3344. Book Review: Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human

By Hiram Caton, Twin Research, December 2005

Bench scientists tend to scowl at the science–public opinion interface as a sleaze zone of exaggeration, sensation-seeking, misreporting, and in the worst case, ‘junk science’. The scowl is usually accompanied by a personal decision not to get involved. That assessment is, alas, often on target. But it doesn’t address the fact that interface there must be. The quality of the interface is important, beginning with the elementary point that science depends on tax dollars and voluntary contributions for its funding. Disengagement from public opinion isn’t an option. 

Matt Ridley is among the handful of authors who have harvested deserved acclaim for rendering the complexities of genetics into everyday idiom. This is his fourth and, as I believe, his best effort. He commences his journey with an example of the messy science–public interface — the story about Craig Venter’s headline-grabbing stunt concerning the announcement of the Human Genome Project result. Venter’s Celera Genomics was party to agreement with the International Genome Project and the Sanger Institute for a joint announcement of the result, but a week prior to the agreed release date, Venter went public with the news that the human genome had far fewer genes (30,000) than anticipated. To this he added the spin that the result ‘refutes’ the idea of biological determinism. ‘The wonderful diversity of the human species’, he proclaimed, ‘is not hard-wired in our genetic code. Our environments are critical’. Thus a leading genome scientist casually abandoned a solemn agreement in order to capture the limelight of the highest profile science story of the decade. It was a disconcerting example of opportunism trumping basic professional ethics. Ridley easily disposes of Venter’s spin and adroitly converts it to a launch pad for his study. The real issue isn’t the nature versus nurture, but how nature and nurture interplay to produce the diversities and uniformities of human nature. His alternative formulation, nature via nurture (or experience), asserts that ‘genes are designed to take their cues from nurture’. ‘My argument in a nutshell is this: the more we lift the lid on the genome, the more vulnerable to experience genes appear to be’ (p. 4). Otherwise stated, we’ve come a long way from the Beadle–Tatum dictum ‘one gene, one enzyme, one protein’, which expressed the core of unidirectional genic thinking that in its day was good enough for the Nobel Prize. 

Ridley devises an ingenious fantasy to organize his complex material. He invites the reader to imagine 12 men assembled at the fashionable Biarritz resort in 1903. They are Francis Galton, William James, Hugo De Vries, Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, Ivan Pavlov, Emil Kraepelin, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Franz Boas, Konrad Lorenz and Jean Piaget. Each grasped something important about human nature although each also committed errors, especially errors exaggerating the scope of their insights. Ridley suggests that if this company really did assemble, they would have entangled in argument rather than pooled their genius into a higher synthesis. However, their conflicts are serviceable to Ridley as a guide to the century-long entanglement of the nature–nurture controversy. His 12 apostles provide a thread of biographical anecdotes that he uses to exemplify the interaction of doing science with personal strengths and failings, and with social context. This stream of the book adapts it to a general audience, but it also enables him to discuss the controversies about human nature that so often swirled around the great men. The controversies aren’t merely human interest diversion; they are themselves evidence relevant for interpreting human nature. Readers will be gratified that the author devotes considerable space to behavior genetics and even more gratified that he clarifies numerous aspects of the field, such as the meaning of heritability, that are stumbling blocks for the nonspecialists. Twin studies in particular are discussed in detail; Ridley leaves no doubt that they provide strong evidence for trait heritability, including one of the five personality factors (neuroticism) and intelligence. That brain size correlates with intelligence has long been suspected, based on comparative evidence of encephalization in mammals, primates in particular. But can it be proved? The discovery of a gene, or genes, for g would settle the question.

The investigation of the PLP and ASPM genes as candidates for the g gene is reviewed and declared inconclusive,1 but the finding of a 95% correlation of grey matter in MZ twins is recognized to be a significant confirmation that gray matter volume is ‘due completely [sic] to genetic factors’. Ridley leaves it with the statement that ‘some of the genes of g will soon be found’. The role of environment in determining g seems to be mainly of a background character. He cites Eric Turkheimer’s study of 350 twin pairs, many of whom were drawn from impoverished families, as evidence that nutritional and sanitation components of nurturing impede brain development. While elucidating exactly what deficits impede development is an important research program, the global conclusion, that failure to thrive imposes lifelong losses, seems obvious and remedial, at least in principle. On the other side of the coin is the rise of average IQ scores at the rate of 5 points per decade (the Flynn Effect). This is probably due to improvements in nutrition, sanitation, and health care, plus increased stimulus to realize native ability. These conditions have produced steady increases in a range of skills, such as athletic performance, as well as height and strength. 

