Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
In today’s (Aug 19) SMH paper was an article by Shane Wright headlined Long COVID leaves multibillion dollar hole in economy.
In an ABC News article by Ahmed Yussuf headlined Long COVID has cost the Australian economy billions in lost work hours, new research says, began with:
These articles refer to the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) paper by Valentina Costantino et al. published on 19 Aug 2024 titled The public health and economic burden of long COVID in Australia, 2022–24: a modelling study. It included:
How many more people need to get chronically ill before changes are made to reducing the impact of long COVID? Will governments engage in a “paradigm shift”?
Alcohol, a defence of moderation and Homer
Professor Devi Sridhar, in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/20/red-wine-drinking-alcohol-health-risks :
“Bad news, red wine drinkers: alcohol is only ever bad for your health. We needn’t be puritanical about having a drink, but we can no longer deny that it harms us, even in small quantities.
[…] In January 2023, the World Health Organization came out with a strong statement: there is no safe level of drinking for health. The agency highlighted that alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, including breast cancer, and that ethanol (alcohol) directly causes cancer when our cells break it down. […] The WHO notes that no studies have shown any beneficial effects of drinking that would outweigh the harm it does to the body. […] The only thing we can say for sure is that “the more you drink, the more harmful it is – or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is”. Alcohol is harmful in whatever form it comes in.”
I like wine, and miss it since alcohol interferes with levodopa, which I must take to stave off Parkinson’s. So I dug into the evidence – and as I thought, Sridhar and the WHO are spinning the case against moderate and occasional drinking.
Take the latest big meta-analysis by Zhao et al, in JAMA, March 2023, covering a total of 4.8m participants and 426,000 deaths in 107 studies. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2802963- Their key conclusion:
“Daily low or moderate alcohol intake was not significantly associated with all-cause mortality risk, while increased risk was evident at higher consumption levels, starting at lower levels for women than men.”
Read this very carefully. There is no good epidemiological reason to think that low alcohol consumption is good for you – the popular red wine story is plain wrong. The association, positive or negative, is too weak to reach statistical significance. By the same token, there is no good epidemiological reason to think that low alcohol consumption is bad for you. The inconclusiveness is itself a striking result, given the enormous size of the pooled meta-sample. If there were a genuine link either way, it would surely have shown up. The relative risk becomes significantly higher only above moderate alcohol consumption (>25g day, one small glass of wine). Intriguingly, Zhao’s tables show that the relative risk, significant or not, is systematically a little lower for occasional and moderate drinkers than for total abstainers.
The scientific basis for the WHO advice that moderate and occasional drinking is bad for you is entirely the physiological observation that any quantity of ethanol damages cells in the lab, promoting a variety of cancers. (So do other things in our daily environment). But this exclusive reliance leaves open the possibility that alcohol has health cobenefits that are not captured by this approach.
The damage that alcohol can do has been evident to the naked eye since the invention of beer in the Neolithic – see the sordid Biblical myth of Lot and his daughters (Genesis 19), which I imagine being first written down by some outraged Sumerian predecessor of Professor Sridhar. Attempts have been made from time to time to ban alcohol, by far the most significant being that in Islam, but elsewhere they have generally failed. In India, Muslims have a life expectancy at birth just one year more than Hindus, but two years less than Christians, which suggests that the benefits of abstention are not great. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440832/v It is therefore a very plausible hypothesis that that alcohol’s high costs are balanced by large benefits.
Where can we look for these? A variety of things are good for health:
Their opposites – passivity, sexual abstinence, loneliness, divorce or bachelorhood, gloom – are therefore bad for you. Homer’s incomplete version of the happy life is still pretty accurate as far as it goes : “dear to us ever is the banquet, and the harp, and the dance, and changes of raiment, and the warm bath, and love, and sleep”. Alcohol does nothing of course to promote exercise or brainwork, or hot baths for that matter. But in our society it lubricates the social interactions required for all the other good behaviours. Physiologically, I have no idea how they work, but it would be surprising if endorphins had no effect on the immune system. Of course, alcohol also facilitates some extremely harmful behaviours, including domestic abuse, hooliganism and dangerous driving. They arise from heavy drinking, not moderate social drinking. My hypothesis does not ignore these evils, but requires that they be dominated by the benefits.
I have then an alternative account of the costs and benefits of alcohol, and it looks more consistent with Zhao’s data than the WHO’s and Sridhars’s puritanism.
1. Alcohol consumed attacks the body at any quantity.
2. At low levels of consumption, the harm is generally roughly balanced by the net benefits of some social behaviours it facilitates.
