Change Everything No 48: The technology-brandishing triumphalists of Durham

Twentieth-century ideas of 'progress' are still infesting our neoliberal universities

Out this week

I write with Edouard Gaudot about Green Freedom in the European Green Journal How is our use of the term different from that of other political currents?

Sneak preview: “Freedom is not just for human animals, but for the more-than-human world too. Drawing on indigenous thinking from around the world, Greens have been at the forefront of the rights for nature movement….That effort is intimately related to the essential freedom of our bodies to live uncontaminated by the microplastics and nano-plastics now found in human breast milk and testicles, by the PFAS (“forever chemicals”) and pesticides in our bodies.”

It is part of an entire print edition of the journal on the issue. You can find that here.

Photo by Kristina V on Unsplash

Picks of the week

Reading

Thanks to my fellow Durham Union debate speaker Dr Aaron Thierry, who pointed me towards Climate Justice and the University: Shaping a Hopeful Future for All, as we discussed the meeting I held with Sheffield Young Greens on this subject, a meeting I hope to repeat around the country.

I strongly agree with the book’s chief premise, that “higher education is an under-leveraged resource within society”, although also that the barriers to its greater effective deployment are large. Jennie C Stephens makes it clear by quoting a traditional saying: “Changing a university is like moving a graveyard - you don’t get much help from the inside.”

As she says, sustainability has too often been seen as just about changing the light bulbs and insulating the buildings, I’ve been dutifully toured around many such projects in my time as a politician, when I’ve been trying to examine a much broader issue, as Stephens puts it:

“Higher education institutions have been manipulated with investments to intentionally spread misinformation and to advance a simplistic, constrained individualism that undermines democratic deliberative processes and obstructs policies to move humanity towards a more equitable and climate-stable future. Higher education institutions are not only complicit in these exploitative processes, they play an increasingly central role in reinforcing authoritative, extractive capitalism and squashing alternative visions of the future.”

And the neoliberal university makes a very bad neighbour, as this case study from Sheffield indicates. Sheffield Hallam University was given a giant, and potentially extremely valuable, area of land (22.5 acres) by the City Council for free, with the expectation that this would be an asset for the city in perpetuity. And certainly for locals, the routes through, long used as footpaths, have been regarded as a public asset. But now the university is trying to deny that, to maximise the value of its assets.

But the Academy can turn outwards, and give back, as evidence by the example from a New Books Network podcast with Professor Asha Rangappa, who took her university course on Russian intelligence and information warfare, that was for the few, and turned it into a Substack for the many. She’s also got very interesting - and disturbing - comments on the nature of immigration officials’ behaviour, and the broader state of the US today.

Listening

In Our Time, for those who don’t know it, is a very long-running BBC Radio 4 programme of history, science and culture, three academics with (Lord) Melvyn Bragg going fairly drily through their subject. Usually it is quite random in subject matter, but not in May, when the episode on the history of copyright was very much of the moment, with the House of Lords locked in a battle with the Commons seeking to defend the rights of British creatives against the plagiarism of the US tech giants. The episode is particularly relevant this week, when the Lords, sadly, gave way, no vote being called for an amendment that would have ping-ponged it (sent it back to the Commons amended) for the fifth time. You can read the debate here in Hansard, but what you won’t get from that is the loud grumble of disapproval when the vote was not called. Crossbencher Lord Berkeley summed it up well - the government being “so far into the bed of AI and tech companies that they have no position to manoeuvre”. Which is a big problem on this issue, but also on many others: just been reading a comment on my Facebook page from someone concerned about Palantir being given a big NHS contract, given its founder and chairman Peter Thiel, also a Trump donor, is on record as saying he no longer believes that "freedom and democracy are compatible".

Thinking

Back nearly 30 years ago, I was on the Bangkok Post subs desk when a call came through from a journalists’ union in the US, asking about how they might use Thai law to recover large sums of unpaid fees for foreign journalists who’d written for a locally launched publication. I had to tell them, to some disbelief, that they didn’t have a hope. Thailand did not then have a rule of law, certainly not in a foreigner against an influential local. And if anything, the situation has only worsened. This interview with American academic Paul Chambers, who was working at a Thai university when he was arrested for lese majeste, is evidence of that. He got out, but was lucky. He summarises: “"Senior military officials manipulated the 112 law for their vendetta against me because I had criticised the economic empire and impunity of the military, specifically the army."

