Just stop, now

I watched an hour of the wonderful Walter Jehne explaining what current agricultural practices do to soil health, and therefore to food and to climate. His no bullshit summary was simply “stop!”. Don’t apply chemical fertilisers or the consequent herbicides, pesticides, fungicides. Don’t do it.

I am similarly convinced by the argument that processed foods and the whole body of “nutrition” “science” built up around it should simply be scrapped. There is nothing to rescue from the unfolding car crash, no science, no useful experience, no processes that enhance human heath. Bin it. Bin the public health messages around food.1

There is intense interest and joy around the world at David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. The book says there is nothing necessary or appropriate about the oppressive social systems we have chosen to subject ourselves to. Other societies have successfully made other choices with very different results. Don’t entertain for a second the notion that the violence is necessary.

As it becomes clearer the damage being done by the descent into farce of “government” in the UK, again the admonition would have to be “stop!”. Before more lives are lost and ruined by an institution that nominally is there for our benefit.

I just saw a tweet from Juergen Moltmann, a German theologian I read while at college some years ago : What does it mean to recall the God who was crucified in a society whose official creed is optimism, and which is knee-deep in blood?

We can go into some detail but I don’t want to lose the imperative to grieve catastrophic errors in the recent past and to move in a radically different direction. There are choices we can make and the first step is to trash the sense of necessity or inevitability in what we do. We don’t need an oil industry. We don’t need a pharmaceutical industry. We don’t need cars. These things are only important until we trash their self-justification narratives.

Corporate optimism

If you are selling something, anything, you have to be a positive citizen with upbeat messages. The product must lead to a better future. There just has to be a way to improve on the status quo slightly. We’re not allowed to say “this has all been a ghastly mistake”. But it has.

There are plenty of examples of catastrophic failures of management regimes. Think of the complete destruction of the immense fish stocks of the Grand Banks or the extinction of the passenger pigeon from a population of eight billion. We have written before about the crash of civilisations when the soil was unintentionally destroyed.

Why then would we believe in optimism? Why do we castigate people who will not sign up to programmes that they think/know are doomed? Think of the immense pressure to believe that vaccines hold the answer to the pandemic. Professional and dedicated careers are being ended because people will not comply with mandates for which the basis is so obviously flawed. This is about the need for optimism not the assessment of evidence.2

Despite all the worthy efforts to protect and value them, whistleblowers can expect to have their lives ruined, no matter how urgent and important the issues they are pointing to. There is a sickness here, a social fantasy that things will be alright. A weird dislocation in which destroying the messenger allows normal life to continue as before. We have fully fledged hysterias, partly created by the media and partly finding ready sycophants.

It is easy enough to see how the institutional form of corporate organisations prevents difficult truths being dealt with. Google doesn’t want to know the fascist outcomes of its AI applications. Oxfam doesn’t want to know about sexual abuse of the victims it is there to support. WWF doesn’t want to know about the persecution of indigenous people in the name of conservation. The is a cognitive dissonance in the institutional arrangements, and one that doesn’t have a governance mechanism to address it in practice.

The root of these failures, tragedies, colonial crimes is our values. We allow people who make lots of money to accrue power and prestige. We respect them, the Elon Musks and Bill Gates. These people have vast conflicts of interest that are never laid bare. And vice versa we allow people who steal power, be they Johnson or Putin to accrue fortunes for themselves and their mates. Graeber and Wengrow point out that there are much more sensible and successful social models. We are stupid, possibly terminally stupid. We have no systemic social sense, we don’t even know what that might be.

It is a measure of our stupidity that in none of the dimensions we have mentioned we can just stop. We build powerful cars with no brakes: going fast is good.

A cultural story or two

I was head boy at the state grammar school I attended in Durham. The headteacher was keen on order and discipline. Together we attended a council ritual election of a new mayor of the city, always the senior member of the council. On this occasion, the senior member was a Labour councillor and the “independents” decided to break with tradition and not to elect him. Some raw political edges were exposed and my headteacher was thoroughly embarrassed at what I witnessed.

Here was a perfect educational opportunity that was never going to be allowed to flower. There was an establishment in the council and an establishment in the school whose wishes were not allowed to be visible, let alone to be questioned.

Not much later my father, a history professor at the university, was facing an era of staff cuts. The decision-making process was that science staff who were pulling in industrial money for their projects had to be kept on to keep the money, whereas famous professors in flagship departments on whose reputation the reputation of the university rested were dispensable. When his three fellow professors in History were retired my father made it all four, in disgust, and so he could pursue his researches. Mere financial accounting ruined an ancient university.

Of course nowadays you can get a knighthood for being an utter know-nothing, and a billionaire by tax accounting tricks.

