Cassandra is Dead. Long Live Cassandra!

After the fall of Troy, Cassandra was taken as Agamemnon's "pallake" (concubine) and taken to Mycenae, where she was killed by Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife. The destiny of prophetesses is never so bright, especially when they turn out to have been right. Something similar, although fortunately much less tragic, happened to my Cassandra blog, censored on Facebook by the powers that be. So, it is time to call it quits. But Cassandra is not dead! She reincarnated in the form of the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Click on the image below to link to the new blog "The Seneca Effect" on Substack. 

On March 2, 2011, I started the blog that I titled "Cassandra's Legacy." 10 years later, the blog had accumulated 974 posts, 332 followers, and more than 5 million visualizations (5289.929). Recently, the blog had stabilized at around 2,000-3,000 views per day. It is now moving to a different site with a different title: "The Seneca Effect"

The reasons for this move are not because I wanted to. I was forced to change. Cassandra was a small blog, by all means, but I always had the sensation that it was not without an impact on the nebulous constellation of the people, high up, whom we call "the powers that be" (the PTBs).

It is a story that reminds me of the legend that George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2003 after he had learned about peak oil from something written by people belonging to ASPO (the Association for the Study of Peak Oil). Apparently, he was impressed by the concept of "peak oil," so much that he decided to invade Iraq to secure the oil reserves there. 

Reasonably, it can't be but a legend, but are we sure? After all, the people who make decisions are not smarter than us, just richer. And they can misunderstand things just like we all do. Of course, their blunders make much more noise.  

And so, it may well be that many things that we see around us have a logic. Certainly, it is past the time when a certain kind of message could be eliminated simply by ignoring it. Now, it has to be actively suppressed. That is what's happening with censorship rampant on social media. Even the Cassandra blog, even though not important in itself, attracted the wrath of the powers that be. It was censored on Facebook, and it is also kept nearly invisible in search engines. As I discussed in a previous post on Cassandra, we knew it would happen, and it did. 

Of course, this blog could survive even while boycotted by Facebook, but when you discover you are in the crosshairs of someone big and powerful, it is better to duck down and take cover. It makes little sense to insist on keeping an indefensible position. It is time for Cassandra to fold. 

But this is not a defeat. It is a badge of honor that the PTBs noticed this blog and acted against it (O.K., maybe it was just a glitch of some complicated AI program, who knows?). In any case, closing the blog means recognizing that the memetic war follows the standard rules of war. It is all about movement. And that's what Cassandra is doing. It is moving. We all do. The only things that never move are the dead, and we are still alive! And "Cassandra's Legacy" will remain online, although it won't be updated anymore.

So, I moved to a blog with a different title, called, "The Seneca Effect". It was also targeted by the powers that be and it had to move away from the blogger platform. Right now, it found refuge on Substack. We'll see how it fares there!

And now, no more shall my prophecy peer forth from behind a veil

like a new-wedded bride

But it will rush upon me clear as a fresh wind 

blowing against the sun's uprising so as to dash against its rays, 

like a wave, a woe far mightier than mine. 

No more by riddles will I instruct you. 

And bear me witness, as, running close behind, 

I scent the track of crimes done long ago. 

For from this roof never departs a choir chanting in unison, 

but singing no harmonious tune; 

for it tells of no good.

Aeschilus, Agamemnon

The Sacrifice of the Sacred King

"In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. On the northern shore of the lake, right under the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi is perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood. ..  In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier."

From "The Golden Bough" - by James G. Frazer

Post by "Mon Seul Desir"

Hello Ugo 

You once asked, what was the meaning of Trump, it crossed my mind that without anybody’s planning or intentions, Trump became an immense collective scapegoating ritual where all the sins and impurities of the tribe are placed upon the king, who is then ceremonially driven out to purify the tribe. Since the 1960s this seems to have increasingly become the function of the American Presidency superseding its previous role which it has held since the days of George Washington, that of a near omnipotent God-Emperor who incarnates American collective power. It’s certainly corresponds to the sacred geometry of Washington DC, enclosed by its pomerium, the sacred regalias on display, the Temples to the Divine Emperors, the Axis Mundi rising through the centre of the Capitol’s rotunda. I personally visited the place a decade ago and was absolutely struck by the mystical religious layout of the place. It was effectively the centre of a secular City of God, destined to extend to, and redeem the entire world. I would say that Americanism is in fact the world’s dominant religious system, erecting its theocracy over the ruins of the British World Empire just as the theocracy of Diocletian Jovius was erected over the ruins of the Roman-Hellenistic Mediterranean Empire. 

Now I must point to the Ancients warnings against hubris and the prophecies of Christian mystics that the reign of God can only come with the return of Christ. When one pushes too hard against the Cosmos, it pushes back. Alexander declared himself greater than Hercules, he was assassinated, his family exterminated and Ptolemy Soter was one of the few of his Companions who lived to found a dynasty and die in his bed. 

 I think that when the history of the USA over the past century is written several generations from now, it will describe not the March of Progress towards the future, the description will be of an ever increasing surrender to hubris culminating in overreach and collapse. 

This is the consequence of giving the powers of an advanced culture to an archaic one, they see what they can do with the new powers, not what they shouldn’t do. The social structure is overwhelmed by the new powers, the effect is that of Dr Erskine’s Supersoldier Serum, what is good becomes better, what is bad, worse. 

Homeric society started out as heroic warrior communities ruled by chiefs and freemen’s councils, their cosmology was of Primordial Chaos forged into Order by the Will of the Gods, the earthly rulers were shades of the Gods, ordering the human community as the Gods ordered the Cosmos. As their knowledge advanced, they studied the Order imposed by the Gods, the regularities they shaped, the ordered structures, from this they developed basic mechanics, observations of nature and the skills to create ordered organizations of their own, the concepts of objective law and disciplined organizations led to basic state bureaucracy and when merged with the fury of the Iron Age warrior led to the Greek Phalanx and the Roman Legion. The Homeric kings who in the past had commanded a few thousands warriors who were the freemen of his kingdom became massively powerful monarchs who had armies of tens to hundreds of thousands supported by workshops and officials who could undertake campaigns for years and where bound to absolute obedience. They became the Incredible Hulk’s of the Ancient World capable of smashing through everything in their paths, the humanistic ethic of the original Homeric world was overwhelmed by a power system stronger than it, the exercise of power became increasingly arbitrary, society turned into a regime of slavery and terror, the lacks of ancient culture became evident, the lack of a deep sense of ethics, no real work ethic, the absence of culturally integrated large scale structures, even the rulers enjoyed no security, any courtier could be a possible assassin, simply eating lunch was a terrifying adventure, their own relatives couldn’t be trusted, the guards who protected them one day could butcher them the next... 

One sees this in Seneca who discussed the ethics of committing suicide under a despotism, of Boudicca who revolted and was massacred after she and her daughters were tortured by petty officials who had the power of life and death over even provincial aristocrats, the Gospels can be read as the testimony of common people living under the arbitrary will of the powerful. Boudicca could torture and kill any commoner under her power, imperial officials could do the same to her, the officials could be ordered by the Emperor to kill themselves on a whim and the Emperor themselves had to watch everyone... The Homeric values of personal freedom and dignity had lost any meaning and increasingly it became impossible to do science under the constraints of Hesiod’s metaphysics, the whole concept of a civilization ordered under its own collective will was dying. 

