how to save the world

In praise of the vernacular.

photo of Ivan Illich (2nd left) and Gustavo Esteva (2nd right), from Radical Ecological Democracy

The idea of ‘practicing’ how we might live in the societies that emerge after civilization’s collapse has always interested me. I’m convinced that we’re not likely going to be able to create viable models of new ways to live, at least not at any scale, until our current global industrial civilization culture has collapsed and ‘gotten out of the way’. But why not practice now anyway, and learn a thing or two in the process?

This is what underlies my fascination with Intentional Communities, which are, in many cases, attempts to do just that — to find a more resilient, sustainable, humane, peaceful and connected way to live and make a living together than the ones on offer from our global industrial civilization. While there are some remarkable, enduring exceptions, most of these ‘model communities’ rarely last. The reasons for that are complicated and varied (loss of founders, financial problems, unreasonable expectations, inequitable workload, dysfunctional members etc.)

In any case, it’s unlikely that anything we learn now will be of much use to post-civilization societies when they emerge — in a generation, a century, or even a millennium from now. And it’s far from certain our species will survive at all. Still, there’s no harm thinking about what models might work, and, perhaps more importantly, about the factors that distinguish those that work from those that don’t.

There are two dangerous tendencies among those who like to think about creating alternative models of how humans ‘should’ live — (i) the tendency to idealize, and invent a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model that fits with one’s personal (often impracticable) ideals and parochial worldview, and (ii) the tendency to think that any effective community model can be ‘designed’ top-down, rather than it just emerging and evolving, through the collective efforts of its participants, to meet uniquely local, ‘vernacular’ needs.

As an incorrigible idealist myself, I confess that, especially in its early years, this blog was replete with idealistic models of better ways to live and be in the world, which are now mostly cringe-worthy. I refuse to take them down because they remind me of past errors in my thinking, and hopefully prevent me from making the same errors again.

And as an impatient person who loves to design things, I confess I have often thought I ‘knew better’ what needed to be done in a particular situation than the people actually personally steeped in the problem. I have often later apologized for my hubris.

I preface this article with those caveats because two of the people who tried valiantly to develop alternative models to the capitalistic crypto-democratic hierarchical massive-scale globalized systems we are struggling with today (and watching fall apart) were staunch, almost rabid, idealists. They were Ivan Illich (1926-2002) and Gustavo Esteva (1936-2022 — a victim of CoVid-19).

What I appreciated about these two, who knew each other well and worked together in some of the most impoverished parts of México, is that they had the courage to try to implement their vision and model of a better way to live in the communities they were adopted into and grew to love. Nothing like a dose of practical reality to take the polished edge off your idealism.

Both of them had seen (mostly from the work of religious missionaries) the carnage that results from attempts to impose an ideology (religious, political, or economic), and even impose a way of being, on an entire population. Instead, as Ivan put it, it’s essential to understand and embrace the vernacular — the ways that have emerged and evolved in each local place to suit their unique circumstances and cultures, ways that “made poverty tolerable” there.

Ivan focused much of his attention on two rigid, imposed European-model systems — education and ‘health care’. The alternative, community-based, community-responsive systems he strove to implement were ‘convivial’ — based on local knowledge and local connection, and on the development of demonstrated competencies, not academic degrees.

He fiercely defended his uncompromising ideals — including that the precondition for creating more responsive, effective, local communities and competencies was the complete abolition of the existing systems. He intuitively understood that radical change was not possible as long as the existing systems, dysfunctional as they were, remained in place, with their inevitably invested, change-resistant, staunch defenders.

He described the ‘health care system’ as inherently iatrogenic — causing and increasing disease rather than reducing it — and favoured systems that empowered the ‘patient’ citizen to learn enough to self-diagnose and self-treat many illnesses, to prevent rather than treat illnesses, and to work as a partner with community health care practitioners instead of waiting for the practitioners to just tell them what was wrong and what to do.

His colleague Gustavo worked closely with the Zapatistas to support their efforts to create a revolutionary, autonomous state free from Méxican government interference and ‘help’. He established the anti-authoritarian unschooling Universidad de la Tierra and spent his life working against the “hegemony” of both nation-states and corporate oligopolies, which he saw as dysfunctional institutions that needed to be abolished. A better alternative, he insisted, would come from indigenous communities themselves, developing local solutions that they would then share with other communities. The educational, political, economic, health care and other systems being forced on nations all over the world had never worked for the benefit of the citizens, he said, nor could they be reformed. They needed to be replaced.

