There can be no return to normal because normal was the problem in the first place
Since 25th December 2019 the image has been circulating on social media.
Q. Why?
A. Because this understanding resonates beyond the frontiers of ideology with the everyday experience of processing information in times of crisis.
The year of 2019 was a tumultuous one for the people of Hong Kong. COVID-19 is partly named for the year it emerged in Wuhan, China. One
month later the first confirmed case of the global pandemic of
coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the territory of Hong Kong was
announced on 23 January 2020. It is NOT the nineteenth coronavirus.
In the print edition of the Guardian (Sat 11 Apr 2020) Patrick Wintour's article was interwoven with a column headlined Eyes on the future that contained half a dozen quotes, including the graffiti from Hong Kong.
Already everyone in the global village is starting to draw lessons.
In France, Macron has predicted “this period will have taught us a lot. Many certainties and convictions will be swept away. Many things that we thought were impossible are happening. The day after when we have won, it will not be a return to the day before, we will be stronger morally. We will draw the consequences, all the consequences.” He has promised to start with major health investment. A Macronist group of MPs has already started a Jour d’Après website.
In Germany, the former Social Democratic party foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel has lamented that “we talked the state down for 30 years”, and predicts the next generation will be less naive about globalisation. In Italy, the former prime minister Matteo Renzi has called for a commission into the future. In Hong Kong, graffiti reads: “There can be no return to normal because normal was the problem in the first place.”Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state under Richard Nixon, says rulers must prepare now to transition to a post-coronavirus world order.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said: “The relationship between the biggest powers has never been as dysfunctional. Covid-19 is showing dramatically, either we join [together] ... or we can be defeated.”
The discussion in global thinktanks rages, not about cooperation, but whether the Chinese or the US will emerge as leaders of the post-coronavirus world.
In the UK, the debate has been relatively insular. The outgoing Labour leadership briefly searched for vindication in the evident rehabilitation of the state and its workforce. The definition of public service has been extended to include the delivery driver and the humble corner shop owner. Indeed, to be “a nation of shopkeepers”, the great Napoleonic insult, no longer looks so bad.
The obvious and widely drawn parallel has been, as so often in Britain, the second world war. In The Road to 1945, Paul Addison’s definitive account of how the second world war helped turn Britain to the left, he quotes the diary of the journalist JL Hodson in September 1944: “No excuses any more for unemployment and slums and underfeeding. We have shown in this war we British don’t muddle through. Using even half the vision and energy and invention and pulling together we’ve done in this war and what is there we cannot do? We’ve virtually exploded the argument of old fogies and Better Notters who said we cannot afford this and mustn’t do that. Our heavy taxation and rationing of food has willy nilly achieved some levelling up of the nation.”
In the same vein, Boris Johnson has been forced to unleash the state, but the impact in Britain seems more noticeable on civil society than politics. The famously standoffish British are no longer bowling alone. The sense of communal effort, the volunteer health workers, the unBritish clapping on doorsteps, all add to the sense that lost social capital is being reformed. But there is not yet much discussion of a new politics. Perhaps the nation, exhausted by Brexit, cannot cope with more introspection and upheaval.
In Europe, the US and Asia the discussion has broadened out. Public life may be at a standstill, but public debate has accelerated. Everything is up for debate – the trade-offs between a trashed economy and public health, the relative virtues of centralised or regionalised health systems, the exposed fragilities of globalisation, the future of the EU, populism, the inherent advantage of authoritarianism.
It is as if the pandemic has turned into a competition for global leadership, and it will be the countries that most effectively respond to the crisis that will gain traction. Diplomats, operating out of emptied embassies, are busy defending their governments’ handling of the crisis, and often take deep offence to criticism. National pride, and health, are at stake. Each country looks at their neighbour to see how quickly they are “flattening the curve”.
The Crisis Group thinktank, in assessing how the virus will permanently change international politics, suggests: “For now we can discern two competing narratives gaining currency – one in which the lesson is that countries ought to come together to better defeat Covid-19, and one in which the lesson is that countries need to stand apart in order to better protect themselves from it.
“The crisis also represents a stark test of the competing claims of liberal and illiberal states to better manage extreme social distress. As the pandemic unfolds it will test not only the operational capacities of organisations like the WHO and the UN but also the basic assumptions about the values and political bargains that underpin them.”
Many are already claiming that the east has won this war of competing narratives. The South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in an influential essay in El País, has argued the victors are the “Asian states like Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Singapore that have an authoritarian mentality which comes from their cultural tradition [of] Confucianism. People are less rebellious and more obedient than in Europe. They trust the state more. Daily life is much more organised. Above all, to confront the virus Asians are strongly committed to digital surveillance. The epidemics in Asia are fought not only by virologists and epidemiologists, but also computer scientists and big data specialists.”
