Hang Onto Your Soul
By Charles Foster
Image: https://the-conscious-mind.com
I can’t avoid Steven Pinker at the moment. He seems to be on every page I read. I hear him all the time, insisting that I’m cosmically insignificant; that my delusional thoughts, my loves, my aspirations, and the B Minor Mass’s effect on me are merely chemical events. I used to have stuck up above my desk (on the principle that you should know your enemy), his declaration (as stridently irrational as the sermon of a Kentucky Young Earth Creationist): ‘A major breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution – perhaps its greatest breakthrough – was to refute the intuition that the Universe is saturated with purpose.’ 1
He tells me that everything is getting better. Has been getting better since the first eruption of humans into the world.2 That there’s demonstrable progress (towards what, one might ask, if the universe has no purpose? – but I’ll leave that for the moment). That there’s less violence; there are fewer mutilated bodies per capita. He celebrates his enlightenment by mocking my atavism: he notes that the Enlightenment came after the Upper Palaeolithic, and (for the law of progress admits no exceptions) concludes that that means that our Enlightenment age is better than what went before. Continue reading
AI and the Transition Paradox
The most important development in human history will take place not too far in the future. Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, will become better (and cheaper) than humans at most tasks. This will generate enormous wealth that can be used to fill human needs.
However, since most humans will not be able to compete with AI, there will be little demand for ordinary people’s labour-power. The immediate effect of a world without work is that people will lose their primary source of income and whatever meaning, mastery, sense of belonging and status they get from their work. Our collective challenge is to find meaning and other ways to reliably get what we need in this new world.
Are Electoral Pacts Undemocratic?
By Ben Davies
In the early hours of Friday morning last week, the long-Conservative UK constituency of North Shropshire caused some political upset (and no little political joy) by electing a Liberal Democrat, Helen Morgan.
It is hard to exaggerate quite how significant a swing this was: the previous Conservative MP, Owen Paterson, whose resignation around accusations of corruption promoted the by-election, had a majority of nearly 23,000 when he was re-elected in 2019. Morgan beat the new Conservative candidate by nearly 6,000.
How was all this possible? One factor will likely have been Conservative voters staying at home, and a few switched to other right-wing parties. But at her acceptance speech, Morgan acknowledged that it was highly likely that voters who would have preferred a Labour MP (the party saw a collapse in its vote share) or a Green MP, lent her their support in order to have the best chance of avoiding a Conservative win. This will lead some to call again for a more formal electoral pact at the country’s next General Election, whereby Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens agree to stand down candidates in seats currently occupied by a Conservative, and where there is a reasonable chance of one of these three parties winning if their anti-Tory rivals stand aside.
How we got into this mess, and the way out
By Charles Foster
This week I went to the launch of the latest book by Iain McGilchrist, currently best known for his account of the cultural effects of brain lateralisation, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. The new book, The Matter with Things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world is, whatever, you think of the argument, an extraordinary phenomenon. It is enormously long – over 600,000 words packed into two substantial volumes. To publish such a thing denotes colossal confidence: to write it denotes great ambition.
It was commissioned by mainstream publishers who took fright when they saw its size. There is eloquent irony in the rejection on the ground of its length and depth of a book whose main thesis is that reductionism is killing us. It was picked up by Perspectiva press. That was brave. But I’m predicting that Perspectiva’s nerve will be vindicated. It was suggested at the launch that the book might rival or outshine Kant or Hegel. That sounds hysterical. It is a huge claim, but this is a huge book, and the claim might just be right.
Nobody can doubt that we’re in a terrible mess. The planet is on fire; we’re racked with neuroses and governed by charlatans, and we have no idea what sort of creatures we are. We tend to intuit that we are significant animals, but have no language in which to articulate that significance, and the main output of the Academy is to scoff at the intuition. Continue reading
Post-Normal Challenges of Covid
Written by Stephen Rainey
How to manage the inevitable disruptions to life brought about by the emergence of a viral pandemic – a question that for many seemed remote has now had us all preoccupied for well over a year. With our just-published article, entitled The Post-Normal Challenges of COVID-19: Constructing Effective and Legitimate Responses, in the Journal Science and Public Policy, Maru Mormina, Sapfo Lignou, Joseph Nguyen, Paula Larsson and I set out to investigate some of the perplexing difficulties especially relating to effectiveness and legitimacy. We examine these in the light of pandemics as wicked problems and lay out how ‘post-normal science’ can contribute to a sound pandemic response.