Both men were extremely outspoken, often controversial, and not always particularly liked. They both intuitively loathed institutions and institutional ‘solutions’, believing that they were inflexible, incapable of evolving and learning, and that they incapacitated citizens from learning to do things for themselves. Even fans and positive reviewers of their work often criticized much of what they said for “going too far”.

Here’s my brief summary of what I thought were the main points from two of Ivan’s best-known books, with some excerpts of his principal ideas. And here’s an article by Gustavo explaining his “path to freedom” for communities. They’ll give you a bit of a flavour for their beliefs and approaches in their own words.

What are the shared principles that underlie small-scale, autonomous ‘vernacular’ systems that have emerged and evolved in indigenous communities and enabled their citizens to thrive? I don’t know that they have ever been specifically articulated, but I thought I would try to identify some of them. There is probably no ‘process’ that could necessarily nurture this emergence; like most natural systems, it’s a matter of trial and error, and learning and evolving by doing. Here’s what I came up with (it’s far from complete):

The emergence of effective ways to be in community requires:

1.  That the members of the community learn and practice the ‘convivial’ arts of listening, conversation, collaboration, consensus building, critical thinking, conflict resolution, self-management, and self-directed learning — a curiosity-driven ‘learning how to learn’ for oneself instead of having to be ‘taught’.
2. A deep understanding and appreciation of the local land and its inhabitants, all the forms of life including humans who ‘belong’ to the land; and hence what the land and its inhabitants offer, and what they need, and a continuous effort to sustainably draw on (accept, gift, harvest) what they offer and to meet their needs, cooperatively. And an ethic that enables everyone to appreciate when the interests of the community outweigh personal interests.
3. Constant opportunities to learn and practice new capacities, both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, to hone these capacities through working with self-selected mentors, watching demonstrations, apprenticing, and through doing and learning from facilitated practice and from mistakes, rather than ‘schooling’ or textbook-based ‘instruction’. And from play! [I saw this learning-from-demonstrations-and-apprenticing ably demonstrated during my short visit with Joe Bageant in a small village in Belize many years ago.]
4. Nurturing the capacity in each of us to take care of our own and others’ health and well-being, including preventative actions (such as a good diet and exercise and accident prevention), self-diagnostic and self-treatment capacities, and understanding what constitutes a ‘good death’. And it requires ensuring that every child achieves the sense of secure attachment and the capacity to be authentic and true to him- or herself, free from abuse, that are needed to grow up to be a healthy, competent, non-dependent adult within a healthy, competent, self-sufficient community.
5. The nurturing of opportunities to give vent to our passions to create and express ourselves through the arts, and to explore, and to discover.
6. A capacity to create lasting confederations with other nearby communities, each respecting each other’s autonomy and unique ways, but also supporting each other in facing shared challenges.
7. The creation of structures (eg for housing and transportation) that maximize conviviality and connection, and minimize isolation.
8. An appreciation of the need to keep the community small, resilient, autonomous, adaptable, and in balance with the rest of life on the land (ie the objective is never ‘growth’).
9. In all of the above, a continuing collective self-assessment of how the community is doing in each of these areas, and a collective determination of remedial actions when necessary.

There are probably many other requirements that a post-civ community will have to accommodate to thrive when our species starts over (probably again and again) after civilization’s collapse, to learn how to live as part of and in concert with all-life-on-earth. Thinking about what I have observed and read about wild creatures, it seems to me they mostly have these capacities, remarkably without the need for language to acquire or sustain them.

We also surely have much to learn from indigenous communities and those who have lived in them, though I suspect that, because their cultures have been so diminished by the destruction of their ways of life by our industrial civilization, that wisdom is quickly being lost.

I think Ivan and Gustavo, were they to look at the above list, would say that these were some of the qualities they spent their lives trying to help the communities they worked with, to achieve.

So this is not a model, a prescription, a process, a recipe, or even a set of ingredients for a functional community. It’s really, I think, just a list of preconditions for any successful human culture. Almost none of these preconditions are present, I would say, in most of our current cultures, or at least our western cultures. There is no prescription for how these preconditions might or could or should be met; they are emergent properties, not something that can be planned for or imposed. We will learn to meet them when we have to — or not. And most of that learning will likely have to await the collapse of the existing systems that consume almost all of our time and attention, and which fiercely resist such alternative ways of being and doing.

