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This article by Natasha Sumner was originally published on Microdose and appears here with permission.

A growing body of research into the therapeutic use of psychedelics, including MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, and DMT, are delivering promising results to treat a wide range of conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, end-of-life anxiety, eating disorders, stroke, and chronic pain. Robin Carhart-Harris, head of theCentre for Psychedelic Researchat Imperial College London,wrote forThe Guardian, we can no longer ignore the potential of psychedelic drugspsychedelics appear to increase brain plasticity, which, broadly speaking, implies an accelerated ability to change.

This article provides a brief overview of the Food and Drug Administrations (FDA) regulatory scheme around drug development, future clinical research of psychedelics, andlegal challenges in this emerging area.

The FDA regulates all drugs sold in the United States, which includes research pertaining to psychedelics. Typically, once a new molecule has been screened for pharmacological activity and acute toxicity potential in animals, the FDAs role begins and the legal status of the molecule changes to a new drug subject to specific regulatory requirements. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) conducted Phase 2 clinical trials from 2004 to 2017 studying the effects of MDMA on PTSD.[1] Six randomized, double-blind, controlled clinical trials at five study sites were conducted. Active doses of MDMA (75125mg) or placebo/control doses (040mg) were administered to individuals with PTSD during psychotherapy sessions in two or three eight-hour sessions spaced a month apart. Three non-drug 90-minute therapy sessions preceded the first MDMA exposure, and three to four followed each experimental session. After two blinded experimental sessions, the active group had significantly greater reductions in CAPS-IV[2]total scores from baseline than the control group. Depression symptom improvement was greatest for the active group compared to the control group.

In May 2021, MAPS released the results of its Phase 3 trial.[3] MDMA-assisted therapy reported a significant reduction in PTSD symptoms compared to those who received placebo with therapy. This is thefirst Phase 3 trial of any psychedelic-assistedtherapy.These are incredibly important findings because although SSRIs are associated with an overall response rate of approximately 60% in patients with PTSD, only 20% to 30% of patients achieve complete remission.[4]

In aPhase 2 study comparing psilocybin to an SSRI, the psilocybin group did not show a statistically significant difference in Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology-Self-Report scores compared with the SSRI after six weeks. However, the psilocybin group showed significantly larger reductions in suicidality, anhedonia, and standard psychological scores for depression. In November 2021,COMPASSPathway completeda phase IIb clinical trial on psilocybin and depression that demonstrateda highly statistically significant and clinically relevant reduction in depressive symptom severity after three weeks, with a rapid and durable treatment response.

In 2016,Johns Hopkins conducted a small double-blind studylooking at the effects of psilocybin on end-of-life anxiety. Researchers reported that a substantial majority of people suffering cancer-related anxiety ordepressionfound considerable relief for up to six months from a single large dose of psilocybin.

The FDA has numerous expedited processes that are designed to speed up the development and review of drugs that are intended to treat a serious condition and psychedelics are no exception to receiving such designations.The first psychedelic drug to gain FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation wasJohnson & Johnsons esketamine nasal sprayfor treatment-resistant depressionin 2013 and then again in 2016.MDMA was designated as Breakthrough Therapy in 2017 for PTSDandpsilocybin in 2018 for treatment resistant depression.

In addition to these expedited programs, the FDA has an expanded access program, sometimes called compassionate use, which is a potential pathway for a patient with animmediately life-threatening condition or serious disease or conditionto gain access to aninvestigational medical productfor treatment outside of clinical trials when no comparable or satisfactory alternative therapy options are available.TheRight to Try Actis another way for patients diagnosed with life-threatening diseases who have exhausted all approved treatment options and are unable to participate in aclinical trialto gain access to certain unapproved treatments. However, the Schedule 1 status of psychedelics has been a hurdle to terminally ill patients being provided with these drugs.

