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The actor on his life philosophies, securing roles, and his new memoir Greenlights

Would it surprise you to learn that more than 30 years ago, before hed even sauntered across the screen in Dazed and Confused, Matthew McConaughey wrote a poem in which he vowed hed someday become an author?As one of its lopsided verses declared:

I think Ill write a book.A word about my life.I wonder who would give a damnAbout the pleasures and the strife?

This was in 1989, when he didnt know all the twists and turns that awaited him the acting awards hed win, the wife and children hed have, the bracing dramas and banal rom-coms hed make. But he was certain he would live a life worth chronicling.

Now that poem, rendered in its creators arcane handwriting, appears at the start of his autobiography, Greenlights, which Crown published on Tuesday. The book offers a shotgun seat to all the l-i-v-i-n that McConaughey has accumulated, from his upbringing in a tumultuous Texas family to his ascent as the ruggedly serene star of Magic Mike, True Detective and Dallas Buyers Club. McConaughey, who turns 51 on November 4th, enjoys spinning some of these personal yarns, not necessarily because they sound cool but because he believes they reveal certain universal and teachable truths.

To that end, Greenlights is filled with homespun wisdom that McConaughey has wrung from his toils, travels and that time he got arrested while playing bongos in the nude. He has fortified his remembrances with the coinages and maxims he dutifully recorded in decades worth of personal journals and which continue to spill naturally from his mouth.

It is a book that is constantly evaluating itself and its reasons for being, much like its author. He acknowledges that he entered into the project both eagerly and warily, looking to use his celebrity for the opportunity to tell his story in his own idiosyncratic way.

I get what equity I bring as Matthew McConaughey, however you see me, he said in a Zoom conversation last month. He spoke from a den in his home in Austin, Texas, wearing his hair swept back and a flannel shirt that was only partly buttoned up as he peered into his webcam through a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

If its a straight memoir he stressed the second syllable with an unexpected French flair as a publisher you could sell some books. What he hoped to produce, he said, was one where the words on the page are still worthy to share if they were signed by anonymous but at the same time be a book that only McConaughey couldve wrote.

Like the bestubbled dude you have seen whooping it up at WWE matches and sermonizing in luxury car commercials, McConaughey is alternately uninhibited and self-serious. He is comfortable referring to himself in the third person and dismisses any suggestion that he has stumbled backward into his professional success.

As he told me, he knows there are people who think, Gosh dang, McConaughey just eases right into everything the guy doesnt seem to have any bumps, doesnt get hit crossing the road. He said he wrote Greenlights partly as a corrective to this perception, to show how much effort it has taken to get where he is.

But McConaughey wants readers to look beyond the boldface name on its cover and focus on its fundamental message. No one can escape hardship, he said, but he can share the lessons that helped me navigate the hard stuff like I say, get relative with the inevitable sooner and in the best way possible for myself.

Codifying his beliefs and putting them down on paper was one test. The next challenge comes as McConaughey releases Greenlights into a world that feels increasingly unsettled and dismissive of values systems one where, like millions of Americans, he and his family have spent the past several months trying to outrun the ol Covid, as he put it.

Im still continuously testing and updating my philosophies, practically daily, he said. And I can do better at a lot of them. As McConaughey tells the story, his youth was dominated by his father, Jim, a former college and professional football player turned pipe salesman who was married three times to and twice divorced from the actors mother, Kay. The books first chapter dramatises a scene from 1974 where McConaughey watched the couple fight ferociously his mother having broken his fathers nose with a telephone while he brandished a ketchup bottle before his parents had sex on the kitchen floor.

It sounds brutal and, as McConaughey told me, This is the reality, but theres humanity in that reality. Jim was tough on his sons, too, but, McConaughey, who is the youngest of three brothers, said, I wouldnt give back one ass-whupping I got for the values that are ingrained in me. When he reflects on his parents, McConaughey said, The love was real. The passion was real. (A few days after McConaughey started filming Dazed and Confused, Jim died of a heart attack while making love to Kay.)

Kay McConaughey, now 88, said in an email that as she raised Matthew, she did not necessarily expect him to become an artist. In fact, that subject was never brought up, she said. I thought he was going to be a lawyer. Even so, she said that she often observed Matthew jotting things down on small pieces of paper about what someone had said or what he thought about what was being said or a way he saw life. Having read Greenlights and seen how Matthew depicted her relationship with Jim, Kay McConaughey said, It was a rocky and passionate love affair we had, but I do wish Matthew would have told more of the stories about me and his dads love, affection and commitment to each other.

Still, she said, she regarded her youngest son as a fundamentally forthright person. What has remained consistent in Matthews life is his honesty and being true to himself, knowing who he was and owning it.

Matthew McConaughey recounts how he landed his breakthrough role as the likable sleaze Wooderson in Dazed and Confused by tracking down the films casting director, Don Phillips, in an Austin bar and charming his way into an audition. A few years later, the not-yet-bankable actor mounted a successful campaign to persuade director Joel Schumacher to cast him in a leading role in his adaptation of A Time to Kill.

To McConaughey, stories like these illustrate how he is not content to merely let life happen to him. Its always been obvious to me that I do not have a laissez-faire attitude, he said. Its a state of being that I work at, continuously, daily, and I break a sweat to get it.

Longtime colleagues say its even more than that: Despite the agreeably dishevelled image that McConaughey projects, they see him as someone who is perpetually preparing himself for opportunities and actively steering himself toward them. As his friend Richard Linklater, who directed him in several films including Dazed and Confused, explained to me, People underestimate the utter intentionality of what Matthews done. Hes really good at going from A to B to C. Hes got a plan, and hes just brave enough and brazen enough to execute it.

The point of the Dazed and Confused audition story isnt that McConaughey simply happened to be in the right place at the right time, Linklater said: He wasnt discovered in a bar he went over to the guy who he heard was casting it. Matthews always playing the long game.

