Against Covid Authoritarianism

Questioning authority is an essential part of a free, creative, dynamic culture

Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Chicago Theater, January 22, 2022

Speaking of “liberal confessions”: I went to a rock concert recently.

Not on Zoom, not socially distanced (although we did have to show proof of vaccination and many people wore masks) — live. In person. With over 3,500 other people. Who were on their feet the entire 3-hour show, dancing, hooting, clapping, and waving their hands in the air like they just didn’t care.

(It was the Tedeschi Trucks Band, who I knew almost nothing about when I agreed to go, and they were awesome. The lead guitarist used to play with the Allman Brothers and they live up to that standard — ‘nuff said.)

An incredible show by any measure, experiencing it after two years of Covid restrictions made me realize just how strangely distant the once-familiar sense of human connection, creative expression, and cultural freedom I experienced there had become. It was like that shift in the classic “Wizard of Oz” movie from black-and-white to technicolor. And the really weird feeling was that it seemed like I’d almost forgotten that such a bright world ever existed.

Fear of Music

So that soaringly good feeling of experiencing great music together with others was shot through with a sense of loss. And then, when I started thinking about writing about that, this negative feeling shifted to anxiety. Because living in a Covid-obsessed, hyper-cautious, Blue State culture, going to a rock concert definitely still feels like Something That Should Not Be Done. I struggled with the sense that I should keep quiet about this experience, as I know people might condemn me for it (and in the impersonal online world, some can be super-vicious).

On the other hand — it’s also true that the band’s four-night “residency” in Chicago was pretty much sold out. This tells me that there are a lot of people around here who are not, in fact, With The Program. Of course, if you live somewhere like Miami, the fact that so many people are going out to hear live music must seem like no big deal. But here in Blue Home Chicago, it struck me as beyond illicit — even though everything was perfectly legal and the crowd was overwhelmingly composed of older people with plenty of rule-following decorum to spare. Strange days indeed.

(As a caveat, I’ll note that I do think that attending such live events does require thinking into not only your own Covid risk tolerance, but also the extent to which you’re at risk of passing the virus along to others who may be particularly vulnerable. If I were in poor health or regularly saw anyone who is elderly or has comorbidities, I wouldn’t have gone. But I don’t and don’t. And yes, I’ve been feeling fine since and had hardly any indoor contact with others for a week after. So, at least as far as I can tell, everything’s fine.)

But going to this concert made me feel even more sharply concerned about what the dominant Covid narrative has been doing to us, both individually and collectively. Because being part of a crowd that was so passionate about sharing an experience of electrifying live music reminded me in a visceral, rather than simply an intellectual way what so many of us have at least temporarily lost.

For a few hours, I felt reconnected to a sense of freedom, creativity, and dynamism that I used to take for granted as part of American culture. Afterward, I found myself wondering whether that once-familiar energy will ever be so widely available again.

Of course, there will always be creative people; art and music will survive. But in broader societal terms, I have this sinking feeling that what used to be a robust wellspring of creative energy in American society is evaporating before our eyes. Dynamic cultural energy that used to flow freely has been severely restricted, forced into artificially narrowed passageways or cut off entirely.

Plus, there must be a lot of young people who have been socialized to see something like a live concert as a massive disease risk before ever having the chance to experience it otherwise. We older folks have been telling ourselves that prohibiting or avoiding such events is only temporary, that we’ll get “back to normal” soon.

But can we be certain that’s true? And what’s going to be “normal” for children and youth who have now spent some of their most formative years tethered to a computer, isolated from others, getting an even more subpar education, stuck in who knows what sort of home environment, wearing masks every time they leave it, and literally afraid of the air?

“Follow the Science”

The conventional Covid-cautious view is, of course, that we have to give up not only such frivolous enjoyments as concerts, but also such fundamental traditions as in-person education as needed “to keep everybody safe.” And again, while I know it’s not the case everywhere, that’s still a prominent concern where I live: The Chicago Public Schools were shut down again due to “safety” concerns again just a few weeks ago.

Given this prioritization of safety, it’s logical to ask: Who, precisely, decides what is and is not safe? From the Blue State perspective, the answer is obvious: “Science.” Here, the unspoken presumption is that there is always a single, easily identifiable expert consensus that can and should be followed. It’s posited as a no-brainer: What sort of selfish, destructive idiot wouldn’t want to honor public safety directives that are reliably and uniquely based on fact, reason, and expertise?

Having spent one disillusioning decade in academia and then another doing social research in the nonprofit sector, however, this widely shared view of a singularly unimpeachable Voice of Science never rang true to me. To be sure, I specialized in the “social sciences” (history, law, political science, etc.) and have no medical or biological expertise. Nonetheless, I don’t buy it: That’s just never the way that any large-scale research enterprise works.

