by Bruce Page
The columnist William Safire, when expressing unease about Murdoch’s reconstituted patriotism, still assumed that the new-made fellow American would ‘challenge the powerful’. An editorial writer in the Wall Street Journal, saddened by gross China-toadying in the New York Post, expressed surprise. Surely antiestablishment Murdoch sheets didn’t do such things? Many journalists know the midnight session when troubled Murdoch rankers plead that the boss – ‘whatever you say’ – does pitilessly stick it to the Establishment. For Newscorp Anzacs, England is the Establishment’s imperial fortress, ripe for plunder. Andrew Neil, as we saw in Chapter 12, observed the establishment’s coils everywhere (Newscorp, almost uniquely, keeping a foot somehow on the monstrous throat).
This widespread usage might plausibly be linked to the opacity of social and political mechanisms which the previous chapter analysed. But it is better included in a larger proposition: that even in fantasies like Stelzer’s the term refers – if with superb imprecision – to things with real existence, that is, the ‘ruling classes’, or the ‘governing classes’. Those were once labels people wore cheerfully to display status and power. ‘Establishment’, then, somewhat resembles a euphemism for older, blunter language.
If society’s rulers are indeed the people as a whole, then the ‘ruling class’ must always be a committee, or perhaps a network of sub-committees, deputed for the sake of praxis to choose courses and exercise powers. Life doubtless departs from that ideal, but the presence all the same of some sort of ruling class, as TrevorRoper said to Fairlie, is ‘hardly a novel discovery’; he called it ‘a necessary condition of social existence’, which is true whatever unease its real name evokes, however corrupt the praxis. Few theorists find anarchism a genuine option.
Unease isn’t unreasonable. Rhetoric connecting ‘rule’ to exploitative barbarism
– if partisan – isn’t baseless. Also, rule requires discrimination; which in whatever cause seems ‘no more just and rational to those discriminated against, than racial discrimination,’ as Randall Jarrell said of cultural choice. And unease is too slight a word if the question is whether those practising rule are genuine agents of a ruling people, or kleptocratic principals like the Soviet nomenklatura – extremes with ambiguous states between. Not even qualification is simple: 500 years after the close of the Middle Ages the meritocratic West still admits power got by birth. These are not even all the reasons people might like to dispense with the ruling class, or anyway not pronounce its name, as primitive folk hope to neutralise an evil spirit. But, short of a failed state, the best reality is that our ruling class, or establishment, should not be ‘so held together by conscious or institutional solidarity that it escapes competition and criticism, as in some countries it does’ (Trevor-Roper’s words).
This may be compressed into saying that in all societies the ‘ruling class’ has one meaning at least, and a democracy is a society where it has two: the people, and their delegated executive, distinct in somewhat the way of shareholders and directors. In accurate discourse ‘ruling class’ should take the second meaning until stated otherwise. ‘Establishment’ only obscures issues of competition and criticism. Obviously, a ruling class exercises power. But it may be forgotten – the quotation from Fairlie shows him remembering it – that a parallel function is restraint of power, particularly that of its own members. In a modern state it has many components, most of which are expected to invigilate each other specifically, while collaborating generally.
This idea of a ruling class is not the same thing as an upper class – the picture in crude Marxism – or a propertied class or, come to that, a proletariat attempting dictatorship. Personnel will overlap if such categories exist, but, when motives overlap, corruption begins. Effective rule involves acceptance of standards which in a modern state are sure to be complex, fast-changing and hard to apply consistently. (Complexity is not least due to the present state’s painful, contradictory struggle with its addiction to centralism, discussed above.) In an ideal politics there might be no reason for members of the ruling elite to accumulate privilege, rewards or status, only powers and burdens. But that would require us to live for ever, as R. G. Collingwood showed (in The Three Laws of Politics, work incomplete at his own death). Under mortality, privilege and status must be allowed for, their price being rigorous transparency.
