“Billions of big babies”: now more than ever
Back in 2006, I published a book called Billions of big babies: the secular imperative, in which I argued that people all over the world were plunging into “a perpetual state of childishness” because of the revival of all sorts of outdated religions and ideologies that kept them from accepting even the slightest responsibility toward solving, or at least confronting, any of the world’s major problems. Most of my current blogposts are focused on the same kind of ethical considerations, lambasting the joint, neoliberal/neofascist “open conspiracy” by which such tremendously important issues as the rapidly deteriorating natural environment, rapidly escalating geopolitical confrontations between rival forms of imperialism, exacerbated by a renewed fascination with cultural and religious cleavages, exponential increases in private debt which will probably soon lead to a much more devastating financial crisis than the one that took place in 2008, and rapidly increasing divisions between the already unprecedentedly polarized social classes—are all being completely ignored, considerably downplayed or at best, only hypocritically addressed, by the world’s leading political, economic, social and cultural decision-makers.
With the exception of a relatively tiny group of radical intellectuals, and a small coterie of largely ineffectual protesters, this pollyanna attitude has also infected a vast portion of the world’s “ordinary” or “common” people. To be sure, there are several billion people out there, adults and children, who are forced to work all the time, just to stay alive, and do not get much of a chance to indulge in any kind of “childishness”, legitimate or otherwise. But for those other billions of people who do possess that luxury, most of them seem to be spending all their “off” time these days indulging various personal addictions toward whatever fantasy of deliberate ignorance that has been concocted for them by increasingly powerful forces, in the often overlapping realms of commercial publicity and populist propaganda.
Such as the idiots in the UK who managed to shut down that country’s most important airports for several days by flying their derelict drones, for the “fun” of it, as closely as possible to extremely vulnerable passenger jets containing thousands of potential victims. Old-fashioned “sales resistance” toward crappy goods and services, and even crappier ideas, seems to have almost entirely disappeared from the face of the earth. I even saw a title in a list of popular books being advertised last month, called, believe it or not, “The subtle art of not giving a (damn)”, although it was not the word “damn” that was actually used in that title. As a result, it no longer seems hard to understand why superhero movies, based on comic-book characters created for kids, have become so popular among millions of adults, in many different countries.
One of the most interesting articles that I read recently, denouncing the same kind of “cultural infantilism” that I was analyzing, was New Zealand psychologist John F. Schumaker’s “The personality crisis”, published in the November-December 2018 edition of the world-news magazine known as The New Internationalist. Schumaker drew on a whole series of extremely pertinent sources, to make the point that the deliberate dumbing-down of contemporary society and the rise of the sociopathic personality have created a “climate of apathy” and an aversion to responsibility that makes solving such horrendous problems as planetary destruction of the natural environment practically impossible.
“The cultural backfire effect”, in which the constant confrontation of ingrained cultural beliefs with extremely uncomfortable facts that undermine those beliefs completely, has resulted in people refusing to face up to reality even more than before, and “doubling down” on those disproved beliefs instead. In other words, extremely dangerous forms of deliberate denial, typified by such unhinged personalities as Donald Trump and Elon Musk (both individuals not specifically named by Schumaker in his article), means that most people living nowadays have been “perfectly groomed” for apocalyptic disaster. People like Trump may be completely clueless, or under the hypnotic control of a foreign Svengali, and people like Musk may be highly successful technocrats, hypnotized only by their own exaggerated personalities, but what they have in common is an innate sense of self-entitlement that is not at all related to any of their accomplishments.
