestrained in his invective against Copernicus and his followers.
Bruno, for all his profanities, still had God on his side, so to speak, but it couldn’t save him from the intense conviction of The Holy Office of the Inquisition. Neither science, philosophy, nor the evidence of the senses could be permitted to challenge the insistent truths of Holy Scripture and that was final. The authenticity of individual experience was no match for the infallible authority of “revelation”, and another way is intolerable when conduct is prescribed on tablets of stone. Such is the power of The Word as all good book-thumpers, from St. Paul to Chairman Mao, to neo-liberal economists know well.
But mere obedience to a precept could never be said to awaken the soul to the redemptive power of a mythic or religious tradition. To interpret its symbolism as literal and historic is to profoundly misunderstand its character as an evocation of our inner nature and the mystery of becoming; and to miss entirely the deeper meaning it holds within its poetic folds for the cosmological, sociological, and psychological orders of existence.
Biblical literalism and Pauline universalism are the solid ground of our presumptive superiority and missionary impulse. For centuries they have been both pretext and apologia for white-supremacist imperialism. Unparalleled in its destructive violence throughout the long history of humankind; and all the more menacing because the espousing nations have managed to persuade the greater part of their populations that its cruelty and its condescension are the precise opposite of this reality. We are really impelled by the best of intentions.
The only thing to add to this continuing horror story is that, as Fabian Scheidler has emphasised, the missionary zeal of a church, now in decline, has been assumed by the high- priests of globalist organizations such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. And an amoral cabal of investment banks, hedge-funds, corporate raiders, property speculators and sovereign bondholders (to list only the most obvious) feasting on unearned income from monopoly rights, speculative gains, political favour, and predatory credit.
Furthermore, since 2008 it has been clearer than ever that those who command capital control the world; that the present system secures the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands; and that its beneficiaries have forgotten, if they ever knew, the theme of countless tales and fables the world over – that to have everything is to have nothing.
The interior of Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana, California.
The Metaphor of the Machine
Science, as we know it today, developed in a world in which capitalism was well established, accustomed to quantification and already defined to some extent, therefore, by mathematics and the ‘laws’ of the capitalist marketplace. In other words, a strictly rational tone was already sounding when Kepler and Galileo began their inquiries.
Under the sway of mathematics everything becomes a number. The world is what can be measured, and measurement defines reality. The moral power and mechanistic bias of science would confirm the imperialist/capitalist dream. Everything, including all that lives and all that sustains life, could be abstracted, quantified, and assigned an exchange value. Whether a bushel of grain, a slave in the fields, or a cog in an industrial machine, all were just so many commodities to be used, abused, bought, and sold.
Just as our privileged position at the centre of the universe was being usurped by the Copernican revolution and Bruno’s relativism, the organic worldview of tradition was being steamrolled by the metaphor of the machine.
But if Kepler and Galileo saw an image of the machine and the unerring mathematics of clockwork in the orbits of celestial bodies and in physical processes on earth, Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, and others later extended the metaphor to include living organisms. And the science that developed from this radical epistemological shift would shape both society and human consciousness and establish a scientific orthodoxy that has survived to the present day.
That authoritarian states and capitalist elites with imperial interests and ambitions would welcome these reductionist assertions and favour the scientific consensus that advanced them is no surprise. Class warfare at home and genocide abroad are less troubling with convictions like these. A machine, after all, is determinable, controllable, and dispensable.
It should be said that these early mechanists were still devout. But the world was no longer alive. It was now thought of as inanimate matter, designed by God but governed by fixed mathematical principles. In a sense, then, the scientist was extending God’s work on earth, and in such a way the quasi-religious status of science began to emerge.
For Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in whom the notion of a scientific priesthood was first conceived, the development of Western civilization would be a scientific and engineering project defined by his slogan, “knowledge is power”.
God would be a bystander, but we were doing his work. With God on our side and the power of science the world would lay itself open and there would be nothing we couldn’t know or conquer – a presumption of omniscience that still prevails in the scientific community.