If the ontogeny of intelligence is relatively stable across a wide variety of nurturance, schizophrenia exemplifies an extreme of multifactoral causality. The prevalence of schizophrenia is about 1.3% of adult populations, slightly less than bipolar disorder. The condition was first recognized by Emil Kraepelin; Eugen Bleuler improved the diagnostic criteria and conferred the name, schizophrenia. The extraordinary mingling of thought disorder (memory, attention, problem-solving) and emotional disorder (ranging from catatonic flattening of effect to traumatic paranoid delusion) has meant that the development of reliable diagnostic criteria, etiology, and treatment regimes has been Twin Research and Human Genetics December 2005 665 Book Reviews slow and error-burdened. Psychoanalysts, Ridley tells us, were the first to propose that the catatonic symptoms of schizophrenia were the result of harsh and unsympathetic mothering (the ‘refrigerator mother’). This diagnosis was extended to autism. The diagnosis had rebound effect on parents, who, already stressed by the autistic child’s behaviour, were stressed even more by the thought that their parenting induced the disorder. But even as the nurturing etiology achieved dominance, twin studies by Aaron Rosenoff and Franz Kallmann between the wars were revealing high concordance (68% and 86%, respectively) of schizophrenia in MZ twins (as opposed to 15% concordance in DZ twins; p. 104). Despite intense hostility from psychiatrists, postwar studies of the heritability of schizophrenia resulted, in 1988, in the discovery of the ‘schizophrenia gene’, so identified by a marker on chromosome 5. However, this finding proved to be one of many faulty identifications in the initial boom years of molecular genetics: it turned out that all but six chromosomes had schizophrenia markers (p. 107). The error was driven by extending the single gene etiology of Huntington’s chorea and cystic fibrosis (confirming the Beadle– Tatum dictum) to all neurogenic illness. Neurotransmitters were another line of attack. Initially dopamine was singled out, but there proved to be five kinds of dopamine on different chromosomes; the attempt to identify a deficiency specific to schizophrenia fizzled. The next neurotransmitter investigated was serotonin. It too failed, but the data derived from the then new microarray techniques for measuring gene expression supported the concept that schizophrenia involves some dysfunction in prefrontal cortex synapses. Ridley next follows this extraordinary story down the paths of influenza viral involvement, developmental dysfunction, and deficiency of cellular release of the fatty acids. In each case he diligently specifies the evidence that stimulated a research path and the outcomes that denied the research a univocal conclusion. After this careful preparation, Ridley suggests that schizophrenia may not simplify to univocal causality but may require circular causality, where A and B are mutually cause and effect. If so, the situation is ‘a perfect illustration that nature and nurture both matter’ (p. 124). 

