Only a Game

Termites vs Meerkats in the Knowledge Wars

12 minute read

Among the more surprising things I've been told by an intellectual acquaintance this year is that there was no point debating the evidence on a certain contentious issue because we could each cite our own supporting research. Yet this amounts to saying we've given up on empirical science - and honestly I rather fear this might be the case. But if this were so, how can it then be insisted by those who purport to possess authority that we must 'follow the science'...? There are questions here that matter and that can hardly be ignored without undermining any plausible concept of democracy.

When we encounter strangeness, the easiest psychological defences will always tend towards either denial or demonisation - hell, the whole of the political landscape in almost every democratic nation is almost entirely explicable through cognitive dissonance. The path less taken (especially by contemporary philosophers) is thinking. To borrow my mentor Mary Midgley's metaphor of philosophy as conceptual plumbing, this means tearing up the floorboards underneath our house of concepts in order to discover where the nasty smells are coming from.

In this instance, and indeed many like it, the problem originates in the loss of something we didn't even know we had: our shared framework of collective knowledge, that is, an epistemic commons. 'Epistemic' is the adjective for knowledge, and a 'commons' is something everyone makes free use of, while communally agreeing on the practices relating to it (for instance, a field that anyone can bring their sheep to for grazing, and the community itself decides how to organise this). A civic society requires an epistemic commons, not least of all to ensure we are talking about the same things. That major political arguments can now occur over such traditionally uncontroversial concepts as 'woman', 'man', 'climate' and 'weather' - not to mention 'safety' and 'efficacy' - are clear warning signs that something has gone horribly wrong with our epistemic commons.

This problem is rooted in radical and unprecedented changes to our academic circumstances. Up until the twentieth century, it could be claimed that the primary civic role of universities was to cultivate a community of virtuous scholarship that maintained the epistemic commons. Since then, alas, research investment has usurped and supplanted this purpose and arguably led to the end the university as such (see After Universities). The impression that this is 'how it is supposed to be' is merely back projection to justify the enslavement of scholarship to technology (that is, 'science plus money'). We have forgotten what a university was and now resolutely believe this to denote a research institution, a concept that arrives only after 90% of the history of universities to date has passed.

We cannot afford to leave this matter unattended, much less permit the cognitive dissonance it engenders to heighten our denial or our demonisation. Without either a newly negotiated epistemic commons (see No Reality without Representation) or an entirely unconceived alternative, we are slouching towards civil war on a global scale, the outcome of which could be far more catastrophic for human life than current anxieties about our every-growing environment impact. This question is thus a most urgent locus for thinking, perhaps the most urgent our species has yet faced, and it is no solution whatsoever to refuse to talk about it.

In order to trace possible solutions, I want to present two different metaphorical images for epistemic commons, one that I believe lies behind my academic acquaintance's ongoing allegiance to the ruling power structures, and another that I suspect underpins my own rejection of this new whirled order. Neither is 'right', both have strengths, weaknesses, and risks - both could be corrupted... indeed, my sense of the crisis we have sleepwalked into (see Awakening the Sleepwalkers) is precisely that both have been corrupted in radically different ways.

Termite Knowledge Networks

Of all the incredible aspects of the natural history of Africa I witnessed during my brief time in what is now Burkina Faso, little was more impressive than termite mounds. Towering above the ground - often at twice my height - these insect-built skyscrapers are constructed above underground nests that are home to thousands of termites, each specialised to different roles within the colony. Workers, soldiers, reproductives... specialisation is key to the extraordinary achievements of these relatives of the earliest winged insects, who in parts of Africa have transformed the entire local ecology in ways that have benefitted all the local wildlife.

The names of 'queen' and 'king' termites are misleading - they do not rule as such, but merely provide the eggs for the huge number of nymphs that then differentiate into specialist roles. Rather, each termite colony is a collective (a so-called 'superorganism'), where the contributions of each insect is vital to the prospering of all. This kind of eusocial arrangement has developed among many other largely unrelated insect species such as ants and bees, and the key in every case is specialisation and not - as the regal euphemisms imply - hierarchy. This is not hierarchical monarchic rule but a network of mutually defined purposes.

By analogy, then, we can speak of a termite knowledge network, where specialisation of roles is the underlying principle. Indeed, intuitively this what we imagine underpins our industrial knowledge economy. Specialist researchers and non-researcher experts (whom today we often forget exist) maintain knowledge in compartmentalised domains. Journalists with their own specialisations (sometimes asininely conceived, as with the absurdly broad term 'science reporter') then propagate changes with respect to this knowledge as 'news', while book publishers try to capture lightning in reference books.

I feel confident that faith in the efficacy and reliability of these networks are the reason so many, including my aforementioned academic acquaintance, place their trust in government and industry sponsored narratives, despite a lack of trust in both government officials and corporate CEOs. Indeed, this is the only way to explain the widespread acceptance of such diverse and otherwise arcane popular beliefs such as 'climate change is so vital we must not research it', 'vaccine candidates without pharmacovigilance are safer than with rigorous oversight', or 'pornography in school libraries saves lives'. Yet the strangeness of these claims is not prima facie evidence that our termite knowledge network has been corrupted. Remember the oddness uncovered in quantum mechanics, after all...

However, the termite knowledge network absolutely requires that those who have been specialised to a role are able to fulfil it. The sign of the corruption of our knowledge network - and the consequent collapse of the epistemic commons - is that those who are best positioned to advise are prevented from doing so if they do not align with pre-prescribed positions. The strongest evidence of this can be found in the lawsuit Missouri vs Biden administration (now, Murthy vs Missouri), legal discovery for which showed how epidemiologists and health economists were censored on social media at the command of the US government (shredding the First Amendment), solely because they brought attention to the lack of reliable knowledge behind what were very odd courses of action to undertake. Likewise, despite their evident qualification to speak on the topic, detransitioners are routinely excluded from the conversation about how to approach the fraught political quagmire that is gender metaphysics (see Were You Born This Way?).

As always, denial and demonisation remain the most common result of confronting any aspect of this corruption of our termite knowledge network. Ever wondered how a diverse range of people are suddenly 'far right' - even committed lefties like Russell Brand! - and thus necessarily deplorable...? The tremendous desire to believe that there's no reason to be concerned and that the problem is entirely up to those terrible Others is in itself a sign of the problem. But to truly get to grips with the situation requires us to wrestle with the other go-to cognitive dissonance avoidance phrase: conspiracy theory. And this brings us to the meerkats.

Meerkat Knowledge Communities

Unusually for social mammals, meerkats do not have a strict hierarchy. It is not that no meerkat is dominant - there is always a pair 'in charge' - but unlike wolves (or indeed chickens) there isn't a strict 'pecking order'. Up to thirty meerkat cooperate in each mob, pursuing a variety of communal activities including keeping watch for predators. There are even birds, drongo, that will stand guard in return for some of the food the meerkats gather - a situation that sometimes becomes a real life Prisoner's Dilemma when the bird proves less than trustworthy.

