Archive for the ‘government’ Category
on national and other origins, and good leadership
So Mr Pudding was going around saying that Ukraine wasn’t a real country for some time before he decided that he needed to abolish its nationhood once and for all, a decision that he clearly made well before the actual invasion of February 24 2022, as the long build-up on the border told us. The fact that he chose to call it a special operation was also a sign that he’d convinced himself that he was simply clarifying a border or territorial issue.
Well, this issue of real countries and not-so-real countries has exercised me for a while, I suppose ever since I started to read history, which was a long time ago.
How do nations come to be nations? Well, there clearly isn’t any general formula, but it more often than not involves warfare, rape, dispossession, and suppression of militarily weaker language groups and cultures. It rarely makes for fun reading. I could probably close my eyes, spin a globe of the earth around and if my finger stopped it on any piece of land, there would be a tale of horror to tell, in terms of the human history of that land, in, say, the last thousand or two years.
I should also say that nations, or states, have been phenomenally successful in terms of the spread of human nature and human culture. My argument against libertarians who inveigh against their bogeyman, the state, and its taxes and regulations and encroachments on our personal liberties, is to point out that we are the most hypersocial mammalian species on the planet. We didn’t get to be 8 billion people, dominating the biosphere, for better or worse, by virtue of our personal liberties. Those personal liberties didn’t provide us with the language we speak, the basic education we’ve been given, the cities and towns and homes we live in, the roads and the cars and bikes and planes we use to get around, and the jobs we’ve managed to secure over the years. All of us living today have been shaped to a considerable degree by the nation-state we live in, and our place in its various hierarchies.
So you could say that nations have become a necessary evil, what with the crooked timber of humanity and all. But it’s surely an indisputable fact that some nations are better than others. But how do we measure this? And let’s not forget the idea, advanced rather cynically and opportunistically by Mr Pudding, that some nations might be more legitimate than others. Afghanistan, to take an example almost at random, was for centuries a vaguely delineated region of various ethnicities – Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and others. Warlords from without and within have brought disintegration upon unification upon disintegration to its ‘nationhood’, while its mostly subsistence-level inhabitants have tried to avoid or ignore the mayhem. It’s likely that most of them don’t consider themselves Afghani at all, but stick to their own ethnicity. The Pashtuns of southern Afghanistan, for example, don’t pay much attention to the border that separates them from their Pashtun neighbours in northern Pakistan, so I’ve heard. And one has to ask oneself – why should they? The Durand line, separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, was created only in the late 19th century – by the British. So, is Afghanistan a real country?
And since I find that Afghanistan has a population of almost 40 million, let me compare it to a nation of similar population. Poland is a north-eastern European nation, inhabiting a region long contested between two expansionist states – Prussia/Germany to the west and Russia to the east. One of the largest countries in Europe, it occupies less than half the area of Afghanistan. It had expansionist ambitions itself a few centuries ago, as the senior partner in the Polish-Lithuanian federation, which dominated the Baltic and often posed a threat to Russia, but in the 20th century it suffered terribly in the second world war, and fell under the domination of the Soviet Union in the aftermath. Of course, if you take the history back to the pre-nation period there were various cultures and tribes, generally warring, with the Polans being the largest. By the Middle Ages, this region had become an established and reasonably sophisticated monarchy, though often struggling to maintain its territory against the Prussians, the Mongols and Kievan Rus. Naturally, its borders expanded and contracted with the fortunes of war. The region, though, reached relative heights of prosperity when, as mentioned, it became the dominant partner of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, for a time the largest state in Europe. Its fortunes ebbed and flowed in the 16th and 17th centuries, but at the end of the 18th it was partitioned between the ascendent powers in the region, Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Poland was finally reconstituted as a nation after the 1914-18 war, but arguably the worst was yet to come…
So again, one might question – is Poland a real country? As a working-class fellow myself, my sympathies go to the ordinary people who grow up gradually discovering what land they’ve landed up in, and the various vicissitudes that have given it the territory and the borders that it currently has.
This is the central point of this post. People are more important than nations. It’s ridiculous to compare them really. And, without getting too much into the free will issue here, it’s obvious that none of us get to choose our parents, or the place and time of our birth. That old philosophical chestnut of being thrown into this world has always rung true for me, and that’s why I don’t get nationalism, though I understand nations as a social evolutionary development.
I’ve been lucky. I was born in Scotland in the 1950s and was taken, with my siblings, to Australia, on the other side of the world. I’ve never seen warfare. I’ve never lived in a thugocracy, and I don’t know if I’d have been aware of living in a thugocracy, had that been the case – that’s to say, if I’d never experienced an open society, in the Popperian sense. I could’ve been born in the 1950s in Vietnam, In which case I may well have been killed in my village or field during what the locals call the American War, and others call the Indo-Chinese War, in which upwards of 2 million died. Or I could have been born in the Soviet Union, thinking who knows what right now about Putin’s treatment of his own and other countries. And so on. If we could all bear in mind that our circumstances, in large, are not of our own making, we might think in less nationalistic terms and in more humane terms. We might even begin to understand and feel a modicum of sympathy for the hill-top gated-community denizens who have grown up convinced of their natural superiority.
So I think in more personal terms. How well are nations, states, communities, cultures serving their members? Whether we measure this in terms of the human rights universalised after the world wars of the 20th century, or the Aristotelian concept of Eudaimonia as reframed and refined over the centuries, or some other valid criteria, it’s surely obvious that some regions are doing better than others, by all reasonable measures. For the sake of human thriving, we need to sympathetically encourage open societies, as well as to stand up en bloc, against bullying and coercion everywhere. There is, of course, no place – no culture or society – where such behaviour is entirely absent, but it’s worth noting that the world’s most authoritarian states, including all 59 of those classified as such by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index (I prefer the term ‘thugocracy’), are led by men, whereas, of the top ten democracies, as judged by the compilers of that index, more than half are led by women. Now, there’s no doubt a ‘chicken-and-egg’ issue at play here. That’s to say, do inclusive, participatory, diverse and humane democracies encourage female leadership, or vice versa? The effect, I’m sure, is synergistic, and it’s a positive effect that needs to be spruiked around the world by everyone with the power to do so.
democracy, women and bonobos
Jacinta Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand
Some people out there might not think that democracy is the best system, but I’d say that, given the crooked timber of humanity and all that, it’s probably the best we can come up with. One of its major problems, as I see it, is its adversarial, or partisan nature. Modern democracies are generally about two major parties, left and right, with power swinging on a more or less regular basis from one side to another. On the other hand, many European nations have evolved multi-party systems, with fragile coalitions always threatening to break apart, and negotiations often bogging down and ending with decisions nobody is particularly happy about, or so it seems. While this can be a problem, so can the opposite, when one party’s decisions and initiatives are swept aside holus bolus by a new government with a polar opposite ideology.
When I occasionally check out social media, I’m disheartened by the number of commentators for whom party x can do no right, and party y can do no wrong. It almost seems as if everybody wants to live in a one-party state – their party. This is a problem for a state which is diverse and necessarily interconnected. That’s to say, for any modern state. And of course there are other problems with representative democracies – generally related to wealth and power. Parliamentarians are rarely truly representative of their constituents, each vote rarely represents one value, and cronyism has always been rife.
And then there’s the maleness of it all. It’s not just that the percentage of women in parliament is always less than the percentage in the general population, but the movers and shakers in the business community, notorious for their pushy lobbying, are invariably male. And then there’s the military, an ultra-male bastion which must have its place…
So here’s a ridiculous thought experiment. Imagine a cast-iron law comes in, dropped from the heavens, that for the next 200 years, no male is allowed to be part of any government of any stripe. Women must, and will, make up every political decision-making body on the planet. Sure they can have the odd male advisor and helpmeet, but they seem to find female advice more congenial and useful. And let’s imagine that in this thought experiment, the males don’t mind their secondary roles at all. They just see it as the natural order of things. After two hundred years, from the point of our current ever-expanding technological and scientific knowledge (which women and men will continue to fully participate in), where will be in terms of war and peace, and our custodianship of the biosphere?