Ultimately this became unsustainable, the reaction came, the Christians stated power comes only from God, the Cosmos is not ordered by the Emperor or any God he represents, it was created by God as an intrinsically ordered structure, there no law of Man, only the law of God which Man can only discover and interpret, all this apparatus of temporal power is just the product of ambition and greed, there is no divine purpose here, a counterfeit of the true City of God. The theology of the Glory of Rome died, abandoned by a people that could not bear its weight anymore and just wanted to breathe freely. Deprived of the faith that sustained it, Rome collapsed under its weight its ruins to become spolia to its heirs who had turned to the City of God. 

Now Medieval Man stepped into the world with the certainty that it was God’s and that he had to live by His rules. Everything moved by His eternal laws, that could be understood and applied to both the human and natural realms. Rulers were as completely under God’s law as the beggar, a new institution was born, Medieval Kingship and Feudalism organized with the support of God’s Church, a massive body of law and customs was created to modulate, contain and control power, lord and vassal relationships, knighthood, the Estates, the Guilds, the Communes, ultimately reaching its fullest development in the great Medieval Courts like Versailles, war was codified into the sport of Kings instead of the genocidal total wars of the late Classical world. The much ridiculed Versailles functioned as a containment structure for power, the King could reign without ruling, he didn’t need to constantly torture and kill people to show he was in charge, he simply distributed perks and honours, he had great fringe benefits compared to a Classical ruler, greater personal comforts, minimal risks of assassination, eating his meals in peace, no worries about his guards, outside the palace a massive array of autonomous institutions ran the whole society without royal intervention, the king’s subjects lived in security and prosperity, the much maligned costs of Versailles were insignificant compared to the costs of despotism. The so-called Enlightenment pseudo philosophers could never have survived in Ancient Rome, they would have been lion food, in a 20th century tyranny it would have been concentration camps and bullets in the back of the head, they were in fact free because the containment structures of the Versailles system protected them, they thought France could be made into a better country if it was ruled by a Caesar, they got Napoleon who used up the wealth and manpower of France the way Alexander used up Macedon, people don’t realize what they have until they lose it... 

Now armed with the concept of God’s law, the development of philosophy took new directions first under the scholastics and then under the natural philosophers taking the development of science well beyond that of ancient world, a new Christian work ethic fostered the Guilds of free craftsman who took technology beyond that the classical era with the clock, navigation skills, new architecture and art and eventually an Italian named Volta but together the first electric battery, opening a new unsuspected realm to science, knowledge that would overturn the Medieval metaphysics and lead to the Quantum Realm and the world of Relativity. 

 By the 19th century the world saw the emergence of a new form of organization, Technocracy, to manage the new railways and telegraph system, the first components that would grow into the Technosphere and a schizophrenic type of Man, Medieval Man in family and public life and Technospheric Man at the railway station, telegraph office and engineering and science lab. 

The concept of regularity and intrinsic order in Homeric society lead to technologies and forms of organization that overwhelmed its ethics and social structure, the Roman Empire was a supersized Homeric chiefdom with the bureaucracy and military of King Philippe the Second but without the customs and institutions that restrained and stabilized his regime, before the power system Homeric society was completely helpless, only the replacement of its values by Medieval ones, accompanied by the collapse of the Roman system allowed the people to become free. 

Today Technospheric Man has carried out a similar revolution, Technocracy, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, it’s technology, it’s conception of Man as taught by Freud and Jung, its achievements that have obliterated the old sense of limits, the Atomic bombs that can level mountains in minutes, the contraceptives that have removed immemorial fundamentals of the relations between the sexes, the medical advances, the communication systems and so much more. Today’s Western system is simply a collection of decayed Medieval courts surrounded by the modern equivalent of the Fuggers and Medecis in the corporate lobbyists attempting to use structures taken from Black Panther’s Wakanda and Doom’s Latveria to create some sort of City of God on Earth, they’re as completely overwhelmed as the Classical rulers were, they wanted absolute power, they have it and everything that goes with it, they’re afraid of each other and of the people they rule, they’re quickly finding that absolute power burns the hands that attempt to wield it. But do they even truly understand what they’re attempting to wield? Does their Medieval mentalities even contains the concepts and cognitive patterns that would allow them to understand? 

That the problems the world is facing are problems in managing the Technosphere, they’re not political and the accepted techniques of financial and legal manipulation don’t work, traditional assumptions are obsolete, essentially what is required is Apollo Mission Control style technocratic management. Do these skills even exist in the current elites? Or they will simply persist in enforcing superstitious rituals of purity and redemption? 

Today I point out the Internet, consider what the printing press did to the power of the Medieval Church, the first printed books came in 1455, 62 years later in 1517 Martin Luther posted his 95 theses and the rest is history. The Internet is the printing press on gamma rays, it’s Big, Mean and Green, consider that the properties of any substance is dependent on the nature of its bonding patterns whether its chemical or social bonds, the current system is dependent on vertical bonds converging on small groups of people, the Internet allows the creation of very large numbers of horizontal bonds across this structure, eventually sufficient to overwhelm the vertical structure and cause it to collapse. I don’t think their pathetic attempts at censorship will work anymore than burning printed tracts and heretics worked for the Church. Can the current governments even survive into the age of the Internet? 

Now this was a long one Ugo, when I start writing I’m never sure how it’s going to come out!

Requiem for Universities: A Historical Cycle is Over

 

After some 10 centuries of existence, universities have arrived to the end of their historical cycle. It is the way things are: it is the great cycle of life. The universities will be gone, something else will come that will help people who want to learn and people who love to teach to find each other. And the cycle of life will continue. Even Simba the Lion knew that. 

Here, Sinéad Murphy has kindly given me the permission to reproduce her recent post "Requiem for Universities" on "Cassandra's Legacy." Her conclusions are similar to mine, as expressed in the post I wrote with the title of "The Fall of the Citadels of Science."

 

Requiem For Universities

Published 21 January 2021 on "Lockdown Sceptics"

by Sinéad Murphy

Universities have been dying for some time. As their prospectuses have grown glossier, their gateway buildings more spectacular and their accommodation for students more stunningly luxurious, the Humanities subjects have been gradually hollowed out.

Academics’ intellectual work has been streamlined by the auditing procedures of the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ and by growing pressure to bid for outside funding, which is distributed to projects that address a narrow range of approved themes – Sustainability, Ageing, Energy, Inequality…

Student achievement has been dumbed down by the inculcation of a thoughtless relativism – Everybody’s different; That’s just my interpretation – and by the annual inflation of grades.

The curriculum has begun to be tamed by continual revision – never broad enough, never representative enough – and by the drive for ‘equality and diversity’.And teaching has been marginalized by the heavy requirements that it represent itself on ever proliferating platforms and review itself in endless feedback loops.

Universities, in short, have been gradually transforming into what they proudly trumpet as a Safe Space, a space that has been cleared at greatest expense to Humanities subjects, a space in which the slightest risk – that a thought might lead nowhere, that a student might be uninterested, that an idea might offend or that a teacher might really persuade – has been mitigated by so many layers of bureaucratic procedure that most of everyone’s time is spent in wading through them.

Safe Space universities have been divesting themselves of real educational content, their plush marketing ploys concealing the decline – of their Humanities subjects at least – into little more than holding patterns for directionless youths.

But up until March of last year, there was still some space and time to act as if. To attempt, in the midst of the decline, to teach, to learn, to think, as if it were really possible to do so.

Because you could still meet your students, and use the small chance you had to teach them to introduce ideas which they might just be taken by and which you, in the process, might deepen your understanding of. And because students could still meet each other, form friendships, gather together, lift themselves out of the lives they grew up with, if only as a temporary reprieve.

It was not much, that is true. And acting as if can too easily collapse into the corruption of an all-out cynicism – quoting Heidegger in the original German to students who are visibly disengaged.

