Maybe it seems coy of me, to have represented that my past or present political leanings are irrelevant to how I couch my discussions of Covid in this newsletter. In my own defense, I thought it reasonable (if maybe naive) to operate as if I could consider Covid purely against some sort of respectable backdrop: information derived on the basis of carefully executed research protocols, in light of intellectual history, germane areas of philosophical inquiry, and so forth. Then—as my thinking went—persons of any political persuasion could engage their own personal process for forming opinions about what is happening with Covid right now. What could be wrong about that?
What is wrong is that I assumed an environment where thinking critically is valued in actuality as well as in theory, with Covid as with other things. Unfortunately the current environment is simply not one where reason prevails. Fear and reason are poor working partners and, in an era of stoked fear, the pergatory of a shrunken-down life seems a reasonable price to pay for the security one’s tribe has to offer. Thanks in large part to the media and whomever it is they work for, animal brains have taken over and the results are not what a bunch of smart, reasonable people should have been able to come up with, in terms of protecting human wellbeing in all its dimensions.
There are many scientists, doctors, statisticians, social scientists, data experts of various kinds making very clear that our solutions do not compute. In every issue of the Covid Mirror I provide links to their research for your consideration. However, unlike those experts, I am here as a generalist to point out that it is very important to tune into culture as its critic. It is important to buck the trend when you notice culture spewing irrationality and immorality. It is important to observe when culture has caused you to shut parts of your own psyche down, and to take steps to build it back up. It is important to ask yourself if, maybe, you are being swept up in something that you may later come to regret, as has happened to people throughout history.
Like other mirrors, the Covid mirror gives us an opportunity to change what is reflected back at us by changing something about ourselves. It seems a shame to waste an opportunity that mirror provides, but more than it being a shame, perhaps it courts disaster.
One of various psychological mechanisms that has done much to enthrone the animal brain in this crisis is the human tendency toward confirmation bias. This ubiquitous gadfly of the reasoning mind has been subjected to much research. Why, in the evolution of reasoning ability, this clear flaw attached itself, has puzzled people attempting to understand intelligence. Contrary to what you might think, the most highly expert are actually found by social scientists to be among the worst offenders, the most clever at constructing rationales that support their comfort zones of thought, their inviolable “right answers” that they might assume protect their identities as the smart ones. In this era of fear and ubiquitous propaganda, these smart people are too often least willing to consider all incoming information in forming opinions. (If you thought scientists don’t fall victim to confirmation bias, think again!) These, unfortunately, are often the experts whose opinions we uncritically adopt.
Both left and right have their “smart people.” To get back to the question of my own leanings, those on the progressive left are the ones whose values I shared in the past, and in large part still do--except when it comes to Covid.
My friends on the left, you are the fruit high on the tree that I have been trying to reach. I could not have predicted how hard that would be. I have entered an unfamiliar state of disagreement with you, resulting in my having been painfully shunned. From a number of you, I have experienced silences, awkward changes of subject, name calling, condemnations from the safety of your locked door. But still, maybe you will remember a time when we used to see eye to eye about many things? Maybe I’m not all bad…. Please, open that door just a crack, and I’ll tell you a quick story. (To please you, I brought my measuring tape and will stay six feet away.) I picked something that in former times you might have found diverting.
Scrappers
Wilbur and Orville Wright were ostensibly a couple of ordinary young men in Ohio earning a livelihood selling and repairing bicycles. In their invention of the airplane, the brothers changed the course of human history. Competitors in the quest to overcome that preeminent engineering challenge of the day had financial resources, training, standing--and yet these two untrained fellows were the ones to fly the first successful aircraft. How could this have happened?
According to writer Ian Leslie, the Wrights owed their success to their skill in the art of “scrapping.” When they were children, their father, Bishop Milton Wright, gave them topics to debate after the evening meal. The boys were encouraged to show passion without crossing the line into disrespect. After the first round, Wright had them switch sides. As a result of this training, the brothers became greatly skilled in wringing information from boiling hot arguments—critical information that failed to occur to their supposed betters. On the way to trying to outmaneuver one another in their verbal brawls, deficiencies of thought would be exposed and expunged. Winning concepts would become refined and strengthened. With mental dross cleared away, unforeseen angles would become apparent, and from this process the first power-driven plane able to fly an astonishing 852 feet emerged.