My criticism of Schumaker’s article is not focused against anything that he wrote, but rather on the fact that he only referenced environmental degradation as the one overwhelmingly important issue whose potential resolution is being undermined by such cultural infantilism. In my opinion, the potential collapse of the entire world economy, enormously exacerbated social divisions and constantly escalating geopolitical confrontations, especially among the nuclear-armed powers, are every bit as dangerous as imminent ecological failure. Not so much as separate problems but more as highly intertwined complexities, that can only be confronted, all together and all at once, as interconnected threats to ongoing human survival. Which makes the current doubling-down on traditional forms of cultural indifference to scientifically evident realities that much more frightening. Not to mention also confronting society with the other horrendously difficult problem of trying to figure out how to go about combatting both elitism and cultural infantilism at the same time.
The other comment that I would like to make to what Schumaker was arguing is that this cultural infantilism is by no means confined in today’s world to the predominantly private-capitalist group of countries that includes most of Western civilization and Japan, countries on which the arguments of many of the sources referenced in Schumaker’s article seem to be focusing. In reality, quite similar kinds of infantilism have also infected all the other cultures in the world, including predominantly state-capitalist countries as culturally divergent as China, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, along with most of the other countries in the former Third World, be they emergent economies or failed states. The long-standing division of the world between a small number of powerful imperialist states, on the one hand, and a much larger number of much less powerful states, and even less powerful stateless peoples, all of those geopolitical entities acting as a sort of mirror image of the enormous income and power divisions among the social classes, has also been intensely exacerbated in recent years during the same process of cultural polarization.
All these analytically separate trends have converged into an “open conspiracy” of overlapping ideologies, that (in spite of appearances) includes both multiculturalist neoliberalism and ethnic-nationalist neofascism (which supports neoliberalism in the socio-economic sphere of activity), as well as cultural infantilism. All parts of the globe are currently being affected by all three of those ideological tendencies, which, just to make things even more complicated, are also quite often expressed through religious fundamentalism, which is always extremely sexist, always “racializes” minority religions within each respective sphere of domination and often promotes barbaric acts of private terrorism, and state terrorism, as well.
This observation applies not only to Muslim fundamentalism, but also to Christian fundamentalism, and similar, antediluvian movements operating within all the other “old-time” religions in this world. Including the “animist” religions still being practised by thousands of indigenous peoples on every continent. In my opinion, it is impossible to understand what is going on in today’s world without considering how all these not-so-separate ideologies are constantly interacting with each other, as if they were all just analytical facets of the same highly complicated, anti-humanist form of cultural atavism.
In every cultural region, and reflecting the influence of those same ideologies converging to different degrees within each region, the deliberate refusal to take responsibility for anything and everything has become the entire world’s most important trend. Perhaps because it has been promoted for the past several decades by thousands of capitalist organizations all over the planet, not only by the leading, multinational, private corporations but also by the state-capitalist enterprises that currently mimic liberal maximization of private profit. In today’s world, every single, revenue-generating production process, and provided service, has been sliced up into dozens of separate, sausage-like sections, in a concerted attempt to avoid any responsibility on any one company’s (or any one country’s) part for the quality, or lack of quality, to be found in each and every finished product or service.
This same type of chopped-up-into-little-pieces approach has also been adopted, whenever possible, by every large political, social and cultural organization in the world, and even by every infected individual active on every one of the world’s social media, in an attempt to make sure that artificially “happy” people can just go on having as much mind-numbing fun as possible, forever. Without having to be rudely interrupted by anyone else’s complaints, whether those complaints come from mistreated workers, or misled customers, or downtrodden members of one’s own family. Not to mention being interrupted by the kind of fake friends foisted on fellow fraudsters by faceless functionaries from Facebook!
More and more deplorable people exist in every part of the world, and include not only the openly racist and sexist rednecks backing up Donald Trump, as referenced by his 2016 liberal opponent, Hillary Clinton, but also indirectly racist and sexist people like the Clintons themselves, as well as mainstream collaborators such as Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau. All those “internationalist” politicians unsuccessfully try to hide their own deplorable characteristics behind neoliberal elitism, an ideology that not only accentuates the already horrendous divisions between the social classes, but also by the same token adversely affects women and minorities even more severely than it also adversely affects men from various different ethnic and religious majorities.
