I’ve been lucky enough to have worked as an extra on the latest fantasy series, and this means I have finally had the time and the freedom from digital poisoning to read some of the books I have wanted to finish.
Like Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. A Thomas Mann book is long and its characters and ideas only really come into focus in the second half. But when they do, wow. Hitler – what were the Germans thinking? Mann describes not the rise of the Nazis but the fall of reason and cults of irrationality that preceded it. And which could precede any form of extreme collectivism anywhere. What he describes isn’t the Popper analysis everyone bandied about cack-handed back when we thought, embarrassingly, that any reinvigorated conservative critique of progressive radicalism was tantamount to a fascist coup. It’s something more general, something latent in our own instinct to find the self-serving pattern of submission and permission to suit any uncertain times, and also latent in the instinct of intellectuals to make all times seem so uncertain that shit like that can be made to happen in them.
I also read four plays by Ibsen, all good and Ghosts and Hedda Gabbler being perfect marvels, the best plays I can remember having read. Seeing these plays as a bourgeoise in a Victorian theatre must have felt like finding a bomb under your seat.
I was also able to start part 2 (having already read parts 1 and 3) of Michael Holroyd’s biography of Bernard Shaw, covering the years 1898-1918. Shaw, a playwright (and disciple of Ibsen), is an unsympathetic character, with his vegetarianism, asexuality, vanity and urge to pontificate on everything, but he’s also the man who was a tireless cheerleader, inventor, and a paradoxically diligent planner for much of what we call progress in the Western world. Everyone being paid the same amount, men and women being treated by society as if they were physiologically and psychologically identical – these were Shaw’s ideas, expressed frequently enough during an age when they only seemed outlandish and attention-seeking to become familiar, if still attention-seeking, concepts in our own times. And so much more – Shaw was the original SJW, with the important exception that he could and did laugh at himself, and was prepared to do the grinding bureaucratic work needed to make civics work well – better schools, better drains, that sort of thing. And not a typical SJW either in that he courted and tolerated opposition in order to better spread his views. Thus he debated G.K. Chesterton, in debates chaired by Hilaire Belloc in a friendly but no-holds barred fashion, for many years.
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And most importantly for our purposes, Shaw was an antivaxxer who debated the most famous vaccinationist of his days, Sir Almroth Wright, regularly for decades. Wright, in fact, sought out Shaw first for publicity purposes.
Shaw’s opposition to vaccination was in part emotional (as an anti-vivisectionist), in part mystical (as a believer in a Life Force which trumped Darwinian evolution), in part envious of the prestige belonging to the freemasonry of Medicine over that of Art.
But he also sensed the role of bunkum in medicine, the unproven theories presented as fact, the faked experiments presented as proof, the corrupting influence of money, and the hollowness of appeal to authority (when the British government wanted to promote Wright’s serum they gave him a knighthood, then used his “Sir” as a selling point).
“Shaw’s sense of vulnerability to the power of this medical elite, replacing his fear of death, gives his satire its edge…Behind these years of correspondence and controversy with Wright, and the play [The Doctor’s Dilemma] that resulted from their association, there lay a wish to take authority from the orthodoxly educated and give it to outsiders… the medical freemasonry was a closed circle of privileged people whose mesmeric power over other human beings angered Shaw.”
Most relevantly to the present day, he saw vaccination as a shameful cover-up for poverty. No need to fix the drains, supply decent housing, or feed the poor properly if you can stop a pandemic breeding in the slums, or at least the fear of one, or at least reduce the chances of it reaching the bourgeoisie, with a cheap jab. And this point – which perhaps acknowledges that vaccination can be effective, but highlights the social cost of its success – remains valid today.
Modern medical opinion, as reported by Holroyd, seems to be, that Sir Almroth Wright’s serum was worthless. There is even a theory that it, or something very like it, gave the Spanish flu what it needed to get going. I don’t have the reading or expertise to comment on that. But I do know that Wright’s certainty that women were psychologically unfit to vote was misplaced, and that his repeated opinion that “the effect of hygiene is aesthetic” was positively dangerous, even if it always gave Shaw the opening to argue the case for Art.
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Which brings us to today. Diet is an arm of hygiene just as surely as hand-washing and the avoidance of crowded indoor spaces, both effective in reducing the spread of COVID19 and other infectious diseases. We can see from China and other places that an adequate selenium level of the diet alone quite possibly reduces the case fatality rate (CFR) for COVID-19 by a factor of 4. We can see that higher vitamin D levels (a sign of good diet quality overall, and not only sunlight exposure or vitamin D intake) are associated with a greatly reduced CFR. And that higher levels of unsaturated fat in fat stores (as in the US population) increase the risk of lung damage and death when infected with SARS-CoV-2. Unsaturated fat is the main component of margarines and the cheap oils used to cook the food of the poor; white bread helps to keep it from being burned for fuel; meanwhile the wealthy eat butter and steak, and are not so prone to the storage of excess fat, despite needing to do less work.
Most of these risk factors, as I’ve said before, are actually the unintended consequences of earlier scientific error regarding the risk of skin cancer (which unsaturated oils also promote) and heart disease (which is mainly driven by the excessive insulin response to the modern diet).
A recent example of how the pro-vax narrative ignores the effects of poverty, and hygiene including diet, appeared in the blog of David Farrier. I’ve mentioned Farrier before in this blog because he’s quite a good bellwether of righteous opinion, and because he’s worth reading for his own sake. He’s the creator of an entertaining film, Tickled, about the human capacity for deception, and has a pretty good take on conspiracy theory and its psychology. But it depends whose conspiracy theory, because beneath his milquetoast veneer of kink Farrier is a bog-standard PMC worrywart and always defers to the interests of his class.
In this article on fake news written by Farrier’s friend Byron Coley, which is otherwise a pretty good guide to the conspiracy theory misinformation landscape inside NZ, we get an example of misinformation by omission, regarding the measles epidemic in Samoa, in a section on some Covid grifters who ran for parliament on the New Conservative platform.
" In April on Talano Sa’o, Tildsley spent an episode interviewing a man she described as “an unsung hero in Samoa” Edwin Tamasese.
