Historical Roots Of The Pandemic Hoax

Yesterday Glenn Ellmers very kindly pointed us to his new essay at the Claremont Review of Books. The essay resonates strongly with a number of themes that Meaning in History has attempted to set forth over the years, so I’d like to highly recommend the entire essay:

Pandemic Pandemonium

Science and civic accountability.

Ellmers’ essay centers around his analysis of two books that address the alarming rise of the Total Surveillance State, based on a pandemic hoax. Each book attempts, in differing ways, how we in the West got to this point.

Aaron Kheriaty, in The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (2022), asks the pressing question: "Many of us during the pandemic puzzled over why data and evidence did not seem to put a dent in some people’s convictions about covid or our public policies."

In The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022) Mattias Desmet analyzes the irrational fears and autocratic impulses attending the pandemic. Desmet draws on research in group psychology and human behavior, but he mostly traces COVID-related irrationality to modern philosophy and the ideologies it has produced. Foremost among these is “scientism,” the reductionist dogma that only the quantifiable is real and the laws of the physical universe explain all of reality.

Before taking a fairly deep dive into Ellmers’ essay, I should probably address where I’m coming from. I wouldn’t be devoting this degree of attention to Ellmers’ essay if I didn’t believe that it addresses key issues for the cultural and political life of the West. That’s the idea behind Meaning in History, as it began, and to which I periodically return. At the same time, while the analyses of the historical roots of the crisis of the West that Kheriaty and DeSmet discover in the “pandemic pandemonium” is valuable in and of itself, my own view would probably be uncongenial to Ellmers and many other followers of Leo Strauss. Without attempting a full argumentation, my view is that the roots of this crisis can be traced to Platonism and its transmutations throughout Western history. That especially includes the Augustinian tradition of Neoplatonic thought, the history of which brings us through the Renaissance, Reformation, and the Enlightenment origins of modern ideologies arising from the bifurcation of Western Platonism into the English classical liberal current and the Neo-Augustinian secular ideologies stemming from Kant. Those later currents of thought are precisely what Ellmers and his chosen authors address. I would maintain, as I regularly do, that the origins of these “moderns” currents of thought should be sought in the breakdown of Augustinian thought in the radically skeptical form of nominalism. The hyper rationalism of the Enlightenment is best understood as a reaction to that radical skepticism, but a reaction that implicitly accepts skeptical nominalist principles and puts them to use in the modern turn to the pursuit of power.

I realize that some readers would want to take issue with what I’ve just written at virtually every step. To those readers I would simply urge that they browse the earlier archives of Meaning in History. Those are more readily accessible via the right sidebar at the original blog site, meaning in history, and especially the years 2007 through 2012, with emphasis on the earliest posts and those from mid 2011 through 2012. It will probably prove to be rather a slog, but it’s the best I have time to offer. In the meantime, I believe readers will derive significant benefit from Ellmers’ essay. To come to an understanding of the historical roots of the Western crisis is crucial to any possible renewal, and this essay is an excellent start. Let’s dive in.

Ellmers begins with an examination of Kheriaty’s book.

Kheriaty’s focus is the dangerous marriage of powerful new technologies with what Abraham Lincoln called “the same old serpent”—the tyrannical temptation. What the COVID pandemic exposed, Kheriaty argues in The New Abnormal, is that all the elements of an emerging dystopia are already here: “The unholy alliance of 1) public health, 2) digital technologies of surveillance and control, and 3) the police powers of the state—what I call the Biomedical Security State—has arrived.”

One of the most disturbing features of this Vaxxed New World is how much of our lives are governed by people and organizations we’ve never heard of.

Here Ellmers is referring to the vast web of lavishly funded foundations and NGOs that do so much to set the policy trajectory of the collective West. This brief description of the elements of the total surveillance state lead us back to the question that Kheriatry is concerned to address, which I’ll rephrase:

All the elements of an emerging dystopia may already be present, as Kheriaty maintains, but how has the general population been prepared to accept this unholy alliance of elements that constitutes the Biomedical Security State?

Ellmers points to a clue to be found on the WEF website. The coronavirus pandemic, according to [the WEF] website, revealed the “inconsistencies, inadequacies, and contradictions” of our current political institutions, and thus afforded the opportunity “to build a new social contract.” Note the phrase "social contract" carefully. It expresses the view that organized human society, rather than being a complexly organic development flowing from human nature, is actually a contractual arrangement--in other words, an invention of human rationality. This notion, of course, is one that is deeply congenial to the populations of modern liberal democracies--the notion that democracy allows Man to control his fate according to desires that are discovered in elections. This ideology that forms the basis of modern liberal democracies is largely a product of the Englightenment. It also poses the danger that those desires may be untethered from true insights into human nature and could become the vehicle even for anti-human ideologies focused on power and control by elites. It is this tendency toward totalitarianism deriving from Enlightenment thought that Kheriaty and DeSmet (and Ellmers) examine. It may seem paradoxical, but follow the historical argument closely—good intentions, etc.