The brothers’ screaming, neighbors later related, at times seemed interminable. It seems unlikely to our way of thinking that Wilbur and Orville could have been close, but by various accounts they were. Part of their skill, their niece later related, was that in addition to yelling at the other, each listened skillfully and respectfully. No matter how hot an argument got, each consistently exercised his ability to remain quiet, take in and process the other’s thoughts.
Leslie proposes that there are a few principles to be gleaned from the brothers’ example, having to do with that pesky confirmation bias that so undermines rational decision making. In this era of discarding and canceling positions found to be inconvenient by whomever happens to be running the show, I believe we would be smart to consider those principles amongst ourselves.
Culturally if not individually, we are “intellectualists:” we tend to think of reason and intellect as traits belonging to individuals. One outcome of this intellectualist perspective is that we hand our vexing problems to experts to solve using their allegedly superior reasoning capacities and knowledge base. For the intellectualist, confirmation bias is a fly in the ointment, an insoluble annoyance. But “interactionists,” in their Socratic posture, posit that reason evolved or was given to serve us in an entirely different manner. According to the interactionist perspective of intelligence, argument is a powerful and necessary tool of inquiry intended for the cohesion and benefit of the group. Passionately held biases in this view are actually not a flaw, but rather create the motivation that makes for productive arguments. Like the Wright brothers, we can create advantages for the group by exposing our biases to opponents, with them exposing theirs in turn. Through such interactions we create goods both for ourselves and our community, as well as bond with people we might otherwise heartily dislike.
Whereas the Wright brothers did not shrink from discussion heated enough to scare the neighbors (heat they intelligently channeled), we value the lukewarm in the form of “nice.” Because of our intellectualist assumptions, we would rather defer to the most confident person in the room than consider the value of grist or gold that might be ours to contribute. (What if both were equally necessary? Now there’s a thought….) Whereas the Wright brothers listened, we too often invalidate through silence, shame/ridicule, or obscure a person’s contribution through a various kinds of informational noise. This is the societal context that continues to prop up a dismally failed vaccine/isolation strategy. (If you don’t think it is failed, please comment below and I will reply.)
Scrappy early man/woman, Leslie points out, somehow managed to predominate in the global landscape, even in the presence of forces and beasts much more physically powerful. Leslie wonders if communal scrapping didn’t play a role in mankind’s ascendency in the face of daunting challenges. Given the magnitude of forces currently aligned against human survival, perhaps it is time to let the interactionist experiments rip. Perhaps it is time to recognize that our investment in experts was not to our collective benefit. Perhaps our experts are cursed by biases, biases that can only bless through the involvement of critics.
(By keeping this discussion simple, I don’t want to imply that people become experts through purely meritocratic processes). The political aspects of expertise must also be fleshed out, just not in a single edition of a newsletter.)
To be very clear, I don’t think that shouting matches are necessary to generate the heat Leslie talks about. One’s manner of scrapping is a matter of temperament. What is important is a heart for the greater good, passion, a willingness to fight fairly for one’s perspective, and the humble willingness to be proved wrong if that’s where things end up.
I don’t think our members of government are the ones to serve as our Bishop Wright. Frankly, I can’t think of many in office who have demonstrated sincere concern for the communal good, not to mention my own safety. Indeed, I have become convinced as a result of everything I have witnessed of late that it is foolish to trust our government with my own health, well-being, or freedom, or frankly anybody else’s. I assume the interactionist revolution will start as a grassroots phenomenon, in places like this Substack. Unfortunately, if we shrink from this job in favor of the comfort of accustomed ways, the cancer of confirmation bias will have the space to metastasize.
Please leave your audacious, respectful disagreements (and agreements!) in the comments below, and I will respectfully answer to the best of my ability.
