Time to Grow Up: Ending Divisions Creating Peace

Graham Peebles

There are said to be around 30 armed conflicts currently taking place in the world, some large, some small, all deadly. The warring factions of today are more likely to be insurgent groups – ‘rebels’ (sometimes fighting proxy wars for a regional or global power) or terrorists, extremists – right and left, battling with a federal army or police force – than nation squaring up to nation.

Research shows that less people are dying in such clashes than at any time in history. This is positive of course, but the number of deaths isn’t really the issue, although clearly less is better. What’s important is to unearth the reasons for violence, to create a world in which the causes of conflict are removed and allow peace, that long held ideal, to be realized.

In addition to armed battles, societies everywhere are violent, dangerous places in varying degrees, as are many personal relationships and homes. Then there is the vandalism mankind is inflicting on the natural world, on intricate ecosystems, on plant and animal species, on the air, the waterways and the earth itself. Although this form of abuse may appear separate from uniformed killings, stabbings or roadside bombs, it flows from the same destructive source – human consciousness and behavior.

Humanity appears to be incapable of living together in peace, or in harmony with the other kingdoms in nature; our long past is punctuated and in many ways shaped by war, by death, destruction and suffering, and by wholesale vandalism and exploitation, of one another, of groups that are (militarily/technologically) weaker, and of the environment.

Some argue that human beings are inherently brutal, others that we are conditioned into violence. This is the reductive nature versus nurture debate; a conversation that centers around the degree to which each aspect influences and colors the behavior of the individual: is humanity (or a specific individual) inherently violent and abusive for example, or is such behavior the result of conditioning, the way we are raised, nurtured, the type of atmosphere we are exposed to, the prominent values and modes of living that are promoted and unconsciously absorbed?

While people’s natures vary and we are all unique individuals – different yet the same – within each and every human being the potential for tremendous good exists (routinely demonstrated in times of need), as does the propensity towards great cruelty, to which some appear more at risk than others. The environment in which an individual lives, the conditioning factors he/she is exposed to, the values and beliefs, all influence the extent to which one or other innate tendency is expressed and or comes to dominate.

Although some forms of conditioning are more damaging than others, all conditioning inhibits, divides, and creates a false sense of self and a distorted view of others. Conditioning into competition, into tribalism/nationalism and adherence to any ideology – religious, political, economic – constructs a barrier, fueling division, facilitating violence; that which is inherent, the seed of the good, is stifled, consigned to the margins, merely an alarming echo, the voice of conscience. As a result of the current socio-economic system, which has found its way into all aspects of life, including education and health care, such conditioning is widespread.

It is a socially unjust model, a violent system founded on ideals that agitate the negative and breed violence. Competition, ambition, greed and desire are promoted, in fact they are essential for its survival; nationalism, via the agency of competition, encouraged. All perpetuate and strengthen separation, dividing humanity, one from another, and where division exists – within the individual and/or within society – conflict is inevitable.

Under the Doctrine of Greed everything and everyone is seen as a commodity, a consumer of relative value, or an obstacle to enrichment of some kind (indigenous people living in the Amazon rain forest for example), something or someone that can be used and profited from, and when drained of value, discarded. Inequality of all kinds, wealth, income, opportunity, influence, is built into its mechanics, which grind the goodness out of all but the strongest; social justice denied, injustice ensured.

Social injustice is a form of mass violence, perpetrated by the architects and devotees of the system, all of whom have profited well and are determined to maintain the cruel status quo and remain in power for as long as possible. Given the level of injustice, particularly between the rich global north and impoverished south (albeit with pockets of enormous wealth), it is surprising that riots don’t break out all the time. There is resentment and anger among people everywhere, but physical exhaustion, economic insecurity; fear and a conditioned sense of guilt and inadequacy coalesce to inhibit action.

Barriers to Peace

The concept of peace has been held in our collective consciousness for at least two thousands years, probably longer. Peace between nations, peace within countries and regions, peace in our communities, longed for by people everywhere and routinely promised by politicians and leaders of all colors, while they invest in the machinery of war, trade in arms and follow the ideology of conflict. Hollow hypocritical words uttered without intent like a mechanically recited prayer, and so (for the most part), like other noble constructs, peace has remained an ideal. And believing in the ideal alone, the conditions for its realization have not been created, systems that ensure conflict are maintained, and so, inevitably violence has erupted, again and again and again.

Despite this fact, and contrary to our history of brutality and cruelty, peace and harmony are the natural order of life. They are aspects of life that are eternally present – like the sun, which even when obscured by cloud or darkness remains in the heavens. All that is required is that the obstacles to their manifestation be identified and removed.

The principle obstruction is division, followed by selfishness and greed. The notion that we are separate, from one another, from the environment and from that which we call God; divisions based on tribal/nation affiliations, ideologies of all kinds (including religions), race and or ethnicity; inequality and social injustice in its myriad forms. Greed and the focus on material wealth, and with it political influence, is itself divisive and has led to the violent exploitation of people (the slave trade being perhaps the greatest and most abhorrent example) and the natural world.