Again, by analogy we can speak of a meerkat knowledge community, where trust and cooperative practice underpins the activities, the groupings are smaller, and roles are mutable and overlapping. Historically speaking, many academic fields went through a stage like this: when Isaac Newton wrote about the mathematics of planetary motion, the number of 'natural philosophers' with skin in the game was few enough that everyone had read everyone else with anything to say on the matter. Anyone with an interest in Newton's physics simply read Newton's own book. (Of course, a printer also produced the book itself - but they changed nothing in what Newton wrote, which is never true of publishers today.)

The impression that this form of knowledge curation is no longer around is caused by our false association between knowledge and research. But maintaining knowledge is a much older and indeed far more crucial practice than research, which has only risen in importance owing to the commercialisation of the sciences through technology. We can find meerkat knowledge communities at every church, temple, mosque, and synagogue; in every scout and guide troop; at every gun range and bowling alley - even pubs and bars can be meerkat knowledge communities. Wherever knowledge is conserved and propagated, there will be a knowledge community... and the communities entailed are typically small and localised.

An authentic meerkat knowledge community maintains the practices of a form of knowledge, and these are legion. Such communities can also adapt to almost any change in the circumstances surrounding their practices - consider the enormous transformations entailed by raised row gardening as a brilliant example of how even successful knowledge practices can undergo radical and unexpected transformations, even within comparatively short intervals.

Furthermore, because such communities are usually comparatively small (many have no more than a hundred or so people) they can also maintain practices which may or may not constitute knowledge as such. Some may be metaphysical, such as theology or faith in the sciences; some may be speculative in other ways - and this is where we find conspiracy theories being shared. Despite the archetype of the lone kook, communities of one kind or another connect almost all conspiracy theorists (by which I mean people speculating about actual conspiracies, not people being censored for holding inconvenient views).

Now it is an interesting feature of our times that 'conspiracy theory' has been massaged into the implication of being false. Because this could only be a plausible assumption if nobody was ever involved in conspiring - which would be a ludicrous assumption. Indeed, the people who benefit from a blanket dismissal of conspiratorial thinking are precisely those most likely to conspire. Still, most conspiracy theories are not knowledge as such but rather speculative scenarios that seek to provide explanations of events in terms of the causal actions of people who would plausibly deny wrongdoing (i.e. everyone). Authentic conspiracy theories inevitable lack decisive evidence (although evidently some of the reports that are now dismissed under this term are well-evidenced e.g. that the Biden administration has censored inconvenient discourse, which disclosure in Missouri versus Biden confirmed as factual).

The meerkat knowledge communities of conspiracy theories are thus engaged in discussing speculative models of events that run ahead of the evidence to some degree. As such, they perhaps ought to be called speculative hypotheses, and we might therefore talk of meerkat speculation communities as a specialist kind of knowledge network. It is my conclusion after observing the discussions of this kind of community online that they occur in a pattern of layers, from the surface layer of a meerkat knowledge community that constrains its speculations to the available evidence, to the most fanciful deep layers that explain half a century or more of events as the result of interlocking conspiracies. I cannot prove these hypotheses false, and if they become extremely fanciful in the depths they are not more fanciful than the hypothesis that everything done by government politicians and corporate executives is strictly for the good of humanity.

Thus much as strange conclusions from our termite knowledge networks are not evidence of their corruption, neither are conspiracy theories evidence of the corruption of meerkat knowledge communities: nobody is in a position to discredit or debunk speculation that further evidence might yet reveal to be true, and by definition conspiracies are underdetermined until such time as substantial evidence is unearthed (especially but not exclusively through legal disclosure). It is worth remembering, after all, how preposterous heliocentric cosmology, continental drift, and even hand washing to prevent infection were in their times. It is certain that some subset of conspiracy theories will be validated - and nobody can reliably predict which will come to be accepted. (Look at the utter reversal of beliefs about Emily Dickenson, for instance).

Rather, the corruption of meerkat knowledge communities is evidenced by the collapse of the community itself. The minimum knowledge any community possesses is an understanding of how to remain a community - a far more significant achievement these days than we give credit! No matter the weird and wacky beliefs of any group that associates, the fact of their continued association is a kind of knowledge (often of a habitual rather than a propositional kind), and it is the corruption of this knowledge that will destroy the association.

This provides a clue as to the other reason why the epistemic commons has collapsed. In addition to the corruption of our termite knowledge network through censorship, we have also thinned down our knowledge of how to maintain meerkat knowledge communities by supplanting them with an automated alternative: social media. Yet the knowledge entailed in participation with these digital tools is not knowledge of how to associate, but merely interface competence. Worse, the associations we make in such spaces (follows) and their opposite (blocks) serve not to foster community but rather to purify ideology - they group people into an illusion of community without providing any knowledge of how to associate. Indeed, the habit inculcated through participation in these non-communities is how to push a button in order to self-alienate from anyone remotely different from us - it is a sick joke to then make claims that our motivations are 'diversity and inclusion'!

We have thus corrupted both aspects of the epistemic commons, and the illusion that our collective knowledge is still functioning normally is scaffolded by the manipulation of the very tools that facilitated this wretched calamity. I am largely agnostic to the question of whether this dreadful state of affairs was intentionally manipulated or the consequence of a cascade of incompetence, although it is my default policy - we might call it hokum's razor - to avoid invoking conspiracy where ineptitude suffices as an explanation. Frankly, how this happened is far less important than what we do about it... and in this regard, it matters greatly that an enormous number of otherwise sapient people, like the associate I mentioned at the beginning, continue to have faith that our epistemological situation remains fundamentally trustworthy.

Conclusion

It will come as little surprise if I say that I place greater trust in meerkat knowledge communities than I currently can in our termite knowledge network. Yet I would be the first to admit that we do not currently have a means of maintaining a global epistemic commons without the help of the termites. It is a luxury I possess as a voracious reader that I am willing to negotiate the conflicted accounts of the meerkats with some confidence, sorting wild speculation from grounded interpretation with the care that flows from perpetual agnosticism. It is evident that this is not a general solution to the problem, but rather a situation evoking endless ambiguity, and whatever my competence I am limited by all the weaknesses inherent to any lone investigator.

Of course when the termites are causing more harm than good they become a pest - I find it easy to abandon premature certainty under such wretched circumstances, yet acknowledge the psychological costs involved will not appeal to most academics, who derive a great deal of their self-worth from the legitimacy claims of the network they participate in. This is also true of those downstream of academics, most obviously science reporters, who are apparently woefully incapable of the thinking required to operate without termites, or else perhaps have 'purified' their associations of anyone who might be so endowed with prudence.

The crisis here is exacerbated by the fact that all the oddest positions taken up by the termites are politically aligned with the blue team in the United States - this, indeed, is the most plausible explanation for why the termites have fallen into corruption: politicisation. This is why this nightmare could result in civil war if it is not resolved, since a nation of gun owners founded upon 'the shot heard around the world' requires an epistemic commons to bolster any stable national identity. Furthermore, the collapse of the US would trigger a global destabilisation (if indeed one is not already underway). The epistemic commons has been helping to stabilise international relations far longer than banking and commerce, which have failed to achieve the international peace Kant and others hoped for (see The Great Graveyard of Humanity).