The polarization of competing social classes, promoted all over the world by neoliberalism, has greatly contributed toward creating the “objective conditions” necessary for the Trump presidency, the Brexit fiasco in Britain, the yellow-vest movement in France, the Greek crisis, the largely neofascist government in Italy and several other European countries, the Bolsonaro presidency in Brazil and the rise of ultra-right-wing populism in several other Latin American countries, as well as the rise of even more authoritarian governments throughout Asia and Africa than the ones that already existed decades ago.
Now more than ever before, deplorability is therefore to be found concentrated not only among the richest and the most powerful elites, but also in a somewhat more diluted fashion in the various intermediate classes, all the way down to the lowest members of the human condition, in the so-called lumpen proletariat (beggars, criminals, prostitutes, etc.). All the world’s deplorable individuals, from whatever class and from whatever culture, are jointly refusing to be held accountable for a severe decline in everything positive in this world, such as genuinely sustainable development, social solidarity, empathy, humanism, pacifism, or even much maligned good manners. All those absences coming together in the overall refusal of millions of deliberately barbarian human beings in every part of the world to support any kind of universal values, which they all see as being uniquely directed only against their own culture by all the other, “obviously inferior” cultures.
A really excellent way in which to try to come to grips with all this ideological regression, not only that promoted by out-and-out, raving-lunatic, pro-fascist populists, but also by the more respectable kind of liberal elitists, is to turn the current fact-checking campaigns started up recently by some of the mainstream media into a more comprehensive, more radical exercise. “Radical” in this sense meaning getting down to the root causes of whatever kind of problem is being discussed. A legal expression long since adopted in several American states for oath-taking can prove to be useful in this context, namely the admonition not just to tell the truth, but to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” as well. Both of which are much harder to do than just to focus on one small part of what is deemed to be true.
Useful, that is, as long as we drop the addendum tacked onto that expression in several of those states, “so help me, God.” From a fact-checking point of view, since there is no way of intelligently validating the existence of the religious entity known as “God”, there is no way of maintaining a serious focus on the material facts when metaphysical concepts are introduced into the argument. As the French scientist, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pointed out to the emperor Napoleon in 1804, when asked why God had no role in his theory of the universe, the answer was that Laplace felt that he had no need whatsoever to refer to that particular (metaphysical) concept. We should also avoid getting waylaid by such other popular slogans as “all facts are relative”, whose influence was bolstered by the kind of deconstructionism that was quite popular in philosophical circles several years ago, since all the facts concerning every situation are by no means equally relative.
A really good example of what I mean by being radical, especially when it focuses on facts that are often ignored, or at least severely downplayed, by establishment figures, comes from comments made by several commentators after the recent death of former US president, George HW Bush. He was praised for being much more polite and gentlemanly than any of the current crop of deliberately foul-mouthed reality-show graduates like Donald Trump, thereby emphasizing the severe, recent decline in good manners among increasingly right-wing-populist politicians all over the world.
In fact, however, GHW Bush deserves to be remembered much more for a number of considerably more important reasons, such as his 1991 invasion of Iraq, to “liberate” the Kuwaiti emirate from Saddam Hussein, but even more importantly for being the leading instigator of the UN’s 1991-2003 economic boycott of Iraq, that killed about 500 000 people in that country. Many, many, more people in Iraq were killed by the boycott than by either the first invasion, or the second one carried out by GHW’s son, George W Bush, that eliminated Hussein and his regime altogether. Or even by both of those invasions put together.
This was the radical fact that should turn out to be the most important thing everyone should remember about GHW, not his gentlemanly attitude toward his opponents in the political establishment of the USA. In a similar vein, GWH’s father, Prescott Bush, should be remembered not so much for his own gentlemanly demeanour, but for his enthusiastic participation in the patrician coterie of American millionaires who supported Adolf Hitler’s regime for quite a long time. In other words, while it is true that politeness is an entirely necessary quality in human society, and should always be supported as much as possible, it is far from being the most important quality that people can possibly possess, especially those who are politically active.