The psychedelic arena has also sought orphan drug status. In February 2021, PharmaDrug Inc., a pharmaceutical company focused on the research, development and commercialization of controlled-substances, natural medicines such as psychedelics, cannabis and naturally-derived approved drugsfiled an application with theFDA to receiveOrphan Drug Designationfor N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT)in the treatment of acute ischemic stroke patients presenting for emergency medical assistance within 3-hours of symptom onset and for the prevention of ischemia reperfusion injury in patients undergoing kidney transplantation. An orphan drug designation allows for seven years of market exclusivity, a great incentive to find treatments for rare diseases or conditions.

FDA-approved clinical trials are key to psychedelics being approved for use in mental health and other treatments. Below is a list of current and upcoming psychedelic research:

There are numerous issues that have and will arise in the context of clinical research and drug development of psychedelics such as findinga source of a Schedule 1 drug that will pass regulatorymuster.In addition to regulating importation of drugs, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) restricts who and howa researcher can study Schedule 1drugs. Furthermore, there are difficulties inusinga placebofor biascontrol in a psychedelic trial because of the strong physical and psychological effects these drugs have; in other words, both the participant and the researcher would know whether or not the participant was given the active compound versus the placebo.

Because clinical trials are showing high efficacy and safety, at least in certain settings, some of the psychedelic drugs may be rescheduled in the near future. That may create issues with exclusivity periods. When the DEA seeks toschedulea new drug under the Controlled Substances Act, itmust request recommendations from theFDA. Because theFDArequires applicants for approval of new drugs to commit not to market those drugs until after the DEA makes itsschedulingdetermination, theschedulingprocess can delay the entry of new drugs into the market, sometimes by more than a year after theirFDAapproval. The central issue inEisai, Inc. v. United States Food and Drug Administration(US Dist. Ct, D.C., 2015) waswhether and under what circumstances the period of time drug manufacturers spend waiting for a final DEAschedulingdetermination counts against the five-year exclusivity period.[5]

Because many psychedelic research companies are located outside of the Unites States,John Doe v. DEA(2017) is an interesting and relevant case addressing importation and bioequivalence in the context of generic drug approval. A drug manufacturer wanted to market a generic version of the drugMarinol, an FDA-approved drug containing the same active ingredient as marijuana and used to treat nausea and loss of appetite incancerand AIDS patients. To get approval to market its generic alternative, the plaintiff was required to successfully complete bioequivalency studies.Id. At 563. The FDA, after extensive testing and research, approvedMarinoldescribing it as [d]ronabinol (synthetic) in sesame oil and encapsulated in a soft gelatin capsulefor treatment of nausea associated withcancerpatients and anorexia associated with weight loss in AIDS patients.Id. At 564. The DEA eventually assigned dronabinol(synthetic) in sesame oil and encapsulated in a soft gelatin capsule in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved product to schedule III.Ibid. All other mixtures, compounds and preparations containingdronabinolremain[ed] in Schedule I.Ibid. In practical effect, only the brand name drug Marinol was rescheduled.Ibid.

The plaintiff sought to import over half a million capsules of its drug from its overseas manufacturing partner.Id. at 563. When the DEA learned that the substance plaintiff sought to import was notMarinol, the DEA denied plaintiffs permit application.Id. At 564. Because plaintiffs drug containing dronabinol has not been approved for marketing by the FDA, the DEA classified the drug as falling within the general category of dronabinol in schedule I, not schedule IIIs narrow description of [d]ronabinol in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved product.21 C.F.R. 1308.13(g)(1)(emphasis added).Ibid. Thus, the plaintiff found itself in a catch22: while it sought to import its drug under schedule III so it could conduct testing necessary to obtain FDA approval, the DEAs interpretation of its regulatory provision effectively prohibits importation of a drug containing dronabinol under schedule III until the drug is FDA approved. Ibid. The DEA interpreted its schedule III regulatory languageDronabinol(synthetic)in sesame oil and encapsulated in a soft gelatin capsule in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved product,21 C.F.R. 1308.13(g)(1)as not encompassing Does dronabinol drug, because plaintiffs drug is not FDA approved for marketing.Id. at 570-71. The plaintiff argued that this interpretation was contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, and violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.Ibid.In disagreeing with plaintiff, the court noted that plaintiff had options: (1) petition to have its dronabinol drug rescheduled, or (2) obtaining schedule I registration.Id. at 573. The court also noted that it was not unsympathetic to plaintiffs predicament. The DEAs interpretation obviously does make it harder (and costlier) for plaintiff to obtain final FDA approval to market its generic drug. As plaintiff has pointed out, this result runs counter to Congresss purpose manifested in the so-called HatchWaxman Amendments,Pub. L. No. 98417, 98 Stat. 1585 (1984), to make available more low cost generic drugs.Ibid. (citations omitted). The court concluded by noting that to the extent the DEAs interpretation is bad policy, that must be addressed by the agency or Congress.Ibid