It should also be said that dissenting voices were raised. Not all scientists were prepared to degrade life to this extent. But the church itself had mastered its alarm and ceded worldly matters to the domain of science, while it would continue to look after our souls and prepare us all for Paradise.
That art, science and philosophy were now free to pursue their own interests without having to look over their shoulder at the stern face of one of God’s representatives on earth, or his legion of scriptural zealots, is one of the boons of modernity, unquestionably. That these three branches would in time diverge and simply feed off themselves would become a significant problem. But, meantime, a modus vivendi had become established; and that such an arrangement would be uncontentious is largely due to a shared dualism.
Religion and science were agreed: the spiritual and material realms were separate and distinct – God above, humanity and the world below.
Up to this point, three orders of existence were recognized: body, soul, and spirit. Our bodies were connected to the spiritual realm through our souls – the ‘rational soul’ of man, in Christian theology and the equivalent, to all intents and purposes, of the human mind, which was, as yet, regarded as immaterial.
Mechanistic science may have removed soul from nature but, since human beings (well, cultivated minds at any rate) considered themselves a cut above brute existence they were still thought to have souls (or minds, or free-will) through which they interacted with God and put themselves in line for eternal life. But all the rest, the whole ecology of living, was mechanical, purposeless, and determined. And our disconnection from nature and more holistic modes of understanding sank into the culture with ruinous consequences.
As dispiriting as this might seem, we could still rely on our God as ideological support, dispeller of doubt and final consolation. But his days were numbered. The convenient accord with the church was never going to survive the rapid progress of science and the no doubt exhilarating sensation that “knowledge is power”. Every advance would endorse the swelling authority of science and install reliable principles such as Newton’s deterministic laws of motion.
This burgeoning faith in science, reason and human progress is what we know today as The Enlightenment. Edge God aside and it is the prototype of contemporary secular humanism.
“The Blue Marble” is a photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17.
From ‘Believe in God’ to ‘Trust the Science’
A machine requires a maker and God made the world we were taught. But the more science discovered about the world-machine the more it became clear that, once set in motion, further divine intervention was unnecessary. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, it was also evident that there was no scientific rationale for God either. Fifty years later conspicuous atheism would provoke no censure and materialism was a firmly established tenet of scientific endeavour.
In the orthodox view the universe is composed entirely of matter. The energy that activates it is also material, or physical. It operates according to fixed laws that can be observed, measured, and formulated – and it is fully determined by them. Like a machine it is a hierarchy of parts right down to the “ultimate building-blocks” of sub-atomic particles and chemical molecules. Even biology is reducible in this way, and in the end, there need be nothing we cannot know.
Of course, if these are a priori assumptions then complete knowledge is indeed possible – it’s a foregone conclusion. That actual science has long since swept many of these assumptions aside has not radically removed them from the core belief system of scientific dogma and, crucially, from its day-to-day application.
As a firmly entrenched belief it has replaced religion as the authoritative voice in contemporary society. The peremptory watchword “believe in God” has been superseded by “trust the science”. Its dogmatic purpose is no different and it was used to effect during the pandemic as a marketing slogan for social compliance and pharmaceutical profit.
In any case, the injunction to “trust the science” simply points up the conventional morass into which scientific orthodoxy has sunk. Science is supposed to be about open inquiry, not a defence of “the science” as if certain matters were resolved beyond question just like old-style religion.
Science prides itself on its empiricism and its positivism. Fair enough; it has undoubtedly been an effective strategy and the basis of unprecedented technological development, but all experience must now defer to the “scientific method”.
The objective world of facts: length, height, weight, motion, capacity, etc., from the stars to sub-atomic particles, is the real world. A world objectively apparent, but devoid of meaning, purpose, or self-existence. Moreover, it disallows subjective experience (reality for most of us) and diminishes your creative presence to the point of disappearance.
Excluded from the terms of the world-machine are those elusive qualities of existence that make us feel alive. Whole organisms are more than the sum of their parts and it is this ‘more’ that is forever beyond the materialist’s scope.
