A voice in the wilderness

Earlier in the week I praised an English doctor for the calm, graphical way he explained the current pandemic.

Today I want to draw your attention to a German doctor who has been calmly suggesting that governments have been panicked into extreme measures by their failure to understand the specifics of statistical measurement and reporting.

My first reaction was that the guy was a right-wing denialist – like Brazil’s right-wing President Bolsonaro - but his style seems a bit too professional for that – and indeed, when I checked on Wikipedia, it was to discover that he is not only mainstream SDP but is currently the Deputy-Head of the German Delegation to the Council of Europe

Dr Wolfgang Wodarg is a lung specialist (pulmonologist) and starts his presentation (subtitled in English) by explaining there are 100 types of virus - which are constantly changing. He quotes research from Glasgow which looked at some ten viruses in which Coronavirus was always present – although only some 7-15% of viruses he says are of the Coronavirus strain.

Wutan, he points out, is China’s largest laboratory for the testing for viruses and has, therefore, a large number of medical researchers who found this strain on about 50 people they were testing. This was duly put into the global data base and picked up in Berlin who did a test and passed the results to WHO for some sort of certification…..

At this point the explanation got a bit cryptic and seemed to suggest a contrast between how the WHO handles validation requests from pharmaceutical companies, on the one hand, and research institutes on the other. Basically Wodarg seems to argue that WHO registered the new strain very easily….without actually knowing how dangerous the new strain was….That requires epidemiological data going back some years – whether for the general population, for those presenting with symptoms let alone for those in hospitals or in critical care. The percentage of those with the virus will start at about 8% but move up to almost 100% for those critically ill…   

I think he says Germany would normally expect 2-3,000 deaths a year from flu and this should be borne in mind in all the current focus on the death rate  

He faults the virologists for creating something sensational – which first impressed the Chinese authorities…...and then got picked up by the global media

Wodarg’s arguments – available on his blog - have caused quite a storm in Germany apparently – although I have not been able to check that discussion out so far. I am a sceptic by nature and very much enjoy books such as those of Ben Goldacre

If he is correct, of course this would massively boost the cause of the “Denialists” – which must be a thought worrying some experts….

One thing does, however, puzzle me – why Wodarg does not simply argue that we should be keeping the number of deaths in perspective. In other words be deducting from the gross number presented in the news reports the 0.1% of deaths expected from flu… 

Instead he seems to be denying there is an issue

The doctor does, however, seem one of these “outsiders” I have discussed quite recently in these posts with one foot in the medical camp and another in the political. 

People who straddle different worlds are able to resist groupthink – and it is significant that, at the end of the youtube presentation, he quotes from my favourite fairy story – “The Emperor who had no clothes”.

Update; Germany is apparently experiencing a low and flattening death rate at 0.3% (compared to both Italy's 9% and UK's 4.6%) according to this article - although Monday we were being told that some regional authorities were being slow in returning their statistics! 
But the UK seems still to be farting about as two blogs from opposite ends of the political spectrum indicate first from Boffy and today on Richard North’s site  
And this article shows how much of an outlier the UK has become

The pic is the last painting done by Egon Schiele a few days before he and his wife succumbed to the Spanish Flu in 1918. He was 28

Links I Liked

Pandemic literature is surprisingly large – we all know of Camus’ The Plague but this very comprehensive article gives us scores more

I know some of my readers think I’m a bit bonkers when I go on about what you can tell about a book’s author by the sort of bibliography the book offers in its endnotes. But the first part of this extended book review demonstrates precisely my point– identifying curiously missing titles in a bibliography which takes up 80 of almost 700 pages and whose  absence demonstrate conclusively the author’s ideological drift.

The book in question is Eurotragedy – a drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody (2018) which I had been tempted to flick. But the review – by one Otero-Iglesias - has told me enough to know that this is yet one more book I can do without. I was so delighted to find such detective work that I actually wrote to the guy to congratulate him……

It’s some years since I first encountered Adam Curtis - who inspired a post In Praise of the Documentary. I’ve just come across a 3 part series he did on the amazing influence the Rand Corporation had on the world in the 1950s and 60s. They were the number-crunchers “avant la lettre” – with such names as Robert McNamara, Thomas Schelling and MAD (“mutually-assured destruction”) Hermann Kahn    

The series is called Pandora’s Box and can be viewed here; here and here.