A sign that the federal government is changing its purview of psychedelics is theMay 2021 DEA decisionto allow Wake Network to legally import psilocybin for research. Furthermore, theDEA recently increased the legal production quotasof MDMA, DMT, and psilocybin for use in research.

The importance of these cases and recent DEA actions to the area of medicinal use of psychedelics is manifold. The courts decision inJohn Doeeffectively meant that Marinol would have a much longer hold on the market absent any competition from a generic version. Additionally, the cases referenced above illustrate the importance of where the DEA places a drug on the schedule and how the FDA describes the approved drug in terms of importation, research, and ultimately commercial viability of a drug.

Psychedelic research is here to stay. How that research progresses largely depends on whether psychedelic drugs get rescheduled, whether and how patents are issued, and state laws. In the next article, I will further discuss paths to drug development specific to psychedelics and some of the legal issues that will likely arise including whether the drug is novel that would dictate the pathway to approval and ultimately the length of time to potential commercial availability.

See the article here:
The Trials And Tribulations Of Psychedelic Research - Benzinga - Benzinga

In his new book, Terreur en Bevryding, historian Leopold Scholtz tells the story of how the South African Communist Party (SACP) was one of the Soviet governments most loyal foreign cells, outperforming all other communist parties in adherence to Moscows dictates.

Scholtz further elaborates how the SACP was, and quite possibly remains, the intellectual leader in the tripartite alliance consisting of the ANC, SACP and labour federation Cosatu. Relatively recent speeches and commitments by people such as ministers Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Thulas Nxesi clearly indicate that the ANC still has some love lost for socialism.

We are poorer for it.

It is certainly true that the ANC tends to talk socialism more than deliver socialism; it has had a pragmatic flare since the 1990s. But since the Zuma years and this has become more intense during the Ramaphosa era the ANC has increasingly grasped at socialist straws to expand government power and attempt to secure its electoral future.

The agenda of expropriation without compensation is the most visceral example of this phenomenon, but South Africas global record-setting unemployment rate is perhaps its clearest consequence.

Economist Ludwig von Mises argued that it was precisely government interference in the economy that leads to unemployment. Where there is no artificial, external market interference, the market wage rate tends to settle at a point where both wage-earners and employers are willing and eager to work, with the former always opting for employment over unemployment, and the latter opting to employ rather than suffer from a labour shortage. Unemployment remains for as long as the government and its union allies are successful in the enforcement of their fiat.

Studies have borne this out as true.

Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess, in a 2004 study of labour regulation in India, conclude that regulations ostensibly meant to benefit employees in the labour market have acted as a constraint on growth and poverty alleviation. Such regulations lead to decreased investment, employment, and productivity, as well as pushing economic activity into the informal (black and grey market) sector.

Research by Juan Botero, Simeon Djankov and others, also from 2004, confirm that people opt to trade in the informal market when there is excessive labour regulation. They additionally note that there is higher youth unemployment in societies with more protective employment laws. While intuition tells us that such labour laws are ostensibly meant to protect and advance vulnerable economic classes, empirical studies show that there are worse labour market outcomes where the government is more actively involved in labour regulation.

