WTF is Wrong With Us?

America's Age of Irrationality

The willingness to be wrong is the basis of the scientific method, which is the cornerstone of reason...and the vehicle that humanity used to escape the dark epoch of superstition, and all the terrors it wrought upon humanity. The unwillingness to be wrong is the promotion of a belief over fact, the denial of reason, and the genesis of insanity… I don’t want anyone to believe anything that I say. Indeed, it would be better if the human race could consciously remove all beliefs that shortcut reason. Instead, take every proposition as a hypothesis, to be tested and evaluated...

-From a Twitter thread by Walt Whitman’s Ghost (@TheRealandIdeal)

It is both sad and ironic that this nation, a courageous experiment in democratic governance founded by men inculcated with the ideas of the Enlightenment, now has a significant segment of its population that rejects reason-based approaches to problems. Strains of anti-intellectualism have always been part of the American social fabric and have bubbled to the surface from time to time,* but it is perplexing in a society characterized by technological progress that a sizable minority rejects the results of empirical research.

The Covid anti-vaccination kerfuffle is currently the most prominent of this Flat Earth-styled denialism. With 55% of our eligible population fully vaccinated, we rank 43rd in the world in immunization. Anti-vaxxers base their resistance on ignorance of science and on the Constitution’s establishment of a government which among other things would ”promote the general welfare”. On the science front, the fact that the vaccines were approved on a preliminary basis- an expediency in the midst of a deadly pandemic- was a stated argument used by some deniers. There is also the cohort who apparently take their cues from social media inanity and refuse vaccination because “Bill Gates has engineered a technology to inject tracking chips into our bodies with the injections”. For these home-brewed medical science experts, the range of treatments has ranged from hydroxychloroquine to horse dewormer. Even discounting fringe conspiracy excuses, the inability to fully comprehend the risk assessments involved in whether or not to accept a vaccine which may be 95 percent effect versus the chance of contracting a deadly virus, seems a bridge too far for a not-insignificant part of the great American public.

“Why in the world do we have to come up with these crazy ideas — and they’re crazy ideas — that the vaccine’s got something in it and it’s tracing people wherever they go? And the same very people that are saying that are carrying their cellphones around. I mean, come on. Come on.”

- W.Virginia Governor Jim Justice (R)

As to the government’s role, the role of our divisive politics to promote the general welfare is hampered on one hand by those who seek political gain by resisting public health mandates for vaccinations and the wearing of masks. On the other are the citizens whose misunderstanding of the relationship of individual liberty and the social contract lead them to believe it is their choice whether or not to wear a mask or be vaccinated. Cynical politicians such as Governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis actively resist public health measures that would mitigate the spread and further mutation of the Covid-19 virus. They are apparently ignorant of the fact that such public health services have been provided by governments at all levels for the greater part of our history. They are derelict in their duty to promote the public welfare.

There are myriad root causes for this large-scale rejection of rational thinking,: Failure of our education system, cynical politics, the “me-versus-we” attitude of many of us… The end result will be the inevitable failure of our democratic republic. James Madison summarized this possibility: "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to Farce or Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."

*Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963) covers this trend from early colonial times to the mid-20th Century. Kurt Andersen’s “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History” covers much the same ground through the Trump Administration and is written in a more journalistic style than Hofstadter’s tome.

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