What would you change about modern society?

There are many answers to the question above. One simple yet important change we can make is the following: stop running universities, and higher education generally, as profit-hungry hedge funds. Universities are there to provide education, but since the 1990s, they are being run as business enterprises answerable to hedge fund shareholders.

Astra Taylor, writing in The Nation magazine in 2016, relates a joke about Harvard University. Have you heard the latest? Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached. A light hearted observation, but this subject has a dark underbelly. Decades of neoliberalism have hollowed out universities, turning them into profit maximisation institutions, undermining the quality and role of higher education.

It is not just The Nation magazine writing about this issue. Let’s have a look at one of the Long Reads in The Guardian.

Since the introduction of neoliberal logic into the higher education sector, students have been turned into consumers, courses are marketable products, and university deans are transformed into corporate managers.

William Davies, writing about the deterioration of universities in Britain throughout the fourteen years of Tory government (2010 – 2024), states that “Political insistence that higher education must operate like a market has led to many of the worst pathologies of market societies.” As he explained in his article, the dilapidated state of public services, the increasing number of local government bankruptcies, and cuts in funding for arts are part of a society-wide assault on the public provision of services by governments.

Universities have been swept up in this neoliberal logic – everyone is a user, and users should pay. Fair enough, but governments have an obligation to provide taxpayer funded higher education to produce an educated citizenry. Engineering, mathematics, law, medicine – all these pursuits are equally important. So are the social sciences and humanities, because these provide the foundation for tackling the wider socioeconomic and political issues.

Universities are not bastions of politically correct and dogmatic ‘wokeism.’ Right wing commentators and Tory party policymakers deliberately pushed the marketisation of universities as the antidote to these supposedly bloated overarching institutions dependent on the public purse. The culture wars, overlaying the economic attacks on the public sector, have created a constituency that devalues sociology, politics and the humanities generally.

The power of the market grows, not because of a shrinking state sector. The state, through its laws and regulations, cedes power to market forces in areas of society where public participation is highest, such as healthcare and education. The state and market grow simultaneously, with state expenditures on police, surveillance, intelligence gathering and dissent suppression growing exponentially.

By cynically positioning themselves as defenders of higher education against politically charged ‘wokeism’ and loony leftie dogma, the Tory governments, and their right wing counterparts in the United States, have cancelled opposition to public education cuts by splitting the working class voters along educational lines. Why should solid blue-collar types care about universities that teach undergraduates irrelevant ‘Mickey mouse’ courses such as medieval Icelandic poetry?

By importing the MAGA style cultural attacks into British politics, the Tories proceeded to implement an economic programme of commercialising universities begun by Tony Blair’s New Labour. It was New Labour that introduced tuition fees, importing international students (and then allowing anti-immigration cultural anxieties about ‘too many foreigners’ in Britain to flourish), and increasing the numbers of casual/temporary adjunct staff to teach at universities.

Adjunct faculty make up an increasingly precarious section of academia. Long hours, temporary contracts, growing workloads, while vice-chancellors pocket huge pay checks; it is no wonder that militancy is growing among the adjunct staff.

Mae Losasso, writing in Jacobin magazine, observes that opposition to turning universities into knowledge factories is nothing new. Decades ago, American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929) denounced the push to convert universities into factories of merchantable knowledge. The intrusion of corporate interests into higher education, Veblen warned, would result in the overturning of intellectual ideals.

Britain’s universities have declined precipitously in the years of neoliberal globalisation. However, the elite universities are doing just fine. Oxford, Cambridge – these institutions are still ranked among the top ten universities in Europe.

However, the vast majority of Britain’s universities and colleges are struggling for funds, and have had to cut back courses. Sheffield University, renowned throughout the world for its archaeology course, has proposed abolishing the archaeology department altogether.

It is not just me highlighting the role of universities as gigantic profit-hungry hedge funds. Law professor Victor Fleischer, back in 2015, lambasted Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and Texas universities for hoarding money. While tuition fees for students increase, and saddled with huge debts once they graduate, these institutions have hundreds of millions of dollars in private endowments and shareholding portfolios.

Fleischer asks the pertinent question; what purpose do these endorsements serve? Do they help to sustain an educational institution through financial crises, and help in the provision of education? Or are they there to increase profits for ultrawealthy hedge fund owners?

It is more than high time to stop running universities as bloated hedge funds, and get them back into public education.

What are your future travel plans?

Being in a position to make travel plans is a great privilege. You could name almost any city in the world, and I would like to travel there. Paris, Kampala, Lusaka, Buenos Ares, Kathmandu – every city has its attractions. Being connected to almost every part of the globe is fantastic. You can tour the Okavango Delta in one issue of the National Geographic, and then view the splendours of Petra in Jordan at the Smithsonian magazine.