One of the ideas they propagated was something we knew as PPBS (“planning, programming, budgetary systems”) which says it all – the belief that everything could be rationally planned…….even the course of the Vietnam War….

McNamara, of course, went from that abject failure to head up The World Bank and inflict huge environmental damage on the world……

The recent Facing Extinction post mentioned in passing one of the key names of the “survivalist” school John Michael Greer who used to have a great blog, some of whose writings can still be found in the Counter Currents website

eg

-        https://www.countercurrents.org/greer290511A.htm;

-        https://www.countercurrents.org/greer241111.htm

Just type J Michael Greer in the search engine

Finally, some Seinfeld outtakes

Coronavirus - who to Believe?

We’re all flooded with information about Coronavirus – most of it partial, speculative or imaginative, serving to feed our fantasies. We should try to shut out everything and focus instead on what reasonably authoritative sources are telling us about the spread and treatment of the virus – at both the collective and individual levels…

I grant you that, in these times of fake news, it is not easy to identify “reasonably authoritative sources”!  

But we can surely rely on the World Health Organisation - which I found to be a highly cost-effective organisation when I helped the Head of its European Public Health division for six or so months in 1991. Certainly I find its 5 page Guidance Note a model of clear advice for governments.

But of course that’s not where we immediately head when we want advice – we go to our favourite newspaper and to people we trust – and we will generally take the advice we want to hear….That’s certainly what I did – going to “The Guardian” which, of course, would and does take anything British or US governments say with a huge pinch of salt….

One of the Guardian articles dealt with the question of handwashing – but not as well as a blogger who happens to have been an environmental health inspector and gave more detailed advice from his experience of a variety of outbreaks including swine-fever and foot-and-mouth.

It was the same blog which alerted me earlier this week to just how much of an outlier the British Government continues to be not just on Brexit but also on Coronavirus – with it choosing to delay the introduction of the drastic steps which Italy and Spain (and other governments) have already introduced. 

But public pressure has forced the British government to place restrictions on sporting events – although schools remain open. Even Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have closed their schools and universities…       

The method in the madness are some theories called “herd immunity” and “Nudge theory” which argue that it is not realistic to expect people to change their behaviour dramatically and that, if the virus is let rip in the population, immunity will be acquired.....(!!!)
A variety of people have challenged this, with a former Director of Child Health at WHO emphasising that -

“The key principle from WHO is intensive surveillance,” he told the Guardian. “You test the population like crazy, find out where the cases are, immediately quarantine them and do contact tracing and get them out of the community. This deals with family clusters. That’s the key bedrock of getting this under control.”

The Brits are supposed to be pragmatic – but here is yet another example it appears where theory is driving us, literally, to perdition. As is often the case, my friend Boffy has an important contrary view for which I am deeply grateful....This post of mine was drafted with a strong sense that I was venturing into, for me, uncharted waters....I had tried to get a response from one of my daughters, a Scottish medic, but she is in Norway on a cross-skiing venture!! And the only other medic in my family is currently awaiting a hip operation…….

But I still don't understand the failure to test those who are displaying flu-like symptoms and who could be contaminating others......Nor frontline doctors - no wonder one of them is reported as saying -

  

The point of not testing you is to spread the infection, deliberately. That is the crazy gamble of this “herd immunity” guess. And who better to spread the disease than the people dealing with acute cases. There is no other logic to not testing people. 

An Update I’m incorporating into the post are the daily youtube videos which an English doctor is uploading about the situation. His calm measured tones and the simplicity of the presentational material give an object lesson in how to convey clear and trustworthy messages…. The comparison with the politicised messages from government leaders is striking 

Dr John Campbell has apparently been running this excellent teaching resource for some time. Another example of the difference which one effective individual can make!!