In order to rid the world of violence an understanding and rejection of those modes of living that create environments of conflict and fuel discord is needed; a shift in consciousness away from selfishness, greed and tribalism; and recognition that humanity is one. We are living in extraordinary times, transitional times, and such a realignment is well underway; there is a growing awareness that if humanity is to overcome the issues of the day and save the planet we must come together, cooperate and share. In the pursuit of peace sharing is essential, for without it there can never be social justice, and social justice is critical in creating trust and community harmony.

Together with justice and freedom, peace is no longer simply a dormant ideal, a cherished aspiration, it is a living force flowing through the hearts of men and women throughout the world, inspiring collective action, demanding change and an end to all forms of violence. Its time for humanity to come of age, to reject all that divides us, to unite and create a space in which peace and harmony can ring out across the world.

Spirituality in a Postmodern Age

Michael Welton

These days it seems that people have plenty of trouble with “religion”, but rather adore the idea of “spirituality.” It pervades the consumerist culture, and one cannot travel the contemporary cultural landscape without encountering it. Businesses promote spirituality in their, one supposes, dispiriting workplaces. Meditation and yoga classes abound. Spiritual therapies offer health and wholeness. Alternative bookstores, scented with the sweet perfume of incense, offer up a stunning display of endless ways of traveling inward or way out beyond the petty self. Explicitly Christian bookstores, good ones, have entire walls devoted to works on spirituality, meditation, contemplation and mysticism. Even the Academy has opened its doors to studying spirituality and education. Perhaps even more surprising, the hard-headed left has recently taken considerable interest in the impelling connection between spirituality and the quest for social justice.

Something is definitely up and needs investigating. Skeptics take note. You will not be able to write “spirituality” off as the pastime of quacks or flat-earth advocates or Ouija board conjurors. In fact, I will argue that a compelling linkage between the postmodern times we inhabit and the explosion of interest in spirituality exists. Our times are very dispiriting. The shadows of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment have grown very long. Materialism does not fill the bottomless pit of yearning. Orthodox religion seems behind the times or too ferociously involved in them. And the atheism pitched by Dawkins and his ilk is so distempered and devoid of depth that we are sent away reeling, hoping to see a rose garden or a gorgeous sunset to aright our gloomy mood. But the dubious certainties of evangelicals offer little consolation in return.

Interpenetrating worlds

Spirituality speaks to us of other worlds. Throughout the ages, believers in the Great Traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have imagined God as the Invisible animator of the universe. As a great Spirit-being, this mighty force breathed the world into being and animates its continuing presence. Religion offered humankind a ritual container, routinized and localized in space and time, a place where glimpses of the sacred might be attained. But religion often ended up containing the spiritual, and restless Spirit broke free from its container in the early 16^th century, fragmenting Christendom and roaming wild over the world ever since.

The rather dispiriting performance of Churches down through the ages only accentuated people’s mistrust of religion. The post-enlightenment world of the 19^th and 20^th centuries indicated pretty powerfully that Christian churches could not stop the relentless evil that unfolded itself in the bosom of the civilization of Luther and Beethoven. As Max Horkheimer once claimed, both reason and God were eclipsed in the fires of Auschwitz.

Nonetheless, the eclipse of the God who is present with those who suffer did not turn us all into secular humanists. We went off in search of forms of spirituality that would enable us to celebrate the mystery of life that transcends our own limited selves and that would provide us with a “community of inquiry” to orient our way in a confusing world. Indeed, the world did seem to be “postmodern”, in the sense that our world was ineffably pluralistic and religiously multi-lingual. We were increasingly and intensely aware that one not only had to justify one’s faith-claims to other communities of faith, but one also had to live with these communities in a world alert to the power of the natural sciences to ground our way of knowing the world.

There are different spiritualities, and these spiritualities have taken form outside the monotheisms. We are spiritual beings who, once tossed into the world, search for direction, purpose and meaning. When traditional containers fail us, we keep on searching. We long for wholeness and transcendence. Perhaps our deepest spiritual moments are those where we experience unity, or oneness, with the natural world or through deep bonds with others. But there can be little doubt that self-transcendence is the core of spirituality. Without self-transcendence, we are locked into our own narrow worlds, cut off from sources of Spirit. Without self-transcendence, we cannot experience the depth-experience of compassion for and with others. Without self-transcendence, we do not see ourselves as integral parts of the mystery that transcends our limited existence (limited in perception, understanding and time).

The call of Spirit

One of the meanings of “spirit” is that of animating presence. When the animating presence is absent, we speak of deadness, of lifelessness, of inertness. A school lacks school spirit; a community lacks solidarity and vibrant relations of trust. A person seems listless, spiritless as we say. Thus, spirituality is a fundamental reference point for the vital source of our human activity. Spirituality may be nurtured by communities of faith and inquiry, drawing upon wells of wisdom teachings and forms of knowing from the great religious traditions as well as the wonder of the natural and human sciences.