The most overt confrontation between nature and nurture is the blank slate agenda of conditioning theory (Pavlov, Watson, Skinner) and nativism in the form of imprinting, promoted by Lorenz, Tinbergen, Piaget, Harlow and cognitive psychology. Conditioning theory had historical roots back to John Locke. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was associated with meliorist agendas such as utilitarian liberalism and socialism. Meliorism was thrust into high focus by the rise of social welfare professions. Pavlov’s experiments, if not his theory, assumed that the psychological and neurological space between sensory excitation and the motor response could be black-boxed without loss of descriptive accuracy. Watson and Skinner, by contrast, declared triumphantly that there was nothing in the black box, hence there was no limit to meliorist social control. (Their initiative was paralleled in anthropology by Franz Boas, who attacked the concept of an evolutionary development for the human species in a graded gene–culture coevolutionary hierarchy.) Ridley’s treatment of this confrontation was for me the most illuminating and instructive section of the book. He organizes his material to show how Lorenz’s key insight into the existence of critical developmental windows (an idea inaccessible to conditioning theory) escaped the limitations of Lorenz’s own partiality for ‘instincts’ to become the detailed and complex description and explanation of the developmental biology of many species. A proper summary of this material is not possible in this limited space. Suffice to say that the nature via nurture theme finds its most persuasive and instructive elucidation in this portion of the book (pp. 125–176). I read it three times, and continued to learn on each run. Having praised the book’s merits, what might be said in criticism? I feel that his enthusiasm leads Ridley to underestimate the extent of the attachment to the nurture-only point of view. The American Anthropological Association, for example, has adopted a statement on race which declares, directly contrary to Ridley’s view, that ‘human cultural behaviour is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification … . Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call ‘culture’. Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are … it is a basic tenet of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior’ (http://www. aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm). This is exactly where Franz Boas positioned anthropology 80 years ago. It is a perspective that optimizes the meliorist vision. But what if all normal persons cannot learn algebra or excel in sport? What if there are indeed heritable race differences in behaviour? The struggle isn’t over yet. 

Endnote 1 While this review was in press, Bruce Lahn and associates published two articles in Science on Microcephalin and ASPM variants, showing that they arose 37,000 and 5800 years ago, respectively, probably under strong selection pressure. This exceptional finding is likely to figure in future investigations of the evolution of intelligence. 

3343. Four Reasons Civilization Won’t Decline: It Will Collapse

By Craig Collins, Political Animal Magazine, March 27, 2020

As modern civilization’s shelf life expires, more scholars have turned their attention to the decline and fall of civilizations past.  Their studies have generated rival explanations of why societies collapse and civilizations die.  Meanwhile, a lucrative market has emerged for post-apocalyptic novels, movies, TV shows, and video games for those who enjoy the vicarious thrill of dark, futuristic disaster and mayhem from the comfort of their cozy couch.  Of course, surviving the real thing will become a much different story.

The latent fear that civilization is living on borrowed time has also spawned a counter-market of “happily ever after” optimists who desperately cling to their belief in endless progress.  Popular Pollyannas, like cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, provide this anxious crowd with soothing assurances that the titanic ship of progress is unsinkable.  Pinker’s publications have made him the high priest of progress.[1]  While civilization circles the drain, his ardent audiences find comfort in lectures and books brimming with cherry-picked evidence to prove that life is better than ever, and will surely keep improving.  Yet, when questioned, Pinker himself admits, “It’s incorrect to extrapolate that the fact that we’ve made progress is a prediction that we’re guaranteed to make progress.”[2]

Pinker’s rosy statistics cleverly disguise the fatal flaw in his argument.  The progress of the past was built by sacrificing the future—and the future is upon us.  All the happy facts he cites about living standards, life expectancy, and economic growth are the product of an industrial civilization that has pillaged and polluted the planet to produce temporary progress for a growing middle class—and enormous profits and power for a tiny elite.

Not everyone who understands that progress has been purchased at the expense of the future thinks that civilization’s collapse will be abrupt and bitter.  Scholars of ancient societies, like Jared Diamond and John Michael Greer, accurately point out that abrupt collapse is a rare historical phenomenon.  In The Long Descent, Greer assures his readers that, “The same pattern repeats over and over again in history.  Gradual disintegration, not sudden catastrophic collapse, is the way civilizations end.”  Greer estimates that it takes, on average, about 250 years for civilizations to decline and fall, and he finds no reason why modern civilization shouldn’t follow this “usual timeline.”[3]

But Greer’s assumption is built on shaky ground because industrial civilization differs from all past civilizations in four crucial ways.  And every one of them may accelerate and intensify the coming collapse while increasing the difficulty of recovery.