There are always politics. And not just the partisan red/blue kind (although those are also quite often in play). More immediately, there’s the politics generated by intense professional competition for funding, reputation, and status. Academia attracts a lot of nerdy, obsessive, driven people, and some have very big egos. All too often, those who become the rain-makers, with the power to land grants, control gatekeeping networks, and set research agendas are not the best scholars around. On the contrary, many of the most creative thinkers, who are driven by passionate curiosity rather than professional ambition, are sidelined by those who are much better at playing the professional game.

Plus, even bracketing the politics, no worthwhile research agenda ever develops in lockstep consensus, as the “Follow the Science” narrative would have us believe. There are always alternative views that should be seriously considered. Usually, a long, iterative process of debate among multiple competing takes on a given issue is what drives the process forward in any worthwhile way.

Research paradigms that are hermetically sealed off from other perspectives tend to be unconvincingly narrow to begin with and only grow staler over time. Eventually, they’re replaced by something fresher. But that can take a long time and isn’t a good way to proceed.

False Choices

When Covid hit, our news media and related information ecosystems were already extremely politically siloed and biased. The mainstream news media (MSM) consistently forces very political issue into a Red/Blue dichotomy — and today, almost every issue that gets any airplay to speak of is highly politicized.

As Matt Taibbi explains in his excellent book, Hate Inc., (which I highly recommend), this division is part of the MSM business model:

After generations of doing the opposite, when unity and conformity were more profitable, now the primary product the news media sells is division . . . The easiest media product to make is called This Bad Thing That Just Happened Is Someone Else’s Fault. It has a virtually limitless market.

Consequently, the working premise of every MSM story — whether it’s in The New York Times or on Fox — is that there are “only two baskets of allowable opinion: Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, left or right.” Further, these two alternatives “are in permanent conflict.” Team Blue blames Team Red for everything bad; Team Red does the same thing in reverse.

Maintaining the false sense that there are no other options — and that it’s somehow your civic duty to keep consuming your side’s content in order to support the Good Guys against the Bads — keeps the whole system humming along at a profit. The cost, however, is any semblance of serious, thoughtful, in-depth, or even realistic political analysis or discussion :

Once you accept the ‘two, and two only’ idea, we basically have you. The only trick from there is preventing narrative-upsetting ideas from getting onscreen too often . . . Meanwhile, a vast universe of systemic issues is ignored . . . If both parties have an equal or near-equal hand in causing a social problem, we typically don’t cover it. Or better to say: a reporter or two might cover it, but it’s never picked up. It doesn’t take over a news cycle, doesn’t become a thing.

True, there’s an infinite amount of alternative news sources and political commentary beyond the MSM’s Red/Blue silos available online. You could immerse yourself in it all day, every day, and never read, hear, and see it all. Some of this alternative content is great. But much of it is terrible. Separating the wheat from the chaff isn’t easy, however. And most people have neither the time, energy, nor desire to do so.

But no matter: The almighty algorithm automatically sorts it out for us! The Giant Machine in the Cloud is always busily feeding us whatever content it calculates will keep us engaged and online. And that means catering to — and thereby reinforcing — our pre-existing political biases.

Having a steady stream of information that purportedly shows us why our team is right and everyone else is wrong tends to be quite attractive. So, the mainstream media’s model of two — and only two! — alternatives tends to be reinforced online unless you consciously strive to make it otherwise. Otherwise, our social media feeds and even our search engine results are pre-engineered to keep showing us more of what we’re already predisposed to believe.

Even worse, this cognitive bias machine is expertly engineered to manipulate our emotions. Consuming information that causes us to feel anxious, afraid, angry, or stoked on hate is the most reliable way to grab and keep our attention. (Content that makes us feel superior to others also works and is complimentary.) Again, that’s the business model. The whole point is to make money by keeping everyone online as much as possible. Then, whatever personal data you intentionally or unintentionally share is vacuumed up and sold to the highest bidder.

The Internet ruined the MSM’s old business model, which relied on paid subscribers and, more importantly, advertisers. Consequently, old-school media has become almost completely enmeshed with social media and the Internet. Pretty much every major journalist is on Twitter. And, if you pay attention to it (which I don’t necessarily recommend), you can see how this Twitterfication of the news is negatively impacting our information ecosystems in real time.

Everything is getting more and more dumbed down. Rather than thinking in sentences and paragraphs, as a print-based culture trains us to do, we increasingly reduce every idea and issue to little more than a roiling stream of emotionally charged hashtags. There’s always a high voltage sense of crisis. It’s good for the media biz, as it encourages the sense that you need to follow the news in order to fight with your team against the enemy (ka-ching!).