I told you this was ridiculous, but you don’t have to be a professional historian to realise that a more or less unspoken ban on female participation in government has existed historically in many countries for a lot more than a couple of centuries. And we’ve survived – that’s to say, those of us that have survived. Sorry about the tens of millions of Chinese that Mao starved to death in his Great Leap Forward. Sorry about the genocides of Stalin, Hitler, Leo Victor, Talaat Pasha, Pol Pot and Suharto, not to mention Genghis Khan and countless other known or unknown historical figures, again invariably male.
So returning to that thought experiment, we could take the easy option and say we don’t know how things would turn out – certainly not in any detail. But that’s surely bullshit. We know, don’t we? We know that the world, and not just the human world, would be a far far better place in the event of female leadership than it is today.
The evidence is already coming in, as creepingly as female leadership. I recently learned of the Democracy Index, a sophisticated worldwide survey of nations conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the people who publish the Economist magazine, among other things. The survey annually measures and ranks 168 nations according to their democratic bona fides, or lack thereof. According to Wikipedia, ‘The index is based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories, measuring pluralism, civil liberties and political culture’. The nations are divided broadly into four ‘types’. The top 21 are described as ‘full democracies’, the second category are the ‘flawed democracies’, the third are ‘hybrid regimes’ and the last and largest grouping are the ‘authoritarian regimes’. But when I looked at the very top ranking countries I found something very interesting, which prompted me to do a little more research.
In 2017, just under 10% of the world’s leaders were female. The percentage may have grown since then, but clearly not by much. We could be generous and say 13-14% at present. There are some difficulties in defining ‘nation’ as well as ‘leadership’, but let’s go with that number. So I had a look at the rankings on the Democracy Index, and the leadership of various countries on the index and what I found was very enlightening. Of the 21 countries rated as full democracies on the Democracy Index, seven of them were led by women. That’s 33%, quite out of proportion to the percentage of female leaders in general. But it gets better, or worse, depending in how you look at it. Of the top ten democracies on the list, six were led by women. Sixty percent of the top ten. Narrow it down still further, and we find that four of the top five democratic nations – which, in order, are Norway, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden and Iceland, are led by women – 80 per cent. It’s almost ridiculous how successful women are at making things work.
So what about the bottom of the barrel – the Afghanistans, the Burmas, etc. Of the 59 nations characterised as authoritarian by the Democracy Index, (though I prefer to call them thugocracies), zero are led by women. That’s nothing to crow about.
So, bonobos. The females, who are as small compared to their male counterparts as female humans are, dominate through solidarity. The result is less stress, less fighting, less infanticide, less killing and rape, less territoriality, and more sharing, more togetherness, more bonding, more love, if you care to call it that.
We don’t know anything much about the last common ancestor we share equally with chimps and bonobos. We don’t know about how violent Homo erectus or Homo habilis or the Australopithecines were, within their own species. We may never know. We do know that chimp troupes have gone to war with each other, with unbridled savagery, and we have evidence, from sites such as the Pit of Bones in northern Spain, of human-on-human killing from near half a million years ago. Our supposedly great book of moral teaching, the Hebrew Bible, describes many scenes of slaughter, sometimes perpetrated by the god himself. So it seems obvious that we’ve gone the way of the chimpanzee. Our worst leaders seem determined to continue the tradition. Our best, however, are making a difference. We need to make their numbers grow. Let’s make those female leaders multiply and see what happens. It may just save our species, and many others.
References
A bonobo world and other impossibilities 25: women and warfare (2)
Number of women leaders around the world has grown, but they’re still a small group
getting wee Donny 1: 2016 campaign finance violations
one of wee Donny’s ‘reimbursement’ cheques – a smoking gun?
Canto: So we both agree that free will is a myth, and that this has major implications for crime and punishment, but we’re also both human – at least I am – and we want to see nasties being punished, and in fact we delight in it. As a person with a lifelong loathing of bullies, I’ve too often fantasised about bullying those bullies, even torturing them endlessly. And I do wonder if my sudden interest in US politics from the time wee Donny looked like he might bullshit his way into their presidency has more to do with gunning for his downfall than anything else.
Jacinta: Yes we think similarly but we have the capacity also to step back and be more analytical and curious about a system that allows such an obvious scammer to take up the very top position in what so many ‘Americans’ – and I put that in quotes coz I’ve heard quite a few inhabitants of that double continent getting annoyed that these ‘Americans’ refer to themselves in that exclusivist way…
Canto: But what should we call them? Yanks? Uessians? United Staters?
Jacinta: Yeah, good, let’s call them United Staters from now on. So many United Staters think they have the world’s greatest nation…
Canto: As the Brits did in their days of glory in the 19th century…
Jacinta: True, the myth of economic power entailing moral superiority dies hard, and jingoism is a major barrier to national self-analysis. So we, as outsiders and non-nationalists might be better equipped to examine why it is that wee Donny, with his so obvious incompetencies, manipulations and deceptions, has gotten so far and damaged so much, with so few consequences. What does it say about the USA, are these deficiencies shared by other nations (leaving aside the out-and-out dictatorships and undemocratic oligarchies), and can the USA redeem itself by imposing some sort of justice on this character, for the first time in a long lifetime?
Canto: Yes, so this series, ‘getting wee Donny’ will look at his crimes, at the system that allowed them, and how the system might reform itself, or transform itself into something more respectable, so that nothing like wee Donny can arise again. And this means not only looking at their criminal justice system, but the anti-government ideologies that have supported wee Donny’s destruction of responsible and effective government. There’s a malaise in that country, which might prevent wee Donny from facing justice, for fear that the malaise turn into a pandemic of self-slaughter. Are we facing the downfall of the USA?
Jacinta: Unlikely. Too many WMD for a start. And the nation has a lot of smarts, in spite of all the morons.
Canto: Morons with guns, and lots of them. And enough brains to make plans…
Jacinta: Yes, there are a lot of obstacles to getting wee Donny, but first I want to look at the plans to get him, now he’s unprotected by infamous and absurd claims to presidential immunity, unworthy of any decent nation.
Canto: Actually, I’d like to look at how Australia and other Westminster-based nations, and other democracies in general, deal with crimes committed by political leaders while in office. I agree with you that immunity for those in the highest political office is absurd, they’re the last people to be given immunity, and should have a whole panoply of laws applied to them, but look at Israel, where Netanyahu appears to be getting away with all sorts of dodgy behaviour. We can’t go blaming the US without checking out any possible beams in the eyes of others, including ourselves.
Jacinta: Haha well I wouldn’t describe the USA as having nothing more than a mote in its political eye, but point taken. We’ll look at the legal accountability for Australian and other political leaders as we go along, but wee Donny is now a private citizen, and I recall that one of his first crimes in relation to the whole presidency thing occurred when he was a candidate, and he paid off a couple of women to remain silent during his campaign. His then lawyer and ‘fixer’ Michael Cohen was sentenced and imprisoned for a range of crimes, including campaign finance violations at the behest of ‘individual one’, known to be wee Donny. This was confirmed by Cohen in congressional testimony, and two cheques signed by Donny, reimbursing Cohen, were presented as part of that testimony. Six other reimbursement cheques were shown to the New York Times, but it seems none of these cheques provide details of what these reimbursement were for, if indeed they were reimbursements at all.