Science can tell you all about life, but it cannot tell you what life is. It can describe the surface of things, but not their substance. The scientist may well stand to one side (in a confusion of subject and object) and probe every inch of you, but life will not be pinned.
Scientists can’t seem to start with a whole organism in its environment and develop a methodology to understand it in these terms as a living phenomenon, in a way that does not involve objectification and dissection – even though it is instantaneously apparent to direct experience.
And one viewpoint need not necessarily delegitimize the other. One could accept both as two sides of a coin, but science insists on its “truth” as superior.
Thomas Jones, The Bard, 1774.
Romanticism
The idea that science alone could define our world was challenged with great energy by the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It left its mark but was no match for the brutal industrialism and economic liberalism of the Victorian era, that explicated Bacon’s rationale.
That said, it would be some time before some scientists would dare to insist that manifest qualities of human nature are illusory; that even the sense of our own being is delusional; that nihilism would be celebrated in literature and philosophy and disintegration of form become the measure of art. And it will perhaps be a little more time before ‘intelligence’ is boxed and the scientifically emancipated individual of the Enlightenment will be, finally, almost fully dehumanized.
But hands up how many of you feel like a machine (as opposed to perhaps being treated like one!). The very idea is clearly nonsensical. In short, a machine is lifeless so how on earth did it ever come be identified with life. It’s hard to imagine even the most ardent materialists can really regard themselves as glorified machines and the world as clockwork, but their science is conducted as if universal existence is material, mechanical, mathematically determined and nothing else.
For Descartes, humanity was uniquely raised above this perfunctory level by the human mind, or soul, which is immaterial and part of our ‘higher’ or spiritual nature. Today’s materialist can invoke no such redemption since the mind has been reduced to the brain – which marvellous (and perplexing) organ has itself been reduced to a personified data processor and control centre.
And while on the face of it, religious creationists and scientific materialists seem at opposite extremes, they in fact make common cause, both in their determinism and their appeal to either an external deity or some deus ex machina such as genetic programs, or ‘laws’ of nature.
Set against both the religious duality of God and humanity, spirit and matter, and the reductive objectivity of scientific analysis and its duality of subject and object (a make-believe world constructed from without) is the immediacy of feeling. The world before our eyes, present to the senses; the sublime plenitude of life, its constancy, its astonishing detail, process within process; a universal accord that could only have evolved as an integrated whole.
There can be moments in life when we forget ourselves, captured by the intensity of experience. Moments of rapture or clarity, free of distraction or intent, that feel complete, and doubt and endeavour dissolve in the pure sensation of being alive. Typically, these moments are fleeting, not a state of permanent bliss. Nor should they be. The everyday is normal; there is a living to be progressed. But they reveal an immediate reality beyond cold hard facts.
The philosopher Alan Watts once joked that in sober society, it seemed, normality was the world seen on a wet Monday morning. The daylight world of consciousness is inescapably the plane on which our daily lives unfold. But science has extended its scepticism to the ‘childhood’ of our religious beliefs to anything beyond its scope. God is not a testable hypothesis, but neither is the very real sensation I’ve just described.
Image Daniel Idini (c)
A World of Things
Science is decisive: the limits of its application define our worldview and determine its commonplace expression. But it generates a world of things, a world without context or meaning. As a consequence, we now live in a forest of facts and can’t see the wood for the trees.
This objective world of facts and things seems real and obvious, which it is, and most of us aren’t bothered by post-modernist allegations that it’s all just interpretation. But at a deeper level there is no such thing as a thing. Which is simply to say that no-thing can exist as an isolated entity apart from other things.
A tree, for instance, seems unequivocally present and specific, but it can only arise and endure as a system of transpiration, photosynthesis and more, supported by an underground universe of micro-organisms. In other words, a tree is more properly thought of as a process. A process, what’s more, that is inextricably interdependent with our own continuing existence through the interchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen.