Some Italians managed to gives us musical cheer from their self-isolating balconies – also here and here

And the redoubtable Tobias Jones – who has been entertaining us all from his base of the last few decades in Parma gives us a superb description of what it’s like to be in lockdown in the country

Sources

http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87548

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/uk-covid-19-strategy-questions-unanswered-coronavirus-outbreak
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/13/why-is-the-government-relying-on-nudge-theory-to-tackle-coronavirus#comment-138916369

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/epidemiologist-britain-herd-immunity-coronavirus-covid-19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTFk34nhoI

https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid19-governments-irrational-response.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/16/great-british-deference-dangerous-boris-johnson-coronavirus#comment-138962254

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/this-coronavirus-crisis-has-forced-the-retirement-of-pantomime-johnson

http://peterjnorth.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-british-government-urgently-needs.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/experts-fashion-covid-19-reality-bites-trump-johnson

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/03/15/it-was-the-virus-that-did-it/

http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87547

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/13/boris-johnson-coronavirus-hero-mayor-larry-vaughn-jaws

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/13/coronavirus-school-exams-five-day-week-pandemic#comment-138904699

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/how-many-will-die-of-coronavirus-in-the-uk-a-closer-look-at-the-numbers

Peripheral - rather than tunnel - Vision….

My faithful readers know that at the end of each year, I make a collection of the year’s posts and make them available - scroll down the right-hand column of the blog until you see the section "new material" which lists the E-books. 
I offer these collections simply because the lack of topicality means that most posts are still worth reading…..even years later. Brexit was, of course, the one big exception to that rule of mine but, even there, a lot of the posts were treating the UK more as a case-study - and trying to understand what made it distinctive.

Blogging is for me both enjoyable and productive – it focuses my mind and disciplines my writing. I totally agree with the 15 benefits enumerated by this blogger. And its search facility allows instant delivery both of what I could only vaguely remember     and relevant material I had completely forgotten about…

Indeed the blog has only one (very small) drawback….The material is back to front…..with the reader presented with my latest musings while even better material is sunk without a trace.

I’ve been particularly active this new year – 30 posts in the 10 weeks.

Some of my readers may be new – I notice, for example, a lot of new readers from Turkmenistan. Welcome!

Others – like the Italians who are now in lockdown – have been with me for some months but may have missed some posts.

So, for all of you, I offer a short book - “Peripheral Vision – the 2020 posts…. so far

Just click the Pcloud file to download

Facing Extinction?

How to Save the World is a gloriously-named blog run by Canadian “survivalist” Dave Pollard. It’s a strand of North American life it’s easy to mock with its connotations of the frontier spirit – let alone of the paranoid streak made famous by historian Richard Hofstader. But survivalism represents an important contrarian element in what otherwise is a rather smug society – boasting such writers as Dmitry Orlov and John Michael Greer.

It was Pollard’s latest post which drew my attention to a powerful extended essay called “Facing Extinction” – and made me realise that 8 months have gone by since I noted the curious absence in my blog of references to global warming. That post had recognized a twofold problem which confronts those who write about climate change –

First, how to overcome readers’ resistance to ever-worsening truths, especially when climate-change denial has turned into a political credo and a highly profitable industry.

Second, in view of the breathless pace of new discoveries, publishing can barely keep up. Refined models continually revise earlier predictions of how quickly ice will melt, how fast and high CO2 levels and seas will rise, how much methane will be belched from thawing permafrost, how fiercely storms will blow and fires will burn, how long imperilled species can hang on, and how soon fresh water will run out (even as they try to forecast flooding from excessive rainfall). There’s a real chance that an environmental book will be obsolete by its publication date.

Naomi Klein, like most of us, had tended to hide her head in the sand on this issue – with justifications that equally explain my own blog silence on the issue - that

- it was too complex; 

- others were dealing with it; 

- technical change would sort things out; or 

- a few personal changes in life-style could at least salve the conscience….

In 2009 a chance encounter changed that for her – and she started to write This Changes Everything which became a bestseller in 2014.  My post of eight months ago on the issue offered an annotated bibliography of no fewer than 17 books. But thereafter silence…….

But, hey, I’m no expert, I say in self-justification.

That is not, however, good enough…..since I have explicitly recognised in these columns that one of the few roles I can play (given the scale of my reading) is to IDENTIFY and then DISSEMINATE relevant and effective writing on the subject.

So, in that spirit, let me share with you some of the great stuff I found recently while I was reading the “Facing Extinction” essay – which I should really start with….
It may be long (almost 30 pages) but I urge readers to flick through it at the very least - since it is a very personal piece in which we actually meet Leonard Cohen, who was a close friend of the author. 
The essay starts with a summary of the signals which warn of our extinction and then moves to explore the possible reasons for our refusal to face reality – praying in aid Becker’s famous The Denial of Death (1973), terror management theory, Carl Sagan and Neil Postman.

