The Ghost Shirt Rituals: Preparing for the End of the World

 

Ishi, (c. 1861 –  1916), the last member of the Native American Yahi people, photographed as he was in 1911 when he came out of the woods in California. How did the Yahi react when they saw that the Whites were going to exterminate them? Perhaps not differently from the way we are reacting to the prospect of the collapse of our civilization: going crazy. The overreaction to the current Covid pandemic is just the first stage of the wave of madness that's engulfing humankind.

 

Imagine you are a Native American living before the arrival of the Whites. Maybe you are a Lakota, hunter of the central plains. Or maybe a Yahi, living in the thick forests of California. Or a member of any of the many Native American nations that existed back then. 

As a Native American, you have your family, your friends, your day-to-day routine of things and tasks. And you are busy with that, except for one thing: you know that there is a big problem. A VERY big problem. There is an entire nation, out there, bent on exterminating you and your people: the Whites. 

At first, you try to ignore the problem: those Whites are far away. Or maybe you'll deny that they are coming, or that they are so many as they are said to be. But, at some moment, the truth cannot be anymore ignored or denied. The Whites are there. They are coming for you, for your family, your children, your friends, your people. And you know that there is really no way to stop them. So, what do you do? 

You go crazy. And so does everyone. Suddenly, you are catapulted into a "new normal," a world where the routines of everyday life have disappeared. You are now into a sort of "heroic space" where you are supposed to go through mystic rituals that involve dancing yourself to a trance, wearing "ghost shirts" that are supposed to protect you from the Whites' bullets. Even more extreme dances, called "sun dances," involve hanging oneself to a pole with a rope with hooks at the end that pierce one's breast. That is supposed to make warriors braver in the coming fight

A contemporary representation of the "sun dance" involving people hanging themselves to poles with metal hooks stuck inside their breasts and other forms of self-inflicted tortures. This image was probably made to emphasize the "barbaric" aspect of these rituals, but it is true that the Native American society, under heavy stress, had developed these bloody self-punishing dances.

We don't know how exactly the Native Americans of those times saw these bloody rituals. Did they really believe that ghost shirts made them invulnerable? Did they really think that their problem was that their warriors were not brave enough and that to become braver they needed to hang themselves to poles by the breasts? We can't know, and we can't know if someone understood that it was way too late, that the Native American peoples should have acted much earlier to face the Whites as a united nation, instead of scattered tribes. But so moves the great wheel of history, mercilessly crushing everything and everyone when their time has come. After the massacre of Wounded Knee (1890), nobody could anymore think that ghost shirts were a solution.   

The Native Americans were not the only culture that went crazy when facing their own demise: Mon Seul Desir (see the text below) calls this phenomenon the "Indian Reservation Syndrome" and he lists other cases of societies gone into a frenzy of mysticism and rituals when they faced problems that they could not solve. One was the Nongqawuse cattle-killing cult in South Africa, another was the Boxer Rebellion in China (the latter also believed that their spiritual powers made them invulnerable to bullets). 

And then, of course, there is our civilization. We are facing a disaster even worse than anything the Native Americans ever faced: the collapse of the whole planetary ecosystem. And, like them, we are going crazy. 

You can see the ongoing craziness everywhere in its many forms, but the overreaction to the Covid-19 pandemic is perhaps the most pervasive, the most destructive, and the most misunderstood form of craziness that has hit us. The parallels with the rituals of the Native Americans are evident, with the role of the ghost shirts taken by the face masks as a visible garment signaling the beliefs of the wearer, and by vaccines as magic tools making people invulnerable to the enemy. 

The most evident parallel is how the current rituals include various forms of penance. Westerners are not hanging themselves by the breasts, but they undergo segregation, limitations to movement, loss of personal freedom, economic ruin, and more. The idea is to turn the whole story into an obsessive-compulsive ritual carried out with the same stoicism and indifference that Native Americans showed in their bloody rituals. 

It is part of the way the human mind works: when things go bad, the first reaction is to look for someone to blame. But, sometimes, when things go not just bad but truly rotten, then the culprit may turn out to be yourself. So, with the Covid pandemic, that's the reason for the general acceptance of rules and laws that, in other times, would have been unthinkable. It explains the demonization and the mistreatment of those who are the victims and not the perpetrators of what's happening: single human beings, treated as the one cause of the pandemic.