He predicts: “China will now be able to sell its digital police state as a model of success against the pandemic. China will display the superiority of its system even more proudly.” He claims western voters, attracted to safety and community, might be willing to sacrifice those liberties. There is little liberty in being forced to spend spring shut in your own flat.
Indeed, China is already on a victory lap of sorts, believing it has deftly repositioned itself from the culprit to the world’s saviour. A new generation of young assertive Chinese diplomats have taken to social media to assert their country’s superiority. Michel Duclos, the former French ambassador now at the Institut Montaigne, has accused China of “shamelessly trying to capitalise on the country’s ‘victory against the virus’ to promote its political system. The kind of undeclared cold war that had been brewing for some time shows its true face under the harsh light of Covid-19.”
The Harvard international relations theorist Stephen Walt thinks China may succeed. Offering a first take to Foreign Policy magazine, he suggests: “Coronavirus will accelerate the shift of power and influence from west to east. South Korea and Singapore have shown the best response and China has managed well in the aftermath of its initial mistakes. The governments’ response in Europe and the US has been very sceptical and likely to weaken the power of the western brand.”
Many on the European left, such as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, also fear an authoritarian contagion, predicting in the west “a new barbarism with a human face – ruthless survivalist measures enforced with regret and even sympathy, but legitimised by expert opinions”.
By contrast, Shivshankar Menon, a visiting professor at Ashoka University in India, says: “Experience so far shows that authoritarians or populists are no better at handling the pandemic. Indeed, the countries that responded early and successfully, such as Korea and Taiwan, have been democracies – not those run by populist or authoritarian leaders.”
Francis Fukuyama concurs: “The major dividing line in effective crisis response will not place autocracies on one side and democracies on the other. The crucial determinant in performance will not be the type of regime, but the state’s capacity and, above all, trust in government.” He has praised Germany and South Korea.
South Korea is in fact selling itself as the democratic power, in contrast to China, that has best handled the crisis. Its national press is full of articles on how Germany is following the South Korean model of mass testing.
But South Korea, an export-oriented economy, also faces long-term difficulties if the pandemic forces the west, as Prof Joseph Stiglitz predicts, into a total reassessment of the global supply chain. He argues the pandemic has revealed the drawbacks of concentrating production of medical supplies. As a result, just-in-time imports will go down and production of domestically sourced goods will go up. South Korea may gain kudos, but lose markets.
The loser at the moment, apart from those like Steve Bannon who argued for “the deconstruction of the administrative state”, risks being the EU.
Some of Europe’s most scathing critics have been the pro-Europeans. Nicole Gnesotto, the vice-president of the Jacques Delors Institute thinktank, says: “The EU’s lack of preparations, its powerlessness, its timidity are staggering. Of course, health is not part of its competency, but it is not without means or responsibility.” The first instinct was to close borders, hoard equipment and assemble national responses. In times of scarcity it emerged every person was for themself, and Italy felt most left to itself.
But the dispute has widened into an ugly battle between north and south Europe over the isssuance of common debt, or the conditions that could be set for any credit issued by the eurozone bailout fund. The Dutch and Germans suspect Italy is using the crisis in Lombardy to rebrand the rejected concept of eurobonds in which the north finances the debts of the feckless south. The Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, is pushing the issue, telling the bloc “it has an appointment with history”. If the EU fails, it could fall apart, he has warned.
The Portuguese prime minister, António Costa, spoke of “disgusting” and “petty” comments by the Dutch minister Wopke Hoekstra, while the Spanish foreign minister, Arancha González, wondered whether the Dutch understood that “a first-class cabin would not protect you when the whole ship sinks”.
The former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta has been scathing about Dutch resistance to helping Italy, telling the Dutch press that the Italian view of the Netherlands has been seriously damaged: “It did not help that a day after German customs officials stopped a huge amount of masks at the border, Russian trucks carrying relief supplies drove through the streets of Rome and millions of masks were sent from China. Matteo Salvini is waiting for this type of action from the Netherlands and Germany so that he can say: you see, we have no use for the European Union.”
The EU’s position is not irretrievable. Salvini’s closure agenda has not yet found its footing, since Conte’s popularity does not make the prime minister an easy target. Conte has become the single most popular leader in the history of the Italian republic. Individual German politicians, such as Marian Wendt, have also undone some of the damage by organising for a group of Italians to be flown from Bergamo to Cologne for treatment.
But with the death toll mounting across Europe, and the crisis just starting to penetrate Africa, the EU discourse so far has been dominated by an unedifying and highly technical row about how to fund the EU’s economic rescue.
Europe’s chief solace is to look across the Atlantic and watch the daily chaos that is Donald Trump’s evening press conference – the daily reminder that rational people can plan for anything, except an irrational president.
Nathalie Tocci, an adviser to Josep Borrell, the EU foreign affairs chief, wonders whether, much like the 1956 Suez crisis symbolised the ultimate decay of the UK’s global power, coronavirus could mark the “Suez moment” for the US.