In reading this list, though, the joyful pessimist in me believes that some day in the long distant future there could well be many flourishing (probably largely tribal) human societies that meet these preconditions. Much will depend, I think, on our capacity to deal with the affliction of our species’ large brains and the separate, fearful selves they have concocted, inventions that, I suspect, make creating and sustaining cohesive communities so much harder than it has to be.

Me, I just watch the local community of crows out my window, with wonder and awe. They obviously meet all these preconditions and do all these things, in spades.

Y’know, what healthy creatures do.

I want to apologize for the ads that appeared on of one of my recent posts on the version sent out by follow.it to email subscribers — I failed to renew my premium membership that allows these emails to go out without ads. Hopefully I won’t forget again.

image by Midjourney AI; not my prompt

Recently, some mostly right-wing opinionators* have been tut-tutting about the extensive research that suggests that long-term, even generational trauma underlies much of the violence and hatred we see playing out in the world today. Their argument seems to be that war, violence and cruelty have always been with us, and so it makes no sense to argue that we are, as a species, any more traumatized than we have been in centuries past. Their implication is that past generations were just more self-disciplined and hence better behaved than we are.

Of course, they’re entitled to their opinion, and since studies of human behaviour lack the rigour of scientific evidence, it’s hard to prove them wrong. I cannot speak about the experience of previous generations — it may be that in the past, religion, political and social indoctrination, and other forms of conditioning made humans more self-restrained and self-censoring, sublimating and turning their trauma inward instead of expressing it outwardly in acts of violence, except behind closed doors.

But if you believe, as I do, that our behaviour is simply the reflection of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment, then the expression of our internal trauma (a form of mental illness) through external acts of physical and psychological violence would seem almost tautological. If our species has been rendered pathological by the stresses and traumas of living in a horrifically fast-changing, perilous, brutal, scarcity-plagued, uncertain, disconnected, insensitive, unfathomable, seemingly out-of-control and massively over-crowded and fragile civilization, it only makes sense that that pathology would be manifested in acts of brutal cruelty, extreme hatred, violence, war, and genocide as this civilization falls over the brink into collapse.

One of the whipping-boys of the opinionators is the idea (of psychologists) that to prevent early trauma, humans need, in early childhood, a sense of secure attachment (to their mothers, primarily, but also to their ‘tribe’ and to the place where they ‘belong’), and also need the ability to be their authentic selves and to relate to other people authentically.

Secure attachment from infancy means, in substance, that you know you will be cared for and looked after, and that you will therefore develop the capacity and the belief in the importance of caring for and looking after others. Authenticity means that when you are asked something, you are not afraid to tell the truth, and not afraid to say what you really believe, out of fear of adverse consequences for doing so.

Secure attachment enables the development of trust and mutuality, self-confidence, and connection to others, and is arguably a prerequisite to genuinely caring about other people and the world. Authenticity enables the development of a coherent sense of identity, beliefs and worldview, and comfort in your sense of who you are and where and how you stand in relation to others and the world.

“Nonsense,” say the opinionators. “All it requires is a bit of backbone, self-control, and a strong moral upbringing to overcome not having these things in early childhood. No need to baby people to have them behave decently.”

In this short video, Gabor Maté summarizes the counter-argument to this. “Trauma is not what happens to you,” he says, “trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” In this video, he explains how what happened inside you (often as a result of your lack of attachment or incapacity for authenticity in early childhood) will get triggered for the rest of your life when an incident occurs that reminds you in any way of what provoked that traumatic feeling inside you. It hence becomes part of your conditioning. The result can be pathological behaviour — constant neurotic feelings of abandonment, inadequacy, profound distrust, betrayal, and extreme suppression of emotions, leading to acts of hatred, cruelty, and violence.

This traumatizing ‘feeling inside of you’ that happened in early childhood is, Gabor explains, actually a coping mechanism, a survival technique, and is your body’s way of recognizing and alerting you about a danger or hurt, so you can supposedly ‘deal’ with it. But if you grow up not being allowed to accept yourself, listen to your ‘gut’ feelings, or express yourself authentically, you may be left with no way to deal with this hurt, so it just festers. “If your ‘survival’ depends on you being a certain way (pathological, inauthentic, dishonest, suppressing your feelings), you’re not going to give it up that easily”.