It was probably unavoidable. The Covid is not the real problem, we all know that. The problem is another: it lurks in the background, but it is there. No ghost shirt (and no vaccine) will send away the ecosystem collapse that we are facing. 

 

Note: What I wrote is not meant to disparage the Native Americans, nor their beliefs. The Sun Dance was a deeply felt ritual developed by people who were trying to cope with an impossible challenge and I am sure that they genuinely believed in what they were doing. I personally met some Lakota men who were still doing the dance and, years ago, even an Italian man who had converted to the rituals and was doing the dance, including the metal hooks stuck in his breast. These people deserve our respect for their courage and their dedication. About the current Covid rituals, I am sure that many people in the West genuinely believe that they are doing something good and useful by punishing themselves with masks, distancing, home segregation, and all the rest. But there are differences. One is that the Sun Dance was meant to unite the people, whereas the Covid rituals are explicitly meant to separate them. Also, the Sun Dance rituals originated from the people, while the Covid rituals, no matter how sincere are the believers, have been inflicted on the people, not developed by the people. 

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The message from "Mon Seul Desir" that inspired this post

Hello Ugo,  

Thanks for the data, it confirms what I’ve was perceiving through feel and anecdotes, you’ve put hard numbers on it. It’s something I’ve been observing building up for a number of years, increasing drug use, alcoholism, and mental illness, I call it the Indian Reservation Syndrome, it’s the product of cultural collapse. I think you have heard of how primitive people can leave themselves to die when they lose their traditional way of life, it was hubris to say that this is confined to allegedly primitive tribes. Any culture can collapse when it comes into contact with a more advanced one. 

A couple of years ago I started having the feeling that collapse would start with massive mass psychoses, like the Nongqawuse cattle-killing cult, the Ghost dance, the Boxers, and the Cargo cults, I’ve been amazed by the Covid cult, it has turned into a collective obsessive-compulsive disorder, disconnected from any reality and resembling witchcraft and demonic possession hysteria, it has the common factor of having been embraced by the elites and much of the educated, with Mr. Fauci and Ferguson in the role of Herr Kramer and Sprenger. And it’s not isolated but part of a massive collective frenzy extending into every aspect of society. The processes that led to this, I’ll take up in a later message... 

Now for the Galla Placidia text, I see you as pointing to a non-linear transition, a complete change of state of the system, where the Homeric world gave way to the Medieval World, the City of God replacing the Glory of Rome. For this to occur implies that Medieval potentialities already existed in Late Rome, the collapse of the Empire allowed actualization of them. We are all chimeras, modernity is a chimera with a younger culture as a ghost in the shell of an older one. The Late Bronze Age had the Homeric world growing within itself, the Roman Empire had the Medieval world within and the modern West which is simply Medievalism in its late form has the Technospheric world growing within itself. 

How do you recognize the new culture? When its mythology emerges in a recognizable form, in pagan Rome the Gospels were regarded as crude tales for the credulous and uneducated, in the Bronze Age, Homer was probably seen as folklore for simple soldiers and sailors. I needed to find something similar, in December 2017 Me and my wife purchased movie tickets and sat down to watch Thor Ragnarok and I found it, Technospheric Mythology right in front of my eyes, it’s regarded as just entertainment for children, I thought about the utterly alien feel compared to movies from the 1950s like the 1959 Ben Hur movie. That earlier movie represents the Medieval Myth, you could show it to an audience from centuries ago and it would be fully comprehensible, but show Thor to even a 1959 audience and it would be surreal and insane, the motivations and morality of the characters would be mostly incomprehensible. 

I’ve seen the way many people react to it, it’s just special effects, it’s action, they can’t see why these movies are so popular. The Christian Myths are the Neoplatonic- Aristotlean weltanschauung turned into a narrative, the Marvel, DC, Inception and so on are the Relativistic-Quantum-Jungian weltanschauung similarity turned into narrative.

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This is a moving and beautiful song by the Italian singer Fabrizio de Andre (1940, 1999) inspired by the massacre of Sand Creek of 1864 where some 700 Cheyenne and Arapaho people were killed, most of them women and children.