South Africas burdensome labour laws and how they are applied are infamous among domestic and foreign investors, who rather choose to take their money elsewhere.

Every year that the Fraser Institutes Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index is published, it reinforces a lesson that our government appears determined to ignore: the poorest people in a freer market are about eight to 10 times wealthier than the poorest people in a command economy, where government actively intervenes economically in the public interest.

Some would be quick to point out that labour regulation is not indicative of socialism. But socialism concerns public (but in practice, government) control and ultimately ownership of the means of production, with labour being one of the most important means of production. The more regulation, the closer the government is to de facto ownership, even of labour.

As economist Russell Lamberti explained during a Free Market Foundation seminar, the new, evolved form of socialism that succeeded its cruder Cold War variant, is technocratic socialism.

Technocratic socialists are eager to distance themselves from the heaps of corpses and economic devastation that communism left behind in Ukraine, Russia, China and Cambodia. Technocratic socialists saw the untold prosperity that even a little bit of free enterprise brought to the disenfranchised masses of the world. Knowing their economic narrative alone will therefore fail, technocratic socialists shifted their focus away from pure economic class to race and gender, a narrative all too well-known in South Africa.

Technocratic socialists have also to an extent but in South Africa, not necessarily entirely abandoned the idea that the state must directly own the means of production. Instead, indirect ultimate control (through taxes and regulations) of the means of production is easier to attain and seems more respectable on the surface. In this respect, Lamberti argues, socialism learned a great deal from its more reviled cousin, fascism.

The ANC has opted South Africa onto the technocratic socialist path. Since 2000, South Africa has slid down the EFW rankings. With a few exceptions, such as the ridiculously disastrous discourse about land, the government seeks to control the means of production through regulation, while still allowing private owners to bear the costs of the governments mismanagement of their property. When it comes to labour, unemployed people bear the unaffordable cost of the government directing how, when, and where they may work.

The Cold War ended more than three decades ago. That period of history showed decisively that socialism, at a country scale, is unsustainable. In fact, it is socially and economically devastating.

What is described as capitalism also has its pitfalls, to be sure, but most of these imperfections will accompany any system that places value on individual autonomy. Nonetheless, the free market, unlike socialism, does not kill or destroy. All the apparent examples of economic freedom killing people yearly malnutrition, unsanitary water are usually prevalent in societies where the government tries to take a leading role in society and the economy, and goes out of its way to stifle the private sector.

There are no absolutely free markets in the world, and there are no absolutely controlled economies either. But practically without exception, the closer a society moves to a freer market, the more prosperous it is, and the closer to a controlled economy it moves, the less prosperous.

In other words, even a regulated free market like Chile proves the capitalist case correct, compared to the controlled Venezuelan economy. The lesson to be learned here is not that a society must strive for a mixed economy but rather for a free economy, as the closer one gets to economic freedom the better the outcomes for everyone, particularly the poor.

It is also true that not all economic regulations in themselves destroy economic activity. But taken together, they represent a huge burden for individuals who simply wish to eke out a living. It is cold comfort to someone who has been unemployed for years that there are a mass of labour laws out there that protect them, while they hungrily beg for money at the roadside, rather than working for an amount that socialist political elites dont approve of.

This means that while good intentions might underlie any new proposed government intervention in the economy, it is usually best to not pursue it, because history has shown that once you cede the principle that economic activity must be free from interference, that body of interventions will only grow and stifle growth and innovation. The temptation to interfere in the affairs of other people must be resisted if a flourishing and prosperous society is our goal.

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OPINION| ANCs socialist thinking is crushing South Africas future - Mail and Guardian

Farming is difficult, grueling work that is essential to our economy and our very existence as a species.

On top of that, most farmers operate on thin profit margins far from the bounty of giant agribusiness. They are beholden to the vagaries of weather and the twists and turns of the global economy, and unforeseen difficulties can lead to the sale of local farmland to developers or corporations.

