The Authoritarian Moment
Page 11
Take another example from the world of Covid policy: the decision making surrounding vaccine distribution. Now, this would seem to be a simple scientific question: who is most vulnerable to Covid? The most vulnerable obviously ought to be given the Covid vaccine first. And, as it turns out, that question has an obvious answer: the elderly, who are most susceptible to multiple preexisting conditions. Covid risk is heavily striated by age: according to the Centers for Disease Control, the death rate of Covid for those above the age of eighty-five is 630 times the death rate for those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine; for those between seventy-five and eighty-four, the death rate is 220 times higher; for those between sixty-five and seventy-four, the death rate is 90 times higher.15 So it should have been an easy call for the Centers for Disease Control to set out vaccine distribution guidelines based on age.
That, however, was not what happened. Instead, wokeism bled into the scientific process, turning science into The ScienceTM.
On November 23, 2020, CDC public health official Kathleen Dooling presented her recommendations for tranching out the vaccine to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Dooling explained that essential workers—some 87 million people—should receive the vaccine before the elderly. Yes, Dooling’s modeling acknowledged, this would increase the number of deaths somewhere between 0.5 percent and 6.5 percent. But such differences were “minimal,” Dooling stated, when compared with the fact that racial equity could be pursued through her recommended policy. After all, Dooling pointed out, “racial and ethnic minority groups are underrepresented among adults > 65.” Because white people have a longer life expectancy than black and Hispanic Americans, Dooling was arguing, there were too many old white people. Why not prioritize younger black and Hispanic people at lower risk of dying from the disease as a sort of reparative measure?
This proposal was not merely morally idiotic. It was evil. Statistically speaking, even if white people are overrepresented as a percentage of the population among those over sixty-five, placing that group after essential workers would kill more black people—it would tranche black Americans more likely to die (those over age sixty-five) behind black Americans who were less likely to die (twenty-year-old grocery workers, for example). Thus, even if fewer black Americans would die as a percentage, more black Americans would die in absolute numbers.16
This perspective was not fringe. It was well respected and well reported. On December 5, The New York Times reported that the committee had unanimously supported Dooling’s proposal. At least eighteen states had decided to take into account the CDC’s “social vulnerability index” in tranching out vaccines. As the Times acknowledged, “Historically, the committee relied on scientific evidence to inform its decisions. But now the members are weighing social justice concerns as well, noted Lisa A. Prosser, a professor of health policy and decision sciences at the University of Michigan.” The Times quoted one Harald Schmidt, an alleged expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, expressing himself in blatantly eugenic terms: “Older populations are whiter. Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”17 All it would take to level that playing field was to bury some disproportionately white bodies in the low-lying areas.
Public blowback to the CDC’s standards led them to revise—but only somewhat. After medical workers were treated, the CDC recommended that the elderly and frontline workers be placed in the same tranche. This approach, too, will cost lives. As Yascha Mounk, a liberal thinker who often writes for The Atlantic, points out, “America’s botched guidance on who gets the vaccine first should, once and for all, put the idea that the excesses of wokeness are a small problem that doesn’t affect important decisions to bed.” Furthermore, as Mounk pointed out, the Times—which was so eager to cheer on the infusion of wokeism into scientific standards—barely reported that the committee had changed its recommendations based on public pressure. “A faithful reader of the newspaper of record would not even know that an important public body was, until it received massive criticism from the public, about to sacrifice thousands of American lives on the altar of a dangerous and deeply illiberal ideology,” Mounk wrote.18
When science becomes The ScienceTM, Americans rightly begin to doubt their scientific institutions. They begin to believe, correctly, that the institutions of science have been hijacked by authoritarian leftists seeking to use white coats to cram down their viewpoints in top-down fashion.
“LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS”
The Ultracrepidarian Problem crops up regularly in the realm of policy making, when scientists determine that they are not merely responsible for identifying data-driven problems and providing data-driven answers, but for answering all of humanity’s questions. The Ultracrepidarian Problem is nothing new in the realm of science. Indeed, it is an integral part of Scientism, the philosophy that morality can come from science itself—that all society requires is the management of experts in the scientific method to reach full human flourishing. Scientism says that it can answer ethical questions without resort to God; all that is required is a bit of data, and a properly trained scientist.
The history of Scientism is long and bleak—it contains support for eugenics, genocide, and massively misguided social engineering—but the popularity of Scientism hasn’t waned. Modern Scientism is a bit softer than all of that, but maintains the same premise: that science can answer all of our moral questions, that it can move us easily from the question of what is to the question of what ought to be done.