 

 

 

They took our hearts under a dark blanket
Si son presi il nostro cuore sotto una coperta scura

Under a small dead moon we slept without fear
Sotto una luna morta piccola dormivamo senza paura

He was a twenty year old general
Fu un generale di vent'anni

Blue eyes and the same jacket
Occhi turchini e giacca uguale

He was a twenty year old general
Fu un generale di vent'anni

Son of a storm
Figlio d'un temporale

 

There is a silver dollar at the bottom of Sand Creek.
C'è un dollaro d'argento sul fondo del Sand Creek.

Our warriors too far on the bison trail
I nostri guerrieri troppo lontani sulla pista del bisonte

And that distant music got louder and louder
E quella musica distante diventò sempre più forte

I closed my eyes three times
Chiusi gli occhi per tre volte

I found myself still there
Mi ritrovai ancora lì

I asked my grandfather. is it just a dream?
Chiesi a mio nonno è solo un sogno?

My grandfather said yes
Mio nonno disse sì

 

Sometimes the fish sing at the bottom of Sand Creek
A volte i pesci cantano sul fondo del Sand Creek

I dreamed so hard that my nose bleed
Sognai talmente forte che mi uscì il sangue dal naso

Lightning in one ear in the other heaven
Il lampo in un orecchio nell'altro il paradiso

The smallest tears
Le lacrime più piccole

The biggest tears
Le lacrime più grosse

When the snow tree
Quando l'albero della neve

Bloomed with red stars
Fiorì di stelle rosse

 

Now the children sleep in the Sand Creek bed
Ora i bambini dormono nel letto del Sand Creek

When the sun raised its head between the shoulders of the night
Quando il sole alzò la testa tra le spalle della notte

It was just dogs and smoke and upturned tents
C'erano solo cani e fumo e tende capovolte

I shot an arrow in the sky
Tirai una freccia in cielo

To make it breathe
Per farlo respirare

I shot an arrow in the wind
Tirai una freccia al vento

To make it bleed
Per farlo sanguinare

 

Look for the third arrow at the bottom of Sand Creek
La terza freccia cercala sul fondo del Sand Creek

They took our hearts under a dark blanket
Si son presi il nostro cuore sotto una coperta scura

.......

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.

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

 

The Great Reset: The Western Path to Dekulakization

 

One of the Soviet propaganda posters promoting the collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s. On the lower right, you can see a small man opposing the line of the marching peasants, He is recognizable as a "Kulak," one of the local independent farmers who were dispossessed and partly exterminated to leave space for collectivized farms, considered more efficient. There exist several similarities between the fall of the Kulaki and the current "Great Reset" that sees the destruction of a number of economic activities, such as retail commerce, seen as inefficient in comparison to modern electronic commerce.

 

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union carried out the "dekulakization" (раскулачивание) of Ukraine. It was the term given to the removal of the relatively wealthy, independent farmers ("kulaki"), to be replaced by collective farms. Their properties were confiscated, many of them were relocated to remote regions, and some were exterminated. We don't know the exact numbers, but surely we are in the range of a few million people. The transition to collectivized farms may have been one of the causes of the great Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, known as the "Holodomor," 

The reasons for the dekulakization are several. In part, they were related to the belief that large-scale, centrally planned enterprises were the most efficient way to organize production. Then, the Kulaki were seen as a potential enemy for the Soviet Government, while the region they occupied was a strategic asset in terms of food production in an age when famines were an effective war weapon. 

But these considerations are not enough to explain why the Kulaki were so ruthlessly destroyed in just a few years. It was, rather, just a simple power game: the Soviet Government aimed at controlling all the means of production of the state. It couldn't tolerate that an important section of the economy, food production in Ukraine, was independently managed. And so it intervened with all the might it could muster.

The most interesting part of this story is how the removal/extermination was an early example of a successful propaganda-based demonization campaign. The Kulaki were consistently portrayed as inefficient and unreliable "enemies of the people." Once it was established that an independent farmer was an enemy of the people, then any attempt to defend the Kulaki would automatically turn defenders into enemies of the people. So, the Kulaki were completely overwhelmed, unable to organize any kind of collective resistance. The best they could do was some degree of passive resistance, for instance by hiding food rather than delivering it to the Soviet authorities. Of course, propaganda exploited that to reinforce the message that they were, indeed, enemies of the people. This is the way propaganda works.