As Elena Lugo says, “Spirituality is the pursuit of meaning, of an intimation of purpose and sense of vital connection to one’s ultimate environment—the dimension of depth in all of life’s endeavours and institutions. In short, spirituality functions as a principle of enlightenment, integration and finality without which our self-reflection, self-realization and self-surrender would become superficial, chaotic and aimless.”

In the Judaic tradition, which has profoundly formed the western mind, Spirit (named Yahweh by the Hebrews) was understood as calling us as human beings to “do justice” in the corrupt world. The story of Moses and the Exodus, though ambivalent for contemporary Palestinians, has been interpreted as paradigmatic for liberation movements of slaves against their masters. Let justice flow down like a river! Translated into contemporary, secular imagery, the ancients recognized that Spirit, if heeded, if listened to, called us to act justly in the world. There is purpose built into the world. To live well is not arbitrary; it is our calling as human beings. We, and all creation, are to flourish; and flourishing cannot happen if orphans and widows and strangers are neglected and mistreated. Let justice flow down like a river!

Multiple meanings of spirituality

Modernity brings a loss of spiritual life. The disenchanted world, as Max Weber so named it, expels spirits from the world. They leave their old haunting grounds and disappear into the dark woods somewhere. The famous article by Lynn White in 1967 on “The historic roots of the ecological crisis” laid the blame for contemporary western society’s degradation of nature at the feet of the Judeo-Christian de-spiriting of nature (that is, God was not in nature, but above it, and counseled his tribe to go into the groves and destroy the idols). Theologians dispute this and offer the caretaker role as counter-narrative. Be that as it may, theology does not necessarily stop the bull dozers from doing their dirty work. Judeo-Christian images of the high god who is not in nature (he may have made it, but he left it to run on its own) certainly smashed one barrier to treating nature as a thing. If it is alive, then one treads lightly, carefully, attentively. If it just a thing, then cut it down! But we can blame the scientific revolution’s treatment of nature as an analytical object for also disenchanting nature (even though some scientists and their astonishing work precipitates a sense of wonder and awe).

It did not help, either, that Christian spirituality (as well as others, like Buddhism), located the “spiritual” in the interior of the person. Since the Protestant Reformation, spirituality had been privatized; with exterior life, be it nature or social life, perceived as devoid of spirituality. Thus, spirituality was set off against the material realm, creating one of the great dualisms, or divides, in western society. The fencing off of the spiritual in the interior of the human being contributed to the disenchantment of the world.

Monasticism certainly may have preserved precious texts and opened up mystical realms to the few. But the light was shone inward, and the outer realm remained in darkness. We can say, I think, that traditional spiritualities were very individualistic. The truly spiritual medieval life was lived in monasteries; this was as true for Tibetan Buddhists as it was for European adepts. Many of today’s “New Age” searchers are, we may also say, in this line of retreat into the inner world, but without the depth achieved in bygone times. The spiritual has often been trivialized in the contemporary spiritual bazaar. This fact interweaves with widespread “religious illiteracy” in our woebegone age.

The search for an integral and inclusive definition

How does one break with dualism? Not easily! We need a more integral and inclusive definition of spirituality. Spirit, conceived of as the call to human flourishing, must infuse all domains of our lives. Here, we can draw upon one of the fundamental sources of spirit, namely, the humanist tradition. What Renaissance humanists and, later, the enlightenment humanists (Kant and others), discovered was that religion often blocked human beings from reaching their fullest potential. Kant spoke of people lingering in immaturity, never freeing themselves from dependency on priests and politicians and masters of every sort. The animating presence towards fullness of being lay within the potential of the human being and the cosmological order itself. Spirit was wooing us to transcend ourselves and experience an expansive opening-up to the world of the suffering other. Opening-up to the suffering of others, the cracking of our cocoons, and interlocking with those who are vulnerable and defenseless, places doing justice and loving mercy at the animating heart of the project to free ourselves from all forms of oppression, religious and other. Spirit is with us, here, in the midst of our suffering and longing. Spirit is here with us, goading us towards depth and fullness.

The sacred cannot be sequestered from the mundane, or the profane. Apprehension of the miraculous must dwell within the ordinary. Those of us who grew up considering the sacred as localized, and cordoned off in the church, must be educated to new forms of awareness. We can open up to Spirit-being in new awareness. Spirit shines through many windows; the world is now our cathedral. The light is shining from Spirit through the cathedral multi-coloured windows. Look up and see. Let the scales fall off from our eyes. Sallie McFague, the feminist eco-theologian, speaks of the world as the “body of God” and the Spirit as its life-giving and maintaining and propelling force.

That is a powerful and attractive metaphor. The sense of awe before the Holy, captured by Rudolf Otto in his work, The idea of the holy, is intensified as scientists take us into worlds of wonder. The psalmist was right to shout that the “heavens declared the glory of God.” They do, even if we post-moderns are reluctant to speak of God. The best we can do is to acknowledge that we are before the mysterious presence that transcends our little selves. Like the romantic poets, we look at rainbows and know we are before the mystery. But Blake does not have to exclude Newton.

