The doctor will stupefy you now

If you think The British Medical Journal is a scholarly publication, not a political one, you haven’t read it for years, possibly ever.

In fact, no publication today, however scholarly, can stick to its subject without venturing into faddish politics. That’s the fee it has to pay to enter a modern mind. Having thus gained entry, it can then proceed to overstuff that mind with ideological drivel that has nothing to do with its subject or any scholarly pursuits.

Thus the current issue of the BMJ regales its readers with an article by Dr Rhys Jones, associate professor of public health at University of Auckland. Dr Jones, who also goes by his Māori name Ngāti Kahungunu (don’t ask me how to pronounce it), is described as “a passionate advocate for health equity, Indigenous rights, and climate justice”.

That introduction should tell any sensible reader that he is about to be buried in an avalanche of bilge, and Dr Jones doesn’t disappoint. Essentially, he argues that the causes of health equity, Indigenous rights and climate justice can only be served by New Zealand (and the world) reverting to pre-industrial, and ideally pre-historic, ways of life.

White man with his forked tongue came to corrupt the country and its people into improving their health and increasing their life expectancy. Or, as Dr Jones puts it: “Settler colonialism, with its underpinning assumptions of superiority and resulting imposition of social, cultural, political, and economic systems, has transformed environments in ways that exacerbate the impacts of floods and storms.”

Sorry, he seems to be saying something else here. Never mind better health and longer life. Poor, nasty, brutish and short is just fine, provided there are no floods and storms. However, since we’ve always had floods and storms, we seem to have arrived at an impasse.

Yet Dr Jones doesn’t see it that way. His worldview is circumscribed by the fact that “a recent ministerial inquiry reported that ‘an environmental disaster is unfolding in plain sight’.”

Such is the diagnosis, now for the treatment. But not so fast: “As health professionals, [we know that] in order truly to understand and tackle the health impacts of the climate crisis, we need to take a proper history – one that goes beyond the presenting complaint and seeks to reveal the antecedents or root causes.”

And as vogue ideologues, we can choose only those segments of history that vindicate our ideology. We’ve had rather warm weather lately, along with some storms and floods – that’s the aetiology. Never mind that the Earth has been warmer than it is now for 80 per cent of its existence, and numerous climatic disasters have been recorded since anything at all has been recorded. As medical professionals, we don’t care about such incidentals.

All we care about is the two bogeymen: colonialism and capitalism. Once they were implanted into the healthy body of the Indigenous population, it has been going downhill ever since. That the problem is physical is self-evident. But it’s also metaphysical:

“The predicament we find ourselves in is not some accident of history in which humankind inadvertently chose the wrong energy sources or food production systems. It is a direct result of globally powerful societies abandoning the fundamental principles that had guided and protected humankind since time immemorial.”

When Dr Jones tried to define those fundamental principles, a toggle switch must have been flicked in his mind, and he began to mutter like a delirious dervish on drugs: “According to Indigenous natural or first law, human development is guided and informed by relational values and mutual responsibilities. Decision making is conducted with a critical awareness of our place in the greater scheme of things and considering the impacts on all our (human and more-than-human) relatives.”

I must have some of what he is on to understand this. A convoluted mind meets involute style to produce utter gibberish. Can we have some clarity please? Dr Jones is happy to oblige:

“Once the Earth is viewed as a commodity to be exploited for human development, rather than an ancestor to be held in good relation, it becomes possible to extract, consume, and pollute in ways that disrupt natural planetary cycles.”

The bliss of a pristine Earth unsullied by human development takes us back to the primordial times of cave dwelling, stone hammers and simian chaps tossing their hirsute females on the grass in the spirit of unbridled joy. Is that the ideal Dr Jones has identified?

Well, yes and no. All that stuff was merely a way of setting his stall. He thereby established a rapport with his presumed audience by uttering the Mowgli password: “We be of one blood, ye and I”. That done, now comes the meat of the article, the reason it was written:

“A detailed history therefore allows us to identify colonialism as a fundamental driver of the climate crisis (and myriad other ecological crises). Its associated capitalist systems are also responsible for modern health crises, including powerful commercial interests promoting products that are harmful to population health and acting to block or delay critical public health action. Colonialism and capitalism can also be seen to drive the unacceptable health inequities between and within countries.”

It’s colonialism and capitalism what done it. They imposed their deadly products, such as analgesics and antibiotics, on the virginal Indigenous people (always capitalised). And now we all have to live with the consequences, illogically expecting the culprits to correct the problem they created:

“Yet, too often, our proposed climate solutions are also situated in these systems. For example, electrifying the vehicle fleet may reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it does nothing to solve the many other problems associated with a car dependent transport system, and inexorably leads to a range of other social and ecological harms.”

You could see me wiping my brow even as we speak. So electric cars aren’t the solution, and haven’t I been telling you the very same thing all this time?

Let’s go back to fossil fuels and forget all this nonsense… No, wait. Dr Jones has a different idea:

“The goal should not be a slightly greener version of multinational corporate exploitation, it should be to dismantle exploitative systems and rebuild relationships. That is the only way truly to solve the climate crisis – because it is a crisis of relationality, not of atmospheric chemistry.”

Lovely word, relationality. Just to think that I’ve lived to an advanced age without ever learning it until now.

Sorry, I digress. Down with corporate exploitation and capitalism, I get it. But what should come in their stead?

Why, primordial economics of course: “What this means is that Indigenous ways of knowing and being must be central to climate responses. Critical actions include re-establishing the authority of Indigenous natural law, recognising the rights of nature, providing for Indigenous self-determination, and honouring Indigenous rights agreements.”

My education is accelerating with every word. For example, I never knew nature had rights, although I’ve heard the term ‘natural rights’. Learn something every day. But how can we go back to Indigenous rights agreements, whatever they are? Easy.

“For non-Indigenous people, it is a call to remember their own ancestral ‘original instructions’ and revitalise their own ancient ways of knowing, being, and relating to Mother Earth and all her inhabitants before patriarchal colonial capitalism took hold.”

How do those ‘original instructions’ relate to, say, transportation? We have already established that IC engines are the work of the colonialist capitalist devil, and electric transport is only marginally better for being similarly tainted. We’ve also learned that the answer lies in the practices of Indigenous people predating the arrival of white settlers.

Hence goods must be moved by oxen, canoe or human muscle. Whatever we lose in efficacy we’ll gain in moral rectitude and a happier Mother Earth.

Now, I’m not a health professional, which is why I suggest we should summon a few of them, the men in white coats. They may deliver the treatment Dr Jones so clearly needs. As to the BMJ, it’ll have to go untreated. It shows every symptom of a civilisational disease afflicting our times, and I can’t think of any possible remedy.