In the last Topic of the Week article I described the emerging debate among scientists, technologists, philosophers, tech entrepreneurs, and others about what are termed “existential risks”, or alternatively “global catastrophic risks”.
I went on to elaborate on one of the commonly mentioned existential risks, the emergence of a form of globalized totalitarianism powered by modern surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence, a nightmarish possibility that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime is well on the to realizing within China’s borders.
In this article I will briefly expand on the discussion in the earlier article about the nature of existential risk, especially its variegated nature and the problem of weighing and prioritizing risks that vary greatly in probability of occurrence, impact, timing, and actionability.
I will then argue that the growing power and financial clout of the CCP dictatorship is enabling it to not only corral international institutions like the WHO and the UN to its purposes, but even more disturbingly is increasingly able to shape and constrain discourse on key issues within the liberal democracies.
This has been starkly illustrated by the CCP’s role in suppressing the Covid-19 lab leak hypothesis even enlisting key scientific figures in America and elsewhere and highly prestigious scientific journals like the Lancet and Nature to support its narratives.
This influence is likely to become ever more pervasive unless it is successfully exposed, widely understood and resisted by governments, corporations and the public within the democracies. This will allow it to corrupt and limit our ability to openly and honestly debate the most important issues we face – including existential risks.
In the third and final article in this series I will pose the question: Could some of the climate change policies being pursued in the Western democracies increase the CCP’s relative economic power, and enhance its chances of becoming a global totalitarian hegemon? How could policies be adjusted to avoid this?
Existential risks are risks that could extinguish our species, or permanently degrade or destroy human civilization.
Several cross-disciplinary centres have been set up in academic centres to study such risks, including Cambridge and Oxford universities and MIT (the co-founder of the Cambridge one, Professor Huw Price, gave a talk on this to the Blackheath Philosophy Forum).
A number of compendia of existential risks have been published. The daddy of then all is the 567 page tome Global Catastrophic Risk (2011) edited by philosopher Nick Bostrom and astrophysicist Milan M. Cirkovic.
The British cosmologist (and current Astronomer Royal) Martin Rees came out with On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (2018), and just last year Oxford philosopher Toby Ord added his contribution The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020).
The authors of the above three compendia differ in their assessment of the likelihood of civilization being seriously impacted, or even extinguished, by the risks they describe. Rees is most pessimistic, putting the extinction risk in the next century at 1 in 2, while Bostrom puts it at 1 in 4, while Toby Ord suggests more cheerfully that it is 1 in 6.
None these estimates are definitive, of course, and I draw some comfort from recalling in the 1970s claims of a fifty-fifty chance of nuclear war by the turn of the millennium.
In the earlier article I mentioned the great variety of existential risks, including ones that are of purely natural origin while others are generated—in whole or part—by human activity, with the latter assuming greater salience because of scientific and technological advances in our own time.
They vary in terms of the probability of the catastrophic event, and its impact. There are low probability but very high impact events, such as a possible asteroid collision. There are dangers that may unfold gradually over time, such as those posed by climate change, but which some argue could impact quite rapidly if “tipping points” are reached. There could be pandemics of varying severity, some of natural origin, some from dangerous lab experiments as seems increasingly likely of Covid-19.
Then there are risks where it is very hard to get any sense of probability, what former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously termed “unknown unknowns”.
This includes scientific experiments that create extreme conditions rarely found in nature. In his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb the historian Richard Rhodes describes how at one point scientists developing the bomb in the 1940s worried that detonating a fission bomb could set of a chain of fusion reactions of hydrogen in the atmosphere and ocean that would destroy the earth.
Humanity erased in one giant puff of smoke. A pretty dire prospect. The scientists in question were able to satisfy themselves that this would not happen. How confident were they about this? What if their theoretical understandings or their calculations turned out to be wrong? Did they try to put a number on the probability?
Such errors happen. After World War 2 ended German scientists working on their own atomic bomb program, including quantum physics pioneer Werner Heisenberg, inadvertently disclosed via “bugs” placed in their accommodation by the British, that the decision to abandon their efforts was the result of a miscalculation that greatly overstated the critical mass of fissionable matter needed to get an explosion.
In his book (mentioned above) cosmologist Martin Rees raises the same issue about experiments being currently conducted in particle accelerators at CERN in Europe and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US that aim to create in microcosm conditions that existed nanoseconds after the Big Bang.
According to Rees, some scientists worried we could all be sucked into a black hole, or the earth reduced to a hyper-dense mass around 100 metres across, or the experiments might even cause a “rip in the fabric of spacetime”.
How do you attach probabilities to any of this? How reliable would they be? What would be an acceptable risk of a planet-destroying event? One in a billion? One in a trillion? Zero?
And how do you address what studies seem to show is endemic to us all: A great difficulty, in some cases incapacity, to make rational judgements about relative risk? This becomes a much larger problem in a politicized climates, where people have locked themselves into ideologically laden positions.
I struck this when I was Minister for Higher Education in the early 1990s, having to fight bureaucratic resistance to funding a small but remarkably productive effort by a group of astronomers at the Anglo-Australian observatory (near Canberra).