Difference #1:  Unlike all previous civilizations, modern industrial civilization is powered by an exceptionally rich, NON-renewable, and irreplaceable energy source—fossil fuels.  This unique energy base predisposes industrial civilization to a short, meteoric lifespan of unprecedented boom and drastic bust.  Megacities, globalized production, industrial agriculture, and a human population approaching 8 billion are all historically exceptional—and unsustainable—without fossil fuels.  Today, the rich easily exploited oilfields and coalmines of the past are mostly depleted.  And, while there are energy alternatives, there are no realistic replacements that can deliver the abundant net energy fossil fuels once provided.[4]  Our complex, expansive, high-speed civilization owes its brief lifespan to this one-time, rapidly dwindling energy bonanza.

Difference #2:  Unlike past civilizations, the economy of industrial society is capitalist.  Production for profit is its prime directive and driving force.  The unprecedented surplus energy supplied by fossil fuels has generated exceptional growth and enormous profits over the past two centuries.  But in the coming decades, these historic windfalls of abundant energy, constant growth, and rising profits will vanish.

However, unless it is abolished, capitalism will not disappear when boom turns to bust.  Instead, energy-starved, growth-less capitalism will turn catabolic.  Catabolism refers to the condition whereby a living thing devours itself.  As profitable sources of production dry up, capitalism will be compelled to turn a profit by consuming the social assets it once created.  By cannibalizing itself, the profit motive will exacerbate industrial society’s dramatic decline.

Catabolic capitalism will profit from scarcity, crisis, disaster, and conflict.  Warfare, resource hoarding, ecological disaster, and pandemic diseases will become the big profit makers.  Capital will flow toward lucrative ventures like cybercrime, predatory lending, and financial fraud; bribery, corruption, and racketeering; weapons, drugs, and human trafficking.  Once disintegration and destruction become the primary source of profit, catabolic capitalism will rampage down the road to ruin, gorging itself on one self-inflicted disaster after another.[5]

Difference #3:  Unlike past societies, industrial civilization isn’t Roman, Chinese, Egyptian, Aztec, or Mayan.  Modern civilization is HUMAN, PLANETARY, and ECOCIDAL.  Pre-industrial civilizations depleted their topsoil, felled their forests, and polluted their rivers.  But the harm was far more temporary and geographically limited. Once market incentives harnessed the colossal power of fossil fuels to exploit nature, the dire results were planetary.  Two centuries of fossil fuel combustion have saturated the biosphere with climate-altering carbon that will continue wreaking havoc for generations to come.  The damage to Earth’s living systems—the circulation and chemical composition of the atmosphere and the ocean; the stability of the hydrological and biogeochemical cycles; and the biodiversity of the entire planet—is essentially permanent.

Humans have become the most invasive species ever known.  Although we are a mere .01 percent of the planet’s biomass, our domesticated crops and livestock dominate life on Earth.  In terms of total biomass, 96 percent of all the mammals on Earth are livestock; only 4 percent are wild mammals.  Seventy percent of all birds are domesticated poultry, only 30 percent are wild.  About half the Earth’s wild animals are thought to have been lost in just the last 50 years.^[6]  Scientists estimate that half of all remaining species will be extinct by the end of the century.^[7] There are no more unspoiled ecosystems or new frontiers where people can escape the damage they’ve caused and recover from collapse.

Difference #4:  Human civilization’s collective capacity to confront its mounting crises is crippled by a fragmented political system of antagonistic nations ruled by corrupt elites who care more about power and wealth than people and the planet.  Humanity faces a perfect storm of converging global calamities.  Intersecting tribulations like climate chaos, rampant extinction, food and freshwater scarcity, poverty, extreme inequality, and the rise of global pandemics are rapidly eroding the foundations of modern life.

Yet, this fractious and fractured political system makes organizing and mounting a cooperative response nearly impossible.  And, the more catabolic industrial capitalism becomes, the greater the danger that hostile rulers will fan the flames of nationalism and go to war over scarce resources.  Of course, warfare is not new.  But modern warfare is so devastating, destructive, and toxic that little would remain in its aftermath.  This would be the final nail in civilization’s coffin.

Rising From the Ruins?

How people respond to the collapse of industrial civilization will determine how bad things get and what will replace it. The challenges are monumental.  They will force us to question our identities, our values, and our loyalties like no other experience in our history.  Who are we?  Are we, first and foremost, human beings struggling to raise our families, strengthen our communities, and coexist with the other inhabitants of Earth?  Or do our primary loyalties belong to our nation, our culture, our race, our ideology, or our religion?  Can we put the survival of our species and our planet first, or will we allow ourselves to become hopelessly divided along national, cultural, racial, religious, or party lines?