In Greenlights, McConaughey tells the back stories of some of his best-known roles, but he does not take a film-by-film inventory of his entire career. Nor does he share any particularly salacious details from his personal life when he was still a single man, beyond a paragraph in which he writes: I wore the leathers. I rode the Thunderbird. I took a lot of showers in the daylight hours, rarely alone. I partook.

McConaughey told me that while such scenes are generally staples of celebrity tell-alls, he felt that to include them would be in bad taste and bad manners thats why bedrooms have doors on em. However, he does unhesitatingly share two different stories in which he awakens from wet dreams you read that right where he saw himself floating downstream on my back in the Amazon River while surrounded by jungle life and African tribesmen lined up shoulder to shoulder on the ridge to the left of me. He interpreted these visions as subconscious exhortations to travel to Peru, where he immersed himself in the Amazon, and to Mali, where he sparred with a local wrestling champion.

Sections like these shed light on the transcendental side of the author, who is a practising Methodist but also describes himself as an optimistic mystic, forever fine-tuning his personal dials in search of further broadcasts from the universe.

That approach to existence has sent McConaughey hunting for what he calls greenlights the traffic signals that mean go, which he prefers to spell as a single word and which he believes take skill and acumen to identify. To conclude that life is all about luck, he said, is to surrender to fatalism: Quit letting yourself off the hook, McConaughey. If thats true, then run every red light. Youve got your hands on the wheel. Youre making choices. They matter.

McConaughey said he has no interest in being anyones spiritual guru and did not approach Greenlights as a work of self-help. Friends say that yes, this is really how he talks and that his book is one more way that he is trying to express himself.

Its his way of wanting to be heard on another level, Linklater said. Its another level of communication that you cant get in a role. Linklater explained that actors like McConaughey are vulnerable in their work: They dont have total control, he said. Even the most powerful actors Denzel Washington, Daniel Day-Lewis are still at the mercy of the parts theyre being offered. Actors need these other outlets.

Sometimes McConaughey dispenses wisdom in miniature pearls, like the beloved bumper stickers he has reproduced throughout the book that sport pithy phrases such as Educate before you indict, I am good at what I love, I dont love all that Im good at and If youre high enough, the suns always shining.

And sometimes he expounds at greater length, like when I asked him how he appears to stay out of Americas toxic culture wars and cultivates liberal and conservative fans alike. Im trying to keep in with it and not out of it, McConaughey replied. For those people who say theres nothing but yellow lines and dead armadillos in the middle of the highway, I say to you this: The armadillos are just fine. Because the right and the left are so far out, theyre not even on the asphalt anymore. Theyre in the frickin desert.

He gave a raspy laugh and added, Man, Ill meet you in the middle.

Getting Greenlights on to the page did not happen swiftly. Crown had its eye on McConaughey as far back as 2015, when the actor went viral with a commencement speech he gave at the University of Houston, structured around his aphorisms (Dont leave crumbs; Dissect your successes; A roof is a man-made thing).

A proposal that McConaughey later circulated to several publishing houses had less story and more of the lessons and philosophy in it, said Gillian Blake, senior vice-president and editor-in-chief of Crown. But in further conversations with him, Blake said, McConaughey did not need much encouragement to turn a retrospective lens on himself.

We had a few long in-person meetings where youd ask him a question and hed say, Oh, yeah, I got a story about that, she said. And then he went back home and wrote it all down. McConaughey said that he had already prepared for the writing process by reviewing the diaries and journals he had kept since he was a teenager. He said he did not work with a co-author on Greenlights but got some needed motivation from his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey.

All of a sudden, my wife was like, Get in the truck, load up your food, water and tequila, and dont come back until youve got something, he recalled. So, bam, I called a friend with a cabin and hit the desert.

Since then, though, McConaughey, his wife and their three children have been living a sequestered life during what the actor calls Covid times. McConaughey said he is a co-operative mask-wearer and social-distancer, but he could not help worrying about reopened schools and sports events leading to a rise of infections. We may see this completely backfire, he said.

It is both a propitious and a terrible time to be plugging a book about how the experiences of a Hollywood movie star can improve your life. And while McConaughey has reorganised himself for several weeks worth of virtual promotion, his greater concerns are maintaining his familys welfare and keeping his own head on straight.

In some moments he tried to alleviate his existential dread with humour. Everyones in a bit of a pickle, and its not a little gherkin, he said. Its one of those big two-pounders you get at a roadside truck stop. Then he would abruptly describe the situation in starker terms: Were going back to our most barbaric selves, he said. But to use an adage that McConaughey might endorse he tried to light a candle in the darkness and find some optimism at an otherwise dire time. Could this actually be a banner year, where things got started? he asked. Where we got cleansed? A little evolution would be nice. New York Times

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Matthew McConaughey: I wouldnt give back one ass-whupping for the values that are ingrained in me - The Irish Times

AT THE recent virtual Tory Party conference Boris Johnson demonstrated that his government is ratcheting up its attacks on the role of the state and using Brexit to divide working people by using nationalist and jingoist rhetoric.

We are proud of this countrys culture and history and traditions; they literally want to pull statues down, to rewrite the history of our country, to edit our national CV to make it look more politically correct, he said.

We arent embarrassed to sing old songs about how Britannia rules the waves while the Labour opposition continue to flirt with those who would tear our country apart.

I remember how some people used to sneer at wind power, 20years ago and say that it wouldnt pull the skin off a rice pudding.

They forgot the history of this country. It was offshore wind that puffed the sails of Drake and Raleigh and Nelson, and propelled this country to commercial greatness.

You can almost hear the drum rolls and see the Union Jacks waving above the marching storm troopers.

He went on to reiterate the mantra of dismantling the state:We must be clear that there comes a moment when the state must stand back and let the private sector get on with it.

I have a simple message for those on the leftwho think everything can be funded by Uncle Sugar the taxpayer.

It isnt the state that produces the new drugs and therapies we are using. It isnt the state that will hold the intellectual property of the vaccine, if and when we get one. It wasnt the state that made the gloves and masks and ventilators that we needed at such speed.

