As an 81-year-old fully vaccinated, often masked-up male in moderate good health with a pacemaker who’s managed to escape getting sick with COVID-19 so far, I was heartened when I read recently of UNM’s and NMSU’s decision to require COVID-19 vaccinations for faculty, students and staff this semester. I was also relieved that the conservative Albuquerque Journal hadn’t gone over to the dark side altogether and opined in an editorial that a mandate for vaccines was “likely our best bet to keeping NM safe.” And despite an apparently nasty and disruptive outbreak of anti-mask protesters at an APS meeting last week, an opposite trend may be in the air. Even FOX News’s Sean Hannity has taken to admonishing his viewers to get vaccinated if not masked up.
But then again, we have bewildering and saddening news that Republican New Mexico Rep. Yvette Herrell has signed on to a bill that QAnon operative Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia supports to pull millions of dollars in federal funds from universities that require vaccinations including, now, UNM and NMSU. The bill is not likely to get enough votes. But that a New Mexican lawmaker would consider undermining the institutions of higher education in her own state because of a conspiracy theory, redoubles my desire to make sense of the anti-vaccination movement and what seems to be a deepening and unbridgeable schism growing in American culture.
How is it possible in 21st century America for 53 percent of unvaccinated adults to feel that getting protected against COVID-19 is more dangerous than the disease itself, as a Kaiser Family Foundations survey recently showed? Like many, I‘m stumped. I wonder if none these people have been vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, hepatitis B and the flu? By most accounts, vaccination are among the most effective and life-enhancing of all medical procedures. Why are they afraid? What is going on here? And then the other day my befuddlement really got the better of me. At an intersection on Osuna Boulevard a crowd of flag-wrapped, sign-waving and screaming people were going all out to convince passersby that face masks, COVID-19 vaccines, and pedophiliac Democrats were somehow all part of a cabal to take over America.
Has the Republican Party become the big tent for the massive paranoid fringe of a rapidly unraveling American culture? It seems to have become the home of choice for anti-vaxxers, QAnon conspiracy theorists who believe Democrats are Satan-worshipping child-sex traffickers, and for billionaires funding the Big Lie of a rigged election. Is it possible that an NPR poll is right that 17% of my fellow citizens believe QAnon’s assertions are credible? It seems to be. And Derek Thompson in The Atlantic in May contended that there’s a “partisan vaccine gap.” And that one in four Americans “don’t plan to take the COVID-19 vaccine, and about half of Republicans under 50 say they won’t get a vaccine.” It appears that many anti-vaxxers don’t get it that vaccines aren’t just about protecting them from COVID-19 but everyone else they encounter, including their older and younger family members and infirm kin and neighbors. It is true, of course, as the New York Times pointed out, that some unvaccinated people just can’t manage to get the shot in its appropriate doses and shouldn’t be blamed but helped. But they seem to be left out of the statistics.
So what is going on here? I certainly don’t have the answer. But it does seem to me that many people in our country are playing by a different set of rules about reality and truth, rules that differ radically from the fundamental rationality of the scientific method that underlies the inventiveness and effectiveness of all aspects of the technological society in which every one of us lives.
Without the scientific method and the technologies it makes possible, we would have nothing upon which we’ve come to depend — no electricity, no internal combustion engines, no clean water, no airplanes, no cancer cures, no telephones, no televisions, no refrigeration, no mass produced clothing, no public health system, no dams and highways and automobiles, no computers, no Internet, no medical science, no hospitals that save lives, no assembly lines, no food we can depend on, no microwaves, no solar energy, no natural gas. The scientific method is at the heart of American Pragmatism which believes that what works is true. Vaccines work. The so-called magical thinking and radical skepticism of anti-vaxxers doesn’t protect them from the spiking COVID-19 that is killing and sickening so many unvaccinated Americans. It doesn’t work.
The scientific method in its simplest form observes needs and problems, asks questions about how they can be met and solved, proposes tentative answers, makes predictions based on those tentative answers and then tests their predictions against what actually happens. It’s looking for evidence, for theories that work. Science stands against rumor, gossip, superstition and the monsters of fear. It is not in itself an ideology, or a religion, or a dogma. It is a way of seeing if our ideas are true or false in the real world.
