(2023-08-16) Blakely Doctors Orders

Doctor's Orders, by Jason Blakely. A piece that's not entirely wrong, but mostly argued in bad-faith.

The pandemic laid bare the extent to which Americans occupy a split reality. From within the credentialed (elite) classes, the demos appears increasingly and disturbingly resistant to rational argument and evidence

But from within these populist camps, it seems that many Americans have been blindly following—or worse, knowingly supporting—an undemocratic regime intent on imposing its values under cover of scientific neutrality. In this view, the pandemic was just the latest excuse for this regime to advance its technocratic agenda; often, resisting that agenda meant rejecting technical expertise entirely.

The result is that American democracy and scientific authority are suffering parallel crises of credibility, each standing accused by the other. (Culture War)

This twofold crisis has many causes, among them political polarization and the spread of misinformation on social media, as well as long-standing antirationalist religious traditions and anti-intellectual strains in American business and culture

they need to be supplemented by another, far less widely acknowledged, fount of skepticism—one that requires contending with what the populist view gets right: scientific expertise has encroached on domains in which its methods are unsuited to addressing, let alone resolving, the issue at hand.

The overextension of scientific authority—or scientism—has become so ubiquitous that it now hides in plain sight

Even as the biological basis of our species remains stable, human life is characterized by epochal shifts in meaning that can render Homo sapiens utterly alien to one another.

A theory of the planets (whether accurate or not) does not alter the paths or locations of those heavenly bodies, but in the social sciences, theories and ideas have the potential to radically transform society itself by becoming part of our identities, practices, and institutions. What was first articulated as a description of the social world becomes a kind of script or map for reorganizing human life.

In the study of criminal justice, the “broken windows” theory justified zero-tolerance policies for misdemeanors, alongside the militarization of policing in American cities. The theory of “democratic peace,” meanwhile, was used by the second Bush Administration to legitimize the war on terror.

one that’s crucial to consider in light of the crisis of scientific authority during the pandemic is the governing regime that formed around the economic “sciences.”

These wonks presented their account of “the economy” as a surefire formula for prosperity and efficiency

Uncountable goods were omitted from the scientific description of the economy, as were questions of justice, exploitation, and greed.

by appealing to a science of human behavior to justify their redesign of American life, the free-market economists not only ensured a backlash to their policy ideas, they bolstered skepticism about scientific authority as such. Following the 2008 financial crisis

critical question about the way policy decisions are made: Are they, as experts claim, straightforward responses to the data, dictated solely by numbers? Or do they contain world-making projects?

From their very emergence, the social sciences have often been pictured as a realm of “facts,” distinct from the realm of “values.” A locus classicus for this idea is the German sociologist Max Weber

Yet the very attempt to construct value-neutral scientific authority over the organization of social life inspired a new class of experts—managers in both government and the private sector—who claimed to offer policy prescriptions grounded in empirical fact.

One of the ironies of modern life is that these self-proclaimed scientific authorities have never spoken in one voice

The unpleasant truth is that any given social scientific attempt to offer a predictive theory has always appeared patently inadequate to those working in rival research programs.

theories presented to the public as “scientific” are in fact enacting a particular social and political agenda. Sometimes policymakers draw on research developed in the academy that they have distorted beyond recognition.

Epidemiology largely involves formulating natural scientific claims about the spread of diseases.

But throughout the pandemic this science has been used not merely to inform the public but also to legislate policy from the top down.

public officials spoke as if the models could automatically trigger particular policies. If a numerical measure reached a level of emergency, “science” dictated the appropriate response

it will be many years before we know which of these policies achieved their desired effects.

even to the extent that they were perfectly successful on their own terms, these policies entailed balancing conflicting interests

Discerning the public good amid this array of individual interests is an unmistakably political act—it is, in fact, the political act par excellence.

Nonetheless, when public officials were challenged on these policies, they routinely insisted that they would not let “politics” dictate their decisions.

ignore the idea that some American communities might have goods that rivaled those heralded by the government in the name of “health.” For all their virtues, neither epidemiology nor social science can establish what is significant or worthy of risk and sacrifice

Anyone governing in the name of data is still making judgments

When the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggested that emergency dictates reflected that the governing ethic in Western societies had become “bare life, and the fear of losing it,” thereby reflecting a politics that “values nothing more than survival,” he was criticized for recklessness.

“the pandemic” served a governing function not unlike “the economy.”

Newspapers put COVID dashboards on their home pages, with new infections, hospitalizations, and deaths replacing daily stock tickers, monthly unemployment reports, and quarterly GDP updates. Readers could check in each morning to see how the pandemic was doing. These charts tabulated lives and infections, but what about anxiety, depression, learning loss, and social isolation?

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom ordered that churches not conduct in-person worship during the 2020 lockdown, while various businesses, including film studios, were permitted to reopen. These businesses, it was argued, were simply too vital to the economy. Evidently, some values—in this case economic productivity—superseded even that of bare life

The implied message was that business of the right kind was worth risking illness and even life for, while the worship of God, or the observance of funerals, weddings, and baptisms, was not.

That fall, it was revealed that Newsom’s children were attending a private school that was exempt from the shutdown

The following month, the governor was outed for violating his own safety guidelines to celebrate a birthday party at the upscale restaurant French Laundry.

These facts reinforced the populist sense that governance in the name of science was an ideological sleight of hand—a tactic for controlling some groups while allowing others greater freedom.

To cover questions of interpretation and significance with the curtain of data is to recruit the authority of science in a way that ultimately undermines it.

This dynamic serves to explain not only the increase in antiscience skepticism during the pandemic, but also the proliferation and resonance of dangerous conspiracy theories—for example, that the COVID-19 vaccines were being used by Bill Gates to inject microchips into the population. How much does it explain such craziness? This is bogus rationalization: look what you made me do!

One clue emerges from anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories, which often argued that the virus was an invention of a particular political elite’s will to power.

Conspiracy theories have their unsound, foolish, and even wicked dimensions, but they may also contain seeds of political resistance.

Consider the mass protests that followed the murder of George Floyd during the first wave of the pandemic. After months of social distancing and restrictive lockdown policies, millions of people took to the street, marching shoulder to shoulder. Soon after the protests began, hundreds of medical experts and public-health officials signed a letter expressing continued opposition to “protests against stay-home orders” while citing the “lethal” threat that white supremacy posed to the “health specifically of Black people” as justification for these particular protests.

But the protests were not a public-health action. They were a public expression of an urgently felt moral outrage

today’s scientistic administrators seem less and less inclined to allow people even their own opinions. Instead, they treat “the facts” as largely determining what counts as acceptable opinion.

unlikely that such a process would yield a one-size-fits-all policy narrative about pandemics and other emergencies. Different communities, allowed to debate what they wish to balance against risks of health, life, and prosperity, might come to different conclusions. But diseases spread across communities - that's why they refer to public health.

Finally, this dialogue would allow for the possibility that at any given moment scientific consensus may be wrong, even within those spheres where it rightly claims authority.

For example, while most scientists agree that mask mandates were an appropriate response to the pandemic, retrospective data offers a decidedly mixed picture of the benefits of these mandates. This is not a failure on science’s part

Many have seen the pandemic as a forerunner to a much darker and more devastating global crisis.

Prioritizing democratic dialogue and shifting away from top-down policymaking will not be easy.