LIVING WITH A WILD GOD: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth About Everything BARBARA EHRENREICH

LIVING WITH A WILD GOD: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth About Everything
BARBARA EHRENREICH
Granta, 2014, 237 pages, $xx.yy (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

What are we to make of the latest book by Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer of wit, clarity and insight, proud to count herself a socialist, feminist, atheist and scientist, who concludes that her teenage ‘mystical’ experiences with some sort of ‘living Presence’, ‘higher Consciousness’ or ‘mysterious Other’ were real encounters with another dimension, beyond the scope of rational analysis?  Not that much, alas.

Ehrenreich is no “New Age fluffhead” - spirituality is “a crime against reason” especially to one “born to atheism” by parents “who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms” - but her ‘transcendent’ adventures in the 1950s have prompted a late-life rethink of her intellectual roots.

She dismisses the explanatory materialist candidates for her “aberrant mental phenomena” - sleep deprivation, hypoglycaemia, faulty perceptual processing of sensory data, optical illusion, dissociative disorders, impaired  neuronal wiring.

She rejects the hypothesis that the “fabric of space-time was doing just fine” and the problem might be with her internal psychology.  As a good scientist, she does not write off anomalous data like her too-strange-to-be-forgotten experiences, but she opts for the scientifically incredible (mysticism) over the scientifically simple (neuroscience) with her operating assumption that there is something out there,  an animistic force emanating from “conscious beings that normally elude our senses”, a power which is, moreover, “seeking us out”.

This stance has only come about in the last decade, after Ehrenreich’s long immersion in sixties-inspired politicisation and scholarly investigation when she saw her “perceptual wanderings” as a petit-bourgeois “distraction from political activism”.  Now, with the decline of the left  into long, navel-gazing meetings “in windowless conference rooms”, she has re-embraced her illicit ‘mystical’ past.

Ehrenreich has declared that she will never write her life story.  This is a great pity because her current memoir would then have been a more digestible, condensed chapter on, say, ‘Neuroscience and the Teenage Mystic’ whilst the tantalising glimpses of the rest of her wonderful life would elaborate on how her political radicalisation tore apart the “façade of everyday normality” to reveal, not some metaphysical power, but the very real, “ongoing, inexcusable cruelty” of the powerful in human society.

POWER FAILURE: The Inside Story of Climate Politics Under Rudd and Gillard PHILIP CHUBB

POWER FAILURE: The Inside Story of Climate Politics Under Rudd and Gillard
PHILIP CHUBB
Black Inc., 2014, 302 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

 

In 2007 in Australia, “climate policy was a reform full of promise and excitement”, writes Monash University journalism academic, Philip Chubb, in Power Failure.  Six years later, however, an “exhausted and confused” electorate had installed a climate-change-denying government that was dismantling the previous Labor government’s few fossil fuel carbon emission reduction programs.  Chubb dissects, with much sorrow, the climate change “policy fiasco” of Labor that led to this outcome.

Labor’s climate change policy in government was to establish a market mechanism to price carbon within an emissions trading scheme to theoretically provide a cost disincentive to the use of fossil fuels.  The schemes of both Labor Prime Ministers, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, seriously misfired, however.

Rudd’s proposed scheme (the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – CPRS) suffered from delay, conceptual complexity, dense technical detail, poor communication, a back-office technocrat (Penny Wong) as climate change minister, the sidelining of the Greens, an autocratic but erratic Prime Minister who refused to call a double dissolution election on the issue when popular support was still significant, and an intensifying political and corporate opposition from aggressive climate change deniers and electricity generators threatening power cuts and job losses.

People “did not know what the government was doing on climate change or believed it was doing nothing”, says Chubb.  They queried Rudd’s commitment and questioned how important the whole issue of climate change could really be given such chameleonic leadership, especially when Rudd suddenly abandoned the CPRS, and, with it, any governmental lead on what he had called ‘the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time’.

Gillard was more inclusive on policy process than Rudd, was a more focused communicator and a better manager of the Greens (buying their support with concessions, albeit important, such as a $10 billion green investment bank) but an antagonistic Murdoch media had so soured the fixed-price carbon tax entrée to her floating price emissions trading reduction scheme that her package died along with the Labor government in the disastrous 2013 election.

For all the apparent differences between Rudd and Gillard, and their respective carbon reduction schemes, however, both were offering essentially the same product – market-based emissions trading in carbon pollution.  What finally sunk both schemes was not, as Chubb proposes, the different flaws in the leaders’ psychology or presentation skills but the common elements of both schemes, namely weak targets and a gushing money tap of compensation for industry.

The pathologically shy target (5% less carbon by 2020) did not match what the science said it should be whilst the free carbon pollution permits and cash compensation for industry was logically contradictory because “the government was trying to force companies to change their behaviour, but then paying them so they did not have to change”.  As could have been predicted, and as subsequent research on the carbon tax (in Victoria) found, says Chubb, coal-fired electricity companies simply passed on the cost of their carbon emissions to consumers through higher prices whilst reaping windfall profits from their taxpayer-funded compensation.