But ruling-class privilege without a ruling-class price (yes, Kipling’s ‘power without responsibility’) is seductive. And here the Establishment ideology may be applied, by insisting that real power doesn’t reside in anyone visible, like yourself, but in an occult conspiracy from which you are excluded with the herd. Penetrating investigation enables you intermittently to expose and pillory particular conspirators. In Murdoch’s case they have often turned out to be subcommittee members tasked with upholding television’s political independence, restraining monopoly or sustaining tedious financial shibboleths. But the powercentre remains obscure – even from Newscorp’s best agents. Never, of course, has Murdoch been excluded – except in ‘Establishment’ pantomime – from the ruling class. Nobody holding such possessions could be, however recalcitrant about consistency and obligations.
Several reasons exist for Rupert to prefer appearing as other than the hereditary ruling-class member he is. But a major one is that media bosses are entitled only to restricted membership. A general conflict of interest properly excludes them from every significant executive sub-committee even from transactions with such bodies. News media are there to invigilate the total process of delegation and agency, thus legitimising it, thus keeping the first meaning alive. That is why the wish of the twentieth-century Times to be a newspaper ‘for the governing class’ (a second-meaning synonym) was corrupt as well as pompous. Democracy is fictional if media are for anyone but the primary ruling class (which includes all socio-economic layers). This is Milton’s meaning, and Jefferson’s: only when media are transparent can the essential qualities of the intimate republic be realised in post-industrial society, where abstract data must supplement the intimate – but may well distort it.
The radical anti-establishment come-on is necessary camouflage for a business specialising in privatised government propaganda. But it also stimulates the peculiar journalistic uselessness which makes Newscorp supreme within the field. (Other proprietors, as we’ve said, may be tempted, but are outclassed.) If you can believe, on the strength of some tosh about establishments, that Murdoch isn’t a ruling-class comprador, but rather a rebellious outsider – this being an element in your recruitment and indoctrination – you might believe anything. Something of this was seen with Death on the Rock, but the classical example is the Sunday Times, AIDS and the Establishment.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is one of humanity’s deepest challenges. Its cause, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), is that rare, unnerving phenomenon, a retrovirus. Life is a pattern which must pass accurately from existing to new generations and it succeeds because DNA, holding the code, isn’t involved in transmission to new cells: RNA carries the message. The Central Dogma of reproduction (as life-science calls it) requires this process to be oneway, so that errors only occur ‘downstream’. Retroviruses defy the dogma. Like other viruses they consist of RNA junk, and have no DNA. But HIV, somehow using the enzyme ‘reverse transcriptase’, copies itself, sloppily, into the DNA of its host’s cells. It may remain long inactive. But when cells divide (to create growth) billions of alien offspring appear. The host’s immune system crashes having evolved to suppress transmission errors and external attack, not a corrupted original pattern. Without antiretroviral drugs, the host must die of opportunistic infections.
Since its recognition in 1981 AIDS has acquire a densely emotional history. Initially terror was widespread, then there was relief when HIV’s role was identified in 1984 and Margaret M. Heckler, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, estimated two years for delivery of a vaccine. Given medicine’s war record against plagues it didn’t then seem hubristic.
Since then, bitter lessons have been taught, amid failure, despair and scandal. Now, with usable drugs, some victories for containment and some ideas about vaccines, we might be near the end of the beginning.
A sad strand in this history is that a fine scientist named Peter Duesberg asserted that the HIV/AIDS model of an efficient retrovirus was false. He was far from alone. Many people resisted the model, for it made sexual orientation irrelevant, and a new sexual civility indispensable. (Some fundamentalists lickerishly fancied AIDS to be retribution for sodomy.) But he was almost alone among capable scientists.
Duesberg thought HIV immunologically trivial, and that various agents were causing distinct afflictions wrongly conflated as AIDS. Sympathetic critics think he just miscalculated the dreadful retroviral leverage. His work, anyway, is the persistent core of the proposition that HIV/AIDS doesn’t exist, still taking fatal effect around the world – spectacularly, in South Africa. The Sunday Times in the 1990s built it into a crusade to save humanity from the disastrous ‘myth’ of AIDS: few newspaper investigations have been as fiercely wrong-headed. Had its idiot counsel against AIDS measures prevailed, disaster would be no adequate description.