It was the private sector, with its rational interest in innovation and competition and market share and, yes, sales.

He totally ignored theshambolic mess that has been created by incompetent private companies many owned by cronies of the government which has resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands and made the Covid-19 pandemic much worse than it should have been.

The thinking behind the calls for dismantling the state has a long tradition and its more insidious aim is hidden behind a smokescreen.

It is one of the most blatant examples of double-think. Both Thatchers and succeeding Tory governments have undertaken massive state intervention and an increased consolidation of state power but on a class basis, while describing it as giving back control to the people.

Regulation of business and the economy has been pared back under the guise of tackling red tape granting monopoly capital almost total freedom to operate as it sees fit, polluting the environment without repercussions and paying minimal taxes.

Trade unions, though, have found themselves shackled by draconian legislation: no solidarity action or secondary picketing allowed, strike ballots and internal elections have to be held under voting rules that are extremely restrictive.

Workers rights have been eroded. Local government has been so hollowed out and underfunded that it has become barely functional and is now largely a tool for implementing central government policy at local level.

The Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit have given the Tories the unique opportunity of rolling back the state even faster than they could have hoped.

There has been a concerted privatisation of many areas of the NHS without parliamentary debate or scrutiny.

The drive to complete Brexit is allowing them to ride roughshod over workers rights, food standards and environmental protections.

Many more people today are realising that we are living in a dysfunctional capitalist system subject to continued crises.

There has been a renewed interest in socialism, not only here but in the US too.

With the increasing militancy and success of a number of new, basicallyanti-capitalist organisations, from environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion, the international Occupy movement, to Black Lives Matter and numerous smaller ones, the ruling class is seriously worried about the stability and resilience of the prevailing system.

This why it is no longer satisfied with defining the shape of the economy, it wants to take full control of British culture as well.

As Andy Beckett in the Guardian (October 10 2020) writes:Starting with the Brexit campaign, the right has launched a series of culture wars: against Remainers, the BBC, the universities, the legal system, the big cities and seemingly anywhere that liberal or left-wing thinking still lingers.

This culture war has appealed to conservative Britons, ensured that debates about patriotism and social cohesion are conducted on right-wing terms and helped the Tories win its recent parliamentary majority.

The latest culture war is the war on woke (woke: being alert to injustice in society, especially racism)being waged by the Tory press.

Right-wing commentators describe wokeness as a cult, an epidemic, anti-Western, totalitarian, and even as cultural Marxism a favourite far-right conspiracy theory.

Last month, the Department for Education instructed schools not to teach pupils about extreme political stances such as the desire to overthrow capitalism,or to teach victim narratives that are harmful to British society.

Such policies reveal the underlying fears of the ruling class and of a government that sees culture wars as a way of gaining electoral advantage.

Only last month, Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley made it clear what is involved: Boris and Cummings understand that you cant change Britain unless you march through the [cultural] institutions that you cant simply cede culture to the left.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made it clear to them that they can control culture because they hold the purse strings.

As Stanley put it: When youre in power and you control the purse strings of many cultural institutions, you do have a say to change their political balance.

The idea that dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries like Charles Moore and Paul Dacre could be proposed respectively as chair of the BBC and head of Ofcom, both supposed to be politically neutral roles, can be seen in this context.

Similarto today, the early 1980s saw an upsurge of British activism for racial, sexual and gender equality.

Parts of the left became involved, in particular with the support of the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone.

The right-wing press and the Thatcher government were appalled and saw it correctly as a major threat to the status quo.

But they also saw a political opportunity. Aided and abetted by the right-wing press, branding all practitioners of the new identity politics the loony left, they created a bogeyman that helped the Tories win a series of elections.

Today, political stances which would have been considered loony in the 1980s, such as celebrating multiculturalism, are widely accepted.

Johnson has devoted his political career simultaneously spouting both liberal and reactionary views, sometimes in the same sentence and generally getting away with it. Populists and the people who vote for them are rarely bothered about ideological consistency.

Since the Thatcher era the idea of a benevolent state has been vilified as anathema by Tories and right-wing pundits.

The nanny state became a cliche term of abuse and a put-down for all those calling for state regulation of any sort.

It was argued that state intervention damages the economy and society and that it is authoritarian and undemocratic.

Just leave the market to regulate itself and social harmony and stability will prevail went the mantra. Johnsons government has adopted this policy with a new vehemence.

Thatcher used it as a battering ram to destroy any remaining belief in the effectiveness and need for socialist ideas. She talked of rolling back the frontiers of the state and used it to justify her objectives.

In a 1987 interview with Womans Own magazine, she said that people had become too reliant on the state: They are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing!

She saw state regulation as the slippery slope towards socialism which she hated.

Thatcherism represented a systematic, decisive rejection and reversal of the post-war consensus, whereby the major political parties had largely agreed on the central themes of Keynesianism, the welfare state, nationalised industry and close regulation of the British economy.

Since Thatcher the programmes of successive Tory governments and of Blairs New Labour basically accepted the central interventionist measures of Thatcherism such as deregulation and the privatisation of key nationallyowned industries, maintaining a flexible labour market and marginalising trade unions, while centralising power.

Governments could get away with such policies in times of relative material affluence, entrepreneurial opportunity and full employment.

If democracy is to mean anything, decision-making at local level has to be a vital part of it, as is meaningful and functioning local government.

By increasingly concentrating power at national level and starving local government of proper funding, we have seen an unprecedented concentration of that centralised power the complete opposite of what right-wing pundits have been telling us is happening.

Johnsons government is pushing for a complete elimination of the state as a means of regulating the economy and bringing about even a modicum of social justice.

We shouldnt forget, though, that the right isnt always as confident and all-conquering as it sometimes seems. The measures being forced through by this government demonstrate a fear as well as power.