3. At higher levels of alcohol consumption, the harms increase and the benefits do not, so the harms strongly dominate.
The practical conclusion is a commonsense focus on preventing the slide from light social to addicted heavy drinking, and promoting a drinking culture of moderation and sociability. Note that the hypothesis neatly accounts for the puzzling lack of statistical significance in the risk of light drinking. The health benefits are mediated by social interactions, which are strongly affected by culture, from Mediterranean family Sunday lunches to Northern European Saturday-night binges. Studies in different countries can be expected to give very different results, so the correlations are all over the place.
This analysis raises the question why accredited experts like Sridhar and the WHO should be offering obviously warped and alarmist interpretations of the data on alcohol. I suggest it’s a professional bias based on differential exposure to the evidence. Doctors regularly see alcoholics, wife-beaters, car crash victims, neglected children and others whose lives have been ruined by heavy drinking. They do not professionally see the compensating conviviality and love that light drinking promotes.
There is another reason why people like booze: it tastes good and gives you a buzz. I do not claim that either benefit will lengthen your life, but they do make it more fun. Public health professionals like Prof. Sridhar focus on life expectancy, which can readily be measured, rather than quality of life, which can’t. Economists have tried to pin down QALYs using wage differentials in hazardous jobs, but the method is tricky and controversial. At all events, it is perfectly clear that most people are willing to assume significant risks to health and longevity in pursuit of pleasure and convenience. They are not wrong to do so, though risk assessment is notoriously prone to bias. Suppose every orgasm reduced life expectancy by one day. Do you think most people would give up sex? Light drinking, intensively studied, does not convincingly show any such risk. So doctors, please stop nagging us about it.
Show me where I went wrong.
Footnote: Zhao’s study uses relative risk as its main indicator. This is incomprehensible to the layperson, It is also misleading. Suppose you live in a country where on average two people are killed by lightning every year and one by sharks, The relative risk of lightning over sharks is 2. Eek! Does that mean you should worry much more about lightning than sharks? No. You should not waste time worrying about either: the absolute risk is too low. (Special circumstances can of course change the calculus, for instance if you work as a repairman on high-voltage power lines, or as a lifeguard on a beach with a history of shark attacks.) What we need for rational risk assessment is comprehensible indicators of absolute risk, like life expectancy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8457574/
I agree with both comments
I agree with the first post and disagree with the second post.
“Examining the Social and Economic Costs of Alcohol Use in Australia was published in December 2021 and reported on the costs incurred during the 2017/18 financial year. It was estimated that the overall cost of alcohol use was $66.8 billion, with 5,219 deaths caused by alcohol in that year. Tangible costs accounted for $18.2 billion, with intangible costs amounting to $48.6 billion (e.g. lost quality of life from poor health). The major domains for tangible costs were workplace ($4.0 billion from absenteeism and injury), crime ($3.1 billion), health care ($2.8 billion, in particular through in-patient care) and road traffic crashes ($2.4 billion). A further $2.6 billion was attributed to the tangible costs of premature death. The intangible costs of alcohol were dominated by premature mortality, with the lost years of life valued at $25.9 billion, with a further $20.7 billion from the lost quality of life for those with alcohol dependence.” – NDRI Report – “Examining the Social and Economic Costs of Alcohol Use in Australia: 2017/18”
This is far higher than the $10 billion in lost labour hours from COVID-19 though maybe comparable to all the tangible, intangible and quality of life losses from COVID-19.
Rationally, we would remove both COVID-19 and alcohol from our society. They both appear to do about equal damage overall. I do not see how it is consistent to decry one and defend the other.
Iko: I notice you do not address any part of my extended argument about light drinking.
You suggest prohibition would be logical. The history of prohibition of alcohol and other mood-changing drugs is one of abject failure. They are generally easy to produce. Yeast in particular is a very reliable and readily available symbiont. There are upmarket abbey beers in Belgium where the mash is simply spread out in open-ended barns, relying on the wind to supply the yeast. If you don’t worry about the taste, anybody can make beer in a garage, and distil spirits from it in a school chemistry lab. Addiction means that heavy drinkers will go to great lengths to get the fix they need. The light drinkers might be swayed by the moral case that they should give up their harmless pleasure to save the drunks from themselves – until they realize that the scheme has no chance of working.