Borrell himself insists the EU is finding its feet after a rocky start and the case for cooperation is being won. Writing in Project Syndicate, he claims: “After a first phase of diverging national decisions, we are now entering a phase of convergence in which the EU takes centre stage. The world initially met the crisis in an uncoordinated fashion, with too many countries ignoring the warning signs and going it alone. It is now clear that the only way out of it is together.”
He may be proved right, but at the moment the scales are evenly balanced. There is, as yet, a world still to be won.
Bob Cesca writing for salon on April 14, 2020 under the headline and subheading:
Donald Trump's scapegoat hunt: Blame China, blame Fauci, blame the governors
Trump has a list of villains to blame for his criminal incompetence. But only his cult members are still listening.
Whenever you read about an obvious scam perpetrated by Donald Trump, it's important to remember one thing: He's lying to his own disciples more than anyone else.
The rest of us — the "normals," for lack of a better term — aren't necessarily the dupes in his various acts of desperate treachery, even though, yeah, we're all the victims of the consequences. But the initial targets of his Batman-villain gambits are his own gullible fanboys, and they're devouring it the way Trump himself devours trans fats.
For example: Trump is engaged in his latest cover-his-own-ass maneuver, while parked in the midst of an historic breakdown of the federal government's responsibilities during a cataclysmic pandemic.
This time, the president's scheme involves blaming everyone except himself for his blind inaction and delusional, carefree attitude toward COVID-19 for months on end, another example of his shrieking impotence, so far removed from the normal behavior of strong, legitimate leaders.
When it comes to this upside-down, horrendously illegitimate presidency, the buck stops with everyone who's not Trump. His strategy to defer blame is aimed at deceiving his own people, the only people who actually believe his screechy gibberish. None of what he's up to is meant for the consumption of anyone outside his brainwashed cult — a cult that continues to swallow his loopy "Jim Jones for Dummies" act.
Step One: Blame China
It's already well established that ever since he tried to coin his own phrase for the virus, the "Chinese virus," Trump's intention has been to find a visible culprit to blame in order to deflect criticism of his unforgivable ineptitude. Namely China.
It's germane to underscore here that it hasn't been the aforementioned Normals who have routinely lionized Chinese President Xi Jinping. In fact, every time the topic of China pops into one of Trump's whining jags, he can't help but to praise Xi as a personal friend with whom he gets along really well, according to him. Consequently, while Trump's Red Hats are accustomed to applauding any mention of the friendship between Xi and Trump, the carpet has yet again been snatched out from under them, now that their cult leader insists Xi's China is the real crook in all this.
No wonder Trump's supporters are so confused. The neck-snapping whiplash must be brutal.
Trump's ties to President Xi's China run deeper than the big beautiful chocolate cake Xi apparently enjoyed so much as a guest at Mar-a-Lago. While the White House is frantically pointing stumpy fingers at China as the real killers, the Trump Organization continues to do billions in business with China. The top Chinese state-owned bank, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., has rented an entire floor in Trump Tower for the last 12 years — at $2 million per month. Ivanka Trump's fashion products rely upon Chinese labor, while the Trump hotel chain has offices in China as well. Meanwhile, half a billion dollars in Chinese money has been invested in an Indonesian project that includes Trump-branded properties.
"Communist China," as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called that nation the other day, is clearly one of Trump's leading business and investment partners — and also the alleged real enemy in the COVID-19 outbreak. How do you square that one, Red Hats?
Step Two: Scapegoat the experts
The Trump White House has also been actively floating trial balloons about firing Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, after Fauci made the mistake of saying on CNN that the president should have enacted preventative measures earlier in the crisis. This obvious truth triggered the president's fragile ego, leading him to consider replacing Fauci. Trump and his fluffers in the conservative entertainment complex are also spreading the word that, somehow, it's really Fauci's fault that the White House didn't do more to prevent the spread of the virus.
By the way, discontinuing travel from China was the least Trump could've done without doing nothing. Even though he's insisting on a participation trophy for his decision to do it, it was nothing more than a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound. Too little too late. Forty thousand people traveled from China to the U.S. anyway, after Trump's declaration. The travel ban was one of dozens of things he should've authorized in January — and much earlier than he did.
Oh, and most of the COVID-19 cases arrived in the U.S. from Europe anyway.
Regardless of all that, get ready for Fauci to be bounced and then for a smear campaign to ramp up, especially now that the White House issued a statement claiming Fauci wouldn't be fired — the usual head-fake kiss of death from Trump. Yes, the most competent pandemic expert in the White House is going to be sacked by an anti-vaxxer who stared into a solar eclipse, risking more lives in order to shield Trump and his delicate ego from blame.
So, in case you're keeping score, the piss-poor response by the federal government, which worsened the crisis and led to increased misery across the country, is actually the fault of China and Tony Fauci. We can add state governors to the list too.