Steven Pinker, a modern Scientism advocate, writes, “The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned . . . I have come to realize that it is not.”19 The phrase “human flourishing” comes up a lot in the philosophy of Scientism. But the question of what “human flourishing” constitutes is indeed a moral question, not a scientific one. The debate over whether a human being should live a socially rich life filled with commitment to others or a hedonistic life filled with commitment to self-fulfillment is literally as old as philosophy.
On a less philosophical level, the Ultracrepidarian Problem undermines science by undercutting the credibility of scientists who insist on speaking beyond their purview. Take, for example, the problem of climate change. In the scientific community, there is a set of well-established facts and well-accepted principles: first, that climate change is happening, and that the world has been warming; and second, that human activity, particularly carbon emissions, are contributing significantly to that warming. There is serious debate over how much the world will warm over the course of the next century—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the global climate will warm somewhere between 2°C and 4°C above the mean temperature during the 1850–1900 period. That’s a rather large range.20 There is also significant uncertainty about sensitivity of the climate to carbon emissions; as NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies director Gavin Schmidt explains, climate sensitivity “has quite a wide uncertain range, and that has big implications for how serious human-made climate change will be.”21 Furthermore, there is wide uncertainty about the impact with regard to climate change—will human beings be able to adapt? How many “shock” events will occur?
These uncertainties lie at the heart of climate change policy. How much should we sacrifice current economic well-being and future economic growth for the sake of stabilizing the environment? What level of probable future risk justifies real-world, real-time policy making in the present?
True scientists are modest about their recommendations on such questions. They speak in terms of risk assessments and quantifiable metrics. William Nordhaus, for example, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on climate change, has suggested that people ought to accept that a certain amount of global warming is baked into the cake, and that w
e will be able to adapt to it—but that we ought to work on curbing global warming outside of that range.22
Experts in The ScienceTM, however, have no problem proposing radical solutions to climate change that just coincidentally happen to align perfectly with left-wing political recommendations. Those who disagree are quickly slandered as “climate deniers,” no matter their acceptance of IPCC climate change estimates. Thus the media trot out Greta Thunberg, a scientifically unqualified teenaged climate activist who travels the world obnoxiously lecturing adults about their lack of commitment to curbing climate change, as an expert; they ignore actual scientific voices on climate change. After all, as Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes, “there are almost no good-faith climate-change deniers . . . when failure to act on the science may have terrible consequences, denial is, as I said, depraved.” He then lumps together those who deny outright the reality of global warming with those who “insist that nothing can be done about it without destroying the economy.”23
But here’s the thing: very little can be done about climate change in terms of regulation without seriously harming the economy. To abide by the Paris Agreement guidelines would cost, by Heritage Foundation estimates, at least $20,000 income loss per family by 2035 and a total aggregate GDP loss of $2.5 trillion.24 And as even the UN Environment Programme found in 2017, if every major country kept to its pledges under the much-ballyhooed Paris Agreement, the earth will still warm at least 3°C by 2100.25 In fact, even if the United States were to cut its carbon emissions 100 percent, the world would be 0.2°C cooler by 2100. To reach net zero carbon emissions worldwide by 2050 via Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) infamous Green New Deal would cost the typical family of four $8,000 every single year.26
This is not to suggest that nothing can be done about climate change. We should be investing in adaptive measures like seawalls, and be looking to new technologies like geoengineering. We should be cheering on America’s fracking industry, which has redirected energy use from more carbon-intensive industries; we should be pushing for the use of nuclear energy; we should be promoting capitalism, which increases living standards around the globe, thus making people in poverty less vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. Yet those who promote these policies are treated as “deniers”; those who shout that the world is ended and the only solution is massive economic redistributionism are treated as truth speakers.
Behind closed doors, those who truly know about climate change understand the complexity of the problem and the foolishness of many of the publicly proposed solutions. Several years ago, I attended an event featuring world leaders and top scientific minds. Nearly all acknowledged that climate change was largely baked into the cake, that many of the most popular solutions were not solutions at all, and that the alternatives to carbon-based fossil fuels, particularly in developing countries, were infeasible. Yet when one actress then stood up and began cursing at these prominent experts, screaming that they weren’t taking climate change seriously enough, they all stood and applauded.
That wasn’t science. That was The ScienceTM.
But the attempt to claim solutions for all problems in the name of science—the Ultracrepidarian Problem—quickly shades over into an even deeper problem: the Bleedover Effect, in which those with the politically correct opinions are deemed experts, and in which science finds itself at the mercy of these so-called experts.
THE BLEEDOVER EFFECT
Perhaps the greatest irony of the Ultracrepidarian Problem is that by enabling scientists to speak outside their area of expertise—to allow them to engage in the business of politics while pretending at scientific integrity—scientists create a gray area, in which politics and science are intermingled. This gray area—the arena of The ScienceTM—then becomes the preserve of leftist radicals, who promptly adopt the masquerade of science in order to actively prevent scientific research.