That indeed is one of the things which make the essay so readable – that she is constantly introducing you to people…..some of whom were familiar to me such as Naomi Klein or Jerry Mander – although I had never heard of the latter’s book she referenced viz In the absence of the sacred; Jerry Mander (1991). Its first half is an assault on our fixation with technology – not unexpected from the author who wrote the superb book “Four Arguments for the elimination of television”

 Amongst the many new names were Christian Parenti author of Tropic of Chaos - climate change and the new geography of violence (2011); and Jem Bendell, the author of another very personal piece - “Deep Adaptation – a map for navigating climate tragedy” whose significance I recognise by virtue of its rejection by magazine editors

But I’ll let you know more once I’ve actually read the material…..

Suffice it to say that we should not be allowing the Coronavirus to take our eyes off an ecological crisis which threatens the human race.

Other relevant articles/podcasts

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/08/im-profoundly-sad-i-feel-guilty-scientists-reveal-personal-fears-about-the-climate-crisis

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/what-is-the-theory-of-change-in-naomi-kleins-on-fire-the-burning-case-for-a-green-new-deal.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/10/deadline-save-world-climate-test-crisis-governments

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-voyage-to-the-end-of-ice-20200116/

https://soundcloud.com/thisistheclimatecrisis
https://soundcloud.com/thisistheclimatecrisis/the-great-unraveling-of-our-world-with-prof-richard-hil

Links I liked

I’m now sold on the idea of a weekly ”Links I liked” feature for the blog. It allows me to use the folder in which I keep the hyperlinks of material which has caught my eye over the year - and select those which warrant further – if brief – study. And the links which are used can easily be found subsequently by me in the "search" facility which is the blog’s most valuable feature..... 

Like everyone else, I have a morbid fascination for the latest development on Coronavirus; and, as a retired person, have the luxury of being able to take the precautions even further than we are advised . So I not only frequently wash my hands, I gargle with salt water; swallow ears of garlic and Vitamin D (for immunity) and avoid public places and touching...

As far as the wider discussions are concerned, I can only follow Oscar Wilde’s dictum that ”I always pass on good advice....it’s the only thing to do with it!”  
- The inimitable Scottish Review carried a typically solid analysis;

- Michael Roberts looked at the economic implications; and then, prolific blogger that he is, followed up the very next day with an analysis of whether the obvious Keynesian solution will work this time around……  

- the Future of Life Institute website gave me access to a fascinating document on existential risks

- no less a figure than Branko Milanovic has some interesting thoughts

I’ve been having (unresolved) problems accessing The New Yorker site to which I took out a temporary 6 dollar subscription – but I was able to read and download a couple of articles from an interesting series they’re currently running on the Future of Democracy – one on Politics without politicians; and this one On the Right to Listen. 
I've long admired The New Yorker for the sheer quality of its writing and the 6 dollar offer appealed to my Scottish nature! I'm not sure if I'm attracted to the 99 dollar annual sub - and it will be interesting to see how easily I will be able to cancel (given the problems I've had accessing)

The LSE Review of Books regularly feeds me with commentary on interesting books and, in view of eralier comments of mine about rationing non-fiction books, I particularly appreciated this intro to a recent review of a book about populism

Sometimes, it feels like populism has become its own non-fiction genre, like true crime or travel writing. Publishers have issued several primers on the topic in recent years, from Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser’s entry in the Very Short Introduction series, to Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism? and John Judis’s The Populist Explosion. Some works try to examine the electoral aspects of transnational populism, like Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism, while others examine populism as a style or manner of campaigning, like Benjamin Moffitt’s The Global Rise of Populism. 

In such an atmosphere of intense examination, wide-ranging research and prolific explanations, each new work on populism emerges to an immediate question – does this book tell us anything we didn’t already know? Does it offer a new angle, a new perspective, a new conception on the problem? And, given how mutable the term ‘populism’ is, does the book even describe the correct subject?