Step Three: It's the governors' fault the economy sucks
As we've all witnessed, Trump is framing his out-of-touch pronouncements about the pandemic as "cheerleading" for the country. There's cheerleading and then there's clinical delusion — best illustrated by that "this is fine" cartoon dog meme. He thinks (or claims he thinks) that he's being positive, but he's actually just shielding himself from accountability by continuing to downplay the emergency.
Make no mistake: Everything the president does is exclusively about Trump and Trump's shot at re-election. Nothing more.
Cheerleading the nation is actually cheerleading the Trump campaign.
So when it comes to rushing ahead by prematurely reopening the economy, he's casting himself as the good cop fighting against the state governors — the bad cops — the meanies who won't let Americans leave their houses and return to "normal" lives.
Quite likely the real point of this aspect of Trump's overzealous attempt to restart the economy too soon is to defer blame on governors who will resist his urge, chiefly because it could cause another spike in COVID-19 infections and deaths.
This way, as Salon's Amanda Marcotte wrote the other day, Trump can blame the economic downsides of the pandemic on the governors, in blue and red states alike, since they're the ones who will refuse to end stay-at-home orders. Perhaps he'll spare the ones who are "nice to Trump," but everyone else will be blamed for struggling businesses and a sluggish economy, even though sparing lives ought to take priority over boosting the Dow. Trump knew long before COVID-19 that his herky-jerky presidency was being propped up by the economy, and now he's doing everything he can to make sure he doesn't get blamed for catastrophic economic indicators that his own screwball lethargy helped to worsen.
Nevertheless, the only voters who'll buy into this "everyone screwed up except Trump" PR strategy will be the ones who already believe Trump is their clown messiah — and they would vote for him even if he told them to substitute pages of the Constitution for sold-out rolls of toilet paper. No one else is buying his snake oil anymore, as indicated by his rising disapproval numbers.
Trump is deliriously grasping for anything that might extricate his incompetent presidency from a disaster he himself made worse — and the reason he did that in the first place was because he was far more interested in not spooking the economy, a goal he continues to pursue. If he were seriously interested in solving these accumulating calamities he would step aside, go play golf, and allow the grownups and experts to handle things from here. But he won't. He's demanding credit when he deserves none, and he's placing blame where little exists.
My rule from the beginning has always been: Trump always makes things worse for Trump. This time, however, he's dragged the rest of us down with him. It's a real shocker that the idiot who asked Meat Loaf whether he should run for president, who paid hush money to a mistress while in the White House, and who deliberately scammed charities with his dubious foundation would be such an irresponsible chief executive. Now he's also presiding over 9/11-level casualties every day due to an outbreak that could have been mitigated by a halfway competent administration, and definitely by a more legitimate president — not to mention one who's not so tragically out of his depth.
Rajeev Syal writing for the Guardian (Mon 6 Apr 2020):
Ministers have been accused of focusing on saving their careers instead of the lives of coronavirus victims by authorising “cowardly and shameful” anonymous briefings against some of the UK’s most senior public officials.
Smears by unnamed Downing Street sources against Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, and Public Health England (PHE) executives show that “some within government are still putting self-preservation first”, according to the head of the senior civil servants’ union.
. . . and passing the buck!
Steven Morris writing for the Guardian (Wed 8 Apr 2020) under the sub heading:
The organisers of the Cheltenham Festival cited the presence of Boris Johnson at an international rugby match shortly before the race meeting was due to begin in a letter explaining why it was going ahead despite concerns about the Covid-19 outbreak, the Guardian can reveal.
This cliché has a colourful history, going back to the playing of the card game poker in the US, during the nineteenth century. Poker became very popular in America during the second half of the 19th century. Players were highly suspicious of cheating or any form of bias and there's considerable folklore depicting gunslingers in shoot-outs based on accusations of dirty dealing. In order to avoid unfairness the deal changed hands during sessions. The person who was next in line to deal would be given a marker. This was often a knife, and knives often had handles made of buck's horn - hence the marker becoming known as a buck. When the dealer's turn was done he 'passed the buck'.
Silver dollars were later used as markers and some have speculated that this is the origin of the use of buck as a slang term for dollar.
The figurative version of the phrase, that is, a usage where no actual buck is present, begins around the start of the 20th century.
The reporter's use of quotation marks around pass the buck indicate its recent coinage as a figurative phrase, or at least one that the paper's readers might not have been expected to be familiar with.
The best-known use of buck in this context is 'the buck stops here', which was the promise made by US president Harry S. Truman, and which he kept prominent in his own and his electors' minds by putting it on a sign on his desk.
This was meant to indicate that he didn't 'pass the buck' to anyone else but accepted personal responsibility for the way the country was governed.
Fred M. Canfil, United States Marshal for the Western District of Missouri and a friend of Truman's, saw a sign like it while visiting the Federal Reformatory at El Reno, Oklahoma in 1945. He thought it would appeal to the plain-speaking Truman and arranged for a copy of it to be made and sent to him. It was seen on the President's desk on and off throughout the rest of his presidency.
