SHARING REALITY

I've rather reluctantly decided to publish in PDF format an incomplete version of 'Sharing Reality' -- the second, companion, volume to my 'Sampling Reality'. It's a tentative application of those ideas to the social sciences, and I'm publishing it incomplete as I've been unsatisfied with all attempts at the final chapters for several years now. The tempo of our current multiple crises makes all efforts at prognostication feel ridiculous. 

Find it on my website at http://www.dickpountain.co.uk/home/materialism or just click the cover picture at left

DAMNED EVERY WHICH WAY

What feels like a very long year ago, in April 2020, I devoted my PC Pro magazine column to the looming Covid-19 pandemic, describing the way in which the official response was attracting competing advice from immunologists and social psychologists, the gap between what we needed objectively to do and what we could subjectively be persuaded to do. Looking back now the UK’s pandemic performance has been poor, with a relatively high absolute number of deaths and deaths per million compared to many other countries (see Our World In Data). It has been partly redeemed though by a roll-out of vaccination faster and more efficient than most.

In retrospect, carrying on scientific arguments about testing, social distancing, mask-wearing and vaccination via the mass media hasn't been so much “transparent” as a cause of mass confusion and destruction of public confidence. Consider a couple of random clippings about the pandemic I’ve collected from newspapers:

"We now know the new variant spreads between 30% and 70% faster than others and it could be 30% more deadly for some people"

"Around 8% of participants in the AstraZeneca efficacy trials were aged between 56 and 6 years old, only 3 to 4% were over 70. This does not result in an efficacy of only 8% among seniors.”

How much information such reports impart to most readers must be doubtful -- people whose daily lives don’t involve mathematics aren’t generally very good with percentages, tending to think of them as additive when in fact they’re multiplicative. “30% more deadly for some people” isn’t entirely meaningless, but all it actually means is simply “be afraid” (that trigger word “deadly”) while giving no idea whether you in particular need to fear since “some” isn’t quantified: is it 10%, 50%, 80%? And the AstraZeneca clip, strewn with figures like pepperoni on a pizza, made my eyes glaze over (and I’ve been tutored in statistics).

Statistics are employed precisely to iron-out individual differences, so they tell us how many people on average are likely to get sick after catching the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and how many of those on average are likely to die of it – hugely important to people who have to plan allocation of hospital beds, PPE and so on, but not so to non-technical citizens whose own personal chance as an individual is what matters. 

Stats don’t quite offer nothing though, because the one area where most non-technical citizens do intersect with statistics is sport: batting averages, betting odds etc. Hence it’s not too surprising that as the world’s pharmaceutical companies continue trials of the 200+ Covid vaccines currently under development, the efficacy figures they release are being interpreted by both media and public as a competition. Give people numbers and they’ll play games with them (anyone remember bus-ticket poker?)

Despite the unprecedented speed with which they were developed, all the Covid vaccines now in use have been thoroughly tested and shown to produce immunity, with those that failed testing either abandoned like Australia’s UQ/CSL or delayed for further work like the French Sanofi. All the pharma companies whose vaccines do work are obliged to publish efficacy figures, which immediately become a horse race: Pfizer in the lead on 95%, Moderna coming up on rails at 94.1%, Astra-Zeneca hanging back at 72%. These figures actually tell you what percentage of the test group didn’t catch symptomatic Covid, but they’re not directly comparable because their test groups differed in size and age composition. Then there’s the question of two doses versus one and what interval between them, which for a while became a dog fight with advantage shifting by the week: Pfizer went down to 52% for one dose, but then back up to 90% on the same test figures. Being exposed to this level of detail does nothing but increase popular fear.

The problem has become especially acute since the discovery of a rare blood clotting condition in a very small number of people inoculated with the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines: use of these vaccines has been restricted or paused in several countries, and the gift to anti-vaccine propagandists has been enormous. Sensational press reporting of this problem has severely damaged the reputation of vaccines that have several advantages - in storage, dose number, price or licencing - over the others. This PR disaster is well explained in the theBMJ journal, and should you want a (highly technical) further explanation of the clotting issue, there's this in The Atlantic magazine.

