George III

Today is of course American Independence Day. But who was the head of state the Thirteen Colonies rebelled against?

The almost photorealistic style of the above portrait of the last King of America brings to mind the rather vivid and rationalistic view of the Georgian and Regency eras of British history. Sarada has said that when you look at the trajectory of history, you seem to perceive increasing liberalisation and tolerance along with the gradual easing of oppression and increase in equality. Extending this backwards beyond the Victorian Era, the time of my grandparents, one is left with the impression that there was a time when things were absolutely appalling. There is an element of truth in this of course, but the idea that there is a straight line of progress leading towards the present is often referred to as “The Whig Conception of History”, which I’ve mentioned previously on here. In fact, the Georgian Era was quite like Victorian times with a couple of important exceptions: it was much less puritanical and the Bloody Code was still in place. On the other hand, we’d recently managed to divest ourselves of our Puritans, though that would come back to bite us later. But I’m not going to say it was paradise. It was in fact a bloody nightmare. On the other hand, it was before the Victorians had invented the past, so all the things we tend to assume go back since time immemorial, which incidentally is 5th July 1189, are in fact much newer, so in some ways it’d be hard to recognise the country as it was back then. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801-1922, and before that the Kingdom of Great Britain, 1707-1801. So that’s one thing which happened during his reign, or possibly rule depending on what else went on.

George III is the third-longest reigning monarch in English history, after the current Queen and Victoria. He was also the third longest-lived monarch of that ilk, dying only four days younger than she. I used to wonder whether this was because he “went mad” and this spared him the stress of running a country, or an empire, but in fact the treatment was probably at least equally stressful and I think it happened quite late in his life (as the Anglo-Saxon has it) anyway. Regarding America, although he did want to hang onto them, the policies which pushed them away were passed by Parliament and weren’t his idea. When I look at English history, I’m left with the rather surprising impression that a lot of it seemed to involve splurging money on wars and then having a problem with lack of money, and the situation with America seems to be fairly typical of this because it apparently cost a lot of money to keep troops over there, we’d had to fight wars with France and Spain there too, plus we were funding the East India Company, so it’s like the British Empire overreached itself and it was costing us a lot of money. This was at a time before income tax too, so the British government ended up introducing extra taxes such as the tea one and the Stamp Act. I always feel like I’m missing something here, because I don’t understand how a government can run out of money. I understand the Gold Standard existed back then, but surely it’s up to the government to invent money rather than just buy and sell stuff? Or they could have slavery, which they had, or whatever, so what’s the issue? Anyway, obviously this was an issue because of the Boston Tea Party and stuff, so I dunno, there you go.

The usual explanation for the madness of King George is porphyria caused by interbreeding. This is where the ring-shaped molecules, porphyrins, destined to become hæm in the hæmoglobin of red blood corpuscles, fail to be completely converted some of the time and build up somewhere, such as in the liver or the skin according to which enzymes aren’t working properly. The skin version has been used as an explanation for lycanthropy and vampirism and the liver version for the madness of George III and also some other historical figures such as Nebuchadnezzar, hence the other pic. In George’s case, it was hepatic porphyria, if that’s what happened. However, it could also have been arsenic poisoning.

His opinion as to why America was lost is worth hearing because by that time he’d been King for sixteen years. His view was that the factors I’ve already mentioned were significant, and also that since the colonies consisted substantially of people who were already discontented with the UK, they had a tradition of dissent going back several generations and were becoming rich themselves. This is all, of course, talked about in terms of people who “matter” as opposed to poor people, slaves and native Americans. He also notes the difference between what would become the US and what would become Canada. It’s been argued that the possibility of the abolition of slavery in the colonies was also on people’s minds in North America, because the abolition of villeinry in England several centuries previously had led to a situation where nobody could be considered a slave in this country, and the general feeling was moving against slavery, which was seen as vital to much of the American economy since it relied on cash crops.