Spirit loves flourishing and vitality. Humanists can rightfully insist that spirit dwells within us all, pressing and nudging us towards creating the conditions for human flourishing. Aristotle spoke of eudemonia (well-being and harmony); well-being can be accomplished in the way we craft our social and cultural and economic worlds. They, too, are containers of spirit. They can be spirit-infused; they can also be dispiriting. They can be open to those who are the least among us; they can be closed off, shut tight. Those who think that modernity, or post-modernity for that matter, is one-dimensional and least open to transcendence, a world marked by spiritual poverty and alienation, have got it right. Sociologist Peter Berger thinks of the “modern world as a culture with no windows on the wonders of life.” He too is right. But openness to Spirit can awaken us to a transcendent horizon, the shimmering kingdom of fullness of the not-yet, the depth dimensions possible to perceive in the ordinariness of life, and authentic interiority that eschews triviality and consumerism.

Fostering a culture of awareness

Our cultural evolution as a species with other species has unfolded to a turning point. Our degradation of the earth—who can deny this?–awakens in us its opposite, the growing sense of the interdependence and sacredness of all life, our special human relationship to the earth and the cosmos. This awakening is triggered in part by the world calling to us, but also by spirit impelling us through a dark moment of time. The earlier form of spirituality—Sam Raya calls it “distributive spirituality” (some follow a spiritual path for the sake of others who do not)—needs be replaced by an “interpenetrative model of spirituality”. All are engaged spiritually in all of our actions. All humans have a “divine spark”. This is a lovely metaphor for the Spirit-being is immanent in all of creation and present within us as a spark glinting toward the horizon.

Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories in Germany

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

By the end of early December 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 1½ million people worldwide as a large number of countries have entered into recession. In Germany, the economic downturn has let to an unprecedented 7.3 million people being laid off. There was a slump in Germany’s gross domestic product in the second quarter of 2020. It fell by more than 10%. Germany’s outlook is still relatively gloomy with more than 300,000 infections and around 15,500 deaths.

Notwithstanding the continuing significant health risks posed by the virus, more and more Germans seem to be largely dissatisfied with the government’s measures to contain the virus. Many are simply fed up. At the beginning of the pandemic, only a few critical voices appeared. In recent months, however, the people who have doubts about the existence of the virus and who believe in obscure conspiracy myths have grown. They show a very serious dissatisfaction with the politically prescribed restrictions and the impact it has on them and public life.

Last August, this dissatisfaction culminated in a massive rally in Germany’s capital Berlin. An estimated 40,000 people took part in an anti-government rally on 29^th August 2020. The attempted storming of Germany’s parliament had sent shockwaves through Germany. Some of the protesters were outright right-wing extremists and local Neo-Nazis while others just wore their tin-foil hats. The tin-foil hat remains an insignia of those believing in conspiracy theories. These rallies are organised under the popular heading of being so-called hygiene rallies. At times several hundred protesters including numerous right-wing extremists as well as AfD supporters and local Neo-Nazis blocked the entrance of the Reichstag – Germany’s parliament in Berlin – and thereby causing widespread horror on the democratic side of politics and society.

To understand the phenomenon of anti-coronavirus measure and the subsequent rallies against these government measures as well as the link to conspiracy theories spun about the coronavirus, Germany’s reputable Hans Böckler Foundation ran a survey. The survey found that there is a significant spread of right-wing ideology, conspiracy theories and sceptical attitudes towards the pandemic and the political handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The foundation’s analysis is based on two surveys conducted by data analyser KANTAR for the Hans Böckler Foundation that surveyed Germany’s labour force. Kantar’s computer-aided online interviews were comprised of 7,677 respondents who represented Germany’s working population aged 16 and over between the 3^rd and 14^th April 2020 and again between the 18^th and 29^th June 2020.

The HBS/Kantar analysis showed the following. While 15% of Germany’s working population supported the anti-coronavirus protests against the government’s measures, approximately one-third of all respondents were dissatisfied with the crisis management of the Federal Government.

Yet, many Germans saw government restrictions – lockdowns, etc. – also as a threat to democracy. Others were concerned that Germany’s restrictions on constitutional rights might not be taken back once the coronavirus pandemic ended. Around 40% of the respondents did not believe that the virus is as dangerous as it is claimed to be. Meanwhile, more hard-core conspiracy theorists also believe that elites are using the pandemic to protect the interests of the rich and powerful.

People holding these attitudes were anything but insignificant. These ideas, ideologies, myths, and conspiracy theories were found in large sections of Germany’s population. One might also like to consider that Kantar’s analysis revealed an increased tendency in dissatisfaction with the government, as shown in many anti-government statements and posters carried at these rallies. Over time, numbers of people rejecting government measures had actually increased. No less relevant was the finding that attitudes of dissatisfaction, doubting the government, and conspiracy myths existed close together. Kantar’s empirical data showed a clear link between them. In other words, those who were dissatisfied with the government were also likely to believe in conspiracy theories and – even worse – they were also willing to share conspiracy myths about the coronavirus with others.