Meanwhile, any deeper understanding of whatever real or imagined crisis we’re obsessively preoccupied with at the moment becomes marginalized. This, in turn, reinforces the stupidity of the “two, and only two” model. In so doing, it creates new crises of its own by poisoning our individual psyches and tearing our society apart.

Asking Questions is Good

These powerful forces of information siloing and political division were already in place when Covid-19 hit. Consequently, it’s not surprising that there has been such a powerful push to divide the vast universe of discussion over what the virus is and how we should respond to it into the two opposing camps of “science” versus “misinformation.”

Obviously, this framework favors the progressive liberal side of the divide, which claims the mantle of science. This side is dominant because today’s wokeified liberal-left (which is not the same as the old-school liberal-left; in fact, the two have serious conflicts) controls the most influential sources of cultural production in the U.S., including legacy media, big tech, and Hollywood. Plus, when it comes to Covid, the liberal-left also has stronger pre-existing ties to relevant parts of government and academia, making it easier to control the narrative.

That said, America’s left-of-center political culture is not a monolith. It only seems that way because that illusion is constantly reinforced by the dominant “two, and only two” Blue-vs.-Red model. Alternative voices who don’t agree with the dominant party line are regularly marginalized or intimidated into silence. Plus, the vast majority of people simply want to avoid conflict. Better to keep questions or doubts to yourself than risk getting into a potentially harmful fight.

I’ve experienced this myself and am sympathetic to the resultant urge to self-censor. Way back at the beginning of the pandemic, I got into a terrible argument with some friends over the then-new issue of school closures. I felt certain that shifting so many kids to online learning for so long was going to have tremendous negative consequences. In my opinion, the many potential costs of this move needed to be carefully weighed against the estimated risks of Covid for different age groups. This contention seemed perfectly rational and reasonable to me then and still does today.

But my friends were outraged — and angry. The more I stubbornly insisted on pushing the view that we shouldn’t automatically prioritize any possible increase in Covid safety over every other issue, the worse the interpersonal dynamics became. It was upsetting for everybody. Plus, no one’s opinion changed. All I learned was that I’d better think carefully before crossing someone with strong convictions on Covid that I don’t share. Even if we’re friends and agree on many other issues politically, it could easily set off a chain reaction that does more harm than good.

True, most people I know wouldn’t be so explosive. Still, on the whole, I’ve found that it’s tricky to talk openly about Covid. At least within my social circles, I just have too much skepticism about the dominant narrative, too many questions regarding what’s really going on biologically, too many reservations about Covid policies, and too many criticisms of the hyper-cautious Blue State Covid culture. Most people find that much needling at the dominant narrative disconcerting, if not disturbing or outrageous. And I get that many people have developed highly sensitive emotional tripwires around Covid for good reason. So, I try to tread carefully.

Or, at least, I did until I decided to write this post (LOL). But, even here, I’m hoping to avoid getting sucked into yet another cycle of unproductive arguments, with everyone squaring off into diametrically opposed camps on masks, vaccines, or whatever, citing their warring studies and data sets that almost certainly won’t change anyone’s mind, anyway. Instead, I want to make the more general argument that a substantial portion of Blue State America has acquiesced to an unstated yet pervasive belief that it’s wrong to question the self-styled Authority of Science — and that this self-silencing is bad for us, both individually and collectively.

To avoid seeming overly evasive and abstract, I’ll offer a few representative opinions that are dicey to share in Blue State circles — again, not because I want to get into arguments, but simply to provide a few concrete examples.

So: I believe that Covid almost certainly came from a lab leak and that investigation into its true origins was deliberately suppressed. I think that the costs of shutting down our public schools for a year and a half far outweighed the benefits. I find the new push to triple-vaxx kids ages six months to four years creepy. And I feel that the new Blue State norm of having so many young, healthy people always wear masks outside — even when they’re walking through the park alone with no one nearby, which I see regularly — demonstrates that our hyper-cautious Covid culture has had some unhealthy effects on people’s psyches.

More generally, I strongly reject any blanket assumption that asking questions about what Covid is, where it originated, and how it should be managed is immoral and dangerous. Particularly in our strange new corporate media/social media/big tech environment, which is designed to trap us in warring information silos for profit, this is a dangerous belief system to reinforce. Plus, once again, it’s simply not how any legitimate process of scientific inquiry actually works.

In a democratic society, the default assumption should always be that ordinary people are capable of evaluating critical information, making reasonable choices, and cooperating with others. If we see that that’s not happening as much as it could and should be (as is obviously the case), then there needs to be an intense focus on how best to revitalize democratic institutions and social trust. Of course, that’s not happening, either. Quite the contrary.

