Vaccine refusal and the bargain of modernity

[Rhiannon12866]

The marvels of modern life require us to trust things we don't understand. But that trust can be lost.

DAVID FARIS
JULY 14, 2021

(The Week) In 1990, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens published a book called The Consequences of Modernity, in which he asks a simple question: "Why do most people, most of the time, trust in practices and social mechanisms about which their own technical knowledge is slight or nonexistent?" Giddens argued that many of the extraordinary marvels of modern life are made possible by widespread trust in what he calls "expert systems,"and noted that we encounter them routinely in daily life, in ways we rarely think about.

Commercial air travel and rail transit are expert systems. So are medicine, science, and government. Every time we climb into a car built this century, we are placing our lives in the hands of engineers and computer programmers we will never meet and whose intricate handiwork we only dimly understand, if at all. And Giddens cautioned that the freely given and almost automatic trust that we place in the designers and operators of such systems shouldn't be taken for granted.

Perhaps nothing has proven him right more than the choice by a large percentage of Americans to refuse the miraculous COVID-19 vaccines. Infuriatingly, resistance to vaccination has broken down along partisan lines, and the GOP's destructive embrace of this kind of conspiratorial thinking will likely kill thousands of rank-and-file Republicans. But this problem isn't just about partisanship. Instead, as Giddens taught, it is a feature of modernity as we live it, an almost inevitable byproduct of social complexity that can only be better managed rather than eradicated.

Almost five years ago, Damon Linker wrote here in The Week about the way that political entrepreneurs have weaponized distrust as a means to tear down existing institutions and to replace them with something new and more radical. He lamented that the "trustworthiness of the authorities" who direct expert systems "has been under direct and continuous attack for the past several decades." Linker blamed the rise of conspiracy thinking mostly on right-wing media personalities for the "continuous artillery fire" they have trained for decades on the institutions that underpin liberal democracy.

That's obviously part of the problem, especially with the COVID vaccines. Hostility to the shots was cynically cultivated by far-right figures like former President Trump and the usual suspects on Fox News and the right-wing media ecosphere. An anti-vaccine posture has now become so de rigueur on the right that it was practically a running theme of this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), most theatrically when Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert shouted "Don't come knockin' on my door with your Fauci Ouchie" to the delirious throngs.

But more fundamentally, it is the dense web of expert systems, only a handful of which most individuals meaningfully understand in a single lifetime, which produces recurring crises of trust and faith in our institutions. Giddens argues that mistrust is a natural part of the lay person's relationship with science. He writes that "ignorance always provides grounds for skepticism or at least caution," given that we frequently are asked to trust expert systems with our lives, or the lives of our children, about which we might be even more protective. He calls this the "bargain with modernity" that we must make to live normally in society without being consumed by constant fear and doubt.

Read more: https://theweek.com/coronavirus/1002523/vaccine-refusal-and-the-bargain-of-modernity

[SheltieLover]

1. Superb!

Ty for sharing!

[Rhiannon12866]

2. That's what I meant

Do these anti-vaxxers drive a car or go on planes? Do they have running water and electricity? I'm willing to bet that they never question these things - which they don't completely understand - but they embrace them because they're necessary and make life easier. And there's nothing that makes life easier than not getting sick and dying.

[SheltieLover]

3. Oh, I fully agree!

[Rhiannon12866]

4. I'd explain that to the guy who was ranting about not being "a guinea pig"

But that would probably just piss him off even more. *sigh*

[SheltieLover]

5. Pls don't argue with magats

Some are quite violent!

[Rhiannon12866]

6. Well, there would be witnesses, but I'm not into taking chances...

[SheltieLover]

7. Lol

Ty! 😷