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The culture wars and rolling back the state - Morning Star Online

Sunetra Gupta doesnt think in straight lines. She is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, but shes also an acclaimed novelist and translator of the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. When she does Zoom interviews, a zany assemblage perches atop a bookshelf behind her: a shop mannequin sporting a Clockwork Orange-style bowler hat.

Her scientific life and her literary life are both propelled by her curiosity about the behaviour of complicated systems, namely disease epidemics and human beings. She argues that Covid-19 policymakers should follow the art more.

I think our societys approach to Covid has been singularly unpoetic, Gupta told me in a recent interview. She is not related to the Guptas of South African state capture infamy.

Gupta is known for speaking out against a return to lockdowns in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, arguing that immunity to SARS-Cov-2 is much more widespread and heterogenous than policymakers believe, and that only the vulnerable should stay at home.

Policymakers have approached Covid along a single axis the science or public health, says Gupta. But even within that axis, things get ignored such as other diseases, be they infectious [or] non-infectious. And whats been completely ignored for a very long time is the socio-economic axis. To fail to triangulate those two axes seems to me a complete violation of a fundamental social contract.

But theres also the aesthetic axis: how you want to live your life. There is a richness in human contact that needs to be respected. Life is not just about survival in the face of a pandemic. Several people I know who are my age have said this to me. This idea that you have to minimise your chances of death; theres a sort of hubris there, a tunnel vision.

Of course, people dont and shouldnt take unnecessary risks. But one of the pleasures of getting older is reaching a kind of accommodation with death, and also knowing how to value other lives. And that seems to be largely absent in the discussions that are taking place both within and outside academia.

Gupta recently resigned from her Oxford academic staff union due to its insistence on exclusively online teaching. To me thats just a dereliction of duty, says Gupta. I dont mind taking the very small risk that I would be taking to sit with three undergraduates and tutor them. Thats what I signed up for, she says, with a bewildered laugh.

The notion that lockdowns might have caused more harm to societies than they have prevented is something of a taboo among Left-leaning intellectuals, scientists and journalists. There is a tacit consensus that to challenge policies such as school closures is irresponsibly anti-scientific and that it chimes uncomfortably with the rantings of rabid libertarians and lunatic conspiracy theorists. If lockdowns are attacked by politicians you abhor, such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, it can feel wrong to do the same, even if you do so from an entirely different position.

Some heterodox economists, notably Duma Gqubule writing for New Frame, have fiercely condemned the economic destruction of harsh lockdowns but with the caveat that the better course of action would have been a systematic campaign of mass-scale testing and contact tracing to control and even suppress the virus, following the South Korean and other Asian precedents.

There is no doubt that would have been a wiser policy if it were practically achievable. The argument for mass testing to suppress Covid-19 (especially after the early stage of an epidemic has passed) cannot be squared with the objective realities of state capacity in South Africa, where vastly simpler health projects such as school sanitation have failed due to corruption and bureaucratic weakness. A suppression policy is also dependent on the imminent rollout of an effective vaccine to relieve a national fortress of closed borders or enforced quarantines for visitors. Only small, wealthy island states like New Zealand and Iceland can keep themselves pure indefinitely. And such a brand of physically isolationist Covid-19 nationalism should surely be suspicious to the Left as a matter of principle.

The ideological policing of the Covid-19 policy debate depresses Gupta, and many other scientists who are unsettled by the authoritarian and destructive dimensions of the global response. She has been heavily criticised by scientists and public officials who are in favour of the suppression of Covid, a goal she considers both impossible and misguided. Her opponents argue that the imminence of herd immunity is not clear enough to inform policy, and that her proposals to shield only the vulnerable are reckless.

Her view is that recurring restrictions are more reckless, that they will worsen already catastrophic levels of hunger, joblessness and mental illness, and cause a further wave of deaths due to the neglect of other disease programmes. In short, she argues, they will hurt everyone except the minority who enjoy lockdown-proof incomes, comfortable homes and supportive families or partners.

Weve had to continuously stress that our position is almost diametrically opposed to that of these far-right, libertarian harangues that have accompanied the imposition of the rules to try and contain the virus, she says. That has been a real problem. Ive received several messages from scientists saying that they agree with me, but find it difficult that the position is being seen as right wing and heartless. When in fact its the other way round. I feel that hard lockdowns and closed borders and the extreme nationalism that accompanies those policies, and the intolerance of any other position, is really quite reactionary. It is anything but left wing. Its not communitarian at all.

But since I interviewed her for this profile, Gupta seems to have happily partnered with a network of libertarian lobbyists. Together with Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, and Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine and economics at Stanford University, she has authored a strident public challenge to lockdown policies.

Their document calls for the focused protection of vulnerable people, allowing the young and healthy to return to normal life, thus steadily acquiring the levels of immunity through natural infection that would mean the highest possible degree of protection for the vulnerable once their period of protection was over.

The Great Barrington Declaration named after the Massachusetts town it was signed in, has been co-signed by over 10000 medical and public health scientists, and by another 28000 medical professionals. Though it is convincing, if in places a little glib, its proposals on the practical mechanisms of focused protection are sketchy.

The troubling part is, however, more the context than the content: the declaration was sponsored and hosted by a libertarian think tank based in Great Barrington. The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) has previously received $68100 in funding from the Charles Koch Foundation and by extension from the environmentally toxic billionaire himself. AIER has previously published research that questions whether humans are causing climate change.

To make matters worse, Donald Trumps White House has endorsed the declaration thus infecting its image with the profoundly antiscientific worldview of that president and his ideological co-travellers. A handful of spoof names among the 28000 doctor signatories such as Dr Johnny Bananas and Dr IP Freely were mischievously added by opponents of the declaration. This was quickly seized on by sceptical news reports as evidence of the dodginess of the declaration itself.

