St. Ronny and the rise of neo-liberalism

Epidemics/Pandemics, Social Democracy and Trust

 

Ever since a client of mine told me earlier in the summer that he did not trust government issued vaccines I have been mulling over why that was the case. Why did he distrust government so much and stuff he learned from his friends or by doing “private research” online so little? I think that is a very important question. It is actually a much bigger question than I realized before I started looking at this issue.

 

Louis Menand wrote a fascinating article in the New Yorker about why people had lost their faith in government. Specifically, he wondered if liberals or conservatives were at fault. He noted that both liberals and conservatives in the US distrusted government:

“December, 1958, by pollsters from a center now called the American National Election Studies, at the University of Michigan, seventy-three per cent said yes, they had confidence in the government to do the right thing either almost all the time or most of the time. Six years later, they were asked basically the same question, and seventy-seven per cent said yes.

 

Pollsters ask the question regularly. In a Pew survey from April, 2021, only twenty-four per cent of respondents said yes. And that represented an uptick. During Obama’s and Trump’s Presidencies, the figure was sometimes as low as seventeen per cent. Sixty years ago, an overwhelming majority of Americans said they had faith in the government. Today, an overwhelming majority say they don’t. Who is to blame?”

 

I know I have been quick to blame Ronald Reagan and his coterie of conservatives. Now I realize the blame can be spread much more widely, though this is certainly part of the problem. Let’s start with Ronald Reagan. Reagan became wildly popular when he said “the 11 most scary words in the English language were, ‘I am from the government and I am here to help.’ ” He also made the following statement in his inaugural address “In this present crisis,” Reagan said in his Inaugural Address, “government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” People began to think that governments were inherently bad and  untrusworthy.

I am not saying Reagan caused the problem, but the neo-liberal ideology was given a big push by him in the US,  Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Brian Mulroney in Canada. At about that time a serious decline in trust in government began.

Yet as Menand pointed out, Reagan a very popular President, one of the most popular ever and who later became an icon of conservatism in America, did not remove one major government program! Why? Because people realized government delivered some pretty good and important things and programs. Really until then most people understood the benefits of public health care as we have in Canada and to a more limited extent in the United States, and understood the importance of schools, libraries, armed forces, police forces, fire fighters, social assistance to the needy, public parks and many other public goods. It was difficult to persuade people to believe that government is all bad.

But things have changed Bigly. Now they have more trust in Amazon, or Facebook, Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, ExxonMobil, Safeway, or any other company than the government? How can that be?

Even during the 8 years that Reagan was President of the United States the trust index for government never rose above 45%. In the last 14 years it has never been higher than 30%. That is not a lot of trust!

How is this significant? The absence of trust in government has been disastrous during the pandemic.  During a pandemic if public health officials are not trusted, people won’t follow their instructions and we will all suffer. That is the problem.  And, as we have seen, it is a big problem. That is why it is so important to look at this issue.

Why do so many people distrust government and what is the significance of that?

 

A Spectrum of Mandates

Epidemics/Pandemics, Freedom, Human rights

 

I have tried to establish that the majority in a democratic society are allowed to impose vaccines on others who do not want to take them. I have tried to establish that on the basis of Mill’s principle of liberty enunciated in his book On Liberty.  Many of us now call the right which we have not to have actions imposed on us the principle of autonomy. I think that is a very important principle, but it is not an unlimited right.

Harms can be imposed on us if that is necessary to prevent us causing harm to others. It is of course necessary to weigh the harm avoided against the harm imposed.  The harm imposed must be less than the harm avoided, otherwise we have created greater harm by our actions. Sometimes, the ends justify the means. I will have more to say on that later.

Therefore, the harm caused by the mandate must be less than the harm avoided.

I suggest that there is a range of harms involved in mandates that depend upon the type of mandate. For example, the mandate could involve manacling the citizen and forcibly inflicting a needle with the vaccine into the body of the resister. That would be the most serious harm. It could cause great harm on the resister.  It certainly would elicit widespread opposition. I have seen photos of such a procedure being imposed on women’s suffragettes in the United States. They went on a hunger strike in the early 20th century to influence the American government, led by Woodrow Wilson, to grant women the right to vote.  They were horrific images of a woman being held while a tube was inserted into her mouth  through which food flowed against her will into her stomach.. The images probably went a long way toward persuading the public that perhaps their position was too strong and they lost public support. The same thing might happen with vaccines.