A lot of Gabor’s interviews have titles about ‘how’ to ‘heal’ from a lack of attachment or authenticity stemming from your earliest childhood. But what he talks about is not a process, but rather a sustained practice developing self-awareness about what it was that, in any particular stressful situation in your life, provoked an angry, sad, or fearful response in you, and what childhood trigger underlay that response, which is rarely related to what actually occurred in that moment. And if you can recognize that it was childhood trauma being triggered and not actually the events of the current moment that produced your reaction, you can then, he says, start to understand and heal from it.

I’m not sure where I stand on the possibility of (self-)healing from the effects of trauma. I think for some of us, though not by any means all of us, our conditioning might equip us to be sufficiently self-aware to heal. But I can accept that it is this triggering of childhood trauma that underlies and enables the ferocious emotional reaction that leads to the (uniquely human) propensity to commit the acts of cruelty, abuse, hatred, violence, war, and genocide that we see everywhere in the world today.

And those suffering from severe trauma who are also in positions of power (and sociopaths often seem to seek power as a futile means of gaining control over their seemingly out-of-control lives), will exploit this knowledge of how trauma works and can be triggered, to ‘deliberately’ (though they actually have no choice over their behaviour) provoke a traumatized response in others — to foment a mob into furious violence, an army into war, or a nation into hate and extremism, for example — by playing on others’ deeply-entrenched anger, fear, and sadness, triggering the emotional response born of internal trauma in each of us.

So I look at the profoundly pathological behaviours of Biden, Trump, Netanyahu, Zelenskyy, and Putin, for example, and I can kind of see how their seemingly irrational behaviour might easily be the result of conditioned, reflexive, trauma-invoked behaviours, responses and triggers stemming from early childhood. And I can see how these men could, given their situations, have likewise been prone to provoke angry, fearful, grief-stricken responses in their colleagues and in their many followers, that have led to such horrific acts of violence by all of them.

Like these sociopathic men, we are all conditioned, and in our species, sadly, it seems much of our conditioning is complicated by trauma, and much of our behaviour therefore ends up being the acting out of that trauma.

Our brutal, frenzied, precarious, disconnected civilization has inevitably, I think, created an environment and circumstances that preclude most of us from developing a sense of secure attachment and a capacity for authenticity when we are young. And the result is that almost all of us have been, I think, to a lesser or greater degree, traumatized and made mentally ill. The desperation that will inevitably accompany the deepening collapse of this civilization may make that situation considerably worse.

In the meantime, some of us, at least, might, through self-awareness of our feelings and what is really triggering them, heal ourselves somewhat from our own personal trauma. That healing will be pretty important in determining what our collective conditioned responses will be to the polycrisis of civilizational collapse. The more of us who are able to keep our wits about us, and not fall victim to the very human propensity to be triggered by, and act out, our trauma, in much of what we do, the better we are likely to cope as a species on the long way down.

* I kinda like this term. I find it applies across the political spectrum to people who offer nothing to a debate or discussion except their personal uninformed or misinformed opinion (or that of someone whose opinions they parrot uncritically), and who mistake righteous indignation for passionate argument. Almost all of what passes for relevant discussion in the mainstream media (notably the op-eds) and in social media is, IMO, nothing but opinionating. But that’s just my opinion.

image from Midjourney AI; not my prompt

None of it makes sense. It all makes sense. Or rather, none of it has to make sense. It is not about what is sensible, or in any group’s rational self-interest. We will go mad if we try to justify our headlong charge into civilizational chaos and collapse, our staggering cruelty to non-human creatures and our hate-fuelled slaughter of millions of other humans, as being logical, sensible, rational, or within anyone’s control.

This is what the relentless conditioning of billions of humans in our horrifically overcrowded world, riven by fear, hatred and insecurity, inevitably has led to. It could not have unfolded any other way, and will continue to unfold the only way it can, with all of us, doing our (mostly lousy) best, helpless to change it. Nothing to do with ‘pure evil’, or madness (unless you count the ubiquitous mental stress of living like rats jammed into a cage wracked by scarcity and dread as a form of madness). It’s just how this civilization is playing out. For most of us in the west, everything is slowly falling apart. For those in much of the world, collapse is already well-advanced.

All that can possibly be done is to accept it, and to start to learn to adapt to what is happening now and what is undeniably going to happen. And we can’t even do that.

COLLAPSE WATCH

What happens when governments decide that social support during a pandemic is “too expensive” to sustain; thanks to Indrajit Samarajiva for the link. Imagine what will happen when the government, bankrupted by military spending and economic collapse, abandons its social security and health commitments to its citizens.