If we want to escape the worst consequences of this ever-growing catastrophe, we must begin by admitting we have a problem. Termites see the problem in those who don't acknowledge their network's authority, but a great many meerkats don't seriously recognise any authority but their own liberty. Small wonder this dispute frequently manifests polemically as authoritarians versus libertarians. Yet we agree on one thing: we have a problem with our knowledge, and anyone who thinks the solution is going to come from a policy of 'shut up and accept what we say' is more naïve than the most credulous of conspiratorial speculators.

The only viable solutions begin by admitting failure and renegotiating the terms of our collective knowledge. There is more than enough political, historical, scientific, religious, and ethical knowledge held in our extraordinarily diverse meerkat knowledge communities to rebuild a termite knowledge network capable of acting as a viable epistemic commons. But to get there, we first have to recognise that a metaphorical wasteland we cannot bear to acknowledge has been encroaching upon our termite mound for decades. Now and forever, we need the wisdom of Socrates who warned "all I know is that I know nothing".

Comments always welcome, although my replies here may not appear swiftly.

The Minds of Squirrels

My last long-form essay for Only a Game this year has been drafted for quite a while, but I haven't had time to paste it up and run it owing to requests at other publications for submissions. The first of these, The Minds of Squirrels, picks up two themes of mine with quite a history at this blog: evolutionary mythology and, of course, squirrels. Here's an extract:

Indeed, if we take a long hard look at the role of genetics in animal behaviour, we may find that we are so closely related to everything from worms, to lobsters, to fish, to birds, and of course to squirrels in terms of the key genetic contributors to behaviour. It then becomes laughable to suggest, as so many do these days, that the behaviour in, say, the corridors of contemporary desk slavery can be explained in terms of what human ancestors were or were not doing on the African savannah. We would be on surer footing explaining anything we observe in terms of what early mammals did in the Cretaceous period, or fish in the Devonian—but in all these cases the genetic explanation provides only one thing: the Lego blocks behind emotions.

You can read the entirety of The Minds of Squirrels over at Analogy magazine.

PS: While I'm cross-posting, I should mention the final part of Origins of Ghost Master, over at ihobo.com, which I ran for Halloween this year.

How The Left Stopped Thinking

In the 1950s, movie audiences were wowed by monsters bursting out of the silver screens. All they had to do was put on a pair of paper glasses with a red gel over one eye and a blue gel over the other. Each eye then saw a different part of the image on screen, and the small differences between them created the 3D effect through an illusion of stereoscopic vision. Today, however, people put on a pair of glasses with the same colour gel over both eyes, and consequently see only one half of the image on screen. It is small wonder that when people exit the cinema, it turns out they've been watching an entirely different movie!

There is a long-standing joke about US politics: the Democrats are the Evil Party, the Republicans are the Stupid Party, and every now and then they get together and do something that is both stupid and evil, and that is called 'bipartisanship'. Of course, those on the blue team are convinced its the red team that's evil, and those on the red team think the blue team is stupid (or, more commonly, crazy). The truth, as ever, is not so simple. The electorate in the United States is neither evil nor stupid, but it is spectacularly distracted, in the sense traced by French philosopher Jacques Rancière. We don't so much stop using our intelligence as deploy it almost exclusively to uncover the horror caused by those wearing the other colour gels over their eyes.

I am ambivalent as to whether this perpetual distraction is the result of an intentional collaboration to keep the populace fractious, or whether it emerges blindly from the commercial properties of news media. For instance, consider why George Floyd's murder was singled out for media attention in 2020 and not, say, Donnie Saunders who was killed by the police two months earlier. (There are many more depressing examples I could choose even in that one year.) The Floyd murder was 24 hour news catnip. Those wearing blue gels would respond to either of these dreadful incidents the same way, but those wearing red gels over their eyes would see Floyd as a criminal who had been arrested nine times for drug and theft charges... Whenever you really want to turbo-charge your news cycle, you need a story that sets the red and blue team against each other, ramping up the outrage and cognitive dissonance. I can't rule out that this entails some attempt at supra-political control of the populace (how could you...?), but we don't need to resort to conspiracy to explain how this happens.

However, by the time of the Black Lives Matters protests and riots, the legacy media was already shooting fish in a barrel in terms of stirring up the political left in the United States. For it is my accusation that long before 2020 the left stopped thinking, primarily because they were distracted in Rancière's sense. The evidence of this distraction was felt most astutely in that very year, because nearly everyone on the political left jumped upon a hastily constructed media bandwagon the moment the panic word 'pandemic' had been spoken. In the wake of this, the zeal with which denouncements of 'misinformation' and 'disinformation' leapt above the necessarily-prior task of establishing the facts was staggering.

Although I am saying the left has stopped thinking, I ought to make it clear that this is not the same as the loss of their intelligence. It is simply that those wearing the blue gels have been so distracted by the fault lines being farmed by the legacy media that they apply their intelligence almost exclusively to justifying their hatred for the other team. Yet whichever gels you wear, it's a certainty that you've witnessed the other team engaged in this grubby process of informed hate - it's impossible to miss once you take off the gels of either colour. This is where our capacity for thinking is expended, safely exploded where it can do absolutely no harm to the guilds and houses of the contemporary technocratic empire.

Yet thinking can also means something more than the application of our intelligence. The German existentialist Martin Heidegger asked what it is that calls for us to think. Whenever we are genuinely engaged in thinking, we are not simply pursuing partisan reasoning. He suggests: "Thinking is thinking solely when it pursues whatever speaks for a matter." What calls for us to think is never as readily visible as the moral flaws of our political opponents. That which calls for thinking withdraws from us, remaining hidden and beyond experience. This withdrawal is something more than a blind spot - our own moral flaws, which our political opponents see all too clearly, are unseen to our own mind's eye, but they are not withdrawn from us in Heidegger's sense.

That which calls for thinking is always beyond our intelligence until we learn how to think about it, and that withdrawal creates a kind of draft, the pull of which can be felt even though what is calling for thinking is not there. Like birds pulled along by the wind, we find ourselves thinking only when we take a leap from the ground and let this draft carry us onwards. This is akin to Alain Badiou's idea (inspired by Plato) where truth is something that punctures the order of everyday existence, an event that upends what we previously believed. Thinking is what happens when we let ourselves be caught up in such an event, just as Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière were in May 1968.

This traces an answer to the question 'how the left stopped thinking'. If thinking is our capacity to encounter that which goes beyond the dogmas and lazy intellectual accountancy of everyday life, if thinking always speaks for a matter, and never against, then the left stopped thinking the moment it became the left. For the origin of the left-right distinction is the French revolution, and the seating arrangements within the National Assembly. Those who sought to uphold aspects of the traditional structures prior to the revolution sat on the right of the hall, and those who sought greater change sat on the left. But at this very moment the left came into being, the left stopped thinking - because those belonging to the left were immediately and permanently committed to opposing tradition, to political partisanship against the right. And this remains the case, more than two centuries later.