Whatever we may try to kid ourselves, what we are actually teaching at school and university is some sort of ask-no-questions sycophancy. David Graeber’s tenure at Harvard was terminated by dirty tricks. One reason why no-one knows how to “just stop” is that we have been trained to believe that certain other respected people know better, even when they manifestly do not. How many people in the US still believe that the last election was stolen?

We all bear responsibility for this state of affairs. It is our weakness, our burden and our fate. And the powerless always suffer most.

Processes

We know absolutely in all this mess that our logic, our reasoning, is fatally flawed. Which doesn’t stop us doubling down. If a management process consistently comes up with crap outcomes, maybe it is time to revisit how management works. But of course, we have to ask crap for whom. I have a senior academic colleague who describes how whole senior management teams move from university to university on a timescale that allows them to enhance their pensions while never facing the outcomes of their “reforms”.

We know that the standard accounting mistake is to neglect costs that are exported onto other parties, or the criminal version where that is a deliberate ploy. All the major UK dairy herds are now housed permanently indoors. This creates a need to move all their feed to them and to remove all the generated waste. At the same time the lack of access to growing plants and to sunshine can only reduce the health benefits of the milk. For whom is this a good idea and who picks up the exported costs? We know that oil producers deliberately create markets for their products, for instance the vast plastics industry. Plastics are one of the key products destroying ecosystems or many types around the world. At a time when people are starting to scale back fossil fuel use, how can the use of them to produce a key pollutant be a good idea for society?

We know that in many industries regulatory capture is complete. The so-called regulators are run by and for the industries that they are supposed to regulate. It is not hard to document this and sometimes we get hand-wringing as with the Deep Horizon oil spill. But if we need regulators, and we do, then they need some independence and some teeth. They need them when it matters most, not in the marginal cases often used for window dressing.

These broken and corrupt management processes are a part of how we get to situations where “just stop” is the best or the only viable policy. We know all the myriad places that are headed for bust because they use partial and partisan reasoning. Just because the GOP and the Conservative party are headed nowhere fast doesn’t mean we are even approaching the peak of the damage they are doing and can still do.

Responses

“Just stop” is splendidly simplifying. We no longer have to evaluate all those reasonable sounding proposals that are simply trimming and refocusing and rebranding. The Auschwitz staff finding more efficient ways to murder people. Politics as the art of the possible. Same old people clinging to power. This is Greta Thunberg territory: you people in power are not protecting my future world, you are not even intending to.

Governance that has any hope of governing future behaviours implies a model of the system in question. That model has to be tolerably accurate in the areas of interest. (Conant-Ashby theorem). The modern populist movements try to create a narrative around “commonsense” models, which are only the prejudices of their members in the echo chamber. The question of evidence and facts becomes so highly charged that the creation of decent models becomes next to impossible. That makes governance impossible and that is the saving grace for their members of populist movements.

The pandemic throws up endless crazy outcomes. Those outcomes seem crazy because a sufficiently nuanced model of how the pandemic works is not possible. Because a model is not available outcomes can be presented as crazy. Even the language is bust. Covid vaccines are not vaccines in any sense that gives continuity with previous vaccines. They were called vaccines to steal the mantle of intrinsic benefit.3

The politics of protecting people from the pandemic is met, rightly, with vast mistrust. Criminal pharmaceutical companies in league with lying governments. Ridiculous coercive measures that cannot possibly achieve their ostensible purpose. Systematically and deliberately flawed data. Disgusting stoking of fear to drive population behaviour.

Just imagine the opposite. The calm construction of a model that facilitated coherent challenges and the building of trust to allow the model and its implications to be understood. In real old politics that would be called building a constituency, getting enough people to buy into something that can work for everyone. And the starting point for doing that might be “just stop”. Not because just stop is clever or subtle but because the net result of all the warring damaged processes is much worse than doing nothing. In a hot war the ceasefire is often a sine qua non.

Of course the courage to defy the imperative for corporate optimism and just stop is precisely what is missing. Even the radicals and revolutionaries want to get on with the necessary work.

Those details

I have been getting into dung beetles. It turns out dung beetles do a better job than we could ever do at burying dung and its associated parasites deep in the ground. We absolutely depend on them for human health and climate stabilisation and no public model includes them. Just fancy, how could that be?

1 cf. “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”

2 I know one chief executive who is so doggedly optimistic that he will vigorously defend that today is the best of all possible days, that this very moment is the pinnacle of his happiness, because to do otherwise would be to betray the companionship of those he is with. Somehow there is a fragility in his defence of the now, that he desperately needs to convey and encourage optimism.

3 Recall that vaccines used to result in the (near) eradication of disease — smallpox, rinderpest, polio, measles, mumps, rubella — not in temporary gains against a seasonal adversary. Like a lot of long-lived cultural ideas, this one is also wrapped-up with the post-War modernism, with whooping cough, polio, and measles vaccines arriving in the US between 1948 and 1963.