But acting as if can also, sometimes, work; the pretence can actually catch on. Two centuries and a half ago, Kant urged us to act as if human beings are rational, convinced that that would eventually make us so; and it did seem to work… for a while, at least.

But even the pretence is over now; even acting as if, no longer an option. Safe Space universities have come to their culmination. No space is safer than an empty space. And universities are empty at last. The shell has cracked and fallen away. The university is no more.

---

A couple of weeks ago, following a year’s leave, I stood in a tiny office on the tenth floor of a university tower.

From here, all teaching for the coming semester was to be done.

Lectures were to be given into the void, recorded for access in a space and at a time of students’ choosing. Hour-long tirades, with only your Panopto reflection for your guide, without even commonplace reference points to scaffold the event – the time of day, the weather outside, the furnishings, quirks in the technology: no experience shared, nothing to bind you to your crowd.

Seminars were to be run from here too. These, at least, were to be ‘live’; when it was morning for you, it would be morning for everyone else too. But – open and earnest discussion with students locked up in their family home, sitting on the bed they tossed in as a child? I am told that they turn off their video, sometimes their audio too, attending the class in name only, suspended in a box on the screen.

A brand new desktop computer blighted the tiny office on the tenth floor. Its oversized screen: the black hole into which teaching and learning were set to disappear.

For how long? Long enough, I am sure, for the sheer implausibility of the prospect to lose its edge. Long enough for what is now deemed necessary – the remote university – to begin, at last, to seem possible.

But it is not possible. Philosophy, at least, cannot be taught by giving a speech to yourself in a room on the tenth floor. Philosophy cannot be taught by orchestrating a grid of nametags. Philosophy cannot be taught on a screen.

The classic model of Western Philosophy is Socrates, who wandered about asking questions of those who would listen, inviting his fellow citizens to discussion of the good life. The gadfly method, it is called – meant to get under your skin. Exactly the opposite of Covid-compliant.

Philosophy does have other models – the grand treatise, or, most suitable now, the solitary meditation. But for teaching Philosophy, dialogue has never been bettered. And dialogue is live, up close, and between bodies.

In any dialogue, most of what is communicated is non-verbal, even if the dialogue is formal, even if it is aimed at instruction. You pause for effect, your muscles stilled. You raise your eyebrows in scepticism. You circle your hands in approximation. You deepen your tone for emphasis. You move from side to side to keep your thoughts in train. You repeat yourself at the sight of a furrowed brow. You re-energise at slumped shoulders. You play for laughs. You stop for hands in the air.

And philosophical dialogue goes even deeper, making your stomach churn with existential abandon, your heart beat at the reason of humanity, your head throb at the nature of the sublime.

Add to this the surface body-language of dialogue generally – the still muscles, the raised eyebrows, the circling hands and the rest ­– and the room in which Philosophy is taught should be a theatre of bodied intensity, a far cry from the tenth floor with its grotesque blank screen.

In the tiny office on the tenth floor, you cannot begin your lecture with a question, or an accusation, or a taunt, or anything else that might get your students involved. There is no one there and you cannot be a gadfly alone. You must speak instead as if from the podium, body hemmed in, a talking head. Except that, from the podium, you might still at least feel your audience there, and what you say might still have a chance of sinking in.

In the tiny office on the tenth floor, you cannot act as if. There is no one to play to, nothing to get the show on the road.

And what must it be like, to sit on your bed in a room in your parents’ house and switch on a tirade-from-nowhere? With your social life (or what passes for it) pulsing through competing portals, does the window to your Philosophy class let in any light at all?

Real learning is done by our bodies – by heart, it used to be said, though the phrase is out of favour. An argument should be grasped, rhetoric should be savoured, and metaphysical truths should make our hairs stand on end. Anything else is just words.

And just words are not only lifeless and cold; they suck the life from you, they leave you cold. Remote teaching and learning actually do you harm.

The university now continually directs its students to its twenty-four-hour support service, in implicit acknowledgement of the harmful effects of its remote provision, which does not merely fall short of the mark but imposes the kind of out-of-body experience that most students find disheartening and many cannot cope with at all.

We are told that it is necessary, the Safe Space university of just words – to save lives. (Our union has just invited us all to an event called “Saving Lives At Work”.) But that something is deemed necessary does not suffice to make it possible – of all lessons, that is the one we ought most to learn from this past year.

We are told also that it is temporary. But we will only ensure that it is temporary if we do not act as if it is possible. We should refuse to carry out their exceptional arrangements, or their exceptional arrangements have a chance of becoming the rule.

The Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, as early as May of last year, wrote what he titled a “Requiem For Students”, in which he described very well the impossibly corrupted character of the Covid university, whose technological barbarism he called out for what it is, and whose students he exhorted to refuse to enroll.

As educators, we are supposed to lead forth. We should go first, and refuse to teach on screens.

It is time to stop acting as if.

_________________________________________________________________________

 

Sinéad Murphy teaches philosophy at Newcastle University. She is the author of "Zombie University" 

 

Eco-fascism and Overpopulation

 

A post by Jacopo Simonetta

 

"Eco-fascist" is the usual insult directed at anyone who dares to mention overpopulation. This is funny to me because, as far as I know, fascists are usually concerned with denatality, race purity and similar morbid fantasies, but not with overpopulation who is just about the number of persons and not about skin color and so on.

Here, I will not go back over the purely demographic aspects of the issue to which several posts have already been devoted (on "Effetto Cassandra" and on "Apocalottimismo", both in Italian).  Instead, I would like to talk about this singular cultural taboo, characteristic (though not exclusive) of industrial civilization.

To begin with.

To understand what we are talking about, let us consider that today there are almost 8 billion of us with a growth rate of about 80 million per year, it means 220,000 per day, over 9000 per hour, 75 per second.  This means an estimated human mass of about 400 million tons.  The world's average human population density is 55 people per square kilometer (excluding Antarctica), which means a square of not much over one hundred steps per side per head.  In Italy we are about 200 per square kilometer, which means half a hectare per person, but if we consider only the agricultural surface the square becomes only 40 steps per side (about 2000 square meters).

However, the number of people is only one of the factors involved because we use livestock, fields, industrial structures, buildings and much more to live.  All in all, the 'anthroposphere' (i.e. us with all the trappings) weighs about 40 trillion tons, which is something like 4,000 tons of concrete, metal, plastic, plants, livestock and so on for each of us. On average and very roughly.

But number is not the only element. Since 1800 the population has increased 8 times, but total consumption 140 times, and if it has started to fall in some countries, like ours, it is still growing globally.

The third determining factor, which is related to the other two, is technology, the effects of which are complex, but which, on the whole, makes the most of the remaining resources, but cannot create new ones.  Ultimately therefore, technology increases rather than to reduces both consumption and the degradation of the planet.  A fact already empirically observed by many authors (starting with Jevons as early as 1865) and scientifically demonstrated by Glansdorff and Prigogine in 1971.

The result is that the biomes, i.e. the great ecological systems into which the Biosphere was divided and which maintained climatic and environmental conditions on the planet compatible with life (including our own), no longer exist and today we speak about Anthromes.

Of the 21 anthromes identified, only 3 are considered "wildlands", i.e. deserts, tundra, and the remains of primary tropical forests, for a total of just over 20% of the earth's surface (excluding Antarctica).  

But even these territories are subject to severe and very serious degradation phenomena such as wildfires, melting permafrost, droughts and so on. 

All the rest, about 80% of the dry land, is occupied by totally artificial ecosystems, such as towns and countryside, or heavily modified ones, such as almost all the surviving forests and grasslands.   In the sea it is even worse.

