If politicians and public health officials want more people to trust them, they would do better to try to refute opposing arguments rather than arrogantly dismiss them as “misinformation.” In spite of concerted efforts by civil leaders, public health officials, big media, and big tech to silence dissent during this pandemic, there have been a number of scientists who have contended that the prolonged use of government-imposed NPIs in a pandemic does far more harm than good. 

Framing Everything in Life as a Matter of Empirical Science Disregards the Immaterial and Transcendent Aspects of Human Existence, Succumbs to the Illusion of Control, Enthrones Experts, and Leads to Tyranny.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, one of the many repeated mantras has been that we need to “follow the science” when determining the public policy response to this highly infectious disease. While many have welcomed this assertion, it has not been without its critics. For example, one writer points out the danger to such an approach by noting the following:

As President Dwight Eisenhower said in his 1961 farewell address, public policy can ‘become the captive of a scientific-technological elite,’ which by nature lacks the temperament and broad thinking necessary to steer a democratic society. Instead, this elite’s conceptual blindspots and ignorance of broader human and spiritual concerns mean it is likely to steer us into the ditch of never-ending lockdown cycles to ‘slow the spread’ of a virus that is demonstrably uncontainable by governments and their edicts.

Similarly, former Bureau of Justice Statistics director Jeffrey Anderson argues that, while public health officials now play a prominent role in our governance, such people do not make for good rulers because “it is in the nature of their art to focus on the body in lieu of higher concerns,” and because they “are naturally enthusiastic about public health interventions.”

He adds,

Their guiding light is the avoidance of risk — narrowly defined as the risk of becoming sick or dying. The risk of stifling, enervating, or devitalizing human society is not even part of their calculation. Under their influence, America has been conducting an experiment in mask-wearing based largely on unsupported scientific claims and an impoverished understanding of human existence.

(For data on mask-wearing, see this, this, this, this, this, and this. It is important to remember that the controversy over masks is not whether people should be able to wear them without being given a hard time. Of course they should. Rather, the controversy pertains to whether some people should be allowed to force other people to wear masks against their will.)

“Experiment” is the proper word to describe much of what has been done in response to this pandemic. One wonders why previous generations did not respond to their pandemics by employing the strategies that have been implemented during the COVID-19 outbreak. After all, it is not as though there is anything technologically advanced about non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) like stay at home orders, closures, compulsory mask-wearing, gathering restrictions, contact tracing, and physical distancing mandates. People had a basic knowledge of the way infectious diseases spread during the pandemics that took place in the late 1950s and late 1960s.

Why weren’t those pandemics dealt with in the way we have dealt with this one? What is it that has made so many people see the COVID response as reasonable even though the data has shown for some time that the virus is not deadly for the vast majority of those who contract it?

While there are surely a variety of factors that have contributed to what has happened with COVID-19, one of them may be connected with the fact that our society is significantly more secularized today than it was in earlier eras. That is, the widespread acceptance of prolonged, government-imposed NPIs that radically disrupt ordinary life and suppress civil and religious liberties is due in part to the waning influence of the notion that human life has a transcendent meaning, along with the increasing acceptance of a scientism that is focused entirely on controlling the material world.

C.S. Lewis had some important things to say about the threat of scientism. This does not mean that he was anti-science, though he knew that charge would be leveled against him. In a letter written in response to such criticism, he defined scientism as “the belief that the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and this is to be pursued even if, in the process of being fitted for survival, our species has to be stripped of all those things for which we value it — of pity, of happiness, and of freedom.” One writer aptly summarizes Lewis’s concerns about scientism by saying that he “feared what might be done to all nature and especially to mankind if scientific knowledge were to be applied by the power of government without the restraints of traditional values.”

Lewis’s most focused treatments of scientism are found in his brief nonfiction work The Abolition of Man and in his fictional Space Trilogy. In the first volume of the trilogy, the scientist-villain (Weston) justifies his mistreatment of the hero (Ransom) by telling him:

I admit that we have had to infringe your rights. My only defense is that small claims must give way to great. As far as we know, we are doing what has never been done in the history of the universe… You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this.^[1]

In the last volume of the trilogy, the plot revolves around how an organization called the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) “follows the science” in its social planning efforts, with ruthless disregard for both animal and human life. At one point in the story, the narrator makes this observation:

The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result.^[2]

This is what Lewis sets his sights upon in The Abolition of Man, the main thesis of which is summed up in this quote: “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”^[3] Michael Aeschliman unpacks this assertion as follows:

Without a doctrine of objective validity, only subjective, individual desire remains as a standard to determine action. In the hands of an empowered elite, the capacity to reorder society with the techniques of a vastly powerful and unchecked science is virtually limitless and, of course, open to monstrous misuses.^[4]

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