Therefore, it is appropriate for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to release nearly $200 million to Washington farmers who lost crops due to natural disasters in 2020 and 2021. The grant, announced last week, is part of approximately $6 billion in disaster relief for farmers and will be paid through a new Emergency Relief Program to offset lower yields and value losses.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said: Last years extreme heat wave and drought was devastating for our farmers and ranchers in the face of a worsening climate crisis, the federal government needs to step up for the Washington state growers and producers who keep our shelves stocked. . . . Im glad we could bring back some badly-needed federal dollars to help our farmers and ranchers during a really tough time.

The aid is necessary, but it also raises several questions about politics in this country.

One is whether critics who recklessly throw around the word socialism will apply it to this situation.

Of course, socialism is grossly misapplied in American discourse. Merriam-Webster defines it as any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Few people in this country advocate for the collective ownership of production and distribution, but any social program designed to provide assistance for Americans is decried as being socialist. Aid to farmers is not socialism, but it represents the kind of program that is criticized when it is directed toward cities.

Another related issue is the fact that subsidies to farmers ballooned under President Trump throughout his failed trade war with China.

After Trump imposed tariffs on some Chinese goods, the United States economic rival responded in kind. The result was diminished markets for much U.S. agriculture, and the federal government responded with payments to offset the impact. Federal subsidies to farmers went from just over $4 billion in 2017 to more than $20 billion in 2020.

That doesnt mean that all farmers were bailed out by the federal government or that all farmers needed assistance. But a government policy that requires $20 billion in annual mitigation payments can only be viewed as a failure.

And yet we have buried the lead. With a $6 billion disaster relief program aimed at farmers, there is reason to question where it will end. Climate change delivered record temperatures through Washington last year, including a day that reached 115 degrees in Vancouver.

As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports: Temperature changes can cause habitat ranges and crop planting dates to shift and droughts, and floods due to climate change may hinder farming practices.

Those practices already have been hindered by a changing climate, and evidence suggests that the impact will only grow over time.

Helping farmers to continue providing food for our families will require vast attention to climate change.

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In Our View: Aid for farmers needed, but where will it end? - The Columbian

The great writer and moralist George Orwell began his literary career as a disciple of G. K. Chesterton. Even after Orwell explicitly diverged from some of Chestertons views in the 1930s, under the influence of socialist ideas and hopes, Chestertons assumptions and political and ethical conceptions continued to shape him.

Orwells biographers provide intriguing evidence. Bernard Crick tells us that Orwells first published essay appeared in Chestertons renegade Distributist magazine G.K.s Weekly on December 29, 1928, and that later Orwell was recorded as saying that what England needed was to follow the kind of policies in Chestertons G.K.s Weeklythat is, anti-imperialist, Little England policies. Gordon Bowker writes that as a teenager, Orwell gave someone Chestertons novel Manalive. He adds that Orwell loved Chestertons Father Brown detective stories. Robert Colls tells us that although Orwell's friends, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, accepted Orwells own characterization of himself from the 30s on as some kind of socialist, this characterization was in several ways anomalousnot only because of his Tory upbringing, private education at Eton, and accent, but also because of his traditionalist sensibility and the way in which he took his bearings from a natural and moral universe. This is a precise and pregnant comment.

Orwell has come to have a unique authority among English-language readers, mainly due to the great anti-totalitarian novels Animal Farm and 1984. But these works were also important in communist-dominated Eastern Europe from their publication until the fall of the Soviet communist empire in the early 1990s. In The Captive Mind, the great Polish dissident writer Czesaw Miosz tells us how 1984 circulated surreptitiously in Poland and Eastern Europe (including a Ukrainian translation), and how its readers were amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception of its life. One hopes that Orwells anti-totalitarian novels have also found readers in China and North Korea.

