No-one can make all human lives completely safe. The zero-Covid agenda presents a fantasy of immortality that more reflective medics know is impossible. As vaccination rolls out and treatments improve, the risk of serious illness or death is falling rapidly. We can live with a new endemic infection, but this will only happen if we… Read More »
… troubling infection rates and daily death counts, although impossible to ignore, are not the only way to understand this pandemic and our attempts to defeat it. After all, there is real hope for the future thanks to the creation of new vaccines. But we still need clear heads if we want to phase out… Read More »
…A big problem of Covid-19 management in the UK has been its lack of clarity about precisely this: when do we stop lockdowns, face coverings and social distancing, and dial our lives back to 2019?… The challenge that faces us as a society now is to decide between two views of the future. Are we… Read More »
One particular loss in the present emergency is Georg Simmel’s discussion of the case for cities, in his 1902 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’…it presents crucial arguments against the break-up of urban life that is envisioned by some contemporary Utopians: the case against the 15-minute city needs to be heard… Simmel composed this lecture… Read More »
No English government has tried to regulate the people’s Christmas since 1655 and 1656 – and that did not go well. After the English Civil War, the country was divided into regions administered by Major-Generals – religious zealots who thought Christmas should be a time for sobriety and reflection rather than joy and celebration. Their… Read More »
I have just posted a link to a lengthy video interview with Dr Clemens Heni, a German political scientist, which you can access on YourTube via my video page. If you are interested, there are two other interviews in text available online. These formats make it possible to give a more reasoned account of my… Read More »
Humans have lived with infectious diseases for at least 15,000 years. Many of these are shared with animals. They infect us, we infect them and, from time to time, there is a new crossover, as with Covid-19…. Humanity has a long history of dealing with these things. What history shows us is that the only… Read More »
Sociologists of Science and Technology take science fiction very seriously. Although it is often dismissed as a cheap literary form, it represents an important way in which contemporary societies try to think about and shape their futures. In this respect, it stands alongside more ‘respectable’ literary forms like modelling or scenario planning. Science fiction emerges… Read More »
…policies have been made by people with very narrow life experiences and imposed on others with whom there is ‘no intercourse and no sympathy’…This indifference is as true of our scientific and medical elites as of our politicians and public servants. Although STEM disciplines have traditional been ladders of social mobility, we are seeing the… Read More »
Let us first understand that ‘disease’, ‘illness’ and ‘infection’ are not categories that are given to us by nature. They are human moral judgements about the undesirability of the impact of certain microorganisms on ourselves, and a few favoured plant and animal species that are particularly relevant to us. Most of the sciences that study… Read More »