All the current vaccines are good enough, even with one dose, to reduce hospitalisation and transmission, preventing health services being overwhelmed, moving us closer to a level of community immunity that could demote SARS-CoV-2 to a manageable endemic virus like seasonal flu. Whatever you do though, don’t call this “herd immunity”, even if that is the epidemiologists’ preferred technical term. Most Brits are individualistic to the verge of anarchism, and sentimental, and competitive, so “herd” is deeply offensive, almost a swear-word. It makes extreme libertarians, who form a sizeable sect within the current ruling party, start frothing at the mouth (which you can easily detect because they won’t be wearing masks).

Shocking as it might feel to say this out loud, at 1 to 3% mortality Covid isn’t lethal enough to terrify most people under 50 into properly conforming to test, trace and isolate, but it is quite lethal enough to trigger empathy towards the old and the vulnerable, and this being so any government will be damned every which way when trying to decide on lockdown easing or vaccine distribution.

A COMPOUND EYE ON HISTORY

To describe the effect of digital technologies on journalism as 'a mixed blessing' would be quite an understatement. The ubiquity of highly functional, easy to operate video cameras - in the form of the smartphone - makes possible the 'selfie', the ultimate expression of narcissistic solipsism, and a torrent of trivia and misinformation. But it also makes possible this extraordinary assemblage of 500+ individual videos which launches a wholly new kind of reportage that doesn't yet have a  proper name. Like the compound eye of some huge digital insect, this ProPublica webpage combines 500 peoples' views of an historic event: 

SOMETHING ROTTEN?

I opted for science early and so didn't do much of the Anglo-Saxon stuff at school, but this review in the recent LRB was a nice refresher for me. The great wave of scheming, poisoning and conquering that went on among a huge litter of Anglo-Danish, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman half-brothers around 1000AD reminds me a lot of what goes on in the Conservative Party around the time of Brexit. Does it help me predict our future at all? Perhaps...

Scotland and Wales get full independence and Ireland is reunited. Following a wave of poisonings (imported Novichok) the last Tory minister standing is crowned king - the German Windsors having been deposed - and takes the name Harfacnut The Unræd, but reigns only weeks before Denmark invades to recover its territory and restore peace and prosperity. Might happen.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n23/tom-shippey/men-who-keep-wolves

The Do Re Mi

I’m occupied at present preparing a review of Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital and Ideology’, which turns out to be one of the most important books I’ve read in many decades. Piketty makes perfectly plain that none of our current problems are soluble until we get to grips with a drastic economic restructuring. Call it reform, call it revolution, call it whatever, none of the other issues that keep presenting themselves as a way forward - gender, race, identity, even climate - are tractable until the power of big money is vanquished. Piketty acknowledges that both social democracy and state socialism have now failed, and offers suggestions for economic structures that could lead further.

He also analyses aspects of our current situation that made my blood run cold:

“Let me be clear about the meaning of negative public capital such as we find today in the official national accounts of the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy. Negative capital means that even if all marketable public assets were sold—including all public buildings (such as schools, hospitals, and so on) and all public companies and financial assets (if they exist)—not enough money would be raised to repay all the debt owed to the state’s creditors (whether direct or indirect). Concretely, negative public wealth means that private individuals own, through their financial assets, not only all public assets and buildings, on which they collect interest, but also a right to draw on future tax receipts.  

[...]

In strictly theoretical terms, there is no limit on how negative public wealth can go. Strictly speaking, one could reach a point where private individuals through their financial assets owned the totality of all future tax revenues or even the totality of everyone else’s income, so that everyone would de facto be working for the bond­holders. This happened frequently in ancient times (when slavery was a conse­quence of heavy debt or military tribute; see Chap. 6)"

[Thomas Piketty 'Capital and Ideology', p614]

In the end it’s still ‘The economy, stupid’, or as Woody Guthrie put it rather more nicely, the ‘Do Re Mi’:

Playing The Goat

Steve Bell’s goats cartoon hits home because “herd immunity” was indeed the worst gaffe so far in the coronavirus emergency, a verbal disaster on a par with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” which may have given us the Trump presidency and all that’s followed from that. Herd immunity is a perfectly respectable technical term in epidemiology: “ a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when a large percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through previous infections or vaccination, thereby providing a measure of protection for individuals who are not immune.“

There are two huge problems with its use in this crisis. First, it contains the word “herd” which is grossly offensive when applied to human beings in a democracy, though perfectly acceptable when used in the abstract about biological systems. It has no place in any political discourse and deploying it was more or less like throwing a hand grenade into a crowded room.