The surest sign of the failure of the contemporary left to engage in thinking is its hatred for the right, and its refusal to recognise the legitimate and even at times admirable ways the political right deploys its intelligence. I read a lot of what is said by those on either side of United States political partisanship (not the politicians, of course, the clever people). At this time, I find the intellectual right using their intelligence far more creatively. They have come to recognise what fools they were for instituting the Department of Homeland security. They have maintained their suspicion of collaboration between corporations and the government. They are applying their intelligence to the question of how to dismantle the corrupt and disastrous federal agencies. In the Bizarro World that is the United States today, the right is closer to the naïve politics that the left explored in the 1960s, while the left is closer to the ghastly politics the right inflicted in the 1950s. What obscures this amazing circumstance is hatred of the other - which is to say, the left's hatred of the right and the right's disgust at the left. This more than anything else keeps us away from any hope of thinking.

If we wish to attempt the infinite challenge of thinking, if we wish to discover all that has withdrawn from us, to find ways to let the truth puncture through the familiar prejudices of our everyday lives, we may need to abandon this split into left and right. Yet we cannot do this, can we...? We must keep the coloured gels over our eyes or else disaster will surely follow soon after we remove them because 'the other side must be stopped'. Horror at the thought of a second term by whichever terrible president it is that you happen to despise compels you to squander your intelligence in partisan in-fighting, and never once to stop and attempt to learn how to think, to seek that which calls for us to think.

Perhaps it is time to abandon our allegiance to right and left, and to give thinking a chance. A future worth sharing lies in rallying those who might attempt to think together, and there is an ancient name for these people: citizens. The left-right divide does nothing now except prevent any hope of thinking, and the partisans of the left and the right need to be contrasted against the citizens of the future. Decide for yourself who you will be: the partisans whose intelligence is squandered upon demonising their political opponents, or the citizens of a future world that is open to thinking. It is calling to us, inviting us to learn how to think together. All you have to do is take off your coloured gels, blink, and look for the first time at worlds that were always far stranger, far more wonderful, than any 3D movie ever imagined.

A journey away from partisans and towards citizens takes two steps forward every Tuesday at Stranger Worlds and How to Live in Them. If you're interested in the challenges of thinking, please join me there.

Eighteen Today

It is with a certain misplaced pride that I celebrate Only a Game turning eighteen today. The blog is now old enough to drink in the city of Manchester, United Kingdom, where I just left, but still not old enough to go drinking in Nashville, TN, where I now am situated. My satisfaction is not so much grounded in the fact that we've lasted eighteen years, because this blog is nothing like what it was back in 2005! It is rather that since my first Substack, WAMTNG, reached one year of age two weeks ago, it is clear that my moving into Substack hasn't removed the need for me to have an outlet for my long-form rambling. While I am far happier putting most of my energy into Stranger Worlds, which has grown to the same size as WAMTNG in half the time, it makes me smile that I still have here to retreat to, my little Fortress of Scholartude, to write longer essays and pontificate while stroking my beard thoughtfully.

With unlimited love to all the Players of the Game,

Chris.

 

Were You Born This Way?

Can you be 'born Christian'? 'Born gay'? 'Born trans'? This is a perilous question to ask, because frankly everyone reading will already have an answer to these questions. What's more, the more certain you are about how to resolve these questions, the angrier you will get when you confront those who believe otherwise. It is absolutely vital to some Christians that their children were 'born Christian' i.e. born into a Christian family, and it is equally vital to others that they were 'born gay', or 'born trans'. If we are used to encountering fights here, we expect it to be between the Christians and the gay community... so it's a new and fascinating situation that we are now witnessing battlegrounds between trans advocates and their gay and lesbian opponents who amazingly have now forged political alliances with certain Christians. How did this happen?

These topics stray into what philosophers call 'metaphysics', and all your untestable beliefs can be described as 'metaphysical'. This includes such diverse subjects as the qualities of God, or the belief that the sciences are destined to achieve ever-more-accurate descriptions of reality. It includes belief in your own nation's existence, and the existence of yourself as an individual. It includes the idea that a child can be 'born gay' or 'born trans', or that either is a 'lifestyle choice'. In short, in includes everything that lies outside of the possibility of definitive evidence, although an unfortunate quality of contemporary metaphysics is that people have become incapable of recognising this.

Pragmatically, a complete discussion of metaphysics is impossible. If I focus primarily upon Christians here it is solely because this religious identity has the key role in the United States where the political skirmishes I am sketching originated and from whence they propagated. They apply just as well to Hindus, Sikhs, or indeed Odinala of the Igbo, at least some of the time. Likewise, I am going to use 'gay' as shorthand for 'gay and lesbian', and I shall avoid using any of the various vowel-free Scrabble words deployed to pretend that there is still a unified community represented by the Rainbow flag, rather than the grim 'queer wars' that have been raging for more than a decade now.

The roots of these issues are far older. Aristotle coined the term 'metaphysics' for whatever thinking could happen 'beyond physics' (hence the name), but for our purposes we only need to go back a hundred and not two thousand years. For if there was a single topic that dominated the trajectory of the twentieth century it was metaphysics... specifically, the steadfast avoidance of this philosophical hinterland, and the denial of its relevance. From the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 30s onwards, metaphysics were marked as suspect, deemed the exclusive preserve of that catch-all category of dismissal 'religion'. It is frankly no surprise at all that the bizarre fruit grown from this trend in the twenty first century are beliefs that to the eyes of many people are indistinguishable from religions.

Yet metaphysical commitments are not religions, not least of all because they do not foster a direct community of care, which is a central defining trait of all religious traditions. The association of 'metaphysics' as purely a religious matter, therefore, distorts religion as much as it does the sciences, knowledge, and morality - all of which must be bootstrapped by metaphysical commitments. It is the breaking away from organised religion (primarily but not exclusively Christianity) that is the historical backstory of the twentieth century turn away from metaphysics, and that legacy has had unfortunate consequences.

Part of this story is the one I have told many times before, about how the association of metaphysics with nonsense by the Vienna Circle of philosophers and scientists led inexorably to new and more disturbing forms of nonsense. These prototypes for the analytic philosophers' fateful trajectory tried to 'think scientifically' by dismissing everything that could not be known as irrelevant to all rational thought. Perhaps if they'd read and understood Friedrich Nietzsche, they'd have appreciated the bitter irony of this curiously self defeating move, as nobody before or since Nietzsche has been so spot on about it being "still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests."

We deceive ourselves when we think we can secure our knowledge without resort to metaphysics, because even the commitment to investigate matters through research requires a metaphysical foundation. Albert Einstein and his generation of scientists understood this. They had necessarily read Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy underpinned every position on scientific matters after him. But the current generation of researchers not only don't know Kant, they don't know Karl Popper, or even Francis Bacon - indeed, they seem to know nothing at all about the established practices of the sciences. How else are we to explain utterly incomprehensible remarks like Peter Hotez's recent and bizarre suggestion that "one doesn't typically debate science"...?