At this point, I guess you understand the point I am making: the similarity of the current situation with the dekulakization of nearly a century ago. Also this time, an entire sector of the economy (actually more than one) is being crushed to leave space for different economic entities, believed to be more efficient with providing the same services: mainly the "new economy" of the Silicon Valley companies. This shift is sometimes called "The Great Reset." An appropriate name that could also be applied to the dekulakization. 

The first victim of the Great Reset has been retail commerce. Mom and pop shops everywhere are the modern Kulaki, replaced by the onward marching militias of virtual commerce under the Amazon banner. But also franchises and shopping malls have been badly hit. It is impressive how nobody in the field dared to oppose the destruction of the source of their livelihood -- they were overwhelmed by propaganda, just like the Kulaki. 

Other victims are waiting for the axe: Universities and schools are going to be defunded, obsolete against the onrush of e-learning. Public transport has become nearly useless with the triumph of virtual work and the fear of boarding a crowded bus: it will be replaced by the smart cars and using AI software. Mass tourism and mass air travel are already relics of the past, resources that can be saved and used for other purposes. And the pervasive control of everyone is advancing: now just as at the time of the Soviet Union, those who control the message control everything. In comparison with Soviet times, the modern propaganda effort is similar. Most propaganda is based on demonizing someone and, today, those opposing the Great Reset are labeled as "deniers" (the equivalent of the "enemies of the people" of Soviet times). 

All that doesn't mean that the Great Reset was planned in advance, nor that the virus was manufactured on purpose. It simply means that the various actors in the economic arena saw how they could gain an advantage by acting in a certain way, and they did. These large organizations do not really plan in advance, they have no "brain," but -- like amoebas -- they move in the direction of the food they need. And they act on the principle that says, "never let a good crisis go wasted."

Of course, the Silicon Valley Companies of our times are not the same thing as the Soviet Government of the 1930s. But there are similarities. Those companies that dominate the management of information on the Web operate very much Soviet-style: they are large, pyramidal organizations, often dominated by a charismatic leader (Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, etc.). In terms of size and planning style, they are not different from the People's Commissariat for Agriculture (Народный комиссариат земледелия) (Narkomzem), established in 1917, the entity that carried out the dekulakization. And they reason mainly in terms of power balance: they don't like and they don't tolerate competition. 

The difference is that the Narkomzem was part of the state, whereas the Silicon Valley companies are not. They do control large swats of the American government but, on the whole, they are best seen as feudal lords. You can call them "Web Barons."

The current situation looks not unlike when King John of England signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215, forced to do so by England's Barons. Right now, the US government seems to be overwhelmed by the Barons of the Web, not unlike King John of England was. At least, when you hear that Twitter can cancel the account of the President of the United States, then you understand who is the boss. 

And here we stand: we are seeing a classic situation in history: a central government being challenged by feudal lords. It is typical of when a state starts its downward path toward collapse, it is what's happening with the Western Empire. So, what's going to happen, now? Can history serve as a guide for us?

History, we know, always rhymes, but never repeats itself. In the 1930s, the Kulaki were destroyed by superior powers and that was the end of the story. Today, the situation is much more fluid. 

For one thing, there is not a single, monolithic entity involved. We have several Barons who temporarily found a common goal, but which are potentially in conflict with each other. Then, the US government is not so weak yet. It still controls (and is controlled by) the military, and that's the crucial element that may change many things. 

It is not clear what the military think of the current situation. Probably they don't have special objections about the elimination of retail commerce and other obsolete economic activities. But they also understand who is paying them: they get their money not from the Web Barons, but from the Government. And they may decide to do something to avoid going the same way as mom and pop shops. A few tanks in front of the Capitol Building would send a much clearer message to the Web Barons than that conveyed by a half-naked, horned shaman. 

If the government is backed by a credible military force, then it would be possible to reduce the power of the monopolies of the Web: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and the others could be nationalized and/or broken down into less powerful entities. On the other hand, nothing prevents the Web Barons from building up their own military forces. Fluid situation, indeed. 

The only sure thing is that the decline of the West is ongoing. There is little that can be done about that.

After publishing this post, I discovered that the same concept had been developed by another Cassandra, on the "The Cassandra Times" blog. That post came before mine, and it has therefore the honor of being the first having noted that the modern small business owners are the equivalent of the Kulaks of Soviet times.