Another situation that should be treated in a much more radical manner is the critique that a number of leading commentators have developed concerning the current world trend, also heavily influenced by the same overlapping ideologies identified above, toward increasingly authoritarian regimes all over the world. Liberal-minded people can legitimately bemoan the fact that multi-party democracy itself is being rapidly replaced by ultra-right-wing populist governments like the ones currently dominating such formerly liberal countries as the USA, Brazil, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, India, South Africa and so on. Thereby joining, or threatening to join, the list of such even more firmly authoritarian regimes as China, Russia, Vietnam, Iran, the Philippines, the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Eritrea, Columbia, Guatemala, Honduras and a host of others.
Most mainstream commentators, however, inevitably fail to mention that the liberal democracy that is indeed declining all over the world, was never all that democratic in the first place. In a world in which the income gap and the human-rights gap between the social classes is constantly being enlarged on the whole (in spite of a very small number of regional exceptions), to say that “democracy is declining”, without embarking on a much more radical analysis about how limited democracy has always been even in liberal countries, is to miss the main point.
The main point being that exaggerated class divisions have always undermined democracy, which can only become somewhat closer to a description of reality with the adoption of a comprehensive, “cradle-to-grave”, series of social programs designed to considerably attenuate enormous differences in income and political power. While it is often easier to adopt some of those programs in a liberal democracy than it is in an authoritarian regime (even under totalitarian “communism”), commentators of whatever political stripe ought to freely recognize that merely political democracies (“one person/one vote”) can never entirely overcome the deleterious influence of fundamental class divisions. As for the total abolition of social classes altogether, that interesting idea has never been successfully implemented anywhere, and continues to exist only inside the feverish brains of a few isolated dreamers. It goes without saying, however, that very few of the world’s mainstream commentators will ever admit to this sort of radicalism, since it would undermine their own preferred, wishy-washy ideologies completely.
Which is not to say that liberal democracy is completely useless, for all sorts of interesting reasons. One of them being that my blog, and thousands of others like it, would never last for more than two minutes in any completely authoritarian regime. The goal of which, as the new Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, pointed out recently, is to do away with ideologies like socialism, communism and anti-imperialism forever, along with all the people who still dare to believe in such things. In fact, Bolsonaro went even further than that, by mimicking dozens of other freshman dictators in the past, pretending that he really wanted to do without “any ideologies” at all and to govern Brazil strictly according to its constitution. As if ultra-right-wing populism were not in itself an obvious ideology, and as if the Brazilian constitution, like all the other constitutions in the world, were not self-evidently ideological in origin as well.
It is a common characteristic of all “strictly pragmatic” strongmen (caudillos) to try to get their political base to agree with everything that they do, simply because they are doing it, and never to question any of their policies. Disagreeing with them is their definition of “ideology”, just like Donald Trump’s definition of “democracy” is agreeing with him, no matter how many thousands of lies he tells and how many times he changes his mind from one day to the next, about every single policy. All the authoritarian regimes running all the countries listed above always define what are for them mere words, like “democracy” and “ideology”, as being whatever they want them to be. Even if their definitions change completely from one political situation to another. Which is also another excellent example of yet another aspect of the “cultural infantilism” identified by John Schumaker in his article.
Radical fact-checking can also be used to challenge the pretensions of many naive environmentalists, in countries like Canada where a couple million indigenous people live alongside seventeen times as many “settlers”. That is, whenever those naive environmentalists pretend to believe that all “First Nations” people are inherently good ecologists, living “close to nature”. Until they stumble across many different indigenous groups who support resource development projects in their regions for exactly the same reasons as “settlers” do. Mostly in order to get jobs located close to home, if only for a limited number of years. It turns out that living “close to nature” does not often result in being able to provide adequately for a burgeoning population.
