Apocalypse Now?

The mysterious case of hydroxychloroquine seems to illustrate a grave problem in our current world. It may or may not work to cure COVID-19. But how is it that we still do not know? First reports of it being effective are almost as old as first reports of the virus. How is it that, six months in, nobody has conducted a proper trial? While prominent authorities, without good evidence, keep declaring that it does not work, or is dangerous.

And there have been no proper trials despite the outlay of huge amounts of public funds to try all possibilities.

There seem to be two problems here: first, that Trump was an early advocate, so that if it works, it makes him look good. That is intolerable to the professional class in general. Second, that the drugs used for the hydroxychloroquine treatment are out of patent and readily available, so that nobody can make much profit if they work. Moreover, if they work, they remove the opportunity of making large profits on some other drug.

Why would this affect even public funding? Milton Friedman long ago explained. Governments must rely on those with expertise to regulate professions and industries. That means industries regulate industries, and professions regulate professions. Public money gets allocated as advised by the big drug companies.

We evidently cannot rely on either public-spiritedness or morality. Those in charge are letting vast numbers of people die rather than prejudice their own interests. Power may or may not corrupt; but the people in power now are corrupt.

Just as something has to be going on with hydroxychloroquine, something has to be going on with Jeffrey Epstein, his island empire and his death; and with the fact that we have heard so little since about it. Something has to be going on with the Durham probe, the apparent attempt to subvert the government through false claims of Russian collusion; and the fact that we have heard so little since about it. Something was going on with Cardinal Archbishop McCarrick, and the resistance in the Vatican to looking any further into it. These are not conspiracy theories; these are proven conspiracies. Nor is this just a problem with the US civil service, the “Deep State.” The Vatican is not part of that. Nor is this a problem with “capitalism.” Professions and unions are at least as corrupt as businesses, it seems, and government as corrupt as private funding. Nor is this corruption just at the top; the same rot is seen as mobs burning and looting in America’s streets. There is the same lack of any sense of responsibility to one’s neighbours or one’s polis. Everyone grabs what they can get.

Probably all of us have seen, too, in our own jobs and our professions, how pervasive corruption has become. Journalism is perhaps the most visible example, operating as it does in the public eye. Nowadays the news itself is grossly biased, often fake, little more than clickbait, published in utter disregard of stated journalistic ethics. TV anchors say things on air they must know are untrue.

Was the world ever thus? Is it just that, with better communication, it is more visible?

Perhaps in part. But major outlets like the Economist, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, really did hold themselves to real standards even a few years ago. There was a distinction between news and editorial pieces. Facts were checked, and both sides quoted. Headlines resembled what was in the story. I am not imagining this; I have done such fact-checking professionally myself. You can go back and read past issues in various places online.

Comparable decay seems evident everywhere. It is as apparent in the arts. The high-tech sector used to be a moral place, leaving aside Microsoft, and Google used to use the motto “do no evil.” Now all the tech giants are deeply political, and seem to be alarmingly interested in power. I am equally aware of the rapid decay in academics, another long-term home. Marks are no longer awarded for merit; academic subjects are often content-free, or the content is completely different from what the fields advertise it to be. Nobody seems to be in it for the sake of human knowledge or pursuit of truth. Only out of self-interest and class interest.

And it is not at all hard to understand why. Postmodernism; it began in the academies. Unfortunately, all other fields have, over time, channeled their initiates through the academies. It was a perfect environment for the virus to spread. It all began 140 years ago, with Nietzsche declaring God was dead. This was picked up quickly enough by intellectuals, and his influence has only grown since.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed. 

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his stare. "Where is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. … Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. 

... 

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. …. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

Nietszche advises,

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.

The intellectuals, the scribes and Pharisees, pulled the plug seven generations ago. Seven generations to move through the grad schools, then the colleges, then the public schools. All else follows. Beginning with Fascism, a kind of vanguard movement.

Yeats saw it in 1937:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Our civilization is in moral decline. This is how cultures and civilizations end. Ibn Khaldun mapped it all 600 years ago. Lack of morality is like rust in the gears of everything, that will sooner or later bring it all to a crashing halt. Perhaps we are finally seeing it happen now.

And now the wheels of heaven stop
You feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future: It is murder.

With no God, at least no God we took seriously, we stopped teaching morality to the young. We stopped caring about the young. We started killing the young. We progressed, a progressive lot, to declaring that morality did not exist, it was only something we agreed upon among ourselves in small groups. Love became to us only sexual gratification. Then we moved to declaring all morality oppressive, and grew hostile to any hint of right or wrong. Things were simply “appropriate.”

Next, we rape and eat one another.

Is it over? I hold some hope for salvation from the East: Christianity, and so Judeo-Christian ethics, is actually growing worldwide, especially in East Asia and in Africa. This could include China, the moment its present government fell and the floodgates were opened. Here there is vitality and optimism, and perhaps social cohesion. Christianity has also been reviving in Eastern Europe.

And there is another possibility.

Apparently, forty years ago, an odd American, deeply devout, living near Rome, had a mad vision, a vision at least as mad as that of Nietzsche’s madman. I take no responsibility for it; I merely report. He believed that a man had already been born who had been chosen by Providence to lead his homeland, the United States, back to God. It was an improbable choice; but then, God’s choices are always improbable. Moses was a stuttering murderer, David was a mere shepherd, a murderer and adulterer. Jesus was an ordinary carpenter, and Peter an uneducated fisherman. Augustine was a narcissist and, he says, a sex addict. Saul aggressively persecuted Christians.

The man he thought he had been told of? A celebrity playboy. A man named Donald Trump.