The second problem is not of words but facts. The coronavirus appears to have a lethality around 1-5% of those infected (with much uncertainty until a lot more testing); a vaccine is probably 18 months away, if one can be found that works, so herd immunity will be the de facto result anyway as it is for flu and most other viral diseases. If around 80% of infections are mild or symptomless and the other 20% require hospitalisation, of whom a quarter may be critical, then a strategy based on what could perhaps better be called “community immunity” might have worked (as is being tried in Sweden). It could only ever be morally acceptable if those 20% are guaranteed plentiful and effective hospital treatment, but this was being contemplated by a government which has spent the last decade deliberately reducing the preparedness of the NHS through its policy of austerity.

But in any case it still could never have been politically acceptable in a country like today’s UK in the age of social media, where individualism and dread of such a horrible, invisible threat have largely eroded collective solidarity (already deliberately weakened by successive Conservative governments since Thatcher). Dominic Cummings and Toby Young notwithstanding, most of Johnson’s colleagues realised this – none too quickly – and performed a U-turn whose long-term political consequences are incalculable. Their mass destruction of jobs and small firms might shift us to the social-democratic Left or to the Far Right.

After 2008 the Left utterly failed to make its case for Keynesian reflation and allowed the Tories’ “household budgeting” metaphor to persuade the electorate to vote for austerity. As I write the new Labour leader has yet to be announced, but whoever it is has an even greater challenge before them. Boris Johnson is chameleon enough to take on Keynesian colouring for a while, though it remains to be seen whether he can keep his party with him. But strident Left sloganeering while the virus crisis persists is likely to be counterproductive, and working out a really cast-iron strategy for holding the Tories to account after it ends must be the priority.

There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

I've been expecting Boris Johnson to become Prime Minister ever since he was Mayor of London, and was only mildly surprised when Michael Gove's little Brutus-act delayed his progress by a couple of years. I don't possess any supernatural powers of prediction, it just seem blindingly obvious that he's the only politician with sufficient ruthlessness and charisma among the current professionalised political class. What was a bit surprising was just how inadequate they all proved at dealing with his Machiavellian skills during those grim months from October to December last year (when even the speaker of the Commons was trying to egg them on like a rowing cox).

This post is the text of a talk I gave in January to a panel discussion organised in Finsbury Park by Phil Cohen, under the name 'There Must Be Some Way Out Of Here'. The other speakers were Phil himself, Andrew Calcutt, Valerie Walkerdine, Tim (T.J.) Clark, Lynne Segal and Baroness Ruth Lister: 

Dick Pountain/There Must Be.../ 20th January 2020 08:52:01

I realised the election was lost on the Friday before, when Channel 4 News sent a team to do a vox pop in a northern labour seat. The man they interviewed, who’d only ever voted labour before, called Boris a "lovable buffoon" but said he would nevertheless vote for him. The following week’s defeat was particularly bitter because many people hoped that Labour was about to win a majority comparable to that of 1945 which founded the modern welfare state. Attlee's government came to power thanks to a social solidarity engendered by the collective experience of fighting and provisioning World War Two. British business - or “the capitalist class” if you prefer - was prepared to compromise with organised labour both for their common interest in reconstruction and to avoid the threat of more radical expropriation.

That degree of solidarity clearly can’t be relied upon nowadays, and to understand why, examine what lay behind that man’s description of the "lovable buffoon" who’s now our prime minister. He knew quite well that Boris Johnson isn't going to solve his personal economic problems, but he didn't believe Jeremy Corbyn would solve them either. That’s probably because he thinks no-one can, but he'd rather vote for the one that he thinks is more like himself -- the one who like a drink and a laugh, and who will get Brexit done -- a largely symbolic raising of the drawbridge that he thinks might preserve what he does have from marauding foreigners. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket but he'd rather go there with Boris, and with a giggle rather than a lecture.

The Left devotes a lot of thought to the question of why the working classes, both here and in the USA, choose to vote against their own "economic interests", often using abstractions like ‘false consciousness’, ‘ruling ideology’, ‘consumer capitalism’, ‘neoliberalism’, all of which are merely descriptive. For the UK we can find a more concrete answer in party politics.The 1945 welfare state improved people’s lives over the next half century enormously, in housing, healthcare, education, and employment. It once looked as if this progress would continue smoothly toward some form of pan-European social democracy.