It follows that every other thing (and this includes us) is also a process that can only exist within the greater process of life as a whole. It is this essential truth of being, not sentiment or scientific necessity that commits us to earth, water, fire, and air. We are nature. Consequently, any de-spoilation of the world or nullification of others is an offence against our selves.
But the language of science is definitive. It supports a methodology that sets the world apart and fails to see that the objective distinction of things is by convention only: that the everyday world of material culture is real at that level, but that a deeper unity underlies it.
The stupendous diversity, adaptivity and integrity of our world – our being – evolved without direction or external law. That is to say, “laws of nature” are implicit. What makes life consistent is that, as it appears in the moment and evolves over time, it establishes patterns. And what makes a pattern a pattern is that it repeats (becomes a “law”). More than anything else living organisms are habitual. As they reproduce and grow and reproduce and grow, they follow well-worn paths. And old habits die hard. Apples can’t be oranges. The young cuckoo abandoned in its egg flies south in autumn.
Habitual behaviour is unconscious. A couple of cells grow into ten trillion. That’s ‘easily’ explained. A ‘genetic program’ underlies it biologists assure us; even though they can barely define a gene and the complexity of cellular development is impossible to fully describe. But a living organism has been formed: one that for the duration of its life is present, constant, adaptive, and purposeful. Try explaining that.
How genes alone could have the determining power of organic development is a modern mystery. How can genes, chemical molecules in the nucleus of a cell, be purposive while the whole organism is mere machine and fully determined? The soul, Rupert Sheldrake suggests, has been resurrected in the genome.[iv]
The expectations of The Human Genome Project have not been realized; in fact, many were confounded. Sure enough, DNA keeps yourself to yourself so to speak, but suddenly everything was ‘genetic’. The cause of all disease and even aberrant human behaviour, not to mention your very appearance (good, bad, or indifferent) was hidden in those helical strands.
We were to finally uncover “the secret of life”. Just as in physics, the atom, and then sub-atomic particles (hundreds now and counting – if they hang around long enough) were thought to constitute the ultimate building blocks of matter, so human biology could be reduced to the molecular level. Our lives are just a matter of physics and chemistry.
What was actually discovered was incalculable complexity, so intricate it resists scientific analysis. Mechanical explanations fall far short. Whole organisms can never be explained in terms of their parts (if you could even isolate parts in this case). And yet an industry has been capitalized as if, and has stepped, like a bull in a china shop, into a dynamic, balanced process common to all life with who knows what consequences.
Furthermore, that such prodigious expansion of interconnected and interdependent life since ‘day one’ could be solely due to the random mutation of genes favoured by natural selection; that integrity in the whole could be produced and sustained by chance in the particular (as is current mechanistic orthodoxy), is a stroke of luck so far beyond calculation as to make the proposition meaningless.
It is also at odds with Darwin himself, in whose view it is the organism that adapts to environmental pressure, and those adaptions are then inherited by its progeny.
The inheritance of acquired characteristics is not easily understood, certainly. But there is no evidence it is genetic. Since genes only exist as integral parts of a whole organism, it is only within a machine theory of life they could be said to determine organic formation or carry that ‘information’ from one generation to the next.
In other words, evolution is a creative process, not a blind mechanism; a sensual interplay of organism and environment, in a world, not determined but open, and committed to its fulfilment – whatever that might be – only as the seed is committed to flower.
Feature Image: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Francisco Goya, c.1799, Etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin, Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
[i] Gwyn A. Williams, Goya and the Impossible Revolution, Penguin Books, England,1976.
[ii] Fabian Scheidler. The End of the Megamachine, Zero Books, England, 2020.
[iii] Ted Dace, Escape from Quantopia, Collective Insanity in Science and Society, Iff Books. UK and USA 2014. p.208.
[iv] Rupert Sheldrake. The Science Delusion, Coronet, England, 2013.
We have a special edition in our Musician of the Month series as Frank Armstrong interviews John Cummins of the Dublin band Shakalak.
