Question:
Are you sure Quinn is a troll and not a victim of trolls? Because
I have come across quite a few leftists indulging in conspiracy
theories and falling for the weirdest kinds of stuff.
Who knows? However, this is not Leftmail. It is
Marxmail. I created it in 1998 as a forum for experienced and
committed Marxists. That is why it has never had more than 1400
subscribers. Doug Henwood terminated LBO-Talk, which started the
same day as Marxmail in 1998 (May Day) because it had been
superseded by FB and Twitter. From what I've seen of social
media, it is no substitute for a mailing list. I have 3,500
"friends". I doubt that more than 500 are the kind of people who
can keep up with the discussion taking place here. I don't see
this as serving the same needs as social media. The goal was to
create a space where people can discuss Lenin's legacy, the
revolutionary potential of the working-class, the nature of
imperialism today, etc. I've been moderating Marxmail for 22
years and have a pretty good idea of who belongs here or not.
Question: Are you sure Quinn is a troll and not a victim of trolls? Because I have come across quite a few leftists indulging in conspiracy theories and falling for the weirdest kinds of stuff.
Let me make clear, I'm not questioning your ban of this person. It is your list after all and you make the rules. I'm just wondering if this person is merely ignorant and not both ignorant and a white supremacist.
Here's something you don't see everyday on Marxmail. A subscriber
posting a link to an article that can been seen as absolving Donald
Trump from white supremacy.
Generally, the trolls have been using domains instead of legitimate
email accounts like Quinn's, who used outlook.com. In her case, I will
make an exception and ban her like the rest of these bedbugs.
In one of the oldest texts available in the Western philosophical canon, a fragment from Heraclitus (c.535–c.475 BC), we read that “much learning (polymathiē) does not teach understanding”. The sheer amount of knowledge one possesses about the world, however wide it may be, is no guarantee that one has grasped what the world is, or how it works. Heraclitus was therefore suspicious of polymaths. He considered Pythagoras, for instance, a charlatan and, since Pythagoras was a magnificent polymath, Heraclitus thought him to be not an ordinary impostor but “the prince of impostors”. Many intricacies of the pre-Socratic world remain obscure to us, but this debate we certainly understand. For we, too, tend to dismiss generalists as frauds, and polymathy as charlatanism. Carlo Ginzburg didn’t mince his words: “Foucault is a charlatan”. Isaiah Berlin was slightly nicer, but only slightly, when he quipped of Derrida: “I think he may be a genuine charlatan, though a clever man”. To be a respectable scholar today is to specialize in a well-defined, rather narrow subfield, and to stay away from generalist pronouncements. Someone once observed about Leo Strauss that his knowledge was so extraordinary, and covered so many fields, that his colleagues considered him incompetent. Indeed, a reputation for encyclopedism can ruin one’s career. The credo of today’s academic orthodoxy was formulated more than a century ago by Max Weber: “Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world”. Ironically, Weber was a compulsively Faustian man himself, shuttling between history, law, sociology, philosophy and political theory, among other fields.
That we recognize ourselves in an ancient dispute pitting specialized knowledge against polymathy is no accident. As Peter Burke shows persuasively in The Polymath, the debate has always been part of the West’s self-representation, recurring and amplifying over the centuries, “always the same in essence yet always different in emphases and circumstances”. Whenever we oppose experts to amateurs, theory to practice, pure to applied knowledge, detail to the big picture, we partake in an argument that started in archaic Greece. Burke uses Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “the fox”, who “knows many things”, and the “hedgehog”, who “knows one great thing”, to emphasize what it is fundamentally at stake.
What has kept the debate alive is that, just as the West has typically valued rigour and expertise, it has at the same time been awed by an ideal of universal knowledge. Heraclitus may have poked fun at the polymath Pythagoras, but his fellow Greeks revered a muse called Polymatheia. A good education in antiquity was enkyklios paideia (which gave us our “encyclopedia”), an ambitious project that demanded the student go through the whole circle of knowledge. Much of our own “liberal arts” education runs along similar lines. People during the Renaissance may have occasionally smiled at Leonardo da Vinci’s unrealistic projects, but they admired him all the same. They could not help recognizing in him the embodiment of an ideal that was only too dear to them, just as it is to us. Dr Faustus was meant to be a dark, repellant figure (“Doctor Fausto, that great sodomite and nigromancer”, noted the deputy Bürgermeister of Nuremberg, in 1532, as he denied the scholar entry to the city), yet he has become one of our paradigmatic heroes. When, about a hundred years ago, Oswald Spengler needed a name to describe what modern Western civilization was essentially about, he came up with the term “Faustian”. We have been calling polymaths names (“amateurs” and “frauds” and worse), and yet we’ve never wanted to be without them.