Overall, anti-government rallies – the so-called hygiene rallies – were strongly supported by Germans aged between 18 and 29 rather than those aged above 65. Younger Germans do perceive the coronavirus pandemic as less of a risk and therefore, are more willing to go out and rally against the government, often violating local rules on mask-wearing and social distancing. In Germany’s still existing east vs west cleavage, anti-government rallies found stronger support in the former East-Germany compared to the former West-Germany. HBS/Kantar believe this is reflective of three facts:

1) The former East-Germany has more people living in rural areas compared to the former West-Germany, which as higher levels of the population living in cities. There is still an urban west and a rural east;

2) Not unrelated, the former East-Germany also showed fewer cases of coronavirus infections compared to the former West-Germany. This means that the level of threat is perceived to be lower in the former East-Germany compared to the former West-Germany. As a consequence, East-Germans found it hard to accept the harsh anti-coronavirus measures of the government; and

3) Finally, there still is a somewhat lower level of educational attainment in the former East-Germany compared to the former West-Germany. There has been a 30-year long brain-drain from east to west. Simultaneously, economic recessions such as those from the post-unification shock (1990s) to the global financial crisis (2008/2009) to the current coronavirus crisis (2020) have hit people in the former East-Germany harder compared to people in the former West-Germany.

Overall, there was no distinguishable difference between German women and men. However, 43% of those aged between 18 and 29 and 23.4% of those older than 60 agreed with the statement – the coronavirus is not as bad as claimed. Next to age, education emerged as a relatively stable predictor. A whopping 70.5% of people who had basic schooling and no formal degree believed that the rich and powerful use the coronavirus pandemic to gain more power. In comparison, only 31.2% of those with a high-school degree or above believed that.

This somewhat mirrored income levels. Only 24.7% of those earning €4.500 per month believed the statement that the coronavirus is not as bad as claimed. While 40.3% of those earning between €900 and €1.500 per month believed the same. Interestingly, only 38.8% of those who earned less than €900 per month believed this. Overall, those who suffered a loss of income because of the coronavirus pandemic are more likely to support right-wing attitudes and hygiene rallies.

Simultaneously, 50.4% of Germany’s unemployed believe that the current restrictions on individual liberty will not end once the coronavirus pandemic ends. 30.3% of small business owners and 24.5% of the self-employed also think this will happen. On the upswing, only 16.4% of Germany’s civil service employees agreed with that. General agreement also increased when it came to white-collar workers and middle-managers (33.9%) and manual workers (46.7%).

Being a trade union organisation, the Hans Böckler Foundation was keen to see whether the existence of works councils – supported by law in Germany – and the presence of a collective bargaining agreement made a difference when it comes to believing in conspiracy theories. The surveying agency KANTAR found no recognisable difference between German workers employed in companies with an existing works council and those without. Equally, there was no difference when it came to believing in conspiracy theories between companies with or without a collective bargaining agreement.

The survey also showed that the belief in conspiracy theories remained relatively constant throughout early 2020. 60.7% of German workers did not change their minds when it came to viewing the government’s restrictions as a danger to individual liberties. Overall, the number of German workers who were satisfied with the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic also remained constant (61.1%).

Overall, the survey found that about 15% of workers support the hygiene rallies against the government’s anti-coronavirus pandemic measures, while 66% of all workers support the government’s measures. Yet, about 40% believe that the virus is not as dangerous as it is claimed to be. Interestingly, the survey found that those who doubt the severity of the coronavirus pandemic and those who reject the government’s approach were also those who were most likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

Remarkably, young workers are more likely to be found in this group rather than older workers. Two factors might explain this. Firstly, young workers are more likely to experience a direct impact of the coronavirus pandemic on their work (job loss) and income (unemployment). Secondly, young people appear to be somewhat distant to the factual realities of the coronavirus pandemic. Twenty-year old's seem to believe in their own invincibility – nothing can bother me!

A clear result was found with the link between conspiracy theories and education. The lower the educational achievements, the more likely people reject government measures, think that the coronavirus pandemic is not as severe as it actually is, and tend to believe in conspiracy theories.

Perhaps those Donald Trump calls “the poorly educated” exist not only in the USA but in Germany as well. These are also the people often suffering disproportionally from job insecurity, diminished incomes, and unemployment. In other words, as British economist, Guy Standing, identifies as the precariat.

Finally, and this comes thirty years after Germany’s reunification, there is a marked difference between the former East-Germany and the former West-Germany. This, in turn, is linked to the impact of the current crisis, which has hit former East-Germans harder compared to former West-Germans. Chancellor Merkel’s management of the coronavirus pandemic is more likely to be rejected in the former East-Germany and more likely to be accepted in the former West-Germany even though Angela Merkel grew up in the former East-Germany.

