The Blog

2021-

2021-05-23 c
WE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO NOTICE II

Of Chainsaws and Moralism: What Does the Covid Moment Tell us About the Contemporary Left?

Science or Superstition?

One thing in which Covid-19 has outstripped previous pandemics, including far deadlier ones, has been in the depth and severity of the global response. Draconian ‘lockdowns’ and border closures which restrict normal taken-for-granted freedoms of movement and association, generalized masking, [anti-]social distancing and the various forms of performative rituality associated with it, are by now all too familiar and require no elaboration here. After over fourteen months of this, however, there is now increasing discussion and speculation as to what this will mean for everyday existence as a new form of ‘biopolitics’ takes shape.

As the lockdown-critical Marxist, Panagiotis Sotiris has noted, Covid has provided not only a health challenge, but “a strategic challenge for any politics of resistance, struggle and transformation.” It is a challenge that the left has failed disastrously. Instead, the left- whilst acknowledging that such a term covers a wide gamut of opinion – has been integral to the construction of a narrative around the pandemic which both relied upon and fed into a loop of hysteria, whereby the sheer scale of constantly negative and context-free coverage within the mainstream media prompted more and more extreme and in many cases irrational measures, which themselves prompted greater fear. As one CNN staffer let slip to an undercover reporter, “Fear is the thing that really keeps you tuned in.” More pertinently, as the Sci-Fi author, Frank Herbert once observed, fear is also a “mind killer…the little-death that brings total obliteration.”

As pro-lockdown commentators on the left have been keen to point out, the political constituency most associated with opposition to the range of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions associated with Covid sprang initially at least largely from what we might call the libertarian right. This allowed any legitimate questioning of these unprecedented mitigation measures to be lost under the weight of ad hominin attacks and guilt-by-association arguments on what were, for those of us aligned to the left at least, seemingly easy targets. They were emboldened in this by the fact that they were cutting with the grain of a hastily established consensus, as voices of dissent from even respected experts in the field were systematically sidelined by both state broadcasters such as the BBC and the powerful privately-owned behemoths which control the flow of information under modern capitalism. Lower-level medical professionals who found themselves questioning the new normal in pandemic response were finding themselves even more vulnerable to ostracism.

This psychological ‘nudging’ over Covid has been spectacularly successful, partly because it has tapped into pre-existing existential insecurities. This allowed the left to be both genuinely caught up in it and able to politically capitalize on it. Those now lumped together under the label of ‘lockdown sceptics’, although never of course a homogeneous group, were generally sidelined for the same reasons. The wisdom and efficacy of these measures, however, is now being more widely questioned. The enormous protest in London on April 24 this year and others subsequently stands testament to that and came as something of a shock to the lockdown left. To help us understand why the majority of those identifying as left-wing have embraced this psychosis with such evident, uncritical enthusiasm is an ongoing investigation, but it is worth starting with a look at some of the reactions to this event.

The immediate response was the familiar one of simply gaslighting those who attended. Twitter came alive with messages such as that from @NHSMillion the following day, which read “today NHS staff across the country were devastated to see thousands of people marching through London. We’ve buried our colleagues. And we won’t let you spit on their graves.” This was accompanied by a photo of NHS staff in full PPE hugging each other (ironically illegal under Government rules!). Various low-level celebrities pitched in. Sue Perkins commented in despair at the protests, suggesting it could lead to a situation like India (which, of course, it didn’t) and ex-SWPer and Radio 4 comedian Mark Steel, for whom any questioning of the dominant narrative is always unarguably an example of mental illness, made a stab at satire by tweeting “I’m organising a march for the right to wave a chainsaw in ASDA and chuck rattlesnakes onto a packed bus. WHY AM I DENIED MY FREEDOM? For YEARS this has been banned. Now we’ve HAD ENOUGH!!”,

While some left-wing platforms, such as Socialist Worker, took what we might call the BBC approach, choosing to pretend that one of the largest protests London has seen for a long time simply hadn’t happened, others at least attempted analysis. Whilst on one level these also displayed the cognitive dissonance long evident on the mainstream left on this issue, which has been well documented elsewhere, they also provided some framework for understanding the political nature of left wing lockdown enthusiasm.

Eddie Ford, writing in the Weekly Worker, conceded that the demonstration “seemed to represent a reasonable cross-section of society” and went on to list some of the issues that had drawn people there, focusing on the prospect of vaccine passports. “Communists certainly do not trust the government, which obviously has an authoritarian agenda”, Ford wrote. However, that was the last we heard of that, as vaccine passports were then simultaneously misunderstood and justified via a succession of by now familiar lockdown tropes, none of which were subjected to any critical scrutiny. He would “not want granny or anybody else to be placed unnecessarily in danger” by being “looked after by staff that refused to get vaccinated in the middle of an ongoing pandemic,” without further exploring the mistrust this implies in the efficacy of the vaccine granny has presumably had and for which he wants passports introduced, or indeed the questionable veracity of the idea that the pandemic was ‘ongoing’ in the UK at the time of writing.