He was the first Hanoverian King to speak English as his first language. Prior to him, the Kingdom had been held at arm’s length and his predecessors had not been that interested in local affairs, but because he was able to engage directly with the people of this country, he was keener on trying to regain some of his power from Parliament. He therefore appointed a Tory government to end the Seven Years War and worked with it to break the Whig hold on power. The Earl of Bute, his appointee and the last favourite in British politics, was the first Scottish Prime Minister and also the first Tory PM. However, both he and the King considered it important to charge the American colonies for their military defence, which was the start of what provoked the Revolution. George then turned to George Grenville for help, and it was he who introduced the Stamp Act in 1765. At this point I’m almost certainly teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, but this was a law requiring all printed matter to be issued on paper stamped to prove it had been produced in London, including of course legal documents as might be involved in internal trade within the colonies. This amounted to taxation without consent and was so unpopular that it was repealed the next year by the King and William Pitt. Pitt then became ill and Lord North was appointed in 1770. His term was dominated by conflict over British attempts to tax America, culminating in the War of Independence from 1775. Looking at this, it doesn’t seem like he could be entirely absolved of responsibility for losing the North American colonies. It was of course difficult with an eighteenth century level of technology to govern colonies on the other side of the Atlantic, and I’m wondering right now whether that difficulty was a factor in the creation of the Electoral College. Maybe if Britain had proposed that, whatever became the US would now be in the Commonwealth.

All of this was quite a strain on the King, and I’m aware that due to his predecessors not being bothered about governing the country, doing so was hardly the family business any longer and it makes me think he may have been doing so without enough experience early on in his reign. In any case, the result was that it affected his health until in 1810 he completely lost it mentally, leading to the Regency, where the Prince of Wales ruled in his place. George IV didn’t become King until 1820, by which time he was forty-eight.

Contemporary with George III was Horatio Nelson, one of whose descendants became a close friend of mine while I was at secondary school, and had quite an influence on my life. It’s quite odd looking at pictures of Nelson, although they tend to be idealised, because they look like my friend. You get something similar more globally with George IV’s successor William IV because he looks like his relatives Adam Hart-Davis and Boris Johnson, and this fact of significant familiarity shows that history is beginning to feel contemporary from about this point. On another personal note, the earliest ancestor of mine I’ve seen a photo of was an old man at the time that photo was taken and was born in the reign of William IV, so in a way it really wasn’t that long ago. Moreover, the earliest books in my family’s possession were bought by my ancestors in the late eighteenth century.

That, then, is a vague sketch of George III written in aid of the fact that today is 4th July.

Let The Bodies Pile Up In Their Billions

It’s been mentioned that They might just be planning our extinction. That is, it may be that the ruling class, having realised that the planet is in trouble and that automation makes most workers unnecessary, might just have quietly decided that if the majority of the human race gets wiped out by various disasters it might be no bad thing for them. I’m going to call this Their Extinction. Although they might have miscalculated and believe themselves to be invulnerable when they aren’t, in which case it will literally be their extinction, I don’t actually mean that they will themselves die out but that the scenario they have in mind is their solution to their problems, which are not our problems. But there’s also Our Extinction: the extinction that we can own. This is what’s been referred to as voluntary human extinction, or anti-natalism. It’s been summed up, perhaps inaccurately, as “Live Long And Die Out”, and is also called anti-natalism because it’s against the idea of having any more babies.

On the one hand, then, there’s the STARK Conspiracy, a fictionalised version of the first plan written up by Ben Elton in his I assume well-known novel and later TV series ‘STARK’. On the other is VHEMT, pronounced ‘Vehement’ – the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. It must be borne in mind that the former is fictional, and therefore probably doesn’t reflect reality. We have to be very cautious at this point about conspiracy theories, and in fact that should probably be addressed first.

Conspiracy theories give the illusion of explanation when in reality they only serve a psychological purpose of giving people a sense of certainty and a superficial hypothesis to account for perceived situations. Most of the time they have no basis in reality, although occasionally they have. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, for example, did turn out to be real. In the unlikely event that you don’t know what this was, the CDC deliberatedly infected Black men with syphilis spirochaetes and refrained from treating them to study the progress of the disease without treatment. Not only were they infected, but of course they passed it on to their sexual partners and children. There was no informed consent. This took place between 1932 and 1972. That, then, is a real conspiracy. They do happen. They may not be the point though. The point is really that we live in a situation where large-scale conspiracies are possible and can be influential. In other words, this world with this system, antisocial people controlling society, the ability to wield large scale power, corruption and so forth. Conspiracies, which are in any case probably not as widespread as they seem to be, are a symptom, not the disease. Whether the disease is endemic to the population or not amounts to a political stance. But exposing conspiracies may be pointless because clearing one up leaves space for another. That’s all assuming that major conspiracies exist of course.

