COVID and ideology

Britain's COVID Inquiry hasn't so far produced any very profound insights.
- Mistakes were made.
- Had we been better prepared, the crisis would have been handled better.
- More planning ahead would be helpful for next time.
All worthy assertions. Whether expanding them into over 700 pages is a worthwhile exercise is another matter. Still, this is the standard stuff of Inquiries: produce a weighty tome to satisfy the desire for official critique and the need to apportion blame. What's less clear is why, unlike other Inquiries, this one has to run to ten volumes, eight of them still to be published.
    Some things which seemed to be ignored in 2020 are now being belatedly acknowledged. In particular, the effects of lockdown and other interventions on the economy, and on people's mental state. The fact that these issues were largely brushed aside in the stampede to 'do something' will perhaps teach us to have a bit more humility next time, exercise a little more caution, and be less zealous about using a simple medical objective (e.g. preventing deaths) as the overriding factor. Perhaps.
    Looking at the bigger picture, the two things that stood out about the policy response to COVID have not been addressed by the Inquiry at all. First, the episode told us something about the dominant ideology; secondly, it revealed the enormous power of the medical profession.

What the Inquiry hasn't considered so far, and seems unlikely to, in the further 8 volumes still to come, is the influence of ideology on governmental responses to COVID and any future crises. Ideology inevitably comes into play when major government decisions are made. If such decisions seem to be largely based on science, as in this case, this merely conceals the fact that they are ultimately driven by ideological preferences. By 'ideology' I simply mean: ways of thinking about big issues that fundamentally are not about facts but about values.
    When the state decides whether to intervene with coercive measures, as in the COVID crisis, the key ideological issue is:
• collective interests (or what they're presumed to be),
versus:
• the individual's right to decide for him- or herself,
and the relative weight which should be given to each.
    Ideology is neither correct nor incorrect, neither true nor false, except in the eye of the beholder – though some ideologies do seem to cause more harm than others. Everyone has their own ideological preferences, though these can be shifted to some extent via education and propaganda, or via cultural output such as movies and TV. Ideology is an unavoidable part of life, for highly educated elites as much as for everyone else. Attempts to eliminate ideology from thought and discussion are futile and, ironically, tend to be proposed by people who are highly ideologised themselves.

Ideology is difficult if not impossible to measure, so I'm relying on impressions. But thinking back to 2020, and thinking globally, the overall picture was of a world in which the elites in power were informed by a predominantly collectivist ideology. An ideology that said "we must intervene whenever society is imperfect – which is basically all the time – particularly when there is some crisis". It seemed at times as if COVID provided intervention‑enthusiasts with the excuse they had long been waiting for. Power was to be put into the hands of trained experts (including themselves), instead of leaving things to individuals and markets.
    There were a few governments holding out against the tide of paternalistic advice from professionals and intellectuals. In Sweden, and a few other countries such as Taiwan, individualist resistance won out, at least with regard to lockdowns. The result for the persons deemed responsible for those relatively libertarian policies, in the case of Sweden, was not good: heavy censure, and blame for causing loss of lives. The hostility they had to endure was an indication of the prevailing bias in favour of interventionism and collectivism, and a sign of how intolerant the dominant ideologists were of any major disagreement.
    Now, with the benefit of hindsight and more information, the positive effects of lockdown are turning out to have been less significant than was claimed at the time. Weighed against the negatives, it could easily be argued that lockdowns were a tragic mistake.
    In Britain there was some attempt to hold out against the insistence that strong-arm intervention was necessary. Ultimately however, so it seemed, there were not enough people within the Conservatives who were willing to resist pressure from those in the medical and related professions and from the Civil Service.

