Sooner or later science wins
Indignation is one of the more undervalued and least mentioned aspects of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s bad enough that we must endure the slings and arrows of outrageous ignorance, but we also get the D-K dunderhead’s outraged, angry sanctimony as a bonus.
When an anti-masker or anti-vaxxer fool rages in public, more is going on than the usual garden variety use of anger to cover incompetence. They really (and I do mean REALLY) believe they are RIGHT, damnit, and therefore any and all screaming and violence is justified in the service of “awakening” those of us who are of the (supposedly) stupid sheep mentality from our torpor of ignorance.
So what’s actually going on? Why are so many anti-science people who go berserk on airplanes and in the aisles of Walmart so white hot with rage? It’s nothing more than the usual tyranny of certainty, the kind that we as a species have had to endure from religious fundamentalists for centuries.. When someone is sure they are right about something they think they don’t need to be careful or calm or even truthful. It is the ultimate expression of the ends justifying the means, and has lead to murders and tortures and burnings at the stake from time immemorial.
One of the glories of the scientific revolution is the recognition that science may sometimes be wrong. Science tries to avoid dogma and, despite the fact that it is implemented by human beings, it succeeds with surprising regularity. Science is careful and meticulous and tries to qualify its utterances with tempered, measured words of rational logic. It backs its findings up with reproducible results published in peer-reviewed journals.
Ignorance, on the other hand, promotes bad reasoning and anecdotal “evidence.” Ignorance snatches words out of context and twists them to suit its own preformed and bigoted agenda faster than you can say “Tucker Carlson.”
But sooner or later science wins, though far too often ignorance forces that victory to be Pyrrhic. For example, it has finally happened that an anti-vaxxer has been refused a heart transplant. DJ Ferguson, 31, is fighting for his life at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and is in desperate need of a heart transplant. But doctors have put him to the back of the queue because he refuses to be vaccinated against Covid-19.
Mr. Ferguson is too weak to throw a tantrum so his father is doing it for him, by speaking out passionately on behalf of his son who, he told CBS Boston, “has gone to the edge of death to stick to his guns and he’s been pushed to the limit.” Ferguson the elder then went on to dare to actually insist that, “It’s his body. It’s his choice.”
While it may be true that it’s his choice, his choice has consequences for other people’s bodies. Because he refuses to be vaccinated he is more susceptible to getting and transmitting Covid-19. But he also has a staggeringly higher likelihood of dying from Covid after a transplant. Even a common cold can kill a patient with a recently transplanted heart, because transplants significantly weaken the immune system.
And that, finally, is the point. The Boston doctors know how rare and precious a donor heart is, and they don’t want to waste it on someone with a high probability of dying from Covid as soon as they receive the transplant. DJ Ferguson is being represented by his father as a “man of principle,” but if that were true then he would be principled enough to consider the impact his choice is having on other people, including his own father who is perversely supporting him in his stupid choice. Anti-vaxxers would have us all believe that selfishness is a virtue. It is not.
Once again another anti-vaxxer is probably going to die. This time he will die ironically, not because of what he’s going to get, but because of what he’s going to fail to get: a new heart. That is the lamentable price one must sometimes pay for sloppiness of thinking and a lack of careful intellectual rigour. Sooner or later science always wins, and people who defy science too often pay with their lives.
There are eight million stories in the naked city of anti-science stupidity. This has been one of them. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.