Literary and cultural critics have also argued that Orwell was indebted to Chesterton as a thinker and writer. Both the wise but now-neglected English writer Hugh Kingsmill and the eminent American critic Lionel Trilling saw Orwells social-cultural criticism as in a direct line from William Cobbett, through Dickens, to Chesterton. Orwells own longstanding interest in Dickens, evident in his substantial 1939 essay on Dickens, is clearly and explicitly influenced by Chesterton, who wrote two substantial books on Dickens and is perhaps his greatest commentator.

It is perhaps Orwells 1939 essay on Dickens that best begins to explain what Chesterton and Orwell had in common in philosophical, ethical, and political terms and why these common factors still matter today. Orwell tries to specify or pin down the ethical basis of Dickenss great fictional works, in addition to his transfiguring gifts of generous humor, characterization, description, narrative, and symbolism. He sees and says that Dickens was a believing Christian, that his morality is the Christian morality, and that despite Dickens's dislike of both Catholicism and ostentatious evangelical Protestant religiosity, he was essentially a Bible-Christian with a quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the oppressor . . . on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere.

Throughout the essay, Orwell uses a word that has come to be identified with him as a person and writer: decency. He says that Dickenss whole message is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently, the world would be decent. Like George Bernard Shaw, Orwell is disappointed that Dickens did not adhere to socialism and was even unsympathetic to the trade-union movement: Obviously he wants the workers to be decently treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own hands, least of all by open violence. With some annoyance, Orwell asks, What does [Dickens] want? As always, what he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing.

Despite Orwells criticism of Dickenss reformist, moralistic politics, he continues to insist that Dickens was neither superficial nor foolish: To say If men would behave decently the world would be decent is not such a platitude as it sounds. He adds: In the last resort there is nothing [Dickens] admires except common decency. Writing with great eloquence in the concluding paragraph of the essay, Orwell praises Dickenss devotion to human brotherhood and the idea of equality under God, with which all through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted. Orwell insists, against the ascendant fascists and communists, that the ordinary people in the Western countries have never entered, mentally, into the world of realism and power politics. Yet he concedes that they may come to do so, in which case Dickens will be . . . out of date. . . . [He] has been popular chiefly because he was able to express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native decency of the common man.

With this emphasis we return to Chesterton, who wrote an influential 1906 book on Dickens and also introductions to each of the novels, which were published in Everyman editions and then gathered as a separate book in 1911. Chesterton saw Dickens as having an elemental, primitive, profound Christian vision of the human person and society. He believed in this vision, and worked against the spirit of his own agethe first third of the twentieth centuryin trying to recover, renew, and defend the Judeo-Christian Natural Law tradition that is the ultimate source of Dickenss worldview and Orwells, too: the very basis of Orwells own, dogged common decency.

Orwell himself intermittently saw this. His intellectual departure from Chesterton occurred partly because Chesterton became a serious Christianfirst an Anglo-Catholic and then, in 1922, a Catholicand tried to renew the central Christian tradition through thought, argument, and writing. The vaguely, residually Anglican but increasingly agnostic Orwell moved on to socialism. He vehemently opposed the Catholic Church and, in fact, all systematic thinking, especially Marxism (an education in Marxism and similar creeds consists largely in destroying your moral sense). His own socialism never favorably impressed left-wing intellectuals, who have always been his greatest haters and detractors.

True communists or socialists such as Raymond Williams, Isaac Deutscher, E. P. Thompson, and the Arab-American Edward Said always knew that Orwells socialism was a jerry-built, home-made, unsystematic, non-Marxist affair, a fact made particularly clear in Orwells own 1941 book The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius and in many of his best essays and reviews. One of the most revealing is his December 1940 review of Charlie Chaplins satirical-comic, anti-Hitler film The Great Dictator. In this review, he credits Chaplin with depicting a sort of concentrated essence of the common man [and] the ineradicable belief in the decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West. We live in a period in which democracy is everywhere in retreat . . . liberty explained away by sleek professors, Jew-baiting defended by pacifists. And everywhere, under the surface, the common man sticks obstinately to the beliefs that he derives from Christian culture. Just as Orwell was to be banned in Soviet Russia and its satellites, Charlie Chaplin was banned in Nazi Germany (it is precisely the idea of human equalitythe Jewish or Judaeo-Christian idea of equalitythat Hitler came into the world to destroy, Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn).

