The Pandemic, Scientism, Democracy, and Deliberation

 by Lael Ewy

Jason Blakely's piece in the August, 2023 issue of Harper's on the discontent with science, or, more accurately, scientism, as revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic makes some important points about the misuses of science, especially of the social sciences. Trusting as settled science the various theories of the manner in which people and cultures believe is incredibly problematic and often harmful.

As someone who worked for seven-and-a-half years in the public mental health field, I have seen this close up: psychiatric diagnoses, which, by necessity are based on a consensus (among psychiatrists) of what constitutes acceptable behaviors, feelings, and thoughts, eventually come to be considered "natural forms" that can be studied and treated "the same as any other illness," and so they get treated generally with medication only. This often elides the real-world problems people seeking help actually have, trapping them in loops of ever-increasing medication instead of helping them into better lives by giving them practical solutions to their issues. Often, people subject to medication-only regimens end up with debilitating side-effects such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, tardive dyskinesia, akathisia, and sexual dysfunction--not to mention the traumas associated with involuntary commitment and discrimination due to the psychiatric labels they carry.

Photo credit Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação

So his basic premise is right: scientism is real, and it does real damage, not only in the mental health field, but in poorly-researched areas such as self-help, lifestyle engineering, and public policy.

Blakely's conclusion that democracy was eroded by the reactions of federal, state, and local governments to the COVID-19 pandemic as these entities "imposed" "top-down" "mandates" based on scientistic reasoning, though, doesn't fly. He mentions in passing that America's distrust of science predates the pandemic, but it's also backed up both by ginned up conspiracy theories of those who actually do want to erode democracy here and abroad and by America's deep tradition of religious fundamentalism.

In response to Blakely's accusation, and to be accurate about what happened during the pandemic, however, and how federal, state, and local governments actually handled it, we have to examine if democracy itself broke down.

I contend it did not. When the COVID-19 pandemic washed over the US, I was teaching at a public high school in the small town of Newton, Kansas. It's true that the state's governor, Laura Kelly, did mandate certain public health measures in order to contain the contagion. But the day-to-day realities of her orders were duly deliberated at the local level, and the manner in which USD 373 reacted to these mandates was decided by the elected officials on the school board--by the people's representatives--just as it should be in a representative government.

Likewise, city and county governments kept functioning much as they had before, only over Zoom instead of in person, deciding how to implement the state's guidelines, and they did so effectively, in ways that led to widespread compliance. This is precisely the way elected officials are supposed to act.

And while many of the choices of the state, county, and local, governments were unpopular, they did not substantially change the political makeup of those bodies at the next election: notably, Governor Kelly kept her post--quite an accomplishment for a Democrat in a conservative state. So while we may not have liked what she decided to do, we didn't dislike it so much that we all voted against her.

Blakely expends a lot of words pointing out that decisions about what defines an "essential worker" were the products of scientistic reasoning instead of political deliberation, as if those decisions weren't also those of duly elected officials, including California's Gavin Newsom, who comes under substantial fire from Blakely for his hypocrisy in attending a large social gathering at a high-end restaurant when the rest of the state was locked down. These actions, though, are merely poor politics, not the breakdown of democracy itself, and, as with Laura Kelly, it didn't seem to have upset Newsom's constituents enough to bounce him out of office--something California is known for, as the political demise of Gray Davis shows. Contrast this with the fate of Boris Johnson, whose hypocrisy during the pandemic did lead, in part, to his political downfall. The fact that these two politicians' recent careers had different outcomes indicates not that scientism reigns supreme but that democracy worked as it should in the terms Blakely sets out: two different groups of people made two different decisions about who they wanted in the executive office, based on their own set of values and principles.

Blakely claims that politicians like Newsom used the pandemic to impose their political and ideological perspectives, but, outside the claims of conspiracy-theorists, there's no indication that liberals have long wanted to make people wear masks or have had a standing agenda to shut down the local coffee shop. (Indeed, the liberals I know love the local coffee shops and found ways to support them even during lockdown.) Blakely completely fails to mention which policies politicians wanted to impose and did, which pandemic policies track with ideological commitments, so it's hard to take that particular charge seriously. We can only assume that his mention of churches being shut down during the pandemic is part of some sort of dark liberal agenda, but, while liberals tend to be more skeptical of organized religion that others, I've never known them to want to shut down churches on the whole: the standard liberal view is that faith as a matter of personal choice. That churches were impacted by lockdowns and certain businesses weren't, again, may have been bad decision-making on the part of elected officials, but there's no indication it was part of a larger, nefarious effort to impose liberal ideas.