Polymathy has played such an important part in the West’s intellectual and cultural history that Burke can only afford to cover the past six centuries. He works with a list of 500 polymaths, ranging from Filippo Brunelleschi and Nicholas of Cusa to Umberto Eco, Oliver Sacks, Susan Sontag and Tzvetan Todorov. In the first part of the book, Burke discusses his polymaths chronologically, grouping them under a specific zeitgeist (“The Age of the ‘Renaissance Man’, 1400–1600”; “The Age of ‘Monsters of Erudition’, 1600–1700”; “The Age of the ‘Man of Letters’, 1700–1850”; “The Age of Territoriality, 1850–2000”). What Burke seeks to provide here, however, is more than a collection of individual portraits of polymaths, picturesque, inspiring or influential as they may have been. One of the book’s major ambitions is to describe “some intellectual and social trends and so to answer general questions about forms of social organization and climates of opinion that are favorable or unfavorable to polymathic endeavors”.
In an important sense, polymathy is boundlessness in action; it is part of the polymath’s job description to disregard disciplinary boundaries and conventions, labels and classifications. There is something rebellious and anti-establishment at the core of any polymathic project. That is why polymathy, as a cultural and historical phenomenon, is difficult to systematize and to study with any degree of thoroughness. How is one to map out an insurrection against, say, the dominion of maps? That makes Burke’s efforts all the more remarkable. He proposes, for instance, several typologies of polymaths: active vs passive (depending on whether they produce knowledge or only absorb it), limited vs general (do they tend to work in related fields or roam freely?), simultaneous vs serial (do they pursue different kinds of knowledge at the same time or in succession?). A seemingly more consequential distinction is that between “centrifugal” polymaths, who gather knowledge without paying much attention to any possible connections, and the “centripetal” ones, who place whatever they absorb within a pre-existing system. “The first group rejoices in or suffers from omnivorous curiosity”, says Burke. “The second group is fascinated – some would say obsessed – with what one of them, Johann Heinrich Alsted, called ‘the beauty of order’.”
Another helpful insight articulated by Burke has to do with what he calls the “Leonardo syndrome”. Fascinating as polymathy is, it can also be a curse, translating into an inability to finish anything, to pursue a project to its logical conclusion. Da Vinci, one of the greatest and yet most unusual of polymaths, a self-taught genius without a classical humanist education (omo sanza lettere, he called himself), embodies the downside of polymathy like few others in Burke’s story. An enormous “dispersal of energy” is what strikes us in the many projects that da Vinci “abandoned or simply left unfinished”. For Burke, da Vinci’s is a cautionary tale: do not become dispersed in the pursuit of chimeras.
Polymaths have also been charged with compulsively collecting knowledge – any knowledge – for the sake of the act itself. As if to prove the old truth that we become that which we study, there are many pages in Burke’s book, especially in its first, historical part, where one has the annoying impression that he is mindlessly collecting. Here’s an example, out of many possible:
As one of his patrons put it in a moment of semi-exasperation, Leibniz was a man of “insatiable curiosity”, a phrase that has been repeated more than once by students of his work. He was described by one contemporary as “deeply versed in all sciences”, and by another as “so comprehensive and universal a genius”. … In a dictionary of scholars published in 1733, Leibniz appeared a “famous polymath”, while a well-known nineteenth-century German scientist … called him a scholar with “knowledge of everything and of the whole”.
And the piling up of quotations goes on and on until they lose meaning and force. The reader also comes across nagging repetitions that a more careful editorial eye would have spotted. Pavel Florensky is mentioned three times, and every time he is introduced as “Russia’s unknown da Vinci” or the “Russian Leonardo”. By the third occurrence you come to resent both da Vinci and the copyeditor.