This means that properly 'natural' ecosystems are practically vanished and that what scattered remains of wildlife survives in the interstices of our 'global anthill'.   In fact, it is miraculous that so much life still exists on Earth.

The 'Demographic Transition”

The father of the 'Demographic Transition' was Adolphe Landry, a French politician of the radical left, who was repeatedly member of parliament and minister.   Decidedly in favor of natalist policies and a staunch detractor of Malthus's work, Landry actually espoused his assumptions, but came to the conclusion that there was no need to reduce the birth rate because a large and dynamic population was a nation's main asset.    Instead, economic prosperity should be increased and spread so as to cause a gradual stabilization of the population, but at much higher levels than at the outset.   In other words, compared to Malthus, he reversed cause with effect.

Originating in the early 1900s and then reworked by numerous authors, in a nutshell, this theory maintains that there exists a 'traditional' condition in which misery, disease and war lead to a high mortality rate, compensated by a high birth rate, so that the population remains substantially stable.  Progress and industrialization increase prosperity and reduce mortality, so that the population increases while, at a later stage, the birth rate decreases until a substantial balance is restored, but at a much higher population levels.  Factors such as the availability of resources, the resilience of ecosystems, pollution, etc. have no substantial relevance.

On the basis of the scientific and historical knowledge available until the 1970s, the theory seemed to explain well what had happened in Europe and the USA over the last two centuries, so that it became a reference point for all demographic models.

So far, nothing strange.  The point is, however, that over the last 50 years the best knowledge, especially historical and anthropological, has amply demonstrated that there has never been a something such a 'traditional' state similar to that assumed by the theory.  On the contrary, populations have adopted very different reproductive strategies in different places and at different times.  In very many cases, even in Christian Europe, more or less effective forms of demographic control were practiced, either by limiting the birth rate (with various combinations of infertile ways of having sex, condoms, prolonged breastfeeding, abstinence, abortion, infanticide and abandonment), or by increasing the mortality of the elderly (abandonment and killing).

Those who did not do so earned a place in the history books because they triggered invasions, or died out, crushed by their own numbers.   If anything, it was the very special combination of historical and environmental factors that allowed Capitalism to take hold that created the cultural, social and economic conditions that led to two centuries of unprecedented birth and population growth in Europe and the USA. 

Looking at the rest of the world, it has been amply documented that, almost always, it was European colonization that first led to a demographic decline, sometimes considerable, and then to the frenzied increase that in some cases still lasts today.

In short, the 'demographic transition' began as a political proposal, grew as a scientific hypothesis and finally became a 'pious legend' in the etymological sense of the term.

So what?

So why is this model still used today, not only in school books, but also in the work of the UN and other political bodies, till to a large part of academia?   To put it very brutally: because it suits everyone.

It suits the capitalists because it is an excellent viaticum for claiming that capitalism has done a great deal of good and that economic growth must be pushed to the maximum, "conditio sine qua non" for the definitive solution to human problems.

It suits governments because it exempts them from taking difficult and often unpopular measures.

It suits the "right wing", which is obsessed with denatality and the possible extinction of the hypothetical "white race".  But also the nationalists of every country and ethnic group, because it denies that the high birth rate they hold dear is a harbinger of disaster.

It appeals to the clergy of the dominant religions, all of them more or less misogynistic and more or less obsessed with sexuality, regarded as intrinsically sinful.  The reproductive goal is thus indicated, sometimes openly and sometimes subtly, as the justification for sexual intercourse.  The fact that the consequent burden and risk falls entirely, or almost entirely, on women does not seem to be a problem, if anything the opposite.

It appeals alzo to supporters of left-wing ideologies, such as the aforementioned Landry, because it supports the idea that progress is a natural and irreversible phenomenon, as well as exempting the proletariat from any responsibility for any mishaps.

Western racists like it because it makes them feel they are in the vanguard of progress, and other ethnic racists like it because it promises them revenge.  And it appeals  to militarist and fascists because they like large mass of “cannon fodder”, but like it also to pacifists who don’t want accept that crisis, violence and war are unavoidable parts of human behavior. 

It also appeals to the variegated environmentalist world because it allows them to overlook the most difficult and deadly of our actual predicaments, thinking that it will sort itself out while we deal with renewable energy and recycling.

The advocates of mass immigration like it because it allows them to think that there may be no limits to the number of people living on a given territory, but so do those who oppose it because it allows them to say that the cause of overpopulation is the 10% of people that are coming, rather than the 90% that are already here.

Many feminists even like it, despite the fact that it is women who bear the heavy burden that the lack of anti-natalist policies of governments places on their shoulders.  The Third-Worlders like it too, despite the fact that, among the consequences of colonization, high population growth is the one that, more than any other, has by now condemned many populations to centuries of misery, social unrest, wars, etc.
Yes, because overpopulation means environmental degradation and pollution, unemployment, misery and exploitation, competition and conflict.  It is never the only factor at play, of course, but it just so happens that it has always been one of the main drivers of the most serious crises in human history.  But it is the first time that it has appeared, albeit in different forms, all over the planet at the same time.

Then “Demographic transition theory” suits those who have power and affluence, but at the same time pleases to people sincerely involved with the poor and the weak.  And is very useful for those who want to rise to political power or, more modestly, to please their readers.   Real poor, women and weak pay for all of them, but nobody care, not even themselves because it is very difficult for facts to make people change their minds when it goes against their feelings, identity believes and personal interests.
However, overpopulation it is not an invention of some eccentric eco-fascist  or of a sect of pathological misanthropes, but an objective reality and to have ignored it is, by far, the most formidable obstacle now on the road to a hypothetical transition towards a "sustainable" society in the proper sense, and not just propaganda.

How will it end?  This is one of the few safe forecasts: we don't know how or when, but humanity will come back within the carrying capacity of the planet.  It certainly will, no questions. Just it is a pity that every day that passes, every mouth and every kWh more contribute to reducing this carrying capacity. So the longer we wait, the worse it will be because in a world where there is no space available for new colonization, migration is not either a solution because it only shifts the acme of the crisis from one place to another.

Where the birth rate and consumption do not fall fast enough, mortality will rise and that is all.

2020: The Collapse of the Christian Church

 

Christmas of 1914: soldiers from opposite sides met in a friendly manner across the front line. For a short time, the Christian message of love managed to overcome the message of hate that came from national governments. It was just a brief moment for a good deed that surely didn't go unpunished. But it was highlighting a deep contradiction that was prefiguring the final collapse of the church, but that would take another century or so. It is coming now. 

 

Sometimes, life is like watching the long needle of an old mechanical watch. No matter how carefully you look at it, it doesn't seem to move -- time is frozen. Then, you look at something else, and when your glance is back to the watch, the needle has moved. Time has passed, and that moment will never come back. 

Sometimes, you have the same sensation with history. For a long time, everything seems to be frozen and nothing changes then, suddenly, everything has changed and the world is a different one. It has happened in this 2020 that, suddenly, changed everything, and the world of one year ago will never come back.

I already noted how some institutions have been shattered at their foundations by the COVID crisis of 2020. One was the university, destroyed by the sudden discovery that it is an expensive machine that produces nothing useful for the state. Another illustrious victim is starting to crumble: it is the Church. Primarily, the Catholic Church in its claims of universality, but all Christian Churches have been affected by a crisis that left them stunned, suddenly realizing that they had nothing to say and nothing to do about a disaster that seemed to affect everybody. 