Friendship Challenge
As I continue to attempt to converse with the highly educated (and I don’t just mean people with college degrees) politically moderate to progressive people who have been my friends, it is clear that for many if not most of them, allegiance to party now supersedes any need to question and find meaning. Censorship has become part of a new normal, a legitimate adjunct to dealing with the virus. To provide one example, I recently forwarded this video by the activist comedian JP Sears (who is most definitely not a Democrat, not that this concerns me at this stage of my personal political development) to a college-professor friend of many years in New York. In that video Sears rang an alarm about laws coming before the New York legislature, coercive inoculation dictats that one might justifiably fear violate the Nuremberg Code. Whatever JP Sears’s political affiliation, my question to Steve (not his real name) was, is this really happening in New York, and if so, can we talk about it?
Though Steve and I have grown apart, at one time we were quite close and my affection for him has never abated. Over and over again I saw him show up as an excellent, compassionate human being, someone who went out on a limb for friends, students, and strangers practically on a daily basis. Though for him and me the state of being simpatico is history, I was still quite taken aback by Steve’s tart response to what I had sent: “there was absolutely no truth” to “anything” in the video, he wrote, and that the comedian was just out to make money, that he was “dangerous” and that I shouldn’t believe “anything” I saw on YouTube because it was a “pigsty.”
My goodness, was I passing around something whose falseness was obvious to everyone but me? Had I foolishly allowed myself to be manipulated by a shrewd Internet shyster? Was I now guilty of spreading rightwing propaganda? I checked the New York Legislature website, and in fact JP Sears, guilty of being a conservative though he undoubtedly is, had not fabricated legislative docket numbers or summaries. Fortunately, the most terrifying of the proposed laws had already been sidelined. That one called for people who were “deemed” by the state to be a public health threat, to be detained and receive medical treatment against their will, among other things. The other proposed laws called for coercive measures to essentially force vaccination in clear violation of the Nuremberg Code, including in children and college students. The laws were to go before the legislature, all right, just as the comedian was saying.
New York City’s vaccine card rules (as you likely know, you can’t do much of anything there without proof of vaccination) already make me feel alarmed for those they marginalized, and afraid of unchecked authoritarianism spreading like wildfire. How could these laws be justified (I wanted Steve to tell me) given legitimate studies showing that the vaccinated and unvaccinated were spreading the disease possibly equally; that data from many countries as well as US counties was indicating that increases in Covid were unrelated to vaccination rate; that the vaccines are still experimental? (That topic has been very cleverly but clearly obfuscated, so that people in the US are not aware that the FDA-approved “Comirnaty” that was a pretext for mandates is not even available here.) “The science” was apparently not supporting mandates, which also happened to violate the Nuremberg Code, and yet New York was strangely persisting along this road of scapegoating the noncompliant.
In a democracy, wouldn’t it be necessary to discuss this? Don’t we have a responsibility to reign in a government that has become corrupt, as the framers of the Constitution clearly understood to be a likelihood?
Steve lied to me about Sears’s assertions, with a bold face. How was I to communicate my hurt and disappointment at his lying, which he was using to dismiss my legitimate alarm? How could I get the fellow citizen I knew well to really have a look at this dangerous thing happening in his own state?
I bluntly but unemotionally, without vitriol, pointed out that the points underlying Sears’s concerns were confirmed by the New York Legislature website. (Of course, I didn’t call Steve a liar, I just laid things out so that he could form his own conclusion.) I further sent him a short list of medical journal articles showing that the inoculated and uninoculated are equally spreaders of the virus and that the inoculated were not being protected from the illness to the degree claimed, in fact to the contrary. (The novel therapies dubbed vaccines are displaying negative effectiveness against Omicron, as shown in a broad survey of countries.) As this is about civil liberties at least as much as it is about illness, I also sent a video of a man being arrested for his act of civil disobedience: ordering food at a Burger King without showing his vax card. (One wonders how it was the swarm of police officers who showed up at the Burger King didn’t have better things to do, in New York City?) I sent him evidence that it is black people who bear the brunt of the vaccine mandates, a feature of the travesty that BLM-affirming liberals ignore.