Overall, the survey shows that there is a significant level of conflict in Germany’s population about the government’s coronavirus measures. Secondly, general dissatisfaction and obscure conspiracy myths are inextricably related. This represents a rather corrosive decoupling of democratic discourse from Germany’s mainstream, as right-wing advocates of violence took over numerous hygiene rallies. Many of them rallying against the government are not – as often claimed – so-called concerned citizens. Instead, they follow conspiracy theories and myths often propagated by right-wing extremists and Neo-Nazis.

The Earth on Fire

Evaggelos Vallianatos

The Greeks thought the Earth was the oldest of the gods. Demeter, sister of Zeus, was the closest of the Olympian deities that resembled Gaia (Earth). Every fall the Athenians sponsored the Eleusinian Mysteries in Eleusis, a small polis near Athens. Greeks from all over the Greek world participated in the Eleusinian celebration of Demeter, goddess of wheat and agriculture. Those who entered the place of worship took an oath not to reveal the secrets of the mysteries. None did.

However, what has come down to us is that Demeter-Earth blessed the wheat seeds in the ground for a prosperous harvest. The Greeks were convinced that the land and the natural world were sacred and indispensable for civilization.

The Greeks were not alone in worshipping the natural world. Other civilizations like the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Persian and the Chinese considered the natural world and the Earth sacred.

Clash of civilizations

The blow against this view of life came from the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The resurrection of Greek science during the Arabic and Western Renaissance of the eighth-tenth and fifteenth-sixteenth centuries respectively took place in a Moslem and Christian world wedded to the pernicious one-god injunction that man could do as he pleased in the natural world. Thus the more power science and technology gave man, the more destructive his footprint among animals, plants, trees and waters.

The twentieth century ecocide

The twentieth century saw the apotheosis of the human control of planet Earth. The two world wars spread man’s merciless mechanical and chemical ferocity to forests, deserts, mountains, land, animals, birds, seas and oceans.

The golden bullet of the war chemistry was DDT: a weapon against insects that nearly abolished the majestic eagle and contaminated nature and human food for decades.

But what has been exacerbating the destructive human footprint on the planet is the excessive and thoughtless burning of fossil fuels for energy.

Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases from fossil fuel burning capture solar heat, preventing it from escaping to space. The result has been the slow but inexorable rise of global temperature above the limit of pre-industrial age. This global warming comes from climate change caused by anthropogenic (human-induced) actions like the burning of petroleum, natural gas, and coal.

Scientists have been studying climate change for decades. They keep warning policy makers the world over. They tell them in diplomatic but unambiguous language that continuing with their countries’ addiction to fossil fuels is a prescription to dire ecological and public health effects. They point out that  human presence has been detrimental to plants, crops, insects, birds, animals, and fish. The resulting extinction rates are uncomfortably high and definitely unsustainable. Ecosystems are threatened with collapse.

It’s like the Earth is on fire: taking decades to engulf the continents and countries with violent storms, floods, hunger, pathologies of harm and higher temperature.

Even the vast oceans are getting warmer because they absorb most of the greenhouse emissions of the industry, petroleum-fueled militaries with thousands of warplanes and tanks, billions of civilian cars, millions of factories, including the cruel animal farms for billions of food animals and industrialized agriculture.

This climate crisis or climate change or global warming is like a gigantic Earthquake shaking people up and threatening their civilizations. Its effects have been seeping into people’s homes through television or surging droughts, intense rains, waters and winds of storms and hurricanes, and near apocalyptic forest fires burning for weeks and months and destroying gigantic groves of trees and towns or homes near them.

Despite the violent message coming from the disrupted, exploited, poisoned, and warmer natural world, the United States under Trump and most other countries are locked into a dangerous routine of business as usual.

The fossil fuel companies are primarily responsible for this suicidal orbit. They care less about our lives, the life of the Earth, much less the lives of our children and grandchildren.

America’s environmental crisis

The story of how and why a country like the United States is paralyzed by climate change and those who own fossil fuels is of great import. It has found space in newspapers and, sometimes, television. There are even some great books denouncing the corruption that keeps the fossil fuel companies so strong.

One of the eloquent voices against petroleum is Larry Schweiger, for decades an environmental insider from Pennsylvania. He presided for ten years over the National Wildlife Federation, and managed PennFuture, and Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.

His book, Climate Crisis and Corrupt Politics: Overcoming the Powerful Forces that Threaten Our Future (Universal Publishers, 2019), is timely and urgent. It tells a personal and national story of enormous interest.

In the mid-1960s, Schweiger came across the horrendous pollution of Lake Erie and decided to dedicate his life to understanding the environmental crisis and fighting those who were destroying the natural world. His decades experience with environmental organizations gave him a unique opportunity to see behind appearances.

He denounces the deceit and irresponsibility of the fossil fuel companies that purchase the enemies of the environment (natural world and public health). These include the US Chamber of Commerce, the Club for Growth, the American Petroleum Institute, the Cato Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council and politicians at state and federal government. He is even unhappy with the apathy of environmentalists.

 

“America has denied the climate crisis for decades and delayed meaningful action for far too long, and now we are out of time,” he says.

