We need an epidemiology of more than Coronavirus

The most dangerous contagions we face are ideological, not biological

I can’t say much about epidemiology as it concerns the Coronavirus - I am a social anthropologist, not a scientist. But as an anthropologist, I do think the concept of epidemiology has a lot of untapped potential as a means to help us gain perspective on, and even diagnose, what ails the liberal democratic west.

While the word ‘epidemiology’ of course means the study of disease, its literal meaning in Ancient Greek is actually ‘the study of what is upon the people’. What is interesting about this phrase is that it doesn’t necessarily require the contagion that is ‘upon the people’ to be biological.

With the ever-deepening integration of society, we actually find ourselves increasingly at risk from two different sorts of viral contagions – the first ravaging bodies, but the other ravaging minds. We can call the latter ideological or social contagions.

Much as how air travel has accelerated the spread of disease, so the spread of ideas has been amplified by the nonpareil vector that is the internet, and social media in particular. Whereas biological contagions, such as Covid-19, pose a threat to our physical and economic security, viruses of thought undermine our psychological and political stability, as has been plainly obvious in the last four or five years.

It is hardly novel to point out that it is more than mere analogy to talk of something ‘going viral’.  Ideas have, do, and always will spread mind to mind, much as how diseases spread body to body. Every widely held idea, whether good or bad, originated in a ‘patient zero’, spreading contagiously until it infected the thoughts of almost everyone within a culture, to differing degrees, and with varying effects. 

The parallels suggest we might in fact benefit from developing an epidemiology of ideas, to counter their metastasization throughout the body politic, where they warp and distort the public sphere. It is certainly hard to deny that, from the left and the right, viral and destructive ideas are increasingly ‘upon the people’, particularly in the liberal democratic ‘west’.

From the right, we have seen the rise of neo-nationalism, be it Trumpism in the US, Brexit in the UK, or their equivalents in Europe and beyond. These are marked by an open indifference to coherence and internal consistency, and contempt for the norms, institutions, and traditions, of the very worlds they purportedly seek to restore. 

From the left, there has been an equal but opposite proliferation of neo-puritanism. This is not the laudable ambition to further social progress and justice, but the corollary rise of more questionable concepts such as ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, or ‘cancel culture’, particularly on university campuses. These are characterised by a presumption of vulnerability or victimhood, and a sort of judgmental reductionism, whereby what is held to matter most is someone’s ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, rather than the content of their character. If the right’s incoherence is epistemological, that of the left is ethical. 

But the neo-nationalist and neo-puritan movements are eerily antipodal in other ways.  The former makes a fetish of strength, the latter, of fragility;  one seeks a return to a halcyon past, the other a leap to a utopian future; whereas Trumpism and Brexit are highly figurative movements, with scant regard for the realities of what their successful execution would entail, the identity politics and woke movements are remarkably literal, repeatedly failing - in their condemnations and demands that someone be ‘cancelled’  - to appreciate or take into account context, or intent, be it of someone who has said something clumsily, or simply as a joke. For a movement that seeks to champion a colour-blind and gender-fluid society, the latter can be remarkably black and white in its thinking, and final in its judgment. 

But if these movements are ideologically antithetical, they are nevertheless similar in their basic structure: both generalise to the point of absurdity; both are deeply discontented with the present; neither understand that the opposite of idealism is not pessimism, but realism; and neither accept that reality is complex, defying simplistic correctives, still less ideological panaceas. 

And in one particular way, they are not simply similar, but mutually reinforcing. To his progressive opponents, Trump has been a problem in need of a solution. To his proponents, he has been a solution to a problem, one that exists in its most concentrated form in the progressive left. In short, both ‘sides’ see the other as the disease, and themselves as a cure. The effect of the centrifugal forces created by this self-perpetuating, ever-accelerating and viciously cyclical culture war is the literal dis-memberment of the political centre. 

While not always something we consider, the true problem here is self-evident: while both sides assume that a resolution lies in the widespread adoption of their ideology, the reality is that neither side will ever convince the other. When countervailing convictions clash, the result is rarely conversion. As it is with strains of disease, strains of thought ultimately strengthen, rather than weaken, when they encounter resistance. 

What to do in the face of this centrifugal cultural cycle, with its enfeebling effect, from the right, on key democratic institutional practices - not least the sovereignty of the legislature, the independence of the judiciary, and the freedom of the press to scrutinise the executive - and from the left, on key liberal principles such as the presumption of innocence, and the assurance that, while I may disagree with what you say, I’ll defend your right to say it? 

The answer may lie in establishing a proper epidemiology of our ideas and convictions. That is, instead of viewing neo-nationalism or neo-puritanism as problems, or solutions, we should instead see them as signs that there is a problem in need of a solution. Rather than framing either as a disease, or a cure, they both should be understood as symptoms of a disease in need of a cure. And perhaps they are both equal but opposite symptoms of the same disease, which can be tackled with the same cure. 

An argument can be made that whether it is Trumpism or Brexit on the right, or the so-called ‘woke’ movement on the left, they are all symptomatic of the same pathology, which is the failed promise of what philosophers call Scientism. That is, the great twentieth century assumption that the priorities and methods of the natural sciences can be applied, technocratically, to society, and that our conscious lives can be understood and intervened upon as if they were unconscious and inanimate things. 

