Roads Not Taken
Welcome to the newsletter that combs through the carnage of Covid for information about culture and maybe even the individual self. It is my wish that through reflective, compassionate insight, the disaster of Covid will become a source for healing actions and behaviors. I have packed a lot into this issue (a byproduct of being in the beginning stages with this newsletter), and I promise to duly unpack in future issues!
For anyone subscribed at the time of my chaotically sent first issue, the actual content of that issue is here. Thank you so much for your interest, it means the world to me!
The Whole
As we all know, artists of various kinds face the intimidating, pure potential of an empty something at the beginning of the creative process. A newly stretched canvas, a block of clay, a film to be scored, blank paper. What element should sit at the forefront? What will the overarching mood be? What type of rhyme scheme would best reflect the poignancy of the thought? With any type of creative project, the range of choices, apparent and unexplored, is staggering.
As long as the topic is art, we accept that intuition, feeling, personal motivation will propel the creator toward a final product. On the other hand, most discount the role of intuition, feelings, and personal motivation in science and medicine, areas that strike people as rational rather than creative, left-brain activities rather than right. (We do love our polarities, as the pandemic has richly illustrated!) It might therefore come as a surprise that we had a practically infinite variety of combined approaches that we could have chosen once the coronavirus hit our radar.
In addition to developing particular kinds of vaccines (non-mRNA vaccines were and are conceivable), we (for example) could have
prioritized developing treatments for people in the earliest stages of Covid.
leaned more toward encouraging people to take charge of their immune systems through exercise and diet.
factored in the findings of the scientific discipline of psychoneuroimmunology.
included non-Western healers (the ones some one-third of Americans visit when medical doctors have no solution for what ails them) in the discussion of what to do.
supported the specific needs of different age bands.
chosen to heed the warnings of legitimate scientists (ones that were censored from platforms such as YouTube and Facebook) that things weren’t working very well, thereby truly “following the science.”
The list of choices not embraced could continue. With a new virus, scary by virtue of its novelty, the humility of keeping options open would have been scientifically appropriate, necessary for stimulating the development of ever-better solutions in the true spirit of science.
This is all to say that, of the many approaches we might have taken for solving the health threat known as Covid, we picked a very particular one (one that heavily relies on vaccines) and of course the choice says something about us. To put it somewhat differently, perhaps we might say that the chosen approach was quite elegantly bound to be the one we were going to take, given the various complexities of who we are. To have made a different choice, we would have to have been in some sense different.
Some of us were more instrumental, more forceful, in picking that very exclusionary approach than others. Many actively supported or passively consented to this approach, with all of its consequences and collateral damage. The contingent in favor often fiercely ridiculed anyone daring to question the approach, and unfortunately continues to do so. The choice of what to do about Covid, greatly strengthened through the sum total of actions that are a by-product of who we are, then ensured that Covid would present itself back to us with the particular coloration, the particular texture, shape, and size it did, as if separate from us and our individual choices.
I am not pure and untainted by a faith perspective any more than any scientist, doctor, or atheist could be. I mean, any person questioning themselves about the why of things will ultimately reach a rock bottom “because that’s the way things are,” with scientists just as “guilty” as the born-again. (Of course, I am being facetious when I say “guilty.” Why even use that word about a limitation you’re born with?) Unlike some, I freely admit to holding a certain faith perspective, and of course claiming that Covid holds a mirror for who we are qualifies. (Considering it a senseless tragedy would be a different faith perspective, something based on a rock-bottom sense of the way things are. It is very easy to see why a person might hold such a faith perspective, and indeed I have wrestled with it myself.)
It pleases and excites me when I receive confirmations for insights into the way things are from science. The great theoretical physicist David Bohm envisioned infinity as a large number of highly silvered spherical mirrors that reflected each other. Quite differently, Stanford physics professor Leonard Susskind argues for the theory that the universe is a hologram. But I don’t pretend such confirmations are anything more than breadcrumbs along my own path. In my case, a sum total of life experiences has led me to this perspective about my relationship to my world. Sometimes the mirror incites gratitude but sometimes it’s troubling, a call toward change not wanted. This house of mirrors we occupy is for good (this is my hard-earned faith position) enabling people to make choices they did not even realize were in the nature of things. By sifting through this field of Covid (for example) for meanings with a humble heart: Perhaps that Intelligence toward which Physics painstakingly gropes is pleased to grant what we didn’t even know we needed.
It seems pretty clear to me that the big-picture healing we need far exceeds the power of the new vaccines. It seems that the good life we crave is beyond the power of pharmaceutical companies to deliver. It seems that my—and your--search for meaning must play a part in creating the shift that is necessary right now.
So maybe it’s not such a bad thing to find ourselves confronted with the mirror of Covid, the one that shows that polarization (to name one aspect of what is reflected, and a big one!) comes with a price that escapes no one. Maybe, as sentient beings, we have a need to see and feel that price before we can be willing to act. So, as deeply sick of dealing with Covid as we may be, as much as we may be dying to move on, I think it a waste of this bad experience to not first look at what it may be reflecting. Our collective and individual dealings with the specters of global warming, terrorism, immigration, income polarization, and so forth are informative, if little else so far, and surely the same is true of Covid. The trick will be to look in the mirror Covid provides with compassion for what we may notice there—otherwise, how can we dare look?