However, let us examine what travel has become in our current socioeconomic conditions. Tourism has become a profit maximisation project, with tourists performing as bit players in an industry that exploits natural resources. While tourism is not new, and people have travelled to experience awe and wonder in places with cultures foreign to their own, mass tourism has devolved into a corporatist exercise.

Let’s explore what that means for international travel.

Crowds on Mount Everest

In 2019, and subsequently to that, climbers of Mount Everest have shared on social media a rather telling photograph. There is a long queue of people, waiting in line in their heavy jackets, to reach the actual summit of the mountain. Wait a minute – there are crowds when summiting Everest? Yes. The scene resembles, in the words of one commentator, a queue at the Motor Vehicle department.

Everest, throughout the ages, represented an awesome yet unattainable goal. Summiting that mountain was the stuff of legend – only the most resourceful and resilient could even hope to climb that lofty peak. From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attaining the claim of summiting Everest was the subject of geopolitical competition.

Not anymore. Now, increasing numbers of socially mobile internet savvy corporate types can indulge their childhood fantasies of summiting that venerable mountain.

To be sure, climbing Everest takes courage and determination. These qualities do not in any way distract us from the adverse environmental impact of mass tourism on the mountain. in an increasingly interconnected world, the American and British investment banker, the advertising executive, the banking consultant – all can now realise their dream of summiting Everest by taking advantage of the tourism industry that nurtures such dreamy, once-in-a-lifetime adventures (hallucinations?)

In a previous article, I wrote about the impact of global economic connections and the expansion of adventure tourism on Everest. The mountainous terrain is no longer the exclusive preserve of the Nepalese Sherpas. In fact, Everest now features the dead bodies of previously highly motivated climbers, tonnes of garbage, empty beer cans, cartons and faeces, and assorted detritus left over by the tourist interlopers.

If you want to climb Everest, nobody can stop you. Just remember the kind of industry that profits from a desire to achieve that objective. No, I am not making a condemnatory judgement on everyone who intends to summit the mountain. We need to balance our individual interests, and whether those dreams of adventure are being manipulated by a destructive and profit-hungry business model.

Billionaire space travel, and Muhammad Faris followed his conscience

Travelling into outer space is the ultimate destination. Numerous TV programmes, documentaries and specials (not to mention sci-fi series) deal with the topic of space travel and exploration. Yuri Gagarin became world famous as the first man in space. Valentina Tereshkova, also from the Soviet Union, was the first woman cosmonaut. Today, we are living in the age of the billionaire space race.

The rivalry between the space barons, as CNN put it, is all very interesting. However, this obsessive focus on which billionaire is going to ‘win’ – Bezos or Branson – misses a crucial dimension of space travel.

The exploration of space began as a quest to understand and answer basic scientific questions about other planets, cosmic objects and the stars. Rocketry was envisioned by pioneering Russian astronomer and scientist Konstatin Tsiolkovsky (1857 – 1935) not as an adventure to satisfy the egomaniacal dreams of the wealthy.

Tsiolkovsky, an expert in aeronautical sciences, advocated space travel to discover the mysteries of cosmic phenomena. The billionaires today have harnessed space travel as an adjunct to their fantasies of ‘conquering’ space.

Muhammad Faris, who passed away earlier this year, was Syria’s only astronaut. Born in Aleppo in 1951, he passed the demanding and stringent tests to successfully pass the Soviet space training programme. Becoming a pilot and cosmonaut, he travelled into space to the Soviet space station, Mir, in 1987. He became a national hero in his native Syria, earning honours and plaudits from the Ba’athist regime.

Yet his story does not end there. Yes, he returned to his homeland, and gave lectures on space travel, rocketry and astronomy. Hailed as a hero, he did not allow adulation to inflate his ego. In 2011-12, with the anti-Ba’athist Syrian uprising, Faris defected to the opposition. He had been a general in the Syrian Air Force, and refused to run bombing missions against his fellow Syrians in rebel strongholds.

Targeted by the Syrian regime, he fled with his family to Turkey, where he lived out the rest of his days. Whether his decision to side with Turkish-backed Syrian opposition groups was right or wrong, I do not know.

What I can say is that he placed his ego in neutral, and spoke out against a regime which was committed crimes against its citizens. His remarkable achievements in space did not negate his sensitivities regarding the plight of his fellow countrymen-women.

Let’s make travel plans for sure. Economic globalisation has made the world more interconnected, but we have to wonder whether this connection has come at the expense of cross-cultural understanding. Indeed, what corporation globalisation has achieved is a kind of consumerist monoculturalism. A McDonald’s and Starbucks on every corner is not necessarily an indication of an interconnected world, but one where we as consumers worship at the altar of profits.

