Stupid or Lying:
or Why We Need Theological Education as Part of a Broader Liberal Arts Education and
Why Such Instruction is Necessary for Citizens in the Political and Technical Spheres to Foster a Secure Republic That Ensures Liberty and
Why the Current STEM/ Technically Obsessed Pedagogical Model and Trends are Undermining the Republic
OK, America we need to have a sit-down convo about something that SHOULD be simple. It isn’t. But It should be. I’m talking about the difference between “technical” and “political”. Now, most people, if you asked them, would SAY that they understand the difference…but I have my doubts. Political comes from the Greek word πολιτικός (politikos) from the root word πολίς (polis) meaning “city”. Thus, political things are things that pertain to the city, or civic life. Politics is the discipline of seeking what is best for the polis – it is fundamentally and inherently and undeniably a moral/ ethical discipline. In fact, you cannot have politics without morality, and you cannot have a moral system that is not, in some sense political. Politics and morality aren’t the same, but they move together. Politics is shaped by morality, and morality is shaped by politics. They have a direct and causal relationship – again, morality and politics aren’t the same, but you can’t have one without the other. Technical, on the other hand, comes from the Greek word τεχνικός (technikos), from the root τεχνή (technay), meaning “a skill or trade”. Thus, technical things are things that pertain to learned skills to be employed. Classically, however, technical issues have been seen as being fundamentally amoral. Carpentry is neither good nor bad, it’s simply skill with wood. Computer Engineering is neither good nor bad, it’s simply skill with electronics and logical systems. Thus, the political and the technical are divergent in their spheres. The political guides and shapes public life by promoting and enforcing a specific moral vision on society that is crafted through the discipline’s search for knowing, implementing, and creating the good. The technical, however, exists to expand knowledge of the trade itself, regardless of the moral implications. Computer technology doesn’t care if people are addicted to the internet; virology qua virology doesn’t care about liberty; technology doesn’t care about morality. And it is a monumental category error to confuse the technical and the political.
And yet, that’s what all kinds of public health officials are doing, right now, in this country. The current mantra from public health when advocating mandates is that “it’s medical not political”. Except that’s either a lie, or the person expressing that statement is an idiot who doesn’t understand the difference between the technical and political.
Because, here’s the thing. Mask/ Vax mandates MAY be the best thing for public health, and weighing all the costs and benefits and the moral and political consequences, weighing out what this means for the constitution and personal liberties and AFTER, and ONLY AFTER we weigh all the implications of a political decision based on technical advice we may determine that Mask/ Vax mandates are the best POLITICAL decision. I don’t think that’s the case at all. And I’m not simply making that case based upon political preferences, which, incidentally, is an entirely legitimate way to make political decisions, indeed, it’s the ONLY way to make political decisions. But I’m not ONLY influenced by politics, I’m also influenced by what I feel is a real lack of evidence, technical evidence, that mask and vaccine mandates will have an appreciable impact on the death rate of Covid.
Now, you say, “Luke, you mean you don’t think the vaccines work?” I didn’t say that. I said, I don’t think that there was good evidence that the mandates would significantly reduce the death rate. We know that masking is not a real-world effective solution. We know this. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. We know it isn’t because in places where masking is mandated the disease still spread to people who wear masks. We know that surgical masks contain about 10% of aerosolized droplets and KN95 masks contain about 50%. Is that enough to prevent the spread of the virus? Real world evidence says, “no”. And the fact that this evidence is continually poopooed by people who claim to “believe science” is disheartening and weakens trust in public health institutions.
Personally, my level of trust is approaching zero. When people lie to my face repeatedly over a nearly 2 year period, I stop trusting anything they say. When the same public health institutions who claim to “believe the science” about masks also can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl – I no longer trust that institution (talking about you American Academy of Pediatrics).
Are the vaccines effective at preventing death and hospitalization? – yeah, they seem to be. And the side effects, currently, seem to be relatively acceptable for most people, in most age cohorts and subpopulations. But the question is not whether the vaccines “work” it’s whether mandating them will significantly reduce the number of deaths. And the logical answer seems to be “no”. And moreover, part of that question that ought to be proposed to the progressive left is: why do you care? But that’s a whole ‘nother essay!