And while many of the reactions of governments against the virus were provisional, shifting, imperfect, that was due to the fact that we were still learning about the virus's nature, not because public health measures are bad science, or even scientistic, as Blakely suggests. The science of public health may be imperfect, but it's considerably more solid than those of, say, economics or quantitative policing.

Besides, elected executives have emergency powers for a reason: to deal with genuine existential threats quickly, when the slower deliberations of legislative bodies would not be able to react with due speed. We might not want our elected executives to have these generally limited powers, but history indicates it's better if they do, especially as natural disasters become more common due to climate change. Nobody likes to see the National Guard in their neighborhood, but when a tornado blasts through our community, I'm sure happy they're there. Even Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who rolled back COVID restrictions in his state in a way that led to the deaths of tens of thousands, and whose acts as governor otherwise border on the fascistic, hasn't gone so far as to invoke emergency powers in order to implement his "anti-woke" agenda. He has reserved these for the state's frequent hurricanes and floods, exactly what they were intended for. Indeed, the equally authoritarian Donald Trump did not use the pandemic as an excuse to impose martial law, which would have helped him implement his plan to seize power when he lost the election.

Tellingly, Blakely fails to address the counterfactual, what it would have been like if the various governments had done nothing, allowing individuals and businesses to decide for themselves how to deal with the viral threat. We have a few cases that suggest how bad it could have gotten all over the country. It was only after initial lockdowns that we saw this: notably in the aforementioned Florida and South Dakota. When they loosened restrictions, people died. When New York reacted poorly at first, bodies were stacked in refrigerated trucks. Places where the virus hit hard saw healthcare workers stretched to, and sometimes beyond, their limits. Would it really have made for a healthier democracy to have potentially let millions more die, to have utterly devastated our already stressed healthcare infrastructure? It's easy for Blakely to preach now, after effective vaccines have arrived, but as an "essential worker" in the middle of the worst of it, I went to work every day worried I'd get infected, or, worse yet, that I'd be the vector that led to the death of my elderly mother or my disabled wife.

The world Blakely posits may be more "free," but it would also be considerably more deadly. A precursor exists, sadly, in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, during which the reaction of the Reagan administration was to do nothing, since, they reasoned, it was "just a gay disease," and the bulk of the electorate didn't care. The fact that it wasn't "just a gay disease" and that it would be morally bankrupt to ignore it even it had been seems to have been lost to history in Blakely's view of things. Thousands of people died, and it led to widespread paranoia not just for gay men but for everyone who was sexually active. It was only when the Surgeon General at the time, C. Everett Koop, went rogue and began to address the issue that people started to have some confidence that safe sex was even possible.

The old adage, often attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, that my right to swing my arm ends where the tip of your nose begins is applicable here, but with the complication that the nature of an airborne pathogen exponentially expands the reach of my swing. We're not protecting individual freedoms from governmental mandates in this case but individual rights not to be infected, and possibly killed, because of the selfish choices or the neglect of others. This is an idea that ought to be utterly clear, and in other cases it is: if I pour waste oil into someone else's well, I am clearly liable. But when I pump my viral breath into your airspace, I'm somehow just expressing my freedom?

Had this virus's effects not resembled other ailments such as allergies, colds, and the flu, had it, instead, been, say, a hemorrhagic fever, a supercharged Ebola, few of the conspiracies would have developed and little of the pushback would have happened. Had the ravages of the disease been more visible and clear, perhaps by turning people green or giving them open sores, we would have been clamoring for our elected officials to do something about it, no matter how forceful or dire.

The real victim of the pandemic, I fear, has not been democracy but the very idea of public health itself. The notion that individual health is related to the health of the community has been undermined not just by conspiracy theories but also by those duly elected officials reacting to the pushback Blakely champions by weakening their ability to address public health concerns in a timely manner. Rather than learning about what works and what does not when a democracy is faced with a pandemic, we have decided to disarm against the next, inevitable, viral threat.

It's democracy still functioning, as it should be, but it will lead to disastrous results.

On Woke's Subtle Graces

 by EW Wilder

Writing in the July 2023 edition of Harper's, Ian Buruma makes the following errors:

• He accepts the far rightwing definition of "woke" which, rather than being a blanket term for social justice awareness, more likely has its roots in the need for Black Americans to stay aware of their surroundings in order to avoid trouble (or worse) in the Jim Crow South.