The collapse of the university and of the Church is all the more remarkable considering how old they are. The University has about one thousand years of history in Europe, more if we consider the Islamic world. The Christian Church is even older than that. Yet, nothing is eternal in human history. Everything moves, changes, crumbles, disappears, is reborn, and disappears again. It is true for empires, and also for institutions that seem to be stronger even than empires: churches, temples, religions, and ideologies. Even the Gods die and are reborn, it is one of their characteristics. 

And so, look at the Christian Church in Europe. It was born as the reaction to a state, the Roman one, that was crumbling, starting around the 3rd century AD. The Roman state was based on military might, but that was too expensive for the new times. Gradually, the Church replaced the Roman state, mirroring the older institutions in new forms, more compatible with an age when the available resources didn't allow the kind of military power that had been the rule in earlier times. The Church delegated force to local warlords while governing on the basis of prestige and on a shared set of beliefs and rituals. As all human constructions, the system was far from being perfect, but it generated an age of relative peace and the end of the worst flaws of the older Roman world: the slavery of millions, the oppression of women, the emphasis on military power, the inequality of the few versus the many, the cruelty of the arena games. 

The reign of the Christian Church lasted for several centuries, nearly a millennium. Then, the giant wheel of history made one of its turns. The printing press appeared in the 15th century, the brainchild of a man named Gutenberg who probably never imagined what he was creating: nation-states, new creatures that had never existed before. Their organization was not anymore based on money, as in the Roman state. And not even on a shared religion and a sacred language (Latin), as it was the case for the Christian Church. Nation-states were based on their national language: an invention of the printing press that created bonds among the people who could understand each other. It was a re-edition of the old Greek concept of the barbarophonoi, those who speak bar-bar, the barbarians. But the new barbarians were not anymore the inhabitants of remote lands, bad-smelling and dressed in animal skins. They were your neighbors who happened to live just on the other side of an imaginary line called "national border." Those same neighbors whom the Church had been telling you to love as yourself, but whom now the state instructed you to hate and despise.

And so there started a conflict that's lasting to this day. As for many features of history, things move slowly, but surely. First, there came the great convulsions of the age we call "Renaissance." It truly started with a bang, the extermination of hundreds of thousands of European women, accused of being witches. Not only the nation-states succeeded in enlisting the Church top help in the task, but with the so-called "enlightenment," we saw one of the greatest successes of propaganda in history. The Church was accused of a mass extermination that had instead been performed by the state. Even people's perception was modified: in their memory, the age of witch-hunting was pushed back to the Middle Ages, turned by propaganda into a "dark age" of superstition and violence. But the Church was not a woman-killing machine. It was the state who wanted more cannon fodder for its armies and so it needed to enslave women and turn them into child-bearing machines. But the force of propaganda is enormous, it is one of the wheels that push history forward. 

The witch-hunting age, mostly the 16th and 17th centuries, was one of the factors that shattered the unity of the Christian Church. Then, there came the reformation, and then the age of colonization when, again, the states managed another master stroke of propaganda. They were able to convince everyone that it had been the Church pushing for enslaving and exterminating non-European people.

Then, there came the 20th century and the age of the world wars where, again, the Church found no role and nothing to say on an event that was shattering its very foundations of a universal institution. I wrote an entire book on how people's faith was affected by this tremendous contradiction: Christians were fighting each other all over Europe and, on both sides of the front line, Christian priests were blessing young men to go killing other young men on the other side (you see, in the figure, an Italian military chaplain blessing Italian soldiers before going to battle). 

The Church barely survived this tremendous blow, but more were to come. Once, a Japanese friend of mine told me something like "I always found it weird how every week Europeans get together in churches to eat God." A flash of how strange some things appear when seen from another viewpoint. But this Japanese man was right: eating God is one of the elements of the Church rituals. A Church is like a state in many ways: it has rituals just like the state does. The state has military parades, the church has religious processions. The state enlists young men as soldiers, the Church enlists them as choirboys. The state vaccinates children, the Church baptizes them. The state taxes people, the Church asks them for alms. And much more. The Church may ask you to eat the body of the son of God who sacrificed himself for his love for humankind, just like the state may ask you to send your son to die on some remote mountains to show his love for that section of humankind that you call the "nation."

You may see all this as a symmetric battle, but the two sides are not equivalent in power. As I said, the Church had started as an alternative to the crumbling Roman state, but it was to be expected that the wheel would turn around. The State is now much more powerful than the Church and the sermons of the priest had no way to compete with the state news services. It was all going to happen and it happened. 

It is curious that such an old and resilient institution was demolished by such a humble creature as a virus labeled SARS-Covid2. But that was how it happened. Faced with the virus threat, the Church found nothing to say, nothing to object, nothing to propose. It meekly submitted to the superior power of the state. 

So, in Italy, this Christmas the state ruled that the traditional midnight mass was to be held at 8 pm. Of course, it is hard to believe that a virus could infect people at midnight but not at 8 pm. One could also say that, while nobody can say at what time Jesus Christ was born (probably not even on the day we call "Christmas"), it was the job of the Church and not of the state to decide on this point. But the Church was totally silent and it bowed down to the state. It had already bowed down on many other things. The images of Italian police stopping the celebration of a mass during the lockdown of March was seen by everybody and condemned by almost nobody. On visiting a church, you would find someone at the entrance pointing a laser gun at your forehead. You saw the benches with places crossed with red tape. Instead of holy water fountains, you would find bottles with disinfecting solutions. People hiding their faces in front of God just like Adam had been hiding from God in the Garden of Eden.  And, finally, the final insult was the virtual mass, with the priest turned into a 2D image confined in a little square on a screen, virtually blessing virtual believers. 

It was a sacrilege, it was the desecration of a place that, so far, had managed to resist, at least in part, the state's power. And it was, basically, the end of an age. Anything you believe in must be eventually be kept alive by practice. Practice is based on rituals, the Christian church has been existed for so many centuries because among other things, as my Japanese friend said, people would collect every week to eat God together. It may have been silly from a Far-Eastern viewpoint, but it was a ritual. And all rituals are collective -- they have them also in the Far East, even though they don't eat their Gods in the form of wafers. 

Without the rituals, or with the rituals compressed on a screen, the structure ceases to exist. It is just like the university: it is no more a university when teachers and students are reduced to 2-dimensional creatures inhabiting a small square of a screen. Without the ritual of classroom teaching, the university cannot exist. Without the ritual of the meetings of people whom we call the "congregation" and that in earlier times was called the "ecclesia," the Church is mute, the faith is gone, the faithful are disbanded, the holy places are desecrated.  And that's what's happening and everything that happens happens because it had to happen.

And now? History will keep going in circles as it has always done. The new state-sponsored rituals to fight the pandemic are triumphant, but there will be new cycles. The Gutenberg machine is being replaced by the much more powerful Google machine and we don't know what effects that will have on the entities that dominate the world, nowadays. Will the triumphant nation-states will see their doom, soon? We cannot say. We can only say that the great wheel of history is turning. It will keep turning.

 

 

Note added after publication

An interesting article appeared on the "Tablet Magazine" on how the members of the Jewish Satmar community of New York decided to defy the COVID regulations and held a funeral celebration for one of their members.

 

This story matches very well my considerations in this post on how most religions worldwide are unable to provide an independent answer to the COVID issue and are being squeezed out of the debate, and perhaps out of existence.

 

In the article, the author bends over backwards to justify the position of the Satmar Jews. Right now, the idea that there is something more important than fighting the Covid epidemic looks incomprehensible, monstrous, even straight evil, to the great majority in the West. 