Ellmers begins by returning to the WEF’s trans-humanist agenda and gradually works back to the Renaissance and Enlightenment:

If Schwab is the organ-grinder of the new world order, his dancing monkey is Yuval Harari. An Israeli academic, Harari provides the pseudo-intellectual arguments for transhumanism’s scientific and historical inevitability. He ... authored a widely read Atlantic essay in 2018 titled “Why Technology Favors Tyranny”— he also believes the inevitable endpoint of scientific progress is for humans—or at least some humans—to “become gods.”

...

[The omnipresence of surveillance in the modern world] is a major theme of The New Abnormal, and is nicely explained with reference to what the father of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham called the “panopticon”—which is often thought of as a design for a prison, but is actually a broader “blueprint for a system of surveilling and completely controlling a population,” as Kheriaty notes. ... Kheriaty cites the postmodernist critic Michel Foucault, who applies Bentham’s concept to the bureaucratic state: the panopticon becomes “a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.” Foucault often emphasized that the tyranny of modern power structures dissolves the distinctions between ruler and ruled—everyone becomes a component within the system. In the all-encompassing prison of the panopticon, everyone is both prisoner and guard, ...

When Authority Determines Truth

Ellmers then brings up the example of Trofim Lysenko. Again, this may strike some as surprising, since Lysenko is described, is the poster boy for, Soviet “pseudo-science”. How could Lysenko be connected to modern Western science, much less to the Enlightenment?

"[Lysenko, a]n agronomist and amateur geneticist, convinced Stalin that plants could be “educated” to conform with Marxist dogma, altering their natures—i.e., their genetic traits—to meet the needs of the state. Stalin was only too happy to hear that “political truth,” as revealed in the unfolding of the historical dialectic, could command nature. This conceit, however, neither originated nor dissolved with the Soviet Union."

If Niccolò Machiavelli was, as Leo Strauss argued, the founder of the modern world, one could say that the one who perpetuated this new political order by giving it a religion was Francis Bacon [1561 – 1626]. The religion Bacon preached, of course, was science. Both Kheriaty and Desmet want to defend genuine, modern science, which is objective, modest, and reasonable, from scientism, which isn’t. But we may wonder if this is a distinction without a difference, and whether the inclination to reductionist materialism (as well as technological utopianism) was present from the beginning of the modern project.

As we will see below, Bacon's reductionist materialism already presented the modern scientific project in hubristic terms—as Ellmers argues, this hubristic agenda was present at the founding of modern science. For Bacon, the scientist is the one who will "interrogate nature" to dominate nature to cause it to follow the dictates of man/the scientist. Science in this understanding is ultimately about power. As Ellmers will also note, this is about “modern” science, a religion. Science in the sense of a search for knowledge had long existed. Bacon’s version was something quite new.

Can we not see here [in Bacon’s agenda for “science”] the spirit of Harari’s transhumanism, and the WEF’s goal of expedited evolution? In The Great Instauration, Bacon announces a goal that today would earn him a grant from the Gates Foundation: “I am laboring to lay the foundation not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power.”

Tellingly, Kheriaty cites the example of the Australian organization that issues medical malpractice insurance to show that the spirit behind the modern project--human utility and power, to use Bacon’s own words—is for modern science in the Baconian tradition the measure of all things. Once “utility and power” become the measure rather than knowledge, we’re on a slippery slide toward totalitarianism in one form or another:

“Health practitioners are obliged to ensure their views are consistent with public health messaging…. Views expressed which may be consistent with evidence-based material may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging” (emphasis added). As Kheriaty notes, “evidence-based material” means peer-reviewed research—which used to be the standard for legitimate science. But the pandemic revealed that the spirit of Lysenko and Bacon is alive and well: power or authority, not nature, determines scientific truth.

In political terms that we’re sadly familiar with, the truth is in the narrative, not the facts.

Ellmers goes on to supply a prime example of "the Left's Neo-Lysenkoism" that Kheriaty omits: gender reassignment therapies, including for very young children ('Horrified' hospital employee leaks DEI training pushing 3-year-olds identifying as transgender). The phenomenon of transgenderism as the focus for the new scientism raises the question Kheriaty’s question to a critical point: What prepared ordinary people to accept this? Ellmers cites, as a prime example of the Left's Neo-Lysenkoism, the US Department of "Health and Human Services", which maintains that gender identity is a subjective “experience,” and “not always congruent with biological sex.” And he asks the question that we are now faced with:

But what happens when nature does not yield as submissively as we would like?

