Want to use this graph again to show the birth and possible death of the unique invention of the past 150 years of human history. The public. The word is used a lot - public health, public service, public education etc. But it’s rarely defined. That’s why it’s being destroyed. /1
You can see from about 1850 onwards, human life expectancy did something it hadn’t done in any of the centuries beforehand. It started to rise. Mostly in children, but across all age groups, with all converging towards a life expectancy of over 80 today. /2
This is England and Wales, but the same pattern is repeated in most richer nations, and today is also underway in poorer nations. Why did this happen? Because elites in societies were forced to respond to social breakdown caused by things like the lack of basic sanitation. /3
But the conceptual leap this caused is rarely mentioned. For the first time in all of history, these elites had to consider society as a WHOLE. From the birth of democracy in Greece, until the end of the 19th century, democracy had never been about the entire population. /4
In most cultures there wasn’t even democracy. But in those that had or claimed it, only a portion of the population was enfranchised. Men, men of a certain class, native to the country etc. People forget that parliaments were invented by Kings, to confront earlier social…/5
…challenges that were beyond them to solve. They were a sop to the feudal lords, to buy their loyalty by giving them a bit more say in how the country would be run. Feudalism not only lived alongside democracy, they were the same system. The same historical pattern always…/6
…repeated. Real political change comes as a response to disaster, from an existing elite being overwhelmed. And that’s what we can see in the graph, the next stage of democratic evolution, from about 1850. When even these feudal democracies with their early parliaments…/7
…were suddenly overwhelmed with crises that they couldn’t solve. Plagues and wars. So now, for the first time in all of human history, the WHOLE population was conceptualised as a political actor. That’s what the ‘public’ is. It’s everybody. /8
Don’t think elites of the time liked doing this, they were dragged kicking and screaming to do it, to survive. As I Tweeted yesterday, what cemented this shift, which would otherwise have been snuffed out very fast, was 3 major catastrophes in short historical time. /9
Epidemics/plagues (Spanish Flu, and before it cholera too) at the turn of the 19th/20th century. Then two world wars in the 20th century. This all-out assault on societies from plagues and wars over a short time was strong enough to maintain this new public-focused politics. /10
Only these catastrophes held pre-existing power balances in check, to allow this shift. And then as I Tweeted yesterday, after WW2 the sense of catastrophe eased, and from about the 1970s, those old power structures have been reasserting themselves rapidly. /11
The anti-public, pro-market and pro-individual politics we all now live in. They invented a substitute for this new public-led society, which they called an ‘economy’. All deliberately designed to reflect their interests, and not public interest. And cunningly, they came up…/12
…with a substitute for the public too, which is still going strong. They substituted the public - the whole population - with majorities. Something they learned while gaming elections. Majorities win elections. They now, to this day, call that ‘the will of the people’. /13
Even though the voter suppression they introduced to counter wide enfranchisement in that late 19th and earlier 20th century period means sometimes even a majority of people don’t vote in these elections. But that now is the ‘public will’, majority rules. /14
Which has no similarity with the concept of the public at all, the idea of everybody being in something together, all sinking or swimming, together. Rich, poor, marginalised, majority, minority etc. All replaced now with market segments, which they manipulate at will. /15
And thus life expectancy is now trending downwards in countries again, after 150 years. Because the idea of the public has been under assault since the 1970s, to try to restore pre-1850 hierarchies. You can’t have public health, without a public. /16
The Covid sickness and death we’ve seen matches more closely plagues pre-1850. And this is why, because the public we invented to deal with plagues is now broken. Deliberately, wilfully broken. They didn’t hide what they were doing. /ends
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The one hope I see for turning around the deliberate destruction of the public as an idea and practice since the 1970s, is engineering. The socio-technical complexity of the modern world. The Romans hold the key. The longest and greatest of all empires. The most misunderstood. /1
It’s easy to mock the Romans for lacking the sophistication of the ancient Greeks for example, the poetry and literature and music and mathematics etc. It’s there, but not as rich or dominant in the culture. But Rome’s genius was something else. Building things. /2
Our modern ideas about technology are the ideas of privileged people. We love gadgets and conveniences, but know almost nothing about the work and expertise that goes into creating and maintaining them. The Romans didn’t just build for functional reasons, to have running…/3
We’re probably 50 years too late to rescue the public from political libertarians. They have a big head-start, in destroying it. Every day I see people here desperately trying to come to terms with the loss of a public, that whole populations can be infected, with no recourse. /1
Predominantly as a response I see people trying to mobilise other people to fight it. All very admirable. But the world we’re trying to get back took 150 years to build, and 3 major catastrophes (plagues and wars) from 1850-1950 to give it opportunity to grow. /2
Protests and social media-driven action is not going to replace that any time soon. The libertarians used the lull in existential threat from 1950-onwards to launch their wrecking ball. Everybody now talks about ‘the economy’ (the front edge of that wrecking ball) like they…/3
We are returning to a ‘normal’ form of life, but it’s not the normal of the post-war years, since 1945. If we zoom out, what’s happening with Covid is part of a much greater historical shift, to unwind most of those post-war years. /1
Wars and plagues, the only two things that really change politics. Everything else is theatre, team sports. The 20th century began with a global war, triggering a global pandemic. The mid-century period was dominated by a second global war. /2
Meantime the public health techniques we know about and which aren’t being applied now, mostly became operational in the late 19th century, in response to epidemics. And then the other major societal response to these great upheavals came post-WW2. The ‘welfare state’. /3
Heart disease in the 20th century followed a pretty classic epidemic-type curve. Have Tweeted before that some believe the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic may have been responsible, that heart disease was the chronic after-effects of that pandemic. Some disagree. /1
Many immediately come back and say it’s smoking that’s mostly responsible. The problem with the smoking hypothesis is that there’s no lag between the two curves. Smoking drops at the same time heart disease drops. You can see that lag for lung cancer, in the red. /2
But if smoking really was the cause of the heart disease epidemic, why would heart disease and smoking drop simultaneously in the 1950s-60s, without a lag from one to the other? Reducing smoking instantly reduced heart disease? These changes need time. /3
Edmund Burke is considered a founder of political conservatism. John Howard speaks of him fondly. But to read Burke is to see how much modern conservatism has misunderstood every word he said. A short 🧵on how his ideas could save us, including from Covid. /1
Burke’s work is too vast to capture in a thread. But the essence of much of it, and why he’s seen as the founder of conservatism, is his belief that the most important thing in society is custom and tradition. And his reasoning isn’t on first principles, he thought those…/2
…were the essential things because they were the empirical testing of ideas, in actual life. Customs and traditions are the ideas and practices that survive all debate, because somehow they worked. That’s not to say all customs and traditions are noble, not at all. /3
The non-response to Covid that has surprised many was actually how society was already operating in most areas, after decades of market-based economic politics. Education a great example. Australia’s education outcomes have been in free fall. /1
For this entire century, in fact. The education policies of the 1990s were the major driver. And what were those policies? The libertarian economic market-based (N=1) politics that we’re seeing now with Covid. John Howard’s policies, originally. Aspirational American-Dream…/2
…politics, grafted onto Australia. The AFR is still cheering it on. Where you replace a collective focus, a ‘commonwealth’ (it’s in our name), with individual aspiration. If you have a go, you’ll get a go, that sort of stuff. /3