Canto: Mmm, so far, so weak. It would be worth having a closer look at that part of Cohen’s charge sheet that includes, from memory, two charges of campaign finance violations. Also, did his sentencing go into detail about what part of it was specifically for those violations? Clearly the fact that he was convicted of of campaign finance violations makes some sort of evidence in itself. Cohen wasn’t the one running for office, he did it for Donny, as the charge sheet presumably states…
Jacinta: There’s a press release from the Southern District of New York from August 2018 stating that Cohen pleaded guilty to, among other things, one count of ‘Causing an unlawful corporate contribution’ and one count of ‘Making an excessive campaign contribution’, each of which could incur a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment. But here’s the thing – Cohen pleaded guilty, and wee Donny would never do that. And another problem is that, according to Stephen Weissman, writing in the Washington Post, there’s a legal requirement for campaign finance violations to be ‘wilful’, that is, done with knowledge that they’re illegal.
Canto: So in some cases, ignorance of the law is an excuse.
Jacinta: Well, yes, perhaps because some kinds of law, like these, are intricate and complex, and it might be easy to break them in all innocence.
Canto: Innocent wee Donny, sure. I think you could make a case stick here.
Jacinta: Hmmm. We’ll have to wait and see – until after this empêchement shite has failed – if SDNY goes ahead on this front. Meanwhile there are many other trails – and possible trials – to follow.
References
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-michael-cohen-broke-campaign-finance-law
https://www.vox.com/2019/2/27/18243038/individual-1-cohen-trump-mueller
Will the USA ever reform its federal system? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
the USA is flagging
So I’m writing this on the last day of the Trump ‘administration’, and I don’t know if I’ll finish it today, and currently I don’t know if Trump will come out with the hundred or so pardons that some reporters are predicting, or if there will be one final attempt at insurrection, or if any more lives will be lost etc etc.
Whenever I write about Trump I feel as if I’m repeating myself for the nth time, and of course I know that virtually nobody reads my blog and I basically get no feedback on it. Still I feel compelled…
Robert Sapolsky begins his book Behave (and he presents this orally on a video available on Youtube) with a fantasy about what he would do with Hitler if he could’ve gotten hold of him at the end of the war. It isn’t nice. As he points out, he’s a liberal fellow, and opposed to capital punishment, but – humans are complex and contradictory. I’ve had similar fantasies about Trump, among others – in fact I might blame Sapolsky for giving me permission. But seriously, I’ve had fantasies about doing horrible things to horrible people long before I read Behave. I’ve long had a kind of visceral loathing of bullies and thugs, whether they’re world leaders or in the local neighbourhood, possibly because I was bullied quite a bit at school, being the smallest kid in my class for about ten years. When in the morning I read or listen to the latest horror story about Trump, or Putin, or some other apparently unpunishable tyrant, I get so mad that my dog, who regularly sleeps on my bed, starts shaking and looking at me with either fear or, I like to think, reproach.
I think I’ve been following the Trump debacle, or what I’ve called the slo-mo train wreck, because I’ve been wanting it to end like the movies, with the villain crashing and burning. And again to emphasise our complex and contradictory impulses, I’ve been hoping, and am still hoping, that Trump ends in gaol, but I’ve also been convinced, since before he decided to claim that he was a politician, that he wasn’t a ‘normal’ person, that there was something fundamentally wrong with him, and that he’s been this way for his entire adult life, and more. And I’ve become convinced, over the years, that free will is a myth, and that this has major implications for our systems of punishment, incarceration and the like. So what should be done with Trump? My feeling is that anyone with an average degree of intelligence and psychological insight should be able to see that this man should be kept away from any position of public responsibility. He’s an extremely, narcissistic, tantrumming pre-adolescent, and has been for 60 years. This is someone who couldn’t manage a public toilet, let alone the government of an uninhabited island. And yet he was put in charge of the most militarily and economically powerful nation on the planet. I don’t blame Trump for this, I blame the USA, and its federal political system.
The USA is, as I’ve written before, exceptional in two things, its religiosity and its jingoism. As a non-believing non-American, a dual citizen of the UK and Australia, where I’ve lived since the age of five, I struggle with my lack of sympathy for these American features. I’ve never waved a national flag or sung a national anthem in my life, and I never will. I feel a kind of emotional aversion to nationalism, and I suspect any explanation will simply be post-hoc rationalisation. So Trump’s patriotism, which is as fake as his religion, his complexion and his business acumen, naturally gets my goat, but it isn’t Trump I want to write about here.
Since realising that Trump was being taken seriously as a contender for US President, I’ve been following US politics like never before, and what I’ve learned has frankly horrified me, and continues to do so. Their federal system and their presidential system are real shockers, and frankly seem to be a disaster waiting to happen. There are plenty of pundits happy to dump on Trump of course, but hardly any are willing to dump on a system that allowed Trump to manipulate it so effectively (though it was more like bull-in-a-china-shop behaviour than calculated manipulation). I would cite Fareed Zakaria as an honourable exception, but his obvious Indian accent suggests that he hasn’t been fully infected by the native jingoism that his colleagues appear to suffer from.
So here – again, but with additions – are some of the glaring problems of a political system, and some political beliefs, that no nation in its right collective mind would want to emulate.
1. The ‘constitutional president’ becomes so as a result of a popularity contest between one superhero and another, in keeping, apparently, with ‘American individualism’. The ultimate recipe for demagoguery. These superheroes are either worshipped or reviled, and remembered by their numbers!
2. The Presidential candidate gets to choose his own running mate, plucked from the general population.
3. The President gets to choose a whole suite of personnel, or courtiers, to effectively run the country for the next four years, with only limited vetting, and has minimal contact with the parliament – living, during incumbency, in a White Palace.
4. Major elections occur every two years, last far too long, and involve obscene amounts of money, inevitably leading to corruption.
5. The political system is based on a much-worshipped, brief, vague and out-dated constitution, written for a small semi-democratic former British colony, and hopelessly inadequate for the needs of the third most populous country in the world. This urgently needs to be supported or replaced by laws, and lots of them.
6. The American people’s attitude to government, from the outset, has been disturbingly negative, so that interventionist government of any kind, to improve healthcare, education, race relations and so forth, is branded as socialism – the dirtiest word in the American language. And that’s something, considering the country’s religiosity, where the most lively and fun ‘curse-words’ aren’t even allowed on TV!
7. The popularity contest for the nation’s presidency is interfered with by an ‘electoral college’, which is state-based and regularly prevents the winner, based on popularity, from actually winning!
8. The President has exceptional pardoning powers, veto powers, government shut-down powers, power to select members of the judiciary and heads of innumerable government departments, as well as, apparently, total immunity from committing offences, however grave, while in office.
9. It follows from the above that the political process known as impeachment would be surplus to requirements, and all politicians’ wrong-doing, up to and including the President, would be dealt with by the judiciary on the basis of law.
The USA should look to the government of its neighbour, Canada, which has a far better political system, but it is of course prevented from doing so by its pathological jingoism. My hope is that the USA might be pressured by the international community to be more reformist in its approach to its national government. It’s a faint hope, of course, but the wreckery of the Trump period has, at least, exposed many glaring deficiencies. Gentlemen’s agreements aren’t anywhere near sufficient to keep ‘commanders-in-chief’, in a nation bristling with nuclear weaponry, with an at times disturbing superiority complex, in check.
covid19 – the European CDC shows the way
poverty and crowding in Peru – BBC picture
Canto: The US response to the pandemic continues to be massively hampered by political muzzling of and interference with the science, especially at the federal level, but the Medcram updates continue to inform us, and to be, or pretend to be, indifferent to this political interference.
Jacinta: Yes, and update 109 has introduced us to the European CDC’s website, which provides us with a wealth of information, on the progress of the pandemic itself in European countries, but also in the political response to it, and how those two things interact.
Canto: The country overview page, and it’s currently updated to week 39 of the pandemic, is as data-rich as anyone can imagine, a statistician’s wet dream, but interpretation of the data needs to be handled carefully.
Jacinta: Dr Seheult does some interpretation of some of the data in his medcram update 109, but there’s so much more in there, and so much more to say. So let’s take a European country at random – Denmark – and look closely at the stats.