Such stylistic infelicities cast an embarrassing shadow on an otherwise impressive project. It takes a polymath to write about polymaths, and Burke proves to be one. Heraclitus may have been too quick in his dismissal of polymaths, Burke warns us. Understanding comes from many things, including much learning. This book not only teaches us something important about polymathy’s past; it does an excellent job of opening our eyes to polymathy’s future too. For it certainly has one.
CosticaBradatan is a Professor of Humanities at Texas Tech University and an Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at University of Queensland. He is the author, most recently, of Dying for Ideas: The dangerous lives of the philosophers, 2015
The Proud Boys declare themselves to be "proud Western chauvinists" and in their initiation they repeat "I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world".
A bunch of white guys talking about how they created the modern world in some idiotic "ceremony" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPABaFF1pD0 but supposedly aren't white supremacists... very believable.
Scientists have developed a weapon, called the "Super H-bomb", which if detonated will wipe out the human race entirely. A "High Tribunal" in "The Great Court of Outer Space" is called upon to decide whether divine intervention should be allowed to stop the bomb's detonation. The devil (Vincent Price), who goes by the name of Mr. Scratch, prosecutes Mankind while the Spirit of Man (Ronald Colman) defends it.
Here's something you don't see everyday on Marxmail. A subscriber posting a link to an article that can been seen as absolving Donald Trump from white supremacy.
Generally, the trolls have been using domains instead of legitimate email accounts like Quinn's, who used outlook.com. In her case, I will make an exception and ban her like the rest of these bedbugs.
‘British Literature in Transition: 1920-1940 Futility and Anarchy’ by Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill (eds) reviewed by Brian Elliott – Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
According to the general editor, Gill Plain, the series ‘British Literature in Transition’ aims ‘to reconsider the habitual practices and critical norms that shape our understanding of twentieth-century writing’ (xiii) and ‘to understand literature’s role in mediating the developments of the past hundred years’ (xiv). As the editors of this particular volume covering 1920-40, Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill, explain, the subtitle is derived from T. S. Eliot’s reference to the ‘immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (6). Eliot made this comment in his 1922 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, one of a small number of epochal literary works published in that seminal year for ‘high modernism’. The novelty of approach adopted in the volume is signified by the fact that two seemingly disparate decades in British literary history are surveyed as the period in question, thereby allowing ‘new breaks and continuities to come into view’ (8).
More specifically, the volume seeks to problematise the generally received understanding that the 1920s were all about formal innovation wedded to an art for art’s sake outlook, whereas the 1930s constituted a distinctly politically engaged period of British literary culture. ‘So-called ‘autonomous’ works of the 1920s,’ the editors contest, ‘can be read as always engaged in the political and social debate’ (9). Reading against the grain of standard literary history, it is noted that the 1920s marked a highpoint in British working-class political activism, most obviously in the case of the 1926 General Strike; while the 1930s were, by contrast, ‘politically quiescent’ (10). The volume editors instantiate the linkages between British literature and political consciousness of the 1920s by quoting a 1927 article by D. H. Lawrence, where the writer accentuates the pivotal social significance of the division between middle- and working-class cultures in contemporary Britain. This theme, of course, Lawrence took up in his final, highly controversial novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was originally published in 1928.
Intriguingly, the volume editors also point to parallels between the period surveyed and our present point in time, alluding to ‘the uncanny ways interwar literature seems to gesture at or participate in the controversies of our own day’ (23). More particularly, they reference the 2008 global financial crisis and ongoing controversies relating to devolution of power to the four nations that comprise the United Kingdom. A further parallel relates to ‘a newly energised anti-internationalist populism in England’ as evidenced in the 2016 Brexit referendum result (23). A final mirroring highlighted by the editors relates to advances in communications and entertainment technologies. As individual chapters go on to investigate in detail, the 1920s and 30s witnessed the widespread adoption of telephones and radios in British homes, as well as the birth of celebrity culture made possible by changed modes of presentation and the expanded reach of newspapers. These socially disruptive media developments can be seen as parallel to the radical ways in which contemporary ‘new media’ have reshaped British society over the last two decades. From the vantage point of the literary and cultural establishment of the 1920s and 30s, media innovations gave rise to a popular culture that was regarded, all too often, as inimical to the means and ends of ‘high art’.
