he traditional way of making someone feel guilty for making you wait is
to whip out a copy of War and Peace. Doctors are notorious for making
us wait, their golf time being far more important than any patient, who's
probably just going to drop dead anyway from the treatment. So they
do you a favor by letting you live a few minutes longer.
Ironically, the author Leo Tolstoy had the same opinion of medicine as we do: then as now, the main risk of getting sick is that some doctor might try to treat you. Example:
He had what the doctors termed “bilious fever.” But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered. [p. 2083]
Indeed, the happiest moment in the life of the main character, Prince Andrew, is when he's lying on the battlefield gazing up at the sky after getting shot in the head. The doctors decide it's a waste of time to try to save him; thanks to their wisdom, he recovers and shows up sixty pages later at his sister's house with nary a scratch.
Government is the same: the more they “treat” you, the shorter your lifespan. Indeed, the purpose of government is to treat people unequally, since if everyone were treated equally there would be no need for government at all. The task of justifying this goes to academia. The government pays them to tell it that what it wants to do is good and just, think up a rationale for it, and find (or invent) facts to back it up.
The colleagues I left behind in government would never dare to use the term ‘woke’, but they tell me that working there is now a Kafkaesque nightmare where a single wrong word gets them a suspension and permanent outcast status. If it weren't for their enormous salary and their guaranteed lifetime employment, they say, they'd quit in a second.
Politics is downstream of science
The popular expression “Politics is downstream of culture” is sometimes criticized as a prescription for stasis and inaction, but a better criticism is that it's irrelevant. The fact is that culture in America is already dead. If anything, politics is downstream of the beliefs that people take to be factual. That is, for better or worse, science.
Here's how that works. Someone wants to legitimize, say, “gender-change” ideology, so they invent a whole new bunch of facts. They say sex is a continuum, sex is assigned at birth, men can get pregnant, and other falsehoods. If they want to legitimize government racism or sexism, they might claim there is no such thing as race or sex. Then they attack anyone who challenges them. If you accept it as a fact, you have to accept what follows logically: that all members of every group are identical in ability and interest, and therefore any difference in outcome is prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination. The “fact”, not the cultural milieu, determines the policy.
Sometimes it is not just beliefs, but logic gone bad. Last week one trans person wrote an article claiming that gender identity is not real, but sex is real. So far, this is a defensible position, but this person then claimed that the fact means it is perfectly legitimate to allow children to undergo irreversible surgery and hormone treatment to make themselves appear to be the opposite sex. Everyone knows that children will say anything to please their parents. The writer has sneaked in an abhorrent extra premise: that surgically mutilating children is fine if they “ask” for it.
Conservatives need to learn more science
Conservatives and libertarians have strong networks of experts in political philosophy. The amount of knowledge they have in the classics, or the Bible, or Thucydides is amazing. But too many lack expertise in science. This leaves them vulnerable to being delegitimized on key issues, where someone gets a fake article published in a science journal, then ridicules conservatives for spreading it. If conservatives wish to stop losing battles on topics requiring scientific knowledge, they need to prevent this. There are are two things they can do.
One is to create an informal peer-review system, where articles and commentary are checked before publication by a knowledgeable person known to be fair. The other is that conservatives could become more science literate. I've seen several articles in top conservative publications in which the writers lost the argument because they had no clue about the science being discussed. I've also run across “experts” on Substack and elsewhere who are widely cited by conservatives but who are only deceiving them in order to discredit their beliefs. That needs to change: the battleground today is not in political philosophy, religion, or the classics. Conservatives have long held the high ground in those topics. The problem is science. Conservatives will lose over and over unless they become more scientifically literate.
With a few exceptions, the facts of science generally support the positions that conservatives currently hold. This is especially true for virology, global warming, and sexual biology. But some of what they take to be true is superficial, exaggerated, or mistaken. They are even weaker on pharmacology, statistics, genetics, toxicology, and chemistry. Current debates are more technical and more likely to discuss J.K. Rowling than G.K. Chesterton.
mRNA vaccines
An example is the mRNA vaccine. The irresponsible rollout of this technology will discredit mRNA therapy for decades, but contrary to what some conservative sites are saying, frameshifting is not a big problem: it merely causes the mRNA to produce a truncated form of the spike protein, which if anything makes it safer than the full length form.
mRNA vaccinations are also very unlikely to cause prion diseases. A 2023 paper in Cureus by Seneff et al. makes this claim. But just because something is in the scientific literature doesn't mean it's true. Saying “could,” as the authors do, makes any statement true, no matter how preposterous.
It's admirable that commentators are finding these papers, but please, please, please conservatives, get someone to check these things before publishing them.
Dealing with ideologues
Of course, we can't be naive. Ideologues will not debate the facts in good faith. The people who wrote those papers about “health hazards” of gas stoves will just laugh and invent more falsehoods. But debunking them is still essential because there are still people out there who think everything in the science literature must be true.
The alternative is to be like the New York Post, which uncritically repeated the ridiculous cheese sandwich story, or those prominent conservative sites that panicked and uncritically repeated the story about microplastics or about chlormequat supposedly decreasing fertility. Ideologues can never be reached, but there are many people out there who will never become conservatives because they're convinced that conservatives don't make compelling enough arguments. When discussing science, conservatives often find themselves on unstable and unfamiliar ground, concede points that could have been defended, and drive away science people who can't risk supporting a mistaken idea.
All the papers I mentioned are publicly available. It doesn't take a PhD in chemistry to know which findings are credible and which are not. All we have to do is read them.
Dealing with experts
Considering the fact that most experts have been co-opted by the government, conservatives are rightly skeptical of them. But dismissing them as a class would be a mistake.
There are two ways to deal with “experts”: through weakness, where we automatically dismiss without understanding anything an expert says that conflicts with our ideology; or through strength, where we demonstrate more expertise than the expert and are able to calmly dismantle his claim through our superior knowledge.
If there is one thing an academic is afraid of, it is of being proved wrong by someone with a deeper understanding than he has. There is no reason a layman cannot be that person. It is true that non-academics have limited access to the scientific literature. But textbooks are abundant, affordable, and generally balanced. Even if they were not, it is essential to become familiar with what they say. With effort, conservatives need not be sitting ducks.
Based on how the popular media cover these stories, the need for news reporters to learn science is even more desperate. But one miracle at a time.
mar 16 2024, 4:04 am. edited for brevity mar 17 2024 original version. updated mar 18 2024, 6:11 am