The eventual outcome of this great implosion is up for grabs.  Will we overcome denial and despair; kick our addiction to petroleum; and pull together to break the grip of corporate power over our lives?  Can we foster genuine democracy, harness renewable energy, reweave our communities, re-learn forgotten skills, and heal the wounds we’ve inflicted on the Earth?  Or will fear and prejudice drive us into hostile camps, fighting over the dwindling resources of a degraded planet?  The stakes could not be higher.

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[1] His books include: The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

[2] King, Darryn. “Steven Pinker on the Past, Present, and Future of Optimism” (OneZero, Jan 10, 2019) https://onezero.medium.com/steven-pinker-on-the-past-present-and-future-of-optimism-f362398c604b

[3] Greer, John Michael.  The Long Descent (New Society Publishers, 2008): 29.

[4] Heinberg, Richard. The End Of Growth. (New Society, 2011): 117.

[5] For more on catabolic capitalism see: Collins, Craig. “Catabolism: Capitalism’s Frightening Future,” CounterPunch (Nov. 1, 2018). https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/01/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/

[6] Carrington, Damian. “New Study: Humans Just 0.01% Of All Life But Have Destroyed 83% Of Wild Mammals,” The Guardian (May 21, 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study

[7] Ceballos, Ehrlich, Barnosky, Garcia, Pringle & Palmer. “Accelerated Modern Human-Induced Species Losses: Entering The 6th Mass Extinction,” Science Advances. (June 19, 2015). http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253

3342. Thaddeus Stevens, Revolutionary

By Bruce Levin, Jacobin, April 4, 2020

Thaddeus Stevens

If Abraham Lincoln was, in historian James McPherson’s apt words, a “reluctant” revolutionary, Thaddeus Stevens was an eager one. “There was in him,” Frederick Douglass said of the Radical Republican and Pennsylvania congressman, “the power of conviction, the power of will, the power of knowledge, and the power of conscious ability,” qualities that “at last made him more potent in Congress and in the country than even the president and cabinet combined.”

An ardent believer in the “free labor” capitalist society then developing in the US North, Stevens strove throughout his life both to assist that economic system’s growth and to rid it and the nation as a whole of “every vestige of human oppression” and “inequality of rights.” At the national level, he worked above all to outlaw the ownership of human beings that was central to the economy, social relations, and politics of the Southern states. Accomplishing that task, he well knew, would be a huge undertaking. It would require radically transforming Southern society, stripping the wealthy planter class of both its most valuable property and the source of its social authority and political power.

Ruling classes, however, do not surrender their wealth and power willingly, passively, or peacefully. Slave state leaders verified that historical truth by launching an armed rebellion after his antislavery party, the young Republican Party, won the presidential election of 1860. When that rebellion led to war, Thaddeus Stevens, by then a Republican leader in the House of Representatives, was one of the first to grasp the conflict’s implications and the requirements of defeating the pro-slavery forces.

Although others in his party attempted to achieve a military victory by restricting the Union to cautious, conservative methods and goals, Stevens emphatically opposed them. “We must treat this as a radical revolution,” he insisted, because “ordinary means cannot quell this rebellion” or “prevent its recurrence.” Only bold and radical measures striking at the very foundations of the slavery-based South — and the implementation of those measures with the kind of “ardor which inspired the French revolution” — would accomplish that.

In Service of the Revolution

In the wartime US Congress, Stevens fought for strong antislavery and antiracist laws and policies, measures that Abraham Lincoln and others would only come around to later. He was one of the first to call for freeing Confederate slaves and was among the first to insist on the need to recruit black men, free and slave, into the Union’s previously lily-white armies. He pushed for the permanent abolition of slavery — not only in the rebellious states but throughout the United States — a year before Lincoln endorsed that idea.