Unlike, forcing women to take food, I have argued that we would be morally justified in forcing vaccine Resisters to take the vaccines. But perhaps, such images, and there surely would be images, would quickly circulate and could persuade citizens that the government was going too far. As a result, such measures might be counterproductive.  Perhaps even though vaccine mandates are permissible we would be wise to avoid at least the more serious harms in the spectrum of harms. The spectrum of mandates could be from the smart to the stupid. I prefer the smart, though that is not always easy to determine.

We already have imposed some lesser measures that still go by the name of mandates. For example, we now require some employees in some situations, to be vaccinated, in order to work.  The loss of employment is obviously a serious harm imposed on the resisters.

We have also imposed restrictions on the unvaccinated to refrain from entering restaurants or certain stores or certain facilities such as hospitals or personal care homes for the purpose of visiting loved ones. Again these are serious harms but less draconian than the manacles.

Even though mandates are justified in my opinion we must be smart in choosing those that are the most effective and least counter productive.

We need smart mandates.

Trust, Mistrust and a Monstrous God

Epidemics/Pandemics, Evangelical Christianity, Politics & Religion, Social democracy, Social Democracy and Trust, The Sleep of Reason

 

One of the things that is so interesting about this pandemic is the astonishing fact that so many people mistrust so many so deeply. The distrust is virtually unshakeable. I am trying to understand why that happens. And it happens a lot where I live, in Southern Manitoba.

This has caught me by surprise. Or at least it once did. After nearly 2 years of this pandemic, it no longer surprises me. I expect it. I am surprised when someone demonstrates trust.  I think it has something to do with the deeply felt religious beliefs in our community, but that still does not explain it.

Here is what Winnipeg Free Press reporter Dylan Robertson said about exactly this issue:

“Manitoba children could qualify for COVID-19 vaccines within weeks, but evangelical parents might not let their kids roll up their sleeves.

In a recent Probe Research survey shared with the Free Press, two-thirds of evangelical Manitobans said they “worry about the long-term effects of COVID-19 vaccinations in children,” compared with 41 per cent of overall respondents.

In addition, 49 per cent of those identifying as evangelical said COVID-19 as an issue was “overblown,” compared with 28 per cent of the overall population.”

 

What would lead Manitoba parents to distrust government or the authorities so much that they would put the lives of their children in danger when the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence, and by now, real life experiences, make it so clear that not taking vaccines is a dangerous choice?

The Free Press  interviewed Rick Hiemstra, research director of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and this is what he said, “A lack of trust and polarization have come home to roost.” So many of these evangelicals now identify with their group—Christians who don’t trust vaccines. They don’t trust  scientists. No matter how many of them. They don’t trust the government. Instead, they trust what other members of their tribe has told them or trust what they have “learned” from their own “research” on the Internet. And they do while they put the lives of their children in danger.

Here is what a local theologian said as reported by the Winnipeg Free Press,

“Evangelical scholar Nicholas Greco said numerous factors cause that gap, from a desire to rely on God for healing, to science clashing with creationism, to general skepticism of media and government.

Evangelicals often are reflective of a social and political conservatism, which calls for smaller governments (and) personal autonomy, but also tends to lead to a mistrust of government,” said Greco, who is provost of Providence University College in Otterburne.

Greco, a long-time communications professor, said there’s a perception the government wants to control everyone, and that the media is overhyping the virus as part of some sort of conspiracy.

“The rhetoric I hear from many of my colleagues… is that we don’t want the government to have further control, because if they do, we will lose our freedoms,” he said.

The evangelicals believe conspiracy theories rather than scientists and they believe it so strongly they put the lives of their children in danger. It is like an article of their faith that vaccines are untrustworthy, and no reasoning, no data, or no actual experiences will shake them from their convictions.

Here is what the Free Press reported, “At a recent panel, one congregant said everyone who got the vaccine is going to die within a few years, and that they’ll all go to hell.”

As an aside, think for a moment about what a monstrous God this person believed in—a god who would punish someone for eternity for doing what our scientists have strongly recommended.

It is as if denial of vaccine efficacy has become part of their religious faith.

The Horror

Classic Books, Colonialism, Exploitation, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

At first Kurtz could not stand to looking into the Heart of Darkness either.  He said, “I can’t bear to look at this.” But eventually he did. He broke down and looked.  But that drove him mad. This is how Marlow described it:

“But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.  I had—for my sins, I suppose to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to one’s belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. Kurtz looked into the mind of all of us—into the heart of darkness within each of us and declared “The horror. The horror!”

Kurtz, went to the edge and looked down into that heart of darkness that most of us just cannot do. We cannot stand it.