There’s also the question of how much a conspiracy “theory” is even a theory. It’s usually more a hypothesis with strong confirmation bias. We think there’s a conspiracy and go on to perceive positive signs of one everywhere. They don’t seem to be testable or falsifiable propositions so much as belief systems which cause one to seek confirmatory evidence. Hence it might be better to call them “conspiracy hypotheses” just to encourage one to bear in mind that they are not rigorously arrived at on the whole.

The next step is to bear in mind the superficiality of their explanatory power. There are ideologies and social and political theories about economics, politics and the social realm which one may agree or disagree with but have sophisticated approaches to society. For instance, there’s the trickle-down theory, which I’ve chosen because I disagree with it but it’s considered respectable. This is the idea that the rich should be taxed less because their wealth will enable them to provide greater employment opportunities for the poor, whose income will therefore increase. And it is true that money doesn’t generally just sit in banks doing nothing, but is often invested and used elsewhere. My point being that I appreciate the reasoning behind this and have a limited amount of respect for it, but I do have some. It makes more sense than the idea that the Illuminati are running the world right now. Incidentally, even if they were it wouldn’t make it any worse than it already is, and might even make it better (but read the blog post if you like).

One conspiracy which did turn out to be true, and was on a larger scale than some, was the one involving Cambridge Analytica. It’s tough to make a case for that being irrelevant although it remains so that a different form of democracy and media and social media ownership and influence would have made it harder for it to succeed, so it is still symptomatic.

We’re left, then, with cock-ups. That’s rather flippant, but to be more serious about it, there are concerted attempts to do things surreptitiously, and there’s the general inability and incompetence of muddling through and hoping things will be okay. It isn’t at all clear what’s happening with Their human extinction. Science strongly supports the existence of various issues whose confluence could be expected to wipe out the species, such as anthropogenic climate change, plastic pollution, oceanic acidification and the appearance of new pandemics among humans. There’s a remarkable response to this among governments which either involves complete silence and failure to address the problems or denial, and it isn’t clear if this is disingenuous or not. It’s possible that they are psychologically speaking in denial about it, and of course that’s an early stage of grieving. Alternatively, it might just be propaganda and they know the score, and given the fossil fuel lobby’s successful decades-long obfuscation, that seems more likely.

The question then arises, if they know, what does it mean that the general public is unable to perceive a response to the crisis? Does it mean they’re doing nothing, or are they doing something so unpopular that the public would find it unacceptable? The problem is that silence is hard to interpret. We do know that the majority of the human race is in mortal danger. That much is undeniable. A clue as to what might be happening could be found in the current mass murder of the poor which is taking place in the UK.

In the past, undesirables have of course been rounded up and put in concentration camps, which are a British invention. This is a fairly expensive solution, although it does allow for the spread of lethal infections fairly easily, for which treatment would be counterproductive. In a move reminiscent of care in the community, it’s now possible for people to be killed in their own homes or on the streets through benefit sanctions or by encouraging assault against them, and this resembles the idea of privatisation – “individuals and their families” – quite closely. Therefore I imagine the plan is to encourage the degradation and habitability of the planet until it becomes impossible for poor people to survive. Perhaps “encourage” is the wrong word, as it suggests agency. It’s more a question of the problem of potentially uncoöperative poor people whose services are no longer required due to automation by allowing them to die. This is a fairly straightforward, not really conspiratorial scenario which resembles other policies in its laissez faire quality. In fact it isn’t so much a policy as the absence of one.

Ben Elton had a somewhat different idea of what was planned, and although his novel had a humorous purpose he’s known for his axe-grinding. ‘Stark’ has been described as “their solution”, and it’s only a very limited one although it kind of is. Elton envisaged the rich engineering an economic crash which rendered the resources more affordable, followed by the construction of a self-sustaining orbital habitat to which the super-rich would escape, but also envisaged them killing themselves after a few years due to something like boredom and disillusionment. I can’t remember the plot that well, but if it did involve going into orbit, the question is, what happens next? How should we feel about their descendants, assuming there are any? Is there another social struggle after most of us have died? Would their children be responsible for the ecocide committed on this planet and the extinction of the vast majority of the human race?

