Are you in denial? Because it’s not just antivaxxers and climate sceptics
It’s easy to laugh at the anti-vaccine movement, and this week they made it easier still. Hundreds of protesters tried to storm Television Centre in west London, apparently unaware that they were not at the headquarters of the BBC or its news operation – which they blame for brainwashing the British public – but at a building vacated by the corporation eight years ago and which now consists of luxury flats and daytime TV studios. If only they’d done their own research.
Anti-vax firebreather Piers Corbyn was there, of course, unabashed by the recent undercover sting that showed him happy to take £10,000 in cash from what he thought was an AstraZeneca shareholder, while agreeing that he would exempt their product from his rhetorical fire. (Corbyn has since said that the published video is misleading.) “We’ve got to take over these bastards,” he said during this week’s protest, while inside Loose Women were discussing the menopause.
In Britain, the temptation is to snigger at the anti-vaxxers, but in the US it’s becoming ever clearer that the outright Covid deniers, vaccine opponents and anti-maskers – and the hold they have over the Republican party – are no joke. The Covid culture wars have escalated to such an extent that the Republican governors of two states, Florida and Texas, are now actively barring schools, colleges and local authorities from taking basic, common-sense measures against the disease.
They are no longer allowed to require vaccines, proof of vaccination, a Covid test or masks. Any Florida school administrator who demands the wearing of masks could lose their pay. Texas is dropping the requirement that schools even notify parents when there’s a coronavirus case in class. Naturally, the Covid numbers in both states are through the roof. For all Joe Biden’s early success with vaccination, this level of resistance is posing a grave threat to the US’s ability to manage, let alone defeat, the pandemic.
What explains this level of Covid denialism? In the US, the roots of a “don’t tread on me” libertarianism that regards any instruction from government as a step towards tyranny run deep. In the Trump era, it has become a matter of political identity: a refusal to believe Covid is real or that the measures against it are legitimate are increasingly conditions of membership of the right and of good standing as a true devotee of the former president. They are conditions of membership. Besides, Covid denialism offers the lure of all conspiracy theories: the promise of secret knowledge, the chance to see what the sheeple cannot see.
For everyone else, it’s tempting to take pride in being untainted by such thinking. To dismiss the Covid deniers, whether in Florida or west London, as a group apart, irrational, if not downright stupid – refusing to take the steps that will provably protect them, their families and those around them. And yet, the distance between them and everyone else might not be as great as you think.
On the same day that Piers and the placard wavers were out in force in White City, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivered its report on the state of our planet. It was its starkest warning yet. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, called it a “code red for humanity”, adding that the “alarm bells are deafening”. The IPCC found that sea level is rising, the polar ice is melting, there are floods, droughts and heatwaves and that human activity is “unequivocally” the cause.
Now, there are some who still deny this plain truth, the same way that some insist coronavirus is a “plandemic” hatched by Bill Gates or caused by 5G phone masts or aliens. Both those groups are guilty of cognitive denial, failing to update their beliefs in the light of the evidence.
But there is another form of denial, what the philosopher Quassim Cassam calls “behavioural or practical denialism”. This is the mindset that accepts the science marshalled by the IPCC – it hears the alarm bell ringing – but still does not change its behaviour. It can operate at the level of governments: note the White House official who on Wednesday urged global oil producers to open up the taps and increase production, so that hard-pressed US motorists can buy gasoline more cheaply. And it lives in individuals, too, in the fatalism that says one person can do nothing to halt a planetary emergency, so you might as well shrug and move on. Which is “to act in the same way as if you were a climate change denier,” says Cassam. “The practical upshot is the same.”
Whether it’s Covid or climate, there is a common defect at work here. It is wilful blindness, a deliberate closing of the eyes to a reality that is too hard to bear – and it afflicts far more than a hardcore of noisy sceptics and protesters. A US poll this week found that a summer of heatwaves, flooding and wildfires – evidence that the planet is both burning and drowning – has barely shifted attitudes to the climate issue. Many, even most, are looking the other way.
Perhaps all this is worth bearing in mind as policymakers grappling with the twin crises try to cajole the wary towards action for both their own and the collective good. In both cases, it pays to peel the committed deniers away from those who are merely hesitant or apathetic, and therefore more persuadable. And, again in both cases, it’s wise to remember that the recalcitrant are driven by an impulse that is all too human: namely, fear.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
of Afghans in Europe at almost half a million. Ongoing clashes between the Taliban and the Afghan government push tens of thousands of civilians out of their homes, forcing them to seek safety wherever they find it. More than 3.5 million Afghans are internally displaced but this number is rising rapidly every day as aid agencies struggle to provide help.
Contrary to our popular perception in the west, for Afghans the period of conflict in their country began long before 9/11, starting with the communist coup in 1978, followed by the Soviet military invasion on Christmas Eve in 1979. Yet, even by the complex standards of this long, gruesome war, the current phase of uncertainty in Afghanistan is unprecedented. The Taliban’s fortunes rise with each district, town and province they capture; at the time of writing they have just captured the strategic cities of Herat and Kandahar. The significance of these territorial gains cannot be stressed enough. It could trigger a civil war or the unravelling of the Afghan government, or both. A less likely but more optimistic scenario would be a political deal that leads to the establishment of a new administration – which the Taliban would inevitably dominate.
Against this backdrop, it is reasonable to ask what happened to the vast western investment of money and blood that occurred post-9/11. The answer is multi-layered, and the blame cannot fall only on the Afghan government, although it has been deeply corrupt and dependent on foreign donors. The United States and its allies bear a large share of the responsibility, too. A combination of serious mismanagement and a lack of foresight, and lack of will to pursue effective policies, bequeathed us the debacle that is Afghanistan today.
The US spent a staggering $978bn on the Afghan war between October 2001 and the end of 2019. The absurdity of this becomes clear when compared with the $36bn total US spending on governance and development in Afghanistan over the same period. As the western war machine churned and incoherent military strategies prioritised partnership with a corrupt Afghan elite, ordinary citizens remained on the margins.
The public parks in Kabul are fast filling with internally displaced people who are fleeing violence in their home provinces. Unlike the earlier episodes of this war, however, Afghans are not able to seek refuge in Pakistan and Iran. A “regional solution” for Afghans displaced by the current violence does not exist. Kabul, a densely populated city with nearly 4.5 million residents and meagre infrastructure, is the last resort for thousands of displaced families.
The world needs to brace itself for a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan that is irreversible in the short term. For the UK and other western donor countries, there is an urgent need to play an active role in mediating a political process that results in an end to the conflict with the Taliban. If this doesn’t happen, the collective failure will represent a stain on our humanity, and leave us with a longterm “refugee crisis” as Afghan civilians flee from the tragedy engulfing their country.
Hameed Hakimi is a research associate at Chatham House
We know what to do. We know how to do it. The only question is whether we will do it, though from activists to scientists many already are, wholeheartedly. The fear of a far worse world should spur us on, but the hope of a better one can motivate us too. At the climate summit in Glasgow in less than three months, public pressure must make the world’s governments commit to saving the world and hold them to it in the years to come.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Men Explain
Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence