Vaccine Passports, Abortion and Postmodern Politics
Being strategically illogical in the pursuit of power
Yesterday President Joe Biden went full authoritarian and announced an attempt by the federal government to force people to be vaccinated. Governors who get in his way will be pushed aside. How they will be marginalized was left unstated, as the most effective threats are. Many were surprised at the authoritarian tone; others were not.
On the very same day, his Vice President, Kamala Harris, went full libertarian by denouncing the Texas abortion law as an inappropriate attempt by the government to impose its morality on the bodies of women. She invoked personal autonomy and individual choice as the basis for her radical pro-abortion agenda.
So, it is “My body, my choice” when it comes to abortion and “Inject the vaccine into your body or lose your job” when it comes to Covid.
Did They Make a Mistake?
Observing this obvious contradiction many of the political enemies of the Biden-Harris administration probably smiled to themselves and thought: “Well they sure messed up there. Now they look like fools. Everyone is going to ridicule them now."
Did their political handlers die of embarrassment and rush out statements last night walking back the contradictory messaging? No, they didn’t. Did Biden and Harris take those positions deliberately? Yes, they did. Don’t they see the problem? No, they don’t. And they see you as the chump for thinking there is a problem.
They are postmodern politicians speaking to postmodern citizens in the language of the will to power. They know what they are doing, and they know it works. What we need to realize is that in this stage of late modernity, logic is seen as weak and cheap. (Donald Trump might put it as “Logic is for losers.”) Just because Biden and Harris don’t say it that crudely doesn’t mean they don’t think it. The strong leader does not get bogged down in petty little things like facts or logic because he or she knows that logic has little to no effect on postmodern people. And for many people, facts are just whatever The New York Times said yesterday, even if contradicts what it said a week ago. Slogans and fear are more powerful motivators of behaviour than facts and logic. And they are not interested in truth; they are interested in power.
It is Not about the Vaccine
By the way, this is not even about the vaccine itself. I have been fully vaccinated and I encourage everyone else to get the vaccine too (unless you have a medical risk factor). I know there is some risk to everything in life including driving on the freeway. But I take the risks I think are logical to take and I really do not want to pass Covid on to my elderly relatives or be separated from them forever. So, I got the vaccine. But in a liberal democracy there should be room for dissent.
I grew up thinking that the reason the West was superior to the Soviet Union was that a society that stifles all dissent is worse off than one that permits dissent. Dissent leads to debate, which helps leaders take all sides of the issue into consideration. Dissent sometimes allows for the preservation of a currently minority position that eventually turns out to be so obviously right that the whole society embraces it in the end. Dissent also forces people to think for themselves and take responsibility for their own choices.
Stifling dissent accomplishes the opposite of all these goods. It shuts down debate by coercion, discourages innovation, erodes trust in the leadership, eliminates minority positions before their true value is discerned, and allows people to adopt a herd mentality that relieves them from the burden of thinking clearly. It fosters the cult of the expert, which is a ruse used by rulers to secure their own power.
I once had a conversation with a man who was the head of a crown corporation, a high up position in the civil service, about management. The context was that we were part of a Christian university board about to hire consultants for something or other. He said consultants are very useful, but you need to hire the right one for the right job. When I asked what he meant he looked at me as if I were a child and said: “Well, if you want to build a long warehouse, you hire long warehouse favoring consultants and if you want to build high warehouses, you hire high warehouse favoring consultants.” He obviously thought he was talking to a naif (which I was at the time). I naively thought you hired impartial experts who based their recommendations strictly on the facts before them even if they knew you would not like their recommendations. But in “consultant school” you quickly learn that this is not the way to financial success in consulting. No, the time-honored practice is for the courtiers to tell the king exactly what he wants to hear. That is how you get ahead at court.