The Reflection of the Whole
This past winter, I finally lost a dear friend, Janet (not her real name) after my long struggle with her adoption of the Q Anon family of socio-spiritual ideas. My purpose here isn’t to perseverate over the harms of Q Anon, inspire anyone to take my side, or imply that I myself am clear of any responsibility for this friendship coming to an end. I just want to relay a telling snippet of conversation that speaks to the kinds of conflicts that have fueled our particular Covid solutions.
I had been thinking about Jeff Bezos and his insatiable hunger for an ever-greater share of the Earth’s resources. Specifically, I wondered aloud why so many of my friends, many of whom are liberal and pretty well off (in other words, they are troubled by Bezos’s footprint and they have plenty of money to shop elsewhere) continue to buy from Amazon. By this time Janet had become fully enmeshed in the Q Anon notion that demonic eminences were manipulating the strings of human affairs through nefarious agreements forged with human elites. Her eyes flashing with anger, she snapped that Bezos was “not even human anymore,” guilty of having succumbed to a Faustian temptation that explained his wealth and power. It was clear to her that he was beyond pity or redemption and richly deserved whatever was coming to him in the grand scheme of things. However horrible his punishment might be, would be fine by her.
Like many of you, I would love an explanation for why elites so often display a callous disregard for the common good, whether Bezos in his ruthless cornering of many markets (with the full participation of many of us, actually), or CEOs at the helm of corporations fecklessly plundering the environment (again, many of us remain on board for whatever reason) or, for that matter, the predominating narrative that set the tone for dealing with Covid. The latter is my topic and, quite like my Q Anon friend, many of my highly educated friends and acquaintances have fallen in with a dialog characterized by either/or, good or bad, stupid or intelligent, black or white.
The absence of nuanced and critical thinking among those our culture considers to be smartest troubles me deeply. To be sure, our culture’s skew toward team membership has its bright side. But the question must be asked: what happened to our ability to do something other than simply go along?
Janet’s explanation has a particular metaphysical basis that would repel some of us even while entertaining others. Her explanation for the wrongs of the world is easily mocked because needlessly all-encompassing, lumping everything together from the Kennedy assassination to Covid vaccination, then blaming the whole kit and caboodle on external evil incarnate. While an educated elite derides and dismisses this form of thinking about the world, it neatly overlooks two things. First, something stinks. Something is very wrong with the entire Covid situation, to the point where arguably every person on the planet has sustained some kind of harm. The collateral damage is insane, contrary to human health in both the mental and physical sense.
When we trade the checks and balances of nuanced thinking and reflection for mockery and pigeonholing, the prevailing systems carry on rather than self-correct. How foolish it is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. (It would be worth reflecting on the left’s abhorrence for hydroxychloroquine, to name a prominent example. We despised Trump, he spoke out in favor of using hydroxychloroquine in the early stages of the pandemic, and so we…..)
Second, contrary to what many of us hold to be true of science, it’s simply not possible to get around metaphysical assumptions of some kind or another. That we have a view of science as pristine, purely empirically derived, not subject to the impurities of faith-based opinions, opinions of professional convenience, not to mention inexplicable flashes of insight, helps us pretend that a particular subgroup of scientists “has it right” or “knows the truth of the matter” behind the virus and its challenges. Suspending innate self-protective powers of skepticism, we become entrapped in ever deeper layers of dogma.
For the most part, we seem to have hidden our heads in the sand from seemingly endless amounts of collateral damage by “following the science.” But what if part of the problem is that we misunderstand science, and our misunderstanding buttresses a framework for unacceptable things to happen? What if we “follow the science” out of a fear that has us stuck and needs healing?
Arguably, that metaphysics Janet embraced is rooted in the history of a Church that used notions of damnation and ultimate evil to frighten and thereby oppress. I would say, we have a certain collective trauma surrounding this oppressive spirituality which claimed to redeem but enslaved instead. How else to explain our worship of our white-robed saviors, particular scientists whose words we embrace as if our ultimate destinies depended on it? As if they, too, had no metaphysics upon which they relied? As if they were free of politics in their own environment, of a drive to “cancel” the work of scientists holding opinions inconvenient to them? As if, in their powerful presence, our perceptions and feelings have no place?
For centuries we have grown in the belief that science—and the science of medicine--can deliver us from having anything to do with metaphysics at all. (Various scholars have traced this history and it will be useful to bring their insights into this discussion about Covid.) In this moment, that leaves us with the problem that something of a nefarious nature is going on with Covid culturally speaking, and an absence of demons and child sacrifice doesn’t change that. My friend, as did many others who share her viewpoint, refused to ignore her feeling that something was very wrong with our response to Covid, and that those wrongs are somehow of a piece with other wrongs she sees. Her particular explanations pain me but sacrificing any of my human capacity to process, in the name of a frightening illness, is rock-bottom unacceptable.
Covid Snapshot
Dr. Peter McCullough has a longer alphabet soup after his name than anyone I can think of. He is exactly the sort of authority whose words we would have heeded pre-Covid. A cardiologist, internist, and MPH with a very distinguished record of service, he was recently threatened by medical licensing boards with revocation of his license to practice medicine because he questions vaccine dogma. (As they put it, he “spreads vaccine information,”—but, as a student of the history of science, I would like to decide what constitutes misinformation for myself!) He has been censored on YouTube but has the audacity to press on in his quest to provide accurate information in a terrible media environment. I don’t think you’ll regret the 65-minute investment in watching Dr. McCullough’s October 2 speech to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.