Jim Hansen talks with Paul Beckwith: The retired NASA Director explains how the IPCC is absurdly underestimating the pace of climate collapse, as catastrophic warming of 2ºC is now likely within 15 years, and 10ºC of warming is now ‘baked in’ based on pollution levels already exceeded. Meanwhile the UNEP similarly underestimates warming, saying their current projection is just 3ºC by 2100.

Human population to fall back below 2B this century: Population expert Bill Rees crunches the numbers on how many people a climate-ravaged planet could support. And that’s with just 4ºC of warming.

Five more tipping points: A new report describes five more catastrophic tipping points that will be unleashed when we pass 1.5ºC of warming, which is now likely to happen this year instead of the 2030 date predicted just two years ago.

Frauds take over COP28: Hundreds of lobbyists looking for government funding of debunked technologies like Carbon Capture and Storage, and Cap-and-Trade systems, have turned COP28 into a farcical industrial trade fair.

Smoke-and-mirrors “growth”: The Honest Sorcerer explains how economic contraction, a prelude to economic collapse brought on by the end of cheap energy, is now occurring, disguised by fake GDP numbers counting financial and legal “activities” that produce nothing of value and add nothing to the economy. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

The health costs of climate collapse: The Lancet has projected a staggering number of heat deaths, deaths from drought and starvation, and deaths from a surge in tropical diseases by mid-century, again based on just 1.5ºC to 2ºC of warming.

Alberta methane release underestimated by 50%: The Alberta oil industry and government regulators have failed to count a third of the horrifically-damaging methane released by its oil & gas projects.

Do we have the ‘free will’ to tackle climate collapse?: Energy expert Richard Heinberg summarizes Robert Sapolsky’s new book denying human free will, and comes down uncomfortably on the “yes, we kind of have some” fence. Ouch. Thanks to Bart Anderson for the link.

LIVING BETTER

cartoon by Michael Leunig, of course

How not to age: Michael Greger’s new book, with 13,000 citations of research reports, summarizes what we all can do to live healthier and longer lives using just diet and exercise. Caveat: He’s a whole-plant-food supporter who warns about paleo and low-carb diets, with the research to back it up. Video summarization of the book here. Transcript of that video here. Kind of folksy review of the book including an interview with Michael here.

Learning from “the Troubles”: Naked Capitalism suggests, without much hope, that the slow, careful, patient process used to achieve a lasting peace in Northern Ireland might be useful for those seriously looking to achieve peace in Palestine.

More books to understand the world: Part 2 of a list of books useful for both appreciating the history of the challenges we face in the world, and coping with them. Even includes some books on non-duality! (If you’re interested in the earlier post, Part 1 is here.)

What (most of) the world considers human rights: The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Kinda depressing how flagrantly they’re being violated and ignored by countries that at least at one time signalled that they supported them. Thanks to Gerry Gras for the link.

Gabor Maté on what we need as children: Why secure attachment and authenticity from early childhood are so important to our mental health, and how trauma destroys them: Brief, brilliant, six-minute clip from a recent interview with Gabor, despite the annoying interviewer.

Self-Directed Learning: A summary of how SDL differs from “schooling”. Thanks to Tasha Gee for the link.

The pseudoscience of “homeopathy”: A sparkling takedown by Rebecca Watson.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Blinken/Biden peace protesters; video from CBC

What if there are no answers to many current conflicts?: Aurélien delves at length into some of the most long-lasting and scarring conflicts in modern history, and suggests there may be nothing that we can do to heal them. Excerpt:

It’s not just that western interventions have often been disastrous, it’s that the belief in “solutions”, particularly inclusive, just, equitable, comprehensive, lasting etc. etc. is a misunderstanding of the situations we are confronted with, and a misreading of history. The struggle between dominant and subordinate groups, and the drawing of nation-state borders have been violent affairs throughout history. We may be able, and we should certainly try, to make the process more rapid and less bloody where we can. But we should not fool ourselves into thinking there are “solutions” ready to implement. Sometimes the best that we can do is to manage intractable problems as well as we can. Sometimes there is no way out.