Canto: But before that, let’s look at some general European trends they report. It’s fascinating:
By the end of week 39 (27 September 2020), the 14-day case notification rate for the EU/EEA and the UK, based on data collected by ECDC from official national sources, was 113.6 (country range: 9.9–319.9) per 100 000 population. The rate has been increasing for 70 days.
So the EU is the European Union and the EEA is the European Economic Area. I’m not sure what is meant by ’14-day’ but I presume the case notification rate is simply the case rate, as far as they can ascertain from the data supplied to them – the cases they’ve been notified about. It’s good that they make that distinction, shifting the onus on the notifiers. So it’s 113.6 cases per 100,000 population over the whole region, and has been rising for over two months – a second wave.
Jacinta: I think ’14 day’ just means the rate over the previous 14 days. They report every seven days for the previous 14 days, so there’s a 7-day overlap. That data is not only dependent on the reliability of particular reporting countries, it’s also dependent on testing levels, obviously. So in the general trends they tell us which countries are doing the most testing. Highest is Denmark, followed by Luxembourg, Iceland, Malta and Cyprus. Small countries, unsurprisingly.
Canto: With all this, it’s interesting from Dr Seheult’s analysis of the data that the death rate isn’t mapping with the case rate, thankfully, and that the age of people contracting the virus in the second wave is much lower, which seems weird.
Jacinta: Probably explained by an increase in testing since the early days. Now they’re catching milder and asymptomatic cases. It suggests, of course, that the case rate was much higher during the first wave, when the testing regime was still being put together. So let’s look at Denmark, and now we have data for week 40. There are four graphs, and in the first we see the case notification rate experiencing a big bump peaking in April with the death notification rate mapping pretty closely with that bump. Then there’s a gradual falling away in both figures, until August when the case rate starts to rise again, but not the death rate. Then in September that case rate rises very sharply, rising well above the April bump, though in the last week it seems to have leveled off at this high level. But the death rate has stayed pretty well level and quite low. Now that raises questions that the other graphs might help to answer. The second graph looks at the testing rate – tests per 100,000. The testing rate was pretty flat and low from February into April, but after the April rise in cases the testing began to rise from late April into May. It flattened and even dipped a bit into June. It stayed fairly steady through the northern winter, but of course at a high level compared to the earliest period, then it started to rise in August, presumably in anticipation of a rise in cases as the colder weather arrived. That rise in testing peaked at a very high level in late September, but has dropped quite sharply in the the last week or so.
Canto: Interesting, so that does strongly suggest a sharp rise in mild cases being ‘caught’, and presumably dealt with, as the death rate hasn’t spiked at all.
Jacinta: Yes, though we don’t know how well those cases have been dealt with – people are talking about ‘long covid’, people possibly having long-term issues. The two graphs don’t really give us granular detail – hospitalisation rates for example. So the third graph breaks the notified case numbers into age groups, and the results are fascinating. The first wave bump shows that most of the cases recorded were in the older age groups, particular those at 80 or over. There were cases in all age groups, but very few under 15. However, in the second wave, the cases found were predominantly in the young. In fact the 15-24 age group was way out in front, followed by the 25-49 group. Even the under 15s were well above the oldest age groups. So what does this mean? It seems to suggest that the older, and perhaps wiser, are recognising the dangers, especially to their age group, and taking fewer risks, and that the younger are still not very sick but can be carriers of the virus and more than ever a danger to the older generation.
Canto: I wonder is Denmark ‘typical’ in this regard?
Jacinta: There are variations of course, but the general trend is much the same. The fourth graph shows test positivity – the percentage of people who tested positive. There was a massive spike in positive test results in March, up to around 16 -17%, but this dropped as sharply at it rose, due presumably to the rapid rise in testing from that period. By May it was around 1% and it has remained much the same since, as the number of tests administered has never been higher, in spite of the recent drop I mentioned. It’s still much higher than it was pre-September.
Canto: But there are more than four graphs as we’ve found. We’ve looked at the data for notification rates and testing, there are other graphs which look at ICU and hospitalisation rates, public health response measures, and which break the nation down into specific regions.
Jacinta: Yes, it’s particularly important to look at public health measures – restrictions on mass gatherings, closures or partial closures of public spaces, workplaces and schools, the mandating or recommendations around face masks, and map them against notification rates, hospitalisations and so forth. The picture that emerges is generally pretty clear, though sadly some countries, such as the USA and Brazil, aren’t paying heed to the fact that public health measures save lives as well as a lot of suffering.
Canto: Well we should be talking about the governments rather than the countries, when we’re talking about public health measures. So I’ve assumed that the CDC in the USA has been hobbled by the Trump debacle, so I’ve gone to the Johns Hopkins site to see what detailed info they provide. Indeed they do have a lot of useful data both for the USA and other countries, though little on the effect of public health measures. An interesting graph they present on mortality shows that, in terms of deaths per 100,000 persons – and they show only the top 20 nations – Peru is on top, followed by Brazil, Ecuador, Spain, Mexico, the USA and the UK, in that order.
Jacinta: Well we know about the macho governments of Brazil, the UK and the USA – not that government is always entirely to blame, but it’s a key indicator – so what about the national governments of those other countries?
Canto: Well other key indicators would be the country’s wealth, or lack thereof, and its healthcare infrastructure, but as to government, Peru had a federal election in January this year – it’s a multi-multi-multi-party system with the most popular party getting only 10% of the vote. The result was that Martin Vizcarra retained the presidency. He appears to be a genuine reformist who has tried to implement stay-at-home orders, but widespread poverty and overcrowding are major problems there. Brazil we already know about. Ecuador’s current President is Lenin Moreno, a right-wing figure who has slashed government funding and seems obsessed with destroying political opponents. He has a popularity rating of 8%, according to an article in Open Democracy, and his mishandling of the pandemic has been extreme. Spain is a ‘parliamentary monarchy’, and its current Prime Minister is Pedro Sanchez, leader of a leftist coalition. Currently there’s a battle with right-wing local authorities, especially in Madrid, to enforce lockdowns as a second wave hits the country. So it’s the usual problem there of non-compliance, it seems. And Mexico is, as is I think well known, a country with a lot of poverty and a lot of problems. Its governmental system has long been a minefield – in fact I’d love to learn more about its chequered history. Currently the President is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a veteran politician who has been a member of various parties and is essentially a political centrist. So again it’s about lack of political control, poverty, lack of services, overcrowding and so forth. As to the UK, years of conservative government have gutted the NIH, there has been a ton of mixed messaging from the top… I’m getting sick of all this. I want to go to Taiwan.
Jacinta: Hmm. How’s your Chinese? Things are pretty covid-safe here in South Australia. Here’s hoping a safe and effective vaccine is ready by next year, and some big improvements are made in certain countries, with a return to justice and human decency…
References
Coronavirus Pandemic Update 109: New Data From Europe As COVID 19 Infections Rise
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/country-overviews
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-53150808
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31955-3/fulltext
Covid-19, politics, government – some observations
No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.
Aneurin Bevan, founder of the UK’s NHS
Let me look at Covid-19 cases and deaths in different countries in terms of the political persuasions (and gender) of their leadership, with some obvious caveats and reservations, e.g. that correlation isn’t causation, that there are a whole host of factors influencing how well or badly particular nations are faring, that the data coming from many nations is highly suspect, etc. My statistics come from the Worldometer site, which names a wide variety of sources, and notably tends to be slightly less conservative than the WHO and Johns Hopkins sites in terms of numbers. The differences aren’t great, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that the overall numbers are greater than even the Worldometer site has been able to confirm.
I’m doing this because I’ve been checking the stats on a daily basis for weeks now, and impressions have, not surprisingly, been forming about the relationship between national leadership and the impact of the virus. So here are some statistics, and some speculations on them, for what they’re worth.