A counter petition attacking the Great Barrington Declaration, the John Snow Memorandum, has been published by The Lancet, attracting the signatures of 3000 scientists. It makes a similarly compelling argument, illustrating the sheer complexity of the crisis. But it has rhetorical blindspots of its own: it skirts the massively smaller mortality risks to young people and the gathering evidence that Covid-19s average infection fatality rate is well below 0.5% dramatically lower than previously feared in March and April.

And just as the Great Barrington Declaration is thin on details about focused protection, so the John Snow Memorandum makes an exquisitely vague attempt to address the social cost of restrictions, calling for financial and social programmes that encourage community responses and address the inequities that have been amplified by the pandemic.

Even so, the optics of AIERs involvement are damaging. Gupta, Kulldorff and Bhattacharya are first-rate scientists and their views are not for sale. But in the context of an increasingly toxic Covid-19 debate populated by zealots, hysterics and reductionists on both sides, you have to pick your allies carefully. The declaration begins with the statement that its signatories come from the Left and the Right. But by working directly with ideological libertarians, the trio have effectively aligned themselves with the Right.

One of the most nuanced (and exasperated) commentators on the Covid-19 policy wars is the Swiss scientist Francois Balloux, who is professor of computational systems biology at University College London and a tireless Twitter campaigner for the cause of reason and respectful dialogue.

Balloux is a longtime admirer of Guptas work, but he chose not to sign the Great Barrington Declaration, despite being unaware that AIER were backers.

I think Sunetra is a wonderful scientist, and definitely not a conspiracy theorist or a libertarian, Balloux told me. I cosigned a letter with her to the British government that was much more carefully worded. But I didnt sign the declaration for a number of reasons: I thought it was rushed, and I didnt like some of the wording. The timing was terrible: Trump was in hospital, and there was a spike in cases in the UK. I think they could have done something more empathetic, and with a less aggressive tone.

But in terms of public health, I think they are making a good case badly. They should have talked to more people, and tried to reach a wider consensus. If you want to convince someone, you have to give a little bit, he says.

Even belief in the reality of herd immunity thresholds a ubiquitous biological mechanism is now read by many as a libertarian political position and as a heartless public health strategy or approach. But every pandemic recedes through herd immunity, which is acquired through natural infection and, where possible, also through vaccination.

We cannot know yet what the threshold for Covid-19 will be in any given community, says Gupta, but her research suggests many places will reach it sooner than antibody surveys might suggest. It may have already been breached in places like Sweden, London, New York and Manaus.

Antibody survey tests are imperfect, she says. They dont pick up all the antibodies gained from direct exposure to Covid-19, nor do they detect cross-immunities from exposure to other coronaviruses, nor possible innate immunity mechanisms. If you factor those in, she says, the threshold of herd immunity comes plummeting down.

It is the point at which enough people are immune to a pathogen that the rate of growth will start to decline, but there will still be more cases. Typically in an epidemic, we overshoot that threshold. So if you see an area with a seroprevalence [the level of pathogen in a population] of 60%, that doesnt mean that herd immunity cant be much lower than that. What that threshold does define for us is how many people in the community you need to be immune for the virus not to take off.

The second wave of Covid-19 infection currently peaking in Europe, she says, is both much smaller than the first wave (when testing rates were far lower, leaving the vast majority of infections undetected) and confined largely to younger people, hence the much lower death rate than in March. It is a necessary stage in the course of a pandemic, not a return to catastrophe, says Gupta.

The natural course is that a new disease has subsequently smaller and smaller waves, and then it settles into an endemic equilibrium. And at that point, the vulnerable are as protected as they can possibly be. You have the lowest possible risk, in a natural state, at endemic equilibrium. So it would make sense to try and head towards that state, and one way to do that is by allowing those who are not at risk of death to go out and get immunity.

The simple tough-mindedness of that call its acceptance of the inevitability and necessity of spikes in infections among the young and healthy, even if that spread results in some deaths seems utterly indefensible to an increasingly anxious and empathetic Left worldview. What bothers Gupta, on the other hand, is the cognitive dissonance that allows so many Left and centrist commentators to suspend this empathetic impulse when considering the suffering caused by lockdowns and economic collapse. There seems to be a reluctance, particularly among many academics who are fundamentally on the side of the impoverished, to accept the fact that during the extraordinary carnage of this crisis, the interests of most businesses and their workers coincide, and that the welfare net (where it exists at all) is not an adequate substitute for lost jobs.

The result is a weirdly counterintuitive political battlefield, in which a large segment of the Left is calling for authoritarian measures that will further impoverish the already destitute, while a large segment of the Right is calling for anti-authoritarian measures that will help the impoverished. Its the ideological equivalent of one of Maurits Cornelis Eschers illogical waterfalls: up is down, and down is up. But despite the wild allegations of malevolent conspiracies on both sides, it is clear that the serious researchers are thinking and acting in good faith. Both sides are simply prioritising one dimension of the unfolding tragedy.

For Balloux, the very phrase herd immunity, with its bovine and ovine connotations, has done thewhole debate no favours. Its a bit unlucky. If it had been called something else, like community immunity, or shield immunity, maybe we wouldnt be where we are. But now the phrase has taken on a life of its own, and become a shorthand for a kind of fascist, libertarian culling of the weak.

The issue, he says, is the extent to which we can shield vulnerable people humanely and effectively until the vaccines and/or herd immunity arrive. We are doing that already in fairly [inhumane] ways, he says. There are many people in care homes who havent seen a single person in seven months. Theyve been locked up in their rooms with the windows closed. And then those arguing against focused protection say no, we couldnt possibly isolate vulnerable people that would be inhumane. Which is a bit hypocritical.

Like almost all epidemiologists, Gupta supported the initial lockdowns, given how little was then known about the virus. But as soon as the age risk profile became clear, she says, the focused protection of the elderly and otherwise vulnerable was the only rational and humane strategy.

As the disease rises towards its peak, the risks to vulnerable people are higher than they would be under normal endemic situations. So a lot of effort must be put into protecting them, and many countries didnt do that well enough. Even in Sweden, [public health chief] Anders Tegnell has said they could have done a better job of protecting care homes.