And Aurélien follows up in a later article with an analysis of how fear and oppression work in a reinforcing cycle in areas of conflict, inevitably leading to calls for a “final solution” to end the cycle (though that has never worked successfully). Excerpt:

If your objective is explicitly to create an ethno-nationalist-religious state, then the very presence of people of a different ethnicity or religion within your state is a security threat, which you are bound to fear will one day destroy you. This leads ineluctably to a policy of repression, exclusion from power, and ultimately expulsion and violence. But with every hostile act against other populations, you start to fear, quite reasonably, that you are creating even more resentment which will one day blow back against you. But you cannot change your objective, then that fear leads to more repression, which leads to more fear, which leads … And in the end, voices arise, saying that the only real solution is the complete expulsion, or even extermination, of the Others, and logically they are right, for some values of “solution.”

So what we are seeing in Gaza is not a “war”, or a national or international armed conflict, though it might superficially resemble one. It is the age-old story of the use of violence by the strong against the weak, in order that the strong should dominate and control the territory they claim, and thus feel safe. And it is hard to see why this episode should end any more positively, or any less violently, than comparable previous episodes in history have done.

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Thanks to John Whiting for many of these links. Short takes:

• The extremist US Supreme Court looks likely to rule that the SEC, and perhaps all other US government regulators, have no right to prosecute offenders and must take all regulatory enforcement actions through the regular (expensive and sclerotic) US legal system, effectively, some say, rendering them all impotent to enforce the law, and unleashing an unstoppable “white collar” crime wave.
• The Pentagon has failed its 6th successive audit, and is utterly unable to account for hundreds of billions of dollars of annual spending.
• In Ukraine, the war is lost, and the will and money to continue it has run out, but the political interference by the US/NATO continues:
  • the evidence is now clear that Ukraine and Russia were ready to sign a peace agreement in March 2022 until it was scuttled by the US and UK;
  • there’s new evidence they’re still trying to negotiate an agreement, not involving US/NATO at all so that both sides can claim some sort of “victory”;
  • meanwhile, the US and NATO continue to use the western media to deny the overwhelming evidence that Biden authorized the Nord Stream pipeline bombings.
• While governments dodder, those who try to offer a safe supply of illegal drugs are regularly raided and shut down by police.
• Jezebel is the latest progressive publication to be shuttered by new owners “because it isn’t profitable”.
• AIPAC plans to spent $100M to “primary” the Squad and other progressive members of Congress and replace them with right-wing, pro-Zionist Democrats, some of whom have been offered flat-out $20M bribes to run against Squad members.
• The current right-wing dictatorship in Guatemala is squeezing the country’s judiciary to arrest and imprison the newly-elected socialist president so he cannot take power.
• And the latest Hunter Biden “charges” appear to be little more than a revamped attempt to let him off with a wrist slap for his crimes, so that he doesn’t hurt daddy’s re-election bid.
• In Palestine, Israel’s horrific genocide and ethnic cleansing continues unabated, with Biden’s full support:
  • the horror inside a bombed Gazan hospital, completely unable to function
  • the long history of dislocation, brutality and hatred of Palestinians at Israel’s hands
  • what Hamas really stands for
  • is this a replay of Israel’s 1982 invasion? (thanks to Gerry Gras for the link)
  • Canada votes against peace in Palestine, and then votes for peace, kind of; like in Iraq, the tide of public opinion is turning, but way too slowly for the victims
  • Peter Dimock’s eloquent public plea for an immediate ceasefire
  • Ralph Nader’s eloquent public plea for an immediate ceasefire
  • Aaron Maté (son of Gabor) talks with Al Jazeera about the hostage exchange, and shows video of the actual exchange
  • John Mearsheimer summarizes the “crime against humanity” and the facts that warrant prosecuting Biden and Netanyahu as war criminals

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

• After a long period of censorship, a few western media are finally daring to let Palestinians tell their story: starting with NPR, the CBC, and the Independent
• What happens when you try to confront a US right-winger on a train about genocide (you get arrested and kicked off the train)
• Behind Biden’s posturing on Israel and Palestine
• Why the Guardian excised bin Laden’s “letter to America” from its site
• I don’t much like Matt Taibbi, but his statement to Congress on “who decides what to censor” is thought-provoking

CoVid-19 as The New Normal: Short takes:

• The latest global data shows a levelling off of excess mortality in most countries in recent months (though the data is woefully slow being released by many countries), and it suggests CoVid-19 remains the fifth commonest cause of death in the world in 2023. I continue to mask in crowded indoor spaces, isolate and test when feeling unwell, and get the latest boosters, all of which this data supports.
• It appears we are going to do nothing to mandate better ventilation in busy public venues like restaurants, schools, and workplaces. Not surprised.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

cartoon by Charlie Hankin in the New Yorker

The strange bedfellows of UnHerd: The right-wing Conservative-funded platform has drawn in former progressives like Paul Kingsnorth and Rhyd Wildermuth. They share the stage with racists, warmongers, anti-vaxxers, and right-wing conspiracy-theorists. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

Kim Quindlen’s tiny hilarious cultural anthropology: Kim’s short videos, poking fun at our (and her) most bizarre and little-noticed proclivities, are masterful. Unfortunately only on X. Thanks to Raffi for the link.