We then move on to speculation that the UK “could easily get Covid variants/mutations from India, Mexico, Brazil or anywhere else with a high prevalence of the virus.” There is no discussion of social conditions or quality of healthcare in these societies. Drumming up fear of ‘mutant variants’ has become prevalent amongst those now addicted to top-down technocratic control sustained by evidence-free panic, and in truth Ford is simply sermonizing from the same hymn book, ignoring the fact that viruses routinely mutate, that the mutations that have been observed in this virus have so far all involved very small changes in the viral genome, and that there is currently no evidence at all that any of the ‘variations of concern’ incessantly hyped by an over-excited media do indeed pose any significantly enhanced risk, as much as some pro-lockdown opinion appears to be longing for that to be the case.

There is a logic to Ford’s argument here, even if it is not one he chooses to explicitly follow through. If the UK does indeed need to be constantly vigilant of ‘new variants’, irrespective of any widespread rollout of vaccines or establishment of herd immunity, that would require lockdowns and tight border controls in perpetuity. It is the desire to agitate for this that motivates all such discussion. As he writes, “We just cannot risk another wave breaking out again.” As for vaccine passports and all that they imply, ultimately you should “just shrug your shoulders and accept it.” In fact, he goes on to liken opposition to lockdowns and vaccine passports as being akin to wanting to drive on the wrong side of the road or mow down pedestrians on zebra crossings. At least he doesn’t mention going berserk with a chainsaw in ASDA.

Far left publications such as the Weekly Worker and Socialist Worker reach a small and shrinking audience. Far more popular in left-wing terms are the glossier, millennial-friendlier platforms such as Novara Media, founded in 2011 by two ex-student activists. Reaching its apogee during the Corbyn leadership period, it can still pull in relatively sizeable viewing numbers for its online content.

On April 27, their resident host, Michael Walker responded to the anti-lockdown protest three days before with undisguised shock that it appeared “quite a lot bigger” than any previous event and was “fairly surprised” at how diverse it appeared.[8] There then followed a discussion, not with a participant, which may have been both more interesting and more fruitful, but with the ubiquitous media-friendly communist Ash Sarkar, who of course agreed with everything Walker had said. She informed us, by way of analysis, that the people on the demonstration were “vulnerable to misinformation and conspiratorial thinking” and in a “state of denial” over the severity of the threat posed by Covid. As an indication of how rattled they were, this was followed up by two more discussions in the following week. On April 28, they attempted a hatchet-job on professors Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta, referring to them as “supposed ‘experts’”, in which Sarkar (presumably a real expert?) was again on hand to bizarrely claim that such lockdown sceptic scientists have enjoyed a “close relationship” to Johnson’s government, alongside “light, soft-touch” interviews on the BBC, revealing a detachment from reality truly difficult to fathom. And then on May 1 they were weighing in on U.S. podcaster Joe Rogan’s eminently reasonable opinion that healthy 21-year olds didn’t particularly need to have a Covid vaccine.

The approach running through Novara Media’s coverage should now be familiar, based upon a refusal to critically evaluate or even acknowledge substantive issues. The modus operandi appears to be to have the host give their opinion, preferably in the most condescending moralistic tone they can muster, and then invite one of their mates to agree with them. And so, rather than invite Sunetra Gupta on to discuss the pros and cons of lockdowns, or a protester to explain why they were on the April 24 protest and argue with them, using the evidence they claim is on their side, they remain stuck in their own unchallenged, self-righteous loop. The superficiality of these discussions on the left is quite stark.

To be sure, this is indicative of a wider problem observable in modern forms of discourse fostered by social media platforms in general. This matters, however, far more with an issue such as Covid as the repercussions for political action and policy decisions not subject to sufficient critical examination carry such high stakes, fostering an atmosphere in which, as an article in the liberal Atlantic recently conceded, many ‘progressives’ continue to “embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence.”

Nowhere has this been clearer than around the question of children, Covid, and school closures. Despite the growing number of studies which strongly suggest that not only are children at minimal risk, but there is little risk of secondary transmission from young children, the incessant doom-mongering promoted by left wing media outlets and teaching unions over the return to in person learning in both the US and the UK has stubbornly refused to abate. This, however, is not the sort of falsified predictions or misinformation Novara Media is interested in examining. There has occurred no reassessment in respect for emerging evidence, something they claim to cherish. Instead, one of the arguments deployed by Walker when discussing young people and the vaccine was that this was like giving a flu jab to children, because they tend to be ‘super spreaders’ of the flu. And so, everybody, whether at risk or not, whether children or adults, have a social responsibility to get vaccinated to protect others. Leaving aside the fact that despite spending eleven years in the British state school system I don’t once recall being asked to take a flu jab ‘to protect others’, this appears to casually brush aside the absence of empirical evidence to suggest that children have not been super-spreaders of Covid. “It’s not the flu!” might be screamed at lockdown sceptics should they dare draw any comparisons, but apparently drawing totally false comparisons such as this, if you’re a lockdown zealot, is fine. In this world, it is the performative and signifying value of mask wearing and vaccination that takes precedence over any evidence-based considerations. This is not science, it is virtue-signaling underlined by superstition. (read more)

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