 

Yet, I believe that the Satmar understand very well that if they are to survive as a religious community they have to uphold the belief that God is more important than a virus. Actually that God is more important than anything else. And they are acting consistently. Something that the Christian Church, and the Catholic Church in particular, is not doing at al

 

 

The pandemic as the end of consumerism. Everything that's happening is happening because it had to happen

 These Medieval ladies look like fashion models. With their splendid dresses in silk brocade, they are displaying their wealth in an age, the 14th century, in which Europe was enjoying a period of economic growth and prosperity. They couldn't have imagined that, one century later, Europe would plunge into the terrible age of witch hunts that would put women back to their place of child-making tools. It is the way history works, it never plans, it always reacts, sometimes ruthlessly. And all that happens had a reason to happen (above, miniature by Giovanni da Como, ca.1380)

 

Can you tell me of at least one case in history where a society perceived a serious, existential threat looming in the future and took action on it on the basis of data and rational arguments? Yes, sometimes they can fight relatively minor problems and, in the case of our modern society, we do have some examples of success, say, the attempt to control the ozone hole problem. But how about truly major threats, those that can wipe out an entire civilization? With the best of goodwill, I can't think of a society (including ours) that perceived the problem in advance and acted on it decisively and effectively. Normally, problems are denied or misunderstood. At best, societies react to existential threats using a primeval stimulus-reaction that may be aggressive or defensive, but almost never rational.

Curiously, our society, that we call sometimes "The West," was the first in history to have a chance to do something rational to avoid the destiny awaiting it much before the threat was clearly visible. It was in 1972 when the newly developed digital computers were coupled with a powerful analytical tool, "system dynamics." The result was the study called "The Limits to Growth" that foresaw how the gradual depletion of natural resources coupled with increasing pollution (that today we call "climate change") would cause the whole Western economic system to collapse at some moment during the first half of the 21st century. The study also suggested rational solutions to avoid collapse: reduce consumption, stop population growth, manage pollution, and the like.

As we all know, the attempt was a remarkable failure: society reacted as if the threat were the people who were trying to sound the alarm. The "Limits to Growth" study was ridiculed, demonized, and ignored. Now, it is much too late to apply the remedies that had been proposed almost 50 years ago. 

It could have been expected. Society lacks the tool that allows people (sometimes) to act rationally: a central processing unit like the one that's part of our brains. My friend Nate Hagens uses the term "superorganism" to describe how society works. I use the term "holobiont" for the same concept. I think it is more correct: an organism needs a central nervous system, but a holobiont may be perfectly functional without one. The kind of holobiont we call "human society" at best has just embryonic structures acting as control systems. Sometimes, control takes the form of a "great leader" who usually does more harm than good. 

So, in most cases, the societal holobiont reacts to perturbations by a mechanism of local interactions among its components. It may well be an effective method: by a series of trials and errors, the holobiont is normally able to absorb an external perturbation and re-establish a certain balance. But it can't plan for the long term, nor for perturbations so strong to require a rearrangement of the whole structure of the system.  

What we are seeing in the West nowadays is the reaction of the societal holobiont to a threat that, in itself, was not large. The COVID-19 pandemic could have been ignored, instead it triggered and amplified a series of effects that were the result of much stronger perturbations. Resource depletion and climate change are making what we call the "consumer society" (aka "consumerism") obsolete. Simply stated, there is little left to consume, and consuming it is bringing not just a climate disaster, but a possible collapse of the whole ecosystem. That just can't go on.

Dimly, the great human holobiont is perceiving these threats and it is reacting as it can: using the tools at hand. Of course, it is very difficult to convince/force the majority of the people to stop consuming resources. It can't be obtained by rationally explaining to them the concept of resource depletion (it has been tried, it just didn't work). But it can be done by using propaganda to scare people and that seems to be working (*).

So, what's happening is perfectly rational, at least in a certain way. The consumer society is being disassembled and destroyed: people are forced to consume less, to travel less, to use less resources. International mass tourism has disappeared forever, commerce has taken a tremendous hit, and other institutions that we took for granted seem to be standing in line waiting for their turn to jump off the Seneca Cliff: schools, universities, public health services, and more. 

Of course, not everybody will consume less. The resources not used by the poor anymore are being funneled into the military system which, in turn, is expected to make sure that the elites can keep consuming as much as before, and possibly much more. That's still possible because the members of the elite are few and their impact on the resource base is much lower. 

There is nothing strange, here: a "consumer society," wasteful as it is, is rare in history and it doesn't usually last for long. In most societies of the past, commoners had no such thing as a "right to consume." Their role was of producers or of soldiers and there was no surplus available to them: just the bare essentials they needed in order to survive. And we may well be reverting to that situation. 

It all happened so fast that we have all the reasons to be surprised, even stunned and bewildered. But nothing really new is happening, it is just an adaptation to a new situation. It takes a form that hides the perception of what the real problem is: we think it is an epidemic, whereas it is mainly resource depletion. It was the same thing when, during the period called "Renaissance," the newly formed European states realized they needed manpower for their industries and their armies. Their reaction was indirect. It didn't consist in explaining to women in rational terms the reason why the state needed more children from them. It consisted in unleashing a hate campaign against women, accused to be witches and burned at the stake in considerable numbers. It was, in a certain way, effective. Women were pushed back to their traditional role of child-making machines. And population exploded.

Last week, I wrote a post on how witch-hunts are related to the current pandemic. Later, Timothy Sha-Ching Wong sent me some excerpts from a book by Peter Sloterdijk. He says the same thing I had said:

The misogynistic excesses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, with their numerous live burnings of women, should not be understood as a regression of modern ‘society’ into medieval ‘barbarism’, nor as an epidemic sexual neurosis, as psychoanalytical commentaries usually claim. They were rather the hallmark of early modernity itself, which followed its main impulse in accordance with the new demographic imperative: to ensure an unlimited availability of subject material.

And you see how history doesn't exactly repeat itself, but it surely rhymes a lot. 

(*) Disclaimer: I am not saying here that the pandemic was invented by the powers that be, I am not saying that the virus was created in a biological weapon laboratory, I am not saying that Bill Gates is trying to kill us all with a fake vaccine, and I am not supporting any of the many conspiracy theories that we can see around the web. It should be obvious that the SARS-Cov-2 virus exists and that it is a real threat. But given the situation, such a disclaimer is necessary.

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From Peter Sloterdijk’s “You Must Change Your Life” (pages 340-341). Excerpts provided by Timothy Sha-Ching Wong

 

“The measure of all measures in this field is the state- and church-sanctioned maximization of ‘human production’ – even Adam Smith, in his main work of 1776, speaks calmly of the ‘production of men’, which is governed by the ‘demand for men’. It was set in motion by the systematic destruction of the informal balance between the manifest patriarchy and the latent matriarchy, and thus by the annulment of the historic compromise between the sexes that, under the mantle of the church’s life-protection ethics, had become established in Europe since late antiquity and remained in force until the late Middle Ages. Hence the unprecedented offensive to enslave women to the imperative of reproduction and the systematic destruction of knowledge about birth control, which went down in history under the misleading name of ‘witch hunts’. 

 

As Gunnar Heinsohn showed decades ago in co-operation with Otto Steiger and Rolf Knieper, the misogynistic excesses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, with their numerous live burnings of women, should not be understood as a regression of modern ‘society’ into medieval ‘barbarism’, nor as an epidemic sexual neurosis, as psychoanalytical commentaries usually claim. They were rather the hallmark of early modernity itself, which followed its main impulse in accordance with the new demographic imperative: to ensure an unlimited availability of subject material.