A great deal of trouble has been caused by this century-long attempt to brush metaphysics under the carpet. Quite honestly, scientific investigations are extremely difficult to pursue if you cannot distinguish experiment and theory from metaphysics, something that arguably reached peak nonsense in evolutionary psychology and related subjects that throw away all the complexities involved in investigating biology and behaviour over geological time. As I accused in The Mythology of Evolution, these half-metaphysical domains offer the kind of simple pat answers that we also find in Victorian natural historians attributing the perfections of nature to God.

But all this is nothing next to the metaphysics of gender, which is now eclipsing the blurring of scientific research via various forms of 'science-loving' beliefs as the premier metaphysical battle line. On the one hand, there are trans activists espousing gender metaphysics that mean that you can be born a different gender to your biological sex, a gender that exists in the mind of the individual and can only be known by them. I have some sympathy for the radical existentialism being attempted here, and also for its inherent absurdity since I am a lover of the absurd. But I draw the line at death threats, something trans activists have repeatedly engaged in and refused to denounce.

When your metaphysical beliefs tell you that other people have to believe a particular way, you are immediately in the problematic territory that caused the Abrahamic religions to get their bad reputation. 'Believe or die' has been the clarion call of the metaphysical fanatic for millennia. Any attempt to defend against this by evoking the image of 'trans genocide' is a gross insult to the historical victims of genocide, such as the 1994 mass murder of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Supporting trans people in their individuality is a key contemporary challenge - yet this is categorically not achieved by vocal advocates being unable to distinguish between literal and figurative genocide, nor indeed by a refusal to condemn those who purposefully terrorise their political adversaries.

Don't think for a second, however, that the trans activists are the only people whose gender metaphysics have spun out of control. Among their political opponents are gender-critical feminists who assert the absolute truth of biological sex and the utter unreality of gender. While I support their freedom to break out from the strictures of social gender however they wish, it can hardly be said that this position represents truth to the trans activists falsehood. The 'unreality of gender', after all, is in the same boat as the reality-or-otherwise of nations and individuals - if we are to disbelieve social realities, why stop at gender...?

It was difficult to appreciate the vast cultural problems of metaphysics when the topic was 'atheists versus Christians', because each side had their own metaphysical commitments to 'God' or 'Not God' and could only encounter the other side's perspective as madness. Now we have reached an equivalent state regarding the metaphysics of gender as well - nobody seems to have realised that we are facing multiple radically different gender metaphysics. Two of these are visible in the clash between the classical gay and lesbian belief that 'you are born gay' and the new metaphysical belief that 'you are born trans'. Factions in the gay community now claim, not without justification, that foregrounding trans gender metaphysics amounts to 'erasing' gay culture. Small wonder the Rainbow Alliance has been torn asunder by this new factionalism that brings to mind the wars in the wake of the Reformation in 16th and 17th century Europe...

Of course, it doesn't end there. There is also the metaphysical belief of certain Christians that being gay, lesbian, or trans is a 'lifestyle choice', which was in fact a major cultural battleground before gender nonsense took the main stage. We might recall that the New Atheists made a push not that long ago to have us rethink religion so that all religions might be deemed a 'lifestyle choice' - another pointless and offensive metaphysical skirmish to throw onto the ever-growing pile. Honestly, if you can accept that you can be 'born Christian', it's not that big of a stretch to being 'born gay' or 'born trans', yet all of these descriptions fall short of getting to the heart of the matter.

What's frequently in conflict here is somewhat closer to 'family versus individual' - since 'Christian' is an identity built over millennia upon ideal conceptions of the family and, for good or ill, both gay and trans identities were predicated at least in part of their troubled history upon breaking with the family. If you take a visit to a Spencer's store in the US and browse their 'statement' T-shirts you'll immediately see why I can say this ('This is not a phase' is clearly a message intended for parents). The battleground over access to medications for trans people has become so fraught precisely because it continues this undermining of the legitimacy of families.

It is staggering to me that those who argue for the medical autonomy of minors cannot even conceive of the risks involved in handing the responsibilities of parenthood over to government intervention. The trans community urgently needs to think through the problems it actually faces. On the one hand, the power of doctors is denied in the trans invocation of 'assigned at birth'. On the other, the trans community is enslaving itself to medical corporations that are far more interested in selling drugs than in respecting what it means to be trans. All manner of disasters lie not very far along this path.

So what's the truth about how we are born? Can you be 'born Christian'? 'Born gay'? 'Born trans'? It depends upon what you believe, upon your own metaphysical commitments. Sadly, it is precisely because these commitments are untestable beliefs that these disputes have become largely meaningless distractions from far more important political matters. If you are a Christian, your children can be 'born Christian', and if you are gay or trans you can back-project and say you were 'born that way'... but in so much as there is any kind of absolute truth here, it is only that you are born a baby, and what you may discover you are or are not as you grow up has precious little to do with your birth.

The political skirmishes in the early twenty first century that railed against the idea of 'gay' or 'trans' being a 'lifestyle choice' revolved around what kind of legal protections ought to be afforded. That's precisely what made these disputes so bitter. Frankly, acknowledging that these are metaphysical beliefs ought to be enough to see that we must allow these diverse perspectives, because religious freedom is supposedly protected. Today, the category of 'religion' obscures more than just the truth about religious practitioners - it conceals the necessity of recognising all metaphysical beliefs and thus never instituting one set to the exclusion of all others. Teaching young students that there are 1,001 genders is to take one set of metaphysical beliefs and to canonise it - if that would not be an acceptable thing to do with Christian beliefs, it cannot be acceptable for gender metaphysics either.

Freedom, the authentic capacity to set your own purposes, rests upon the demilitarisation of metaphysics. Freedom of religion was the formulation that made sense to the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, but today limiting metaphysical beliefs to 'religion' is causing more trouble than it is worth because the term 'religion' has devolved into merely a generic bogeyman. What is needed now is freedom of metaphysics, and this is next to impossible when gender metaphysics are absurdly couched as a scientific dispute, all while prominent imbeciles insist that the sciences are not in the business of discussion, as if truth emerges from the heads of scientists by divine intervention. What a mess!

You must own your metaphysics, or else your own beliefs will betray you without fail. You - along with every other human - cannot live from moment to moment without embracing a peculiar set of untestable beliefs that underpin everything meaningful about you and those around you. Only when you can do this, when you can acknowledge that your metaphysics make you who you must be will we come close to ending the uncivil war of gender metaphysics, and behind and before it, the cultural skirmishes over religious practice and its alternatives. Freedom of metaphysics is the unrecognised political necessity of our time. Until we appreciate this, there will be nothing but endless, intractable culture wars that harm everyone involved in ways we have not even begun to acknowledge.

The opening image is a detail from Sonia Gechtoff's 1959 Children of Frejus. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down as asked.

I Am A Farmer Now

Dear Players of the Game,

I have now completed my fifth international move, restoring the circumstances for the name of my company back at that very first move. I am not so much the 'International Hobo' these days, though, it is more of a 'rags to riches' tale than I expected. As I always said, it's not that I seek to be rich and famous, just well-off and well-known. I think, for the most part, I have succeeded, although destitution and obscurity are always only a few inches away for anyone. 