I wish I had some way of sending it to the author of a 500 page book called EuroTragedy – a drama in Nine Acts which has a 25 page intro and a 75 page bib but absolutely no attempt at an explanation of why he burdens us with yet another history (I know of at least half a dozen books on the same topic). I stumbled on the book because of this article the author has just written for Spiked

The TransNational Institute (TNI) is a body I admire and has released a very useful short paper Seven Steps to Build a Democratic Economy

The TLS is doing an interesting series called Footnotes to Plato ”appraising the works and reputations of great thinkers”. Ever since University I’ve recognised the importance of Hannah Arendt -  particularly the care she took to parse the Latin and other words for the deeper meaning they contained. But I don’t pretend I understood very much. One sentence in the current TLS article is typical of her  

Self-interest, Arendt frequently argued, is a misnomer, since ”inter est” refers to the common world that lies between individuals, not inside them.

A very good example of what the writer in an earlier post had emphasised as the benefits which can come from looking at words carefully

The Communards are one of the few groups I remember from the 1980s (Queen was my favourite) and I was fascinated by this article about one of its members who has subsequently  become a clergyman (!) and public figure – to the extent of fronting several television programmes including one called The Great Painting Challenge which led me to this delightful presentation by a painter

The Guardian is currently marking the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union with  a brilliant series called This is Europe -

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/mar/05/european-critics-on-uk-culture-this-is-europe

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/07/shock-of-new-novelists-stories-europe

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/mar/07/my-europe-27-things-we-love-european-union

on Gods, Robots and the rest of us Superfluous People

The next two books in my current reading list are bestsellers – by Yuval Harari

- ”Homo Deus – a brief history of tomorrow” (2016) and ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018).

A dislike of marketing hype makes me suspicious of best-sellers such as his earlier Sapiens – a brief history of mankind (2014) but “she who must be obeyed” persuaded me to persevere - and I must confess that “Homo Deus” is very well written.. 

LRB had a very useful summary of it a few years ago

Once upon a time, we accepted three score years and ten as our divinely allotted lifespan; we reckoned there wasn’t much we could do to prevent or counter epidemic disease; we looked on dearth and famine as bad hands dealt by fate or divine judgment; we considered war to be in the nature of things; and we believed that personal happiness was a matter of fortune. Now, Harari says, these problems have all been reconfigured as managerial projects, subject to political will but not limited by the insufficiencies of our knowledge or technique. We have become the masters of our own fate – and ‘fate’ itself should be reconceived as an agenda for further research and intervention. That is what it means to refer to the world era in which we live as the Anthropocene: one biological species, Homo sapiens, has become a major agent in shaping the natural circumstances of its own existence. The gods once made sport of us; the future will ‘upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus’.

The review then usefully puts the book in context by looking at how histories have generally been written…

Providential history – invoking God’s plans for human affairs – had lost its academic authority in the 18th century, displaced in the 19th and early 20^th centuries by secular schemas: progressivist Whig interpretations of history; Auguste Comte’s law of three successive stages in human history (the ‘theological’ giving way to the ‘metaphysical’ and then to the ‘positive’ or ‘scientific’ stage); the narratives of the march of civilisation from myth to science offered by such anthropologists as E.B. Tylor, L.H. Morgan and J.G. Frazer; the determining force of class conflict in Marxism; the environmental ‘challenge and response’ theories of writers from Montesquieu and Malthus to Arnold Toynbee; the selection pressures identified by Social Darwinisms.

The title of Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) is today commonly used as shorthand to warn against histories that presume inevitable progress, but the book was, fundamentally, a freewheeling condemnation of what Butterfield called ‘general history’ – any attempt to reduce change to the workings of a definable ‘historical process’.

It is different nowadays when science and technology – innovations emerging from the minds of a visionary technical elite – write the script. No social history ‘from below’ for him: ‘History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.’

The revolutions of the last two hundred years in the treatment of pathogenic bacteria and the production of antiviral vaccines have made death from infectious disease far less common, and Harari assures us that ‘medicine in 2050 will likely be able to deal with’ new bugs ‘more efficiently’ than it does today.

If we fail to cope with new strains of flu or with multiply resistant microbes, it won’t be because the threat is insurmountable or our science inadequate but because of a failure of political will or the proper mobilisation of resources. We can look forward with confidence to continued increases in human longevity: ‘In the 20th century we have almost doubled life expectancy from 40 to 70, so in the 21st century we should at least be able to double it again to 150.’….