When the South was finally defeated, Stevens saw in the ensuing tasks of “Reconstruction” an opportunity to bring the country’s laws and government into fuller accord with the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of human equality. He demanded civil and political rights for African Americans, urging the federal government to use all the force at its disposal to defend and enforce those rights against white-supremacist terrorism. (They were eventually codified in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, whose enforcement the modern Civil Rights Movement would demand a century later.) When Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, allied himself after the war with the South’s white elite in order to restore and reinforce white supremacy, Stevens pushed the House to impeach the president. Only the resistance of more conservative Republicans in the Senate prevented the Radical Republican from getting his wish.

Although trained as a lawyer, Stevens was not especially concerned with staying within the four corners of the law or even the Constitution. His north star was the needs of the revolution. He justified confiscating Confederate property and slaves, for instance, by arguing that the seizures were necessary to suppress the planters’ rebellion. Stevens was not rejecting morality as a guide. But he held that whether an action was moral or immoral depended upon the ends that it served, on the particular context in which the action occurred. Implicit in this line of thinking, of course, was a belief that an appropriate end dictates and justifies the means needed to achieve it.

Then and now, this claim is commonly deplored in the name of absolute standards of right and wrong that transcend time, place, and circumstance. But Thaddeus Stevens considered his own, more practical, understanding of the relationship between ends and means both irresistible and unassailable. His was the same moral compass that revolutionary forces throughout history have commonly utilized.

Stevens found legal support for his approach in “the laws of war,” as explicated by the eighteenth-century Swiss scholar Emer de Vattel. The United States was in a fight for its very life, Stevens argued, invoking Vattel, and it was obliged to do whatever was necessary for victory. But when the war itself was won, Stevens simply modified his argument. Having suppressed the rebellion and begun emancipation, the Union must secure its wartime accomplishments and continue “perfecting” the republic by ensuring equal rights for all, black and white. That goal was the sole standard against which the rightness or wrongness of government action must be judged.

Some worried that such reasoning could also justify tyranny. Stevens responded by directing attention back to the specific ends being sought in each case. That was the way to evaluate the legitimacy of the means being justified. Thus, he noted, both the wartime Union and the leaders of the pro-slavery rebellion claimed extraordinary governmental powers. Must we judge both sets of claims to be of equal merit, Stevens asked. Of course not, he continued. We uphold one claim and reject the other because of the very different ends that each actually serves. In the Union’s case, he said, extraordinary “power is granted for good,” while in the Confederacy’s case, extraordinary power is “seized for mischief.”

Stevens’s ends-based argument reappeared in his impeachment crusade against Andrew Johnson. While the Pennsylvania representative occasionally gave lip service to the narrow framework of other Republicans — who claimed that to be impeached a president must violate a specific law — Stevens’s core motive for trying to remove Johnson from office was not that he was a lawbreaker. Nor was Stevens animated by his personal distaste for the man, although Stevens had indeed come to despise Johnson. (When another congressman tried to excuse the president on the grounds that he was, after all, “a self-made man,” Stevens replied acidly that he was “glad to hear it, for it relieves God Almighty of a heavy responsibility.”)

But at bottom, Stevens was far less concerned with punishing a villain or penalizing past crimes than with clearing a path for future positive action. As with the extraordinary measures that he had championed during the war, that is, Stevens shaped his Reconstruction policies with less concern for the formal legalities involved than for the ends he deemed urgent.

He thus told his party’s caucus in early January 1867 (according to a reporter’s summary) that Republicans needed to impeach Johnson because “it was impossible to reconstruct the South with Andrew Johnson as President.” When a Democratic congressman denounced impeachment’s motives as political, Stevens agreed. The fight to oust Johnson, he readily acknowledged, was “wholly political” in purpose — it was, in other words, indissolubly bound up with a struggle over government policy. Johnson’s removal was necessary for the implementation of policies that would “protect . . . the liberty and happiness of a mighty people” and “take care that they progress in civilization and defend themselves against every kind of tyranny.”

Thaddeus Stevens’s Radical Proposal

More conservative members of Stevens’s party not only blocked Johnson’s impeachment. They also killed one of the congressman’s most radical and potentially transformative initiatives.