When I say 'I am a farmer now', I mean it literally although not quite seriously. For I'm now living on ten acres in the hills outside of Nashville, Tennessee. If I am not actually farming myself yet, there is a farmer (his name is Steve) who comes and collects the hay crop from the hill pictured, which is also the field where my wife and I were wed some two decades ago. I grew up in the country (on the Isle of Wight, in the United Kingdom), and now I have returned to a different country.

• As I said before, I have moved my philosophical base camp to Substack, but there are pieces - like this one - that just don't fit at Stranger Worlds. Fortunately, Only a Game makes a fine home for them. However, if you've ever read my philosophy please join me at Substack. Something special is happening there, and it feels like discourse might not yet be dead.
• As of this very day, WAMTNG is one year old! Thanks for every grizzled old Star Trek: The Next Generation fan joining me on this journey, and there's a link for a third off forever if you want to support this adventure with some of your latinum.
• Other than the move, the main thing that's been preventing me posting here isn't Substack (I'm well on top of this) but the Ten Player Motives serial at ihobo.com, which runs at twelve parts. We've just started the second half now, with a look at the Horror motive.
• I have a few thoughts about essays for Only a Game this year, but am currently enjoying the luxury of not having to rack these up. Expect a few essays here in the second half of the Gregorian year on assorted topics, probably directly political as this is still the only place I can put such things.
• Lastly, I am still open for blog letters, if there's something you want to talk to me about. 

Whatever challenges you're facing, keep going!

Chris.

The Ten Player Motives

Starting on ihobo.com today, a twelve part series examining the ten player motives. This model for play is one we've been using at my consultancy, International Hobo Ltd, for nearly six years now, and it has served us very well indeed. I've given talks about it all over the world, but I have still not written anything about it outside of some academic papers in awkward to acquire volumes. I felt it was time to share these ideas more widely.

You can read the first part of Ten Player Motives over at ihobo.com today, and the following parts will come up week-by-week each Wednesday. I'll also cross-post the bookend (with links to all parts) here at Only a Game after it's finished.

The Last Citizens

The Last Citizens may already have been born. The ideals that made it possible to be democratic citizens of a nation protected by international human rights have become so corrupted, and indeed purposefully distorted, that it is far from clear that anyone is still a citizen in the sense that came to exist immediately after World War II. But the Last Citizens are still citizens in at least one sense: they remember what it means to be part of a democracy of rights... and even the capacity to remember what this means provides some glimmer of hope for the future.

Despite its influences in the ancient world, citizenship in the sense of belonging to a democracy of rights is a comparatively contemporary idea. Unrest in the imperial nations brought an end to the old faith in the divine right of kings that had sustained monarchy as the sole legitimate mechanism of rule. The English Civil Wars ended in 1649 with the execution of Charles I - a situation previously unthinkable. Yes, one monarch had executed another, and wars of succession had a long history, but this was something different. The king was found guilty of asserting "unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people". The world's first Bill of Rights arrived forty years later. But we were not yet citizens.

There is a certain irony to the way that the American Revolution was also a revolt against the British crown, that is, against the monarchy formed through a merger between the Scottish and English crowns. The throne had been restored after the English experiment in republicanism ended in failure after just eleven years, but it now faced in 'the colonies' what it had previously faced at home: revolution. Yet the Declaration of Independence in 1776 still did not create citizens, and even the constitution of 1789 did not allow for this understanding until the addition of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868. Conversely, the French Revolution that followed soon after proudly announced in 1789 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

As Benedict Anderson remarks of these events, the combination of a revolution followed by a declaration of rights and citizenship created a model for a nation that could be creatively 'pirated', and citizenship spread around South America and the former imperial colonies bordering upon the Pacific with a certain inevitability. Anderson's claim, oft repeated but seldom fully appreciated, was that the arrival of widespread printing created novels and newspapers that allowed people to imagine themselves as part of the same community. These imagined communities were the origin of the nation in a sense that was radically different from that of monarchy. No longer subjects, we were now citizens.

The usual interest in Anderson's arguments is rather shallow, since it is taken as a diagnosis of nationalism, taken in the negative. But Anderson's interest was broader and more intriguing - he expressly denies we should think of 'nationalism' as an ideology, like liberalism or fascism. Rather, he sees 'nationalism' as akin to 'kinship' or 'religion' - as different ways of imagining human relationships. Indeed, a large part of his book is taken with showing how the imagined communities of religion served a role similar to that of the nation in the half millennia beforehand: people imagined themselves as members of a religion that united them with vast numbers of strangers long before they imagined themselves as members of a nation.

To be a citizen of a nation, however, is to recognise one's membership in that nation, just as to be a Hindu, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim, or a Jew is to recognise one's membership in that religion. In both cases, what matters is not merely recognising membership of a set, but a metaphorical brotherhood and sisterhood with others who also belong to that set. Those who leap from Anderson's book to nationalism-as-ideology misunderstand his purposes. Racism, he argues, justifies repression and domination within the nation; nationalism leads to wars with others in order to protect 'our' land. Whoever loves their nation is willing to die for what it represents, just as one who loves God is willing to die for that faith represents - and contrary to how this is usually taken, this need not mean being willing to kill.

The lazy assumption that these imagined nations are a pathology betrays us. We are lured into thinking that those people who believe in nations are terrible and need to be excluded and repressed. In other words, demonising the love of a nation is itself a path to the bigotry being reviled - a pattern we have seen so many times, with each and every belief system whether religious, national, or secular. In this regard, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, whatever its flaws, attempted to transcend nationalist bigotry by declaring not only rights for everyone, but a right to citizenship itself (a right to belong to a nation). It was a spirited attempt to make good on everything that had gone wrong when the old conception of 'Natural Rights' that had fuelled the Revolutions had been discredited by the two World Wars.

No, nationalism as such is not necessarily our problem. Indeed, it was love of the United States that led people to protest against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, as Anderson himself later made explicit. The citizen of a nation is capable of feeling ashamed of crimes their country has committed, for which the concept of 'not in my name' carries some weight. While we are still citizens, we must have this connection to a nation, because it is only in the context of a democratic nation that we can be citizens, and we can be so solely if we belong to that nation. It is the erosion of this sense of imagined community which is precisely why citizenship has begun to unravel.

The problem, as Chantal Mouffe brilliantly explored in the early twenty first century, is that the 'left' and the 'right' ceased to be mutually engaged in citizenship any more. The entire point of this original division, which commenced in the French Revolution with the first seating of the National Assembly, was to distinguish two different perspectives within one common nation. But as Mouffe traces, the 'left' gradually lost this commitment, and this in two ways: through adopting extreme forms of individualism, that elevated the individual and denigrated the nation, and also through an obsession with a zealous rationality that is often named 'Science' but has nothing whatsoever to do with scientific practice.

Thus for those caught up in the imagined tides of the 'left', identarian politics invited people to join different imagined communities - as LGB or one of its later permutations, as neuro-diverse, as queer, as black, as trans, and ultimately, when all the seats outside of white and male had been taken, as these final accursed categories, which became the reviled and excluded remnants of the identarian parade. These alternative identities pulled people away from imagining themselves as part of a democratic community united as nations. Nowhere was this clearer than in the nonsense of the last few years, when the mistaken belief that experts could establish, at the drop of a hat, scientific and therefore medical truth, led people to abandon citizenship for a brutal and ignorant technocracy. Nations were suddenly irrelevant: what mattered was your chosen identity and your loyalty to a specific political surrogate for scientific truth.

