Greetings,
Sorry for not sending out a newsletter last week. I only hope that you were all able to cope with your grief and disappointment. This week, I’ve got some thoughts on vaccine skepticism, tribalism, and our intellectual myths.
There are basically two communities into which I am reasonably well integrated: church and academy. For each of these communities, I suspect that as often as not my membership in the other marks me as a bit odd. One of the things that I have noticed is the differences in the reaction to mask mandates and vaccination in each. By and large, the university community of which I am apart has been pretty deferential to health care experts like the CDC. The response of my church community has been more varied. On the whole, I would characterized their response as grudging and inconsistent compliance with things like mask mandates with a noticeable minority (in my congregation maybe 3 or 4 families) who dismiss masks per se and refuse to get vaccinated, despite urging from the church hierarchy. (I am guessing on the vaccination number; I can observe mask wearing each Sunday but not vaccination.)
Those who trust health care experts tend to tell rather self-congratulatory stories about their own beliefs. Unlike the anti-vaxers, they say, we can engage in critical reasoning and trust scientists. Those skeptical of masks and vaccines, on the other hand, are likely to tell equally self-congratulatory stories about their convictions. Unlike those who are blindly following untrustworthy authorities, they say, we think for ourselves and based our judgments on independent research.
I suspect that the reality is more often than not simpler and more viscerally tribal. My academic peers tend to trust health care experts because those experts look like them. In the academy we are nothing if not obsessed by diversity and its many virtues. Racial, gender, and sexual orientation numbers are tracked obsessively and there is much handwringing about the distressingly large number of white males that one sees scattered about the universities. However, for all of the diversity theater and the occasional real efforts at diversification, we tend to be a professionally homogeneous lot. University faculties are populated by well-educated people who are professionally successful in academic terms. If you don’t fall into those two categories, you wouldn’t be here. This, broadly speaking, is also what health experts at the CDC look like. When a law professor sees an epidemiologist, a law professor sees a member of his or her tribe, even when the law professor knows nothing about epidemiology (Twitter posts notwithstanding) and is in a different university-DEI category. The anti-vaxers that I know are not idiots. They are intelligent and often professionally successful. Generally speaking they are not, however, academics. They often don’t have graduate education nor do they spend their professional lives around universities and research institutions. Indeed, with a few exceptions, the vaccine skeptical folks I know are likely to see the inhabitants of such institutions as members of a different tribe. Those are people who are not like them. The point here is not about race, gender, sexual orientation, or the other tribal markers that obsess the diversity-industrial-complex in the universities. Rather, the tribal markers are social and cultural. In short, I think that a lot of those who trust medical experts do so because they see themselves as members of the experts’ tribe, while those that distrust the experts see them as members of a different, culturally hostile tribe. On both sides, the reaction is, as often as not, a simple matter of “I trust people who look like me and distrust those who don’t.”
Another thought on these fights: Modernity has fed us a really powerful intellectual myth that goes something like the following. Once upon a time, people were ignorant and miserable because they blindly trusted in authority and valued intellectual conformity. Then the free thinkers arrived. They questioned authority, reasoned for themselves, dared to be non-conformists, and discovered the truth. The reactionary forces of institutional authority tried to squelch the truth. Galileo was forced by the Inquisition to recant heliocentrism. But in the end truth triumphed because of the courage of the intellectual non-conformists.
One of the things that this myth does is grant a kind of epistemic authority to the intellectual non-conformist. I can’t help but think that this narrative accounts for the outsized real-world influence of a handful of folks peddling conspiracy theories about vaccines or wild claims about mass, vaccine-related deaths that are just around the corner. These are the individualists. These are the free thinkers who dare to reason for themselves rather than submit to the claims of authority. In this sense, I think that it is a mistake to suggest that anti-vaxers are anti-intellectual. They are sitting right at the center, it seems to me, of our society’s central intellectual myth.
The problem with the myth — aside from quite a bit of inaccuracy as a matter of intellectual history — is that it is the victim of intellectual survivor’s bias. Looking back at history, we tend to celebrate the daring non-conformists who ended up being right. We see only the theories that survived. Galileo, as it turns out, was right that the earth rotates around the sun. On the other hand, the legions of cranks propounding theories that turned out to be nonsense who were also daring non-conformists have been forgotten. Indeed, we tend to forget the nonsense theories of even the daring conformists who were right about some things. For example, no one seems to remember that Galileo’s theories were questioned in part because they failed to explain precise astronomical observation. Contrary to Galileo’s theory, planets don’t rotate around the sun in circular orbits. We remember Descartes, but no one remembers his theory of vortices, which suggested that celestial motion could be explained as a series of whirlpools in the celestial ether. Newton spent most of his career obsessed with alchemy, and Einstein spent most of his career attacking quantum theory. Both projects, as it turns out, were intellectual dead ends.
We sometimes do learn new things because of daring thinkers who are willing to question received truth. But it’s also worth remember that most of them are crackpots.
For those looking for some reading, my article “Established Agreeable to the Laws of Our Country: Mormonism, Church Corporations, and the Long Legacy of America’s First Disestablishment” was recently published by the Journal of Law & Religion. It provides a history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a legal entity, a story that I promise is waaay more interesting than you think that it is. Also, for those who are interested, my Dialogue Sunday School lesson on D&C 109 is now available on YouTube. Enjoy.
See you next week,
Nate
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