• He conflates Anabaptists' baptism conventions with other Protestant traditions of public confession and implies they are parallel to Catholic confession of sin. The Anabaptist conventions are theologically distinct.

• He argues by analogy that Puritan traditions of "doing the work" equate with contemporary corporate statements on social justice issues.

The latter is at the core of his argument, so let's delve into it.

Arguing by analogy is always fraught, and while it's true that vestiges of Puritanism can be found throughout American secular culture, chances are the corporate statements Buruma excoriates are more public relations stunts than they are any expression of real ideological of even political positions. Rightly, Buruma points out the widespread hypocrisy of these statements, coming as they do from companies—such as Amazon—that have a poor history of giving a rip about their workers. But hypocrisy is a longstanding part of corporate life. If Buruma is scandalized by giant companies saying they support #BLM while simultaneously funneling money to the campaigns of racist politicians, wait until he discovers the falseness of their statements that "employee safety is our highest priority" or that clearly terrible customer policies are being implemented "to better serve you."

The only people who are scandalized or even surprised by the hypocrisies of the boardroom aren't, well, "woke" enough to write comprehensively about the subject.

Later in the essay, Buruma puts scare quotes around "'structural'" racism, as if redlining, Jim Crow laws, and race-based gerrymandering never existed, or, indeed, in the case of the latter, don't continue to plague us.

He ends up noting that Democrats, if they want to win, need to de-emphasize social justice issues in their campaigns, lawmaking, and public statements in favor of economic ones. But this is also hardly profound; it was the basis of Bernie Sanders's campaign strategy, after all, and it was a popular enough stance for establishment Democrats with strong corporate ties to quash the Sanders campaign in 2016. So, at best, Buruma's essay is about a decade too late. At worst, though, it helps feed the rightwing hate machine, which, as Ron DeSantis's politics embody, is actively using "woke" as a wedge issue.

Buruma's stance, though, also elides a very serious problem: a lot of White working and middle class Americans are, quite simply, racists. I'm not sure what Buruma's life has been like, but, as a cis/het/middle-class White guy from the Great Plains, I can attest to the fact that racist attitudes are both common and open in all-White spaces, especially informal ones. Behind the barn, over lunch or coffee, at family gatherings, when White people of my demographic get together, jokes about Black and Brown people are often thrown around like a baseball in a game of catch. It's ugly, but it's true.

And the fact that certain swing voters went for Barack Obama once or even twice does not make them not racist. Obama worked for years on making his personal brand acceptable to the White power base, the white electorate. Putting Joe Biden on the ticket, a man who openly used terms like "clean" and "articulate" to describe Obama, was a strategy to appeal to voters who would themselves use those terms to describe an "acceptable" Black person. Like Bill Cosby before him and Clarence Thomas now, Obama knew how to play the White man's game, and he was rewarded for it. It also helped that the economic collapse of 2008 made a message of "hope" and "change" resonate. That many of these same voters reverted to vote for the clearly racist Donald Trump eight years later just adds evidence to the idea that a deeply racist White middle-America is happy to use a Black man to get what it wants and is happy to return to form when it senses that the Other is getting too "uppity."

Buruma goes on to note that globalization has benefited those he deems, in a distortion of Protestant tradition, "the Elect," and that he is among them. He contends that these so-called Elect benefit from virtue-signaling. I admit that I have no idea who his "Elect" are or how they differ from the people (many of them Jewish) the far right deem "the elite" (or, if you're Donald Trump "the a-leet"). Professors and other academics are supposedly part of this cohort, but, as one of their number, I don't see how globalization has helped or hurt me very much one way or the other. The internationalism Buruma cites—the ability for academics to cross international boundaries to collaborate—seems indistinguishable from jet travel, something theoretically more open to the coal miners who once made close to six figures a year than to underpaid profs. But virtue-signaling and benefiting from global trade are unrelated: just ask Rupert Murdoch. Oil companies seeking new markets, manufacturers looking to outsource, and the largely (and vocally) libertarian tech industry looking for cheaper coders from overseas, not to mention uber-wealthy investors looking for a tax dodge, seem to all have benefited from globalization more than anyone else. Few of these entities have a history of even paying lip service to social justice issues, unlike retailers, whose presence in local communities creates a need to appeal to local populations. Retailers, while globalization has allowed them to offer cheaper products, can't offshore their workforce, and they have been among the first to raise starting wages in the years since the pandemic.