Mandates will only be effective if they force people who don’t want the vaccine to get the vaccine. But reason and logic suggest that people who refuse to get the vaccine, most likely, are in age and health cohorts that are least susceptible to the virus (statistically speaking) or who live in sparsely populated areas. People at highest risk of death or serious illness from Covid are, statistically speaking, the most likely to get the vaccine. So, who is helped? Cui Bono? Either people who are at high risk and are afraid of the virus, but are unwilling to get vaccinated; or people at low to moderate risk, who don’t care and aren’t afraid and are unwilling to get vaccinated. Statistically speaking, the only people that vaxdates will appreciably help are people who are at high risk who are currently unwilling to get vaccinated.
But how many people like that are there? Dozens? A few thousand? It can’t be many. And in a country where nearly 80% have already gotten jabbed, the effectiveness of the mandates, medically speaking, is suspect at best. Not to mention the fact that there are, indeed, questions about the vaccine durability and vaccine effectiveness in contrast to T-Cell memory/ immunity that comes naturally from getting the virus.
But that’s the medical side. That’s all technical info. And the technical case for getting the vaccine if your risk factors are high is very strong. The technical case for vax mandates is weak. The technical case for masking is very weak. And the technical case for mask mandates is non-existent – there is no case because real world data show mask mandates to have no statistical significance.
And here’s the thing. Politics needs technology. The political needs the technical to inform it.
But public health experts and officials who think that their medical training automatically gives them the right to speak authoritatively and authoritarianly on public policy means that they either don’t understand what politics is, or they think that everyone is dumb but them. And the fact that they keep saying that this is “not political” makes me strongly suspect that they’re just massively ignorant.
Any policy is inherently political. Notice the root word “polis”? Whenever you create, advocate, or enforce a policy, you are no longer speaking as a technician but as a politician. And you can no longer run and hide behind “the science”. You’re entering into a conversation that is moral. Yes, the political is informed by the technical, but it is a separate category, because the political is fundamentally concerned with the moral, not the technical. These MDs and PhDs who think that THEIR technical expertise outweighs the technical expertise in any other field are arrogant and ignorant – or arrogant and…well arrogant.
You can’t craft public health policy without considering the moral implications, because the political is the moral. Somewhere along the line these people went to post-secondary education for like 8 years and never seriously considered ethics and morality and philosophy in a way that would allow them to rigorously engage with it in the public sphere – or they did and they’re cynical gaslighters. Prolly a l’il a both, amiright?!
But America is on, and has been on, a trend in education that is moving further and further from a liberal arts education – you know the study that was fit for preparing a “liberal” or “free” citizen to take an active and beneficial part in public life. For decades people have been sounding the alarm that we’re turning out little robots. And that’s bad enough. Educating a citizenry who do not understand morality, ethics, history, theology, and philosophy doesn’t just make bad citizens it makes a bad civis – a bad civilization. And what’s worse is not just creating generations of technophiles but an entrenched political class of technocrats.
For many years I worked with teens, and the complaint I heard more than any about school was “why do we have to study” and then fill in the blank. Why? Why study history? Why study philosophy? Ethics? Theology? Why study them?
Because a society that lets people make political decisions who don’t understand human nature, good and evil, logic and reason, and the patterns of societal and individual behavior is a society that is going to devolve into a factious, ignorant, self-centered, immoral mob clamoring for panem et circensis.
We need the liberal arts. We need them to guide people’s understanding of what it means to be human in a society with other humans. We cannot create fit citizens without them.
Most of all we need theology. We cannot guide people’s understanding of what it means to be human in human society without understanding God, as revealed in Christ, who is the image of God, whose image we bear.
Public health is not just medical – it’s political. And because it’s political it’s moral. Because it’s moral it’s theological. And I don’t want to hear about public health policies from people who are unable or unwilling to recognize those realities: their technical competencies are irrelevant to the political category. They’re either stupid or lying. I don’t much care which. Such people are unfit to lead a republic.