Scientistic thinking is so widespread in the culture of liberal democracies, and the international system of nation states and institutions wrought in its image, that it is almost wholly constitutive of our frame of reference when we attempt to think about anything. It is a way of thinking that conceives us as workers or consumers before it sees us as people or citizens - as means towards ends, rather than ends in ourselves. It is a culture which assumes that everything important in life may be quantified, and thus perfected, a view that necessarily requires the ironing-out of everything qualitative, including traditional identities - be they of community, religion, or geography - which are viewed as redundant, antiquated, and, worst of all, inefficient. In seeking to maximise consumption and efficiency, it seeks a world that is qualitatively minimalist. 

The appeal of Scientism was always in its assured promise. In the wake of the scientific advances of the 19th and early 20th centuries, it seemed plausible enough that these methods - if extended to the organisation of society in general - would systematically dissolve our collective problems and anxieties, and banish the spectre of uncertainty, and perhaps even mortality. And its promises were bold: the end of history; the end of boom and bust; the end of poverty; the eradication of disease; the inexorable expansion of Pax Americana - liberty, wealth, democracy - with the international export of the latter presented as not just a flat-packable possibility, but an inevitability. 

For the first cohort of baby boomers, there was good reason to have faith in Scientism. For the post-war generation, they did indeed see, in the closing decades of the 20th century, growing opportunity, and rising longevity, standards of living, and both personal and national security. But the 21st has seen many of the old anxieties return - call it the baby boomerang - as their now adult children fail to find secure or well-paid work, or affordable housing; as advances in health and longevity begin to regress; as markets have buckled; and as old international antagonisms have re-opened to fester like poorly sutured wounds, a gangrene on the liberal international order. 

Almost all these corrosions are at least partly attributable to the encroachment of science into virtually all aspects of society. The presumption of the ‘end of history’ was a conceit only conceivable if one believed the west had discovered the most effective and scientific method of politics; the ‘end of boom and bust’ was similarly founded on an assumption to have arrived at the most efficient form of economics; the quixotic crusading of liberal interventionist nation-builders was built on a presumption that democracy could be reduced to a science of ‘governance’.

Similarly, the decline of the middle class, and the hollowing out of industry, is largely attributable to the inexorable advance of management as a science framed by a reductive concern for efficiency. The sub-prime crisis was a consequence of the imposition into international finance of mathematics so advanced that only a handful of people understood how it worked, and seemingly none understood its ultimate consequences. The neoliberal reconstruction of the citizen as a consumer reflects the evolution of sales and marketing into a psychological science in its own right, which has led to the ‘hacking’ of ‘backdoors’ to our psyche, leveraging insight on the cause and effect of a dopamine rush, which have since been most successfully exploited by the silicon architects of social media. 

Whereas the scientific has been of incalculable use, its scientistic application to society as a whole has been of inestimable abuse. And so is it really surprising that, by the mid-2010s, many had begun to tire of a status quo underwritten by the hollow, and hollowing, promise of neoliberal technocracy?

On the right, the reaction is evident in the rejection of expertise of all types, with objective facts met by alternative ones, mainstream by fake news, wonky detail by populist sloganeering. The rose-tinted nostalgia of this new nationalism perhaps reflects the age of its average adherent, who remembers a time before technocracy, scientism and neoliberalism began to cube the social sphere, privileging tuition over intuition, data over experience, and things over people. 

On the left, the exclusive, spiritless consistency of technocracy has been met by the inclusive, animated contradictions of some advocates of identity politics, who while rightly attempting to reinstate feeling, personhood, kindness, and humanity to the culture, often do so in terms that appear - in their emphatic and universalising assurance, and clinically objective view of language stripped of subjective context or intent - to be oddly scientistic in spirit. This perhaps reflects the youth of these new puritans who, in having experienced nothing but technocracy and scientism, can only articulate their rebellion in the idiom of that which they – consciously or not – seek to reject. 

The approaches on the right and the left may, in this way, be antipodal and antithetical, but there is a strong case to be made that they are both symptoms of the same pathology, of the same sense of societal malaise, brought on by a culture that, as the saying goes, prices everything, but values nothing - people not least. 

In the history of tackling disease, the great leap came once we recognised the difference between the symptom and the underlying pathology, allowing treatment of the cause, rather than the effect. We worry today about Coronavirus, but relative to our medieval ancestors, we have developed the epidemiological means by which to mitigate its worst effects. We will – hopefully - not waste time treating a symptom, nor finding scapegoats for the disease. 

The same cannot easily be said about the spread of bad ideas. As long as we continue to view symptoms as pathologies, or indeed as cures, we will remain at the mercy of ideological contagion. If contemporary liberal democracy is to survive this current culture war, we must begin by recognising that the competing ideologies we see before us are in themselves neither the disease nor the cure, but simply signs that there is a disease in need of a cure.

Before we can find a remedy, the most important step is to develop a proper epidemiology of what, precisely, is ‘upon the people’. Doing so would seem to be a matter of urgency, for, as is the case with many diseases, while pathologies leave us vulnerable, it is the symptoms that can prove fatal.

There is perhaps an irony in suggesting that, to combat the symptoms of scientism, we must adopt a heuristic from science. But, as noted at the outset, epidemiology’s original meaning was not restricted to the study of biological contagion. Perhaps it is time to restore the term to its full scope, for there are more afflictions in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of by our science.