Starting with a brief review of some of the pseudo-scientific authoritarian proclamations committed over the COVID pandemic, and connecting that to exacerbated public scientific illiteracy and mistrust of science, Big Biology interviews Alina Chan, Broad Institute researcher and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. Dr. Chan reviews the evidence for natural origin v. lab origin of SARS-COV-2. She has been researching the evidence for these origins since 2021.
With the book’s research, we can draw out two key features distinguishing imperial (military)-driven positivist-mechanism as a reduction of fully-specified organicist science: 1) centering imperial military and commercial interests as the social good (justice telos) instead of widespread human development and Terrestrian life; 2) secrecy and disinformation in lieu of scientific communication.
First, gain-of-function virus engineering is an example of military-driven positivist-mechanist research at odds with public welfare. SARS-CoV-2 was so virulent because it has furin-cleavage capacity, spike, which allows the virus to enter almost any cell of almost any animal. SARS viruses had never had this capacity up to 2018. As was publicized in The Intercept from 2021-2023, after suppression, a document was leaked showing that because SARS did not have spike, WIV’s (Wuhan Institute of Virology) New York City partner Eco Health Alliance, led by Peter Daszak, had therefore applied in 2018 for military research (DARPA) funding to add the MERS spike–furin cleavage capacity–to the SARS virus at the WIV lab.
Gain-of-function research is niche engineering to make pathogens more pathogenic. The altruism claim is that engineering extremely-virulent pathogens will allow pharmaceutical companies to outcompete both the empire’s enemies and nature, by designing the ultimate vaccine that will protect people against everything imaginable. However, this claim is unscientific and spurious, since both viruses and life are agents that evolve–and many pathogens can evolve rapidly. It is not possible to “solve” an “ultimate” pathogen. That’s not a real scientific project. “Gain-of-function” doesn’t just sound Orwellian. The altruistic claim should be read as military funding proposal speak gone wild, and dissimulating public comms.
It is far more reasonable to suppose that, however they may be deluding themselves, gain-of-function researchers are clients of militaries propelling a bioweapons arms race. Nearly a century later, imperial Postwar military elite-driven positivist-mechanism appears to continue to be wedded to business elite interests, as gain-of-function research is supposed to be complemented with a publicly-funded, for-profit pharmaceutical “solution,” a vaccine market.
The leaked funding proposal to develop SARS-CoV-2 at WIV in 2018 was denied on safety grounds. As Chan and Big Biology’s Marty Martin and Art Woods clarified, these virology labs have many sources of funding, and one rejected funding proposal is not evidence that the research was not conducted at WIV in 2018-2019. The document is evidence that prior to the pandemic outbreak, plans were underway to engineer SARS-CoV-2 at WIV.
Chan identifies three interested collectives within a coalition that has insisted, since the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, that the virus’ origins are natural and not connected to gain-of-function research: 1) virologists working with WIV, focused on their reputations; 2) gain-of-function virus engineers, focused on protecting military gain-of-function virus engineering and bioweapons from public regulation, oversight, and enforcement; 3) liberal political parties focused on managing an electoral population in opposition to conservative parties, where both liberal and conservative parties serve military and commercial elites.
[Add: Bourdieusian field graphic.]
Second, we can distinguish the positivist-mechanist reduction of science in its replacement of the community of scientists, and the centrality of communication within that community, with imperial-capitalist secrecy. While WIV had publicized its pathogen data up to the end of 2019, that data has been hidden ever since. Its experimental findings were however subject to delay release. And the communication between the New York virology lab partner and WIV have been hidden. That’s not science. That’s not even Mexico.
Liberal party adherents have embraced their political branding as dutiful and cooperative communitarians; they have argued that they are meritorious and aligned with science, where medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies stand in for science. Yet such dutiful cooperation with this positivist-mechanist reduction of science corrodes rather than contributes to science and the universal, democratic social good.
The Counterenlightenment justice telos served by imperial postivist-mechanist knowledge is a utopia in which scientific communication is suppressed; scientific communication with the public is mediated by political party comms strategy and public scientific literacy is suppressed in favor of political party messaging around collective duty and the “universal social good” of pharmaceutical industry growth; and patriarchal, military surveillance, carceralism (isolation and immobilization), and guarding substitute for public scientific communication and literacy. The population is managed by political parties (and their comms/media outlets) to support sustained, engorged, and normalized patriarchal military and carceral capacity as social problem solving, as well as pharmaceutical industry growth. To this imperial end, the pandemic was successfully managed.
However, as scientists Chan, Martin & Woods observe, the imperial Counterenlightenment utopia involves costs:
- Suppression of scientific communication, proliferation of secrecy and lying, scientism to disguise dangerous, inhumane, dehumanizing, and toxifying ideology, interests, and activity as though they were dedicated to the universal public welfare.
- The antagonistic bifurcation of the politically-managed population into, on one hand, a scientifically-illiterate liberal constituency governed by the idealistic communitarianism of sacrificial duty to patriarchal policing and carceralism, and vaccines as a new-materialist technology of communitarian universalism, and on the other hand, a scientifically-illiterate conservative (libertarian/feudal) constituency determined to be the system’s police rather than its prisoners. Dismantling democratic organizing capacity, this politically-engineered population bifurcation governance strategy also has spillover consequences that exacerbate costly social problems and crises.