The UK (I was born in Scotland) has fared worse than any other country, apart from Belgium, in terms of deaths per million. Conservative PM Boris Johnson, prior to catching the virus himself, seemed to suggest letting it run its course through the community, which of course would have led to a huge death rate, and generally the messages from the beginning were confused, and mostly of a softly softly nature, which has clearly proved disastrous. The NHS has suffered years of severe cuts under ten years of conservative government, and mixed messaging has continued to damage what has been a truly woeful governmental response to the crisis. Scotland, which has a female First Minister and a centre-left government, has a slightly lower ‘excess death toll’ than England, but it’s still high compared to most countries, and higher than those of Wales and Northern Ireland. England is, of course, by far the most densely populated of the four UK nations.
Belgium wears the shame of having the worst Covid-19 mortality rate of any significant-sized nation (of say, 5 million or more) on the planet. However, to be fair, Belgium appears to have an accounting system for the virus which is as anomalous as is that of Russia at the other end of the spectrum (a spectrum from inclusive, i.e Belgium, to exclusive in Russia’s case). This issue of accounting is too enormously complex and fraught to be dealt with here (though many are suggesting that measuring ‘excess mortality’ might be the best option), so I’ll take Belgium’s disastrous figures at face value for now. The country’s PM, Sophie Wilmès, is a member of the centrist Mouvement Réformateur, and heads a coalition government. In fact Belgium has long been so factionalised that coalition governments are a more or less permanent feature of government there, and internal squabbling in recent years has led to a lot of government inertia. Though clear information is hard to find, the lack of strong, supported central government is very likely negatively affecting the country’s Covid-19 experience.
Germany is generally regarded as the success story of Europe. It’s Europe’s largest country, and currently the 19th most populated country in the world. It is 12th overall in the number of cases, and 11th in the number of deaths. This may look bad, but we know that western Europe has been particularly hard-hit, and it’s worth comparing Germany to its neighbouring countries. Interestingly, Germany shares its border with no less than nine different countries, and in terms of deaths per million, which I think is a good guide of a nation’s internal handling of the pandemic, it is doing far better than its westerly neighbours (Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark), and considerably worse than its easterly ones (Austria, Czechia and Poland). Again I’m skeptical of some of the stats, especially in a country like Poland, which has descended into a quasi dictatorship under its all-powerful Law and Justice party, but there does seem to be a radical divide between the eastern and western halves of Europe in terms of the pandemic’s impact. Anyway, Germany’s centrist Chancellor Angela Merkel has been in power since 2005, and she’s recently suffered under the description, ‘leader of the free world’ in lieu of the USA’s absence of leadership. Being a former research scientist, she’s been credited, rightly or wrongly, with having shepherded the country through this crisis better than most. Wikipedia has this to say about the country’s response:
The country’s low fatality rate, compared to fatality rates in Italy and Spain, has generated a discussion and explanations that cite the country’s higher number of tests performed, higher number of available intensive care beds with respiratory support and higher proportion of positive cases among younger people.
Italy, a country renowned for its political instability, fared disastrously early on (in March and April) in terms of cases and deaths, but has reduced the numbers greatly in recent weeks. Even so, Italy’s deaths per million is one of the worst rates in the world, five times that of Germany. Italy has in recent years developed closer ties with China than any other country in western Europe, and evidence points to the virus arriving in northern Italy via a Chinese couple from Wuhan. It’s clear that there was early skepticism and government officials were caught unawares by the magnitude of the crisis, and the rapidity of spread. The wealthy and densely populated Lombardy region has been disproportionately affected. Italy’s PM, Giuseppe Conte, has held the position for two years, making him one of the longest serving leaders in Italy’s post-war history. The nation’s volatile political history makes co-ordinated strategic planning for pandemics very difficult. This article on Italy from the Harvard Business Review, aimed at an American readership, captures the problems that face individualistic nations who favour rights over responsibilities:
Consider the decision to initially lock down some regions but not others. When the decree announcing the closing of northern Italy became public, it touched off a massive exodus to southern Italy, undoubtedly spreading the virus to regions where it had not been present.
This illustrates what is now clear to many observers: An effective response to the virus needs to be orchestrated as a coherent system of actions taken simultaneously. The results of the approaches taken in China and South Korea underscore this point. While the public discussion of the policies followed in these countries often focuses on single elements of their models (such as extensive testing), what truly characterises their effective responses is the multitude of actions that were taken at once. Testing is effective when it’s combined with rigorously contact tracing, and tracing is effective as long as it is combined with an effective communication system that collects and disseminates information on the movements of potentially infected people, and so forth.
Clearly this information-collecting, when it isn’t coercive, requires compliance and collaboration for the broader good. Libertarians are reluctant, it seems, to admit this.
Sweden‘s record on the pandemic is worth comparing to the other four countries comprising Scandinavia – Norway, Finland, Denmark and Iceland. Sweden is certainly the most populous of the five, but its deaths per million tell a grim story – more than five times those of Denmark, around ten times those of Norway and Finland, and almost 20 times those of isolated Iceland. The rate is higher than that of the USA and France, and not far below that of Italy. Currently, the centre-left PM Stefan Löfven heads a highly unstable coalition, which clearly isn’t able to provide the co-ordinated response required in a pandemic. In fact the country deliberately took a ‘relaxed’ attitude to the virus, and are now paying the price, though some of the country’s epidemiologists are still standing by the nation’s approach, astonishingly enough. Around half of the country’s fatalities have occurred in nursing homes. Apart from Sweden, all of the Scandinavian countries have female leaders. Just saying.
Russia, which has recorded the third highest number of Covid-19 cases in the world, has a bizarrely low death-rate, which can’t be accounted for from an epidemiological perspective, as I’ve reported before. Dmitry Peskov, one of Putin’s favourite arse-lickers, defended the record, saying “Have you ever thought about the possibility of Russia’s health care system being more effective?” This in fact caused a spike in fatalities, as several thousand Russians immediately died laughing. A very brave doctor, Anastasia Vasilyeva, founder and head of the medical trade union Alliance of Doctors, is creating videos exposing Putin’s lies about Russia’s handling of the pandemic, showing run-down hospitals, sick and unprotected medical staff and a generally under-funded and unprepared healthcare system. She has, of course, been viciously attacked by Putin’s media thugs, arrested and generally harassed. It’s safe to say that nothing credible is coming out of Russia’s state reporting of Covid-19, and the same must be said of China, or any other state which has more or less complete control of its media. So the full truth of what is happening in Russia, and in other closed societies, will likely not come out for years.
Final remarks – from what we’ve seen so far, right-wing, limited government, libertarian-type governments do worse than strong, centralised governments, especially those led by women. Closed societies generally can’t be trusted on their reporting, so it’s virtually impossible to judge their performance vis-à-vis the pandemic.
Next time I’ll look at some countries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
References
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/04/tories-protect-nhs-coronavirus-slogan
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-18/why-belgium-has-a-high-number-of-coronavirus-deaths/12259032
https://www.livescience.com/results-of-sweden-covid19-response.html
https://hbr.org/2020/03/lessons-from-italys-response-to-coronavirus
Covid-19: lies, damn lies and statistics
Canto: So Russia is being described as a ‘late arriver’ with regard to Covid-19. It now has the second-highest number of cases, as everyone knows. Yet the mortality figure is astonishingly low. It’s only natural to be suspicious as there’s surely no obvious epidemiological explanation. It’s worth comparing Russia to Germany, whose figures few would quibble with, given its reputation for efficiency. It’s been treated as the European outlier in terms of its response, but nobody appears to be praising Russia for its tiny mortality rate. Why would that be?
Jacinta: Just looking at some reporting, various reasons have been given. Take this one from Dr. Elena Malinnikova, the chief of infectious diseases in the Russian Ministry of Health:
The low mortality is due to timely detection of infection as well as the fact that that Russians tend to see their doctor soon after symptoms appear.
Canto: Hmmm. Other nationalities don’t see their doctor, when there’s a killer pandemic on the loose? And ‘timely detection of infection’ sounds overly vague to me.