As soon as lockdowns started to become the norm rather than the exception, I really started to fear for what this would do at a local and international scale. Its difficult to ask someone to lock down in a country like India, where I come from. We heard reports of migrant workers walking back or being stuffed into trains and dying on their journeys back to their villages. You hear of a 90-year-old walking back to her village because she cant sell toys on the pavements of Delhi anymore. Thats pretty scary. I was in South Africa earlier this year, and its obvious that in many parts it was inconceivable to lock down. Several healthcare programmes have been compromised. It has led to hunger and death.

Covid-19 is scary for good reasons: because it is new, because it is significantly deadlier than flu, and because it can make you sick for months on end. But this rational fear has also exacerbated an obsession with risk in rich countries, particularly in the Anglophone world. In many of those countries, citizens now live safer, longer and healthier lives than ever before. Often, the first real bereavement that a middle-class Briton or Australian might experience comes in late middle age, with the death of an elderly parent. By contrast, for the impoverished in India or South Africa, bereavement can be an annual event.

But the relative remoteness of death in atomised, healthy and wealthy societies seems only to heighten collective anxiety about it. This effect has been amplified by the mediated drama of the pandemic, with the daily Covid-19 death figures almost never contextualised against the all-cause death data. Positive developments (such as when all-cause death rates fall below the expected curves) often go unreported. Mix in the hyperbole of the culture wars, and the plague of conspiratorial fake news, and you end up with two huge, cacophonous echo chambers instead of a progressive debate.

Says Balloux: Many peoples reaction in a situation of fear and anger is to become more inward looking. There is a very strong tribal dimension, which goes beyond the narrowly political. In times of crisis, many people tend to believe they are part of some kind of clear consensus.

Lockdowns, says Balloux, were initially prompted by public opinion, not by governments themselves. And a big chunk of public opinion in wealthy societies remains in favour of lockdowns, particularly among workers in those sectors such as the financial and public sectors which are relatively protected from job losses. In Europe, its mostly the public asking for more extreme mitigation measures, and politicians have followed suit more than imposing them. In the UK, some surveys show that close to 70% of people would stay locked up forever if they could choose to do so.

In response to this massive undertow of anxiety, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has promoted what Gupta sees as a delusional, zero-Covid goal of defeating the virus through a mix of localised lockdowns, mass testing and contact tracing.

But for Gupta, the dangers posed by the virus itself have not been ethically weighed against the dangers of recurring harsh restrictions in the rich world, which reverberate into the impoverished world through collapsing trade and tourism. Poverty, starvation, loneliness, mental illness, educational deprivation and medical neglect will only worsen in the absence of a global economic rebound.

Those of us who have lived in countries like South Africa and India have a better understanding of the fact that infectious diseases are a part of our lives, and we have to make some quite difficult and complex decisions about what level of disease we have to tolerate in order to achieve the best outcome for everyone in the community. Its an optimisation problem, involving an entire landscape of other diseases and other risks attendant on the measures that one takes to control a disease. Its a fundamental state a condition of living in society that we make these quite complicated decisions.

Were doing it all the time, she says. It is part of the social contract. Every time we make a car journey or visit an elderly person, we dont make an assessment of whether we should because we follow a shared set of rules that create that optimum. When a new thing like Covid comes along, we dont simply accommodate it within that landscape of risk. Its as if weve forgotten how we normally go about our lives. And that rather suggests people dont realise those everyday risks exist. Which is fair enough who wants to be constantly beleaguered by a sense of risk in every activity? But not having an appreciation of that underlying calculation leads to this dangerous situation, in which people have lost sight of the landscape of risk.

Gupta supports the use of surgical masks when in contact with vulnerable people, or in crowded or confined public spaces, but she believes that mandates to wear any kind of mask in all public spaces are excessive, given the lack of proven evidence of the efficacy of cloth masks when used on that scale. One always turns to Sweden, where they are not wearing masks, and it doesnt seem to be making a big difference there.

And the masking of children disturbs her. The imposition of masks on young people has a cost to their mental health. Young people need to be taught to be tolerant and kind, to be good members of society. I find making them wear masks in each others company very problematic, particularly because they are not at any risk of serious illness or death.

Even worse, she says, is the scapegoating of the youth as gran killers by Matt Hancock and other British politicians. What does that do to young people? Its a violation of the social contract. Because what we do when we decide to live with a disease like influenza is to say, okay, 650000 people are going to die every year from this. Somebody is going to give it to each of them. And that somebody may be you. But that responsibility is going to be absorbed by society, because there is a tacit understanding that we have to carry on as a society. We dont lock down every flu season, partially because we realise that would not be of any benefit to the elderly, who would rather take the risk of dying in order to see their children and grandchildren. So we disperse the blame and responsibility.

Being sanctimonious about social distancing, when your own circumstances allow you to practice it with practical and psychological ease, is above all an expression of privilege, she argues. Lockdown for me was fine it was obviously fraught because of what was going on, but my two daughters in their 20s came home and worked from home. And we have a garden. But what about the child for whom coming to school and interacting with people at school is their main route of emotional and social and intellectual development?

By disputing some official assumptions about Covid-19, Gupta has copped a fair amount of abuse from strangers. But shes far more incensed by elite condemnations of the non-compliant masses. I have found it difficult to deal with the level of smugness and self-congratulation thats been displayed, and the indignation about people not following the rules and toeing the line.

For Balloux, what is unfolding is a societal calamity in the wake of a public health calamity. What I really regret, deeply, is that in most places we have failed to have a real discussion, he says. In the early days, there wasnt much time to decide on the early mitigation measures. But then instead of moving toward a more helpful dialogue, we degenerated into slogans and into polarisation, which is extremely unhelpful.

Covid-19 will not just be remembered as a health crisis, but as a major moral, psychological and geopolitical crisis.

In other words, the world has serious co-morbidities.