Though Marlow could not muscle up sufficient courage to go to the edge and look down into that heart of darkness, as Kurtz had done, he remained loyal to Kurtz for that was his “choice of nightmares.” He respected the courage of Kurtz “to dream the nightmare out to the end.”  Marlow recognized that he had learned tragic things about life, like Leslie Fiedler’s hero who could carry that torch to the end of the cave. Marlow described the lesson this way, with just the hint of a summing up of his philosophy, of what he has learned from his encounter with Kurtz,

 “Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.  The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.  If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.”

Marlow’s final statement was less declarative, more tentative than that of Kurtz.  Marlow knew that Kurtz “had summed up—he had judged. The horror!”  Kurtz’s final statement had “the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and hate

 

Yet somehow Marlow saw Kurtz’s final summing up with its astonishing characteristics. For it was the most horrible conclusion imaginable.   Yet Marlow said “It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last.”

But what was the victory?

That was why Marlow when he returned to London, the “sepulchral city” as he called it,  he felt sorry for those poor shallow souls who had not gained such knowledge as he had in the jungles of Africa. He had gained knowledge. A terrifying knowledge but knowledge nonetheless. As he said,

“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.  They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.  Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficult in restraining myself from laughing in their faces , so full of stupid importance. I daresay I was not very well at that time. I tottered about the streets—there were various affairs to settle—grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable persons.”

 

This reminded me of what my great uncle Peter once told:  If you have been through the Russian Revolution you would not bother going to the bar in Labroquerie. After all was it not true that in Labroquerie all I did was gulp my unwholesome beer and dream my insignificant and silly dreams?

Joseph Conrad was wise. After reading Heart of Darkness we might be a little wiser too. This book is well worth the read.

 

 

 

The Final Dark Truth

civilization, Classic Books, Colonialism, Exploitation, racism, reason, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, The Sleep of Reason

 

In his novel Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad tried to show us what he thought was a dark truth. It is not just a truth about European society, he showed it was a truth about all of us. You and I too.

Bu how can a person face this horrifying darkness?  Marlow has some advice. Clearly pious phrases are not the answer. Nor noble truths.

“Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look without a wink. But he must at least be as much of man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true self—with his own inborn strength. Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags,–rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.”

 

You need deep inner strength to face such horror. It takes strength of character and courage. It reminds me of the person Leslie Fiedler, an American literary critic described in his bookLove and Death in the American Novel—the person who had the courage to go the end of the dark cave with a torch to see the tragic.  Fiedler like Conrad, realized that “The final horrors, as the modern society has come to realize, are neither gods nor demons, but intimate aspects of our own minds,” Fiedler said in his book.  We are the final horror! What an awful truth to face.

Fiedler saw this as the final consequence of the age of reason. I disagree. I think it is the final consequence of the abandonment of reason. Racism, white privilege and exploitation on an insane scale,  were the result of reason being forsaken in favour monstrous desires. The age of reason Fielder said, dissolved in sentimentalism, “in a debauch of tearfulness; sensibility, seduction, and suicide.”  Fiedler noted how the French philosopher Diderot wrote about Richardson the author of that classic novel, Clarissa: “It is he who carries the torch to the back of the cave… He blows upon the glorious phantom who presents himself at the entrance to the cave; and the hideous Moor whom he was masking reveals himself.”  Surely, “the hideous Moor” is a striking symbol of the demonic in ourselves, which the Enlightenment inadvertently discovered in its quest for light.”  Not that dissimilar from Kurtz who found that demon in his pursuit of noble ideals in the deepest jungle of Africa. We have created that image of the hideous Moor.  He is not real except in our own minds.

 The racial component here is not accidental either. The hideous Moor is, of course, black. He is at the heart of darkness. It is the black Moor that we fear the most and will do anything to stamp out. But that Moor is Us! He is the product of our original sin!

Kurtz found that demon when he looked at those shrunken shriveled heads on poles.  Heads that showed shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of teeth grinning horribly and “continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.”  Those heads “only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts.”

From that came the understanding only at the last that “the wilderness had found him out early and had taken him on a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it whispered to him things which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.”

As I said earlier, the horrors perpetrated by Kurtz in the jungle were never described by Marlow. That was because he did not know what they were. He just knew that they would be even worse than the heads on spikes. Marlow had the feeling that

“such details would be more intolerable than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz’s window.  After all, that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief.”

 

The heart of darkness within the human mind was much, much worse. That was what Marlow could not bear.  He could not carry the torch into the back of the cave and confront that horror, as Kurtz had done. He did not want to know. He did not want to know the truth about himself. Do we want to know truth either?