The problem, largely ignored by Chubb, was not the messenger (Rudd versus Gillard) but the message (emissions-trading markets).  Nor was the problem what Chubb terms an “excess of purity” from those environmentalists who were opposed to Labor’s inadequate policies.  Voters were simply underwhelmed by what was on offer.

Chubb does note, without, however, expanding on it, the strong popular support for renewable energy which continues to exist, across class and political divides, including government investment in renewables and the Renewable Energy Target (a Rudd legacy which mandates that electricity generators source a percentage - currently a modest 20% - of electricity from renewables).  There, with state intervention in the market and not in political genuflection to it, lies the future, for a political party willing and capable of grasping it.

THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book by FINN and COUVEE

THE ZHIVAGO AFFAIR: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book
PETER FINN and PETRA COUVÉE
Harvill Secker, 2014, 352 pages, $35 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Both the KGB and the CIA thought they had the measure of Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel, Doctor Zhivago.  As Finn and Couvée recount, the Kremlin feared it (as an attack on their rule) and the White House celebrated it (as a condemnation of all things socialist).  Both were right.

A Russian poet who was sympathetic to the Bolshevik revolution, Pasternak became disillusioned with Soviet Russia after the show trials of Old Bolsheviks and the mass repression of the late 1930s.  His short-lived attempt to ‘think the thoughts of the era, and to live in tune with it’, including his poetry lauding Stalin, was abandoned.

At age 65, Pasternak’s passive opposition went public with his first novel, Doctor Zhivago, about the doctor-poet, Yuri Zhivago (Pasternak’s alter ego), and his love affair with the nurse, Lara Antipova, during the 1917 revolution and subsequent civil war. 

Doctor Zhivago first saw the light of day, in 1957, thanks to a wealthy and dissident member, and financier, of the Italian Communist Party, who arranged for Pasternak’s manuscript to be smuggled out of Russia.

Courtesy of British spies, the CIA gained access to the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago, which, particularly after Pasternak’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, became a star exhibit in the Agency’s clandestine publishing arm.  This million dollar operation (including the CIA’s own printing press which produced ‘black’ editions) subsidised, translated and disseminated anti-communist books to the Soviet bloc (touring Moscow Philharmonic members, for example, hid pages of Doctor Zhivago in their sheet music).

The CIA recognised the propaganda potential of Doctor Zhivago for its ‘intrinsic message’ (‘a cry for the freedom and dignity of the individual’ or, as an anti-communist placard in the US put it, ‘Troubled by communism? Then consult Dr. Zhivago’) as well as for the ‘circumstances of its publication’ – the censorship and vociferous harassment of a writer forced to decline the Nobel Prize.  The 1965 Hollywood film starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie added cinematic melodrama and malign Marxist murderers of the Tsar’s family to the West’s cultural offensive.

Although Pasternak was unhappy with being turned into Cold War fodder in the West, he had left himself open to such treatment.  Doctor Zhivago transfers Pasternak’s disgust with Stalinism to a distaste for the early revolutionary period, implying that Stalinist tyranny was the direct outcome of Bolshevik-led socialist revolution even though the monolithic and repressive nature of the regime did not take shape until a decade after the revolution.

This familiar political revisionism marrs the political integrity of Pasternak, and, not that you know it from the authors’ failure to analyse Doctor Zhivago as a political and literary work, it also infects the artistic virtues of the novel.  The fate of all the novel’s characters is one of misery, despair and death at the hands of the Bolsheviks.  Love and humanity is defeated in a historically and psychologically simplistic battle between the sensitive and the evil, the individual and the collective.

The CIA got the novel right  but it was the crushing of the socialist revolution by Stalin which enabled Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to be turned into the cultural servant of capitalism.

STEPHEN WARD WAS INNOCENT, OK by GEOFFREY ROBERTSON

STEPHEN WARD WAS INNOCENT, OK: The Case for Overturning His Conviction
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON
Biteback Publishing, 2013, 194 pages, $24.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

‘Get Ward’, was the order to the heads of Britain’s criminal and political police in 1963 by the Home Secretary.  Dr. Stephen Ward, society osteopath and portrait artist, would thus become, says human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, the scapegoat for a disgraced Tory government out to save its own neck in the sensationalist ‘Profumo affair’.

John Profumo, Minister for War, had had a brief sexual liaison with the promiscuous ‘society girl’, Christine Keeler,  whose brief fling with a Russian embassy defence attaché had implicated their mutual introducer, Ward, in a political panic that loose pillow-talk could threaten ‘national security’.  It helped, by adding some moral alarm to the mix, that Ward was promiscuous, an atheist and “vaguely left-wing”, and thus ripe pickings for a Tory government desperate to silence him, by judicial means, and keep a scandal-plagued government in office.

Grasping at the charge of Ward ‘living off immoral earnings’ from Keeler and the showgirl, Mandy Rice-Davies, who both shared Ward’s flat, police hounded potential witnesses, pressured dozens of genuine prostitutes to give false evidence, persuaded Rice-Davies to change her mind about cooperating courtesy of a spell in Holloway prison on a driver’s licence misdemeanour, and scared off Ward’s patients.