Jacinta: Let’s try another one. ‘Russian journalists have reported that more than 60% of all cases diagnosed in the country have been in Moscow, which has a younger and healthier population than rural areas’.
Canto: Yeah, but in the USA it’s the richer, more heavily populated regions of the north-east that have been hardest hit. The rural regions much less so.
Jacinta: Okay. In the article linked to above, Kent Sepkowicz, a physician and infection control specialist, provides good reasons why Russia’s mortality figures don’t make much sense on their face. And before I report on that, let’s look at rough reported mortality rates of a few countries, for comparison. I’ve just looked at total reported deaths as a percentage of total cases. As of May 20, the USA’s mortality rate is around 6%, the UK’s a horrendous 14%, Germany’s has gradually risen to 4.6%, and Brazil, another latecomer like Russia, and now with the fourth largest number of cases, is at 6.5%. Russia, on the other hand, is at 0.95% mortality. That’s a huge disparity, which we might call ‘Russia’s miracle’. But, as Sepkowicz points out, despite reports that Russia is doing well on testing (more than ten times that of Brazil, and somewhat more than the USA, and they might’ve started earlier too), Russia scores poorly on the comorbidity front, otherwise known as ‘pre-existing conditions’, such as heart disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes and obesity. It has an ageing population, and smoking is far more prevalent there than in European countries and Brazil. The testing regime is definitely not so much better than other countries to account for Russia’s apparent success – both Spain and Italy have done more tests per population.
Canto: Hello, are you saying there’s something shifty in the works? Vlad and and his charming circle would never lie to us, surely?
Jacinta: I don’t know that they’d gain much from fudging the figures…
Canto: Are you kidding? Isn’t that like saying Vlad wouldn’t gain much from rigging his election results? What he loses in international credibility, he might gain on the national scene, and that’s more important for him. But maybe there’s some less nefarious reason for the low mortality – I know they’re counting the numbers differently in some way. But the deaths from Covid-19 are the deaths from Covid-19. It should be a straightforward matter.
Jacinta: What about the deaths from x, y or z, exacerbated by Covid-19 infection?
Canto: I think that’s what they’re doing in Russia. Unless they’re certain that it was Covid-19 directly, they’re not counting it, even if they’ve tested positive for the virus, and then they die. They might be arguing that they were going to die anyway, Covid-19 just hastened the end.
Jacinta: Very dodgy if true. You could say that about anyone who’s a bit peely-wally.
Canto: Anyway let’s look at another country in this very complicated trans-national battle against the virus. Brazil’s an interesting one. I’m noting that countries with right-wing laissez-faire governments tend to be killing their citizens at a faster clip than leftist or centrist governments. Whadyareckon?
Jacinta: That’s a bit crude, but let’s look again at the reported figures and give number of deaths per number of cases as percentages. I’m going to leave out Russia and China, as I don’t trust what they’re reporting – which isn’t to say I entirely trust the other nations, but you have to draw the line somewhere. Britain, as mentioned, is very high at 16%, and has a conservative government. A very interesting country to look at is Belgium, which has the highest death rate per million of population of any major country in Europe. It’s death-to cases percentage is also high, at just over 16%. The country’s political situation is horrendously complex. They’ve had a caretaker PM for a year or so, and there’s basically a caretaker government after messy election results in March, in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis. This interim government is supposedly in place just to manage the crisis. Clearly it’s not going well. It would be reasonable to put their problems down to no strong central government, à la the US. Now, Brazil has a notoriously extreme-right government at present, and I’ve already given its deaths-to-cases ratio, but the number of cases is rising rapidly, as are the number of deaths. Now, let’s have a look at Scandinavian countries, often glorified as models of good government. I’ll include in that vague grouping, in order of population: the Netherlands (17m), Sweden (10m), Denmark (5.8m), Finland (5.5m) and Norway (5.4m), and I’ll exclude Iceland, which has all the advantages of a distant island re isolation (it’s 87th in the world for cases). On deaths-to-cases: The Netherlands 13%, Sweden 12%, Denmark 5%, Finland 4.7% and Norway 2.8%. On those statistics, it seems that the smaller the country, population-wise, the better managed it has been in terms of preventing mortality, which does make some sense.
Canto: Okay so I’ll look at their current governments. the Netherlands is clearly hard-hit, Covid-19-wise. It has a multi-multi-party system (that’s not a typo) and is currently governed by a centre-right or conservative-liberal party, VVD, presumably supported by the next largest party, PVV a right-wing nationalist group. The left appears to be divided amongst a number of smaller parties, and the current government has been in power for ten years. Sweden, also faring badly under Covid-19, currently has a minority government with a social democrat PM after a controversial and inconclusive election in 2018. So it’s a centre-left government relying on centre-right parties. The social democrats have been in power, mostly as a majority, since 1917, but there has been a movement towards the right in recent years. Denmark, doing better than the previous two, but faring much worse than we are here in Australia, where we have a death-to-case ratio of 1.4%, has again a multi-party system – and by the way, all of these Scandinavian countries, except Finland which is a republic, are constitutional monarchies practising parliamentary democracy like Britain, and, in a weird way, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The leftist social democrats are currently in power in Denmark, and they have a far tougher position on physical distancing than the Swedish government. Finland Has both a President and a Prime Minister, somewhat like France. The Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, made news worldwide as the youngest PM in the world when elected late last year. She’s a social democrat and heads a coalition government, which seems to be the case with most Scandinavian governments.
Jacinta: Yes, They seem designed that way so the parliament is more or less forced to collaborate in order to get things done. It seems a much better way to run a country, a far superior system to that of the USA, much more team-based. Anyway, statistics seem to suggest that, overall, strong central governments that can co-ordinate efforts effectively, and have the support of the people, are doing better at saving lives. It’s not a conclusive finding though, and no doubt each country has its confounding factors.
Canto: Norway, finally, has handled things in much the way you would expect of the nation rated first in the world by the OECD. On March 19 this year, their federal government was granted emergency powers by parliament until December. That’s one way of creating strong central government, albeit temporarily. The current government is essentially right-centrist, within a multiparty system where the balance is usually held by left-centre parties. Clearly, though, this is a nation where people place more faith in government than, say, in the USA. And speaking of libertarianism and such, it’s interesting to look at Brazil more closely. When we began this post a couple of days, ago, Brazil was fourth in the world in terms of confirmed cases. Now it’s up to second, that’s how fast-moving things are.
Jacinta: And it’ll never reach top spot, surely – the USA is way way ahead of the rest of the world.
Canto: So Brazil is a republic, and currently has an extreme right-wing government under Jair Bolsonaro, who, according to this very recent New Yorker report, seems to be doing everything he can to exacerbate the situation. Brazil’s rise in cases has been more recent than most, and the death toll is now rising rapidly, now up to sixth in the world.Bolsonaro is shrugging it off and encouraging defiance of state restrictions in much the manner of Trump, whom he idolises. So it seems that when you get extreme anti-government government – negligence mixed with incompetence – as in the case of Trump and Bolsonaro, the death toll will likely be devastating, and will impact mainly the poor, elderly and disadvantaged. Who would’ve thunk it?
References
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/13/opinions/russia-low-covid-19-mortality-rate-sepkowitz/index.html
https://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Europe/Belgium-POLITICS-GOVERNMENT-AND-TAXATION.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_Netherlands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Sweden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Denmark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Norway
Empress Dowager Cixi: tradition and reform
Canto: So we’ve written a piece on Cixi (to save time I won’t keep referring to her by full title), touting her as a reformer, within strict limits, but without actually mentioning and discussing any of her reforms.
Jacinta: Yes, there’s so much to write, to put her in context, that a few blog posts wouldn’t be enough. But before we begin I want to express my annoyance at the Wikipedia article on Cixi. It ends with this on Jung Chang’s book:
In 2013, Jung Chang’s biography, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, portrays Cixi as the most capable ruler and administrator that China could have had at the time. Pamela Kyle Crossley said in the London Review of Books that Chang’s claims “seem to be minted from her own musings, and have little to do with what we know was actually going in China”. Although Crossley was sympathetic to restoring women’s place in Chinese history, she found “rewriting Cixi as Catherine the Great or Margaret Thatcher is a poor bargain: the gain of an illusory icon at the expense of historical sense”.
