The Luxury of Skepticism

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Skeptics occupy an important place in our collective psyche, and I say that without irony. After all, skeptics are a vital part of any healthy debate, often asking questions mainstream sources do not even think to ask. Skeptics offer us counternarratives to evaluate, and in the larger culture, they even pick thoughtfully at collective mythologies and can slowly force a culture and society to reevaluate assumptions about what is and is not true.



There is also a fairly ugly side to a lot of skepticism -- namely, taking advantage of the honorable tradition of doubt and honest inquiry in the pursuit of bias, profit and genuinely crack potted ideas. I recently came across an example of this from the anti-vaccination movement. I present for your consideration Melanie's Marvellous Measles a children's book that, in the words of its author:

This book takes children aged 4 - 10 years on a journey of discovering about the ineffectiveness of vaccinations, while teaching them to embrace childhood disease, heal if they get a disease, and build their immune systems naturally.

The anti-vaccination movement is by now well-known, well-established and most every claim they have ever made has been thoroughly debunked. And yet it holds on strongly enough that California has recently seen its worst outbreak of pertussis since the 1940s and cases of measles are on the rise. Even though one of the leading figures of the anti-vaccine movement has been proven to be an utter fraud with financial interests in discrediting the MMR vaccine anti-vaccine forces show no signs of going away.

It occurs to me that anti-vaccination is not merely a form of corrupted skepticism; it is also a luxury that could only be born out of societies that have seen public health flourish so well due to the breakthrough of vaccination that living memory of diseases all but banished has practically shriveled up. It takes a remarkable amount of progress in the sphere of public health to look at the history of vaccination in modern Western medicine and NOT a practical miracle that has immeasurably improved nearly every life in every developed nation. While it is always good to ask medical science to evaluate and reevaluate itself, it is ignorance, not healthy skepticism, that causes people to ignore what life was like before vaccination, and to forget the public health scourges that prompted the first moves for mandatory vaccinations over almost 180 years ago. Or to dismiss the ravages such diseases played on their victims:



Looking at the horribly cavalier attitude Ms. Messenger's book has towards measles, a disease whose complications include pneumonia and encephalitis, I can only conclude that her form of deranged skepticism is a luxury item that she can only afford by living in a society that largely eradicated the diseases she thinks are less dangerous than vaccination (she also claims a vaccine killed one of her children but offers no details that can be evaluated). It would be fine to discuss actual known effectiveness of various vaccines, but she and her ilk go very far beyond it, and are only able to keep their unvaccinated children reasonably healthy by mooching off the immunity of the rest of the population that behaved more rationally. It is an attitude born out of the distance our society has put between ourselves and the pandemics that routinely killed or maimed millions annually. Smallpox alone is thought to have killed almost half a billion people in the 20th century. Doubting the importance of vaccination is a luxury afforded by distance.

I tend to think this applies to political skepticism as well. Early 20th century Marxists looked at world that was built by capital and markets, rightly identified both excesses and abuses, and wrongly concluded that modern economies could do without capitalism. If one looks objectively at the increase not only in wealth but also in the average standard of living in market driven economies, it is absurd to even suggest that market economies are not among the most powerful innovations in history. Skepticism of that nature can only be supported if one is living far removed from the extreme difficulties and depravations that came from living in pre-industrial society.

The same, I believe, can be said about certain elements in today's Libertarian ideology. Today, we live in a world where regulations and social democratic programs have made remarkable improvements for most people. Healthy skepticism would ask if publically financed pension plans developed when the average retiree lived 5 years past retirement need to be reconsidered or redesigned when the average retiree lives 20 years in retirement. Healthy skepticism would ask us to properly consider the cost to commerce of environmental regulation against the benefits to the overall environment. But it is unhealthy or dishonest skepticism to ignore that poverty among the elderly has been greatly reduced in the past 7 decades or that assumes the enormous gains in air and water quality of the past 4 decades would have come about without intervention. Similar to anti-vaccine skeptics and skeptics of capitalism, it is a skepticism that seems to thrive given distance from the very problems we have addressed via social action.

Obviously, all of these are likely to get serious push back from members of the community, but are there other candidates for unhealthy skepticism in our society?

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Fundamentalism, ironically, qualifies on 2-3 levels as unhealthy skepticism in its sweeping denunciations of all secular reality and in its tendencies to amoral existence in its own. Fundamentalism's skepticism applies to a rigorous and faithful analysis of the very texts it claims to revere, and this means it's not only unhealthy but self-contradictory. And it's this ideology that propels people like Bachmann and Huckabee to fame/infamy.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

See, I thought Truthers would be the first nominee out of the gate...

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Odd, I see that as non-skeptical. To me, skeptics are people who distrust, not those who put forward alternate and evidence-less hypotheses and then cling to those.