The mildly individualistic resistance of the British government at the time, against pressure from medical and other experts, illustrates the broader divergence between, on the one hand, the majority of voters and the politicians they tend to favour; and on the other hand, elite power blocs such as professional groups within medicine and education. This divergence between elites and populace is one that increasingly seems to colour every area of politics in Britain, America and other Western societies. The elites are confident that their expertise allows them to know what's best for people. Meanwhile people themselves beg to differ.
    What happens when individualist resistance meets collectivist dogma? Conflict is what happens. The Inquiry skates over this problem in simplistic fashion. Yet given the broader mismatch between voter preferences and elite ideology, it's an important problem, likely to recur in connection with any future crisis, and one that shouldn't just be dismissed as a sign of poor management. The Inquiry claims that it "accepts the need for challenge" but opines that "challenge does not need to lead to conflict". It strongly censures the alleged culture of conflict within Boris Johnson's administration at the time (see Module 2, 11.182).
    More generally, the Inquiry comes down hard on Johnson's team, which at the time included pro‑Brexit campaigner Dominic Cummings. However, the evidence it provides for some of its accusations such as misogyny, and the claim that rule-breaking caused "huge distress", seems weak or non-existent.*

The bias in favour of collectivism in 2020 was hardly surprising. The pro-intervention model has been preferred by university intellectuals for decades. As those intellectuals have increased in numbers, and been assigned more weight in decision-making, and as more young people have come under their influence, the remnants of pro-individualistic thought inherited from 18th-century Enlightenment and 19th-century liberalism were bound to give way to collectivism. There are entire institutions, such as Oxford's Nuffield College, devoted to developing the thesis that society should be improved by means of intervention, imposed from above by the wise and the trained. Such thinking now dominates the humanities and the social would-be sciences.
    Some ideological biases are only to be expected among particular professionals. The political class is likely to show a statistical bias in favour of more power for the state. University intellectuals forming a class of supposed experts, particularly when authorised by the state and remunerated with state funds, can be expected to favour collectivism over individualism.
    The class of medical professionals is also likely to exhibit a bias in favour of collectivism, particularly in a society such as Britain in which most medical services are supplied via the state. Just as surgeons have a bias in favour of operating, so medical professionals in general are likely to support 'rational' interventions, independently of the wishes of recipients.

What take-home morals are to be had from the whole experience? Just because something looks like it's concerned with issues analysable by science, doesn't mean that science – whether it's solid (controlled experiments), speculative (theoretical models), or just wannabe (armchair theorising) – is the overriding thing that should determine policy. Scientists, intellectuals and medics may be good at the scientific bit, but their assertions also tend to reflect the biases that are to be expected from their membership of particular professional groups. As Terry Eagleton might say, "there's no such thing as a disinterested statement."
   Conclusion? Don't be afraid to disagree with what's presented as evidence-based advice, if hidden within that advice there are value judgments.

This blog will be back in the new year.

* Ibid, 11.170, footnotes 320 and 321; and 11.218, footnote 433. The language used in some of the electronic conversations is highly aggressive but not necessarily misogynistic. And post-Climategate and its hacked emails, we should be used to the idea that private exchanges between like-minded professionals, referring scathingly to their opponents, can be shockingly different in style from what we might expect from the public image.

Postscript
Given that the term 'collectivism' is being redefined by the humanities profession to suit their own interests, I feel duty-bound to add this reminder: political collectivism, at least in large societies, does not mean 'rule by everyone', or 'rule by the community'. It means rule by elites, possibly subject to a modicum of democratic control via elections. In modern states, such elections are likely to be manipulated by the media in favour of the preferred ideology of the elites.
    For a more detailed discussion of collectivism, see chapter 5 of Power-mad and Hypocritical.