Canto: Yes, this is a travesty of the book, which at no point makes comparisons with the other leaders mentioned, or ever hints at such comparisons. Having said that, Chang’s book was a biography, not a history of China during this period, which of course would’ve been a far more monumental task. The book focuses particularly on the court and the Forbidden City, and the struggles and machinations there, and only occasionally, but effectively, expands outward to the nationwide repercussions. As to being ‘minted from her own musings’, the book is clearly massively researched, with primary sources linked to almost every page of the book. Of course some decisions and actions require speculation, all of which, it seems to me, fits with a coherent description of Cixi’s character – that of a proud and often ruthless, baggage-laden Manchu aristocrat with progressive tendencies in keeping with her love of knowledge and innovation, struggling to make sense of and keep abreast of a wave of progress, internationalism and foreign encroachment without precedent in Chinese history. And also of course that of a powerful 19th century woman in a part of the world even more repressive of powerful women than that of ‘the west’.
Jacinta: Yes, it’s particularly disappointing that Wikipedia ends with this hatchet-job, leaving the unwary reader with a very wrong impression of the book, IMHO. Anyway, to the reforms. Chang highlights most of them in the epilogue to her book, and the list is well worth presenting here:
Under her leadership the country began to acquire virtually all the attributes of a modern state: railways, electricity, telegraph, telephones, western medicine, a modern-style army and navy, and modern ways of conducting foreign trade and diplomacy. The restrictive millennium-old educational system was discarded and replaced by western-style schools and universities. The press blossomed, enjoying a freedom that was unprecedented and arguably unsurpassed since. She unlocked the door to political participation: for the first time in China’s long history, people were to become ‘citizens’. It was Cixi who championed women’s liberation in a culture that had for centuries imposed foot-binding on the female population – a practice to which she put an end. The fact that her last enterprise before her untimely death was to introduce the vote testifies to her courage and vision Above all, her transformation of China was carried out without her engaging in violence and with relatively little upheaval.
Canto: Yes, all this is true, and it largely came from her, or more accurately from her complex response to the massive changes going on in the outer world, and that world’s growing impact on China. I’m sure Chang wrote this partly as a corrective to the propaganda surrounding Cixi, that she was an obstacle to progress and, in contradiction, a figurehead manipulated by powerful aristocrats and factions.
Jacinta: And also a cruel and lascivious harridan. And I must say, in response to Crossley’s review, she does bear comparison to other major female power-wielders. To Thatcher perhaps, if only for her formidable ‘she who must be obeyed’ presence, to which many eye-witnesses throughout the book testify, and also perhaps to Elizabeth I (I don’t know enough about Catherine the Great), for her concern for stability and moderation, and for the Chinese people.
Canto: And yet she could be ruthless and cruel, though I put this partly down to the absolute power wielded by the throne, and the history of imperial and aristocratic cruelty she was born into – the eunuch system, lingchi (death by a thousand cuts), the bastinado and so forth. Reforms to the Qing Legal Code, late in Cixi’s lifetime, banned many of these cruelties, though certainly this was under pressure from other nations.
Jacinta: Yes, she has to be seen in the context of China’s long isolation from the ‘enlightenment’ ideas of the west, which was coming to an end just as she gained total power. And her experience, for example, of the wanton destruction of the Old Summer Palace – regarded as ‘the garden of gardens’, an apparently wondrous complex of outstanding architecture, floral designs and historical treasures – by the British in the 1860s would hardly have warmed her to any ideas of western superiority. In fact I think her early sympathy for the Boxer Rebellion well captures her sympathy for so many of the ordinary people who felt threatened by the many changes wrought by foreigners and the arrogance with which some of those went about their ‘mission’. And I’m thinking about Christians in particular.
Canto: The cruelties and the despotism of mid-nineteenth century China bear comparison to the different cruelties of pre-enlightenment Europe, with its burnings by fire, its trials by ordeal, its divine rights and so forth. Reforms came to China almost too quickly, and the path from that nineteenth-century ‘opening up’ to the extremely repressive and unrepresentative government of modern China is no doubt as complex as it is depressing. Cixi was bowing to the inevitable towards the end of her life, it seems, acknowledging, or hoping, that a constitutional monarchy, with popular representation in some kind of parliament, would be the eventual result of all the pressures being brought to bear on the system she’d been accustomed to manipulating. Certainly she was a traditionalist in many ways, full of superstitions that seem bizarre to us, overly loyal to her heritage, the Manchu minority (though she appointed more Han people to positions of authority and power than any previous Qing ruler), and keen to uphold court ceremonial (though flexible when it suited her). It seems to me that if she was twenty or thirty years younger at the turn of the century, with the same hold on power, she would’ve had a better chance than anyone else of effecting a peaceful transition in China, from an absolute monarchy – one of the last – to some kind of more democratic system. But that wasn’t to be, and the rest, sadly, is history.
References
Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: the concubine who launched Modern China, 2013
progressivism: the no-alternative philosophy
Canto: So here’s the thing – I’ve occasionally been asked about my politics and I’ve been a little discomfited about having to describe them in a few words, and I’ve even wondered if I could describe them effectively to myself.
Jacinta: Yes I find it easier to be sure of what I’m opposed to, such as bullies or authoritarians, which to me are much the same thing. So that means authoritarian governments, controlling governments and so forth. But I also learned early on that the world was unfair, that some kids were richer than others, smarter than others, better-looking than others, through no fault or effort of their own. I was even able to think through this enough to realise that even the kind kids and the nasty ones, the bullies and the scaredy-cats, didn’t have too much choice in the matter. So I often wondered about a government role in making things a bit fairer for those who lost out in exactly where, or into whose hands, they were thrown into the world.
Canto: Well you could say there’s a natural diversity in all those things, intelligence, appearance, wealth, capability and so forth… I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, it just is. I remember once answering that question, about my politics, by describing myself as a pluralist, and then later being disappointed at my self-description. Of course, I wouldn’t want to favour the opposite – what’s that, singularism? But clearly not all differences are beneficial – extreme poverty for example, or its opposite…
Jacinta: You wouldn’t want to be extremely wealthy?
Canto; Well okay I’ve sometimes fantasised, but mainly in terms of then having more power to make changes in the world. But I’m thinking of the differences that disadvantage us as a group, as a political entity. And here’s one thing I do know about politics. We can’t live without it. We owe our success as a species, for what it’s worth, to our socio-political organisation, something many libertarians seem to be in denial about.
Jacinta: Yes, humans are political animals, if I may improve upon Aristotle. But differences that disadvantage us. Remember eugenics? Perhaps in some ways it’s still with us. Prospective parents might be able to abort their child if they can find out early on that it’s – defective in some way.
Canto: Oh dear, that’s a real can of worms, but those weren’t the kind of differences I was thinking about. Since you raise the subject though, I would say this is a matter of individual choice, but that, overall, ridding the world of those kinds of differences – intellectual disability, dwarfism, intersex, blindness, deafness and so on – wouldn’t be a good thing. But of course that would require a sociopolitical world that would agree with me on that and be supportive of those differences.
Jacinta: So you’re talking about political differences. Or maybe cultural differences?
Canto: Yes but that’s another can of worms. It’s true that multiculturalism can expand our thinking in many ways, but you must admit that there are some heavy cultures, that have attitudes about the ‘place of women’ for example, or about necessary belief in their god…
Jacinta: Or that taurans make better lovers than geminis haha.