The eighteen chapters of the book are organized into five thematic parts, dealing respectively with the wake of the First World War, a changed understanding of the human condition, contemporary politics, the situation within and between the UK’s four constituent nations, and oppositions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Each part, in turn, contains an impressive breadth of theme and perspective. For example, the part devoted to politics includes contributions on the changing consciousness of history among writers, presentations of women in the home and workplace, the birth and development of the documentary genre in literature, and the reception of Indian writing in English. In the editors’ introduction to this part of the book, the main critical argument of the volume as a whole is restated: ‘In recent years the narrative of the autonomous Twenties being followed by the political Thirties has received considerable modification […] Miners’ strikes and lock-outs in 1921 and 1926, and severe, bitter industrial unrest in all Britain’s major centres, contributed, for many on the left and right, to a feeling that the 1920s was a decade of revolutionary challenge’ (146).
In a fascinating chapter entitled ‘Women’s Work? Domestic Labour and Proletarian Fiction’, Charles Ferrell questions the cut and dried gendering of household work in depictions of working-class life in British literature of the 1920s and 30s. Contrasting Orwell’s presentation of a strict and invariable gendered division of labour in working-class households in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Ferrell argues that ‘working-class writing from the 1930s is actually surprisingly sensitive to the condition of working-class women. “Surprising” that is unless the assumption of a masculinist bias is in fact a middle-class prejudice’ (168). In making his case, Ferrell steers the reader through numerous portrayals of working-class life to be found in novels written and published at the time by working-class authors. Along the way, Orwell’s further assumption that depictions of worker-class protagonists inevitably hinge on a desire to overcome class origins through social mobility is also questioned. In certain cases, at least, working-class protagonists may indeed ‘desire to escape from the material conditions of the working and lower middle classes but they do not desire any kind of middle class status, and the “culture” they acquire and display is not an inherently middle class quality or possession’ (172-3).
In the following chapter, entitled ‘Ordinary Places, Intermodern Genres: Documentary, Travel, and Literature’, Kristin Bluemel expands on the theme of artistic presentations of working-class life and the social position of those who create such depictions. In this case the context is ‘documentary literature’ and its precarious blending of fact and fiction. Bluemel shows how this genre of British literature can be understood to have grown out of earlier popular travel literature, exemplified most prominently by H. V. Morton’s In Search of … book series, which examined the current state of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales between 1927 and 1932. In its seminal period, a ‘documentary’ was synonymous with a travelogue, giving rise to the two early examples of documentary literature compared and contrasted by Bluemel in her chapter: J. B. Priestley’s English Journey (1934) and Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. In great detail, the chapter demonstrates how Priestly and Orwell respectively employ a quite distinct ‘rhetoric of place’ (183). Whereas, in Orwell, ‘the lack of proper names, particularly names of places in between North and South, has the effect of keeping English people and places apart’ (189), in Priestley ‘readers not only share his sense of national investment in diverse and distinctive Northern localities, but understand that places between origin and destination are integral to the nation’ (190).
The framing of class-based literary presentation is expanded in Liam McIlvanney’s chapter on depictions of Glasgow as the ‘Second City of the Empire’. The 1922 General Election saw an ascendant Labour Party win ten of Glasgow’s fifteen seats, something that made ‘Glasgow – along with Sheffield – the ‘reddest city in Britain’, and gave birth to the enduring legend of ‘Red Clydeside’ (244). McIlvanney relates how, a matter of years before this, in 1919 riots in Glasgow’s central George Square had been met with tanks when the UK Scottish Secretary had presentiments of a ‘Bolshevist rising’ (245). Against this backdrop of working-class organisation and agitation, this chapter brings to light the contradictions inherent on Glasgow’s presentation as a major centre of industry within the British Empire: ‘The imperial economy that drove Glasgow’s precipitate growth also trapped swathes of its working population in a cycle of dangerous, low-paid employment.’ (245) The rest of the chapter then goes on to document the ‘ambivalence towards Empire’ in novels written and published by Glaswegian authors in the 1930s, many of which have been neglected and marginalized in recent surveys of modern Scottish literature. A particular preoccupation of these novels is the decay of shipbuilding in the city as economic depression struck and deepened in the 1930s. As the sense of an end of Empire looms in the face of a moribund shipbuilding industry, the literary works considered in this chapter presage the emergence of Scotland into something very like the semi-autonomy it has gained over the last two decades.