But Chesterton understood something that Orwell would not steadily meditate: This set of allegedly normal beliefs is not ineradicable. Orwell wantedloved, in factthe fruits of centuries of Christian civilization, including manners and customs, and often said so, dreading their replacements. (Of a popular, depraved contemporary novelist he wrote in 1944: Emancipation is complete, Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs.) But those fruits that Orwell loved came from Judeo-Christian roots. It was Chestertons long quest to recover and restore those roots, through popular and witty but also powerfully philosophical works such as The Everlasting Man and St. Thomas Aquinas. In A Knight of the Woeful Countenance, a brilliant retrospective 1971 essay on Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge praised his dogged devotion to the truth but warned that one of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only truth as enlightened expediency.

Orwell thought, or at least hoped, that common decency (ethics) and objective truth (epistemology) could survive without any metaphysical-philosophical basis or confessional-ecclesiastical structure, though he married in an Anglican church and requested burial in an Anglican service and grave (which was a bit tricky for his friends Muggeridge and David Astor to arrange). But he was also frightened at the erosion of this inheritance: the common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped . . . but . . . the doctrine of realism is gaining ground (Raffles and Miss Blandish, 1944). The ascendancy of fascist and communist propaganda in the 1930s and 40s is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1943). Of course, this is the ultimate nightmare of 1984.

Orwell had gotten his essential currency of beliefs and valuations from traditional English culture, whose nineteenth-century and subsequent capitalist-imperialist developments he documented, despised, and critiqued with great eloquence in his novels and expository prose works. The culture he loved was represented by writers such as Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, and Chesterton, not by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalinor even by H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. In 1936, when he tried to get a letter of recommendation to fight in Spain from Harry Pollitt, the leader of Great Britain's Communist Party, he was turned down. In Spain he fought the fascists (and was badly wounded) but was horrified by the communist purges of fellow Spanish Republicans, including the party of anarchists in whose ranks he was serving. Orwells documentary account of his experience in Homage to Catalonia was not initially popular, but Trillings 1952 introduction to an American edition did much to make Orwells modern reputation, and not only in America.

Orwell rather dangerously committed himself more than once to the phrase and idea that all art is propaganda (Charles Dickens, 1939). Every writer, especially every novelist, has a message. . . . Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. He means that all artevery work of artpropagates some worldview and scheme of valuations, however absurd, idiosyncratic, or irrational. But this is to recognize that philosophy, worldview, or ideology cannot be escaped; that analytical reason, inference, implication, and evaluation are inevitable in humans. Philosophy cannot be escaped.

Chesterton died too early (1936) to see the astounding historical tragedies that Orwell would see before his untimely death in 1950. But Chesterton was in crucial respects wiser and deeper. In 1906, the same year his first great book on Dickens was published, he wrote a brief introduction to a volume of selections from the Victorian sage Matthew Arnold. He praised Arnold and credited him with great insight. He discovered (for the modern English) the purely intellectual importance of humility, Chesterton wrote. He had none of that hot humility which is the fascination of saints and good men. But he had a cold humility which he discovered to be a mere essential of the intelligence. To see things clearly, he said, you must get yourself out of the way.

It is that cold humility, self-depreciating and honest, that so many of Orwells friends, admirers, and readers saw or see in him. Whatever his deficiencies, we are right to do so.

M. D. Aeschliman is the author ofThe Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism.

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What Orwell Learned From Chesterton | M. D. Aeschliman - First Things

When George Floyd was in high school, his teacher Bertha Dinkins prophetically told the teen: I want to read about you in the newspaper that you have made history and done something to change society. She could never have foretold that Floyd would become a household name because the world watched a video of police officer Derek Chauvin slowly choke him to death with his knee on his neck in 2020.