Between these two forces, the imagined ideal of the citizen in a democracy of rights was entirely torn apart. Rather than the 'left' and 'right' having different imaginings about the same nation, the 'right' continued to imagine the nation, while the left began to imagine internationally, which is to say (like the subjects of the English and French crowns before them), they began to imagine an empire. As I wrote in The Third Accord, our image of citizenship has thus been torn into two fragments. The 'right' clings to the image of membership in a nation that belongs to them, while the 'left' has carried the freedom to dissent to an absurd extreme that now denies any disagreement. For this 'new left', any attempt to imagine belonging to a nation has become secondary to the coalition of imagined identarian communities united in commitment to an empire of magical science.

Nowhere is this collapse of the ideals of citizenship clearer than in the cries of 'Not My President' and the deranged denouncement of political opponents as inhuman, evil, and beneath contempt, such that any thought of compromise or debate with them is unthinkable. The absolutism of monarchy has returned in the divine right of idiots to believe in their own stupidity so completely as to become incapable of listening to any other perspective at all. On this path, even censoring free speech and tampering with elections becomes morally justified because 'they' cannot be allowed to 'win'. The United States has all but lost any notion of citizenship because it has abandoned its commitment to debating disagreements and working collectively to forge a common image of what the nation could or should become. And the other nations are never far behind the mistakes that the United States leads the world in making.

Yet all is not lost. The Last Citizens may indeed have already been born, but these are still the people among us willing to listen and compromise. These brave souls - or those that follow them - might be able to forge the third accord, to reunite the many different worlds of our one, shared planet into a common political ideal. Those that were seduced away from freedom by the deceptions of a false necessity have at least this one redeeming quality: they still believe in ideals... it is just that our collective imaginings have been so corrupted they can now cause only harm. We must rebuild either the notion of citizens within democracies of rights, or an ideal that can replace it. And the only way this can come about is if we discover how to pursue this momentous undertaking together.

The opening image is a detail from Citizens by Chris Arlidge. No copyright infringement is intended and I'll take the image down if asked.

Our Duty to the Truth

Two months ago, on 29th November 2022, I wrote a Rapid Response to an opinion piece at the British Medical Journal entitled "Understanding and neutralising covid-19 misinformation and disinformation". My reply was longer than the article and the editors chose not to run it (quite possibly for reasons other than length, though). I include it here, unedited, since the points it makes are salient. You do not need to read the original opinion piece for context - it will all be quite clear from my response.

Dear Editors,
This is surely a timely topic, with California having recently passed the controversial legislation Assembly Bill 2098 that the authors refer to in passing. This is a law that allows doctors who express views that depart from 'consensus' to be struck off, and prevented from practicing as doctors. The authors' argument revolves around the claim that that since misinformation and disinformation are by definition a harmful distortion of the facts, such laws are desirable and ought to be pursued. Yet as scientists, we are obligated to remain open to new evidence as to what the facts might be - otherwise, we foreclose investigation and can no longer claim to be acting as scientists.

To a great degree, the authors conclusions rest on a series of presumptions that are not well-supported by any of their chosen citations. For example, it is apparent from the text that the authors have reached the following conclusions about non-pharmaceutical interventions:

a) That 'lockdowns' and other disruption of assembly measures are effective at halting transmission of respiratory viruses and/or SARS-CoV-2 specifically
b) That community masking is effective at halting transmission of respiratory viruses and/or SARS-CoV-2 specifically

The authors do not provide any evidence in support of these assumptions. Instead, they provide a link to evidence that "long covid has risen substantially in children and young people". This is a tangential question, and one that is also a matter of ongoing scientific research and debate. The decision not to provide evidence in support of the implicit claim that non-pharmaceutical interventions are effective constitutes a substantial flaw in this text. Having followed the research on these topics closely for two years, I would personally judge that the balance of evidence was currently against both of these hypotheses, but as a scientist I am always open to hearing new evidence, and would readily acknowledge that the scientific discussion is far from being concluded in these matters.

Because the success of non-pharmaceutical interventions is assumed, and not evidenced, the authors' discussion of mis- and disinformation takes an odd turn. The authors imply UsForThem, HART, UK Medical Freedom Alliance and Children's Health Defence are propagating mis- and disinformation about these and other interventions. Are the authors correct? It's not possible to tell this from their text and its citations. Perhaps more importantly: how could we possibly know if they are correct while these matters are still live research topics...?

It is worth noting that the organisations named are of very different kinds. Conflating a parental activist group (UsForThem) with a research coalition (HART) is a dubious proposition, although it can be acknowledged that there is some political commonality in the groups mentioned, just as there is a political commonality between the authors of this paper and the sponsors of Assembly Bill 2098. This political dimension may be considerably more important than the authors allow.

In the implied denouncement of the previously mentioned organisations, the first two articles cited by the authors are from the Byline Times. One of these pieces claims HART is "a COVID-19 disinformation group which harbours a range of conspiratorial views about the pandemic." This claim is unsubstantiated in this citation and appears quite implausible on the basis of a brief review of HARTs published commentaries. The Byline Times' view is one that could only be reached by pre-supposing the outcome of ongoing scientific research topics. The same article later terms the Great Barrington Declaration (a statement reinforcing what was the standard view on pandemic response up to 2019) a "pandemic disinformation network" - which is an odd and implausible claim, although one that goes beyond the scope of this rapid response to explore. The inclusion of these Byline Times articles as cited evidence significantly weakens the authors claims to speak in a scientific register, as this cited article is a deeply politicised perspective with negligible scientific relevance.

Their third citation is a BBC article that itself contains a factual error: it claims that all the groups mentioned by the authors are engaged in putting out a message 'against vaccines'. But the matter being discussed in the article cited is specifically the mRNA vaccinations for use in the context of SARS-CoV-2, and even then in the specific context of administering these to children. As new drugs, and treatments that received approximately 90 days of safety testing (versus, say, 5 or 10 years of assessment as was expected prior to 2020), conflating doubts about these specific new medical treatments with opposition to vaccination in general (as both the authors and the cited-BBC article engage in) is questionable and misleading. It might even qualify as misinformation - or even, if either party purposefully intends to mislead on this matter, disinformation.

I certainly condemn those who mislead parents by falsifying an NHS Consent Checklist and circulating it, as the BBC article reports. This is certainly not the action of a reputable scientist. But the BBC article does not provide any prima facie evidence against any of the groups the authors mention. Instead, it expressly admits the difficulty in drawing such a connection. Rather, the BBC article assumes that because certain scientists are questioning the mRNA treatments, all such individuals can be grouped together in the vilified category of mis- and dis-information. As scientists, we must take much greater care on these issues, especially given the fact that - as the BMJ reported in November 2021, Pfizer's trial for their mRNA treatment entailed serious data integrity issues.