What bothers you and why?

Let’s answer the question above with an exploration of a controversy – stop falsely blaming the indigenous Easter Island people, the Rapanui, for their own demise. This requires a bit of background information.

Jared Diamond, professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote a book in 2005 called Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. In it, Diamond depicts a people, the Rapa Nui, over exploiting their natural resources, cutting down the trees, denuding the lush landscape, thus undermining their ability to sustain a large population.

Dwindling food and resources resulted in internecine warfare, communal violence, and even cannibalism, from about 1600 onwards.

European settlers arrived in 1722, to be confronted by an indigenous population on a downward spiral of destruction. Diamond coined the word ‘ecocide’, to denote a cautionary tale of a society outstripping its resource base. That is a general overview of Diamond’s case, and I hope that I have done justice to it.

However, this tale of environmental degradation and socioeconomic collapse, while a necessary warning, blames the wrong people. Archaeologists and geographers, working on this question, have instead found an indigenous Polynesian civilisation that was resourceful, cooperative, growing food to feed themselves, and building the mysterious moai – the giant statues that dot the landscape. All this was achieved prior to European colonisation which began in 1722.

This picture is hardly one of a society resembling a Polynesian fight club, with axes, fists, knives, and weapons deployed in an all-gladiatorial contest. This depiction of inherently violent indigenous people has never sat well with me. No, I am not challenging Diamond’s qualifications or expertise. But this myth of the ‘savage Savage’ has always bothered me, in ways I could not elaborate previously.

Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is correct to warn of the socioeconomic consequences of ecological destruction. What kind of economy can we sustain on a dead planet? However, he has chosen the wrong society upon which to base his ecocide scenario.

Archaeologists and geographers have consistently challenged the simplistic and sometimes quite false view blaming the indigenous Rapanui for their own destruction.

This is not a personal attack on Professor Diamond; he is an outstanding public intellectual and writer. He has published books which have expanded my knowledge. However, what bothers me is the use of the ‘ecocide’ scenario – a term that Diamond coined – to portray indigenous societies as inherently violent and destructive. This depiction is often used to rationalise our own capitalist society’s environmental overexploitation and destructiveness. If all humans are selfish and violent, what’s the point?

The point is that the current billionaire class, to justify their raking in billions, have been allowed to define human nature for the rest of us. No, there is no conspiracy between Professor Diamond and Bill Gates to connivingly misrepresent the Rapa Nui as violent and destructive. There is a growing and strong body of evidence against the simplistic ‘ecocide’ paradigm which has dominated the public discourse.

When the Europeans arrived on the remote island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), they were mesmerised by the giant moai (statues), and deduced that only a huge population could build them. Since 1600, the indigenous population must have been decimated – how could a small population be capable of constructing such structures over a long period? This assumption made its way unexamined into European writings on archaeology.

Diamond is not the first writer to worry about the alleged covetousness of the Rapa Nui; but he is the first to gain such widespread public acclaim for that work. Numerous archaeologists and field researchers, such as Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, have pushed back against the ‘ecocide’ scenario. For instance, Lipo performed a complex mathematical analysis of rock samples from Rapa Nui, rock gardens cultivated by the indigenous Rapanui people.

Growing a staple of their diet, the sweet potato, the indigenous people are estimated to have numbered no more than 16 000 prior to 1722. The assumption that Rapa Nui was overpopulated prior to 1722, and therefore subject to internal warfare, is a conventional wisdom derived from faulty bases.

The indigenous islanders were cooperative and resilient, nothing like the all-encompassing state of warfare as depicted by the European colonisers. How were the moai built? You may find a detailed answer here.

Earlier in this article, I used the expression the ‘savage Savage’ to describe Diamond’s portrayal of the Rapanui people. That expression was first used by science writer John Horgan, in the pages of Scientific American.

Dispelling the myth of the ‘Noble Savage’ is one thing; what Diamond, Professors Steven Pinker and Richard Wrangham have done, is recycle an old colonialist trope that the indigenous are savages. They form a cohort of academic hawks; rather than advocate harsh socioeconomic policies at home, they attempt to rationalise their implementation by retroactively projecting their punitive motivations to past societies.

The work of Lipo, Hunt and other researchers upends the ‘ecocide’ narrative, based on solid factual foundations. Critics of the ‘ecocide’ scenario are often accused of being motivated by ideology rather than scientifically rigorous evidence. I hope that this article prompts readers to examine the Easter Island ‘collapse’ skeptics with an open mind.