The killing sparked the largest protests ever against racial injustice, prompting society to discuss racism in ways it has not done for more than a generation. His Name Is George Floyd (written by two Washington Post reporters) attempts to use the life and death of Floyd as a vehicle to examine the bigotry that lies at the heart of the present-day US.

Figures that spark protests are often barely drawn in two dimensions: we have a name, an image and little else. We know Emmett Till whose lynching in 1955 is credited with sparking the civil rights movement after his mother displayed his disfigured body in an open casket as a 14-year-old killed for supposedly whistling at a white woman. Trayvon Martin whose killing by George Zimmerman in 2012 ignited the Black Lives Matter movement is the teenager in a hoodie who died for going to a shop to buy Skittles.

In this age of misinformation, where the victims of police killings are made out to be the problem, this humanising of Floyd is necessary. The book does not paint him as a saint but explains his flaws in the context of his experiences. Yes, he was an addict, a convict, and even made a porn movie. But these are not separate from his role as a father, friend and the backbone of his family and community. It is welcome that Floyd is no longer an anonymous Black man and you can feel the devastation of his family, friends and community in the interviews that pepper the book.

Samuels and Olorunnipas greatest triumph is placing Floyds life in the context of white supremacy. Before we get to Floyd, we learn about his ancestors struggles as tenant farmers in the period after slavery was abolished, known as reconstruction. Rather than abolition marking an end to racism, we grasp how the logic of racism continued. Racist laws and segregation became the tools for keeping the Black population oppressed. Floyds great-grandfather was stripped of the land and money he had managed to accumulate in tobacco farming, leaving the family in the poverty that was passed down through the generations.

The authors reflect on the irony of Floyd being killed after allegedly buying cigarettes with a fake $20 bill, given his familys history with tobacco. Throughout, Floyds life is used to discuss issues such as racial terrorism, housing segregation, mass incarceration and racism in schooling. The point is driven home that his life and death were a result of the racism built into American society. David Smith was killed by Minneapolis police in 2010, in an almost identical manner to Floyd, but there was no public outcry.

There is a way in which all the attention on Floyds death has in some way limited the conversation: we all agree that his murder was indefensible, Derek Chauvin went to prison, minimal policing reforms occurred and now we can move on. His Name Is George Floyd adds to this narrative by focusing on this one event and its aftermath. The lack of any global context severely limits our understanding of racism, which, as Malcolm X explained, is not just an American problem, but a world problem.

The focus on Floyd also follows the unfortunate pattern of highlighting the plight of Black men, reinforcing how we are drawn to the spectacle. The violence has tended to be public, from lashings on the plantation to lynchings leaving strange fruit hanging from southern trees. The oppression of Black women is more private sexual violence, evictions and deadly institutional inequalities, such as being four times more likely to die in childbirth and more difficult to capture on camera.

Activist and professor Kimberl Crenshaw started the #SayHerName campaign to draw attention to the Black women who were far more likely to be killed by the police than their white counterparts. I couldnt read this book without thinking how Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her home by police in 2020, would have been a rich subject.

The horrific murders in Buffalo last weekend are a reminder of how a focus on racism can cloud larger issues. Killing sprees by White supremacist males are a symptom of structural racism but they are so violent and public that they, rather than the ways in which society kills Black people every day, become the basis of our discussions.

In defence of the authors, they make a valiant effort to use Floyds story to educate society about the ills of structural racism; for many readers this will be the first time they have encountered the history that shapes the present. But it is also a depressing reminder of how much work needs to be done, of the lessons that still need to be learned this deep into the 21st century.

Kehinde Andrews is professor of Black studies at Birmingham City University and the author of New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World

His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa is published by Transworld (20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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His Name is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa review the murder that shamed the US - The Guardian