Granted, the scientific method can be easily corrupted. It’s built on a basic criticality that is meant to let the data, the evidence, fall where it may. When you fudge on the findings, though, and lie about them, twist them to serve your own interests even when they don’t, or use sloppy and unreliability methods, then the scientific method is no better than snake oil. Unhappily, we see this corruption all the time — in the tobacco industry hiring “scientists” to claim its products aren’t the direct cause of multiple diseases, or with the fossil fuel industry that conspires against climate change science to protect its profits, or with any company whose healthy bottom line depends on being able to freely pollute the air and water with its hazardous waste, or with nuclear science that dramatically underplays the dangers of its technologies and means of mining and manufacture. Corrupting the scientific method is a secular sin. Nothing works without reliable information upon which decisions can be made and adequate technologies produced.
It’s more than ironic that many of the corporate corrupters of science for hire are also in the same political camp as those who deny the findings of science, like the fearful anti-vaxxers who are victims of a political con job disguised as scientific doubt and corporate climate change deniers who have perfected the propaganda of doubt. When you combine that with a deeply entrenched hatred of government, doubt becomes associated not with proof and evidence, but with sniffing out suspected malign intent.
If a good portion of our culture has bought into the perspectives of a political cult funded by a power elite, a clique that rejects the rules by which we determine what’s true and not true and creates a set of rules for itself in which anything goes, then our culture is facing a schism, an unwinnable zero sum conflict that may result in total social and technical paralysis. With the deterioration of an underfunded public education system and a flame-throwing partisan media establishment, we may never be able to politically untangle completely the cultural mess we find ourselves in.
By pulling away from the scientific method, many Americans must feel estranged from the society in which all of us live. They must feel that they don’t belong, that their version of reality is missing from the general discourse. Their frustration leads to rage. And rage is the high octane fuel of political manipulation. It seems entirely possible that the paranoid fringe of the Republican Party is the creation of the billionaire elites, that the top of the hierarchy is creating fear in the dispossessed, and using it to manipulate elections and secure their hold on power.
If the Heritage Foundation, and other conservative think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), funded by Big GOP money, are supporting efforts to undermine the validity of the vote in Arizona and elsewhere, as the New Yorker has pointed out recently online in a piece called The Big Money Behind the Big Lie, then what else are they supporting in the Republican Big Tent? Do they have the blood of the sick and dying on their stock portfolios?
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Yes, science has given us all those wonderful things, most of which will reduce drastically or even disappear as we move into a future that promises to be, in one degree or another, dystopian. Science is essential, but lacks heart. All the products of it lack heart too. It gives us nothing in how we interact, and thus how we act. So what is lacking, essentially, is the guidance of wisdom. This can only be derived from the humanities, or culture. Science has been much more destructive than beneficial to the natural world because we have distanced ourselves from our home. Only by moving beyond our cultural insufficiency and melding back into the world can we “solve” the problems we have created, through science, that will destroy us and most of the life on the planet.
It’s difficult to wrap one’s head around the paranoid lunacy of the QAnon crowd, but there has always been a wacky nativist segment of the population in the US. Now everything is hugely magnified by social media and the internet, a technology which has upended societal discourse and has pushed us, as it were, through the looking glass. This was the case before the pandemic and now it is much worse. There are also powerful actors, as you point out, who fan the flames of this insanity for their own nefarious purposes. But there’s a larger point, I believe, which is the complete breakdown of trust in our institutions. This has been happening for a long time, and now is virtually total, with everyone retreating into their own perceptual redoubts, joined by like-minded tribal members and reinforced and manipulated by the corporate media with their cynical business models. Given the obvious corruption of the political system and its capture by corporate interests, including the pharmaceutical industry, this loss of trust is understandable and has permeated every aspect of our culture, including interpersonal relations.
Excellent piece Barrett! Thank you for all you do. What about all the Tejanos and RED Rightwingers invading northern New Mexico and spreading the Delta variant to our elders and young people. Are tourist $$$ worth it? New Mexico True? Peace.
So very well stated Mr Price, thank you … many of your words true for us also in Washington state. What about the idea of us all calling Rupert Murdock for what he is? The funding behind so many lies, deceptions, conspiracy theories, and most of all Fox NOTNEWS. His money feeds so much hatred and dishonesty and he lines his coffers with glee hiding away in his “castle” in England.