Excerpt from:
Sunetra Gupta and the Covid-19 culture war - newframe.com

That Malta has a deeply-rooted nexus between organised crime, prominent politicians, police officers and big business has now been made amply clear by last Decembers horrific revelations, which led to the disgraceful exit of Joseph Muscat, who has now resigned from parliament without shedding any light on his relationship with his former chief of staff, Keith Schembri. Then COVID-19 came and the anti-corruption drive took a back seat as everyday insecurities and fears took centre-stage.

Change without revolution

Under Robert Abela the country has moved forward on a number of aspects, with all the protagonists of Panamagate and its aftermath having been removed or forced to resign. This includes former police commissioner Lawrence Cutajar, former Attorney General Peter Grech, deputy police commissioner Silvio Valletta, minister and former Labour deputy leader Chris Cardona, former minister Konrad Mizzi who was fired from his own parliamentary group and finally Muscat, who has now resigned from parliament.

Police also arrested Keith Schembri and Brian Tonna, and Nexia BTs audit licence has been suspended. Yet while this list of departures looks impressive, the absence of any political reckoning in Labour on what led Malta to an institutional fracas, which ultimately created the climate for the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, is all the more striking.

So while Abela seems to be delivering in terms of removing impunity, something which cannot be underestimated in the Maltese political context where resignations are rare, he evades the political reckoning which his party and country deserve. Abela has to be commended for instituting reforms on key appointments, but fails in delivering political closure in three important aspects: cutting the umbilical cord between big business and politics through radical transparency reforms and state financing for political parties; investigating the nefarious deals undertaken by Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri; and finally convening his party to reflect on what went wrong in the Muscat era.

Culture wars: hunting and migration

While Malta is gripped by COVID-19 insecurities and a daily roll-call of deaths of its elderly citizens, sacrificed on the altar of economic recovery, what we have witnessed so far has been culture wars unleashed from above.

Abela seems keen on appeasing the hunting lobby by literally turning poachers into gamekeepers at Miieb, in that way provoking a negative reaction from both environmentalists and a segment of PN voters appalled by their own partys silence on the issue. Pushing the hunting issue to the fore helps Labour not just to reinforce the countryside alliance it had craftily built during the Spring hunting referendum of 2015, but also to sow confusion inside the PN which suffered its worst decline in pro hunting localities like Zebbug, Siggiewi, Safi and Gozo.

The same strategy is also present in the perverse logic of Abelas inane challenge to Opposition leader Bernard Grech where he demanded he agree with him that Malta is full up with immigrants, in what amounts to agreement with a verbal commitment, and which can only be enforced through an abnegation of international law clearly, a statement that would only serve to fuel toxic, xenophobic sentiment in the country by emboldening bigots. It also offers a ridiculous choice between absolutist positions instead of focusing on everyday community policing, cultural mediation and integration, and investing in deprived communities.

In this context the government could well be manufacturing electoral consent by deploying popular, but misinformed common sense to silence and delegitimatise not just the parliamentary opposition, but also activists who are actually fighting popular and pro working-class struggles but are regularly demonised for advocating social justice for migrants.

The abortion bogeyman

To further murk the waters, Abelas disgraced predecessor Joseph Muscat came close to declare his rational and justified pro-choice stance in an interview on state television, a stance which puts him at odds with Abela and which can only have a polarising effect on civil society. In this context while Labour can afford to remain officially against abortion, it stands to gain from pushing the debate on this issue to the fore to keep liberals away from an opposition where ultra-conservatives are irked by the very idea of a debate on the topic.

In reality even if it remains against, Labour will always be perceived as more liberal than the PN on this particular issue. In this way Labour, which uses Trumpian nonsense on migration to hold on to its redneck vote, can still offer hope to liberals.

But while the country cannot be expected to stop discussing any issue, and abortion has indeed been left under the carpet for ages, Muscats intervention in the nascent debate risks contaminating it with a presence which also makes pro-choice liberals uncomfortable.

Naturally, Muscat provokes the more conservative elements to come out of the woodwork to vilify him, and here he can even find a way to reinvent his damaged political persona, just as Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando had done after the Mistra scandal. But is he throwing a grenade at his own party leader or handing him an effective weapon to disorient the opposition?

A battle-cry for the next election

Abela cant afford to fight an election where the main item on the agenda remains corruption and the scandals of the Muscat era. Neither can the opposition hope for a repeat of the 2017 election. Bernard Grech himself seems to have learnt the lesson by pouncing on the governments handling of elderly care during the pandemic.

Neither can anyone expect voters to dismiss bread and butter issues even if corruption and subservience to big business impinge on long-term sustainability, quality of life and competence in handling the pandemic.

But with COVID-19 crippling the economy and killing the elderly, Abela should not just fall back on Labours economic track record except in emphasising that the rich coffers gave the government breathing space to keep spending up during the pandemic.

When having to deal with this kind of headache, culture wars on migration and hunting have the advantage having no bearing on dominant business elites, unlike more radical demands for stricter planning rules, rent controls and the introduction of a living wage, which Labour seems less keen on pushing to the fore. Without a left-wing alternative and with the PN keen on reassuring business elites and potential donors, Labour can afford to pay homage to these issues without really addressing them.

A real socialist party would fight the next election on a radical platform of transparency, sustainability and social justice. But Abela would prefer presiding over a hotchpotch of issues which keeps unlikely bedfellows the xenophobes, groupies and turncoats, social liberals, partisans, developers and hunters united in an electoral bloc that holds the conservative Nationalists at bay, but riven with massive contradictions and possibly even more scandals for the future as the murky wine gets repackaged into new bottles.

See the original post:
Culture wars: How hunting, migration and abortion weigh on the next election - MaltaToday

Oct 24th 2020

Live Not By Lies. By Rod Dreher. Sentinel; 256 pages; $27.