Aficionados of the Dublin cultural scene over the past decade or two are likely to be familiar with John Cummins. Cutting a dash with a distinctive Rasputin beard and Reggae styles, John’s poetic performances in the Dublin vernacular have mesmerised audiences young and old. His playful, rhyming verse always had great musicality, and it seemed a natural progression for him to begin collaborating with musicians, culminating in the formation of the band Shakalak in 2018, which also contains another former Musician of the Month in Fin Divilly. If you haven’t made it along to one of their gigs yet, you are in for a treat.
John recalls some of his earliest musical memories:
Absolutely loved music … I remember going into into the record player in the room and putting her on and learning how to treat the needle respectfully and all that. So you just listen to whatever was there. What was that? Leo Sayer, you know, things like that … And then when I was a little bit older, maybe my brother [Paul] was probably fifteen and he got his hands on the guitar … So Paul would be playing and learning songs in the room, and yeah, I’d be left handed picking her up upside down, just playing one string or something like that, you know, that kind of thing. He’d be doing Simon and Garfunkel songs. I remember your wonderful tonight, Eric Clapton. He learned how to do that one, and he told me that that was his song and that he wrote it, and I believed him. I was of an age to believe that … I must have believed that for years, until it was years later when I was at a party somewhere and I heard it …, fucking Penny dropped … I am old enough to remember Bob Marley when he passed away and and everyone getting the the reggae into you. The knitted jumpers [with] Bob Marley R.I.P. all around and Bobby Sands at the time, all that. And then people going off to the Lebanon, maybe bringing back cassette tapes … and they do the rounds around the estate … So you’d be getting all sorts. And then you may be working and then you’re buying, buying your own music, whatever you like.
And talks about moving from poetic performances into becoming a musician:
So everything that I’ve been writing for a good number of years has consciously been with structure around where it’s easily adaptable to a template for a song. So everything’s been written with music in mind for years and sometimes they’d have melodies, sometimes they wouldn’t, sometimes they’d have certain BPMs or whatever, or even a key. And around that time, 2010 was when I first started. I suppose really performing … I started doing the open mics [in the International], and Stephen James Smith would help me a lot back then. The glass sessions, the Monday Echo, similar things that Minty is doing now on the Tuesday nights and the circle sessions on the Monday nights. Great stuff. This is a great old spot.
…
And that was where I came out of the shell. I started off hiding behind the page. Then I’d be doing things with my eyes closed. And then you’re just meeting people and you’re hooking up, and you’re there strumming a guitar, and you’re chatting your poems over and it’s all coming together. Loads of little collaborations down the years … Played with a band during the Lingo Festival. I don’t know if you remember that. The Lingo Festival 2014, 15, 16, … played with a band. Then I got the bug and then there was a couple of vibe for fillers where I jumped up on stage with these amazing musicians. And I was doing my poems in between, and that gave me the bug as well. You know, I kept feeding the bug, as it were … So Fin and I just got just got chatting. It just really happened very naturally, organically and quickly, you know? Meanie. A friend of Finn’s, came in with a couple of little beats because we were looking for a drummer back then, you know, a real life human being drummer like, which, you know, are not that easy to come across.
As to the vibrancy of the Dublin cultural scene today compared to the time he was starting off in early 2010s he says:
It’s a shilling thing, I think. It’s a money thing. Definitely. Things are more expensive. There were some Wednesday nights back then you’d be like a stone going across the town trying to catch several nights that were going on, and the talent, as it were. I don’t really like that word, the talent, but the people sharing their songs and doing their bits and bobs, it was great … there was something in the air … Well venues are less. That’s maths isn’t it. That’s just out there. You can Google that and find out all them that’s disappeared and gone … [But] I think it’s going strong [still] … If you go down there to the sessions on the Monday night [in the International], that room is jammed down there, you know. And then there’s the Smithfield creatives that do bits and bobs. I haven’t been on social media now for for a few years, so I feel that I’m not up to speed to tell you what’s going on around town. But from word of mouth, from what I’m hearing, it’s not the same. Not as maybe … prolific or strong or whatever, but it is happening. Definitely. Yeah.