Back to the Classroom: The Best Teachers are the Students Themselves

During my whole professional life, I always enjoyed teaching. It was part of my life, part of what I am, part of the way I relate with the world. I made mistakes, at times made a fool of myself, sometimes I was ashamed of how poor a teacher I was. But I always did my best. And I think my students, some of them at least, appreciated my effort. And most of them enjoyed being students, just as I did when I was their age. Still today, some of my best friends are people I met when I was in my first year of college.

 

I don't know how it was possible, but a few months of folly have been enough to turn universities into jails, the students as prisoners, and teachers as prison guards. And teaching was transformed into an odious chore. A senseless ritual performed in front of a computer screen, the students reduced to small 2-D squares, as real as the characters of a videogame. 

 

On the media, everywhere the students were insulted, humiliated, insulted, told over and over that they are little more than walking bags full of viruses, plague-spreaders, irresponsible, vicious, self-centered individuals unable to restrain their instincts and harming their elders because of that.

 

This is truly a disaster. Going to school is one of the few remaining chances that the young have to socialize and become functional adults. Chuck Pezeshki said it very well in his latest post on his blog

 

"If we’re to start understanding why the enforced collapse of socialization matters to all students, we’re going to have to come to terms with what we actually do in schools. The answer is not “we smart adults tell students a bunch of stuff, they soak it all in, and they’re far better off for it.” I’ve been teaching (and winning awards) my whole career for teaching, which is really only a modest part of a relatively modest career. The reality is that students learn mostly from each other. And the lessons they learn, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, are mostly about how to relate and listen to each other. We sprinkle the lessons of the venue on top of all of this, of course. But the biggest hunk of everything they learn involves themselves, and their interactions."

 

Here is an excerpt of Chuck's post, but do read all of it. It is an optimistic and inspiring post. Despite the disaster, we must go on and keep teaching and learning.

 

From "The Empathy Guru"

A New Year's Prayer for our Children

Jan 1, 2021

.....

Over and over, we’ve attempted to pin this pandemic on those we disagree with politically. I’ve written about this here. It’s just nuts, and these things have to stop. Or we’re going to end up in a civil war. And that will kill far more young people than COVID ever could.

Where we are missing the boat regarding COVID is the damage that the pandemic has done through destruction of relational growth that really fuels how young minds are formed. Primary- and secondary school-age kids get this from going to school, and there is no real risk, despite the histrionic anecdotes pushed by the media, for school children. Yes, there is a smattering of extremely tragic cases that are part of the pandemic. One of the curiously sociopathic angles discussing COVID is the risk to football players for some version of myocarditis as an after-effect of the pandemic — as if the well-established dangers of smacking each other’s skulls together weren’t enough. There can be no better juxtaposition of how we perceive risk, however. One is a reason to lock down/up our children indefinitely. The latter is merely a continuation of “how we do things around here.” The various lockdowns have been done ostensibly to save the old, though, once again, it’s not clear that any of this anti-socialization has helped them either. In fact — probably not.

When it comes to college-age kids, living in a university community, I hear the constant berating from the elders about irresponsible college kids are, because they continue to socialize. And it’s wild to me that voices of control have been recruited from the student population themselves. I’m not going to name names, because I still have hopes that these young people, though adults, will grow out of the need to please their elders and represent their natural constituencies. There is really functionally no risk to college kids as well. And schools that have opened (I live next to the University of Idaho) have managed to even control spread, as much as it can be contained, than schools that have gone online. Which would, not surprisingly, jibe with the overall statistics — that not much we’ve done, plus or minus, really matters.

If we’re to start understanding why the enforced collapse of socialization matters to all students, we’re going to have to come to terms with what we actually do in schools. The answer is not “we smart adults tell students a bunch of stuff, they soak it all in, and they’re far better off for it.” I’ve been teaching (and winning awards) my whole career for teaching, which is really only a modest part of a relatively modest career. The reality is that students learn mostly from each other. And the lessons they learn, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter, are mostly about how to relate and listen to each other. We sprinkle the lessons of the venue on top of all of this, of course. But the biggest hunk of everything they learn involves themselves, and their interactions.