The Anthropocene proposal is another possible example of what can happen when even good environmentalists take their arguments a little too far. In this case, I am not at all criticizing the Anthropocene idea for pointing out that the human impact on the natural world, since at least the industrial revolution (1780-1880), has increased exponentially over the past two centuries. There is no doubt about the fact that agricultural and industrial pollution, all over the world, has resulted in the much more rapid disappearance of thousands of multicellular species than used to be the case, at least since such colossal events as the enormous meteorite collision that apparently led to the destruction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. Nor am I denying the effects of climate change, that is expected to cause global warming by about four degrees by the year 2100 (although humans might not survive long enough to witness that particular event). The stupendous accumulation of plastic forms of pollution in the world’s oceans is also a very real threat for marine life, including the fish that millions of people depend upon as their main source of food.
My criticism of the Anthropocene concept is centred instead on the attempt to turn the deleterious effects of human-caused pollution into a geological argument. From the fact-checking point of view, it seems to me that geological events take place on a much larger time scale than the mere 200 000 or 300 000 year time-scale of human (homo sapiens) existence on this planet. There are also quite a few potential causes for the possible destruction of human life that are not in any way caused by human intervention itself. One should never forget that entirely “natural” (non-human) causes of catastrophic events potentially leading to our collective demise also include such things as another collision between the Earth and a truly large piece of space junk (like the one that presumably knocked off the dinosaurs), or the eruption of a truly giant volcano (like the one that presumably lies under Yellowstone Park in the USA, or other ones apparently located inside the Indonesian archipelago).
People are not going to get anywhere with arguments about human irresponsibility if we exaggerate our effect on the physical universe. Of course disruptive human behaviour is much more threatening than any possible natural causes of potentially catastrophic events, for the same reason as before (the totally different time scales involved). In any case, one way or the other, the disappearance of all human beings, for whatever causes, would not have much of an effect outside our immediate astronomical environment.
Getting back now to those much smaller-scale realities, within the human realm of things…Another fascinating example of how to radicalize mainstream fact-checking, related to infantile regression in society, has to do with analyzing the articles written every day by thousands of newspaper columnists (where such people still exist). About such things as trying to figure out why parents of children living in countries where primary and secondary education are supposed to be provided for free by the state, still end up paying thousands of dollars per year for “non-essential” educational materials. Those columnists regularly point out, quite rightly, that most of what is officially deemed non-essential is in fact quite essential after all, if all the children involved are supposed to end up getting a decent education, not just those whose parents are rich enough to pay for everything that is being ignored by the government. Or those fortunate enough to belong to a schoolroom class in which the teacher ends up paying for the materials instead, out of his or her own pocket.
Some of the columnists involved are then able to trace that situation to governments, even in relatively rich countries such as Canada, which have been practising austerity for the past forty years because of the nefarious influence of neoliberalism. What the vast majority of those columnists refuse to do, however, if they want to keep their jobs, is to take the next obvious step by pointing out that those governments are often obliged to adopt such austerity programming by the fact that a large number of really important multinational corporations, run by private capitalists as well as by state capitalists, have managed to avoid paying the larger amounts of taxes that they used to be paying several decades ago, when many of those public educational systems were initially set up.
The tax evasion involved having been in some cases stupidly encouraged by governments competing among themselves for new, practically non-existent investment in any non-speculative sector of the economy, by deliberately lowering taxes on rich investors and their corporations, far below the rates that used to be charged. Or by the corporations directly adopting various legal (and illegal) stratagems, more than ever before, by registering most of their largely financial investments, and their profits, in the world’s very numerous tax havens. Not to mention actively supporting enormous increases in the levels of corruption, and criminal activity in general, in every single country (some more than others).