This program was devoted to finding and tracking dangerous “near earth objects”, asteroids and comets potentially on a collision course with earth. This required the princely sum of $300,000 per annum, less than the salary of the average municipal town clerk these says. I kept it going while in the portfolio by using a discretionary ministerial slush fund, but no subsequent minister, of either party, would do likewise so the program closed, to the consternation of NASA which now has its own program.
This example raises a further complication: actionability. Some existential risks arising purely from nature are beyond human control – Rees offers cosmic gamma ray bursts and super-volcanic eruptions that could block out the sun for decades as example.
The asteroid collision case probably strikes most people as another one that we just have to be philosophical about. However a considerable amount of thought and research has gone into how, given sufficient notice, ideally by detection during an earlier orbit around the sun, this could be averted by slightly deflecting the object’s path.
This would require advanced space flight and probably nuclear weapons capabilities, which would undoubtedly push some ideological buttons.
So we have all these varied, asymmetrical risks, some of which involve what might be called terminal events as far as the human species is concerned, some may take effect gradually, others suddenly, some are not terminal but have the potential to severely degrade our quality of life. Some are purely natural, some are the result, in whole or part, of human activity. Some are amenable to prevention or mitigation, others not.
And some are susceptible to politics factors that either under or over emphasize their significance in the overall scheme of things.
So, what if we get a conflict of priorities. What if actions or policies to mitigate one form of risk exacerbates another?
In the third and final article in this series I will argue that we are looking at just such a situation when we weigh the prospect that I described in the previous article of the rise of a global totalitarian hegemon, the CCP regime in China, against the much more widely discussed – and acted on – risk of damaging climate change.
In this forthcoming article I will describe the CCP’s dual circulation economic strategy, described this way in an article on the Project Syndicate website:
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s new strategy centres on the concept of “dual circulation.” Behind the technical-sounding phrase lies an idea that could change the global economic order. Instead of operating as a single economy that is linked to the world through trade and investment, China is fashioning itself into a bifurcated economy. One realm (“external circulation”) will remain in contact with the rest of the world, but it will gradually be overshadowed by another one (“internal circulation”) that will cultivate domestic demand, capital, and ideas.
The purpose of dual circulation is to make China more self-reliant. After previously basing China’s development on export-led growth, policymakers are trying to diversify the country’s supply chains so that it can access technology and know-how without being bullied by the United States. In doing so, China will also seek to make other countries more dependent on it, thereby converting its external economic links into global political power.
Could the climate change policies currently being pursued by the major democracies, especially the rapid abandonment of fossil fuels and the rush to implement renewables like wind and solar facilitate the CCP strategy to turns “its external economic links into global political power”.
I think the answer to this question is yes, and I will make this case in detail, and consider its implications, in the next Topic of the Week article.
But as a precursor to exploring this future danger I think it is important to consider the success the CCP has already achieved in leveraging its economic and financial power to influence the Western democracies.
This is a major contrast with the Cold War, when the economies of the Soviet block and the democracies were pretty much hermetically separated. Today, the CCP has a wide array of linkages into all sectors of Western societies, especially the economies, but also education, especially higher education, the research systems, media and entertainment.
This provides the regime with tremendous power to bribe, coerce and intimidate business, political and cultural elites, ironically turning them into what Mao Zedong termed a comprador class that he used to designate Chinese figures who acted as enablers and apologists for foreign powers and are “wholly appendages of the international bourgeoisie, depending upon imperialism for their survival and growth”.
This is a threat that is upon us now, not some abstract future possibility. To see this it is worth considering how the debate about the Covid-19 virus has unfolded. At the crudest level, we are all aware of the trade retaliation against Australia for calling for a proper inquiry into this.
But the story is much more interesting, and disturbing, than this.
In his latest book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (May 2021) the British/American economic historian Niall Ferguson asserts that:
In recent years we may have allowed one risk — namely climate change — to draw our attention away from the others … In January, even as a global pandemic was getting under way — as flights laden with infected people were leaving Wuhan for destinations all over the world — the discussions at the World Economic Forum were focused almost entirely on questions of environmental responsibility, social justice and governance.
In the above quote Ferguson describes how, at the outset of the pandemic, Western elite attention was overwhelmingly focussed on climate change, followed closely by the “Woke” Left’s peculiar and counterproductive conception of “social justice”.
In January 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic seemed to be essentially confined to China, with even the sainted Dr Anthony Fauci advising the American public that “this is not a major threat for the people of the United States. And this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about."
Trump’s (closely followed by Scott Morrison’s) decision to close the border to China was denounced was “racist” and “xenophobic” by the CCP regime, as well as their sock-puppets in the World Health Organisation (WHO), one of whom inanely asserted that “viruses have no ethnicity”, as if anyone ever suggested otherwise.
Both the CCP regime and the WHO also lied through their teeth about the transmissibility of the virus and, as well as its increasingly probable origin in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was carrying out the incredibly dangerous “gain of function” research on bat viruses.
So, where am I going with this? Here’s the rub: I think Ferguson is right about the possibility of concern with the most politically salient risks “crowding out” consideration of other dangers.