The police ruination of his medical practice prompted Ward to publicly expose the Tory moralist, Profumo, who had sworn in parliament that he had never had sex with Keeler, as a hypocrite and liar.  Thus did the Tories seek vengeance against Ward by making him the fall-guy.

The aggressive police investigation was conducted against a booming extra-judicial prosecution.  With politicians chiming in on Ward’s moral depravities, the press, both tabloid and ‘quality’, slandered Ward, the media honey-pot attracting prostitutes with preposterous stories for sale, whilst both Keeler (the star witness, and confessed perjurer) and Rice-Davies sold theirs for very large sums, with Keeler’s ghost-written ‘exclusive’ for The News of the World massively prejudicing the popular climate against Ward.

Ward’s fate was sealed by a crooked trial judge with well-known views on the sinfulness of prostitution and promiscuity.  He had already pre-judged Ward as guilty of pimping and conveyed this to the jury which convicted Ward even though Keeler and Rice-Davies were not prostitutes (they did not seek payment for the sex they had with the partners they were highly selective about) and even though it was they who lived on Ward’s considerable professional earnings, not the other way round.  The judge’s highly biased summing up was the final indignity that spurred Ward to commit suicide just before the verdict.  An “appalling misuse of state power” had finally silenced Ward.

A host of errors of law, logged with technical precision by Robertson, make a strong legal case for overturning Ward’s verdict.  The artistic case is being made by Andrew Lloyd Webber whose upcoming musical, Stephen Ward, relies on Robertson’s input.  Together, they may just help to deliver historical justice to Ward, and prevent future frame-ups of other “innocent victim[s] of public prejudice and politically expedient prosecution”.

THE GREAT PROSTATE HOAX: How Big Medicine Hijacked the PSA Test and Caused a Public Health Disaster
RICHARD ABLIN
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 262 pages, $42.50 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When Richard Ablin, then a young immunologist and now a University of Arizona pathology professor, discovered, in 1970, an enzyme specific to the prostate gland (prostate-specific antigen or PSA) whose elevated levels in blood indicate an abnormality in the gland, he had no idea how a simple blood test would go on to become the foundation of a “profit-driven public health disaster” through prostate cancer screening.

Elevated PSA levels can be caused by prostate cancer but also by infections, aspirin, riding a bicycle, ejaculation and normal, age-related prostate enlargement.  The PSA test is organ-specific not cancer-specific yet it has become ubiquitous as a diagnostic cancer-detection tool leading to many unnecessary and dangerous treatments.

Most prostate cancers are slow-growing and can be safely left alone because prostate cancer is an older man’s disease and nearly all men will die with it but few of it, succumbing instead to other diseases of ageing (80% of men in their seventies will have prostate cancer but only 3% will die because of it).  Nearly all prostate cancers will do absolutely no harm unlike, however, the screening and treatment for them.

Because of the PSA blood test’s worse-than-chance inaccuracy (15% of its negative results are wrong, 60-80% of its positive results are wrong), the test requires a follow-up biopsy of prostate tissue.  The biopsy causes bleeding and pain and, with the biopsy needle passing through the bowel, carries a risk of potentially fatal infections of genito-urinary organs and of the blood.

The treatments that follow biopsy have their own suite of adverse effects.  Surgical removal of the prostate gland (prostatectomy) carries a high risk of urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction, radiation therapy causes inflammation of the bowel, and chemotherapy is not renowned for its pleasures.

The associated waste of health resources and men’s well-being is staggering.  There are an annual 30 million PSA tests (at $80 a pop) in the US, a million biopsies (at $2,000 each) and 100,00 prostatectomies (each fetching $30,000) for a total cost of US$28 billion, coming from the pocket of patient or taxpayer.  All of this expense is for little clinical benefit – one thousand men have to be PSA-tested to successfully prevent just one prostate cancer-related death.

Yet, the PSA test has become embedded in routine men’s health checks – all because of money, says Ablin.  Entrepreneurial medical scientists and the biotechnology industry saw the potential of mass screening to turn the PSA test, and its more expensive successor blood tests and cancers treatments, into a cash-cow, to be milked by pathology, urology, radiotherapy and oncology practices, medical device companies and ancillary medical businesses (erectile restoration, incontinence pads).

From blood test to diaper, “the prostate cancer business is a self-perpetuating industry that creates a need for its services and products”.  The only difference any of this over-servicing makes is to the corporate medical bottom line, not to prostate cancer mortality.

Corporate influence over government health watchdogs also creates a regulatory culture “that looks the other way” over dodgy data and clinical risk, whilst medical industries finance most clinical trials and dollar-dazzled doctors-for-hire have a financial interest in plugging the PSA test.  The corporate dollar also feeds patient advocacy groups whilst marketing triumphs over evidence as charismatic survivor testimonials and sports celebrity endorsers manipulate millions of men, playing on the fear of cancer, onto the prostate cancer conveyor belt with its unnecessary, costly and dangerous, but above all, lucrative, testing and treatments.

“Powerful interests knowingly misused the PSA test to generate huge profits”, concludes Ablin.  Be informed, is his warning to men when their GP talks prostate.  Ablin’s story of “greed and damaged men and government failure” is a good place to start.