In any pandemic response, the measures undertaken by authorities must effective in the sense of actually addressing the viral threats. A strategy that didn’t slow the rate of viral spread, for instance, wouldn’t work and for that reason would be due criticism. The concept of legitimacy is one perhaps less easy to cash out. In any pandemic response, the measures undertaken by authorities must be legitimate in the sense of fairly and justifiably constraining liberties enjoyed prior to the viral outbreak. A strategy that placed undue or disproportionate burdens on societal sub-groups, for instance, wouldn’t be legitimate and for that reason would be due criticism. For effectiveness in a medical crisis particularly, science is an essential element of any response. Continue reading
Lockdown Erodes Agency
By Charles Foster
A couple of lockdown conversations:
- The other day I met a friend in the street. We hadn’t seen one another for over a year. We mimed the hugs that we would have given in a saner age, and started to talk. ‘There’s nothing to tell you’, she said. ‘Nothing’s happened since we last saw you. And that’s just as well, because, as you’ll find, I’ve forgotten how to talk, how to relate, and how to read ordinary cues. We’ve not been out. We’ve not changed anything. I wonder if we’ve been changed?’
- Another friend. ‘Zoom’s great, isn’t it? You switch off your camera and your microphone, and the meeting just goes on perfectly happily without you. Everyone thinks you’re there. Your name’s up on their screen. But you are just getting on with your own business.’
And a lockdown fact: Lockdown has been great for book sales. 2020 saw an estimated rise of 5.2% in volume sales of print books in the UK compared with 2019 sales. This was the biggest annual rise since 2007: Continue reading
Legacies
By Stephen Rainey
Joe Biden won the recent US election. As yet, the normal concession speech from the losing candidate has not been forthcoming. Donald Trump’s actions since losing the presidency have been, well, Trumpian, prompting Biden to label them an ‘embarrassment.’ He also suggested that The Donald was endangering his legacy in not reacting more gracefully. But what use is talk of ‘legacy’? What matters most about it?
It would be easy to ‘Goldwater’ Trump, that is, diagnose some mental incapacity from afar. One could suggest he was ill-equipped to absorb his defeat. He has behaved in ways that could be seen as pathological. Maybe, we might continue, he really doesn’t believe this is the end. If that were the case, there would be no need to consider legacy. It would also be easy to have suspected that, far from sticking around, 45 would flounce out of the White House, his pride wounded. Legacy wouldn’t matter in that case, because the electorate, the people, would have shown themselves to be unworthy, having voted the wrong way. Sad. Continue reading
We’re All Vitalists Now
By Charles Foster
It has been a terrible few months for moral philosophers – and for utilitarians in particular. Their relevance to public discourse has never been greater, but never have their analyses been so humiliatingly sidelined by policy makers across the world. The world’s governments are all, it seems, ruled by a rather crude vitalism. Livelihoods and freedoms give way easily to a statistically small risk of individual death.
That might or might not be the morally right result. I’m not considering here the appropriateness of any government measures, and simply note that whatever one says about the UK Government’s response, it has been supremely successful in generating fear. Presumably that was its intention. The fear in the eyes above the masks is mainly an atavistic terror of personal extinction – a fear unmitigated by rational risk assessment. There is also a genuine fear for others (and the crisis has shown humans at their most splendidly altruistic and communitarian as well). But we really don’t have much ballast.
The fear is likely to endure long after the virus itself has receded. Even if we eventually pluck up the courage to hug our friends or go to the theatre, the fear has shown us what we’re really like, and the unflattering picture will be hard to forget.
I wonder what this new view of ourselves will mean for some of the big debates in ethics and law? The obvious examples are euthanasia and assisted suicide. Continue reading
Politics, Ethics, and Shutting Down in the Face of Covid-19
Written by Stephen Rainey
Recently, I wrote about some possible limits of democratic politics in the context of climate change science. The idea was that politics could owe debts to citizens that might prompt suspension of established, and in themselves desirable, norms under certain circumstances. Coronavirus presents more such circumstances, so it’s worth revisiting those earlier thoughts, and looking at how the responses stack up in light of them.
Viruses are not really organisms in the sense of living things with which we are broadly familiar. Whereas plants are practically self-sufficient, in generating their own energy, and most other life requires the consumption of plant or plant derived materials to thrive, viruses are utterly dependent upon colonising the mechanisms of cells in order to survive.
Covid-19 is a string of ribonucleic acid (RNA), with a fatty coating, and a spiky crown of proteins. Like any other virus, covid-19 requires the cells of other living things in order to generate the proteins it needs in order to multiply. This involves hijacking the mechanisms of the host cells. Covid-19 is what’s called a messenger RNA virus, meaning it fools a host cell into creating not the proteins required by the host organism, but those of the virus.
We all know now that among the host cells amenable to Covid-19’s survival are human cells. As a result of this, thousands have died, thousands more have fallen ill and will fall ill, and we have witnessed a pan-national suspension of socio-political rights and freedoms. It seems remarkable that the protein generating requirements of a string of RNA could so directly impact upon established socio-political norms. But more to the point, it is right that such impacts are evoked by this virus. A response to such emergencies that falls short will be ineffective, and unethical. Continue reading
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