Thailand - known as “land of smiles”, a phrase that has its own problems, but certainly not land of law. Photo by Evan Krause on Unsplash

Researching

Critical thinking required!

Previous research has asserted that women and men in gender-equal countries differ more in their preferences than women and men in less equal countries, for example, by making more traditional educational choices. This relationship is known as the gender-equality paradox.

Except, more nuanced consideration of the data has concluded “the question is based on western perspectives and conditions and cannot be applied to other countries”. So the claim that when “more free”, men and women show distinctly different behaviour has ZERO, ZILCH, ABSOLUTELY NO basis.

‘Don’t worry, technology will provide solutions’

The nature of University Union debating is that there is a massive tension between actually making serious points and being entertaining, preferably for many being scathingly entertaining about the opposition. I’m always slightly torn as to whether it is worth doing, and uncomfortable about the degree of privilege of many members of the audience and organisers, but it is a chance to reach different people, and show Greens are in the national debate, so I tend to cycle around most of the universities every couple of years. Last Friday night it was Durham, and the proposition that “this House would prioritise the economy over the environment”.

I’m not going to rehash the debate, or complain about it (as Toby Young did one time I was in Durham), but rather reflect on how it is useful as a format to see how entrenched so many totally outdated, laughable ideas remain. It is obvious that they are the gospel that many students are still being taught. Yes, I am looking at you - particularly - economics faculties. It is as though the past 20 years - or 200 years - of financial crisis, social pain and ecological descent never happened.

We heard not just from the opposition speakers, but also from the floor and in later discussion, an unspoken but clear “end of history” thesis, that we have advanced or progressed now to a totally unprecedented age, which will continue indefinitely, and which with technology, particularly “artificial intelligence” (oh there was a lot of unthinking embrace of the IT bros) will solve any little hitches like the climate emergency or nature crisis.

Fantasies of future … Photo by Gerard Siderius on Unsplash

A 10-minute speech is no place to unpick all of that (my next book takes 100,000 words for that project), but I was thinking about what short reading I might recommend to try to shake up these 20th-century world views that are so unfit for 2025. One that came to mind is a little collection of anthropology essays from 2017, The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress, and particularly the introductory essay from editors Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis.

It sets out the task of our age, and the utter inadequacy of solutionism (seeking technical fixes for the tsunami of problems our systems are creating).

“The challenge of sustainability demands much more than the protection or preservation of communities or nature reserves, and more than technical fixes for CO2 production, or resource limitations: it requires re-imagining and reworking communities, societies and landscapes, especially those dominated by industrial capitalism, to help us build a productive symbiosis with each other and the many nonhumans on whom we depend.” (p. 20)

So many of their observations provoke a “oh yes” moment:

Legislation to protect forests or wildlife, which is intended to mitigate the degradation of landscapes and ecosystems due to these global movements of resources, tends to impose the greatest restraints on local populations rather than the consumers driving international trade. (p. 25) [Or I would rather say the companies pushing it.]

The application of the broader perspective of anthropology in the book produces fertile spaces for reflection, such as “what Aït-Touati and Latour provocatively call a ‘surprising reversal’ of the Copernican revolution” (p. 30) in the form of the Anthropocene - humans are at the centre of the universe with our impacts on the planet.  The Earth System, or Gaia, or geo-stories (Latour’s term) show that we are not (and never were) “outside” or separate from nature, but are part of it, but very much not in control of it, or our own future.

No, I think it is a good job I didn’t start on this in Durham, but the fact that it is so impossibly intellectually distant to many of the students really is an indictment of the neoliberal university in action. I would like to have put them in another room last week, where I joined the NGO Cool Earth in an event promoting unconditional cash payments to indigenous rainforest communities, to support them in continuing to do what they’ve long done, protect the ecosystems of which they are a part.

Photo by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash

Those are the people with emperically founded wisdom embedded deeply in the place where it is held. It is demonstrably possible for this to exist, is within human capabilities, but how can we turn our universities into something like that?

Almost the end

In winter in the Florida Everglades, black-crowned night herons perch in crocodile-rich areas. The presence of the crocodiles protect them from smaller potential predators: a good chance for a peaceful night’s sleep or a daytime nap. When they migrate to Chicago for the summer, a significant number favour very different, but systemically similar, protection from living alongside apex predators, in the red wolf enclosure at the Lincoln Park Zoo. A little reminder of how sophisticated natural systems can be.

Smart thinker: source

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