WORLDLY SUCCESS has not made Rod Dreher fonder of the world as he finds it. In The Benedict Option, published three years ago, the veteran commentator on religious affairs lamented that conservatives like him had been utterly vanquished in Americas culture wars. The moral gap between liberals and traditionalists had become unbridgeable, he argued; the only hope for the godly lay in abandoning the fight for power and withdrawing from the social mainstream into self-contained families and communities.

The Benedict Option was a bestseller. So warm and widespread was the acclaim that its Manichean pessimism seemed to have been disproved. But Mr Dreher has not mellowed. In his new book he compares the situation of observant Christians in America to dissidents, especially religious ones, in the Soviet Union. The title, Live Not By Lies, invokes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who told his compatriots that even if they could not oppose Soviet rule, they should avoid colluding with it.

Plenty of believers, in America and elsewhere, share Mr Drehers sense of alienation. But his work resonates for another reason. Many others who disavow the rest of his worldview have confronted the basic choice that he lays out: participation or flight. That fraught dilemma seems especially acute in an age of sharply polarised politics, but it is ancient.

Visiting Russia, Mr Dreher learns how honest Soviet citizens tried to avoid having much to do with the system. Geology was a popular discipline among scientists, as it let researchers spend a good portion of their lives in far-flung and unsullied places. (Humbler jobs as furnace-stokers or nightwatchmen were another refuge for free spirits.) Mr Dreher also speaks to people who lived through communism and know modern America. These battle-hardened folk say they find something horribly familiar about the emergence of intolerant thought police who can ruin careers, in academia or the professions, as punishment for dissent from the new orthodoxies on gender, race or sexuality.

Whatever you make of that analogy, there are some fundamental parallels between the two places. Like Russia, America is vast, meaning retreat has always seemed physically possible, even enticing, whether in the mountains of Idaho or the Arizona desert. Motives for withdrawal have included ideological dissent, Utopian experiments, eschatological hopes, the avoidance of social or technological change or the acceleration of such change. America has its Amish communities; the taiga and steppe of tsarist Russia accommodated schismatic groups such as the Old Believers, who were theologically conservative but economically progressive.

Today the kind of flight proposed by Mr Dreher need not be physical. You can live on a remote island and engage furiously in political battles (Mr Dreher wages his own from Baton Rouge, Louisiana). Conversely, a city-centre flat can be a place of isolation, embraced for intellectual reasons as well as pandemic-related ones. And in many modern democracies lots of liberal-minded people, too, have been tempted to desert the political and social mainstream, with or without a change of place. That has been most starkly true in cantankerous America and Brexit-era Britain.

Anthony Barnett, an English writer on democracy, observes a mood of retreat among older, left-leaning people in England and America: some over 50 are, he says, withdrawing from active politics into un-ideological passions such as gardening. The impulse, he thinks, derives less from fatalism than from an awareness that the job of fixing a broken system properly belongs to a younger, untarnished generation. The older cohort know they were part of the problem.

Retreat and reflection are a healthy response for liberal-minded activists chastened by populism, reckons Hugo Dixon, a co-leader of the failed campaign for a second popular vote on Brexit. They must ponder why the old managerial style of politics was rejected in favour of abstract values like meaning and community. Nor are they the only ones to feel desolate or, for the time being, politically homeless. Linda Bilmes, a professor of public policy at Harvard who served in Bill Clintons administration, points to the cadre of moderate Republicans who have been driven to abandon the fray. Whatever its outcome, the impending presidential election may push some Americans into a sort of internal exile.

Conservatives longing for a safe space to marry and bring up children as they see fit; liberals in search of a quiet spot to lick their wounds: another category of people may harbour a different worryabout the impact on social cohesion when the disillusioned withdraw. One risk is that their flight from the arena will leave it free for opportunists and cynics, and that politics enters a degenerate spiral. Alongside that concern is a long-standing question of personal morality. If you are deeply convinced that the present order is wrong, do you have the right to opt out rather than remaining engaged and working for change?

Among the philosophical currents that shaped the West, a powerful one insists not merely on the right to engage in public debates, but on the duty. The great Anglo-Irish theorist Edmund Burke reputedly warned that evil would prevail if good people stood aside. You need not be a totalitarian to find merit in Karl Marxs adage that philosophers must change the world as well as understand it.

More recently some of the Frankfurt School of German thinkers, such as Theodor Adorno, took refuge from Nazism in the United States; but their critique of modern society and populist culture, for all its cerebral opacity, was meant for active use, not just idle observation. Their ideas probably helped shape post-war German culture and immunise it against fresh totalitarian temptation.

In some circumstances, the calculus changes. Former dissidents of the kind Mr Dreher meets might insist that the Soviet regime offered no leeway for improvement. Preserving their own integrity was as much as they could doand that in itself could amount to a profound moral statement, incurring harsh retribution. Rancorous as they can be, though, have America and other democracies really reached a similar point now? After all, for those who abhor national politics, there is a glorious array of alternative forms of engagementfrom voluntary groups and local civic initiatives to conservation movements, not to mention the free exercise of speech online and elsewhere.

As it happens, the worlds first democracy, in ancient Athens, also fretted over degrees of participation and the price of withdrawal. Many Athenians resented the apparent indifference to politics of the citys wisest person, Socrates; some alleged, not absurdly, that his seeming apathy had opened the way for vicious interludes of authoritarianism.

On trial for his life, Socrates insisted he was anything but indifferent to the citys welfare. He simply chose to stand a few paces back, challenging his fellow-citizens by asking basic, awkward questions and hence prodding them, like a gadfly, to act more wisely. Socrates was not a quietist, says Paul Cartledge, a British expert on ancient democracy. The trouble was that some of his compatriots saw politics, like religion, as something to be done in public if it was done at all.

Todays representative democracy finds it easier to accommodate a division of labour between thinkers and doers, actors and observers, participants and abstainers. Many citizens eschew even the minimal commitment of voting. But those who abstain will always face hard questions about whether leaving the stage was the only way to enact their principles.

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "Worlds of their own"

See the article here:
Giving up on politics is often tempting. It is also risky - The Economist