So, it seems to me to be entirely plausible that one can be in favor of the Covid-19 vaccine and yet also see value in balancing social responsibility with individual rights. We manage this balancing act in a hundred ways as a modern society. But the balance can only be achieved if we are capable of caring about conflicting goods simultaneously, in this case the need to protect the vulnerable in society and the need to respect personal liberty. This is not always easy, and it can lead people not trained in critical thinking to get anxious and rebel against all further discussion of the issue. There does not seem to be a lot of patience for tolerating dissent right now and there does not seem to be much capacity for logical reasoning.
Emotivism and Politics
Instead, what we see is a media narrative designed to generate clicks (we used to say “to sell newspapers”) in which the “Science Deniers” face off with the “Adults in the Room” in a cage match to the death. We used to have debates and votes. Now politics has been reduced to World-Wide Wrestling.
The vaccine debate and the abortion debate are not the main problems with our late modern, Western society; they are symptoms of the main problem. The main problem is metaphysical in nature. As Alasdair MacIntyre showed in his great book, After Virtue, it is the skepticism about the human ability to know the truth about the nature of reality that is the source of our inability as a society to agree on moral issues. It is not that we disagree about an issue; it is, rather, that we have no agreed upon method for settling those disagreements.
Ethics becomes “emotivism,” which is the position that all ethical injunctions are merely expressions of our feelings. The claim, “Abortion is wrong,” simply means, “Abortion makes me feel bad.” The claim “Abortion is a right” simply means “I want to do it so don’t try to stop me.” MacIntyre points out that the function of the Supreme Court in such a society is to weave back and forth between competing claims so as to stave off the outbreak of civil war.
In an emotivist society like ours, slogans that appeal to selfish desires are powerful motivators of behaviour. Since there is no principle of reality to consider anyway, one slogan is as good as another. They are judged only by their effectiveness in convincing people to go along. So, for Biden to say: “The government owns your body” and Harris to say “Get the hands of government off the bodies of women” is not a mistake or even something likely to discredit the administration. It is just good postmodern politics.
If you find this depressing, you should.
Metaphysics, Logic, and Ethics
Logic is downstream from metaphysics because if you believe we can know reality then you can argue that we ought to submit to reality. If you want to submit to reality (that is, to God’s creation), logic is important. Logic is the means by which we bring our opinions into submission to reality. And ethics is downstream from logic because knowing what is right depends on knowing what is real. Natural law is real because it is built into the design of the creation by the Creator and it exists objectively whether we understand it or not, whether we know it or not, and whether we care or not.
Once the possibility of any actual knowledge of reality is denied (as it has been for two centuries now in the West, since Hume and Kant), then logic is not all that important anymore. There is no natural law that can be discovered even if you wanted to discover it. Everyone has his or her own “worldview” or basic premises and can argue from those premises to whatever conclusion is desired by the individual. You pick your political party like managers pick their consultants. Everyone knows this is the game and all the talk about “shared values” and “principles” is just window dressing. At the bottom is the naked will to power. The strong impose their will upon the weak. The most skillful ones do so while making the weak grateful for their efforts.
This was Hitler’s philosophy so, (of course!), Hitler would be turned into the greatest symbol of evil in our society. Just as diversity of thought is squashed in the name of “Diversity” and those who refuse to conform are excluded in the name of “Inclusion” and intolerance is advocated in the name of “Tolerance” – just so, Hitlerism is advanced in the name of “Antifascism.”
Every bit of logic must be scrubbed from the minds of the masses so that they no longer think for themselves but just obey. This is why politicians say things that are obviously untrue and obviously illogical. They are probing and watching for your reaction. If they can get you to acquiesce to such things, they know you have surrendered your mind to the hive and you can be controlled by a system of rewards and punishments. This is the technocratic dream of modern totalitarians: total control of society and complete scientific rationalization of the allocation of goods and resources.
You open a news story, and another contradiction comes out of the mouth of a politician. So, you think, they are being illogical again. Instead of smiling and expecting them to fail spectacularly, we should be afraid that they are getting away with it more and more. Once nobody notices the contradiction anymore, freedom is over. Brave New World is here.