What does work, up to a point, is harm reduction. My late friend Mark Kleiman was one of the scholars who have helped shift drugs policy in many places in a more sensible direction. One key insight from him is that booze companies make their money from heavy, not light drinkers, and it is in their interest to encourage them. When (not if) governments legalise cannabis, it is important to try to prevent the emergence of a Big Cannabis industry with a parallel interest in promoting excessive use. So go ahead: ban alcohol advertising and store promotions, impose fairly steep taxes, support AA, alcohol education, and medical treatments for dependence, and doubtless many other things. Just don’t waste time trying to make light drinkers anxious and guilty.
Iko: I notice you do not address any part of my extended argument about light drinking.
You suggest prohibition would be logical. The history of prohibition of alcohol and other mood-changing drugs is one of abject failure. They are generally easy to produce. Yeast in particular is a very reliable and readily available symbiont. There are upmarket abbey beers in Belgium where the mash is simply spread out in open-ended barns, relying on the wind to supply the yeast. If you don’t worry about the taste, anybody can make beer in a garage, and distil spirits from it in a school chemistry lab. Addiction means that heavy drinkers will go to great lengths to get the fix they need. The light drinkers might be swayed by the moral case that they should give up their harmless pleasure to save the drunks from themselves – until they realize that the scheme has no chance of working.
What does work, up to a point, is harm reduction. My late friend Mark Kleiman was one of the scholars who have helped shift drugs policy in many places in a more sensible direction. One key insight from him is that booze companies make their money from heavy, not light drinkers, and it is in their interest to encourage them. When (not if) governments legalise cannabis, it is important to try to prevent the emergence of a Big Cannabis industry with a parallel interest in promoting excessive use. So go ahead: ban alcohol advertising and store promotions, impose fairly steep taxes, support AA, alcohol education, and medical treatments for dependence, and doubtless many other things. Just don’t waste time trying to make light drinkers anxious and guilty.
James,
Indeed, you touched on my point. Light drinkers should be swayed by the moral case that they should give up their “harmless” pleasure to save the “drunks” from themselves. Whenever the privileged enjoy something and the negative externalities are borne by others, the priveleged have a
Oops, a mis-click sent my message too early.
James,
Indeed, you touched on my point. Light drinkers should be swayed by the moral case that they should give up their “harmless” pleasure to save the “drunks” from themselves. Whenever the privileged enjoy something and the negative externalities are borne by others, the privileged always have ways of rationalising, justifying and enjoying their privileges.
You will notice from the quotes that I question your assumptions behind “harmless” and the stigmatising of “drunks”. Full disclosure, I was a person who suffered severely, albeit episodically, from mental illness from the age of about 16 to the age of about 33. (This put me a generation *behind* my contemporaries.) Since the age of 33 – now 70 – I have been what is quaintly termed by AA a “non-practicing alcoholic”. This term somewhat misses the mark of the genetic and neurological realities.
To detail slightly, my genetic and neurological realities mean I am a person with BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) (about the best available short term) who has struggled much with anxiety, depression, anger and in youth with severe dissociative episodes under stress. The battle of managing this condition is life-long even without alcohol or other psychoactive substances in the mix. I take nothing stronger than two instant coffees a day.
The term “harmless drinking” is incorrect. Alcohol is not harmless when harms to all (the negative externalities) are considered. The ubiquitous legal availability of alcohol spreads the harm far and wide: not only to people who are vulnerable to alcohol but also to all the people affected by people who cannot control their reaction to alcohol. High vulnerability to alcohol is determined genetically and from that (obviously) neurologically. Developmental and life stressors also play a role. Just as I certainly would not mock you for suffering from Parkinson’s disease, I expect to not be mocked as a drunk or as a drunk in remission. In each case, things have occurred and can occur beyond the sufferer’s control.
If a person is truly a “light drinker” and completely non-addicted and non-habituated in any significant way then that person should be able to give up that little harmless pleasure because it would actually mean little to nothing to them. Weigh that little or even no meaning and need against the massive harm of alcohol to society at large and hen the decision to boycott alcohol should be easy. If they cannot or will not do so but rather defend their “harmless” drinking vigorously then methinks they protest too much. There are already tendrils of the grip of the grape upon them or else they have simply not thought it through logically and ethically.
The argument that we should allow our civilization to succumb and surrender to some of the very worst of human inventions (like the methods of inveigling, manipulating and addicting people to substances and also activities, like gambling, all for profit) is bereft of considered thought at least, if not bereft of ethics as well. All unnecessary harmful substances and processes should be strictly controlled with a view to eventual discontinuance or eradication from civilization, as the case may be. Otherwise it’s not a civilization, it’s an exploitative and collapsing travesty. That goes for CO2 emissions, COVID-19, serious pathogens in general, and seriously addictive and damaging substances and activities, to name some of the important categories. Fundamentally, it’s all the same thing, all the same mistake.