Steve replied in another hostile email. (I guess I should consider it a hopeful sign that he even bothered to reply.) He wrote that the man arrested at the Burger King was just a “single asshole.” He also represented New Yorkers as a monolith, getting vaxxed of one altruistic accord because they understood that freedom entailed sacrifice (unlike selfish me, I think I was intended to gather, though the issue of whether I personally was injected had not come up). Apparently large-scale protests involving more than a “single asshole” in his own community of Brooklyn did not register with him. Nor did he answer to my calling him out for dishonesty (incredibly politely, I thought), at all. As for the articles calling into question the integrity of vaccine mandates, he either answered in dismissive monosyllables (“everybody knows that” in the case of a Lancet article showing that the vaccinated spread Covid, without any clarifying comment) or not at all. He alleged an association between Sears and Trump, which was quite beside the immediate point. Wow!
I usually resist clickbait but, later that day, an article popped up that was intriguingly called How Verbal Abusers Exploit Conversational Norms. The article helped me process that, yes, that feeling of incredulity and self-doubt came from having been on the receiving end of abuse.
The article discussed gaslighting in terms of linguist and philosopher Paul Grice’s “conversational maxims.” As Grice noticed of linguistic interactions, people engaged in conversation expect certain “cooperative principles” to be honored. He noted four:
Quality: according to which you only say what you believe to be true and backed by evidence.
Quantity: according to which you don't say more or less than the conversation calls for.
Relevance: according to which you don't say anything that is irrelevant to the current topic of the exchange.
Manner: According to which you attempt to convey information with as much clarity as possible, avoiding ambiguity and obscure or cryptic expressions.
Steve’s emails violated all four maxims. I called him on that, and though I would like to think that a friend of more than three decades will work with me to create resolution, my experiences of the last twenty months lead me to doubt it. The fact is, people are gaslighting each other all over the place over Covid, even while public authorities and the press are gaslighting them. Who are the winners? Who will interrupt this crazed circuit?
Though I don’t regret having instigated an attempt to converse honestly with Steve, it has been difficult to process that I had been treated so disrespectfully by someone I adored over decades. In our preposterously divided country, accounts of similar relational breakdowns are everywhere. But there is a silver lining, I think, which is that words can’t help but matter. Even if Steve threw sand in my face, he is still that person of integrity and compassion. It’s just that, like everyone else, he has his darkness.
I’m not sure we can put Covid behind us without dealing with the cultural darkness that preexisted Covid, communal darkness tightly maintained within individual minds. I believe my words and Steve’s darkness are not finished their back-and-forth. Can I resolve what is dark within myself without this process?
Fascinating Brain Food
Our publicly vaunted experts have thought it prudent to shut out the thinking of experts no less trained than they are. (Censorship!) Please apprise yourself of intelligent points of view that you won’t see crossing the pages of the New York Times (for example) which is after all corporately owned and beholden to its pharma advertisers (not to you, your children, or their future). This is but a soupçon from the vat of scrapworthy information out there, though those offering to publicly scrap about it are being routinely ignored.
Here is a careful study showing that in the majority of 145 countries, the vaccines are associated with increases in cases and deaths, in some countries very profoundly so.
RFK Jr. is a controversial figure—but is that necessarily fair? I hope you will read this piece he wrote about CNN anchor Jake Tapper, and decide for yourself if his own ostracization from a great variety of channels of discourse is warranted. Be skeptical, yes!—but given what is at stake, best not to ignore.
The director of global infectious diseases at Massachusetts General (Harvard’s teaching hospital) declared to colleagues that Covid is on its way out, that the virus in the form of Omicron has devolved into something no more harmful than a common cold, and that we don’t need boosters. (Others predicted this in early December, so he’s a bit late, actually. In the meantime the mainstream press represented Omicron as as grave danger, and here we are.)
The author of the article, Mary Beth Pfeiffer, writes, “The booster statement is particularly startling in view of the near universal mainstream medical support for vaccinations and boosters, including for children as young as five years old.” A hospital spokesperson (for some reason) downplayed this doctor’s remarks but did not dispute them.
One more intriguing tidbit: Covid outbreak at an isolated research station in Antarctica, though everyone there was vaccinated! Just one of many examples that I hope will inspire people to ask, What is wrong with this picture?
Fellow scrappers-in-training, where do you suppose this information belongs in our collective sorting out of Covid?
Please expose your friends to censored thinking! What harm could there be?