In December the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC) published a comparatively critical reviewof the government’s Budget 2024. Criticisms of ‘bad budgeting’ arose from the ‘lack of transparency,’ and the use of ‘fiscal gimmickry.’ IFAC defined the latter as ‘creative accounting techniques’ used to make the numbers ‘look more favourable than they are.’
The Irish Times described this as ‘an extraordinary broadside against the Government’, with RTE referring to IFAC’s assessment as ‘controversial.’ However, as IFAC made clear in February, they were standing firm behind their ‘perfectly valid’ analysis which they stated was backed by ‘substantial evidence and reasoning in support of this conclusion.’
This episode had me wondering whether similar kinds of “fiscal gimmickry” are at work outside of budget time, specifically when Ministers are out making what are nominally ‘new’ funding announcements. You will of course be familiar with this type of thing.
It goes something like this: a Minister appears on RTE, or broadcasts via their social media platforms, that they are ‘delighted’ to be announcing x million for some initiative. Now the ordinary person probably never stops to consider whether this is new expenditure for a new program, additional expenditure for an existing program, or simply existing expenditure for an existing program.
But to be fair to the average voter, there are a few Ministers that probably never to stop to ask this question themselves. What matters to them is that they are out and seen to be doing things – energy in lieu of action. If taking a bit of creative licence results in positive media coverage, then some see that as all well and good.
I must confess that for some time I’ve been puzzled by how some Ministers seemed to be making ‘new’ multi-million announcements every other week, whilst for others such announcements were few and far between. So, I thought I would investigate the matter. As we’ll see, this is where a kind of “fiscal gimmickry” meets the ‘the politics of the last announcement.’
In Table 1 we can see the number of funding related announcements made by all our current government ministers (excluding the Taoiseach) in 2023. We have a total of fourteen Ministers spread across seventeen Departments. The median amount (think middle value) of funding announcements made last year was 11.5, so just under one funding announcement per month.
As we can see, half of our Ministers made less than this, and some significantly less. For instance, Messrs McGrath (6) and Donohue (5), perhaps the two Ministers most associated with the word ‘prudent’, were certainly amongst the most judicious. The same goes for Minister McEntee (4), although she was off on maternity leave for a period.
Just three Ministers; Harris (32), Martin (30) and Humphreys (21) were significantly higher. But to be fair to Heather Humphreys she is Minister of two departments (Social Protection/Rural and Community Development), so it’s really just Harris and Martin that were so far ahead of the pack.
Could it be that they occupy larger spending Departments and hence their respective Ministers need to make more funding related announcements? Considering neither of these Departments is in the top five in terms of expenditure, however, and indeed Martin’s is forth from bottom, that doesn’t seem to account for it.
The second largest spender is the Department of Health, but Minister Donnelly made one of the fewest amounts of funding announcements (6). In fact, the size of a Department’s expenditure seems to have almost zero relationship with the number of funding announcements that its Minister makes.
As we can see from Figure 1 there’s no statistically significant relationship between the size of a department’s expenditure and the number of funding announcements its respective Minister makes.