The foregoing gives some sense of the admirable detail and complexity offered by the various chapters of this volume. The underlying editorial argument is consistently evident through the book, offering the reader a satisfying sense of congruence and coherence across parts and chapters. The authors also do justice to the aim of the ‘British Literature in Transition’ series ‘to understand literature’s role in mediating the developments of the past hundred years’ (xiv). From a Marxian perspective, of course, this role of mediation has always been something of a contested issue. While the overall argument offered in the book is that writers of British literature in the 1920s were already very much involved in the political and social issues of their day, it is also perfectly plausible to argue that this involvement did not, by and large, find overt expression in the key works that were deemed to constitute the birth of British modernism at the time. For instance, it is noted by Gabrielle McIntire, in her chapter ‘History: The Past in Transition’, that ‘D. H. Lawrence’s writing was radicalised by the General Strike’ (164). While Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover certainly turns on a cross-class relationship, it is very far from overtly depicting anything about ongoing political turmoil in Britain in the way, for example, George Eliot had done in her 1866 novel Felix Holt, The Radical. If anything, Lawrence’s novel represents a coming to terms of the First World War, something we know continued to preoccupy the writer long after 1918.
As has been made clear, there is much to admire in the way contributors manage to weave together literary works and the social and political histories of the day. Nevertheless, I believe the underlying argument of the historical revisionism at work – namely, that the standard reading of an autonomous 1920s versus an engaged 1930s should be rejected – ultimately remains vulnerable to substantive objection. On this point, it is necessary to grapple with the class positioning of both individual writers and of artists as a collective grouping. In simple terms, artists are akin to artisans, namely specialised workers. Writers, especially, conduct their work under largely solitary conditions. Equally, their works can be incubated for many years and further external contingencies can delay their publication. For example, Lawrence’s Women in Love was originally conceived as a book project entitled The Sisters years before it appeared in 1920. In other words, many seminal novels of a period are essentially retrospective, representing the immediate past rather than the ongoing present. Secondly, the decision to be a literary producer is effectively a decision to place oneself at several removes from political praxis in an immediate sense. Of course, this in no way means all literature is radically apolitical; but it does in principle problematise the very notion of ‘engaged literature’. This does not amount to saying, however, that the cultural clashes between leftists and conservatives in Britain in the 1920s and 30s were little more than a social storm in a teacup. Rather, it is a matter of registering, in nuanced and fine detail, how the ebb and flows of such debates fed into institutional, political, social and educational reform. It is in this key way that aesthetic mediation truly matters, both a century ago and today.
Maybe the real story is how the mainstream press ignores such things, since it doesn't fit their racialist narrative?
I doubt Marx would turn to wikipedia for his information, but if he did, he would have seen that Gavin McInnes left the Proud Boys in 2017. He would also have seen that Enrique Tarrio, leader of Latinos for Trump, has been chairman of the Proud Boys since 2019.
In the Trump era, however, demanding that the president
answer formal questions is asking a lot, which is why, on his own
accord, he’s transformed the debate medium into talk radio, in
which the host can hang up on callers and riff on Hunter Biden (“He got three and a half million dollars from
Moscow…”).
Maybe this most recent debate would have made more sense
if, instead of taking place on a colonial red-white-and-blue
stage, the candidates had ditched the moderator, worn those
YouTube headphones, and shouted their insults into oversized mics.
Viewers would then have understood that they were tuning
into something akin toThe
Rush Limbuagh Show,Mike
and the Mad Dog,orHoward Stern, and that this was not an
attempt to recreate the agora in Periclean Athens. At least we all
would have been spared this week’s national disappointment over
the quality of the exchanges.
The far-right Proud Boys group, whom Donald Trump
refused to denounce this week, have beenlinkedto
assaults on protesters, white supremacist organizing, the spread
of Covid misinformation and other threats against Americans.
Emily Gorcenski has been tracking them every step of the
way.
Since 2018, the 38-year-old data scientist has been
exposing members of the far right and cataloguing white
supremacist violence across the US through her site,First Vigil. The project grew out of the
attack on her Charlottesville, Virginia, community the year prior
– thedeadly Unite the
Right rally, which brought Gorcenski face to facewith neo-Nazisbearing
torches and swastikas, shouting racist and transphobic vitriol at
her. One of her attackers was laterrevealedto
be an active US marine.