In recent years, postmodernism has entered the world of science through this vector, endangering the entire scientific enterprise. Postmodernism claims that even scientific truths are cultural artifacts—that human beings cannot truly understand anything like an “objective truth,” and that science is merely one way of thinking about the world. In fact, science is a uniquely Western (read: racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.) way of thinking about the world, since it is a theory of knowledge that has historically perpetuated systems of power.27 Again, this is nothing new in human history—the Nazis rejected “Jewish science” just as the Soviets rejected “capitalist science.” But the fact that the Western world, enriched to nearly unimaginable heights by science and technology, has even countenanced the postmodern worldview is breathtakingly asinine.
This philosophy obviously hasn’t infused all of our scientific institutions, but it doesn’t have to do so in order to endanger the enterprise. Renormalization must merely occur in terms of setting boundaries to research—science must be curbed in the most sensitive areas when it conflicts with authoritarian leftist thought. That is precisely what has happened. Where the Ultracrepidarian Problem widens the boundaries of science beyond the applicable, the Bleedover Effect narrows the boundaries of science to the “acceptable.” By infusing social justice into science, science must now meet with the approval of the New Ruling Class. Those who speak in contravention of established left-wing theology are outed and ousted, in truly authoritarian fashion. As theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss writes, “academic science leaders have adopted wholesale the language of dominance and oppression previously restricted to ‘cultural studies’ journals to guide their disciplines, to censor dissenting views, to remove faculty from leadership positions if their research is claimed by opponents to support systemic oppression.”28
That left-wing theology dictates that all groups ought to achieve equal results in every area of human life; if science suggests differently, science must be silenced. Thus, conversations about IQ and group differences will be met with exorbitant outrage, as Sam Harris found out, even when the participants explicitly denounce racism in all of its forms;29 conversations regarding differences between men and women in terms of aptitudes and interests must be punished, as Lawrence Summers found out;30 studies questioning whether women do better with male mentors in academia rather than female mentors are retracted, based not on faulty research but on “the dimension of potential harm.” In fact, Nature—perhaps the most prestigious science publication on the planet—quickly issued a policy stating that editors would be seeking outside opinions on the “broader societal implications of publishing a paper,” an open invitation for political interference into the scientific process.31 This means the death of scientific inquiry at the hands of the woke.
The overt politicization of science is most obvious with regard to gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is a condition characterized by the persistent belief that a person is a member of the opposite sex; it is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. Or, at least, it was—rates of reported gender dysphoria have been increasing radically in recent years, particularly among young girls, a shocking phenomenon given that the vast majority of those diagnosed with gender dysphoria have historically been biologically male. That unexplained phenomenon became the subject of research from Brown University assistant professor Lisa Littman, who released a study on “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” documenting the fact that teenage girls were becoming transgender in coordination with others in their peer group. Brown pulled the study, with Brown School of Public Health dean Bess Marcus issuing a public letter denouncing the work for its failure to “listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of their work.”32 Something similar happened to journalist Abigail Shrier: when she wrote a book on rapid-onset gender dysphoria, Amazon refused to allow her to advertise it,33 and Target temporarily pulled the book from its online store. Chase Strangio, the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice, suggested “stopping the circulation of this book”—a fascinating take from an organization liter
ally named for its defense of civil liberties.34
There is no evidence whatsoever that gender is disconnected from biological sex. Yet scientists have given way to gender theorists, whose pseudo-science is inherently self-contradictory. This leads directly to absurdity. Doctors have claimed that gender identity is “the only medically supported determinant of sex,” despite the fact that biology clearly exists.35 In 2018, the American Medical Association announced that it would oppose any definition of sex based on “immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” instead favoring language stating that doctors “assign” sex at birth—a laughable assertion.36 The AMA even outlined legislation that would ban therapists from suggesting to children that they ought to become more comfortable with their biological sex rather than acting in contravention to it.37
The New England Journal of Medicine, likely the most prestigious scientific journal in America, printed an article in December 2020 recommending that sex designations on birth certificates be moved below the line of demarcation, since they “offer no clinical utility.”38 Despite the lack of longitudinal data on transgender surgeries and the high rate of desistance from gender dysphoria over time from young people, much of the scientific community has rejected “watchful waiting” as somehow transphobic; blacklisted doctors and journalists who refuse to encourage gender transition for those who are underage; and stated without evidence that the solution to gender dysphoria is a radical redefinition of sex itself, whereby children ought to be taught that they can freely choose their own gender, and adults ought to be socially cudgeled into using biologically inapposite pronouns. “Your truth” now matters more than objective scientific truth. And those who know better are forced to denounce the objective science, engaging in top-down censorship of other viewpoints while proclaiming their adherence to the new moral code.