POLARISED - part 3

There's been a lot of talk about 'hate' in recent years. We've had a programme to eliminate hatred of particular ethnic groups, for example – those who form minorities in Western societies. While that's a laudable objective, the idea that this has resulted in an overall reduction in hatred is an oversimplification. For other social groups, hatred seems to have risen rather than fallen. I seem to tick a few of the currently negative boxes myself: white, male, middle-class, middle-aged.
   Hatred of the outsider, of the foreigner, of the 'enemy of society' – however 'outside' or 'foreign' or 'enemy' is culturally defined – may be hardwired in homo sapiens. But it seems such hatred can be either damped down or cranked up. One of the methods of cranking up is to create narratives or perspectives that associate every member of a particular group with one or more negative characteristics. For example, Jews in 1930s Germany were accused of possessing 'unfair' levels of wealth. (While antisemitism is often characterised as being about contempt, the truth may have more to do with jealousy and resentment.)
   In 1973, when I emigrated from Germany to Britain aged ten, hostile narratives – in relation to groups that are now 'protected' – weren't much in evidence in my country of destination. What was visible to me from popular culture wasn't negative narratives about (say) Blacks, or women; on the other hand, there was a certain amount on the topic of Germans. In practice, I rarely had to deal with seriously anti-German prejudice – but I did find it irritating that practically every German I encountered in fiction or drama was unpleasant.
   The efforts of the last four decades have made the use of narratives that are hostile to protected groups, or of any wording that comes even remotely close, prohibited in public discourse. While this has seriously impacted free speech in the broader sense, you could argue that there's been some benefit to members of minorities.
   But to suggest that hatred in general has been reduced is surely overstating things. What seems to have happened instead is that hatred – to some extent a free-floating emotion, always on the look-out for targets – has been shifted around.

There are new objects of hatred, and new narratives/perspectives to support that hatred.
   For example, in America, groups identifying with right-wing or other anti-leftist positions are now routinely characterised in terms of adjectives that amount to labelling them as evil – and as deserving of contempt, cancel culture, and even violence. Those who identify with such positions are supposedly 'driven by hatred' – which (apparently) makes hating them okay. Anti-leftists, so the story goes, want to oppress minorities. They are misogynist, racist, phobic of sexual minorities. Other than hatred, their principal motives are selfishness and greed.
   These leftist-populist narratives receive important support from academia, which has been busy over recent decades generating theories that buttress such sentiments. Non-leftists (described as 'right-wing', 'conservative', 'neoliberal', and so on – automatic insults in an academic context) are oppressive, ideological, prejudiced, phobic of change, and so on, according to 'research' published in respected peer-reviewed journals.
   In shifting the focus of emotions – "don't hate those people, hate these people!" – academics, highbrow commentators and other intellectuals have gained important power. Power over thought, morality and speech. Ideological power, in other words.
   Such power was once held by the Christian Church. By now it has largely passed to the Church's successor. I see plenty of signs of the Church bowing to the new religion of wokeism, but not vice versa. Transmission of moral ideology has become largely a one-way street, between those two Western hegemonies, the old and the new.

POLARISED - part 2

In the previous post I suggested that increased polarisation can be linked to the fact that – despite the West supposedly having become more secularised and more science-based – there has been a rise in fervent belief. Belief in the absolute rightness of certain theories, or attitudes, chiefly in relation to political topics.
   I suggested that the apparent decline in people's capacity to consider alternatives to their own beliefs could (paradoxically) be attributable to the influence of academia. Far more people nowadays receive training, in the kinds of intellectual approach favoured by humanities professors, compared to 40 or 50 years ago. While some of the approved approaches may be analogous to those used in the physical or medical sciences, many are not.
   Critical Theory, for example, a set of techniques that's become dominant in academic arts subjects, has little in common with science. It's essentially an arm of Marxist ideology.
   Though there's a pretence that 'critical' analysis is being employed, in practice the answers are largely predetermined, and tend to come with a strong dose of moral pressure. 'If you don't agree with our stance, you're probably complicit in causing harm.' The underlying effect seems to be to stir people up, or make them uncomfortable, though they may not always be conscious of it.
   Being repeatedly told (even if only in the form of subtext) that contemporary society is harmful, and that you're complicit unless you're actively opposing the status quo, is bound to leave its mark. For some impressionable individuals, it's likely to change their attitudes fundamentally and permanently. But even for less impressionable students, it's likely to exert profound background influence, however much they may say that they didn't take campus ideology seriously at the time.