The second-class treatment of autoimmune disease sufferers: Thanks to medical system ignorance, lack of profitability, and lack of glamour, sufferers of autoimmune diseases are less likely than those suffering from other conditions, to get proper diagnosis, funding or care for their disease.

War is over (if you want it): 700 people sing the John Lennon classic.

The SAT question everybody got wrong: No peeking ahead in the video to see the correct answer. No, I got it wrong too.

No singularities, please, we’re Kiwis: Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is astonished to read that Roy Kerr, a New Zealand-based expert in their field, has proved that a fundamental assumption about black holes, articulated by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, is simply wrong.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

fridge magnet from Cedar Mountain Studios

From Anne Boyer, letter resigning from her post as NYT poetry editor (thanks to Lyz Lenz for the link):

I have resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. The Israeli state’s U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted throughout decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture. Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.

I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies. If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.

From Caitlin Johnstone, post entitled I Will Not Look Away:

I will not look away. No matter how horrific it gets, I will not look away. No matter how many children I see killed and injured in the most gruesome ways imaginable, I will not look away.

No matter how much human suffering I see by keeping my gaze on Gaza, I will not look away. No matter how many nightmares I have, I will not look away. No matter how many tears I shed, I will not look away.

No matter how many reasons the propagandists and manipulators come up with for me to turn my gaze elsewhere, I will not look away. No matter how many insults and accusations I am tarred with for refusing to look away, I will not look away. No matter how much easier it would be to look away, I will not look away.

I will not avert my gaze. I will not become distracted. I will not lose myself to the sedated stupor of escapism. I will not do my best to pretend that everything is normal and that life is basically fine. It’s a paltry offering, really. Almost nothing. But it’s all I’ve got to offer: this simple, sacred vow to honor the victims by refusing to look away from what’s being inflicted upon them. To be here for it, to the furthest extent possible.

The people of Gaza are suffering far more than I have ever suffered, and probably far more than I ever will suffer. But, in my own meagre and entirely insufficient way, I can try to make sure they’re not suffering on their own. To the extent of one person’s gaze, one person’s attention, one person’s reverence, I can ensure that the world has not turned their back on them. I can ensure that, to that extent, they are not forgotten.

That way even if my other efforts fail, if all our collective efforts fail, if the activism comes up short, if we fail to open enough eyes and apply enough pressure in the necessary places, then at least their deaths, their losses and their anguish will not have slipped by unnoticed. Unappreciated. Unvalued. Unwitnessed.

I will not look away, because these lives matter and I have a duty to honor them. I will not look away, because that would be giving the bastards what they want. I will not look away, because even in my powerlessness to help I still have the power to bear witness. I will not look away, for the same reason that when my parents are dying I will hold their hand and stay by their bedside until they are gone.

Even if we can’t stop this, at the very least we can give them our seeing. At the very least we owe them that.

From Nesrine Malik, in the Guardian:

The truth, too hard to accept, is that there is nothing you can do. You can write to your MP, you can march, you can protest. And the killing continues. As that happens, a jarringly bloodless account of the conflict is given by political leaders in countries like the US and UK, one that seems to omit the sheer fact and number of the deaths and resorts instead to an almost surreal language that calls for “every possible precaution” to protect civilian life. UN officials, not known for intemperance, now lose their cool and use the strongest terms possible, in what seems to be a direct result of this weird insistence on not calling reality what it is. The day before the truce, Gaza authorities put the death toll at 14,532.

That’s where the sense of losing your mind comes from: the fact that it seems, for the first time that I can think of, western powers are unable to credibly pretend that there is some global system of rules that they uphold. They seem to simply say: there are exceptions, and that’s just the way it is. No, it can’t be explained and yes, it will carry on, until it doesn’t.

From Derek Walcott, from Collected Poems 1948-84:

EARTH

Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;

you can never be dispossessed.