Minister
Department(s)
No. funding related announcements (2023)
Department(s) Gross Expenditure €000/rank (2023)
Comment
Simon Harris
Further and Higher Education, Research and Innovation
32
€4,092,446
(6th place)
Catherine Martin
Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media
30
€1,165,509
(13th place)
Heather Humphreys
Social Protection/Rural and Community Development
21
SP – €23,901,145 (1st place)
RCD – €428,981 (17th place)
Minister for two Departments
Norma Foley
Education
13
€10,025,107
(3rd place)
Charlie McConalogue
Agriculture, Food and the Marine
12
€2,164,509
(9th place)
Roderic O’Gorman
Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth
12
€5,931,759
(5th place)
Darragh O’Brien
Housing, Local Government and Heritage
12
€6,414,089
(4th place)
Michael Martin
Defence/Foreign Affairs
11
Defence – €1,209,737 (12th place)
FA – €1,057,144 (15th place)
Minister for two Departments
Eamon Ryan
Transport/Environment, Climate and Communications
10
Transport – €3,516,269 (7th place) Environment – €1,066,060 (14th place)
Minister for two Departments
Simon Coveney
Enterprise, Trade and Employment
7
€1,621,413
(11th place)
Michael McGrath
Finance
6
€600,240
(16th place)
Stephen Donnelly
Health
6
€21,358,420
(2nd place)
Paschal Donohoe
Public Expenditure
5
€1,670,513
(10th place)
Helen
McEntee
Justice
4
€3,428,623
(8th place)
Maternity leave for a period
We’ll zoom in on new Taoiseach Simon Harris for three reasons. First, he’s the most prolific in terms of making funding announcements – averaging almost three a month; secondly, he’s the new Taoiseach so it could provide a window into what his tenure might look like; and thirdly he’s the only Minister I am aware of that has ever been accused of making re-announcements dressed up as new spending measures.
In January Simon Harris appeared in DCU for a carefully choreographed photo opportunity. This was off the back of a big announcement he made about seeking Cabinet approval for a ‘new’ student housing policy. Note: this policy is almost indistinguishable from its predecessor.
Off the back of this he appeared in DCU with the big funding announcement that he was there to ‘unveil plans for 500 student accommodation beds,’ something he again alluded to during Fine Gael’s Ard Fheis over the weekend. The glaring problem with this was, of course, that he’d already announced it last year, with an almost identically choreographed photo opportunity.
So, is this characterisation of Harris fair? Let’s take a look at some of his other creative accounting announcements. In June 2023 he announced: ‘Today I am launching a €9 million fund for higher education institutions to improve access to higher education for students with an intellectual disability.’
It was in 2022, however, when he first launched what was then a €12 million fund. It was to work as follows; €3 million would be disbursed in 2022, with the remainder disbursed over 2023-25. So, essentially it is €3 million a year over four years. Yet with Harris’ approach €12m can be announced one year, €9 million the next, €6m the year after and then €3 million in the final year!
If you weren’t following closely, you would be forgiven for thinking this has been a total of €30 million (12 + 9 + 6 + 3) rather than the €12 million that was originally set aside. Now the Minister could surely counter that what he said was technically correct, and he would have a point.
Such announcements, however, as the USI pointed out, are made on the assumption that most people don’t look beyond the headlines. Or read the Department’s press release which will usually contain explanatory notes.
In October in the wake of Budget 2023, where the Minister was severely criticised for having produced no new funding for student accommodation, he suddenly appeared to announce that he was ‘Delighted to announce a new €434 million student accommodation partnership, which will help build over 2,000 beds on college campuses across the country.’
Delighted to announce a new €434 million student accommodation partnership, which will help build over 2,000 beds on college campuses across the country.
This one seemed to catch everyone off guard, including the universities, his Cabinet colleagues and the opposition. One of the glaring problems with this announcement was there was nothing new in it. Not only can the universities already borrow from the EIB, they already have significant borrowings. Their issue isn’t being able to access borrowing, it’s their ability to repay the money sustainably. Several universities are already grappling with financial deficits this year. Indeed, the entire sector has to deal with a core funding deficit of over €200 million, which is a hangover from the Austerity period – a shortfall he was supposed to address but has now left to his successor to sort out.
If his past Ministerial performance proves a good indicator of Simon Harris’ future performance as Taoiseach, then we can expect big announcements, and then big announcements with even bigger bells on. But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll probably find some fiscal gimmickry afoot. I just hope that when these big announcements come, they will be met with equivalent levels of scrutiny by our media and state broadcaster.
We’ll zoom in on new Taoiseach Simon Harris for three reasons. First, he’s the most prolific in terms of making funding announcements – averaging almost three a month; secondly, he’s the new Taoiseach so it could provide a window into what his tenure might look like; and thirdly he’s the only Minister I am aware of that has ever been accused of making re-announcements dressed up as new spending measures.