 

With its terror against midwife-witches, the early nation-state handed its business card to ‘society’ as the latter modernized itself. The question of whether one can genuinely ascribe a ‘highly developed expertise’ to the ‘wise women’ of that time in matters of contraception will perhaps remain open; supposedly, however, over a hundred procedures for the prevention of unwanted offspring were known before the repression began – procedures whose effectiveness may, in some cases, be open to doubt. But apart from this, the consequences of ‘witch oppression’ were soon plain to see – and represent statistically. During a long period of rigid demographic policies, the modern state in alliance with the Christian clergy refused to tolerate the conventional controlling function of wives over the ‘source of humans’ at all, let alone respect it. The guided sensibility ofearly modernity declared infanticide the exemplary crime against humanity and a direct attack on the national interest; here one finds a rare case of total congruence between family and state morality.

 

It is anything but coincidental, then, that the greatest modern state theorist after Machiavelli, the jurist Jean Bodin (1530-96), a former Carmelite monk, distinguished himself as one of the most rabid witch hunters of all time. The writer of the epochal Six livres de la république (1576) was at once the author of the most brutal witch-hunting tracts of all time, published in Paris in 1580 under the title De la démonomanie des sorciers.

 

What he wanted to achieve in his dual function as the founder of the modern theory of sovereignty and master thinker of the inquisition against reproductively able but self-willed women is plain to see. The crux of the matter had already been revealed a century earlier by the authors of Malleus Maleficarum, alias The Hammer of the Witches: ‘No one does more harm to the Catholic faith than midwives.’

 

From now on, Catholic faith implied an unconditional subjugation of married persons to the consequences of marital intercourse, regardless of whether they were in a position to ensure a sufficient inheritance, and thus a productive future, for their offspring – without consideration, even, for the question of whether one can expect workers with no property of their own to bring up children at all. The policy of ‘capital expansion through population increase’ calmly passed over objections of this kind. In truth, the population explosion of the Modern Age was triggered in part by the extensive incorporation of the propertyless workers, the subsequently much-discussed and usually wrongly declared ‘proletariat’, into the family and procreative praxis of late aristocratic-bourgeois ‘society’.

 

In matters of procreation, the attitude of most Reformation theologians was even more Catholic than that of the papacy. Martin Luther, who produced half a dozen children with Katharina von Bora, taught – intoxicated by the élan of his own faith – that Christian men should rest assured that if they increased the numbers of the faithful, God would not withhold the material means to nurture them as long as they were sufficiently diligent. Heinsohn and his colleagues incisively sum up the maxim behind such thinking: ‘Generalization of individual irresponsibility in the form of responsibility to God.’

One should note here that the concept of responsibility is significant neither in theology nor in classical moral philosophy; it only moved to the centre of ethical reflection in the course of the twentieth century, when the explosively grown problem of actions and their unintended consequences gained a large part of the moral attention.

 

It is undeniable, however, that to this day, Christian sexual ethics – in its official Catholic form – shows a resolute blindness to consequences that would like to be mistaken for trust in God. Because of their commitment to the protection of unborn and born life, an honourable thing in itself, Modern Age churches of all confessions acted as de facto accessories to the most cynical biopolitical operation of all time.”

 

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This post was slightly modified after receiving suggestions from Louis Nuyens III, AD Mitchell, and an anonymous commenter.

In Praise of a Dying Empire: America, the Beautiful

When I was a young postdoc, I was staying with my wife in a small house in the suburbs of New York. We couldn't afford much in terms of furniture but, behind our bed, we had hung a big American flag. America gave me a job, a career, a language, a way of seeing the world, and much more. America the promise, America the land of the free, America the beautiful, America the wonderful. But is also true that, "For every nation is a specified term. When their time has come, then they will not remain behind an hour, nor will they precede it." Sūrat l-aʿrāf (The Heights), Verse (7:34).

United States: An Obituary

by Richard Heinberg

The United States of America was problematic from the start. It was founded on genocide and slavery, and, while frequently congratulating itself on the rights and freedoms it granted its citizens, never managed to confront the demons in its past. The question would arise repeatedly, generation after generation: rights and freedoms for whom?
...
In short, we are living through the fall of a great power. With it will go a unique way of organizing the world. The symbolism of president Trump cowering in an underground bunker beneath the White House in late May couldn’t be plainer.

It is reasonable to ask whether the United States will continue to exist as a unified nation for much longer. The federal government has become so incompetent as to be increasingly irrelevant to the solution of many pressing problems—and a new face in the White House may not change the situation decisively. Out of necessity, states are exploring strategies of regionalism, as governors in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and the Northeast collaborate to respond to the pandemic
 

Read the complete post on Richard Heinberg's museletter.

Taboos and illusions in the environmental question: The viewpoint of a physician

Physicians have a view of the world that makes them especially able to understand the concept I called the "Seneca Cliff." Here, Lukas Fierz, Swiss physician, provides some basic principles that apply to collapses of complex systems, it doesn't matter if we deal with human bodies or entire civilizations. The basic behavior is the same: collapses start slow and often unnoticed, and then strike hard by a combination of mutually reinforcing factors. The final result may be that someone dies, or that an entire civilization goes down to the dustbin of history, or even that an entire ecosystem is destroyed. It happened, and it will happen again.

 

 

A painting by Holbein, presently at the Kunstmuseum in Basel. It was one of the sources of inspiration for this post by Lukas Fierz

 

Guest post by Lukas Fierz

 

Taboos and illusions in the environmental question

I am not a climatologist, but as a physician, you only master certain areas and otherwise you listen to various other specialists. We are also used to deal with uncertainties: e.g. If you are considering an operation, you estimate the chance of success based on the patient's age, nutritional and physical condition, morale, heart health and previous illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes etc. Every risk factor reduces the chances of success. Inability to calculate anything precisely does not release you from making an estimate.

Similarly, the uncertainties in the climate discussion do not release one from making an assessment. There we are unfortunately hindered by some taboos and illusions, but let’s try:

I grew up in Basel where in the museum hangs a picture of the dead Christ, painted by Holbein 500 years ago.

This made a deep impression on me and I had it above my desk for years: A mercilessly realistic view of our God, his passion and the end of us all. We have to measure our actions against this end. Until then we must do, what we do as well as possible and not lose time. And there is already the first taboo, death. Death being repressed in the prevailing consciousness, much that is related to it cannot be seen.

Later I studied medicine and learned some principles:

1.     Illnesses often begin in secret: First symptoms are often not the beginning, but the last act. A drunkard or a smoker take decades to ruin their liver or lungs; this goes unnoticed because the organism compensates. Once jaundice or shortness of breath occurs, the further course is not in decades, but rather years. Similarly, if our bees die, this is not a beginning but the end, because they have been poisoned already for a long time.

2.     Risk factors for disease can more than add up: E.g. depression occurs in one percent of the population every month. A serious stress factor (death of family member, loss of workplace, illness, etc.) adds two percent more. Two stress factors add three percent. With three stress factors, one could assume depression in nine percent, but it is 24 percent: Suddenly the risks multiply. Similar mechanisms may apply in other situations.

3.     Patients and insurances want forecasts. Diseases often remain true to themselves: A patient with multiple sclerosis who is only slightly disabled after ten years, will probably not be in a wheelchair after another decade.

4.     This is only true in the absence of self-reinforcing mechanisms: The most dreaded example is the narrowing of the aortic valve, the valve of the main artery. The heart adapts, uses more energy, generates more strength and pushes enough blood through the valve; patients can even practice athletics. But when the heart can no longer get enough blood for its own energy requirements, heart failure and death occur within seconds, We physicians are terrified of such self-reinforcing and uncontrollable mechanisms.

5.     In our profession there are authorities: If a physician repeatedly has made diagnoses missed by everyone else, he will get a fabulous reputation. You believe him with advantage, even if you don't quite understand his reasoning.