Iko: I apologise for my thoughtless use of the stigmatizing “drunk” instead of the neutral “alcoholic” or “heavy drinker”. I also sympathize with your personal health burdens, as you kindly do with mine.
I stand though with my argument. Just how would you set about eliminating alcohol, or for that matter gambling, prostitution, the flu and HIV viruses, and all the other denizens of Pandora’s box, aka the human condition?
Light drinkers, whose alcohol consumption imposes negligible externalities on others, already pay more than their Pigovian share of specific alcohol taxes, which ideally should all fall on heavy drinkers. That is not practicable, and the light drinkers in fact pay up without complaint. Fair enough.
James,
I ought to apologize for the form and self-righteousness of my rant. And I do. Sorry for that.
I defend the substantive content though, despite its apparent unrealistic nature to many. I view quite a lot of “unrealistic to change this / impossible to eradicate that” arguments as forms of what I call “extantism”. With your knowledge about diplomacy and the EU you likely know that the word “extantism” has already been appropriated by some of the theorists of international relations and institutionalism, in relation to the survival of micro-states.
“Membership of an international or regional organisation legitimises the existence of a small state and confirms its territorial integrity and sovereignty; this is a concept known as extantism (Maass, 2017, p. 108).
However, I use “extantism” in another sense as the theory that what exists now in social practices and relations is all that can exist. I mean this particularly when that which is currently existent has a long history. What exists and/or has existed is all that can exist. This is the general hard form of the extantist thesis, in my terms. It fundamentally denies the possibility of the emergence of genuine novelty in human affairs.
It’s a type of thinking which, in my view, forecloses possibilities before they have even been properly considered. “Humanity has never done this, therefore it is impossible.” Needless to say, I don’t agree with this thinking when it is applied to clearly actionable ills and harms.
You ask: “Just how would you set about eliminating alcohol, or for that matter gambling, prostitution, the flu and HIV viruses, and all the other denizens of Pandora’s box, aka the human condition?”
With regard to pathogens and with regard to social ills, I would take a stepped approach in each case. The process would be reduction to eradication / elimination. Of the two types of cases, eradication of certain harmful pathogens (the ones you mention plus COVID-19 for example) would be the easier. This is if we took them seriously and sought their realistic and properly defined eradication (one step short of extinction of the pathogens which would be ideal but likely unrealistic). With all the tools at our disposal, the near eradication of epidemic flu and the eradication of HIV and COVID-19 are eminently feasible. Social attitudes and the political economy they are embedded in (neoloberalism) are the problem. We have the knowledge and the resources.
I can’t write too much on this or as usual I become TLDNR. Suffice it to say here that many epidemic and even endemic diseases (and perhaps all of the epidemic respiratory diseases) owe their origins and evolution to civilization itself: zoonosis from wild and domesticated animals as the source and evolution in humans from close living and frequent transmission for the evolution. They are in essence diseases of close civilized living, hyper-mobility (compared to hunter-gatherer living) and food production methods. One pathogen, COVID-19, with the mountains of circumstantial evidence revealed to date, can be fairly certainly assigned to lab creation, lab leak and failure to control for ideological reasons from neoliberal capitalism (and from Chinese autocracy and its state capitalism succumbing to neoliberal capitalism).
If we understand the close of relation (and even co-evolution) of these pathogen-caused diseases of civilization with the production and consumption processes practices and living practices of modern civilization itself, we can then frame the questions about how we modify our civilization to not give a carpet ride to these pathogens, while retaining and enhancing everything we regard as clearly good about our civilization. Engineering for clean indoor and clean travel / transit air (just as the UK Victorians engineered for sanitation and clean water), using all available layers of protection, pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical and using our testing, data collection, data analysis and now AI capabilities for science rather than for profiteering, influence, misinformation and disinformation would easily enable us to control and then eradicate these diseases. And to do so without draconian measures and with great improvements to human health and welfare and indeed to the economy.
This has become too long. A second post will address alcohol and society.
Continuing after my reciprocal apology and preamble on infectious disease, I will address alcohol reform into the future. I might even term myself a “futurist abolitionist”, meaning that should be a quite realistic final goal although it will not happen in our lifetimes.