On the reverse side, that is, the side that Truman saw, it was inscribed, "I'm from Missouri". That's a short form of "I'm from Missouri. Show me". Natives of that state (a.k.a. the Show Me State), which included Truman, were known for their skeptical nature.
Does the buck stop with him . . .
. . . in the blame game?
The Week published this story (Mar 30, 2020) about Tory ministers being accused of using Beijing as ‘convenient scapegoat’ to deflect criticism over lack of Covid-19 testing.
A diplomatic row between the UK and China is growing over Beijing’s lack of transparency about the coronavirus outbreak.
Speaking on BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show yesterday, Minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove appeared to blame the Chinese authorities for the UK’s lack of mass testing for the virus.
“We’ve been increasing the number of tests over the course of the last month… The first case of coronavirus in China was established in December of last year, but it was also the case that some of the reporting from China was not clear about the scale, the nature, the infectiousness of this,” Gove said.
Meanwhile, senior Downing Street officials told The Mail on Sunday that the Communist state faces a “reckoning” when the pandemic is over.ture
Scapegoating . . .
The Scapegoat (1854–1856) is a painting by William Holman Hunt which depicts the "scapegoat" described in the Book of Leviticus. On the Day of Atonement, a goat would have its horns wrapped with a red cloth – representing the sins of the community – and be driven off. In fact the scapegoat was one of two kid goats. As a pair, one goat was sacrificed (not a scapegoat) and the living “scapegoat” was released into the wilderness, taking the sins and impurities into the wilderness.
Steve Bell, political cartoonist and artist representing UK government minister Michael Gove as "the scapegoat", with reference to the picture by Holman-Hunt.
Steve Bell has been inspired by this story of a herd of goats running riot in the Welsh town of Llandudno.
Taking advantage of the deserted streets because of the coronavirus lockdown, a posse of Great Orme goats has moved into town and is running riot.
In the Great Orme country park, there are said to be about 120 goats descended from the goats of the mountains of Kashmir. These Kashmiri goats that came down from the Great Orme and into the town Llandudno, were originally a gift to Lord Mostyn from Queen Victoria, yet another legacy of British imperialism to the landed aristocracy.
A "goatique" of UK government unprincipled opportunism, incompetence, and evasion?
The Great Orme
The Great Orme is on the LODE Zone Line, and is connected, in several ways to the project, including historical links to the Lighthouse on Bidston Hill.
In 1825 the Board of the Port of Liverpool obtained a Private Act of Parliament to help improve safety and communications for the merchant marine operating in the Irish Sea and Liverpool Bay. The Act allowed them to erect and maintain telegraph stations between Liverpool and the Isle of Anglesey. This would help ship-owners, merchants and port authorities in Liverpool know the location of all mercantile shipping along the North Wales coast.
In 1826 the summit of the Great Orme was chosen as the location for one of the 11 optical semaphore stations that would form an unbroken 80 mi (130 km) chain from Liverpool to Holyhead. The original semaphore station on the Orme, which consisted of small building with living accommodation, used a 15 m (49 ft) ship's mast with three pairs of moveable arms to send messages to either Puffin Island 7 mi (11 km) to the west or 8.5 mi (13.7 km) to Llysfaen in the east. Skilled telegraphers could send semaphore messages between Liverpool and Holyhead in under a minute.
In March 1855 the Great Orme telegraph station was converted to electric telegraph. Landlines and submarine cables connected the Orme to Liverpool and Holyhead. At first the new equipment was installed in the original Semaphore Station on the summit until it was moved down to the Great Orme lighthouse in 1859. Two years later the Great Orme semaphore station closed with the completion of a direct electric telegraph connection from Liverpool to Holyhead.
Bidston Hill on the Wirral, was also the site of one of these semaphore stations, running along a section of the LODE Zone Line.
Many countries worldwide have closed their schools, colleges and universities, but the coronavirus crisis is itself providing us all with an education, especially when it comes to the ideology and policy dimensions of modern government across the globe. Much of the language and rhetoric used in recent months, in discourses centred on the pandemic crisis, is the kind of language normally associated with a war. War is an education, as much as educationitself is also, in a way, a situation similar to a form of war.
This current type of language use should be compared with the rhetorical language used in discourses relating to the climate emergency, where the message from 99% of the scientific community is that the urgency for real action cannot be understated.
What we are learning in this crisis is how Political, economic and capitalist interests are using science now, with this crisis, to avoid taking responsibility. The tactic seems to include pushing the science to the front, as a kind of screen of disinformation, to justify political decisions that are not being made in the light of day, and in the end it is science that will be blamed. The consequences of this relationship between power and science, will likely prove to be disastrous, especially for the poor and vulnerable. And the scale of such a disaster will pale into insignificance if the current climate emergency is not faced up to honestly and realistically.