But as we all know this progress was interrupted in 1979 by the election of a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, which set out to head off such an outcome. Within that government, a group on the Right of the party, who favoured an American-style unregulated economy, set out on a deliberate, tenacious and effective 40-year campaign to undo the solidarity that sustained the welfare state. During Margaret Thatcher’s three periods of office, they devised a policy of selling council houses to their occupants. In the 2nd January edition of the London Review of Books there's an excellent review by Susan Pedersen in which she identifies this policy of selling public housing as a turning point in post-war history.

The policy was part of a three-pronged attack, the other two being malicious neglect of heavy industry to weaken the grip of trade unions, and the fostering of anti-European and anti-immigrant sentiment. But the housing sales were the masterstroke. They gave many Labour voters a stake in the housing market, and this was followed up by restrictions on any further building of council houses, which eventually lead to the housing shortage and ferocious price inflation that’s still with us and is a major factor in the huge increase in inequality and homelessness of the last 40 years. It drove a wedge through the heart of Labour's support, between those who’d bought and those who hadn’t, another split that's still with us. Thatcher famously said she was creating a ‘property-owning democracy’, when in fact she only created half of one. 

The other half, now mostly at the mercy of private landlords lived more precariously, more liable to identify immigrants as competitors for jobs and homes, and less likely to vote Labour. But among the new home owners it reinforced a feeling of autonomy - having your own home to decorate as you like, perhaps a car rather than public transport to go where you like. It’s the attraction of such feelings of autonomy that’s missing from many Left analyses that ask why people vote against their ‘economic interests’ - in the last instance, they value autonomy over cash. Conflict between autonomy and collective good has been around as long as there’s been society, and it always plays better to the Right than to a Left that tends to undervalue autonomy. 

Following Thatcher’s fall, the Labour Party was forced to acquiesce in her counter reformation to get reelected in 1997 under Blair, and ever since the crash of 2007 it's been unable to regain the full confidence of ‘lovable buffoon’ man. Brexit was the Tory Atlanticist's final decisive weapon. Like all the most effective weapons it was two-edged in that it split both the main parties, but the Tory Right correctly guessed that the party’s historic will to power over principle would prevail against Labour’s historic tendency to factionalism and moral probity. And during those horrible three months of 2019 they deftly out-manoeuvered both their own “wet” wing and the Labour Party, to place Boris Johnson in power with a working majority.

Climate crisis hasn’t played a major role in the ‘Thatcherite plot’ until now, but now it’s set to widen the splits in our society that they’ve caused. And we’re not alone in this predicament, as the electorates of almost all Western democracies are splitting in a similar fashion. There’s growing generational split. The younger generations, whose futures are most threatened by climate change, are being politically galvanised by the threat, as well as by an inability to afford housing in the inflated market their parents generation profits from. There’s a growing gap between city dwellers who have decent, even greenish, public transport, and those outside cities won’t be willing to give up driving cars because alternative public transport is inadequate (and because they like driving - that autonomy thing again). Widest of all is the split between those who would close borders to keep out the mass migration of those displaced by war, flood, fire and famine, and those who support freedom of movement.

Under such conditions, promising to restore 1945-style social democracy will no longer win elections: accepting the reality of climate crisis means managing the winding down of fossil fuel usage which will be resisted, and the Right may continue to deny its reality. Australia is likely to be one of the earliest test cases, because when and if Scott Morrison’s government is thrown out over its attitude to the bush fire emergency, whichever successor that does accept the crisis will have to tackle a coal industry that provides a third of the country’s exports. In fact national solutions to the climate crisis aren’t feasible, since a degree of global governance that doesn’t exist is necessary to curb the fossil fuel industry. The UN is the only available institution, but its Millennium Goals, admirable as they are in principle, are unrealisable so long as climate-denying administrations like Trump’s have a power of veto.

Over the next decade preserving any sort of democracy will be a challenge, and we’ll need to invent wholly new rhetoric, institutions and practices to achieve it: the spectrum of Left, Centre and Right is no longer helpful, while electoral reform and green coalitions barely begin to touch the magnitude of the task.