AIDS delusions rest on pseudo-science which caricatures the real thing as a one-dimensional reductive process, where every investigator interrogates every fact individually, and scepticism zaps anything logically incomplete. This antique vision – formally captioned ‘epistemological individualism’ – decorates naive websites, though it has been properly laid to rest now by work like Steven Shapin’s (A Social History of Truth, etc). Realistically, science’s major dimension is trust, with judicious scepticism a vital supplementary. Realistically, potent science may be logically insecure – the grand example being calculus, flawed as Newton and Leibniz designed it because they could not explain infinitesimals. Bishop Berkeley cleverly showed that it was all nonsense. Calculus nonetheless created the basis of modern life, and afterwards, in mid-Victorian times, it was completed logically by ‘limits’. The subject was right, as Alfred North Whitehead put it; it was just that the explanations had been wrong. And
this possibility of being right, albeit with entirely wrong explanations, often makes external criticism of science ‘singularly barren and futile… The instinct of trained observers, and their sense of curiosity, due to the fact that they are obviously getting at something, are far safer guides …
At the time the Sunday Times campaign took off, the collective instinct of trained AIDS observers was that the HIV model was ‘getting at something’ – this was ten years ago, ahead of the strongest evidence – and that Duesberg’s ideas were not. Research interest in them was fading; scientific publications largely ignored them; newspapers and television saw nothing to report. Nature, the most powerful journal in world science, considered them not worth further significant resources. And this, the Sunday Times asserted, was a gigantic scandal: a process of censorship, suppression – and boondoggling – only possible if the whole world of life-sciences – corporate, official and academic – had been corrupted. Neville Hodgkinson, the paper’s science correspondent, undertook to end this outrage, with the zealous backing of his editor, Andrew Neil.
Their thesis was that Duesberg had been silenced because his work proved that AIDS – in the sense of a pandemic, caused by HIV, and killing millions of men, women and children – didn’t exist. AIDS was sustaining a vested interest of great power, which was consuming immense revenues. But it was an illusion: as one of their headlines said, yet another case of the emperor’s clothes’. The reality behind the AIDS illusion was just an ailment of homosexual men and heroin users. To be sure it was mysterious, and lethal. But it was inflated by confusing it with diseases always suffered by peoples outside mainstream Western society. The causal agent was certainly transmitted in blood, but only in the practice of buggery (the sturdy vagina would exclude it) or in the sharing of needles by addicts. Those avoiding such habits were scarcely endangered. And to hide such unprofitable, unfashionable truths, immunologists (aided by many others, journalists particularly) were risking the whole fabric of normal Western life. If true, this might have been the most significant disclosure ever made by one newspaper.
To most people working on AIDS, however, it was worse than shouting ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre. It was more like telling people in a bushfire to sit back and make toast. At that time, with no effective medication, containment was vital. Government was responding (that of Mrs Thatcher, after all a scientist, very notably). But everything rested on making it plain that sex, however rigorously orthodox, may infect either partner with HIV Nature’s editor, John Maddox, wrote a leader bitterly accusing the Sunday ‘Times of recklessly logic-chopping scientific evidence – which was certainly incomplete, but just as certainly compelling – and of ‘recruiting young and adult people’ to the avoidance of safe sex. He was accused in return of censorship: the world’s leading scientific journal was ‘playing in a sinister game’.
At this point the Sunday Times came generally into dispute with other newspapers, and selectively with its own older self. It considered that most papers were betraying their readers and joining the ‘sinister game’ because they were trapped in soggy, conventional thought, and pre-Murdoch the Sunday Times had been like that too. But even then it had broken free once, to expose the thalidomide scandal – an advance manifestation of the intellectual liberation now systematically installed, and significant as a prior example of the evil done by ruthless application of scientific orthodoxy. This was a curious statement, however, because what the thalidomide investigation uncovered was evil done because application of scientific orthodoxy didn’t occur at all (p210 et seq. above).
Though not undamaged, AIDS science survived two years of frantic assault from one of the world’s major newspapers. When for distinct reasons Neil left the Sunday Times – he authentically revealed certain misdeeds by the Thatcher government, stuck admirably to his story and terminally alienated Murdoch – this gruesome zeal collapsed. The life of the contrarian hypothesis ended by increment rather than breakthrough though elimination of HIV fragments from American donor blood had great impact, for the problem of AIDS by transfusion went with it.