Richard Horton, a doctor and editor of the Lancet writes this sobering opinion piece, published in the Guardian (Thu 9 April 2020) under this headline and subheading:
Coronavirus is the greatest global science policy failure in a generation
The warnings of doctors and scientists were ignored, with fatal results
Richard Horton writes:
We knew this was coming. In her 1994 warning to the world, The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett concluded: “While the human race battles itself, fighting over ever more crowded turf and scarcer resources, the advantage moves to the microbes’ court. They are our predators and they will be victorious if we, Homo sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational global village that affords the microbes few opportunities.”
If you think her language hyperbolic, consider the more sober analysis from theUS Institute of Medicinein 2004. It evaluated the lessons of the 2003 Sars outbreak, quoting Goethe: “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” It concluded that “the rapid containment of Sars is a success in public health, but also a warning … If Sars reoccurs … health systems worldwide will be put under extreme pressure … Continued vigilance is vital.”
But the world ignored these warnings.
Ian Boyd, a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government between 2012 and 2019, recently recalled “a practice run for an influenza pandemic in which about 200,000 people died. It left me shattered.” But did the experience trigger government action? “We learnt what would help, but did not necessarily implement those lessons,” Boyd said.
Austerity blunted the ambition and commitment of government to protect its people. The political objective was to diminish the size and role of the state. The result was to leave the country fatally weakened. Whatever the reasons for failing to act upon the lessons of Sars and influenza simulations, the fact remained, as Boyd summed it up, “we were poorly prepared”.
The global response to Sars-CoV-2 is the greatest science policy failure in a generation. The signals were clear. Hendra in 1994, Nipah in 1998, Sars in 2003, Mers in 2012 and Ebola in 2014; these major human epidemics were all caused by viruses that originated in animal hosts and crossed over into humans. Covid-19 is caused by a new variant of the same coronavirus that caused Sars.
That the warning signs went unheeded is unsurprising. Few of us have experienced a pandemic, and we are all guilty of ignoring information that doesn’t reflect our own experience of the world. Catastrophes reveal the weakness of human memory. How can one plan for a random rare event – surely the sacrifices will be too great? But, as the seismologist Lucy Jones argues in her 2018 book The Big Ones, “natural hazards are inevitable; the disaster is not”.
The first duty of government is to protect its citizens. The risks of a pandemic can be measured and quantified. As Garrett and the Institute of Medicine showed, the dangers of a new epidemic have been known and understood since the emergence of HIV in the 1980s. Since then, 75 million people have been infected with the disease and 32 million have died. HIV may not have swept through the world at the same pace as Sars-CoV-2, but its long shadow should have alerted governments to prepare for an outbreak of a new virus.
During a crisis, the public and politicians alike understandably turn to experts. But on this occasion, the experts – scientists who have modelled and simulated our possible futures – made assumptions that turned out to be mistaken. The UK imagined the pandemic would be much like influenza. The influenza virus is not benign – the number of annual deaths from influenza in the UK varies widely, with a recent peak of 28,330 deaths in 2014-15 – but influenza is not Covid-19.
China, by contrast, was scarred by its experience of Sars. When the government realised that a new virus was circulating, Chinese officials didn’t advise hand washing, a better cough etiquette and disposing of tissues. They quarantined entire cities and shut down the economy.
As one former secretary of state for health in England put it to me, our scientists suffered from a “cognitive bias” towards the milder threat of influenza.
Perhaps that is why the key government committee, the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group (Nervtag), concluded on 21 February, three weeks after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency of international concern, that they had no objection to Public Health England’s “moderate” risk assessment of the disease to the UK population. That was a genuinely fatal error of judgement.
Failure to escalate the risk assessment led to mortal delays in preparing the NHS for the coming wave of infections. The desperate pleas I have received from frontline NHS staff are painful to read. “Nursing burnout is at an all-time high and a lot of our heroic nursing staff are on the verge of emotional breakdown.”“It is sickening that this is happening, and that somehow this country thinks it’s OK to let some members of staff get sick, get ventilated, or die.”“I feel like a soldier going to war without a gun.” “It’s suicide.” “I’m sick of being called a hero because if I had any choice I wouldn’t be coming to work.”
The availability of, and access to, appropriate personal protective equipment has been appallingly bad for many nurses and doctors. Some hospital trusts have planned well. But many have been unable to provide the necessary safe equipment to their frontline teams.
At every press conference, the government spokesperson always includes the same line: “We have been following the medical and scientific advice.” It’s a good line. And it’s partly true. But the government knew the NHS was unprepared. It knew it had failed to build the necessary intensive care surge capacity to meet the likely patient demand. As one doctor wrote to me: “It seems that nobody wants to learn from the human tragedy that happened in Italy, China, Spain … This is really sad … Doctors and scientists who are not able to learn from one another.”