Foreign Policy
The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable
There are big problems with the United Nations’ most important
environmental metric.
BY JASON HICKEL | SEPTEMBER 30, 2020, 2:53 PM
In 2015, the world’s governments signed on to the U.N.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a commitment to bring
the global economy back into balance with the living world. Now,
five years later, as the U.N. General Assembly convenes online
to discuss the global ecological crisis, everyone wants to know
how countries are performing.
To answer this question, delegates and policymakers have
referred to a metric called the SDG Index, which was developed
by Jeffrey Sachs “to assess where each country stands with
regard to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.” The
metric tells a very clear story. Sweden, Denmark, Finland,
France, and Germany—along with most other rich Western
nations—rise to the top of the rankings, giving casual observers
the impression that these countries are real leaders in
achieving sustainable development.
There’s only one problem. Despite its name, the SDG Index has
very little to do with sustainable development all. In fact,
oddly enough, the countries with the highest scores on this
index are some of the most environmentally unsustainable
countries in the world.
Take Sweden, for example. Sweden scores an impressive 84.7 on
the index, topping the pack. But ecologists have long pointed
out that Sweden’s “material footprint”—the quantity of natural
resources that the country consumes each year—is one of the
biggest in the world, right up there with the United States, at
32 metric tons per person. To put this in perspective, the
global average is about 12 tons per person, and the sustainable
level is about 7 tons per person. In other words, Sweden is
consuming nearly five times over the boundary.
There is nothing sustainable about this kind of consumption. If
everyone on the planet were to consume as Sweden does, global
resource use would exceed 230 billion tons of stuff per year. To
get a sense for what this would look like, consider all the
resources that we presently extract, produce, transport, and
consume around the world each year—and all of the ecological
damage that this causes—and triple it.
Or take Finland, for example, which is No. 3 on the SDG Index.
Finland’s carbon footprint is about 13 metric tons of carbon
dioxide per person per year, similar to that of Saudi Arabia.
This makes it one of the most polluting countries in the world,
in per capita terms, and a major contributor to climate
breakdown. For comparison, China’s carbon footprint is about 7
tons per person. India’s is less than 2. If the whole world were
to consume as much fossil fuels as Finland does, the planet
would be literally uninhabitable.
This isn’t just a matter of a few odd results. Data published by
scientists at the University of Leeds shows that all of the
top-ranked countries in the SDG Index have significantly
overshot their fair share of planetary boundaries, in
consumption-based terms—not only when it comes to resource use
and emissions but also in terms of land use and chemical flows
like nitrogen and phosphorous. It is physically impossible for
all nations to consume and pollute at the level of the SDG top
performers without destroying our planet’s biosphere.
In other words, the SDG Index is, from the perspective of
ecology, incoherent. It creates the illusion that rich countries
have high levels of sustainability when in fact they do not.
So what’s going on here? Well, the SDG Index is directly linked
to the Sustainable Development Goals. There are 17 goals, each
of which include a number of targets. The SDG Index takes
indicators for each of these targets (where data is available),
indexes them, and then averages them together to arrive at a
score for each goal. Then the 17 goals are averaged together in
turn to come up with the final figure. All of this seems
reasonable enough, on the face of it. But taking this approach
means introducing a number of analytical problems.
First, there is a weighting problem. The SDGs include three
different kinds of indicators: Some focus on ecological impact
(like deforestation and biodiversity loss), some focus on social
development (like education and hunger), and some focus on
infrastructure development (like transportation and
electricity). Most of the SDGs contain a mix of these, but the
ecological indicators are almost always swamped, as it were, by
the development indicators. For example, the SDG Index has four
indicators for Goal 11 (on “sustainable cities and
communities”); three of them are development indicators, while
only one of them has to do with ecological impact. This means
that if a country performs well on the development indicators,
its score for that goal will look good even if it fails in terms
of sustainability.
This issue is compounded by a second problem, namely, that only
four of the 17 SDGs deal mostly or wholly with ecological
sustainability (Goals 12 through 15). The other 13 are mostly
focused on development. Once again, this means that good
performance on the development goals outweighs poor performance
on the sustainability goals, so countries like Sweden, Germany,
and Finland can rise to the top of the index (with the United
States ranking in the top 20 percent) even though they have
highly unsustainable levels of ecological impact.