Infantile regression of contemporary society can also be found in the recently developing trend of providing for poor people’s welfare by eliminating government welfare checks and returning to the age-old practice of providing “alms” through philanthropy and private charity, especially religious charity. Those people who set up all the government-supported welfare systems, back in the twentieth century, did so because they realized already back then that private charity was totally incapable of providing adequately for poverty-stricken people, and that anyone who pretended the contrary was simply condemning most of them to life-threatening misery. It is nothing more than barbarian backtracking in society to promote private charity (as an alternative to public welfare) nowadays, for neoliberal or for neofascist reasons, especially given the fact that the entire world population has doubled over the past fifty years. Not to mention the other pertinent fact that although total world wealth has also doubled during the same period, most of it has been gobbled up by extremely rich people, who only make up about one percent of one percent (one ten-thousandth) of the world’s current population.
Which brings to mind yet another example of how to do radical fact-checking. This one has to do with the so-called “population bomb” of the 1970s, when several commentators tried to convince everyone that the world population was increasing much faster than anyone had ever expected before, particularly in Asia. In fact, it turned out that many of the world’s most populous countries, some in Latin America but most in southern and eastern Asia, experienced a radical decline over the past fifty years in the average number of children actually being born to women in the potentially fertile age group. Much the same as similar changes had already taken place before that in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as in Japan (the first of the Asian nations to successfully industrialize).
In this case, the radical part of the fact-checking has to do with the recent realization that although birthrates have indeed declined in most parts of today’s world, with the notable exception of most parts of Africa and western Asia, the current world population is not only double what it used to be during the 1960s, but is also still steadily climbing higher all the time. Not as much as some exaggerated predictions had pretended to reveal, but nevertheless a lot faster than what is good for the world these days, when the combined effects of neoliberalism and neofascism have eliminated any recent progress in fighting against poverty.
It is therefore exceedingly disgusting to fix so-called “extreme poverty”, as the World Bank has done, at the absurdly low level of people earning less than two dollars a day. Instead, we should be fixing the real level of overall poverty, enabling most people to earn an income capable of providing them with at least a modicum of hope for the future, forty times higher (at about eighty US dollars per day). A change in practice that would give everyone a much more realistic picture of how much progress still remains to be done in the fight against poverty. Even in a world in which progress, especially social progress, has become a dirty word, detested by every country’s most reactionary, and thereby most deplorable, people.
Another popular expression in the world media these days, that is desperately crying out to be fact-checked, is the assertion that there are already 400 million “middle class consumers in China”, with many more millions being added to the list every year. Given the fact that a “middle class” person in China earns only about one-tenth of what an average middle-class person earns in the USA, the use of that term merely serves to hide the reality of relative poverty in that country, an omission that is even more obvious when commentators attempt to use the same argument for countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico. People also have a tendency in this context to overlook the fact that all those countries possess enormous populations that do not get anywhere near even those so-called, “middle-class standards”. This is simply just another method of indirect lying, by omission rather than by commission (as in more direct lies coming from people like Trump).
Discussions about religion in the world media also provide us with hundreds of other excellent examples of debates that require radical fact-checking in even more obvious ways, since the claims being made are so incredibly at odds with reality. There was a recent case in point about some judge in the province of Ontario (Canada), who got all upset about the “spiritual trauma” that could be caused to some of the more orthodox Jews due to the fact that some bakery in that province came up with a cake mix that claimed to be composed of kosher food, when in truth it was not. The newspaper report about that event quite rightly reminded readers about how several thousand such products have in fact been manufactured in a kosher way, at least since the Second World War, in dozens of countries all across the planet. Even if the vast majority of the people consuming those products have not been Jewish at all, let alone those of the more orthodox variety.