We’re supposed to be living through the Anthropocene, an era where human activity has become the dominant influence on the environment. The idea of the Anthropocene conjures notions of human omnipotence. But Covid-19 has revealed the astonishing fragility of our societies. It has exposed our inability to cooperate, to coordinate, and to act together. But perhaps we can’t control the natural world after all. Perhaps we are not quite as dominant as we once thought.
If Covid-19 eventually imbues human beings with some humility, it’s possible that we will, after all, be receptive to the lessons of this lethal pandemic. Or perhaps we will sink back into our culture of complacent exceptionalism and await the next plague that will surely arrive. To go by recent history, that moment will come sooner than we think.
The Anthropocene . . .
This story of geological epochs was adjusted in 2016 to add the latest era, when scientists declared the dawn of a human-influenced age, and to be called the Anthropocene, a term first coined in 2000 by the Nobel prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen.
Damian Carrington covers the story of this change in his article for the Guardian (Mon 29 Aug 2016) under the sub heading:
Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.
The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration.
The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene.
“The significance of the Anthropocene is that it sets a different trajectory for the Earth system, of which we of course are part,” said Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester and chair of the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA), which started work in 2009.
“If our recommendation is accepted, the Anthropocene will have started just a little before I was born,” he said. “We have lived most of our lives in something called the Anthropocene and are just realising the scale and permanence of the change.”
Prof Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and WGA secretary, said: “Being able to pinpoint an interval of time is saying something about how we have had an incredible impact on the environment of our planet. The concept of the Anthropocene manages to pull all these ideas of environmental change together.”
Prof Chris Rapley, a climate scientist at University College London and former director of the Science Museum in London said: “The Anthropocene marks a new period in which our collective activities dominate the planetary machinery.
“Since the planet is our life support system – we are essentially the crew of a largish spaceship – interference with its functioning at this level and on this scale is highly significant. If you or I were crew on a smaller spacecraft, it would be unthinkable to interfere with the systems that provide us with air, water, fodder and climate control. But the shift into the Anthropocene tells us that we are playing with fire, a potentially reckless mode of behaviour which we are likely to come to regret unless we get a grip on the situation.” Rapley is not part of the WGA.
Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and former president of the Royal Society, said that the dawn of the Anthropocene was a significant moment. “The darkest prognosis for the next millennium is that bio, cyber or environmental catastrophes could foreclose humanity’s immense potential, leaving a depleted biosphere,” he said.
But Lord Rees added that there is also cause for optimism. “Human societies could navigate these threats, achieve a sustainable future, and inaugurate eras of post-human evolution even more marvellous than what’s led to us. The dawn of the Anthropocene epoch would then mark a one-off transformation from a natural world to one where humans jumpstart the transition to electronic (and potentially immortal) entities, that transcend our limitations and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth.”
The evidence of humanity’s impact on the planet is overwhelming, but the changes are very recent in geological terms, where an epoch usually spans tens of millions of years. “One criticism of the Anthropocene as geology is that it is very short,” said Zalasiewicz. “Our response is that many of the changes are irreversible.”
To define a new geological epoch, a signal must be found that occurs globally and will be incorporated into deposits in the future geological record. For example, the extinction of the dinosaurs 66m years ago at the end of the Cretaceous epoch is defined by a “golden spike” in sediments around the world of the metal iridium, which was dispersed from the meteorite that collided with Earth to end the dinosaur age.
For the Anthropocene, the best candidate for such a golden spike are radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests, which were blown into the stratosphere before settling down to Earth. “The radionuclides are probably the sharpest – they really come on with a bang,” said Zalasiewicz. “But we are spoiled for choice. There are so many signals.” Advertisement
Other spikes being considered as evidence of the onset of the Anthropocene include the tough, unburned carbon spheres emitted by power stations. “The Earth has been smoked, with signals very clearly around the world in the mid-20th century,” said Zalasiewicz.
Other candidates include plastic pollution, aluminium and concrete particles, and high levels of nitrogen and phosphate in soils, derived from artificial fertilisers. Although the world is currently seeing only the sixth mass extinction of species in the 700m-year history of complex life on Earth, this is unlikely to provide a useful golden spike as the animals are by definition very rare and rarely dispersed worldwide.
In contrast, some species have with human help spread rapidly across the world. The domestic chicken is a serious contender to be a fossil that defines the Anthropocene for future geologists. “Since the mid-20th century, it has become the world’s most common bird. It has been fossilised in thousands of landfill sites and on street corners around the world,” said Zalasiewicz. “It is is also a much bigger bird with a different skeleton than its prewar ancestor.”
The 35 scientists on the WGA – who voted 30 to three in favour of formally designating the Anthropocene, with two abstentions – will now spend the next two to three years determining which signals are the strongest and sharpest. Crucially, they must also decide a location which will define the start of the Anthropocene. Geological divisions are not defined by dates but by a specific boundary between layers of rock or, in the case of the Holocene, a boundary between two ice layers in a core taken from Greenland and now stored in Denmark.