[soliloquy76.livejournal.com]

*cough* Climate change *cough*

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

My cynicism trumps your skepticism.

That book is just sick!!!!
I know a lot of people who fell into "panic mod" over the whole vaccination thing; fortunately no serious damage occurred and the people closest to me have reconsidered. (I know an exceptionally large number of home-schoolers, and so the vaccinations were not mandatory)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No sicker than the devout, God-fearing Christians who try to pray away the diabetes of Type 1 diabetics who are kids and wind up killing their own children trying to work miracles.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

The problem is that they're skeptical of vaccine claims, but not equally skeptical of the anti-vaccination claims. This is not skepticism, it's simply picking your belief. It's only called "skepticism" because it happens to go against the dominant belief. They don't function logically or in any way supportable by evidence or fact, because they conveniently and intentionally ignore it wherever it contradicts their pre-determined belief. That's not skepticism, it's fundamentalism.

[kardashev.livejournal.com]

I've heard these anti-vaxxers are sending each other infected lollipops now.

As far as being skeptical toward political ideologies, I'd have to say that I'm skeptical about having an ideology at all. Most "true believers" sound frightening when they start spewing their pseudo-utopian false dichotomies. Why do we need to have them at all? Especially in the information age of 21c where the gaping holes in all of them are laid bare.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

I've heard these anti-vaxxers are sending each other infected lollipops now.

Quite illegal, and soooOOO stupid.

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

Talk about historic reenactment, I remember pox parties.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

Obviously, all of these are likely to get serious push back from members of the community, but are there other candidates for unhealthy skepticism in our society?

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Now I wanna go fishing... In a frozen lake. Make a hole in the ice and catch some pike-fish. Awesome... *dreamy*

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I doubt skepticism is that important. ;cL

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Skepticism loses it's point when skeptics stop being skeptical about their own beliefs, then it just becomes dogmatism.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

I see the proposed LJ style changes went through early this AM, just when I was going to reply ;)

NBC News had a story on this a few days ago, and said several doctors offices in L.A. are now not seeing children that have not received their vaccinations-- all in an effort to protect the health of their other patients. The NBC feature interviewed a few of the parents, asking them for their rationale in not having their children vaccinated. "Well, we read on the Internet..... [insert some conspiracy theories why scientists are wrong and why someone with a degree in medical science is right]." Did you know that during the 1950s, a person who was infected with polio infected another four people (with seasonal influenza, they infect just one). I didn't know this until recently and I had no idea how contagious polio was. The other issue at play according the NBC report, most Americans don't remember the polio wards in hospitals, or see survivors having to wear leg braces.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

I'm loving some of the changes, particularly the mass-expand-comments. It'll spare me a lot of clicking, yay!

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

If one looks objectively at the increase not only in wealth but also in the average standard of living in market driven economies, it is absurd to even suggest that market economies are not among the most powerful innovations in history.

...followed by...

But it is unhealthy or dishonest skepticism to ignore that poverty among the elderly has been greatly reduced in the past 7 decades or that assumes the enormous gains in air and water quality of the past 4 decades would have come about without intervention.

...is contradictory. Libertarian ideology looks at the fact that capitalist markets produce the increase in wealth and living standards and sees that that is what has produced the gains that you're attributing to government intervention. Also, social action doesn't require government, and often works better without it.

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you're old enough to have experienced water quality when left to "the market." The market caused rivers to actually burn due to the buildup of industrial waste, it took government intervention to clean them up.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

When skepticism becomes more of an automatic knee-jerk habit just for its own sake, rather than a sign of critical thinking, that's where insurmountable problems start to occur.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Why is there no 'like' button on LJ, I ask :)

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

The skepticism is only applied toward evidence against their claim. This isn't being skeptical, what they are engaging in is called bias.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

They're called kooks more than skeptics.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

I would assert that just as Libertarianism is a luxery that comes from living in a society wherein "the rule of law" is deeply entrntched, so is Progressiveism.

By giving the government (or any other monopoly) the power to provide something you also give them the power to deny it. This works as long as they play by the rules (and the power is not abused) but rapidly turns into a nightmare the moment someone decides to say "fuck the rules".

And this is before you raise the specter of perverse incentives and other unintended consequences.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Progressivism rose in an era where market forces were exploiting people wholesale. Where producers could lie about their products and suffer no repercussions. People found that the only people who would listen to their grievances and could actually improve their way of life was government, which lead to the Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt.

Which era did libertarianism rise out of? Late 18th century anarcho-communists. In the US it took on a different meaning as it came to encompass opposition to The New Deal. Since The New Deal passed and ultimately did its job, libertarianism has constantly rebranded itself to the point where it just means "fuck you, got mine."