What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

I was thinking about ways to answer the question above. Rather than talk about myself, I have decided to approach this prompt from a different angle.

Each ethnic group attracts its particular stereotypes. Being of Egyptian Armenian background – Armenians born and raised in Egypt, I get asked all kinds of irritating questions, based on the obnoxious and laughably ignorant stereotypes about people from Egypt.

In similar vein, Italian Americans have expressed their despair and irritation at being asked about one subject in particular – the mafia. My precise answer to the prompt above is please stop employing crude mafia stereotypes when interacting with Italian Americans – or Australians of Italian descent, for that matter.

John Cottone is a psychologist, the clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the Renaissance school of medicine at Stony Brook University. He is also an Italian American, and wrote about the subject of Hollywood promoting harmful cultural stereotypes regarding Italians.

The movies which we have all seen and loved, The Godfather trilogy, Goodfellas, Casino, and more recently the new special House of Gucci, all in their own way deploy the stereotypes of Italian American men as ravenously libidinous, cunning and barely literate mafiosi, and Italian American women as volatile, temperamental ‘ball-busting bitches’ with garish jewellery who can cook up a mean pasta fazool.

These kinds of stereotypes seep their way into the public consciousness, and leave the non-Italian communities with a deeply flawed picture of Italians in the diaspora. Michael Parenti, Italian American socialist academic and author of numerous books on political science, writes of his experiences in dealing with the question of the mafia stereotype as an Italian interacting with the wider Anglo majority society.

To be certain, the 1951 Kefauver committee exposed the inner workings and structure of Italian organised crime. Parenti writes that while Al Scarface Capone and Lucky Luciano were already figures of infamy, the Kefauver commission uncovered, among other things, the multitudinous variety of personalities that made up the mafiosi:

…Lucky Luciano, Scarface Al Capone, Sammy the Bull Gravano, Joey Bananas Bonanno, Crazy Joey Gallo, Jimmy the Weasel Fratiano, Sonny Red Indelicato, and Sonny Black Napolitano.

One could go on with Joey Kneecap Santorielli, Johnny Bingo Bosco, Itchy Fingers Zambino, Big Paulie Castellano,and Lupo the Wolf Saietta. Also Johnny Blind Man Biaggio, Vinny Gorgeous Basciano, and Fredo the Plumber Giardino.

Finally, none of us will ever forget AnthonyChicken F**ker Bastoni (don’t ask).

Parenti relates that in one job interview for a teaching position at a university, he was asked about the mafia – the interviewers referenced the Godfather movie as their source regarding close-knit relationships among immigrant communities. He tried unsuccessfully to steer the discussion towards the rich variety of Italian authors, scientists and sociologists, but somehow the mafia was the subject which captivated the interview board.

We all know that the mafia come from Italy. That much is unmistakable. However, what is less well known is how such an organisation started. In the Mezzogiorno – Southern Italy – the majority of land was owned by absentee landlords. The latter protected their latifundia from peasant uprisings and foreign invasions by hiring middlemen guardians.

These organised gangs, serving their absentee landlord bosses, formed the first instances of a parasitic organisation based on hostility to the peasantry. It is worthwhile to note that until today, the mafia is hostile to peasants, and is an enemy of the working class. Yes, there are ordinary working class people who, motivated by opportunistic reasons, join the mafia. In fact, in the Hollywood depictions, mafiosi are often portrayed as enterprising, self-motivated people, but in an antihero kind of way.

As the capitalist system became the dominant mode of production in a unified Italy, the mafia adapted their ways, parasitising the newly rising labouring class. Capitalist economic relations opened up a transoceanic migratory network for capital export.

The other distinguishing feature of the mafiosi is its parochial racism. It is no exaggeration to state that the mafia are a kind of Sicilian Klan. Like the Klan, the mafiosi claim to respect ancient codes of honour and respect. Strongly patriarchal, the mafiosi claim hostility to the powers that be, but are not averse to cooperating with those authorities as footsoldiers deployed against trade unions, labour and peasant organisations.

Instead of asking about the mafia, how about we ask Italian Americans about Enrico Fermi, the Italian born American scientist who worked on the Manhattan project? Instead of referencing Scarface Capone, or Joey Bananas, or Frankie the pastry chef Cacciatore, how about we ask about Petrarch, Vivaldi, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Giordano Bruno.

As for myself, please don’t ask me about the pyramids, or Tutankhamen, or the curse of the Mummy, or Moses and the Hebrew captives in the fictional Exodus. Let’s also stop recycling regressive stereotypes about Italian Americans – there’s more to Italy than marital problems, cooking pasta, temperamental volatility and organised crime.