 

Yet he does not give up or wish others to give up by delusions that it’s too late to save the planet. He is a fighter for his children and grandchildren. He wants to leave then a better place than the one he inherited.

 

“This is our legacy moment, and perhaps our last chance to right a stupendous, and persistent wrong. Regardless of your faith tradition or worldview, we must all agree that wrecking the climate system is a profoundly moral, profoundly spiritual, and intensely ethical issue. There has never been an environmental threat in the history of humankind as profound, and far reaching as the climate crisis. Yet with dimwitted cruelty, a climate denying Congress has been parading itself as acting responsibly,” he wrote.

Read Larry Schweiger’s book. It’s a passionate telling of America’s environmental history, which gave Schweiger  facts and wisdom. He is convinced the scientists are right about the climate monster unleashed by fossil fuel burning and political corruption funded by the petroleum, coal, and natural gas companies.

Capitalist ideology of putting money above every virtue does not make things any easier. In fact, that’s the engine that explains the abomination of Trump and the Republican Party that would rather cripple the future for millions of children than tax and put out of business the fossil fuel killers of our beautiful and sacred Earth.

How Racist Capitalism Fuels COVID

Scott Weinstein

Long before Donald Trump, racial capitalism had doomed North America’s attempt to meet the challenge of the Covid pandemic. Yet in the middle of the pandemic when Black Lives Matter protests broke out, it seemed reasonable to demand the impossible – an end to profit-driven white supremacy. These two pivotal events graphically reveal our competing realities.

Why did advanced capitalist countries, after fair warnings from a history of earlier pandemics, respond to this time around first with denial, followed by ignorance and panic, resulting in chaos, fragmentation, and now a deadly second surges in cases?

As a Health Worker and Nurse…

I became angry with the “We are all in this together” hype when I looked around the ICUs in my major high-tech Washington, DC hospital. I am proud to work with staff truly fighting for our patients’ lives. But in gentrified Washington, now a majority White city, just about every Covid patient was Latino or Black. My union battles management for more single-use N95 masks that we are forced to reuse for days, because there is no national plan to provide personal protective equipment.

Why don’t media images illustrating super-spreader events show immigrant Latino and Caribbean farmworkers, Somalis working in slaughterhouses, Haitians staffing nursing homes, or the hundreds of thousands of poor people stuffed in prisons?

Moreover, why is the West denying the successful strategies and logistics by African and South-East Asian countries who still have dramatically limited pandemic transmission, illness and death while we experience a deadly second and third surge?

The Covid crisis is an opportunity to undo White supremacy. Understand that our focus on Sweden’s experiment instead of studying Africa’s proven strategies to manage the Covid pandemic is how White supremacy deploys information. We need to discard the assumptions of our white civilizational heritage delivers the gold standard. We ought to recognize capitalist and imperial intent that lurks behind the glorification of White heritage and accomplishments.

Another Approach

If we look at African and the SE Asian countries, we see national mobilizations guided by prepared plans and a willingness to act – together.

What can Palestine teach us? Palestine limited Covid death rates to half of Israel’s and Canada’s, and 1/5^th of the US – despite Israel’s active sabotage of their health care services and killing of their health care workers.

Decades of public health defunding through austerity budgets has been prosecuted by neoliberalism, a predatory capitalist ideology that attacks the core value of government services and social solidarity. Margaret Thatcher famously proclaimed, “There is no society – only individuals”.

Anti-capitalists can use the pandemic to mobilize against neoliberal agendas of undermining, then privatizing public health care, imposing private insurance and selling off public medicine manufacturing, while simultaneously cutting taxes and free access. We must de-mythologize a system where billionaires plunder $2.75 trillion during the pandemic from our work and our communities. In the meantime millions of Americans go hungry, and cannot afford running water to wash their hands or flush their toilets, and public health departments are forced to operate on a shoestring.

Ironically, the pandemic crisis gives us a glimpse of the possibilities of a just economy. After shutting down, nations suddenly panicked and spent billions (indeed trillions) to rescue their stock markets and economies. People received survival money. Evictions for those unable to pay their rents and mortgage defaults were suspended. Public transportation was free. All this without bankrupting our economy or rocketing us into inflation. Lesson learned – austerity economics is a predatory capitalist weapon.

Now is the moment to attack centuries of punishing racial capitalism that has so jeopardized Black, Indigenous American and Latino lives with higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and kidney disease – the “co-morbidities” that turn Covid infections so deadly. Poor and racialized communities are systemically toxified by the other co-morbidities: polluted air, water and soil.

Individualism and the Spawning of Distrust

We now end up sacrificing ‘unproductive’ seniors. Society is not expected to prevent or treat illness – it is the individual’s responsibility. Propaganda blames our ‘personal behavior’ for Covid surges.

Neoliberalism’s class war tactics have us distrusting public health officials and scientists. Not surprisingly health officials and scientists distrust us.