The internet page linked below is brief and useful to gain an overview of the genuine severity and tremendous costs of alcohol abuse to individuals and society. I would add that I regard “alcohol abuse” as not only any excess and harmful drinking by users but also the exploitation and profiteering on human vulnerability and misery by many others (persons and entities) involved in the production, distribution, wholesale and retail of alcohol, plus finally excess government reliance of taxing this traffic in human misery and destruction (as I see it) for topping up revenue: certainly while refusing to levy adequate taxes on wealthy corporations, businesses and persons. The correct setting of Pigouvian taxes is contextual in this and other senses.
https://www.surgeons.org/about-racs/position-papers/alcohol-related-harm-2016
Overall, my argument is evolutionary (and emergence related) in both the biological and cultural senses. It has to do with what one might term widespread enculturation and thus the widespread and shared neurological patterning in the brains (plural) of the social population or super colony of humans (our nations as cities and hinterlands are certainly super colonies in the biological sense). This patterning occurs via all formal and informal, all legal and criminal, and all sub-culture enculturation and occurs via the neural “wiring” or “re-wiring” or connections made between synapses etc. in the healthy human brain which demonstrates very significant neuroplasticity for at least the first two decades of life and is capable of having these paths further enhanced (or sabotaged) over ensuing decades (at least) and thence embedded as crystallised intelligence, basic assumptions, aptitudes, tasted and desires. People are to some very considerable extent “wired” by their upbringing, milieu, schooling and enculturation.
This is the context within which relatively uneducated, unreflective, uncritical, credulous or authority-awed people (one could use many more adjectives and this means most people in our propaganda-, misinformation- and disinformation-dominated society) advance their extantist positions. (Using extantism in the sense I defined it in my last post.) Much of what passes for wise conservatism and realism is, or may conceivably be, enculturated extantism and an unawarenss of the far-reaching powers of biological evolution and cultural evolution operating in tandem and in iterative feedback fashion to generate radical changes to the human biological and cultural trajectories.
Speaking at the genetic level, some people are not well evolved or well endowed genetically and/or epigenetically to metabolise alcohol and/or deal relatively well with it neurologically and thence behaviourally. This lack, if overall lack it be, could be based on not having forebears who evolved to tolerate significant or even quite moderate alcohol consumption. It could also be based on an individual getting a gene mix that lacks the necessary mutations and even this lack being combined with other developmental and neurological challenges.
“To engage in alcohol consumption and the development of an alcohol use disorder appear to be common to primates, and is not a specific human phenomenon.[9] (Modern globalised) Humans have access to alcohol in far greater quantity than non-human primates, and the availability increased, particularly with the development of agriculture.[10] The tolerance to alcohol is not equally distributed throughout the world’s population.[11] Genetics of alcohol dehydrogenase indicate resistance has arisen independently in different cultures.[12] In North America, Native Americans have the highest probability of developing an alcohol use disorder compared to Europeans and Asians.[13][14][15][16] Different alcohol tolerance also exists within Asian groups, such as between Chinese and Koreans.[17] The health benefits of a modest alcohol consumption reported (doubtfully) in people of European descent appear not to exist among people of African descent.[18]” – Wikipedia.
I think we could also add to the list of those ethnicities with a relative metabolic and neurological vulnerability to alcohol, those people of full or part aboriginal descent. We can also add to the list of white people with clear and severe vulnerability to alcohol myself, as I disclosed a few posts back. There ought be no shame in this either but as I know firsthand, sometimes the long-standing shame and self-stigmatisation can be perhaps the most debilitating and self-undermining psychological factor of all. Instead of blame and shame, there ought to be reasoned help, treatment, education and prevention. As we all know I think, different people can be vastly different in their tolerance and reactions to many drugs and medications. A great deal of this is genetically and epigenetically and then there are the complex interactions with deprivation, developmental issues, poverty and abuse.
I wrote above “if lack it be”. Lacking resistance to or tolerance to alcohol is not a lack if people simply don’t like it and feel no need (for the taste or the effects). Such folk are fine unless there is some kind of undue or coercive social pressure on them to drink. Lacking resistance to or tolerance to alcohol is not a lack if one lives in an era, region or environment where there is no or very little opportunity to drink alcohol, no experience of it and thence obviously no felt need for it. Indeed, every metabolic capacity comes at some kind of cost. Indigenous people who lack the genes and capacity to deal with alcohol do not carry the cost of having that metabolic “machinery” set up to run. They may, in a sense, have evolutionarily used a spare metabolic potential or even spare energy (not implying knowledge, decision, volition in this of course) to evolve some other feature more useful in their native environment. It may be (speculation on my part) that long-evolved desert dwellers tolerate water deprivation better than long-evolved wet environment dwellers.