- Public distrust of science, and scientific illiteracy.
- The COVID pandemic demonstrated that pharmaceutical companies’ vaccines are not an optimal, universal solution to bioweapons, epidemics, and pandemics. a) The distribution of vaccines is constrained by effective demand, contributing to high morbidity and mortality world wide, particularly across class and populations harmed epigenetically by the wear and tear of subordinate class and imperial position. b) Vaccines as the solution accompanying bioweapons, epidemics, and pandemics require not only scientistic manipulation of human populations, but also pathological and pathogenic carceral isolation and immobilization population management excessively targeting womenandchildren.
- The insufficiency of unregulated, military gain-of-function engineering and pharmaceutical development in solving the problem of epidemics and pandemics, particularly as militarized engineering, militarized and politicized population isolation and immobilization, and pharmaceutical growth replace and proscribe scientific communication (including within the scientific community, as well as with the public) and scientific literacy.
The Swedish Health Minister Nils Anders Tegnell understood this problem and strove to center scientific literacy in Sweden. Tegnell recognized problems as problems, and did not participate in population Toxification politics (such as are deployed to prepare genocides). He was therefore subsequently viciously blacklisted by US-dependent global health organizations and sidelined by Sweden’s neoliberal SAP party. He should be celebrated as a hero of Enlightenment science.
Tegnell’s heroic leadership suggests democratic socialist ways in which we can organize to expand democratic capacities, including fully-specified, communicative science (rather than positivist-mechanist reduction and scientism), and put boundaries on the tendency in inegalitarian societies for leaders, officials, and even scientists to lie in order to protect inhumane interests.
Antienlightenment lies on the rise
- Eschewing the sociological Enlightenment understanding of institutionalized racial discrimination, EDI is an Antienlightenment Human Resources patronage reduction of antiracism that seeks to stigmatize, isolate, punish, and exclude majority-population nonelites, typically workers, as the cause of racism. EDI boss Claudine Gay went to the EDI well, and deploying EDI discursive strategy in response to authoritarian, imperial-capitalist demands that she punish students supporting Palestinians’ rights to life, Gay perpetuated the lies that Harvard is antisemitic and that objecting to the genocide of Palestinians is genocide against Jews. As designed, this Antienlightenment EDI discursive strategy was not compatible with and could not reinforce the university’s commitment to science and academic freedom. EDI discursive strategy did produce a perverse outcome, convening three enemies to subject Gay to Congressional interrogation and remove Gay from the Harvard presidency: Antienlightenment Republicans; Antienlightenment Zionists; and EDI victims working within the university. More crises of Antienlightenment communitarianism: Are we experiencing the return of the Red Hunt, but a more desultory Scare at this stage?
- Also in LRB 46(2), Conor Gearty analyzes the function of the stream of hasbara lies Israel issues as it destroys the Palestinian people: “Describing the Palestinians as vermin to be removed or killed (Toxification for genocide) is hardly the language of denial, but many Israelis combine celebration with a denial that what’s happening is their fault. Denial in Israel is a means of keeping supporters abroad on message. We in the Global North need lies so that we can continue to see our support for Israeli action as morally possible.”
- Canada’s private telecomms system is one of the most expensive and poorly-functioning systems in the world. The CBC interviewed a Globe and Mail reporter who had analyzed it, and asked her what could be done to improve Canadian telecomms. The Globe and Mail reporter answered that she believes the government should stop regulating and taxing the monopolistic telecomms companies, as the companies simply pass this tax on to consumers, nevermind the fact that when governments do not tax the result is that the goods/service is not provided to the working class or the corporation increases its profit rate–a private tax on the consumer. The CBC reporter pressed her colleague: But it is also the case that Canadian telecomms companies have some of the highest profit rates in the world. Oh, yeah, that, replied the Globe and Mail reporter. Well that’s because they promised their stockholders giant dividends.
Here we see that an investigative reporter goes to lengths to cover up the source of high telecomms costs and low performance: Corporations are serving as siphons of private wealth, redistributing it to their upper management and owners, as well as Boomer pension funds. The truth is that we are living in a long era of decline, in which the class compromise is determined by Boom-generation clientelism, leaving the technologies and infrastructure as well as subsequent generations neglected and depleted, to the immediate benefit of Boomers, but ultimately, to the exclusive benefit of the multi-millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires’ families. - The two horrors of our time are a) second-stage feudalism, or as it’s more commonly called, capitalism does not allow for democratic decision making capacity, so we cannot plan for the quickly descending climate crises; while b) capitalism incentivizes a high birth rate, leaving the Earth with 8 billion humans and growing. So we’re just facing down tragedies and horrors which we are not permitted to avert or manage. This is enabled by the master Antienlightenment lie that inequality is the social good and that simply by cooperating dutifully, or policing and incarcerating people, we contribute to that social good, rather than devastation.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 