What was missing in this particular report was any reference at all about how peculiar it is to oblige non-religious people, or those coming from some other religion, or even liberal-minded practitioners of the same religion, to consume kosher products, when no one in those same countries has ever been forced to consume halal products, or any other similar religious fare. An even more radical remark would be to compare this situation with the equally unusual situation in which private schools (such as many of those in the neighbouring province of Quebec) often receive considerable help from the government, the entire population helping to pay for private-school education that is quite often under the control of various kinds of religious educators, emphasizing purely religious content, rather than the usual secular fare. Curiously enough, the province of Ontario has never decided to subsidize religiously-organized private schools, particularly for the large Catholic minority in that province, like the governments in Quebec have been doing. So why should Ontario refuse to subsidize religion in one instance, and willingly do so in some other instance? Coming up with comparisons like these is what radical fact-checking ought to be all about.
Another even more interesting example comes from the USA, in which the House of Representatives patted itself on the back (so to speak) for having recently authorized the wearing of religious headgear (such as the hijab) inside the building, for the first time in history. The problem here, from a radical fact-checking point of view, is that the journalists reporting on this event cannot legitimately denounce other legislative assemblies as being intolerant for not doing the same thing. Without also pointing out that the people wearing such headgear, ostensibly for religious reasons, are also indulging in intolerance towards any of the world’s women, who have chosen instead to free themselves from the discriminatory effects of fundamentalist forms of religion. In spite of religiously-inspired theories about how religious people are much more serious, and sincere, in their “deeply-held” beliefs than are people following mere secular ideologies, the fact remains that there is no intelligent way of distinguishing between the more or less deeply-held beliefs of religious and non-religious human beings.
Radical fact-checking should also be used to help solve a number of other problems that have cropped up again in the news, such as the proposed extension of patent and copyright protection. These programs were initially set up, at least ostensibly, to reward major effort, on the part of large corporations as well as on that of creative individuals, so that such people and their organizations would be properly reimbursed by society for their contributions to material and cultural innovation. In fact, as has been pointed out repeatedly in dozens of different reports, after about five or ten years of this protection racket, very few of the big-name companies or well-known individuals from whatever variety of star-system, have gone on to produce anything more, possessing any significant social value. Instead, patent and copyright protection have quite often become just another way to make umpteen gobs of money for a very long time, for no good reason. In the meantime, extremely useful innovation, in certain limited cases like investigative journalism (which is always innovating by definition), has not been protected in any way, shape or form. Quite the contrary.
In fact, the general decline in journalism has become, at one and the same time, both a cause and a consequence of the dumbing-down of society, coming at the worst possible time, when critical thinking has never been more important to nothing less than the survival of the human race itself. Unfortunately, many of today’s journalists do not seem to be all that interested in investigative work, and end up copying a lot of their material directly out of the press releases that they receive from professional publicists hired by whatever private corporation, government agency or other official source that is being written about. Which, to say the least, does not contain a great deal of critical thinking.
The accompanying decline in the overall levels of shared cultural, background information, which is to say at least minimal levels of popular knowledge about science and society in general, is also directly related to declines in primary and secondary education. Focusing not only on mere statistics about the number of people going to school all over the world, but on the dumbing-down of educational curricula instead. (Which is often exacerbated by the exceedingly poor material conditions in which many schools operate, all over the world.) Children being educated should be receiving much higher levels of general knowledge these days, not the much lower levels that have been reported in most parts of the globe. As for critical thinking, it is often at school that young people learn how to copy from someone else’s work, thereby preparing at least some of them to become successful publicists, or plagiarizing journalists, later on.
Yet another general example of issues that could benefit immensely from radical fact-checking is in the functioning of millions of historical monuments, erected over the years all over the world. A case in point that was in the news recently was the fact that the obscure, seldom-seen monument to the Irish potato famine of 1847-1849 in Montreal (Quebec), near the Victoria Bridge, is apparently going to be much enlarged and enhanced. Local authorities have finally come up with a plan about how to make this monument much more well-known and well-visited in the near future. Which in my view ought also to be planned for another extremely poignant monument, about the same horrendous event, that is also hidden away, and therefore seldom seen, along the waterfront of the city of Toronto (Ontario). Among the projects decided upon recently in Montreal was the installation of a vegetable garden on the site, to presumably remind people of the origin of the famine, a blight that wiped out most of the potato plantations on which most of the Irish people back then depended for most of their food.