All this is to say, firstly, that ability to process and tolerate alcohol in large or small amounts still carries a metabolic and even likely an evolutionary opportunity cost overhead. These costs are not noticed personally, not significant, for light drinkers when food and other necessities and luxuries are all abundant. In the second instance, what you don’t know and have no experience of, out of the non-necessities, you cannot miss. While adult persons of current living generations who can drink lightly and enjoyably could still miss it, future generations raised and enculturated to not know alcohol (except as chemistry knowledge) and to not have experienced it (by and large) would not miss it. It addition they could even develop cultural history and ethical system that avers that only “still culturally and ethically challenged civilizations were comprised of people who still needed and drank alcohol and it was indeed a very significant net ill to all societies which tolerated it and even perversely lauded it and the capacity to imbibe.
The short Iko is we can culturally and biologically evolve ourselves out of the use of it and we ought to mindfully proceed on that path. It might take human several generations (if we have that time – you know climate change, pandemicene and all that) and it would a great net good to humanity and the environment too. The measures proposed by the RACs would be a start plus adequate (not excessive Pigouvian taxes) plus other education and preventative measures plus assistance for the alcohol vulnerable. I got that assistance when I sought it but I was still economically and socially privileged. Slowly over time, maybe a 100 year plan or more, we should seek to enculturate ourselves out of it and even perhaps evolve out it. Encultrating ourselves out of it would mean mindfully re-programming ourselves, which even equates to mindfully re-wiring our (humanity’s) firmware. People rewire their CNS all the time. It’s called culture, sport, learning, practice etc. Why not mindfully, ethically and programmatically rewire it generationally over decades and centuries if we have that time? It would then also affect our actual evolution, most likely also in a positive way.
Is there a comparison table to countries where culturally and legally drinking alcohol is illegal? And yes, I am thinking about strict Islamic countries where alcohol drinking is illegal with severe consequences – by the studies definition, they should outlive the rest of the planet but the country with the longest lifespan is Japan where alcohol consumption is widespread.Having lived there, I can attest to the quality of their beers and spirits (sadly their wines need further development).
Anon,
The problem is confounding variables.
You are putting up a good fight, and I will think more about what you say, Iko.
Yet, I am not sure about this part: “And to do so without draconian measures and with great improvements to human health and welfare and indeed to the economy.”
I am not at all sure that such a regime would not need “draconian” measures. I don’t know how you feel about the elites in your country – but I’m not that happy with the ones here. I don’t think I want them making these decisions for me. Where will it stop? Any number of things could be called “harmful.”
And if we had such a strong public health system, couldn’t we have a system set up in which those vulnerable to alcohol abuse could be registered, and then no one could sell to them? Could we not achieve most of the benefits of eradication, without eradication then? Your imagined future society sounds a little bit Borg-y to me.
But again, it is an interesting argument you make. I will think about it more. Maybe I’m too pessimistic about human nature.
N,
My argument is about intentionally and in a planned, long-range, multi-generational fashion *changing* human nature. The fact that I want to change human nature indicates how pessimistic and dissatisfied I am with current human nature.
There is always an argument about nature and nurture and the role these play in our make-up individually and as a species. I add to this argument, the idea of programming. Upbringing, education and enculturation do, very literally, program us, program our brains. These processes encode and/or develop in our brains both software and firmware, the later via the phenomenon of neural plasticity. We must be conscious and ethical about the programming we put into people.
There is good programming and there is bad programming. “You want to be what you see,” as Quincy Jones said when explaining his adolescent criminality, in the slums of Chicago, IIRC. Then he saw and heard musicians too and his life changed direction. He also developed an eventual problem with alcohol BTW. We must always remember the genuinely important individual autonomy and creativity in every person and these qualities must be cherished and developed, not stultified. Humans are complex and uncontainable in many ways. We won’t be able to turn ourselves or others into robots. I think that risk is vanishingly small.
Our command and control and feedback / feed forward hardware includes the brain proper but rather more extensively the CNS (Central Nervous System) and the peripheral nervous system. We must add in also the limbic system (part of the brain and supporting emotion, behavior, memory, and olfaction) and the endocrine system (which uses chemical messengers called hormones to regulate a range of bodily functions through the release of hormones). So the body and the brain have both electrical and chemical command and control, feedback / feed forward systems and these interact with each other as well as all the organs.