* * * * *

On 10 September 2025, conservative pundit Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a university campus in Orem, Utah, apparently by a young college graduate who objected to Kirk's views, or to what he imagined those views to be.
   More disturbing than the event itself have been the reactions to it. Comments on discussion websites such as Quora.com, presumably representing a cross-section of viewpoints, were at best only lukewarmly sympathetic. On average, they weren't sympathetic at all. Many comments amounted to the view that 'Kirk had it coming'. One got the feeling that there's quite a few people who wouldn't have minded killing Charlie Kirk themselves, if it had been easy and they could have been sure of getting away with it.
   How does what we're seeing fit with the narratives constructed by leftist intellectuals? According to the latter, it's the Right whose views are fuelled by hatred and intolerance. The image that's been created is one of crazed, unreasonable reactionaries; fervent believers who are emotive, verging on hysterical, in their attachment to irrational positions. Yet the evidence suggests that the precise opposite may be true. It's the Left that has become immune to reason, believing in the values of its preferred religion (wokeism) with evangelical zeal. It's the Left which seems to have adopted near-hysterical intolerance as its MO.

POLARISED

Why has political and ethical opinion in the West become so polarised? To the extent that many no longer seem to be able to tolerate living in the same country as others with different viewpoints?
   The Left likes to blame the Right. Figures like Donald Trump are said to be 'divisive'. But the current resurgence of rightism, often denounced as 'extreme', is perhaps best interpreted as a reaction against the increasing cultural dominance of leftism. It's a reflection of the fact that leftism has become gradually more intolerant as it has acquired power – suffocatingly so, from many people's point of view.
   As with any social phenomenon, the causes of increasing polarisation are complex. But one reason seems to be that for many people, their opinions have taken on (in their own minds) the status of fact. They 'know', for example, that men usually oppress women, that white people are racist, and that economic inequality is unjust. Opinions that diverge from these 'facts' are simply wrong. They don't deserve to be given space. Rather, they deserve to be suppressed and punished.
   Where did people acquire this unjustified certainty, and the inability to consider they might be wrong? I suspect the answer in many cases is, they acquired it at university, at least if they studied a humanities subject. Marxist and Marxist-inspired perspectives, which promote dogmatic ways of thinking, have gradually infiltrated the academic humanities. By now, such perspectives have become dominant in many institutions, including blue-chip ones.
   Not all Marxist perspectives are necessarily wrong, so long as one remembers they're just perspectives. The reasons for social stratification (for example) are not well understood; arguably, they're not understood at all. Marx's theory that inequality is due to 'oppression' may be correct, in part, but there's currently no way of knowing. It could be completely false.
   Marxist-inspired perspectives on gender, sexuality and ethnicity can be intellectually broadening, if that's considered an objective worth pursuing – so long as they're presented as perspectives, and not as compelling theory, with alternatives or critiques dismissed as 'ideology'. But that doesn't happen in practice, and it's not clear if it's even feasible. It's an integral part of the Marxist approach to treat itself as factually and morally correct, and to treat other ways of thinking as deluded and harmful. This is one important way in which Marxist analysis is very different from the scientific approach.
   Marxism is toxic to the spirit of free enquiry. It regards 'free enquiry' as an instrument of oppression. It's not surprising that support for neutral debate, and dispassionate weighing of alternatives, has declined, if professors encourage their students to regard such things as merely a cover for dodgy agendas.
   Rather than teaching people to think sympathetically about a range of differing viewpoints, many humanities professors encourage adopting faith-like positions on certain questions. They don't do it by stating categorically that (say) men oppress women; the process is more subtle than that. Students are encouraged to think 'critically', but only in certain directions. Getting good marks depends on getting to the 'right' conclusions, and avoiding the 'wrong' ones.
For example,
• anti capitalism: thumbs up.
• anti state intervention, or anti Marxism: thumbs down.
   Ironically – or hypocritically – it's actually the humanities that are doing one thing (political propaganda) under the cover of another (intellectual analysis). It's made to look like science, but has more in common with religion.
   And if you want to know why professors are attracted to Marxist perspectives, read the book.

the destruction of Britain (contd.)