Counter to what Buruma seems to think, so-called "wokeism" actually has benefited me as an instructor at a small college, and in practical terms. I serve a diverse student body, and I have to run classrooms and virtual spaces in which Black, immigrant, and LGBT+ people feel safe alongside the White, cis, het, and native born. Besides, this stuff is real: not only is structural racism still alive and well in our congressional districting, gay and trans kids still get bullied, their lives and bodies continue to be sanctioned against by rightwing state and local governments and school boards, and women's representation and wages still lag in business and tech fields.

As someone who spent seven-and-a-half years working alongside the public mental health system, I have seen how economic inequality can impact lives in a massively negative way. Generational poverty is more often the cause of mental health problems than the result of it. But as most progressives realize, addressing economic inequality alone won't solve all social justice issues. There was, after all, a strong Black middle class even when much of America was segregated, and the sexual orientation of Apple CEO Tim Cook didn't stop eleven gay kids who live in a wealthy suburb of my home town from attempting suicide one recent fall semester due to bullying at school and lack of acceptance at home.

Instead of just ceding the "woke" ground to the rightwing, just as liberals have ceded faith and finance and free speech, the left needs to start doing what it used to do: it needs to start educating the public. The rightwing has spent four decades filling the radio airwaves and cable TV signals with its vitriol and hate, while the left has largely sat on its hands. The left needs to raise consciousness; it needs to be unapologetic about issues of gender and race and sexual orientation as well as about issues of economic inequality. This messaging needs to be accurate and frequent and clear.

Indeed, if there's one thing that Americans admire more than anything else, a quality that surpasses ideology and identity in the American mind, it's confidence. Trump won not because he had anything substantive to say—he still doesn't—but because he spouts his nonsense and lies with utter conviction. This is the lesson that we on the left need to learn: not that we need to be less woke, but that we need to be righteous in our commitment to the cause. 

 

Photo credit: "woke" by Bob Larsen 

Night Moves

 

Some of my earliest memories are of lost sleep, of the circadian disruption of fluorescent lights in a hospital hallway, of the clutching fear of knowing that my chest would soon be cut open, my heart stopped, my blood given over to a lifeless machine. The constancy of the needles and the nurses' cold hands brought me back to where I was: alive and awake, always awake. A few years later, a leg injury put me in traction for weeks, the days punctuated by the taste of cherry Jell-O, not cherry at all but the chemical burn of the fake stuff, the scent of which I burped all night long as I watched the merry-go-round of locally made airplanes whirl away the hours atop the restaurant next door.

In my life after, sleep was disrupted by nightmares of being trapped, of wandering those hospital halls unable to escape, dreams of not breathing, of being breathed for by the machines. It's hard to sleep when the landscape of slumber is full of such terrors.

The news, now, is full of studies on the ways sleeplessness kills: both fast in accidents and slow in chronic health problems: heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, dementia. The irony in my case is that the very invasive surgery that fixed the heart condition I was born with set the sleep cycles that, 45 years later, will potentially wreck my heart.

What cures also kills.

Aside from shift work, there are not many jobs someone who is more awake at 3:00 a.m. than at 3:00 p.m. can successfully pursue. I've managed to manipulate academe to offer up enough flexibility for an afternoon nap, but being assigned an evening class just exacerbates the problem. Getting used to even less sleep is possible, though the TV doctors don't recommend it.

I've stopped talking to my GP about my lack of sleep. She's recommended melatonin, and, from a medical perspective, I'm sure she isn't wrong.

But at this point, my weird sleep cycles are something of an identity: I'm not sure who I'd be without these early morning workouts, without these predawn runs, without seeing the world at 4:00 a.m. in all its stark, dark beauty.

When Frost wrote that he was "acquainted with the night," he was writing what he knew, but he was also writing about an alternative way of knowing. Certainly, we can read that poem as addressing depression, but it's also about the way the night and darkness reorient us toward our inner lives. The darkness reminds us that we have one and that it does more emotional an even intellectual work than we're generally aware of.

The brash, daytime world is for extroverts, and there's part of me that's ready to let them have it. It's full of aggression and bad driving, thoughtlessness and acting for the sake of action. When I hear the coyotes bray in the nature park nearby, I'm slightly frightened, as any human might be, but I'm also sympathetic: yes, brothers, yes. I understand the longing in your keening lamentation.