Ellmers then turns to DeSmet's study of mass hysteria, The Psychology of Totalitarianism. What ties DeSmet's work to Kheriaty's is the way in which, while relying on modern psychology, DeSmet also traces the spirit of power and, thus, of totalitarianism to the Enlightenment:

Desmet argues that the extraordinary distress, irrationality, and overreactions the world witnessed in response to the COVID pandemic emerged from a deep psychological disorder at the heart of the modern project. Indeed, mass formation psychosis “is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.” Moreover, the instigation and manipulation of this psychosis forms the basis of a totalitarianism that is “the defining feature of our Enlightenment tradition.”

In other words, the deep, societally pervasive, psychological disorder we witnessed in the acquiescence to the Covid Regime was definitely weird, but it was predictable for those who understood the historical roots of the modern project in reductionist materialism (“mechanistic thinking”). Paradoxically, while the Enlightenment is probably best know as the generator of modern liberal democracy and the Bill of Rights, its inner logic of mechanistic thinking leads directly to totalitarianism.

Note that underlying this type of thinking is the idea that nature conforms to human notions of rationality--it is thus ultimately transparent to the human mind, which expresses itself verbally in concepts. This is the fatal conceit of all forms of Platonism. As Bacon mantained, nature is susceptible of "interrogation"--which is the meaning of "science" for Bacon--by which means nature is forced to yield up its supposed "mysteries" and provides man with power.

In the classical or pre-modern understanding, science was simply knowledge, and fully aware of its own limits. But with the modern project launched by Machiavelli, Bacon, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes, the principles governing physical reality came to be understood through a technical method, leading to the belief that we can achieve mastery over nature. Science then became an ideology, which Desmet sees as the source of our spiritual and political discontents. “The relief of man’s estate,” to use Bacon’s famous phrase, was intended to liberate us from labor, suffering, the penalties of vice, and even death.

[As an undergrad taking a course in the Philosophy of Science I wrote a paper that contended exactly that—that the notion of a “scientific method” is basically a rhetorical device. Science does not advance by the application of a method—history amply illustrates that the progress of science is far more human and much less mechanistic. The broader basis for my views can also be found in this book: Thomist Realism and The Critique of Knowledge, which is a critique of the malign influence of modern ideologies (masquerading as philosophy) on Thomist thought.]

DeSmet's argument isn't simple to summarize--follow the link to Ellmers' essay for that. Here is my simplification, from the standpoint of answering our question, Why was the general population and even many well educated people willing to accept the patently hubristic irrationality of the Covid Regime, and submit to at least the early stages of a total surveillance regime? DeSmet basically argues that as long as "science" is able to offer—or to convince the general population that it is offering—"new medical breakthroughs, better gadgets, and more titillating entertainment," the general population will continue to worship Bacon's "new religion", as described above. We could extend this also to other areas of the scientistic project, especially the regime of population control embodied in the entire Climate Change (formerly Global Warming) agenda, as well as other modern pseudo-science hoaxes and "narratives" that proclaim natural crises on scales that exceed the human mind’s ability to process. Yet, DeSmet argues, the general population will accept these narratives based on a belief in the beneficence that the supposedly relentless advance of human power over nature proclaims.

Ellmers adds a caveat to his analysis of DeSmet's work:

As valuable as Desmet’s analysis is, however, there are other elements of our political crisis—including key aspects of the leftist or woke ideology—that simply can’t be characterized as mechanistic thinking, or products of runaway scientism. ... Desmet is correct that a fanatical faith in the technological conquest of nature ultimately descends into anti-rationalism, ... Likewise, Desmet recognizes the hole in the soul created by modern society and sees mass formation as a response to this psychic crisis, but he does not fully appreciate the way woke religiosity, and mass formation itself, reflect a deep, innate longing for “natural” political life, including the civic piety of the ancient city. Desmet’s invaluable book, while essential to understanding one key ingredient of our contemporary crisis, requires supplementary analysis to appreciate the other moral, political, and philosophical dimensions of the crisis.

...

An adequate response to the pandemic crisis would mean holding people responsible. But it would also mean recovering a deeper understanding of the moral and metaphysical basis of responsibility ... The grim pictures presented by Mattias Desmet and Aaron Kheriaty suggest that we are unlikely to avert both the pandemonium and the panopticon. Yet perhaps long odds are precisely what we need. Centuries of false hopes and hubris, after all, are what got us here. If we manage to recover our humanity at all, that recovery will be long and difficult, slow and painful.