My tagline, since I started my empathy project, has been “as we relate, so we think.” The meaning of this is not simply “if you relate nice, then you think nice.” The stakes are far higher. The DeepOS lesson of all this is that relating to different people, across varying ages, social statuses, and racial/ethnic variations, creates the conditions in the brain for other complex, more discipline-specific information to get slotted. Without that interaction, though, the brains of young people, while not exactly being frozen, do not thrive. And being that all people, in all walks of life, are spread out on a probability distribution for pretty much any issue/concept you can think of, we will decrease a certain percentage of the population’s intellectual and developmental abilities in ways we cannot predict yet. If you say you care about disadvantaged populations in the U.S. this should deeply concern you. Those will be the students whose starting line is moved back once again. My advantaged students, and their parents, can and will find ways around this, and I absolutely do not begrudge them.

But in a time of already-extreme separation between opportunities for rich and poor, those without resources, juggling even furnished iPods in mediocre online classrooms, will be even more screwed. Don’t fool yourself. And they also will not have the more evolved social environments that well-off parents are already creating for their children. Mores the pity.

Just so folks know, I’ll be back in the classroom myself in 18 days, running students through my curricular vehicle, the Industrial Design Clinic. I’m one of the few that’s made that choice. It was not forced on me by my administration. And, no, I haven’t had the vaccine. And yes — when I’m told my number’s up, I’ll get in line, but not before. I already know there are people that need it worse than me. There’s a reason I have 2400 hours of sick leave accumulated through my career– it’s not because I’m unhealthy.

I’m doing it because, even though it will be a difficult classroom environment, it will give my students to get to know their best teachers — each other. We’ll be in masks, we’ll be wiping down tabletops, all things of indeterminate efficacy, but part of whatever set of rules we are told to follow. But we’ll do it together. And I’m looking forward to a great year.

 

The Ghosts of 2020. And the Ghosts of 2021

 

 

The devil scene from Walt Disney's 1940 "Fantasia" movie. A fitting representation of the nightmare that 2020 has been. 

This clip is especially fitting because you may notice how the devil doesn't really do anything bad during the whole scene. He summons ghosts and demons, they scream, they fly, they dance, but they don't touch anything, don't harm anyone. Evil is a characteristic of our mind: we create evil and we suffer its consequences because we believe in our own creation.

Perhaps we could hear bells dispelling evil in 2021, as it happens in the movie at 5:40? Maybe, but it is also possible that we'll create even worse ghosts than anything seen in 2020. Whatever the case, as always, we'll remain dominated by the ghost that we ourselves create.

 

 

 

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 Fall of the Citadels of Science: the Pandemic and the End of Universities

 

Far from being ivory towers, nowadays universities look more and more like battered citadels besieged by armies of Orcs. The Covid-19 pandemic may have given the final blow to a structure that was falling anyway. (image credit "crossbow and catapults")

 

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the end of the University as I knew it. It was a line of students standing in the main hall of our department. All of them were masked, all of them had to stand on one of the marks drawn on the floor -- at exactly 1 meter of distance from each other. A teaching assistant was watching them, least they could stray of a few inches away from their assigned position. The only thing that was missing was iron chains and balls and the cadence gang march. 

That was not the only humiliation imposed on our students because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, it is all done with the best of intentions, but it is a heavy burden. Students can't get close to each other, they have to reserve in advance a seat if they want to attend a class, when they enter a building they have to show their ID and to stand in front of a camera that records their face and takes their body temperature. The diabolical machine can also check if they are wearing their masks right. Then, of course, the university personnel is supposed to check that the rules are respected and to report those students who don't respect them. Symmetrically, I suppose the students are expected to report a teacher who doesn't comply with the rules.

Transforming the university into a jail and the teachers into prison guards took just a few months and you may imagine that the students are not happy. Not that they are protesting loudly, they just react with passive forms of resistance. The data show that fewer and fewer of them attend their classes, even when it is possible for them to do that in person. Then, the virtual lessons are turning into an exercise of futility. Bored teachers speaking into their microphones and bored students looking into their cameras. But sometimes they flatly refuse to show their face online and you can't force them to. It doesn't matter whether you can see their faces or not, you can't know if they are listening. Are they watching movies, playing games, or chatting online among themselves? 