It is noteworthy that the BBC did not report this story, a point I will return to below.

I would venture to suggest it is implausible to assume any scientific misconduct on behalf of HART et al with respect to what is, after all, a treatment with incomplete safety and efficacy data. It is far from clear to me, frankly, that "contrarian messages" (as the authors put it) are where our concerns regarding mis- and disinformation ought to lie, especially since the engine of scientific discovery is precisely the engagement of contrarian interpretations with our prior assumptions. To be opposed to contrarian messages is to be opposed to the very possibility of new scientific discoveries.

However, the authors are surely correct to draw a parallel with the way that alcohol and tobacco industries distorted the research and media landscape in connection with the health risks of their products. It is plausible to assume that similar interference has occurred in connection with the mRNA treatments, especially given the tremendous advertising expenditure provided by Pfizer and Moderna in the United States via all major television news services, which have played a substantial role in framing debate around these issues.

As BMJ editor Peter Doshi has repeatedly stressed, what is required at this point to restore trust is for Pfizer to release anonymised data of its original trial in order to see where it's "95% effective" figure came from. It is now quite clear from the data on the ground that these treatments were not in any way 95% effective, and it is apparent from the BMJ's whistle-blower story that fraud is one possible explanation for how the now-falsified figure was obtained. In the question of mRNA vaccines and mis- and dis-information, this aspect of the situation ought to be a far more significant area of investigation than "the extent to which groups promoting contrarian messages were able to influence policy" that the authors judge of particular importance.

In this regard, it is worth noting that on 10th December 2020, the BBC announced an alliance dubbed 'the Trusted News Initiative', which included AP, AFP; BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Facebook, Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, Microsoft, Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, and the Washington Post. The stated purpose of this media group was to:

...ensure legitimate concerns about future vaccinations are heard whilst harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks.

The implication was that this group would report all factual issues about vaccines. Yet as far as I can ascertain, not one of these sources reported the whistle-blower story covered by the BMJ, which certainly constituted "legitimate concerns". As such, we have reasons to doubt that this media group was able to follow-through on its original commitment, with the inevitable implication that its attempt to prevent mis- and disinformation might ironically have ended up operating as a source of mis- or disinformation in at least some cases.

When we act as scientists, our duty is towards the patient assembling of the truth. This is not something that happens quickly or easily. Prior to 2019, we spent five to ten years establishing the safety of vaccinations before green lighting them for population-level distribution. As such, the earliest we could realistically expect to be able to make assessments of mis- or disinformation with respect to these new mRNA vaccines would be in the 2030s, when there has been sufficient data gathered, and time for adequate debate. Unless that time has passed and that discussion has occurred, it is impossible to ascertain with any certainty whether groups like HART will have their concerns vindicated or disproven. Certainly, it is premature to assume on the basis of a single BBC article that HART is a greater risk of mis- and disinformation that, say, Pfizer, for whom the BMJ has already confirmed malfeasance.

Ultimately, the authors suggestion that the inquiries into the response to SARS-CoV-2 ought to be widened to examine the extent to which "groups promoting contrarian messages" feels terribly misguided, even on the logic of their own discussion. If it were reasonable to expand the inquiry into such areas, the priority ought to be establishing the extent to which news organisations such as those who joined the 'Trusted News Initiative' were unduly influenced by pharmaceutical companies in a manner parallel to the author's references to alcohol and tobacco companies. The question of importance here ought to be the degree to which scientific investigations have been disrupted by pre-empting the dissemination of facts and the withdrawal of support for open debate in public channels on the topics of both non-pharmaceutical interventions and mRNA vaccines.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that what should be topics of open scientific enquiry and debate have become politicised, and therefore distorted. If we are acting as scientists, this concern ought to be of far graver importance than attempting to police singular interpretations of the facts by smearing alternative interpretations as mis- or disinformation. The authors consider Assembly Bill 2098 in California an "appropriate course of action". Contrary to this opinion, I would call it a shameful betrayal of the ideals of scientific discourse, and a potentially unlawful attempt to supress both free speech and open scientific enquiry.

If we are scientists, our first duty is to the truth, no matter how elusive it may be. When we pre-empt the ongoing search for that truth, as every attempt to assert the categories of mis- and disinformation on an active research topic must necessarily entail, we are no longer acting as scientists. We have let our political beliefs blind us, and we have betrayed the very ideals upon which scientific investigation rests.

Dr Chris Bateman

Changing the Game

Advance notice that I am moving my philosophical basecamp to Stranger Worlds and How To Live In Them over at Substack, although the Game is not yet concluded.

Dear Players of the Game,

It has been seventeen years, and during that time this blog has transformed in many ways. Remember in the early days when it was all about games...? That seems forever ago now. I marvel at the volume of material I have thrown into this blog over the years, but I am unsatisfied these days with the disparity between the time spent writing essays and the volume of discussion generated, which has become exceedingly low.

Partly, the downturn in discussion reflects what has happened in traditional blogs as reading has more and more been captured by services (Medium, perhaps, foreshadowed what was to come, although Twitter is an important part of the story too). Partly, however, I fear the lack of discussion here results from reaching a point whereby the intersection of people who feel confident enough to discuss my chosen topics with me and those with the time and inclination to do so is close to a null set. Mostly, however, I am certain that the Age of Distraction has continued to intensify, and even my efforts to promote Only a Game on Twitter, which represented a substantial additional investment on top of the blog itself, are not having any noticeable impact.

My experiences with WAMTNG have encouraged me to begin another project at Substack. This is Stranger Worlds and How To Live In Them, which you can discover yourself by following the link. In brief, it's a philosophy blog focussing on principles for life, building upon my philosophy books without requiring anyone to have read them. It starts tomorrow. Primarily, the purpose of beginning this project is to have a Substack where only paid subscribers can comment. I have some hope that this format has sufficient psychological impact to break through the forces of distraction amassed against the few defenders of equality. Even if it does not, I cannot pretend that the Game still plays the way it did. Golden ages never return, and their glittering sheen arises chiefly from nostalgia. As such, beginning something new feels appropriate to my circumstances, especially since my fifth international move is imminent.

I am not done putting essays on Only a Game, but I see no point continuing to put 30-40 essays a year here. I'm expecting it to end up with more like one a month, but I have no specific plan. More than posting here less frequently, however, I am decamping from here. This has been my writing basecamp - whatever I have done elsewhere, I have posted links to it here. But I see no reason to continue doing this (although if you do, please do let me know - this matters to me greatly!). Rather, Only a Game will become home to my longer philosophical essays just as ihobo.com became home to my writings on games. But neither will be 'my blog', and both will become 'one of my blogs'.

As ever, I offer my enormous gratitude to every Player of the Game, past and present, and I am still happy to hear from you whenever you are willing to take the time to write, here, there, or anywhere else. Your time here has been very special to me. But if discourse with me matters, or if you just like to read my ramblings from time to time, please join me at Stranger Worlds. 

With unlimited love and respect,

Chris.

The new Substack, Stranger Worlds and How To Live In Them begins tomorrow.