I return here to the ideas of human programming and intentional rather than accidental or opportunistic evolution of humans. There are clear examples of humans evolving because of opportunities and opportune / fortuitous mutations which allowed humans to exploit environmental (and cultural!) opportunities. The best example perhaps is the mutation that led to the ability to drink milk (digest lactose) after infancy. It appears from evidence that there was a mutation about 10,000 years ago, roughly in the area now known as Turkey, in an originating individual, to the gene that shut down the production of lactase – the enzyme that enables digestion of lactose – when infancy ended.
This mutation was propagated (the individual and his progeny bred) and proved so advantageous to its possessors that it became fixed and eventually dominant in certain populations. The increase in food supply enabled nomadic herders of the era to gain multiples of extra sustenance from their herds in that the necessity for destructive slaughter of the beasts for food was much reduced: (slaughter being destructive to maintenance and growth of the herds and thus becoming a more selective and elective activity). This increase in sustenance led to a boom in tribal population and indeed added a boost to growth and strength making for more productive mothers and more powerful warriors, to put it bluntly. With this huge advantage, conquest as rape, interbreeding and pillage was supercharged. The mutation spread with the conquering tribes. Such was the nature of humans in those times. Such is our nature today but perhaps ameliorated by further evolution as well as the further enculturation techniques we have developed.
Today, 35 percent of the global population, mostly people with European ancestry, can digest lactose in adulthood. So we can see that the mutation led to regional domination but not global domination. Many other factors affected European colonial success for example, the most important perhaps being the diseases Europeans brought with them like smallpox and the dieases they met and had little resistance too, like malaria. But we can see that the ability to digest lactose in adulthood was a factor, among many others. which drove or enabled successful colonisation (successful in the view of the colonisers).
These ideas and indeed the research and scientific literature reports come from “The 10,000 year explosion – How civilization accelerated human evolution” – Gregory Cochrane and Henry Harpending. Before these writers and perhaps more importantly before the research they report, there was a dominant theory in anthropology, speaking we now know from authority and not from science, that human evolution stopped about 60,000 years ago when we became as we are term it “modern humans”. This is an absurd notion now that we have the hindsight of far more data and a greater understanding of genetics and evolution. Any time conditions change markedly they rupture an existing equilibrium and evolution accelerates. The advent of the continuous civilizational, cultural and technological revolutions of the last 10,000 years and especially the last 3,000 years or so have in fact changed the direction of and greatly accelerated human evolution.
We have an opportunity now to engage in the intentional rather than the accidental or opportunistic evolution of humans. It is sometimes pejoratively argued that this would be social engineering” and “an experiment”. It would be. It would also be genetic engineering in sense (by proxy selection). But we do these things anyway. The choice is for it to be done consciously and decidedly for ethical reasons and not blindly and for unethical reasons. Creating the dominant ideologies of capitalism and neoliberalism has been and continues to be a blind experiment in human evolution and as we know now probably also a blind experiment in human extinction and mass extinction in general.
There are perils of unforeseen consequences in all courses humans take. The world is a complex and fraught place. But proceeding with some foresight and considered intention has always been, I argue, a safer procedure than blind progress.
Oh dear, I’ve just learned that quoting Henry Harpending is fraught despite his science credentials. The whole arena I have entered is a minefield as wiser heads than mine would know. Being a eugenicist could be the nicer thing I might be accused of. Just to be clear, genetic ancestry ethnicity can be more clearly and scientifically defined than race, which as a term is broad, poorly defined and terribly fraught.
Also, to be clear I am not advocating the use of eugenicist methods such as involuntary sterilization, segregation and social exclusion to rid society of individuals deemed to be unfit. I am advocating specific harm reduction policies for social and physical ills which could operate in a way to enculturate people in a new way and essentially help them to behave better. This might in the long run encourage a genetic selection to more civilized, compassionate and sharing people rather than selection for the enculturation and even possible natural selection for selfish and callous people which seems to me to be the case under neoliberalism.
But perhaps best that I leave this topic.
Being not a scientist, as a mere speculator, I think it’s quite possible we are still evolving. (Maybe stopping that would be the difficult thing.) I think the plastics in our food supply are definitely and obviously changing women’s bodies, f.e. I mean, visually it seems really obvious. I happen to think this is bad, and I hope we stop it.
I’m not ambitious enough though to think we are changing “human nature.” It seems stable enough. And I don’t know how to or who could bring about the kind of consensus that would be needed to make the changes you want.
However, otoh, I do tend to think, “couldn’t we learn not to have wars?” Just that one thing, maybe we can give up. Technology is giving us a way to see ourselves in a new way. Maybe some good will come of it. So I don’t think that there is any harm in your ideas. You don’t seem in the least fascist. We can all have our hopes for the future.