6.     Cheating is useless: If the patient dies you are dealt with by the pathologist or the coroner. They are merciless.

Let's apply this wisdom to the environmental situation:

In 1972 the Club of Rome fed whatever one knew into a computer and he predicted that if we don't stop economic growth and limit the population at four billion, ecosystems will destabilize in the middle of our century. They even mentioned the greenhouse effect hoping for a timely solution. The limiting factor was pollution, not scarcity of resources or of land. Whoever pretends that the Club of Rome is discredited because it incorrectly predicted a resource shortage tells a lie or has not read the report. Later, the Club of Rome corrected, that perhaps even a population of 8 billion could be sustainable, but they explicitly stated that the consequences of human aggressiveness could not be modelled.

In 1988 James Hansen first demonstrated that the greenhouse effect was happening while predicting the future warming with great accuracy to this day. Hansen is an authority. If he questions official forecasts and measures, this must raise concern.

James Hansen is taken away by police in shackles

The Paris Treaties of 2015 wanted to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 or 2 degrees. And this brings us to the illusions: 

First illusion: The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) takes 1850-1900 as the starting point which gives a temperature rise of more than one degree. But industrialization started 100 years earlier, and starting from the lower pre-industrial values we have already reached the 1.5 degrees.

Second illusion: From the start it was clear that the Paris 1.5-degree target would be missed. James Hansen speaks of a fake deal. If it were kept, the temperature would rise above 3 degrees, over land twice as much. Moreover, the Paris Agreement assumes large-scale sequestration of CO2 from the air, which Hansen describes as illusory.

Third illusion: Hardly anyone keeping the Paris Agreements we are underway to global warming of 4-5 degrees by 2100, again meaning about the double over land.

This is official mainstream, i.e. the predictions of the IPCC.

The fourth illusion assumes that this is hysterical alarmism. Even the greenhouse effect is denied although he has been proven more than 150 years ago.

But in fact, all statements made so far are not alarmistic, but rather too tame,

Fifth illusion: Many think that the temperature increase is linear. But it becomes faster, as one sees with the naked eye:

 

Even the IPCC suffers from this illusion: Before 2015 they talked of limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees by 2100. In 2018, the IPCC moved this to 2040. American climatologists immediately objected: The IPCC had forgotten that greenhouse gases continue to rise which takes the 1.5 degrees to 2030, a shift of 70 years in  some years.

The sixth illusion holds that the greenhouse mechanism is the whole story. This would be bad enough, but the many positive feedback mechanisms are even worse  because according to Hansen they were always match-deciding in the previous history of the earth and they can cause tipping points.

The IPCC neglects these feedbacks, because precise predictions are impossible. However for a physician, they are more frightening than anything else: All go in the wrong direction, each can become uncontrollable, and their effects can not only add, but possibly multiply. And then, developments can be shortened to years.

The seventh illusion imagines that the CO2 concentration only depends on how much we blow into the air. However almost a third of the CO2 emissions have been absorbed by the ocean and a warmer ocean no longer absorbs, but releases CO2.

Similarly with trees and vegetation: So far, they also absorb almost a third of the CO2 emitted. Most CO2 compensation programs work with actual or alleged reforestation. But we are already losing forest through logging and fires. And with a temperature increase of four degrees by the year 2100, the trees will die off over large areas, like the coral reefs, and thus trees will change from being a CO2 buffer to CO2-production. The German Climate Pope Schellnhuber says: "We kill our best friends". CO2 emissions will increase, even with zero emissions by humanity! Not counted by the IPCC either.

In the eighth illusion the ice melts slowly, but things accelerate in the Arctic. Wadham, the Pope of Ice, believes that without snow and ice, the reflectivity of the earth decreases and warming becomes 50 percent greater. That may bring us to six degrees by 2100, twice as much over land. Not counted by the IPCC.

The ninth illusion was that the permafrost would not thaw until the end of the century. But it is already thawing, and methane is bubbling there and elsewhere and rising rapidly in the atmosphere. This short-lived but very powerful greenhouse gas can acutely accelerate warming with self-burning becoming a matter of years. Not counted by the IPCC.

The tenth illusion: At a higher temperature, the air stores more water vapor, also a greenhouse gas. Several models predict a decrease in cloud cover, which could further accelerate warming. Not counted by the IPCC.

The eleventh illusion is that everything goes slowly. But geologically, the pace of the current changes is unprecedented, ten times faster than the fastest changes in the last 65 million years.

Twelfth illusion: It’s not only the climate that endangers us, but also the extinction of species, at an extraordinary pace in terms of earth history. It’s still rather climate-independent, mainly caused by hunting and by the loss and poisoning of habitats due to expanding human population and activity. E.O. Wilson thinks that half of the earth should be reserved for wildlife if one wanted to stop this extinction.

Let’s summarize, like a surgeon before an operation:

The first symptoms of disease are omnipresent: droughts, fires, glacier retreat, loss of species, not a beginning, rather the beginning of the end. The biosphere can no longer compensate.

The effects of causal factors - CO2, methane, water vapor, forest fires, cloud loss, ocean acidification, pesticides, habitat loss - don’t necessarily just add up, they sometimes multiply with unpredictable results.

But a physician panics above all about the multiple self-reinforcing feedbacks: ice melt, methane release, forest fires, CO2 release from soil and ocean. There is little handle against such self-reinforcing mechanisms, even if they occur individually, and even much less if they work together.

The 1,5- or 2-degrees goal is out of question. The Paris Agreement is fake, the governments reactions inadequate or contra productive. Only with luck will we reach four or five degrees at the end of the century, but this is improbable, because the self-reinforcing feedbacks have already all kicked in. Some experts expect six or seven degrees, meaning twice as much over land, which human civilization cannot survive.

For Johan Rockström from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, with four degrees of global warming the earth can only feed four billion people. This means widespread wars for a living space that will become increasingly scarce.  

Because death is tabooed in our consciousness we are unable to see him, even if he stares directly into our eyes. I don't blame idiots like Trump. But rather the climatologists, who do not tell the whole truth. And the Greens, who are raving about the 1.5 degrees, a lie to the voters.

Last but not least, we come to the second taboo: Nobody wants to see the fact that we are too many. We are reproductive machines and reproduction is programmed into us as the most sacred goal. Therefore many - e.g. our benevolent Greens – prefer to believe into the illusion that reduction of consumption is enough.

Admittedly, only the wealthy produce the pollution: The ten percent of the wealthiest probably fifty percent, the 50 percent of the wealthier almost all the rest. But a large part of resource consumption and pollution is forced because we have to live in megastructures, which need energy-guzzling transports.

Some want to solve the problem by eliminating the privileges of the top 10 percent or even - according to old revolutionary customs - by eliminating the top 10 percent of the privileged, e.g.by guillotine. But even half the burden is too much. Therefore one would have to guillotine the wealthier half. This would work if the remaining half would not want to multiply and become wealthy, with industry, meat consumption, cars, airplanes. This they are already trying to do all over the world, e.g. in India, for the noble savage is just another illusion.

Many whose birth is not avoided by birth control will be killed by manslaughter, starvation and disease. That’s the reality we should face. Two generations of one-child family would be more humane.

 

Lukas Fierz (79), from a Swiss family of musicians and scientists became a physician and neurologist. Shocked by the report of the Club of Rome together with others he founded the Swiss Green Party for which he sat in the national parliament without any effect. He fought the resulting depression as an amateur cellist with music once played on the Titanic (live recordings on playlist “Music for Titanic”). Moved by the climate youth, he began to participate in the discussion again with his Blog  “Letting down humanity”.