From a radical fact-checking point of view, what is missing in this case is any reference to the fact that Ireland back then was under the total colonial control of the British Empire, which had recently adopted an extreme form of economic (and social) liberalism, the ancestor of today’s neoliberalism. That particular famine ended up killing about a million people, sent another million into overseas exile (such as to the British colony of Canada), and also forced several hundred thousand others to become cheap labourers in the nearby island known as Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales).
What is also left out of the equation in most media accounts of that event is the fact that the same Irish colony was also producing, during the same period, enormous quantities of other agricultural products (meat, dairy and so on), at least some of which could have been diverted by imperial government intervention into feeding the starving multitude. Rather than being mostly shipped over to Britain, to make a lot more money for the mostly absentee landlords that owned the best agricultural land in Ireland. Doing so, however, would have been anathema to the prevailing ideologies of the period, not only economic liberalism but also British imperialism. Which according to historians like Mike Davis was also largely responsible for several other nineteenth-century famines, such as the even more murderous ones in “Third World” colonies like British India.
What is really good, on the other hand, about monuments to the Irish famine, and other such events, is the fact that at least they have as a subject things (even very negative things) that directly concerned millions of “ordinary” people. Unfortunately, most historical monuments in the world are more like most of the ones to be found in Paris, like the emperor Napoleon’s famous “Arc de Triomphe”. Which was apparently defaced recently during one of the more violent episodes of the “yellow vest” protest movement in France. I have no sympathy whatsoever for the particular individuals who carry out such vandalism, but it ought not to be forgotten that the vast majority of the world’s historical monuments, be they in France (the Louvre is another example), in the USA (the White House), in Russia (the Kremlin) in Egypt (the pyramids), in India (the Taj Mahal), or in any other country, were erected by extremely rich and powerful people whose original intent was to impress the masses of “ordinary” people about how excessively important their “superiors” were. And, presumably, to remind those less well-off, and less well-treated people, about what kind of “fire and brimstone” might fall upon their heads if they ever forgot the lessons learned from admiring such impressive monuments.
There are also dozens of other stories appearing in the news these days, about equally simplistic or childish ways of thinking about things, that also cry out for radical fact-checking. Such as showing how incredibly hypocritical all sorts of different official pronouncements, as well as editorial opinions, can be when they furiously attack (quite rightly) tobacco smoking, while simultaneously supporting, often through legalization, increased smoking of marijuana instead. Not much critical thinking going on there. Or whenever certain people from the academic world, or some governments or political parties, get very upset about Islamophobia (the popular opinion according to which all Muslims are terrorists), while at the same time promoting the kind of religious essentialism (all Muslim thought comes from its origins and cannot ever evolve in any way without ceasing to be Muslim) that provides ideological cover for religious extremists, many of whom do indeed go on to become active terrorists.
Just re-reading everything that I have written so far in this blogpost makes it difficult to imagine how human beings are supposed to go on surviving for a very long time. In spite of the fact that we are being faced with quite a few increasingly difficult problems, we are nevertheless simultaneously dumbing-down our responses to any of those problems, adopting instead more and more simplistic, reductionist and childish approaches to every possible issue. To be sure, no one can hope to become an expert in every field. Unfortunately, most of the experts in each one of those fields are very much inclined to be exceedingly biased in favour of the rich and powerful people who employ them. Some of the world’s most important people can be very good at accumulating large quantities of capital, and others may be very good at obtaining, or holding on to political power. But none of those people can be trusted to be unbiased when it comes to solving, or even confronting, the world’s most important existential problems. No one seems to have an overall vision about what a fully adult attitude toward all of this could possibly resemble. There does not seem to be any way out of the maze into which we have all so childishly blundered.