N,
It is certainly true that our food system including junk food, our pharmaceutical system products when misused and wastes like plastics and chemicals including endocrine disruptors are affecting our health negatively, men and women. Microplastics are everywhere in our bodies (and brains!) because they are everywhere in the environment, in the food we eat and the water we drink. The latest research seems to indicate that declining human fertility and the rise in dementia are at least partly related to these factors.
People are “addicted” (propagandised, enculterated, habituated and even genuinely endorphin-rush addicted) to many of the products and services of the modern system. The entire economy is systemically dependent on over-production and also on over-exploitation of humans and environment. In a way, this economy is a mega-machine (Lewis Mumford’s term) which runs us as much as we run it. Even those who think they are free are less free than they think.
I was unware, until I checked, of the very serious concerns about Henry Harpending’s ideology. Yes, scientists have ideologies too.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/henry-harpending
It is unfortunate, but all too human, that people, scientists included, mix science and ideology. At the very least, when it comes to science, it raises concerns about confirmation bias in research and interpretation. However, I think the fundamental thesis is sound. Human evolution, like all evolution, never ceases. It may slow to a crawl in periods of equilibria and then speed up in periods of punctuated equilibria. I think it is clear that civilization itself and then rapid scientific, technological and social change have inaugurated and continued an extended (human generational scales) a punctuated equilibrium. Hence an acceleration of significant human evolution is to be expected over scales of centuries.
You mention war. If the dividends of peace are greater than the dividends of war and conquest, and they are now in a world at capacity and with modern technology, trade and interconnection, then being peaceable ought confer a reproductive advantage, all else remaining the same. If this is true then over time, (many centuries) humans would evolve to be a less violent, less war-like species. If our species survives the next five or ten centuries say, without a collapse into chaos and barbarism, then this could conceivably eventuate. But surviving that critical period will be the problem given the mistakes we made after we had enough knowledge to not the make them.
I single out the period from the 1970s to the present. We had enough environmental and complex systems knowledge to not make the mistakes we made. We also had enough economic and technical knowledge, yet the greed, over-consumption and inequality pressures and ideology of neoliberalism arose and basically ruined and threw away many of our chances. Let’s hope we have some chances left.
As usual, we continue to fall behind in the battle against COVID-19. The mutating virus is winning the race against our vaccines. Our tech is slow. Our approvals are even slower. The mutating virus is winning spikes down. I predicted this virtually from the start of this pandemic: that our tech and our political economy would lose the race against the virus. That letting the virus spread would be a disaster. In our political economy system, vaccines are primarily produced for profits and only secondarily produced to protect people. Producing and distributing badly out-of-date vaccines (relative to the rapid mutation rate) *is* the business model. The costs are lower and the profits higher.
From Eric Topol on Jul 21:
“The new boosters (vs. KP.2) should be available the first week of September (in the USA). It takes ~90 days make them from the FDA decision on June. But it didn’t have to be that way. We’ve known about KP.3’s marked growth advantage since April and could have made the call then to make the new booster. That would have been aligned well with the current wave.
But the FDA has tried to force fit Covid into an annual shot like flu, even though all data tells us it doesn’t follow an annual pattern. Even the CDC acknowledges this now.
COVID-19 can surge throughout the year. COVID-19 peaks in the winter, like many other respiratory virus illnesses, but can also surge at other times.
This has left high-risk folks betwixt and between. Getting the current booster (XBB.1.5), a poor match vs KP.3, or waiting to get the new booster in ~6 weeks. This is clearly suboptimal and could have been avoided. Meanwhile, not enough is being done to get nasal vaccines (to prevent infections) and universal shots (vs all variants) ready, which would get us out of this vicious cycle of waning immunity, new variants, and reliance on shots which don’t achieve mucosal immunity.” – Eric Topol.
I have read something which indicates that Australia won’t even be getting the KP.2 boosters later this year. We will be getting the old JN.1 boosters. Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. Various authorities are saying the JN.1 booster will be (more or less) adequate for protection against the KP strains. Even Raina MacIntyre has been saying this. She may be correct. She is one of the very few experts I give any credence to at this point. We could also get the KP.2 boosters if our TGA updates its approvals. But I am just guessing and I am not hopeful. It seems that our Aussie model is to force fit COVID-19 vaccination to the annual model and into the bargain take significantly outdated castoffs as our “latest” vaccine. Maybe we get a discount. Too bad if the protection is poor.
Of course they can’t make vaccines before the mutation arises and of course there must be a development and approval process. But both could be significantly sped up without risk. This is essentially what Eric Topol is saying.