Climate change, environmental collapse and the renewed threat of nuclear war do get a mention – on global warming, ‘we shall have to do better’; on ecological disaster, ‘we could lessen the danger by slowing the pace of progress and growth’; nuclear weapons have compelled the superpowers ‘to find alternative and peaceful ways to resolve conflicts’ – but Harari focuses fears for the future not so much on species annihilation as on species transformation.

Here too science and technology drive the future. Homo sapiens may cease to be, not because Earth will become uninhabitable or because Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un will push the button, but because we will become new kinds of beings: our bodies, minds and relationships with the environment and with mechanical devices will be altered in fundamental ways…..

Harari here enthusiastically repeats the lessons taught by Victorian scientific materialism. Religious legend notwithstanding, we are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul; there is no essential human ‘self’; our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can, in principle, be modelled by the formal problem-solving rules we call algorithms; our bodily frames and mental capacities have evolved over time and there is nothing fixed in our ‘nature’. The only thing that can be predicted with certainty about human nature is that it will change. Harari’s prediction is that we will become more god-like as we become more machine-like and as machines’ capacities become more god-like. Humanity’s future is in the hands of technical experts – in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science…..

The current version of Homo sapiens will become surplus to economic and military requirements. War will be waged by drones and work will be done by robots: ‘Some economists predict that sooner or later, unenhanced humans will be completely useless.’ Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace algorithms embedded in flesh, which, Harari reminds us, is what biology and computer science tell us is all we really are anyway…..

We will no longer be able to sustain belief in the unique, free-acting, free-judging individual as the basis of liberal social order: ‘We – or our heirs – will probably require a brand-new package of religious beliefs and political institutions.’

The new religion will be called Dataism. The boundaries between animals, machines and social systems will dissolve: all these will come to be seen as algorithmic information-processing systems. The notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ will be superseded by the unchallenged virtue of the flow of information….

Wealth will be concentrated in the hands of the ‘tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms’. Some of us will then be as gods: members of a new species, Homo deus, ‘a new elite of upgraded superhumans’ clever enough, and rich enough, to control for a time the knowledge that controls the rest of humankind, and to command the resources needed to transform themselves through intellectual tools and biologic prostheses. ‘In the long run, we are all dead,’ Keynes said. If some of the wilder ambitions of anti-ageing prophets are realised, the dictum will need to be reformulated: ‘In the long run, most of us will be dead.’…

I had read the first 50 pages of “Homo Deus” but, by this stage, I reckoned that this and a couple of other reviews had told me all I needed to know about the book. I was eager to see what his ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018) held for me….

From the realisation that it consist of a lot of op-eds and answers to his fan-club mail, I’m not holding my breath! A contrarian article and a "digested read" tend to confirm my prejudice.... 

Other Assessments of Harari

A recent profile of Harari in The New Yorker revealed that a team of eight people supports him in his various   speaking and writing endeavours. Doesn’t that risk “groupthink”???

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/24/homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review from the David Runciman whose book my last post lavished praise on…..

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/a-big-history-of-the-future/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/15/21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-by-yuval-noah-harari-review

https://quillette.com/2018/10/26/21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-a-review/

Breakdown and Crises

No fewer than 6 very well-written books have been vying for my attention in recent days – all dealing with the sense of breakdown and crisis which is in the air.

Let me begin with the one I have managed to complete – not least because it's a very useful guide to the others

David Runciman is one of the few political scientists who writes both thoughtfully and extraordinarily well. His latest book - How Democracy Ends; (2018) – has me not only scribbling on every page but going to the internet to chase references. No less a reviewer than the political editor of The Observer has this to say of it -

Runciman’s flair for turning a pithy and pungent phrase is one of the things to admire about his writing. The cogency, subtlety and style with which he teases out the paradoxes and perils faced by democracy makes this one of the very best of the great crop of recent books on the subject. What he doesn’t offer is solutions, bluntly admitting “I do not have any”. There is penetrating diagnosis here, but no suggestion of a cure.

He considers the alternatives and rightly finds them wanting. The Chinese experiment with authoritarian capitalism may look seductive to those who think economic expansion is all that matters to a society, but can the repressive Beijing model survive the inevitable day when growth slows down?

Government by experts, “the rule of the knowers” or “the epistocracy”, was advocated by Plato and is still promoted by those who regard citizens as too stupid to be trusted with making decisions. The public wouldn’t wear that and “intellectuals” are just as prone to making terrible mistakes as the crowd.