The Labour government currently appears to have two main objectives:
(1) raise money by any means necessary (the coffers are empty);
(2) penalise the middle class for having 'unfair' advantages.
   As Arthur Laffer recently reminded us, objective (1) isn't necessarily going to be met, in net terms, by having a new tax. For example, if you slap a 20% tax on private schools, but twenty percent of them go bust as a result, you may actually decrease tax revenue. Nevertheless, if you manage to penalise the middle class, then at least one of your objectives will have been met.
   Having successfully punished those who wish to keep their children away from the horrors of comprehensive schools, Labour's next move is to penalise family farms. Farming is linked to private land ownership, one of the primary objects of hatred and disapproval for Marxists and other leftists. Stalin, for example, was willing to let millions die for the sake of eliminating private farming, which he saw as anathema to the communist cause.
   Labour's approach is to abolish the exemption for inheritance tax on agricultural property (agricultural property relief) for farms valued above £1 million. This is a ludicrously low threshold. There are houses in the Oxfordshire village I live in – not by any means grand houses – selling for close to a million.
   One of the concepts that came out of the COVID crisis is that of key workers, and key sectors – sectors of the economy that we cannot do without, if a catastrophe ever hits. One of those sectors is surely food production. Rather than over-worrying about which minority groups need protection (from being offended), shouldn't we be worrying about which sectors of the economy need protection? Because, in a crisis, we are going to be royally screwed if they don't exist and we're forced to rely on possibly non-existent imports? Personally, I would put food production above even medical services and transport, on the list of sectors we cannot do without.
   Farming, more perhaps than any other business, depends on long-term planning and strategy. It can take decades for an agricultural plan to come to full fruition. Continuity across generations has been a crucial part of British farming. And one unwise policy change is all it can take to permanently destroy an agricultural business. Can it ever be rebuilt? Don't count on it.
   Depending on whose data you believe, the proportion of British farms affected by the tax change could be two thirds, or it could be 20 percent. But even 20 percent of our farms being gradually decimated is too much.
   Academic think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies has recommended the abolition of agricultural property relief, on the basis that "[if we have inheritance tax] it should apply equally across all types of assets."

If the government wishes to promote certain uses of land – such as producing food [...] – it would be fairer and more efficient to explicitly target support towards the activities it seeks to promote.

This line of argument may look convincing on paper. But do the academics responsible for it have any practical knowledge of how farming works? Or considered that a tax you have to pay, plus a subsidy you have to claim, may look the same – in theory – as being left alone, but be very different in practice?
   Even the Institute of Chartered Accountants, not particularly known for having a pro-Conservative stance, has warned that the £1m threshold is set too low, and that it will affect many more farms than the government claims.
   As in the case of private schools, the big players will no doubt find ways and means to survive the onslaught. It's the smaller farms who are likely to go to the wall.
   Do Labour politicians understand the economics of farming? Do they care? Is it wilful ignorance? Whatever the causes, the result will surely be to push the British farming sector closer to the brink.

• My colleague Celia Green has sometimes suggested that perhaps Britain "has a death wish". It's clear that there are people who seem to hate Britain (or a particular version of it), and who seem to want to destroy it. But is it possible for destruction to happen, unless a good proportion of the populace as a whole is to some extent on board with it? Is it possible that Freud's Todestrieb can operate at a societal level?

le déluge (après nous)