Just to tell you what kind of atmosphere we are living in, one of my colleagues told me that a student of his refused to attend her laboratory class saying that she didn't feel safe from infection. But she insisted that she should be graded as if she had attended. I don't think it was a trick to avoid attending a boring lab class, although it is not impossible. More likely, she was genuinely scared. She can't be faulted for feeling in that way, after having received the massive bombardment of scaring news that the TV is pouring out every day. But the effect on the morale of the other students must have been devastating. It sounded to me like the start of a rout in battle. Once a soldier starts running away, all of them will.

Next year we may have a good vaccine or, perhaps, the virus will simply go away by itself. But the virus has simply accelerated a trend that was already ongoing, forcing people to ask themselves a question that few had dared to ask before. What are universities for, exactly? 

Of course, universities have a long history. Almost a thousand years in Europe, even more in the Islamic world. There was a time, up to no long ago, when it made sense to concentrate books and scholars in a single physical location: a "campus". Universities were citadels of science where you could both maximize the interactions among scientists and the availability of books. Then, students could be in touch with their teachers almost every day. It was the concept of "cross-fertilization" of ideas and of minds.

But then, gradually, things changed. For the students, attending a university has become not unlike having dental work performed. Nobody likes that, but when it is needed you pay for it and you are happy when it is over. So, college was three years of boredom (maybe five) in crowded classrooms where students had to suffer hours and hours of incomprehensible lectures derived in a droning tone by someone who couldn't care less about them. The boredom was punctuated with humiliation at those silly rituals called "exams." 

Fraternities and sororities became nothing more than exclusive clubs for wealthy students. The professors, on their side, gradually lost their job security and their academic freedom. They found themselves in a rat race where they had to run to survive, competing with their colleagues for salaries and research grants. The worst was the deadly mechanism of "academic incest" that consists of academics grading each other in a baroque procedure known as the "h-index." It is loved by bureaucrats, but it rewards conformity and lack of innovation.

Worst of all was how universities were taken over by bureaucrats who managed them as cash cows. The profits of universities went mainly to administrators while teachers were paid well only if they were superstars, supposed to be able to attract paying students. The rank and file were paid low to moderate salaries while the bulk of the research work and the teaching was carried out by non-permanent staff on starvation salaries on positions that could be revoked at any time. 

No wonder that the whole contraption was starting to fall apart at the seams and, perhaps, it is good that now it is apparently to everyone. The last hit was the pandemic. Once the students discovered that they don't need to be physically present in class, they are going to realize that they don't need to attend the low-quality lessons of the staff of their local university. Why shouldn't they enroll with the best ones?

In Europe, there are about 2700 universities and in the whole world the count is at about 25,000. Most of them provide the same array of basic curricula. There follows that for most subjects there are tens of thousands of teachers who teach more or less the same things. Think of basic chemistry: I can't imagine that in Bangalore they teach chemistry differently than they do in Florence. Do we really need so many teachers? And most of them are amateurs at their job. Just read a site as "rate my professor" and you'll see that not all teachers are appreciated by their students. No wonder that it is so: there is no quality control on the way university professors teach.

If we go to online teaching, instead, for each subject we can have just a few high-quality courses prepared by teams of professional instructors. And we can keep the best teachers while getting rid of the band of useless loafers who staff universities nowadays. What a saving for the economy! 

It is funny how some professors are praising the new concept of "e-learning" as if it was a good thing for them. It is as if horses were praising the internal combustion engines that were to replace them. Horses didn't realize that they were going to be slaughtered and rendered for their fat. A similar destiny may be awaiting most university professors, although not literally (hopefully, at least). 

Maybe it is not going to happen so soon, but the writing is on the blackboard. Universities may well be replaced by some kind of Google service. Just like we have Google Translate and Google Groups, there will be something like "Google Teach" or "Google School" and I am sure it will do a much better job than that done by those amateurs who have been in charge up to now. And those hateful bureaucrats will have to go packing, too.

The sad thing is that for what we gain in terms of the quality of the teaching, we are going to lose a lot more in other areas. Universities were not just scientific centers. They were places where young people had a sort of "initiation," often being their first experience of living outside their families. The students were the citizens of the village of science, it was a duty and a privilege at the same time. But that seems to be gone.

And our youth? Maybe they are going to become larvae sitting in front of their screens all day long. Or maybe we'll find some way to teach them how to be good human beings. Maybe.

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See also 

"On the demise of universities"

"R.I.P The University" 

"Colleges do the Unthinkable"

 

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.