Murray Rothbard’s wonderful History of Economic Thought opens with a blast against what he called the Whig theory of intellectual history. It’s a variant of the Victorian-era idea that life is always getting better and better, no matter what. Apply it to the world of ideas, and the impression is that our current ideas are always better than ideas of the past. It rules out the possibility that there is lost knowledge in history, peculiar incidences when humanity knew something for sure and then that knowledge mysteriously went away and we had to discover it again.
I’m writing this under a five-month near-global lockdown for fear of a new virus. And just today, a major epidemiologist in the UK, Raj S. Bhopal, dared say precisely what my mother said at the outset of this disease: the way we must manage it is to develop natural immunities to it. Yes, he said the taboo thing: people who face no fatal threat need to get it. This is precisely what my mother told me back in February.
It’s a bit late but at least the subject is finally on the table. The idea of (badly named) herd immunity is consistent with how all societies have come to manage diseases. Protect the vulnerable while groups at no or low risk acquire the immunities. It is especially important to understand this if you want to preserve freedom rather than pointlessly impose a police state out of fear and ignorance.
It’s extremely odd that we woke up one day in the 21st century when such knowledge seemed almost to evaporate. When famed statistician and immunologist Knut Wittkowski went public with the basics of viruses, he created shock and scandal. YouTube even deleted his videos!
How did my mother know about immunities? Because her mother taught this to her, and hers before her. It was a major public-health priority after World War II in the United States to school each generation in this counterintuitive truth. It was taught in the schools: do not fear what we have evolved to fight but rather strengthen what nature has given you to deal with disease. Professor Bhopal dared say what few others have been willing to say but which seems obviously the case when you look at areas of the world where the virus is fully under control (New York and Sweden, for example).
My next question: why is herd immunity a taboo topic in the 21st century? Perhaps this is a case of Rothbardian-style lost knowledge, similar to how humanity once understood scurvy and then didn’t and then had to come to understand it again. Somehow in the 21st century, we find ourselves in the awkward position of having to relearn the basics of immunology that everyone from 1920 to 2000 or so seemed to understand before that knowledge somehow came to be marginalized and buried.
Yes, this is hugely embarrassing. The science never left the textbooks. It’s right there for anyone to discover. What seems to have gone missing is popular understanding, replaced with a premodern run-and-hide theory of disease avoidance. It’s so bad that even the imposition of police states around the country, including brutal shutdowns and house arrest, have not inspired anywhere near the level of public resistance that I would have expected. It’s like everyone gradually became ignorant on the whole topic and so they were caught off guard when politicians announced we had to get rid of human rights to fight a novel virus.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
