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.