But what the pandemic illustrates is that things can be far worse when you add to the picture a totalitarian state, with tentacles extending deep into the liberal democracies, intent on pressing its own narrative, and with the clout to do so.
Every person with even the most tenuous connection with reality should not be surprised the CCP regime would suppress dissenting views internally, including the disappearance, persecution and mysterious death of courageous Chinese whistle blowers, or even to bend international institutions like the WHO to its purposes (let alone hopelessly corrupted outfits like the UN and its agencies).
That, sadly, is par for the course these days. But what is genuinely surprising, and deeply disturbing, is the extent to which the CCP has been able to constrain, indeed to shape, public discourse about the pandemic in the democracies.
Most people who follow the news are now aware of the extent to which big corporate interests, desperate to access the huge Chinese market, can be bullied into becoming enforcers of CCP orthodoxy (Nike, the NBA etc). Sports stars, movie actors, can be seen making grovelling apologies for slight verbal transgressions, like the heinous crime of inadvertently referring to Taiwan as “country”.
The social media and tech giants, likewise, became increasingly censorious about anything that supported the “conspiracy theory” that Covid-19 could have originated in a lab. The problem was compounded when Trump publicly supported the idea, prompting the usual Pavlovian response from the mainstream media, as well as the “useful idiots” of the woke Left, all too willing to join the CCP’s propagandists with talk of Sinophobia and racism.
But what about Western scientific institutions and publications?
Recall how, in the months following the pandemic outbreak, the key developments relegating the lab leak hypothesis to the status of conspiracy theory were the publication of articles in the Lancet and Nature journals, two of the most prestigious journals in the world of medicine and science respectively.
Surely, you would hope, such journals would be beyond the reach of CCP influence, would have an unshakeable commitment to scientific objectivity and rigour?
Well no, as it turns out. The two journals that published articles dismissing the lab leak hypothesis are both beneficiaries, either directly or through their parent companies, of grants or other benefits provided by the CCP regime. The Lancet article was organized by Dr Peter Daszak, who was directly involved in directing funds to support gain-of-function work in the Wuhan lab. Daszak also heads the Lancet’s review committee tasked with assessing submitted articles on Covid-19.
For a thorough and scrupulously fair account of these matters check out this video by the excellent YouTuber Mallen Baker:
According to an article just published on the Voice of America (VOA) website, a number of highly and relevantly credentialed scientists have complained that it has become almost impossible to get anything seriously considered for publication if it supports the lab leak theory:
They say the editors of the influential journals rebuffed dozens of critical articles which raised at least the possibility of the coronavirus being engineered and that it might have subsequently leaked from a lab in Chinese city of Wuhan.
Among the complainants is Nikolai Petrovsky, professor of medicine at Flinders University in South Australia, who told VOA:
The managers of these journals may have wanted to appease the Chinese Communist Party, as China is where an increasing proportion of their revenue comes from, and China has made it clear that those journals it supports must agree to adhere to its policy agendas.
So many papers questioning the origins were quickly rejected by the journal editors at Nature and Lancet, etc. without even being sent for review. This early rejection was therefore presumably largely not on scientific grounds but on political or other grounds determined at a high level within those journals.
What this serves to make clear is that the rise of the CCP regime as a global totalitarian hegemon is not a remote and distant possibility. A totalitarian surveillance state is well on the way to realization within China’s borders, and it undoubtedly aspires to extend its scope to the wider world.
Yet many informed commentators seem unable to perceive the importance of this. In 2018 there was an IQ2 debate that pitted two doyens of the liberal intelligentsia, New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik against British author Will Self.
The topic was the relative importance to our current situation of two books: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984, with Gopnik backing the latter and Self the former.
Remarkably, in making his case for Orwell, Gopnik mentioned Putin and, needless to say, Donald Trump, in describing current threats to the liberal order, but not a work—not one—about the state that was bringing Orwell’s vision to reality.
Similarly, in her latest book Twilight of Democracy (2020) the liberal historian and columnist for The Atlantic magazine Anne Applebaum makes extensive reference to Putin, Russia and various former communist states in eastern Europe, and innumerable references to the Bad Orange Man. There was even an entire chapter on Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham. But Xi Jinping—nothing—and several utterly innocuous references to China.
Where have these people been for the last twenty years?
Thankfully, as evidence continues to accumulate of CCP malfeasance over Covid-19, and Xi Jinping’s increasingly belligerent international conduct, the scales are finally dropping from the eyes of many as to the nature of this regime.
But will this be enough? Consider the pathetically tepid tone of the final communique from the recent G7 summit in Cornwall, that talked about the “situation in the East and South China Seas”. What “situation”?
Or the mention of Hong Kong and Xingjiang in the context of “human rights and fundamental freedoms”. Is this an adequate response to the ruthless crushing of the Hong Kong freedom movement, or the largest mass internment of an ethno-religious minority since the fall the Third Reich?
Still a way to go, it seems.
In the third and final article in this series I will discuss the risk that Western policies to address climate change run the risk of further empowering and feeding the CCP monster.