Runciman seems attracted to the idea that technological advances could offer some form of “liberation”, but comes to the equivocal conclusion that this “includes all sorts of potential futures: some wondrous, some terrible, and most wholly unknowable”.

But it’s, appropriately, an historian whose very positive review puts the book in an historical context

The ancient Greeks may have invented democracy but they felt deeply ambivalent about it, regarding it as just one of the phases in the political cycle. It was not until the start of the 19th century that a democratic wave began to emerge again, in the Americas and briefly in southern Europe, and not until the second half of the 20th that representative democracy in the sense we have known it spread around the world.

In that relatively brief span of time, it was fought over by liberals and socialists, rejected – in its “bourgeois” form – by communists, and smothered by dictators who could rarely decide whether what they were doing was superseding or perfecting it.

After the second world war, parliamentary democracy got a new lease of life. When the cold war ended, the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to leave democracy as the only game in town. By the beginning of this century, most political scientists, especially but not only in the US, had come to believe that liberal democracy was the new normal, something to which the entire world should aspire.

The crushing of the Arab spring, and the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, could be written off as backsliding in polities whose democratic roots were shallow.

It was the 2016 US presidential elections that, in a single moment, changed an implausibly rosy (and complacent) outlook, replacing it with an equally implausible pessimism…..

Runciman uses the metaphor of a “mid-life crisis” to explore 4 different ways in which democracy might end –

- a coup;

- catastrophes such as ecological or pandemics;

- technological takeover; or

- improved systems

Historian Mazover’s review continues –

Runciman draws the contrast between the situation in Greece in 1967, when there was a very visible military coup with tanks on the streets of Athens, and 2015, the year of the referendum on whether to accept the European commission’s bailout deal, when some have argued the Greek government caved in the face of what amounted to a silent coup by its European partners. It becomes harder to say what is a real coup d’état and what is normal politics.

A second challenge is posed by the way we respond to the existential threats that surround us. In the past, Runciman argues, societies were galvanised by such threats: one need think only of the mass mobilisation that occurred around nuclear disarmament or the international response in the 1970s to rising pollution. World war itself created a sense of collective action; but the dwindling of mass conscription makes that unlikely in future. And today people seem paralysed when threatened with global warming or a nuclear accident: the prospect of catastrophe leads not to collective action but passivity.

Then there is the impact of the digital revolution, which is undermining democracy in numerous ways. We simply don’t sufficiently understand the impact of current forms of communication and information gathering. The problem with huge corporations such as Facebook is not their malevolence, nor the danger that they might rival states. They are run by people who are principally interested in profits not politics, and they are far less legitimate and more hierarchical than the political systems that govern us. But the modes of communication they encourage make a mockery of democracy for other reasons. They encourage instant gratification when democracy presupposes a capacity for frustration and patience. They encourage a pretence of authenticity, making politicians seem even more fake and contrived. The politicians who flourish are the ones who play along. Populism is the natural condition of democratic politics in the age of Twitter. The most successful democratic politicians are the ones who try to turn parties into social movements – the one thing Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Emmanuel Macron have in common. The trouble is that this can work for only so long.

The book is a wonderful read and contains much good sense. It is fond of the contrarian position, overfond perhaps. After all, behind the noise and fury of Twitter-era politics, real struggles of interests are still taking place. But what Runciman captures well is the sense of living in an age in which democracy is taken for granted and thus allowed to disintegrate from within. He goes further: it is not just that it is taken for granted, it is that the “battles are all won”. It is now the preferred political system of elderly populations muddling through, and this is hardly a recipe for restoring democracy’s lustre. If all that holds it in place is the sense that the alternatives are worse, then what happens when people no longer believe this to be the case?

The other books on which I hope to comment in future posts can all be accessed in full by clicking the link in the title -

- ”Homo Deus – a brief history of tomorrow” Y Harari (2016)

- ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” Y Harari (2018)

- The Globotics Upheaval – globalisation, robotics and the future of work; Richard Baldwin (2019)

- ”Pax Technica – how the internet of things may set us free or lock us all up”; Philip Howard (2015)

-  ”The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how to save it”; Yashka Mounk (2018)

The photo is the great vegetable market I have access to in what used to be the oil city of Ploiesti, Romania