The censorious dynamic that’s developed around any discussion of Covid would be laughable were it not so terrible. Anyone who questions, dissents, or explores alternative opinions is automatically relegated to the same category of Dangerous Voices That Must be Stopped. Accomplished professors at top research universities are put in the same “misinformation” basket as tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists. It’s ridiculous. This isn’t Following the Science, it’s Controlling the Narrative. And it’s way past time for it to stop.

Internalized Censorship

Looking back at the course of the dominant “Follow the Science” Covid narrative over the past two years, I would find it shocking that so many people still refuse to question it were I not so inured to such dynamics by now. As former special ed teacher Alex Gutentag recently pointed out:

By January 2022 . . . the failure of the previous two years of U.S. COVID policies has become undeniable. Vaccinated people were once promised that they would be “dead ends” for the virus, but 80% of the first omicron cases in the United States were double vaccinated and one-third had received a booster. Many cities that implemented mask mandates and vaccine passports are seeing some of their highest case counts of the pandemic. As a result, the original justifications for COVID restrictions are now being openly contradicted by the same people who once argued for them—but without acknowledging the pivot. With the 2022 midterms in sight, the narrative is simply shifting without apology, and many of the arguments once made by “covidiots” are now being backed by Anthony Fauci, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and the familiar cast of journalists and experts.

Yet despite such gigantic yet unacknowledged shifts in the sanctioned Covid narrative, the vast majority of smart, highly educated, good-hearted, and well meaning people I know simply will not question it.

Of course, not wanting to challenge the dominant Covid narrative publicly in contexts where you know it won’t be welcomed is totally understandable. Because in that case, if anyone’s listening at all, there will almost certainly be blowback. And that can not only be very hard emotionally, but a potential threat to your livelihood, depending on where you’re employed. So, there may be very compelling reasons not to make even the slightest wave.

Of course, that’s disturbing: People should be free to share their thoughts on vital public issues without fear of being deplatformed, demonetized, or fired. It’s less disturbing, though, than the fact that so many people seem unwilling to question the dominant Covid narrative even in the safety of a private conversation with a trusted friend — or, worse, the inner sanctuary of their own minds.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, many seem to assume that it’s morally wrong to question the dominant Covid narrative in any circumstances or for any reason. And while that may have made sense for a short time when the pandemic first hit, after two years it most certainly doesn’t (particularly with so much new information that challenges or refutes what used to be taken as rock-solid truth coming out now).

Internalized self-censorship is the most insidious form of censorship there is. As Zhang and Barr (2020) detail, China presents a “cautionary tale” on how highly censorious Covid policies may not only shut down productive scientific and policy debate, but also negatively impact cultural dynamism and human flourishing:

Once censorship has been normalized in a society it is no longer just a facet of the political culture but also seeps into the collective mentality that, in Foucauldian terms, ‘conducts the conduct’ and in the process censors the imagination.

. . . Bourdieu (1991) asserts that the more effective the process of regulation and repression is, the less apparent it becomes. The need for top-down interdiction diminishes as the mechanisms of internalization take hold.

He writes, ‘Censorship is never quite as perfect or as invisible as when each agent has nothing to say apart from what he is objectively authorized to say . . . he is . . . censored once and for all, through the forms of perception and expression that he has internalized and which impose their form on all his expressions.

While the U.S. is not remotely as bad as China when it comes to authoritarianism (whether on Covid or otherwise), it’s also true that censorship can be “normalized in a society” by means other than centralized government control. And given the unprecedented power of the corporate media/social media/big tech nexus in American society today — and the addictive, insidious, manipulative effect it has on us — the threat of normalizing a culture of censorship is something we should take very seriously indeed.

As devastating as the pandemic has been and will no doubt continue to be for some time, there are still issues that remain bigger than Covid. We shouldn’t lose sight of them. Particularly now, when so many of the political narratives and social systems that we used to take for granted as “normal” are breaking down. We desperately need to rally, reconnect, envision a better world, and work together to try and figure out how to get there.

People who feel chronically insecure and frightened are much more likely to jettison whatever principled commitments to freedom and democracy they have in favor of whatever promises to provide safety and security. By the same token, people who are being routinely manipulated to believe that they must stay loyal to only one of two warring political camps can easily lose sight of the fact that other, better alternatives may exist — and perhaps even be worth fighting for.

And when a censorious culture becomes overly normalized, it may invade people’s psyches to the point that they lose touch with their powers of imagination and creativity. They may give up their internal freedom without even realizing it. And that’s not a price worth paying. Such an impoverished and flattened culture is no culture at all.