 

Philanthropic and Missionary Enterprises

civilization, Classic Books, Colonialism, Exploitation, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In the novel Heart of Darkness, Marlow had no regard for the philanthropic or missionary enterprise.  The marauders used such concepts as camouflage—to fool their prey and even themselves. They used such words to convince themselves that they were doing good—God’s work. Kurtz first, and Marlow second, saw through that hideous lie. They thought of themselves as exploring the world in search of Eldorado—the city of gold. Yet according to Marlow, they were “reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage.”  They were worthy of no respect—only shame.  All they really wanted to do was loot, pillage no matter what the cost.  “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

 

Then astonishingly the natives treated these rapacious burglars like gods. Imagine that!  The whites no doubt could hardly believe what they saw. Marlow compared that to how “sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse.” That is exactly it.  It is entirely unreal—fantastical. Horribly fantastic. Marlow described the scene this way,

 

The earth seemed unearthly.  We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.  It was unearthly, and the men were,–No, they were not inhuman.  Well you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one.  They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours  the thought of remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes it was ugly; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in which you—you remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.

 

Marlowe also calls it the “edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.”    Again, he is vague and circumspect, but all the more chilling and terrifying for that. It is an incomprehensible horror. And the real horror is that this is the result of our humanity. It is not inhuman; it is human incarnate. No matter how frightful that seems. This is the heart of darkness. Our own dark centre.

 

Exterminate all the Brutes

civilization, Classic Books, Colonialism, Exploitation, Genocide, Indigenous People After Contact, White Supremacy

Kurtz, the central disturbing character in Conrad’s novel, The Heart of Darkness, was a product of Europe.  He was the child of Europe, believing naturally, without thinking about it, that Europeans were naturally superior to and could help the native savages achieve civilization. All the Africans had to do was assimilate to the superior Europeans. Europeans of course, are famous for this point of view though it is shared by many peoples.

Kurtz had been given the task by his company of preparing a manual to help new Europeans learn about the job of “helping” the native inferiors.  As Marlow, the narrator of the novel,  said, “the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance.” He wrote it.  “He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on.  ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.’  The reader, like Marlow got the idea reading this pamphlet of “an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence.”  It made Marlow tingle with enthusiasm.  No doubt it had the same desired effect on new recruits.  Marlow noted “that this was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words.”

 

Marlow explains though that this report was started “before his—let us say nerves–, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites which …were offered up to him.   After all Kurtz, as Marlow said, “had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honour.” Those rites are merely hinted at. Conrad never explains exactly what happened, we just know that Kurtz was treated like a god, and withered black human  heads were attached to the end of spikes on poles in the dark jungle. How that happened we are left to imagine, and our imagination is no doubt more effective than any bald statements would be.  Good novels can do that.  As a result, at the end of that report Kurtz abandoned  his noble ideals, and his noble words.

As Marlow said,

“…at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightening in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes.’”

In Kurtz’s case, that was the inevitable result of all those noble ideals. Just as it was the inevitable result of all the pious talk of civilizing the natives. It was all a lie—a cunning, false rapacious lie!  That was the end of the noble philanthropic enterprise of European colonialism.  That was the end of noble lies everywhere. That was the heart of darkness we all carry within us and which we have to guard against. Or we too will end up exterminating the brutes!

This has significance far beyond European colonization. It is a chastening for all enterprises with excessive hubris. We would do well to be modest. Humility always becomes us. Over confidence not so much.

Kurtz is us. We are no different. That is the most terrifying part of his story.

The Real Prince of Darkness and the False Gods

Classic Books, Colonialism, Exploitation, Indigenous Issues, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

When Marlow found Kurtz in the centre of the heart of darkness, he had already given in to the powerful forces of darkness. He fell under the spell of the prince of darkness within his own heart. This was no bogey man devil created by religious zealots to scare us into submission. This was the real prince of darkness who resides in us all and who can conquer us as he did Kurtz if we allow it to do that.

Joseph Conrad, through his protagonist Marlow, described Kurtz this way,

“The wilderness has patted him on the head, and behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favorite.”

 

Kurtz had become the pampered favorite of the forces of darkness.  As a result, he found unimaginable heaps of ivory. Stacks of it. “You would think there was not a single tusk left either above, or below the ground in the whole country,” Marlow said. That was his ivory.  That was what he got in exchange for his soul.

When the Europeans arrived in Africa, as when they arrived in the New World, they were seen as gods. At least some Europeans thought they were seen as gods. Evil gods perhaps, but gods nonetheless. That is what happened after the good intentions of men like Kurtz failed. Many white men succumbed to this dangerous illusion that compared to the indigenous people they were Gods.

This was the original sin! The sin of believing they were superior!

 Some whites still suffer from that sin. It continues to stain some of them.