The scientists are focusing on sites where annual layers are formed and are investigating mud sediments off the coast of Santa Barbara in California and the Ernesto cave in northern Italy, where stalactites and stalagmites accrete annual rings. Lake sediments, ice cores from Antarctica, corals, tree rings and even layers of rubbish in landfill sites are also being considered.
Once the data has been assembled, it will be formally submitted to the stratigraphic authorities and the Anthropocene could be officially adopted within a few years. “If we were very lucky and someone came forward with, say, a core from a classic example of laminated sediments in a deep marine environment, I think three years is possibly viable,” said Zalasiewicz.
This would be lightning speed for such a geological decision, which in the past would have taken decades and even centuries to make. The term Anthropocene was coined only in 2000, by the Nobel prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen, who believes the name change is overdue. He said in 2011: “This name change stresses the enormity of humanity’s responsibility as stewards of the Earth.” Crutzen also identified in 2007 what he called the “great acceleration” of human impacts on the planet from the mid-20th century.
Despite the WGA’s expert recommendation, the declaration of the Anthropocene is not yet a foregone conclusion. “Our stratigraphic colleagues are very protective of the geological time scale. They see it very rightly as the backbone of geology and they do not amend it lightly,” said Zalasiewicz. “But I think we can prepare a pretty good case.”
Rapley also said there was a strong case: “It is highly appropriate that geologists should pay formal attention to a change in the signal within sedimentary rock layers that will be clearly apparent to future generations of geologists for as long as they exist. The ‘great acceleration’ constitutes a strong, detectable and incontrovertible signal.” Evidence of the Anthropocene Human activity has:
Pushed extinction rates of animals and plants far above the long-term average. The Earth is on course to see 75% of species become extinct in the next few centuries if current trends continue.
Increased levels of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere at the fastest rate for 66m years, with fossil-fuel burning pushing levels from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 400ppm and rising today.
Put so much plastic in our waterways and oceans that microplastic particles are now virtually ubiquitous, and plastics will likely leave identifiable fossil records for future generations to discover.
Doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our soils in the past century with fertiliser use. This is likely to be the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle in 2.5bn years.
Left a permanent layer of airborne particulates in sediment and glacial ice such as black carbon from fossil fuel burning.
A state shift represents . . .
. . . a fundamental turning point in the life of our biosphere system.
Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietzsche's madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion: although industrial Europe had reduced divine influence to the semi-compulsory Sunday-morning church attendance, nineteenth-century society couldn't imagine a world without god. The twenty-first century has an analogue: it's easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism.
We need an intellectual state shift to accompany our new epoch.
The first task is one of linguistic rigor. to note a problem in naming our new geological epoch the Anthropocene. The root, anthropos (Greek for "human"), suggests that it's just humans being humans, in the way that kids will be kids or snakes will be snakes, that has caused climate change and the planet's sixth mass extinction. It's true that humans have been changing the planet since the end of the last ice-age. A hunting rate slightly higher than the replenishment rate over centuries, together with shifting climate and grasslands, spelled the end for the Colombian Plains mammoth in North America, the orangutan's over-stuffed relative the Gigantopithecus in east Asia, and the giant Irish elk Megaloceros giganteus in Europe. Humans may even have been partly responsible for tempering the a global cooling phase tweleve thousand years ago through agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions.
Hunting large animals to extinction is one thing, but the speed and scale of destruction today can't be extrapolated from the activities of our knuckle-dragging forebears. Today's human activity isn't exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue that what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400's, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene.
Using this name means taking capitalism seriously, understanding it not just as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature.
Mongabay is a significant resource for all those concerned with the degradation of nature on the frontline, be it rainforests, the oceans and the planet's biodiversity in all its wildlife. Yesterday, looking forward to the 50th Earth Day next Wednesday, 22 April 2020, the website posted an Audio Newscastby Mike Gaworecki (14 April 2020):
The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22nd, 1970 in the United States. As many as 20 million people across the country got involved, and the event is widely considered to have marked the birth of the modern environmental movement. Today, the Earth Day Network coordinates events in more than 190 countries around the world and estimates that a billion people take part in Earth Day celebrations. This April 22nd, of course, many of us will still be under orders to stay in our homes or will be otherwise quarantining or self-isolating. But a half-century of the environmental movement is such a big moment that it must be commemorated. How have Earth Day celebrations changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic?
How do we keep attention focused on environmental issues during such a widespread health crisis — a health crisis born of our mistreatment of the environment?
How do we push back on attempts to use the crisis as cover for pushing through environmentally damaging projects and policies? How do we keep hope and inspiration alive that we can build a better tomorrow for the planet, for people, and for all the creatures we share the planet with?
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