Canto: Haha, maybe. Some false beliefs have more serious consequences than others. So multiculturalism has its positives and negatives, but you want the dominant culture, or the mix of cultures that ultimately forms a new kind of ‘creole’ overarching culture, to be positive and open. To be progressive. That’s the key word. There’s no valid alternative to a progressive culture. It’s what has gotten us where we are, and that’s not such a bad place, though it’s far from perfect, and always will be.
Jacinta: So progressiveness good, conservativism bad? Is that it?
Canto: Nothing is ever so simple, but you’re on the right track. Progress is a movement forward. Sometimes it’s a little zigzaggy, sometimes two forward one back. I’m taking my cue from David Deutsch’s book The beginning of infinity, which is crystallising much I’ve thought about politics and culture over the years, and of the role and meaning of science, which as you know has long preoccupied me. Anyway, the opposite of progress is essentially stasis – no change at all. Our former conservative Prime Minister John Howard was fond of sagely saying ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, as a way of avoiding the prospect of change. But it isn’t just about fixing, it’s rather more about improving, or transcending. Landline phones didn’t need fixing, they were a functional, functioning technology. But a new technology came along that improved upon it, and kept improving and added internet technology to its portability. We took a step back in our progress many decades ago, methinks, when we abandoned the promise of electrified modes of travel for the infernal combustion engine, and it’s taking us too long to get back on track, but I’m confident we’ll get there eventually. ..
Jacinta: I get you. Stasis is this safe option, but in fact it doesn’t lead anywhere. We’d be sticking with the ‘old’ way of doing things, which takes us back much further than just the days of landlines, but before any recognisable technology at all. Before using woven cloth, before even using animal skins and fire to improve our chances of survival.
Canto: So it’s not even a safe option. It’s not a viable option at all. You know how there was a drastic drop in the numbers of Homo sapiens some 70,000 years ago – we’ll probably never know how close we came to extinction. I’d bet my life it was some innovation that only our species could have thought of that enabled us to come out of it alive and breeding.
Jacinta: And some of our ancestors would’ve been dragged kicking and screaming towards accepting that innovation. I used to spend time on a forum of topical essays where the comments were dominated by an ‘anti-Enlightenment’ crowd, characters who thought the Enlightenment – presumably the eighteenth century European one (but probably also the British seventeenth century one, the Scottish one, and maybe even the Renaissance to boot) – was the greatest disaster ever suffered by humanity. Needless to say, I soon lost interest. But that’s an extreme example (I think they were religious nutters).
Canto: Deutsch, in a central chapter of The beginning of infinity, compares ancient Athens and Sparta, even employing a Socratic dialogue for local colour. The contrast isn’t just between Athens’ embracing of progress and Sparta’s determination to maintain stasis, but between openness and its opposite. Athens, at its all-too-brief flowering, encouraged philosophical debate and reasoning, rule-breaking artistry, experimentation and general questioning, in the process producing famous dialogues, plays and extraordinary monuments such as the Parthenon. Sparta on the other hand left no legacy to build on or rediscover, and all that we know of its politico-social system comes from non-Spartans, so that if it has been misrepresented it only has itself to blame!
Jacinta: Yet it didn’t last.
Canto: Many instances of that sort of thing. In the case of Athens, its disastrous Syracusan adventure, its ravagement by the plague, or a plague, or a series of plagues, and the Peloponnesian war, all combined to permanently arrest its development. Contingent events. Think too of the Islamic Golden Age, a long period of innovation in mathematics, physics, astronomy, medicine, architecture and much else, brought to an end largely by the Mongol invasions, and the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate but also by a political backlash towards stasis, anti-intellectualism and religiosity, most often associated with the 12th century theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.
Jacinta: Very tragic for our modern world. So how do we guard against the apostles of stasis? By the interminable application of reason? By somehow keeping them off the reins of power, since those apostles will always be with us?
Canto: Not by coercion, no. It has to be a battle of ideas, or maybe I shouldn’t use that sort of male lingo. A demonstration of ideas, in the open market. A demonstration of their effectiveness for improving our world, which means comprehending that world at an ever-deeper, more comprehensive level.
Jacinta: Comprehensively comprehending, that seems commendably comprehensible. But will this improve the world for us all – lift all boats, as Sam Harris likes to say?
Canto: Well, since you mention Harris, I totally agree with him that reason, and science which is so clearly founded on reason, is just as applicable to the moral world, to pointing the way to and developing the best and richest life we all can live, as it is to technology and our deepest understanding of the universe, the multiverse or whatever our fundamental reality happens to be. So we need to keep on developing and building on that science, and communicating it and applying it to the human world and all that it depends upon and influences.
References
The beginning of infinity, by David Deutsch, 2012
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
Covid 19: hopes, failures, solutions
Covid-19 continues to be devastating, especially in the USA, where there are vastly more cases than anywhere else, and vastly more deaths, though the picture there is complex. The hardest-hit region, the New York area, is seeing devastation in poorer districts such as Queens, where the Elmhurst public hospital is inundated with uninsured, critically ill patients. New York has suffered almost half of US deaths. Some other states and regions, especially physical outliers such as Alaska, Hawaii and the Virgin Islands, have very low numbers, and it would be hard to explain why the spread of cases across the mainland has been so uneven. Of course it’s obvious that there has been no federal leadership on the pandemic.
Here in Australia, where the numbers seem to be improving (we’re 33rd on the list of total cases, down from 18th when I first started paying attention to the list about three weeks ago, and 52nd on the list of total deaths), our conservative federal government is keen to open up the country again, and has released modelling to the effect that the virus will be eliminated from the mainland if we maintain current physical distancing measures, though it’s likely to take weeks rather than months:
The model suggests that every 10 people infected currently spread the virus to five more people, on average. At that level, the virus would eventually be unable to circulate and would die out within Australia.
Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Australia in course to eliminate Covid-19, modelling shows’
Australia’s current reproduction number (R0) is just a little over .5. A maintained R0 of 1 or less will eventually eliminate the virus. Of course, there will be fluctuations in that number, so it will be difficult to project a time when things are ‘all clear’. Another difficulty with modelling is that the number of infected but asymptomatic people is unknown and difficult to estimate. For example, recent Covid-19 testing of the entire crew of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt found that a substantial majority of those who tested positive were asymptomatic, casting doubt on previous estimates (already worrying for transmission) of one in four cases being asymptomatic.
The asymptomatic/presymptomatic transmission issue was addressed by Bill Gates in this article back in February. It’s what makes SARS-CoV-2 a much more serious threat than the previous SARS and MERS viruses. Gates, in this very important article, also provides an outline of what needs to be done globally to fight this pandemic and to prepare for inevitable future ones. If only…
It’s worth comparing Gates’ call for national and global co-ordination, and more expenditure, in the fields of epidemiology and disease prevention, with another more recent article, also published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which tells a tale of Britain and its NHS, gutted by years, in fact decades of ‘reforms’ and budget cuts:
Thanks to government “reforms” of the NHS, it has become highly decentralized, with over 200 commissioning groups in England that can make independent decisions about staffing and procurement of equipment — far from the monolithic “socialist” health care system it is often assumed to be. The devolved governments in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have substantial health system autonomy. At a time when central management of staff and resources might be most helpful, the decentralized decision-making structure leads to competition for resources and inconsistent policies.
One can hope that the travesty of this virus, especially in places like the US and the UK, will lead to a rethinking of the importance of a well-funded, centralised, co-ordinating and interventionist government in modern states, with particular emphasis on the healthcare system. But I suspect that, in the USA at least, things will go the other way, and the government-hating and government-blaming will only intensify. I’d love to leave this topic and look at solutions – that’s to say I’d love to focus more on the science, but I’m barely equipped to do so. Still, I like to have a go. A very technical and comprehensive review review of pharmacological treatments has been posted recently on the JAMA website, which includes an account of how SARS-CoV-2 enters host cells and utilises those cells for reproduction.
The review claims that currently the most promising therapy is the antiviral drug remdesivir. So what is it and how does it work? I’ll try to answer that question next time.
References
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2005755?query=recirc_artType_railA_article