It seems France is paying the price for 50 years of cultural-Marxist ideology, which started to become hegemonic over there in the 1970s. The French structuralist and post-structuralist movements – variants of the intellectual collectivism that Marx's disciples pioneered, and hugely influential – no doubt made the French intellectual establishment feel they were masters of the (mental) universe. A pleasant feeling, after the humiliation of the Occupation.
   Their ideas became fashionable, then dominant. It soon became difficult to be a non-leftist intellectual at all in France. Even the occasional maverick like Bernard-Henri Lévy still genuflected towards the basic principle of leftism: that intellectuals were there to make the world 'a better place'. Instead of making France 'better', we can see what the eventual effects of leftist hegemony are: instability, political incompetence, loss of social cohesion.
   France no longer occupies the position of standard bearer for cultural Marxism. (One of the ironies of collectivism becoming hegemonic is that eventually high-grade collectivist thinkers are hunted to extinction, because the concept of an exceptional person, even a leftist one, is regarded as too individualistic.) The role of leadership was transferred to the US during the 1980s and 90s. Applying a temporal analogy suggests that America has about another 20 or 30 years to go before it, too, succumbs to the weight of Marxist-inspired ideology, and starts to go downhill.
   For the moment, the concept of enterprising individuals, and their importance, still forms a key part of America's self-image. Only this morning I was made aware, by an American brain-training app, of the historical role of Boston's 'ice king' Frederic Tudor (1783-1864).
   But the rot has obviously started even in America, as can be seen from yesterday's assassination of Charlie Kirk. Unless the US wakes up and realises that its bloated university system has become a wokeist propaganda machine, it will soon be in the same position as Britain, with every historical figure 'deconstructed' and 'revisionised' to prove they were enemies of social justice, or else mere components of 'social movements'.

• The key to seeing through wokeism is to think about the motivation (conscious or unconscious) of those involved. They would be the first to tell you that everything is about power. Shouldn't you consider whether this applies, a fortiori, to themselves? Who benefits when all political thinking and action is eventually influenced, or outright controlled, by a class of state-authorised intellectuals?

paying the price for pseudo-logic

The tides are changing for higher education. In 2020, Joe Biden was elected on a platform of free college education for all Americans. Five years later, few politicians in the West talk about expanding the bloated university system. The penny seems to have dropped that bumping up participation rates has achieved little, except satisfy egalitarian ideology and generate massive debt.
   As always with state involvement, there's now a ratchet-effect problem. Reversing the expansion will create unemployment among academics, and lead to waste of useless expenditure on infrastructure (lecture halls, student accommodation, etc.) Did New Labour, or their counterparts in other countries, consider this reversibility issue, when they encouraged the spending spree? It's doubtful.
   There's an interesting recent article by a retired academic who says he was opposed to the UK's expansion that started in the 1990s, and who argues that chickens are now coming home to roost. The fact that the article appears in Times Higher Education suggests that even the academic and administrative elites are starting to acknowledge the problem.
   Former politics lecturer Lincoln Allison points out that the UK's current two-tier system (half are graduates, half not) condemns non-graduates permanently to lower-grade jobs. Rather than increasing opportunities for the able, the expansion has succeeded in entrenching class differences.
   Allison says that the university sector has been "bloated to an unsustainable level", and predicts that it is now "bound to decline".

... the government of a new party – or an old party on a new trajectory – may get into power and boldly and deliberately dismantle large parts of the system.
   As a competitor for public funding, universities don't look good compared with health, defence and environment, and we must bear in mind that the British constitution can allow nearly complete control over policy based on 40 per cent of the vote. Such a government might institute a programme of closures and insist on the sale of assets and real estate.

Allison's article doesn't explore the dodgy logic that was used to rationalise the bloating, back in the heady nineties and noughties. The phenomenon is especially noteworthy given that academics themselves – cleverer than the average person? – were presumably involved in developing the case for expansion.
   The 2006 Leitch Review in particular provides a prime illustration of ludicrous pseudo-rationality: statistics, charts, arguments ('Britain needs more graduates in order to compete!'), all conveniently collated and targeted at producing a desired conclusion ('increase participation rate to 40%!') that had probably been fixed in advance. It's a testament to spurious logic of the kind nowadays habitually deployed in the humanities, and a testament to how such pseudo-logic can have massive political consequences, with a massive price to pay down the line, in the form of economic mismanagement and sorting out the mess.

Boycott the universities!

My advice to middle‑class parents:
Keep your offspring away from institutions that promote toxic ideology, and that encourage massive personal debt.

My advice to working‑class parents:
Ditto.

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