The final problem is that the vast majority of the ecological
indicators are territorial metrics that do not account for
impacts related to international trade. For instance, take the
air pollution indicator in Goal 11. Rich countries come out
looking clean—but this is largely because they have offshored
most of their polluting industries to countries in the global
south since the 1980s, thus shifting the problem abroad.
So too with the indicators on deforestation, overfishing, and so
on: most of this damage happens in poorer countries, but it is
disproportionately caused by overconsumption in richer
countries, and quite often perpetrated by corporations or
investors headquartered there. As a result, poorer countries get
punished in the SDG Index for being harmed and polluted by
richer countries. Of course, in many cases territorial metrics
are appropriate; but there are a number of indicators in the SDG
Index that should be reckoned as well in consumption-based terms
and yet are not.
In effect, the SDG Index celebrates rich countries while turning
a blind eye to the damage they are causing. Ecological
economists have long warned against this approach. It violates
the principle of “strong sustainability,” which holds that good
performance on development indicators cannot legitimately
substitute for destructive levels of ecological impact. The SDG
Index team are aware of this problem. It’s even mentioned
(briefly) in their methodological notes—but then it’s swept
under the rug in favor of a final metric that has little
grounding in ecological principles.
Ultimately, metrics of sustainable development need to be
universalizable. In other words, the top performers on the index
should represent a standard that all nations could aspire to
achieve without this leading to a collapse of global ecosystems.
That’s not the case with the SDG Index, where rich countries are
held up as models when in reality, as the Leeds research shows,
they are a big part of the problem.
The United Nations needs to redesign the index to correct these
issues. This can be done by rendering the ecological indicators
in consumption-based terms wherever relevant and possible, to
take account of international trade, and by indexing the
ecological indicators separately from the development indicators
so that we can see clearly what’s happening on each front. This
way we can celebrate what countries like Denmark and Germany
have achieved in terms of development while also recognizing
that they are major drivers of ecological breakdown and need
urgently to change course, with rapid reductions in emissions
and resource use.
Until then, we should avoid using the SDG Index as a metric of
progress in sustainable development, because it’s not. Given the
stakes of the crisis we face, we need to tell more honest,
accurate stories about what’s happening to our planet and who is
responsible for it.
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a fellow of the
Royal Society of Arts. Twitter: @jasonhickel
WASHINGTON — President Trump said early Friday morning that he and the first lady have tested positive for the coronavirus, throwing the nation’s leadership into uncertainty and escalating the crisis posed by a pandemic that has already killed more than 207,000Americans and devastated the economy.
“Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter shortly before 1 a.m. “We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!”
Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2020
The president’s physician said Mr. Trump was “well” without saying whether he was experiencing symptoms and added that the president would stay isolated in the White House for now.
“The president and first lady are both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence,” the physician, Sean P. Conley, said in a statement without saying how long that would be. “Rest assured I expect the president to continue carrying out his duties without disruption while recovering, and I will keep you updated on any future developments.”
Other aides to the president would not say whether he was experiencing symptoms, but people at the White House noticed that his voice sounded raspy on Thursday, although it was not clear that it was abnormal for him, especially given the number of campaign rallies he has been holding lately.
Mr. Trump received the test result after one of his closest advisers, Hope Hicks, became infected, bringing the virus into his inner circle and underscoring the difficulty of containing it even with the resources of a president. Mr. Trump has for months played down the severity of the virus and told a political dinner just Thursday night that “the end of the pandemic is in sight.”
Mr. Trump’s positive test result could pose immediate difficulties for the future of his campaign against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger, with just 33 days before the election on Nov. 3. Even if Mr. Trump, 74, remains asymptomatic, he will have to withdraw from the campaign trail and stay isolated in the White House for an unknown period of time. If he becomes sick, it could raise questions about whether he should remain on the ballot at all.
Even if he does not become seriously ill, the positive test could prove devastating to his political fortunes given his months of diminishing the seriousness of the pandemic even as the virus was still ravaging the country and killing about 1,000 more Americans every day. He has repeatedly predicted the virus “is going to disappear,” asserted that it was under control and insisted that the country was “rounding the corner” to the end of the crisis. He has scorned scientists, saying they were mistaken on the severity of the situation.