“I am troubled by just how little the health profession has done to address the persistent misperceptions arising from the nation’s history.” Writes – Reed V. Tuckson – Former Commissioner of Public Health for Washington, DC. “This should be the last time our society has to struggle against the legacy of the past as we fight persistent disparities in health outcomes and tackle this pandemic and the challenges to come.”

Given our history of racist, colonialist and sexist medical practices, to say nothing of funding greedy pharmaceutical corporations, perhaps we ought to see how easily neoliberalism motivates the individualism of Covid-deniers, anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers.

A radical way out of pandemic conditions demands a just and effective response: –

1. Directed help to communities and essential workers at risk. We as a caring society owe them support if they refuse to work in an unsafe workplace, and adequate pay and protection when they do work.

2. Demand the West cancels African debt. Due to predatory lending practices, Africa owes $500 billion in Western debt. In 2019, many African countries spent more money servicing their debts than they did on health.

3. Abolishing prisons and immigrant detention is medically and socially healthy.

4. Stop the refusal to spend on school safety measures such as ventilation and extra staff, and oppose jerking kids, parents and teachers around with politically decided in-class vs. online teaching mandates.

A Failure to Learn

In my hometown Montreal, Quebec, a perfect storm of profiteering, austerity and racism contributed to one of the world’s highest Covid-19 death rates. Almost 80% of Quebec’s five thousand Covid-19 deaths during the first surge were Montreal area nursing home residents – almost all were White.

A large percentage of nursing home staff are immigrants working at bottom wages without adequate personal protection such as N95 masks or sick leave. Because both private and public employers did not want to pay them benefits guaranteed with a full-time position, many worked part-time in different facilities. These policies spread Covid throughout facilities, then to their families, and into their immigrant communities.

Only enormous pressure on the Quebec government forced it to grant bonuses, delayed pay increases and some extra hiring for nursing home caregivers. But without any long-term commitment, bonuses were rolled back, staff quit, officials denied the crisis, and nursing homes are once again besieged by Covid disease.

Learning From Failure

Contrast us to S.E. Asia and Africa whose national and collaborative planning and deployment reinforces collective responsibility. Both experienced failure and tragedy after the SARS and Ebola pandemics respectively swept their regions.

Despite being at or near the epicenter of the novel corona-virus outbreak, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam and South Korea are mastering the pandemic. Their shut down measures are less calamitous then ours.

After suffering from the SARS pandemic, they developed national plans. They built robust national public health systems including testing and contact tracing, clear and unified communication, and control over distribution and pricing of essential medical equipment like testing supplies and masks.

In January, they took seriously the reports of a new coronavirus outbreak from Wuhan China, while Western governments failed to mobilize.

Borders were controlled for people entering from hot spots. Fever and symptoms health checks sprouted up at transit points, schools, workplaces and public buildings.

South-East Asian countries have a culture of masking in public that has proven to limit influenza transmission. Taiwan distributes masks to all residents and prevents price gouging.

When people are quarantined, many countries support those in need with food and money.  Contact tracing and quarantine surveillance is thorough. However, the state’s surveillance on people quarantined or locked down – using integrated government departments, cell phones and even CCTV face recognition in China – easily reinforces authoritarian control.

By employing multiple tools and strategies, South-East Asian countries can flexibly adjust to changing data and circumstances. Shutdowns do happen, but more selectively according to the data and science – not by panic and politics.

Superior African Organization

In February, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) convened an emergency meeting with all 55 continental health ministers to agree on a strategy on preventing transmission and mitigating community spread to avoid overburdening the already stressed healthcare systems.

Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo learned painful lessons from Ebola. “The response to an outbreak should begin and end at the community level,” Claude Kasereka, a surgeon from the DRC explained. “Training local leaders was much more effective for communicating the message than using untrusted outsiders.”

African countries that have so far are outperformed the global West, benefited from national preparations and high mask usage as well. They already had rapid-response teams, trained contact tracers, logistics routes, and other public-health tools and protocols in place.

Those that did not have staff in place at the beginning of the pandemic such as Uganda, Ethiopia and South Africa, devoted tens of thousands of people to do thorough contact tracing and city surveys to detect Covid-19.

Rwanda used local leaders to identify vulnerable members of communities affected by shutdowns and provided them with food and financial relief. Ethiopia reduced rents by 50%.

Perhaps with the West in mind, Professor Michael Hawks points out that , “Disorganized and conflicting messages from polarized political leadership leads to population mistrust of public health messages. And they have to be tailored to local understanding.”

Amara M. Konneh of Liberia explained that health authorities there “engaged pop stars to compose jingles and songs with health messages.”

“The continent of Africa reacted aggressively,” claims John Nkengasong, the director of the Africa CDC. “We have evidence to show that that helped a lot.”

“We’ve seen that in an epidemic, one day can mean a lot,” Sabin Nsanzimana, of the Rwanda Biomedical Center says in the New Yorker.

How well did our different systems work? Use this updated chart to compare us and them.

But in the Global North our deeply embedded structures of systemic racism and capitalism need to be overcome if we are to develop a coherent collective response to ensure safe and equitable health outcomes.