Something I keep meaning to get round to talking about here is the concept of “Up Wing”. The concept has changed over the past few decades, but there are suggestions that Left and Right be replaced by Down and Up. Brian Stableford calls these “Green” and “Grey”, but that isn’t quite what I mean. Up wing politics supports the idea of technological progress and Down wing believes that technological innovation has become detrimental to the human race. In the context of human extinction, the idea that technological innovation is harmful to us is not simple because in a way, some people would prefer us to die out as that could promote the recovery of the biosphere. This is still not the place, unfortunately, to go into too much depth on this issue, but I often feel it’s a major thing I’m not mentioning with big flappy ears, wrinkles and a proboscis. I’ll get round to it someday. But I will say, in spite of my endless invective against capitalism, this is not the whole story.

Moving on, there’s “our extinction”. The meaning of “our” here is quite limited because I’m not personally convinced by this position, although it might be better to orchestrate it rather than having it thrust upon us. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, also known as VHEMT, espouses what’s known as “anti-natalism”, in this case with a Green tendency. I first came across VHEMT in the early 1990s in connection with Earth First!, a group with which I have major issues, but I can see the point of VHEMT itself. The movement takes a humorous approach to the issue of environmental devastation, although the underlying message is serious. The thesis is basically that the existence of human beings on this planet, in their current state at least, is harmful to all life on Earth and therefore that we should stop having children and deliberately die out, as peacefully as possible. In fact I get the impression that they believe that no manifestation of human life and culture on this planet or off it is positive for the biosphere. Right now, it does appear that if we were all to disappear tomorrow, the planet would quickly bounce back from the damage we’ve done, and this chimes with James Lovelock’s earlier opinion on the Gaia Hypothesis that human arrogance alone makes us believe that we can have a long-term impact on the survival of life on this planet, and that we metaphorically amount to a case of the common cold, which Gaia could easily shake off. Rather disturbingly, Lovelock has now changed his mind and now believes that the Singularity will save the planet but that if we continue in the same vein life will indeed become impossible here. In any event, VHEMT are not misanthropic, but actually want to spare us all from the disasters which will ensue if we continue as we have been. They also acknowledge that the chances of everyone deciding to stop breeding are effectively zero, but that it’s still worth trying, presumably because good will is the only moral impulse (this is Kant’s idea incidentally – I didn’t get this from them). This is reminiscent of my attitude towards veganism, or rather a plant-based diet, in that although I believe it’s essential for human survival given current conditions, that doesn’t mean I think most of the human race will ever adopt such a diet. Nonetheless it isn’t about that for me. It’s just about not being part of the problem in that respect. In other ways I am part of the problem. Likewise with VHEMT. Interestingly, they also have a concept of THEM – Terrorist Human Extinction Movement – which is the military-industrial complex and amounts to the tendency I described in the first part of this post.

They also want to clear up some misconceptions. They are pro-parent, pro-child, voluntary and life-affirming. They believe that children who already exist deserve a good life, which is in fact one motivation for them advocating this view – the starving children cliché. Given that children exist, they also need good parenting. They are not imposing the idea on anyone, i.e. they don’t believe in enforcing anything like abortions, sterilisations or contraception. Finally, they are life-affirming: they don’t want more people to die than are dying already or for people to kill themselves.

I hope I’ve given them a fair press there. It’s also quite persuasive to argue that if a person in a rich country, particularly a middle-class person, has children, those children will then probably go on to consume and cause more damage to the planet over their many decades of life, as would further descendants and so forth up until the point where human life on this planet becomes unsustainable. I do not, however, agree with them.

VHEMT abuts onto several other issues in an interesting way. One of these is the GSM community. If the idea of sex for physical reproduction is abandoned, it makes it harder to argue for heterosexuality being better than homosexuality, and of course if the infliction of existence is seen as a negative, it could even make sex for the purposes of procreation morally inferior to sex where procreation is impossible. However, I wouldn’t entirely agree with that portrayal of queerness as many lesbians, gay men and trans people do in fact want children, and gender dysphoria can even include the negative perception of one’s own barrenness or sterility, because one may be technically fertile but is unable to procreate in the manner which is congruent with one’s gender identity. There’s also the concept of freedom from children. Patriarchy often means that initially similar circumstances gradually drift towards more rigidly circumscribed gender rôles because of such factors as potential employers’ expectation of the nature of one’s parental responsibilities and the biological clock.