After the war, Stevens called upon the federal government to confiscate lands owned by the Southern elite and give them to former slaves as small farms. Doing so, he argued, would provide at least a measure of justice to the “four millions of injured, oppressed, and helpless men, whose ancestors for two centuries have been held in bondage” and forced to perform the labor that paid for the land in question. Creating and safeguarding a democratic society, Stevens argued further, demanded such a measure. “It is impossible that any practical equality of rights can exist,” Stevens explained in the fall of 1865, “where a few thousand men monopolize the whole landed property.” For “how can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs?”

As a party floor leader in the House of Representatives whose initially unpopular proposals had often proved essential, Stevens had won great authority among many fellow Republicans. But very few of them were willing to follow his lead on this issue. Just one day after Stevens introduced a land-reform bill, the House overwhelmingly rejected it. More than two-thirds of the Republicans who voted (including even some members of the party’s radical wing) joined Democrats in opposition, and another ten Republicans abstained.

Why? Because most Republican leaders — staunch champions of “free labor” capitalist society — refused to cancel the private-property rights of plantation owners. The challenge of treason and armed rebellion had eventually reconciled them to the abolition of a form of property — human property — that they already considered illegitimate and even sinful. But they balked at infringing, especially in peacetime, upon claims to another form of property — private property in land — that remained as close to their hearts as ever. Many also feared that if black farmers were granted land, they would refuse to use it to grow cotton (a crop so closely associated with slavery), thereby harming New England’s important textile firms.

More broadly still, Republican leaders and their business-backers worried that redistributing property to assist exploited and impoverished people would set a dangerous precedent, one that might encourage similar demands in the North. After all, warned the Republican New York Times, calls to seize property and give it to the poor posed “a question . . . of the fundamental relation of industry to capital.” So “if Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital” in this case, then “sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.”

A Boston editor expressed similar anxiety. Attacking landed aristocracies, he wrote, “is two-edged,” since “there are socialists who hold that any aristocracy,” including the North’s own economic elite, is anathema. Stoking these fears among capitalists and their newspaper allies was an unprecedented wave of labor organizing and worker strikes in the North that was just then cresting.

The same aversion to labor radicalism would later fuel Northern Republicans’ turn against Reconstruction as a whole, thereby leaving freed people to the tender mercies of a reinvigorated and vengeful Southern white elite. As a result, the fight to further democratize US society was thrown back, and the Second American Revolution was left unfinished.

Democratizing America

In his last year of life, 1868, Thaddeus Stevens already thought he saw that outcome on the horizon. Suffused with gloom, he told a writer that his principal “regret is that I have lived so long and so uselessly.”

Others, however, held his achievements in higher regard. Some who did so could not yet foresee the defeats that lay ahead. Others, because they understood that such defeats would not be total, that key achievements — especially the abolition of outright slavery and all that implied — would endure. And still others, because they believed that the gains that survived and the example that Stevens and other radicals had set would help future generations to reconquer lost ground.

The Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century did accomplish some of that. But the task of genuinely democratizing US society — especially by doing away with all forms of racial discrimination and oppression and assisting those victimized by it to overcome its powerful and poisonous legacy — remains before us. The kind of dedication and boldness that Thaddeus Stevens displayed in his lifetime will serve us well as we undertake that work.

3341. The Pandemic Is a Portal

By Arundhati Roy, Financial Times, April 3, 2020

Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!”

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered.

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.

The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists?

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed.

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

Women bang pots and pans to show their support for the emergency services dealing with the coronavirus outbreak © Atul Loke/Panos Pictures

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”.

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers.

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed.

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

Migrant workers head towards a highway leading out of New Delhi, hoping to return to their home villages © Rajat Gupta/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

State governments in India (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear.

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

On the outskirts of New Delhi on March 29, a woman pushes her daughter on to an overcrowded bus as they attempt the journey back to their home village © Reuters

Migrant workers in New Delhi wait to board buses © Getty Images

As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting.

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place.

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now.

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

A boy wearing a protective mask ventures on to a balcony in Srinagar, which recorded Kashmir's first coronavirus death in late March © eyevine

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.