Journalistic delusions as such are not rare. What made this one truly rare was its scale, its persistent, paranoid inflation into something that could only be true with the pressure of a vicious, ramified, international conspiracy. Nothing remotely fit to support such a proposition was produced then or has been since. And it was not a case of devil-may-care Sun or Post gullibility. It happened to a substantial newspaper run by people professing serious aspirations. What made it credible to them? The paranoid ingredient was their General Theory of Establishment – of IRA pollution in ITV, of protection enfolding thalidomide’s developers. Here was the Establishment, riding again. Headlines and text expounding the Emperor’s Clothes AIDS thesis were spattered insistently with references to the Establishment. The ‘sinister’ aspect of things was that the Establishment’s scientific chapter (or division) had awesome clout, having managed to suppress evidence about AIDS worldwide. It would have utter victory in sight if it could stop the Sunday Times. According to Neil’s memoirs he spent much time ‘locked in hand-to-hand combat with various parts of the Establishment’, and this must have been a testing bout.
Anyone equipped with such assumptions knows a lot before starting corruption investigations. An Establishment, as it rules us in secret, is by description corrupt conspiracy at the top level – so that’s clear straight off. Investigators sure of conspiracies readily see one, because evidence trivial to others yields to them significance. But a potent Establishment can suppress evidence, so absence of evidence may itself become evidence (as in the scientific depredations above). Now reporting admittedly can’t start in a mental blank. Coleridge, for instance, said all inquiry lacking an intellectual ‘prerogative’ was futile. But Coleridge added a proviso, relevant to conspiracy cases.
When the prerogative of the m
ind is stretched into despotism, the discourse may degenerate in the grotesque or the fantastical …
What reality underlay the grotesque, fantastical campaign? What should be called the scientific ruling class was culling dud ideas – that is, discriminating. This is always happening, and is always a hard call, because knowledge is incomplete, causing a kind of natural unfairness. AIDS remains a’ deeply emotive problem, seeming at times insoluble. But on the HIV model doubt seems sufficiently eliminated, so the rulers of science probably got that about right.
Was conspiracy even likely? Broadsheet pundits like to see events as ‘cock-up, not conspiracy’; tabloid headline-writers see conspiracies proliferating (‘gay mafias’ and the rest). The first attitude is the sillier, being a false antithesis (and a licence for lazy journalism). Cock-up, mostly, is conspiracy’s outcome, the outcome of enterprise run on a hidden and thus confusing plan. As confusion is endemic there is always a cock-up rate, which conspiracy drives up. ‘Successful’ conspiracies seem mostly to be crimes or counter-productive wars. They rarely conquer disease, establish peace, or win gold at the Olympics.
Exploding them is an ongoing news-media function (and if it’s properly performed most detonations are scarcely noticed). But a good working assumption is that conspiracy, though frequent and serious, is unordinary and uncomprehensive in a free country. This makes a priori sense: conspiracy being mostly uncreative and incompetent, a society in which it is truly routine will get into terrible trouble under modern conditions. Soviet history demonstrates this, though it also shows that the trouble can be suppressed until large sympathetic detonations occur, with vast destructive effect.
Can conspiracies occur in science? Yes, of course, but not easily. The rules of publication and peer review are robust, crossing national or cultural borders easily (unlike, say, accounting rules). Cases of the scientific ruling class behaving with the kind of lunatic solidarity the Sunday Times alleged are hard to find. A scientific ruling class tends to be, in Trevor-Roper’s words, ‘loose … and fissile’. That was the case with thalidomide. The rulers, persuaded by ruthless commercial lobbyists, fell into an error. But, once it was unearthed, they did not hang together long to defend it; some expertly assisted the excavation. The risk in science’s ruling class is that it lacks one of Trevor-Roper’s democratic attributes: it is not ‘heterogeneous’, but selective and specialist. Discourse is nominally open, but few of us rate as ‘peers’, therefore penetrating a potentially corrupt argument is arduous and often expensive. That said, corruption and conspiracy in science has mostly occurred at corporate or political interfaces – tobacco and BSE are examples – where superior levels of the ruling class predominate.