Antinatalism generally is often motivated by other reasons than simply hastening the demise of the species. Although I personally consider the coming into existence of a sentient being as morally neutral, it’s undeniable that into every life a little rain must fall. There are claims that our memory is selective and that we rationalise our suffering to minimalise it, partly because we are instinctively driven to stay alive, reproduce and raise children.

There is a sense in which I am myself antinatalist, though not usually about humans. I would far rather not be infested with parasites than have to debate myself over the moral quandary of killing them, and I would definitely prefer houseflies not to breed in my home. I’m also pro-choice, so to that extent it does apply to my own species. In a sense, anti-natalism could be seen as assessing the quality of human life sufficiently negatively that it means that it is usually or always better not to be born. That said, we do have children, although we limited it to two because that amounts to zero population growth if universalised. I should point out that I only really believe in zero population growth for the developed world because of our greater potential for environmental damage, the lower need for support from one’s children and the easy availability of contraception. I wouldn’t impose that on others in the majority of the world, and I wouldn’t even impose it on anyone else. It probably goes without saying that most vegans are probably antinatalist with regard to farm animals, and I’m no exception. I don’t believe that farm animals should continue to be bred and a lot of the time the breeds themselves have been modified with purely human benefit in mind. I do, however, believe in animal sanctuaries if livestock (horrible word) farming has ended.

There are a few issues with human extinction being a positive thing. We don’t appear to be moving towards a managed or planned extinction for a start, and this is problematic because if we leave our machines running, as it were, the risks to various localities become considerable. We have stored toxic chemicals, biological weapons and nuclear facilities, and if any of these fail without human supervision, the environment in the vicinity at least will be severely damaged and at best take a long time to recover. On the other hand, mass extinctions can be increase biodiversity. The problem with this view, though, is that it focusses on proliferation of variety rather than the suffering and death of the creatures going extinct or otherwise being harmed.

There’s a long history of communities which decide not to have children and die out. Entire religious sects have done so. The Shakers, for example, founded in the eighteenth century, were celibate after admission, although they allowed people to join when they were pregnant and they adopted children. The sect found it difficult to support itself economically because mass production was bringing the price of the kind of goods they made by hand and sold down, and there was a constant decline in membership, which peaked at six thousand in the early nineteenth century. There appear to be only two left although they hope others will join them. This is the reason I don’t think movements like VHEMT will succeed: they won’t pass their ideas on to new generations of their own and belief systems acquired during childhood are the most durable for adults. Therefore they would have to rely on converting people, and I just don’t think this is going to happen, so for me it isn’t a question of whether it’s desirable but how likely a planned extinction is by this method.

One of the arguments the founder of the movement, Les Knight, made for human extinction was that even if we were able to achieve harmony with the planet in the short term, this could later change. This seems erroneous to me because the forces of oppression need to win every battle but the forces of liberation only need to be victorious once, provided they’ve truly won, and a sustainable society is only possible if society is liberated.

There’s also the Medea Hypothesis, the “evil twin” of the Gaia Hypothesis. This is the claim that life tends towards self-destruction of its environment. For instance, a few æons ago microörganisms began to produce oxygen via photosynthesis, which poisoned most of the other organisms alive at that point and it took the planet many millions of years to adjust. In general, microbes are seen as responsible for the catastrophes associated with this, and therefore the idea of stewardship by humans could make sense. Maybe we could monitor the biosphere for threats and prevent them. Believers in this hypothesis would attribute the current crisis to it, although this time it isn’t instigated by microörganisms. However, we technically have a choice. Given that some time in the next æon there will be another Medean event, when the Sun wipes out all complex life on this planet leaving only microbes, the presence of intelligent tool users at that point, even if not human, or in fact any successful establishment of biodiverse settlements elsewhere in the Cosmos could have led to the survival of the kind of complex life which originated here. So maybe we owe it to the Universe to continue to survive.

Boris Johnson has recently been criticised for his alleged statement, “let the bodies pile up in their thousands” in response to lockdown measures. He may well not have said this. However, it is the case that the policies his and other governments pursue guarantee that the bodies will in fact pile up in their billions unless something is done. It seems there are three options: their extinction, in the sense that we all drift into a situation where almost everyone dies; our extinction, where VHEMT’s idea catches on universally, and the scenario where we survive. That last scenario is incompatible with capitalism of course, which makes it improbable, but if we did, stewardship to prevent future non-human caused disasters would seem to be morally incumbent upon us.