People are angry and divided. A large chunk of the US population is passionately protesting that the “experts” are rigging the system to get rich at the benefit of the people. Others disagree and see the protesters as willfully ignorant and shamefully stupid people without a basic understanding of how the world actually works. All media feature the protesters prominently before mentioning that everyone who has any real background on the subject thinks the protest movement is simply dangerous hysteria that will only harm the American people. The leaders of the protest movement are reviled by intellectuals, who see them as unprepared outsiders with no real authority to say anything.
Of course, I’m talking about vaccines. In recent decades, numerous parents have shared stories of deep suffering after their children developed symptoms of autism and have explained how they believe this affliction came into their lives. Celebrities, some of whom have autistic children of their own, have amplified these voices and helped sew them together into a movement. A large number of doctors have responded that the whole movement is hopelessly misguided and that parents just need to listen to, accept, and follow the learned words of their trained medical professionals.
At the same time, my introductory summary of events seems to describe the current US presidential election pretty well. Just replace doctors with politicians and childhood autism with blue-collar unemployment. With that in mind, we can see that Donald Trump is just the new Jenny McCarthy. This is starting to sound like a joke, but this is where things get really serious. Why? Because this same analogy provides the opportunity to understand the true foundations of the brutal political divide threatening to damage the American people. How? By letting us apply the lessons of an exceptional book about the recent vaccine debates to the political crisis. The lessons of this work may help many of us move forward constructively after the votes are counted and competition gives way to resentment.
The book is The Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin, which he published in 2011. The book gives a summary of the recent debates about vaccines and autism, along with an explanation of why so many parents have come to oppose vaccines and an outline of how we, as a society, can resolve the crisis. Even more importantly, Seth Mnookin characterizes the basic psychological and sociological factors that have gotten people into so much trouble regarding vaccines, as well as many other issues. The author explicitly generalizes his arguments to all medical and scientific journalism, but I think we could go much farther and generalize many of his assessments to other areas of social discourse, such as politics. The careful analysis of this one instance of social conflict gives a template for much wider understanding of how people come to hold (so very passionately) such disparate beliefs about issues that appear to have been resolved. One of the factors that contributed to his success is that the author himself had no noteworthy medical knowledge before beginning the book. Starting from an uninformed state and gradually building his understanding of the available data, Mnookin draws together disparate points of view, seeing both sensible and inadequate aspects of each. As is generally the case in the real world, each of the warring social factions has valid arguments as well as inadequate ones.
In The Panic Virus, Mnookin carefully dissects the roots of the profound mistrust between anti-vaccine parents and the pro-vaccine establishment. By allowing himself to feel both the terror of a man preparing to start a family and the careful commitment to evidence of a journalist, the author is able to find the enlightened middle ground that so many of us have been unable to see. On the one hand, doctors and their defenders haven’t, in many cases, accepted the responsibility for presenting the scientific consensus to parents in a clear and respectful way. Whenever a vaccine advocate presents Jenny McCarthy as an idiot (as I think almost all vaccine advocates do), many who doubt vaccines get the impression that the medical establishment is arrogant, elitist, and perhaps sexist. That isn’t productive, and Jenny McCarthy uses that perception masterfully, as Mnookin notes. On the other hand, vaccine doubters need to rein in their intuition and emotional thinking, which very often lead people to irrational judgments and decisions. Data tend not to provoke strong emotional convictions in the way that personal anecdotes often do, but data are more often correct in describing large-scale phenomena than are personal anecdotes. That’s a major cognitive bias, one that can potentially lead us to highly destructive decisions and one that generalizes for beyond questions about vaccinations.
The same dynamic of the educated elite against the common people is playing a central role in our current presidential election. Just as vaccine advocates laugh at Jenny McCarthy and her supporters, Hillary Clinton’s fans very often laugh at Donald Trump and his supporters. That tone of ridicule can lead those who prefer Clinton to minimize anything that Trump or his followers say, which could potentially lead Democrats to ignore the real suffering that makes many people open to Trump’s arguments. At the same time, some of those who support Trump take the widespread criticism he receives from the media and political establishment as confirmation that the world is rigged against them and that Clinton is at the center of some sort of malevolent Illuminati conspiracy that controls the nation’s institutions. Reality is rarely that straightforward. Just as many people have different reasons for supporting Trump (that aren’t racism or ignorance or being evil), many people have different reasons for supporting Clinton (that aren’t corruption or elitism or being evil). There are people who have spent time in high places and have learned how the system works on a large scale. There are people who have spent time in not so high places and have seen what’s happening in their neighborhoods. Both sides possess distinct knowledge that we need to combine in order to discover how to progress as a nation and both sides need to take turns speaking respectfully and listening respectfully. Otherwise, things are only going to get worse after November 8th. We need to heal the festering wounds opened and reopened during the last year and I hope that Seth Mnookin’s book helps us to realize the need to reconcile and empathize with those who haven’t voted for our favored candidate. Perhaps that would make America greater than ever.
Note: This is the same post that I shared on LinkedIn on November 2nd, before the election.
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